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Mimi Khalvati, born in Teheran, trained in Switzerland and London, where she also settled, is a living cultural proof that the Legend of Manole the Craftsman is circumscribed not only to the Romanian cultural background but also to a multicultural one. The similitude that exists between Mimi Khalvati’s poetry and the Legend of Manole the Craftsman derives from the idea of walling in the living heart and the soul in order to build up the genuine literature based on self-sacrifice, empathy and the transcending of the real by aspiring at the ideal. For our paper to acquire a critical support, Kelly's personal construct theory, Bachelard's poetics and sound symbolism have also closely been turned to good account.
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John Milton has frequently been accused of multiple sexisms in his Paradise Lost. However, when he, or rather Satan, contemplates the gender of hard men and soft women, he actually leans on a long standing tradition in philosophy, theology, and medical science, from Aristotle and Galen to Isidore of Seville and Milton’s own time. This gendering tradition had close ties with the virtual, which has been misunderstood as “fake,” “illusion,” and “unreal” in more recent times. In its original form, the virtual had dialectical ties with the actual and it meant power, the power that operates in the manner of Moebius strip and, in the sphere of language, manifests itself in reading, interpretation, translation and derivation of words. So, to be more virtual did not mean to be more “unreal,” “disembodied,” or “dehumanized” but to be empowered with the potential of becoming a male. Derived from virtus and vir, the virtual was even an etymologically gendering power. The lack of this power deprived some fetuses of being fully actualized as men, so they became women or, rather, failed men.
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The aim of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of the Unsaid in one of Graham Swift’s best-known short stories, “Seraglio.” There are reasons to maintain that the Unsaid represents the point where secrecy, trauma and the extreme solitude that characterize the short story are intertwined. The Unsaid is both a metaphysical and an ethical concept. The way memories of the past interweave with few exotic elements of time and space, the parallelisms and contrasts between worlds and experiences that are easily found throughout the text contribute to the Unsaid, which embodies aspects of the relationship between death and silence. Therefore, the Unsaid also expresses the uncanny relationship between language and the experienced trauma from the past. The paper will investigate the relationship between language, silence, death, memory and fear which appear to be the core of the inner experience of both characters of the story. The typical darkness that contributes to the ambiance of Swift’s text is considered to be the result of the Unsaid, which designates something present and absent at the same time. This dual nature of this phenomenon defines one of the most important aspects of Swift’s narrative: a story that is told in–and through‒silence. Consequently the story represents itself a seraglio because it highlights the individual’s limited access to the process of knowing and verbalizing the relationship with the self and the other as well as the inability to break free from a limit-situation.
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In his study The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Kantorowicz explains the concept of the ruler’s divine power that spreads from its secular sources, whereby the dominant idea is that of the king’s two bodies: natural (mortal and transitory) and political (immortal and timeless). After applying this concept to the analysis of the tragic destiny of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the paper also deals with the idea of this king’s personal identity loss, its reduction to mere “nothing”, interpreted as an example of Shakespeare’s rhetorical deceptions (Gordić Petković 2012). Apart from these critical insights, the ideas of contemporary literary critics (Eagleton, Legatt, Montrose and Holderness) are also included in the theoretical framework of the paper.
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John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman is often considered as a paradigmatic postmodernist text which combines deconstruction of history with a metafictional self-conscious narrative. Set in the ninetieth century and written in second half of the twentieth, it contrasts and compares two ages, providing illuminating insights into both. Furthermore, along with blending two historically and culturally different worlds, this novel also blends two forms of the novel: the Victorian – by imitating its style and literary conventions, and the postmodern – by self-reflective theoretizing about its own status. This article, therefore, examines the interaction between the two ages in terms of both their social and literary realities, underlining in particular how reading of the literary past in The French Lieutenant’s Woman leads not only to a better understanding of the present (Fowles’s own, as well our own present), but also towards creating future literary tendencies, evident now in what is frequently called the postpostmodern novel.
