Versions of Pastoral Biography: Ackroyd, Carter, Berger

Author(s): Stephen Hardy / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

BIOGRAPHY and pastoral both constitute broad generic categorizations which are open to a constantly changing and developing variety of interpretations with regard to their precise nature and boundaries. This chapter primarily concerns itself with an analysis of parts of the work of three English-born writers, Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949), Paul Carter (b. 1951) and John Berger (b. 1926), and ways in which they provide instances of combining elements of biography and pastoral, while also challenging what might be considered as the boundaries of their conventional characterization. The commentary and analysis provided here are intended as initially suggestive rather than potentially definitive and do not therefore incorporate any theoretical overview of either genre. The prefatory remarks on biography and pastoral are provided as a form of contextualization which is intended to be of immediate relevance to what follows. No previous acquaintance is presumed on the part of the reader with the three writers in question. A short introductory sketch of the nature of their work will therefore be in order before embarking upon a more detailed exploration of those aspects relevant to the brief series of partly explicative and partly interpretive commentaries presented here.

"Sent to Mama..."

Author(s): Yana Rowland / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

This paper examines some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s earliest written dedications to her mother (up till 1815). These provide sufficient material to stress the stimulating influence of the parent in the young poetess’s interest in writing as existence. I indicate a direct relation between parental care and literacy in the juvenile writer’s growing appreciation of time. The narrative essence of many of these early commemorative verses endorses the humanizing impact of memory which emerges alongside a sense of belonging and filial duty. The first poems suggest the poetess’s inability to be without an Other, without a guide in her aesthetic self-recognition. In the later dedications (up till 1828) Barrett gauges in a more dialectic manner the fruitfulness and rate of filial dependencies in the creation of a poetic selfhood of one’s own.

Margery Kempe’s Roman (Purgatorial) Holiday, or on Penance and Pleasure in Medieval Journeys

Author(s): Liliana Sikorska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Magic and Religion in the „Prose Merlin”

Author(s): Bartłomiej Błaszkiewicz / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

All That is Wrought is not Gold: Locating Wealth in Old English Gnomic Texts

Author(s): Rafał Borysławski / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The Character of „Iêsu Krist” in the Old Saxon Gospel Harmony „The Hêliand” as a Dramatic Cultural Synthesis Combining Elements of Deep Christian Piety and the Germanic Code of Heroic Honour

Author(s): Łukasz Neubauer / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

“Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?”: “Spring and Fall” in the Poetic Thoughts of Gerard Manley Hopkins (and Charles Taylor’s Philosophy)

Author(s): Ewa Borkowska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Ethnically Different Mothers-in-law in Chaucer’s „Man of Law’s Tale” and Its 2003 BBC Adaptation

Author(s): Anna Czarnowus / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Jacques and the Politics of Melancholia

Author(s): Tadeusz Sławek / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Death and the Hero – „Paradise Lost” and the Problem of „Theomachia”

Author(s): Maria Błaszkiewicz / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

A Fairy Tale in Focus: Ecstatic Focalizations in „A Christmas Carol”

Author(s): Jacek Mydla / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Czytanie cudów w „Panu Gawenie i Zielonym Rycerzu” i „Opowieści Franklina”

Author(s): Barbara Kowalik / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

More Motivated Malignity? The Ominous Agenda of the Green Knight in Andrzej Wicher’s Translation of „Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Author(s): Piotr Spyra / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and the Spirit of the American Place

Author(s): Francesca Orestano / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

A map of travel writing from antiquity to the Victorian age opens this reflection on the distinction between quest and travel, as two modes existing within the same genre, which yet can harbour a variety of discourses, ranging from letters to autobiography, from satire and fantasy to the scientific account and the Baedeker style. However, despite the many narrative masks adopted by travel writing, and the essential ambiguity its literary discourse may adopt, it can be argued that quest and travel can still be seen as bearing distinct features, inasmuch as the personality and the final aims of the traveller provide elements of response to the place visited that dispel the ambiguity of the genre. In the XIX century, history, culture, aesthetics and visual culture enhance the traveller’s response to the spirit of the place. Charles Dickens’s "American Notes" and Anthony Trollope’s "North America", respectively published in 1842 and 1862, while accounting for the writers’ experience in the United States, are remarkably dissimilar. My contention is that in Dickens’s case the travelogue takes the shape and nature of a quest: a journey that had started under the best auspices ended up in bitter disappointment as the writer did not compromise with local newspapers on his plea for international copyright; Dickens’s American experience is loaded with spectral images that make it nightmarish and, on the whole, unpleasant. For Trollope, who started with the best intentions to provide readers with plenty of information, the place proves ungraspable, unmanageable, despite pages of figures and tables of products, prices, values. In Trollope’s case, for different reasons, the spirit of the place instigates a kind of response that produces, instead of the best possible travel book, an unwieldy documentary account of the United States in 1862.

