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My paper explores medieval and early modern pageantry in contemporary British culture through performances staged in 2012 in England: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, Damon Albarn and Rufus Norris’ opera, Dr Dee, and the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. I argue that global attention in 2012 offered the opportunity for Britain to redefine its cultural identity through the above-mentioned performances.
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The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the epic and dramatic qualities and elements present in Coleridge's lyrical ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", analyze their functioning and purpose and interpret the meanings they disseminate within the structure of the poem that serve to construct its main thematic aspects. Accordingly, the narrative characteristics of the poem have been also explained, its similarities to the epic, the dramatic relations between the characters, the elements of the medieval forms (morality and miracle play) present in it, as well as the complexity of Mariner's character and his transformation. Furthermore, this paper aims to analyze the ways in which Coleridge introduces the motives he draws from myths, other literary types and literary epochs, thus building the characteristic composition and atmosphere of the poem. Hence, the polysemy, allegorical features and selfreferentiality will be stressed with which "The Rime of the Ancient Mariners" abounds. The thematic aspects of the poem concerning religiosity as well as its semantic levels which communicate the Coleridge's idea of the poem as "an organic form developed by the power of individual imagination" and poetry as "the balance and reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities" have been also discussed. Finally, this paper comes to a conclusion that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is compositionally and thematically focused on the process of creation, the nature of poetry, the similarity between the poet and the Creator, and that in itself, it unites the universal concepts of truth, cognition, imagination, love and faith.
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Hamid’s fourth novel Exit West is a story about migration. In this novel, Hamid attempts to claim that we are all migrants. Characters appear out of magical doors as the gateway to another life. Structured around the story of a young couple from an un-named country Saaed and Nadia who escape through one of these magical doors but in this story the voice of the millions of migrants, refugees are silenced, existing on the periphery, hardly mentioned at all, other than in terms of the streets filling up with tents and people. It is through their inability to speak in universalising the idea that all people are migrants Hamid has silenced the voices and stories of those migrants relegating their existence to a state of unbelonging and human waste at the mercy of countries, traffickers and the conditions they are faced with. In this world of Hamid’s, walls are built, police intervention, social disorder, result in state sanctioned violence leading to securitization. Rather than interconnectedness and belonging, a sense of un-belonging and uncertainty prevail. In silencing migrant voices, Hamid says little about or supplies any answers to why all people being migrants ultimately make a better world. In this world time and space collapse into disorder, fear and securitization.
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The purpose of this paper is to show the competing sides of silence in the novel Here We Are, recently published, in 2020, by Graham Swift, such as: isolation vs trust, thrill of magic vs loss, and the relationship between silence and respect for rules. Swift challenges the usual one-side associations with silence, positive or negative, by showing that silence can be sometimes negative, and sometimes positive. Sometimes it can be used to communicate even more than by using words. The conclusion is that silence can reveal trust and emotional connection, ensuring protection for Swift’s characters in this novel.
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Postmodernism offered the context for feminist and postcolonial writers to challenge the canon, by rewriting canonical texts from fresh perspectives or by filling the gaps, voicing the silences and narrating the untold stories. Such is the case of Marina Warner’s novel “Indigo”, a lyrical narrative that abounds in intertextual references to William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. I argue that Marina Warner uses female characters that in Shakespeare’s play are either absent or simple pawns in the patriarchal game, to give voice to the enslaved natives and to the silenced women and to emphasize the importance of oral history. Marina Warner’s novel is an invitation to look back in order to revisit history, to challenge it and/or to recover it through the act of storytelling. Moreover, storytelling also becomes the instrument that can help in constructing a better future
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Our article, a part of a larger, undergoing, project, focuses on the role of silence and voices in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, which begins with the narrator’s expressed need to reveal the story of his family and of his life in a race against time in order to leave something behind. While the story is dominated by the need to communicate, by the presence of voices, by the issue of language, the episodes in which silence is referred to are also important, marking crucial moments in the text.
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Even though silence is conventionally seen as merely absence of sound, emptiness bare of any definition, it can, in fact, have a multiplicity of meanings. It is used to negate, to express a variety of emotions, to maintain the status quo or to threaten it. The use of silence in fiction is of particular interest due to the plurality of ways of expression that a literary text provides.Although silence itself is not used as an independent motif in David Lodge’s work, many of his narratives use it as a tool to represent certain feelings, power interpersonal relations or relations between people and institutions. One such novel, and the one that focuses on such relations the most, is Deaf Sentence (2008), which recounts a process of the loss of hearing by a former professor of linguistics. In my research, I aim to explore the possibility of connecting deafness (and, hence, silence) with the places the character occupies, visits or avoids, and investigate the relations that are built between the main character and the space around him with the involvement of both sound and silence, as well as the balance of noise and silence of the spaces the protagonist occupies as a means of reinforcing the representation of the character development and provide additional levels of understanding of the conflicts touched upon by the novel. While focusing on Deaf Sentence, I will draw examples of the use of silence as a tool of representation from other novels written by David Lodge, and examine whether silence of spaces can be identified as influencing the narrative. To do so, I will utilise existing research on silence provided by the works of Judith Butler, Michael Foucault and Maria Tumarkin, as well as relevant findings in the field of space studies.
