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This article examines the ways in which the self-awareness of a feminine identity, the perceived value of women and the self-esteem of a particular author have been evolving from 1904 to the end of the First World War; the author in question is Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė (1886–1958), Lithuanian publicist, writer and educator. During her studies at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków in 1904–1907 (and in Adrian Baraniecki’s High Courses for Women), she decisively chose to study the humanities and became one of the first modern Lithuanian women engaged in literature, literary criticism and the politics of education. This article presents the context of the women’s emancipation movement that at beginning of the 20th century in Kraków, where the increasing possibilities of education for young women had become increasingly available. Right after her return to Lithuania in 1907, Kymantaitė took part in the Lithuanian Women’s Congress in Kaunas and became involved in the preparatory work on the regulations of the Lithuanian Women’s Society. In her collection of articles Lietuvoje: kritikos žvilgsnis į Lietuvos inteligentiją (“In Lithuania: A Critical Look at the Lithuanian Intelligentsia,” 1910), besides a wide scope of issues that were considered, Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė discussed the issue of the relationship between well-educated men and women and questioned the equal value of women in the nascent modern Lithuanian society. In 1910, Čiurlionienė wrote a dramatic dialogue Ateities moteris (“Woman of the Future”, 1910), which highlights the idea that the equality between man and woman rests on shared human values. The dialogue foregrounds the spiritual faithfulness of the woman to the man she had chosen – faithfulness that is upheld despite the distance that greatly separates them, contradictory to the thought that women are incapable of creating ties of friendship with men, as expressed by one of Nietzsche’s literary characters. The main character of Ateities moteris – Johanna – reveals herself as a rebel only when she confronts the antagonist’s patriarchal worldview and his commanding affirmation of women’s lower position and the determinism of biological needs. References to Otto Weininger’s study Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903), as well as a quote that evokes misogynistic sentiments from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883), appear in the dramatic dialogue, provoking a polemic with these authors' positions. The dialogue indicates the writer’s interest in the theories of gender struggle. The text reflects Čiurlionienė’s involvement in the preparation of the statute of the Lithuanian Women’s Society as well as the influence of liberal feminist ideas that she had encountered while still in Kraków. Following the Romantic authors’ attempts to reveal female heroism, Čiurlionienė strived to create a distinctive interpretation of the end-of-the-19th-century “Lithuanian Jeanne d’Arc” in her psychological sketch (novelette) Joana Vaidilaitė (1914–1918). Johanna’s worldview is undoubtedly more akin to the ideas of early modernism, whereas Joana Vaidilaitė’s sedentary lifestyle is determined by the young woman’s realia of the 19th-century countryside, and later by her treatment in a psychiatric hospital. The sketch suggests the reality of the protagonist’s mystical motherhood, which others treat as a manifestation of madness. The novelette has never been published. Had Joana Vaidilaitė been published during the first years of Lithuania’s independence, there could have been an opportunity to enrich the history of Lithuanian literature with original efforts to give a sense to motherhood, with the Romantic treatment of madness as a form of clairvoyance and the modernist interpretation of the sea as a fluctuating womb. To conclude, starting with the formulation of the statute of the Lithuanian Women’s Society in 1910, Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė’s attempts to express liberal feminist ideas in literary fiction become more noticeable; in these writings, the author refuses to think of motherhood as a manifestation of the impersonal nature's force (which relates to the views of the misogynists), and she cherishes the idea that conscious motherhood is equated to the creation of an individual capable of enriching cultural resources in the future.