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The focus of this paper is Flaubert’s Parrot, a novel by Julian Barnes. One of the major questions in this study was whether this was a biography of a famous writer, Flaubert, or an autobiography of a fictionalised character, Braithwaite. This research discusses what connection Braithwaite found between Flaubert and himself, as well as what purpose Flaubert’s art would serve to Braithwaite. It explores the meaning of the parrot in the novel as well as the persistent quest for that same parrot. The research aims to analyse the difficulties of interpreting the past correctly as well as how perspective influences that interpretation and ultimately it provides an analysis of the result of the narrator’s quest and a conclusion of what it suggests.
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Hrvatski čitatelji, evo, po prvi put nakon dvije stotine godina, imaju priliku upoznati jednu od značajnijih engleskih književnica, začetnicu gotičkoga romana i značajnu predstavnicu engleskoga romantizma u prijevodu poliglotice Marine Alie Jurišić. Čudno, ali istinito! A mnoge druge velikane svjetske književnosti bolje bismo shvatili i smjestili u kontekst određenih književnih strujanja, tendencija i uopće književnoga stvaralaštva određene epohe da smo ranije imali zadovoljstvo upoznati ovu značajnu književnu osobnost osamnaestoga stoljeća, Ann Radcliffe.
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The paper aims at discussing the treatment of fictional characters through the theoretical apparatus of possible world semantics with clear and practical applications within postmodern fiction, more precisely in Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach. First it explains the manner in which the theoretical apparatus applies to fictionality in general, to postmodern fiction and to the selected novel going through the essential theories in the field, the Kripkean perspective, David Lewis’ Counterfactuals, Marie-Laure Ryan’s system for understanding fiction through the possible worlds framework. Then it showcases how the identity of fictional characters appears in the fictional piece under discussion, and the manner in which it unfolds within the mindset of the possible world semantics. Finally, by blending in these perspectives within the narrative universe and observing how they render a structural matrix of fiction upon which worlds of possibility can be modally distinguished, the paper will prove that the analysis of character identity and character worlds in fiction completes the entire picture of a syntax of the narrative within the possible world determinism.
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The article focuses on the Manx cat as a zoometaphor and subject in Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). As suggested by Woolf, both cats and women occupy a subordinate position in the hierarchy ruled by the masculine-coded human. The story of the Manx cat is an allegory of the exclusion of women from the systems of education and the history of literature, but in the essay cats are also depicted as subjects in their own right, victimized by humans. The analogy established between cats and women can be read as a reflection on Darwin’s theory of evolution, which effectively erased the differences between humans and animals. The unusual physical appearance of the Manx cat, characteristically lacking a tail, also reminds the narrator of the Great War that still required working through in Woolf’s post-war society.
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The article explores the concept of Victoriana and its relationship to the Victorian as presented in A. S. Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia” from Angels and Insects (1992). The analysis is done on two levels: firstly, on the level of form, or different narrative strategies that Byatt is using in order to make her text “Victorian.” Secondly, the article detects, explores and describes those aspects of Victoriana in “Morpho Eugenia” which relate to the gender roles and relationships of its three central characters: William Adamson, Eugenia Alabaster and Matty Crompton. The argument is based on the supposition that Byatt uses Adamson’s character in order to both alienate the reader from and attract her/him to the text by reversing the gender roles and subverting our expectations of “Victorian” fiction. By choosing the “New Woman” Matty over the “Old Woman” Eugenia, Adamson’s character confirms and promotes the progressive worldviews thus addressing not only the Victorian time but our own time (and expectations) as well.
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The present article evolved from a series of short Romanian translations based on the German version of Adam Fletcher’s book entitled “How to be German in 50 new steps/ Wie man Deutscher wird. In 50 neuen Schritten” (2016). Spanning more than three months, the outcomes of the translating process were rendered concrete with the collective contribution of five Erasmus students at Leipzig University, Germany, all of whom (their teacher included) are native speakers of the Romanian language. Frequently employing a combination of free and formal translation-styles, the team of translators-to-be strove to retain all the meanings, be they propositional or expressive, presupposed or evoked, or those generated by idioms, fixed expressions and non-equivalence in the original text. They provided alternative translations, mostly differing on the levels of lexis, grammar and register, but eventually negotiated the best one, which naturally became the final translated text, as much as possible freed from any traces of “translationese” and suitable for any authentic contemporary sample of Romanian language.