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The present paper highlights the way in which, in order to answer the need for a different kind of rendering the characters life-stories, namely by reconstructing them from bits and pieces left after they had been silenced by fatal circumstances, contemporary detective fiction authors often opt for disclosing the secrets of the human bodies after their demise due to the use of cutting-edge technology and highly specialized professionals as it appears in forensic crime thrillers which combine fiction with facts and scientific elements. This kind of hybrid writing, currently embodying the contradictions of modern life and the preference for intercultural texts, generates a narrative that breaks down the traditional life-story telling into apparently unrelated pieces of a mystery puzzle that eventually develop the entire picture of a late existence. The reliable knowledge is provided to the reader by fictional forensic scientists who become carriers of non-fictional information that can help to bring a subject to life in a virtual way, beyond the sheer data, thus demonstrating how human remains reveal both secrets and truths in a fascinating, make-believe way as foregrounded in the present selection of texts authored by highly acclaimed writers.
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The intention of the paper is to examine the way in which realist conventions are deconstructed by the narrative strategies used by the contemporary English writer in his novel. The narrative under scrutiny isn informed by the post-structuralist theories regarding the relation between art and reality, more specifically the way in which history can be rewritten as fictional discourse.
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Samuel Beckett's popular play Endgame, depicts a prison-like room with two windows that show a dead universe and a "corpsed world". Throughout his play, Beckett uses ideas, symbols, objects, and actions that reflect an ending. In Endgame the characters cannot choose; it seems that everything is coming to an end and they can do nothing about it; they have to accept it. The play's world is devoid of meaning, warmth, humor and all beautiful things. In most of his works Beckett shows that human faculties are deteriorating and Endgame is no exception. Hamm and Clov are not mobile; Hamm cannot stand and Clov just moves in a limited way. Nagg and Nell are confined in a dustbin totally without action and mobility. Hamm's chronicle is an unfinished one and one can generalize it to all Beckett's works as they avoid closure. In fact the play starts from the point where it's "nearly finished" and it ends the same.
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This article deals with autobiographical remarks and autobiographies written in medieval England, either by English authors or by authors who came to England (mainly from France), as well as by authors that were born in England but moved (or had to move) abroad (mainly to France). The survey is broad in that it takes not only Old and Middle English texts into account, but also relevant Latin texts. A wide range of material exists, from passages where authors simply mention their name to fully-fledged autobiographies, such as the Book of Margery Kempe, which is often regarded as the first genuine English autobiography. In another respect, my scope is narrower than that of some previous critics (especially Brandl and Misch): autobiographies by clearly fictitious characters such as Beowulf or the speakers in many of the Old English elegies are excluded. However, the borderline between the genuine and the fictitious is not always easy to draw. Therefore, I also briefly discuss the Old English elegy “Deor”, where the speaker mentions his name (Deor), but is nevertheless probably a fictitious character. It is also not always easy to decide where the autobiography describes real events and where the speaker uses or at least seems to use topoi, conventionalized images; but even a conventionalized image can express real events. There are several cases where the speaker describes himself as an old man, who repents the luxurious and sinful life which he led in his youth. Due to these and similar problems, scholars have not been able to identify some authors or characters, even if their names are mentioned. This applies to the Old English poet Cynewulf or to Nicholas of Guildford, who is referred to as a wise man at the end of the Early Middle English poem “Owl and Nightingale.” Chaucer is the only author who describes himself with a bit of clear self-irony – this confirms Chaucer’s exceptional status among the medieval English poets.