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The article is to describe an interesting phenomenon of the duplication of the literary patterns of behaviour among female protagonists created by Jane Austen. The subject of the paper is the analysis of the set books of the heroines invented by the British author in the both social and cultural context. Jane Austen’s novels can be regarded as the treasury of knowledge on the existence of the young girls at that time. The omnipresent conventions took away their right to dreams and self-fulfilment in almost every sphere of life. Lots of them found the coveted hope of improving their lives on the pages of overly aesthetic, sentimental novels. The characters from the books became inspirational among the female sex. The view of young ladies was based on their inner cultivation of the behaviour and mood which were inseparable from the girls from the popular romances. The patterns, continually given by fiction, took the place of humanistic and scientific knowledge, making the girls unaware – without the simplest information about the world. The subjects given in a wrong way by wrong teachers lowered their interest in education among youth, which also led to the popularity of sentimental, historical (especially those presenting the romance on the background of crucial events form the history of the given country) and Gothic novels. The text will concern the analysis of the attitude of the heroines created by the British author – on the basis of their set books and the position of Jane Austen in the range of literary criticism and the above-mentioned social phenomenon.
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The aim of the article is the consideration of the way in which Jane Austen asks in her novels about the status of reality. The subject of the interest are the narrations about “crime” understood as the events breaching the normal social experience and revealing how fragile the reality is. The significant context of the consideration is the classical detective literature. The author proves that the work of Jane Austen can be characterized by the similar reflection on societies in which the project of social reality is entangled. Referring to the conception of Luc Boltanski, she shows that, in the novels of the British writer, crime is a form of “reality testing”. Austen casts in doubt the frames of reality and reveals the conventional dimension of the social life. Her purpose, however, is not to disclose the social world – she sees the possibility of its integration.
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The graphic designs proposed by Polish publishers cannot be compared neither in number, nor in diversity to those presented by Margaret C. Sullivan in Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Book Covers. Nevertheless, they are a valuable and still undiscussed source of knowledge on the Polish reception of Austen’s novels. Further information on this subject is provided in the first part of the paper by a compilation of book series in which some or all of the texts by Austen have appeared since the 1990s. The analysis of the book covers takes into consideration the relation between the design and the content of the narrative as well as the character of the artwork and its origin. The most popular were 19th century paintings (portraits, genre scenes, less frequently landscapes), film stills from the movie adaptations and floral patterns. As one of the aims of the study was to answer the question how the covers direct the reading process and place the text in the literary tradition, the remarks on the publishers’ choices were supplemented with the readers’ reviews. In the conclusion, it was suggested how the potential, new editions could be designed to stand out from the former ones.
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The subject of the article is the reception of Jane Austen in the sphere of e-culture – its fragment connected to websites and discussion forums concerning the writer. The phenomenon of “Austen mania” starts in Poland mainly because of the popularity of the movies based on Jane Austen prose. These sites and forums played not only a popularizing role, spreading the knowledge about the writers’ biography, work, film adaptations, or Regency, but they also grouped the society of fans who felt the need of being close to the other readers of Austen and some virtual companion in a feminine sphere created by numerous, common interpretation of the behaviour of the heroes of her prose, and also fans’ creativity in the area of gadgets, Regency costumes and literary tourism. The other form of activity is fan fiction, slightly represented on the forums and sites, especially in the comparison to fan fiction around the work of Austen in the English-speaking circle. They are most frequently the translations from The Republic of Pemberley, not prepared, unfinished, fragmentated, or personal attempts of a romance kind, in a style of Harlequin literature and a sentimental tone.
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The article is devoted to the works of Emma Tennant, an English writer, the author of, inter alia, the continuation of Sense and Sensibility, Emma, as well as Pride and Prejudice. A characteristic feature of Tennant’s writing was the ability to give new meanings to the texts and myths of the popular culture – so she did with the story of Elinor and Marianne, or Sylvia Plath, to whom she devoted one of her better texts. The article, based on the example of Emma Tennant’s writing, focuses on the issues of the strategy of creating literature as rewriting and functioning of feminist ideas in the modern literature.