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This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” po-ems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and In¬dependence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.
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In the nineteenth century, the swing of anthropocentric forces wrought profoundly deleterious changes upon the face of the natural environment. Witnessing these metamorphic processes at work was Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose unique sensibility found the despoilment of nature by human hand no less than extremely dispiriting. Against a backdrop of the vanishing beauty, Hopkins fervidly engaged with the transforming world in his ecopoetical ruminations. He was not the first poet of ecolo¬gical dissent, for during the Romantic period John Clare had poignantly expressed the anguish at what had then been the incipient stages of nature being disrobed of its inherent singularity. Being quite familiar with Clare’s ecopoetical meditations, the Jesuit poet was able to further elaborate upon Clare’s vision, while proving successful in presciently observing the discrepancies between wilderness as a cultural construct and a wildness whose emphasis upon the appreciation of the global through the local corresponds closely to the present-day awareness concerning the fragility of ecosystems. Most vividly and extensively, Hopkins explores the dyad of wildness and wilderness in poems like “Inversnaid,” “Duns Scotus’ Oxford,” and “Binsey Poplars,” wherein he truly establishes himself as one of the essential forerunners of modern ecological science.
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Throughout the history of Western culture and art, there are numerous examples of those who, in their creativity, went beyond the limits of a particular art, embarking instead on attempts to combine in one artistic discourse the practices of various arts, such as music and poetic text, drama and dance, literature and sculpture, literature and painting, and so on. One of these artists is William Blake, acclaimed as a major poet and painter of romanticism in English and world art. He is accredited as the founder of a whole new and original method of producing artistic works, called “illuminated printing”, which is a remarkable combination of poetic text, decoration, and picture. Apart from revealing Blake’s appurtenance to romantic tradition, the present study aims to present the specificity of his technique and, primary, to disclose the ways in which it combines the artistic practice of poetry with that of painting as to render and strengthen the meaning by mutually sustaining and illuminating each other.
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Children’s literature can be argued to expose its child readers and characters to certain norms because of its conventionally didactic quality, reverberation of adults’ nostalgic feelings, and tendency to create an image of the ideal child. This, however, creates a hierarchy between childhood and adulthood, rendering the child silent and passive both outside and inside the text. Published in 1995, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights destabilizes the hierarchy between adulthood and childhood, restructures archetypal renditions, and gives voice to the child that has been supressed in various ways in didactic children’s books. In this respect, this paper aims to analyse how such issues as silencing, voice, ideal child are employed in Pullman’s novel. It explores modern children’s fantasy as a fruitful ground not only for problematizing the hierarchies between binaries such as adult/child, adulthood/childhood, and maturity/immaturity but also for providing children with the voice and individuality they were deprived of in earlier examples of children’s literature.
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Kiran Desai’s critically acclaimed novel, The Inheritance of Loss, intertwines narratives of the lives of three characters: the judge, haunted by his past, is joined by his granddaughter Sai in his house in north-eastern India, while the son of his cook is working illegally in America. Published in 2006, the novel has mostly been analysed in the light of diaspora studies and praised for its author’s questioning of the effects of globalisation and immigration when leaving home. Yet what is also worth examining is the way in which some of the characters of the novel, including the judge, inhabit their chosen homes as foreigners or, to be more specific, as surrogate Britons in their country of origin, creating a separate community of anglophiles. The “solace of being a foreigner in [their] own country” (29) is but one of their rewards in their attempts at mimicking a British way of life. If the houses of the novel are set in independent India, this article questions the extent to which they could be read as counterparts to the British country house, relating them to values of continuity, tradition and Englishness. While anglophile characters take the British country house as model for their own Indian houses, their nostalgia is for a British home they never knew or owned. Their experiences of immigration can only lead them to create a pastiche of an English country house, which relies on a mythified vision of England. Their acceptance of English values and social hierarchy turns them into foreigners in their own country, seemingly blurring the definitions of “home” and “abroad”. Their reliance on the model of the British country house further points to the ways in which The Inheritance of Loss parodies the genre of the English manor house novel and the way it relies on colonialist norms.
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