Disappointment and Discovery

Author(s): Michael Hollington / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

This essay explores the topos of disappointment and discovery in three major travel writings by significant authors in the European tradition: Goethe, George Eliot, Dickens. With reference in particular to Italy, the chief goal of many classic ‘Grand Tours,’ we find in each initial disappointment at regular intervals in the places visited, most particularly Rome, and in the case of Goethe and Dickens, most particularly with reference to its famous Carnival. George Eliot is examined first, and we find in particular in her case that the pattern is repeated, not only in Italy, but virtually everywhere: Antwerp, Cologne, Weimar. In the case of Goethe, who stayed nearly two years in Italy in the course of his travels, a whole process of Bildung and self-discovery takes place, particularly where two bites of the same cherry are possible, as with Rome. On his first experience of Carnival there, he exclaims sarcastically that “one has to see the Roman carnival to lose all wish to see it again.” But a blissful intervening experience of Naples and some double-takes in Sicily cause him to eat his words. Approaching it afresh, he recognises some of the meanings of the Moccoli rituals with which the Carnival concludes. The extinguishing of others’ candles now signifies for him the joyous celebration of the simultaneous destruction of the old and return of the new in spring. Dickens too came to love this festival after an initial rejection of Rome comparable to that of George Eliot. But the main disappointment/discovery motif in "Pictures from Italy" concerns Genoa, where to begin with he declares “I never was so dismayed in my life.” Drawing on an anti-Catholic tradition in English travel writing that goes back to Addison, he denounces the squalor and neglect that is rife in the city as a manifestation of the church’s indifference to questions of social welfare. But even at the outset, at a time when “I little thought I should ever come to have an attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa,” he begins a process of discovery in Italy that will lead eventually to a delighted appreciation of the Moccoli festival at Carnival: “anything so gay, so bright and lively as the whole scene there, would be difficult to imagine.”

“The blessed isles” and the “native shore”

Author(s): Julia Helena Wilde / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The medieval story of the Irish saint, Brendan the Navigator (c. 484–c. 577) and his voyage in search of the Earthly Paradise has inspired many artists. A narrative poem “The Voyage of St. Brendan” (1848) by Denis Florence MacCarthy was written at the time of the Irish Famine (1845–1849) which led to a mass emigration to America. The poet connects the past with the present, resurrecting the belief that St. Brendan was the first European to discover America. He combines Brendan’s patriotism with his courage to cross the ocean in search of the Earthly Paradise identified with America. The aim of this paper is to compare the detailed descriptions of Ireland with the marvellous images of the Earthly Paradise in MacCarthy’s work. By looking at the portrayals of both places through historical revisionist lenses, I argue that MacCarthy creates a transtemporal bridge between two islands of happiness - the human and the spiritual one - in order to revive the Irish pride and hope.

Henry Lansdell’s Repeat Journeys to Central Asia

Author(s): Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Reverend Henry Lansdell’s (1841–1919) preaching position allowed him to travel extensively, first in Europe and gradually to make long and arduous journeys in Russia, Siberia and Central Asia. His eight-volume travel accounts, running to several editions in England, confirmed Lansdell’s reputation as a talented and careful observer with unparalleled knowledge of the geopolitical situation in Central Asia in the second half of the 19th century. My paper examines the rhetorical strategies Lansdell employed in writing his last book on Central Asian sensitive border regions under the imperial security constraints of the moment. Lansdell’s failure of self-censorship in fact erupts in concealed messages, hidden between the words, smuggled past the censors, to reach certain sections of his readership able to read between the lines, revealing the undisclosed and unsaid of his repeat journeys.

The Acts of Writing and Reading Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental Travel Journals

Author(s): Magdalena Ożarska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In July 1820, William, Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth, set out for the Continent in order to retrace the itinerary of William’s youthful trip, documented in "The Prelude". During the tour, Dorothy and Mary kept travel journals. Dorothy’s was first edited and published by Ernest de Selincourt in 1941; Mary’s remained in manuscript until recently. The two journals are very different. Mary’s journal repeatedly relies on Dorothy’s to provide details of their shared experience, while the only reference that Dorothy ever makes to Mary’s writing is in connection with an inkbottle that Mary wants to buy in Interlaken, Switzerland. Readers of the two journals include the two diarists themselves, William Wordsworth, Henry Crabb Robinson, Sarah Hutchinson and Dora Wordsworth. Soon, the readers’ circle expands to include more friends and acquaintances. This paper discusses the intertextual relationships between these travel diaries as well as their reception by their first readers.

Romantic Wanderers

Author(s): Przemysław Uściński / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

For the English poets of the Romantic period wandering or roaming without fixed direction or purpose suggested not idleness but the possibility of rediscovering one’s sense of place and establishing a meaningful connection with nature. Peripatetic poetry tends to appreciate the need for movement, liberty, and spontaneity as well as the sense of openness and connectedness. By looking at two selected poems, one by Coleridge and one by Wordsworth, the article seeks to offer some notes on the Romantic attitudes to walking, especially in terms of their approach to nature, the role of imagination and experience, as well as in the context of their reaction (especially in case of Wordsworth) to the growth of mass-tourism in the period.

“She is a pregnant horror as she stands”

Author(s): Dorota Osińska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The vision of mythological Medea allures and repels the Victorians. The late Victorian women writers recognised the powerful figure of the Colchian princess, who has served as the embodiment of female cruelty and brutality. However, women authors saw the need to portray Medea not exclusively as a ruthless killer, but rather as a desperate woman entangled in the web of social, and marital constraints. One of these writers was Amy Levy, an English poet, whose insights into the Woman Question have recently been rediscovered by literary scholars. In this article, I explore how Medea, as reworked by Levy, personifies the concept of the Other in nineteenth century English literature. Looking at Medea through the lens of monstrosity theories, I argue that Medea’s depiction becomes symptomatic of the larger problem of perception of unconventional women in late Victorian middle-class society.