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The article analyses an ITV series Lost in Austen (2008), directed by Dan Zeff, as an example of postmodern play with Pride and Prejudice. Moving the contemporary heroine to the imaginary, textual sphere, the movie compares the reality of the 19th and the 21st century, emphasizing the visibly different positions of women. It not only “rewrites” the course of events, but also makes the tensions (which were previously silenced by the romance convention) more dynamic. Oscillating between the parody and nostalgia, Lost in Austen both continues and enriches Pride and Prejudice. Playful engagement with the original novel is the principal theme and motif of the series, but also the subject of its parodistic criticism. Lost in Austen engages both with the novel and with its 20th century reception. Moreover, by creative reinterpretation of the writer’s text, it shows the changing paradigms of the 20th century criticism and the cultural and literary theory. Highlighting the aspects of the novel important for the contemporary era, it initiates an interesting dialogue with the rich intertextual tapestry that contemporary popular culture weaved around Jane Austen.
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Contemporary (Re)interpretation of Jane Austen’s Novels – about Looking for Freedom is a comparative study of the works of the author of Sense and Sensibility and the British series Taboo. As the main aim of paper the author took the search for analogies in these, far and totally different, as it may seems, texts of culture. Naming after Carrie Vaughn the works of Miss Austen as the “universe mirrors”, the author drew the attention to the modern “reflections” of Austen’s characters (anti-heroes, look-alikes) and today’s reinterpretation of the 19th century. For the palimpsest reading of the Austen’s novel she used the tools of the feminist criticism and the postcolonial theory. It allowed her to observe the femininemasculine relations, the relations based on a master-servant pattern, and, at the end, to analyse the political, social, cultural image of the coloniser and the colonised, which has been made by the colonial regime at that time. The author of the article put these two discourses together in order to prove that the rights of the 19th century wife were limited to those of a slave from the Dark Continent.
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The review of: Agnieszka Łowczanin. 2018. A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic. Anna Mostowska Reads Ann Radcliffe. Berlin: Peter Lang.
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The political censorship in Romania during the communist period set off the so-called exile. Romanian writers, who did not submit to the political regime, leaning towards a realistic, aesthetic, transparent and open literature, waiving the opacity of words and the hiding of truth in their approach, were forced to endure the route to exile.
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Translation is a human activity and like all human activities, it has its difficulties and satisfactions. With the aim to enlighten some theories regarding the translations, we are going to explore the studies of the theorists Anca Greere (2003), Hans J. Vermeer (2000) and Christiane Nord (1997). By examining the above theories, our goal is to obtain a clearer view upon the difficulties encountered in the translating activity, on the one hand and on the other, to find the proper way to surpass these difficulties. The translator as a professional has to take into account different aspects in order to comply with the translation task. Thus, the translator has to consider aspects related to the analysis of the source text, this constituting a source of information. On the other hand, the translator has to consider aspects regarding the text type, the text production and the recipient of the target text. In addition to presenting theoretical considerations on functional approaches, the applicative part of our paper will bring to attention four types of translation mistakes, which any translator should avoid and some viable solutions to the problems they pose.
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Edgar Allan Poe neither cherished nor appreciated the fundamental standing points of American Transcendentalism, never missing the opportunity to express his “disagreement” with the ideas discussed by some leading figures of this religious, literary and philosophical movement in antebellum America. He criticized their “obscurity for the sake of obscurity“, their being prone to vagueness and imprecission as well as the way they perceived the Universe, the Oneness, the Soul of the World and the Soul of the Individual. The aim of this paper is to highlight Poe’s perspective on Transcendentalism, both on the literary scene of the day and in some of his short stories.
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Owing largely to the political situation in the United States, which seems to head, dangerously so, towards a dystopian Gilead, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale gets, at the end of the 2010s, to be re-told by many voices: that of her original creator – by her writing a sequel, The Testaments (2019) –, but also those assumed in successful transmedial adaptations – the homonymous graphic novel authored by Renee Nault (2019) and the TV series that has taken Offred beyond her final step “into the darkness within, or else the light” (Atwood 2010: 307) into the second, third and fourth seasons. Aside from Season 1, which follows closely the convoluted structure of Offred’s monological testimony, the TV series seems, at a glance, less a multimodal adaptation and more an appropriation of a late 20th-century novel that has become a political and cultural phenomenon. Part of a project concerned with the many re-tellings of The Handmaid’s Tale, this paper aims to analyse the TV series’ fabric beyond the plot departures from its hypotext, as well as the latter’s ‘translations’, with a view to proving its unquestionable indebtedness to the ‘mistressmind’ of contemporary speculative fiction.