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The problem-thematic unit “Finance” is outlined in the theoretical work “The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction” (2018). The importance of this unit is due to the presence of texts in which to understand the worldview of the characters it is important to take into account the socio-economic environment in which the characters live and which affects their behavior. In the novels “NW” (2012) by Zadie Smith, “Other People’s Money” (2011) by Justin Cartwright and “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” (2010) by Jonathan Coe, the writers offer a new representation of the image of money, which distances money from the material world and becomes a transcendental value. Monetary processes are perceived as imaginary phenomena that the characters perceive speculatively. This leads to cataclysms and painful experiences arising from the loss of the characters of their work and the total banking crisis. The representation of money in the novels exploits the tendency that contemporary British authors discover trends related to German philosophy and the ideas of Kantianism. Money is not a form of achieving material goods, but a tool that shows that the characters are able to create another virtual world, which can exist as a speculative phenomenon. The presented range of novels confirms the ideas of B. Shalahinov that the sources of philosophical thought of German Romanticism were nourishing both for the Modern period and the Post-postmodern one, in particular exploited in the British post-postmodern novels.
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Карил Филипс: Далека обала, превели с енглеског Аријана Лубурић Цвијановић и Игор Цвијановић.
More...![“Eternity roll’d wide apart”: The Creation of the World and Man in William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen in Light of Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Last Judgment](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2021_60985.jpg)
Beginnings are usually regarded as either hard or energizing times that set our inner world in motion. However, there is a beginning that is more important for humanity than any other: the origin of human life and of the world. The knowledge of our origin and the mystery concerning the beginning of the world have been the most intriguing and most engaging issues since man became aware of their own physical and spiritual existence. For many centuries, it was the duty of religion to provide humanity with a teaching about their origin and the foundation of human dignity. However, the 18th and 19th centuries were critical in the treatment of the biblical creation stories in Europe. The debate between misinterpreted creation myth accounts and scientific theories led to a sharpening confrontation between religion and science, but it also divided the believers and resulted in the birth of new theories. Emanuel Swedenborg, an influential theologist of the period, wrote detailed commentaries and genuine tractates related to the topic that influenced the ideology and art of William Blake, a versatile and ingenious artist and thinker of the era, whose influence is still significant today. The aim of this study is to highlight the parallels and contrasts between Blake’s Genesis myth and Swedenborg’s teachings, mainly through the unusual pairing of The [First] Book of Urizen and The Last Judgment, to show the connection between Swedenborg’s unorthodox views and Blake’s ideas about the creation of man and the world.
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Postmodernist Faces of Truth and Fiction in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. This essay analyses Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea and argues that the concept of truth stands for multiple-faced fiction to be interpreted according to the readers’ vision, culture and education. One’s vision of the world represents one’s truth about the world. Emphasizing the fictionality of truth and inviting the readers to analyze the symbols of the sea and of the “various lights” (Murdoch 77), which stand for different views on the past and the world, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea evinces its postmodernist and metafictional condition.
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Art, Depth and Affect in Winter: Metamodernist Contexts of Ali Smith's Novel. The paper discusses Ali Smith’s Winter through the prism of the theory of metamodernism. The novel can be related to the works of authors who reject the cynical sophistication of postmodernist art and appropriate its strategies to focus on authenticity, sincerity, and affect. Drawing on Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen, who maintain that the metamodernist structure of feeling manifests through a mix of/or oscillation between pre-modernist, modernist and postmodernist tropes and devices, the author considers Ali Smith’s novel a mixture of postmodernist, modernist and romantic elements and explores how these elements function in the production of the metamodernist effect of her novel.
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Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. This article focuses on the way Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey’s heroine, is influenced and even guided by the literature she either chooses or is given to read. Her reading habits, as well as her changing typologies as a reader, influence both the development of her character and the narrative. This study also debunks the idea that Northanger Abbey is a parody of Gothic fiction, contextualizing book reading in an age when the novel was yet to be considered a respectable literary genre.
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Review of: Ljubica Matek, English Literature in Context. From Romanticism until the Late Twentieth Century, Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku, Osijek, 2020., 150 str.
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Poetry written by Joseph R. Kipling (Aкo; Човек са два лика; Хар Диалина љубавна песма; Сестина о краљевској скитници; Ми и они; Пророци у свом крају; Химна телесним мукама; Богови записа древних)
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Among the twentieth-century writers who made the city a part of their discourse aiming at revealing both self-identity and social meanings is James Joyce, a major representative of modernism. Portrait is a Bildungsroman which proves that this type of fiction is a psychological novel about an individual who strives to acquire a self, or, having a self, he or she embarks on a quest for a better self. Portrait prefigures modernism, Joyce making use of his aesthetic concentration to achieve literary innovation by exploring new fields of human experience and developing new means of artistic expression in his focus on individual, primarily psychological, existence. The present study argues about the link between the protagonist and the chronotope of the city as a factor of synthesis of the formative experience which in this novel ends in departure and search, whereas the Bildung (self or identity) is still to be acquired and asserted.
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