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How to Be Both by Ali Smith, which centres around the concept of art and reality to a great extent, is an experimental novel that invites the reader to think through dualities, including life and death, artwork and human; and, significantly, from the perspectives of eyes and camera. Divided into two sections, the novel includes two stories which are decade-apart. One of them focuses on the life of the 15th-century artist Francesco del Cossa, and the other is reflected through the point of view of George, a young girl from the contemporary period, dealing with the loss of her mother, as she recalls some precious moments she shared with her. The different plots merge when George and her mother go to see the paintings of Cossa. By foregrounding the two kinds of perception, Smith’s novel signifies the art critic John Berger’s theory of perspective, indicated in his BBC series-based book Ways of Seeing. According to Berger’s cultural theory, the human eye, like a painting on the wall, can only be in one place at a time. Yet, the camera takes its visible world with it as it moves, and through the camera we can see things which are not in front of us; it is freed from the boundaries of time and space. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the significance of gaze while interpreting relative reality in Smith’s novel by employing Berger’s cultural and artistic theory.
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Throughout the medieval and early modern periods in Europe, animal-derived materials were routinely used in book production, and thousands of animals thus left their bodily traces in and on supposedly human cultural artefacts. Acknowledging their presence requires us to rethink how we conceive of life, embodiment and response in relation to writing and of animals in relation to textuality. The animals whose remains were turned into books not only embody meaning but their bodies became meaning in the shape of text. This article sets out to follow the material traces of these animals rendered invisible centuries ago to draw attention to the tangible animality of our literary heritage. By raising consciousness for the essential, yet often neglected role other animals played in its creation, my research troubles traditional animal-human and nature-culture binaries, calling for a more nuanced appreciation of animal lives in- and outside (human) texts.
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This article delves into the problem of nonhuman subjectivity in two literary texts: Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise with the first-person tortoise narration, and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth that employs the collective primate narrator. While nonhumans cannot actively participate in the act of creation of the text, their presence in the story, arranged by the author, conveys multiple meanings. Considerations of the narrative techniques are critical for negotiating the relevance of nonhuman actors. I argue that although each author finds different methods of giving voice to nonhumans and both ensure practical significance of animal particularity, nonhuman subjectivity should not be perceived as a fixed value of the presented literary texts.
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Engagement with animals is a central theme in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, reflected and shaped by the character-narrator Pi’s reading of animal minds. The article examines attributions of minds to animals in three types of encounters with them: observation, interaction, and narration. While in childhood Pi tends to project human temperaments and emotions onto animals, he is forced to recognize animals’ species-specific experiences as the shipwreck foregrounds his embodiment. As such, the novel introduces the logic of nonhuman psychology into narrative development, formulating an intersubjective and interspecies relationship. Furthermore, at the end of the novel, it alerts us to intellectual and therapeutic functions of animals as narrative elements through a comparison between representations of human and animal minds. The text not only identifies different forms of presence of animals in the human world, but generates insights into how narrative in general conveys and responds to complex human-animal entanglements in our reality.
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Place and significance in the traditional mentality led body, especially in some epic productions at a certain determinism of being. Quality double body (biological and spiritual), allowed to imagine a traditional mentality an epic scheme which they can pose to the daily, the need for something else, non-ephemeral, the transreality. Where is the subject brought me into the discussion in this study, in which the hero always tries to close, purpose erotic and marital, a superior being to his human nature, profane, ephemeral. Coveted, sought so feminine beings produce in psychology hero, by their nature substance, a certain re-structuring, re-psychological and behavioral modeling which eventually will give meaning and motivation epic. But how and why it will get here? What are the traditional epic scenarios ahead for final success? Where are located, epistemic speaking, such situations? Phenomenologically, all these efforts the hero had only a social basis or reflects a (diluted) scheme mythical thinking, absolutely necessary for self-fulfillment of the individual person who is the hero?
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