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In 1872, a few months after the end of the conflict, G. A. Henty, who had been a war correspondent, published The Young Franc-Tireurs and Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War. In the hundred or so historical novels he would subsequently write, the young reader will have occasion to witness similar historical events, seen through the eyes of a protagonist, a boy of his own age; this in many titles is explicit: With Clive in India (1884), With Wolfe in Canada (1887), With Moore at Corunna (1898), With Buller in Natal (1901). This paper will discuss the books Henty dedicated to the history of England in the Middle Ages: Beric the Briton (Romanization), The Dragon and the Raven (King Alfred and the Danes), Wulf the Saxon (the Norman Invasion) and half a dozen others. At school history was schematic, indeed boring; for the avid readers we then were, History, authentic History, was that described by Henty.
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The paper deals with particular ways of telling History to children. The analysis refers to Les arbres pleurent aussi (written by Irène Cohen-Janca and illustrated by Maurizio A.C. Quarello; 2009) and Memorial (having Gary Crew as author and Shaun Tan as illustrator; 1999). Conceived in different cultural contexts – European and Australian – these picture books are linked by specific expressive choices, regarding content items and formal solutions: in both books, the main characters are trees which become unexpected witnesses of History and frail guardians of Memory. Images are thus endowed with a semantic and narrative function: they amplify the strength of the story, without falling into pathos or rhetoric. These are stories that show the expressive dignity which visual language can take when it intersects with words in the definition of a text conceived as textum, as discursive fabric whose overall design depends both on verbal and iconic threads. The way these images ‘talk’ to the reader is metaphorical. They operate through figures which offer themselves as a field of exploration open to multiple possibilities of signification.
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The first nine articles of this year’s issue of Cultural Perspectives deal with the presence and role of history in children’s literature in English . From the very start, our contributors agreed that neither term could be taken at face value. Ideological, cultural and literary intersections demanded a careful unraveling of several knots. Experts on children’s literature agreed that the genre of history and its discourse offered at once a powerful concentration of all that we regard as un-childish in children’s literature, and un-historical in historiography. The variety of approaches, the texts analyzed, the very tools adopted by the contributors, speak of their awareness of the problems embedded in these two relevant terms, which can be described as the literary/visual presence of historical matter in texts performing a significant cultural role. Ideology functions as the hinge between these two dimensions: between the literary uses of the past and the cultural performance of the text in the present.
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This paper looks at some of the political, gender and educational implications of rewriting history in English-language children's literature and the ways in which writers of fiction manipulate historical ‘facts’, in the context of the relatively small amount of historical knowledge that modern British children possess.
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A passionate engagement with the education of children pervades Dickens’s writing. In fiction, throughout his extended career as a journalist and in his daily correspondence he argued strenuously on their behalf: to take their educational needs seriously, to treat pupils with kindness, to provide intelligent and well-informed instruction, and, most importantly, to be “devilish sharp in what we do to children” (Letters 4: 653). This paper has two sections. It begins with a brief comment about the biographical context of that remark as it is refracted in Dickens’ fiction. The latter section shows Dickens’s opinions concerning the teaching of English history and the control of the curriculum that loses none of its urgency as Government ministers seek to implement notions of ‘British values’ that provoke fierce opposition from a range of opponents.
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This article explores Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, as a contemporary play, which manages to be highly entertaining and at the same time educationally enriching. While not written for adolescents, they have flocked to see the play onstage. Among other topics, the author focuses on the different methods of teaching history of three teachers at a secondary school in the North of England in the 1980s. Dramatic conflict and humour derive from the way he pits against each other the view of history held by his teacher-protagonists, often throwing the students into a state of intellectual confusion. Which teacher are they to believe? Through a close reading of the play, it would appear that the spectator, including an adolescent spectator, is left free. He or she can choose to identify with one of the teachers and the view of history she or he is purporting, or simply watch the play, appreciating the challenging intellectual debate it sets forth.
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This article explores adaptations of Shakespeare’s Henry V in the years leading up to World War I, and demonstrates how they articulated an unreservedly positive vision of Henry V, turning this play into an imaginative narrative resource offered to British children to arouse patriotism. By emphasizing the king’s heroism and the unity of the English (British?) people, retellings of Shakespeare’s Henry V provided a powerful inspiration for a national spirit which is represented as a fantasy to be shared with the original Elizabethan audience.
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This article aims to decipher the semiotic journey which is experienced by the fairy tale characters in the tradition of storytelling. From a semiotic perspective, every storytelling process transfers its own perception to the reader; in other words, every text creates its own reader. Storytelling in fairy tales reconfigures the moral history ideologically in order to maintain the so-called integrity and continuity of religious, cultural, politic and economic values. When the reader/the child is attracted into the text, then s/he accepts what is given by the narrator without any objection. The author will tackle aspects such as: how fairy tales serve as the cultural adaptors of transference, revision and duplication of moral histories through signs in nature for inhabiting the traditional patriarchal moral stance in the brains to shape a certain identity.
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Texts, Contexts, and Intertextuality. Dickens as a Reader/ Norbert Lennartz, Dieter Koch (eds.) - Paolo Caponi ; The Dacian Knot (Nodul dacic)/Ioan Marchiş - Doina Cmeciu; Children’s Literature, Popular Culture and Robinson Crusoe/ Andrew O’Malley - Elisa Marazzi ; The Stylistic Identity of English Literary Texts/Nadia-Nicoleta Morărașu - Ioan-Lucian Popa; Parallaxes: Virginia Woolf Meets James Joyce/ Marco Canani and Sara Sullam (eds.) - Alisa Nikitina
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The aim of the article is to compare entries referring to the names of dishes, drinks and food products registered in the Dictionary of Polish Language ed. by Mieczysław Szymczak and in the Universal Dictionary of Polish Language ed. by Stanisław Dubisz. The comparative analysis reveals the structure of neologisms in the researched area - apparently predominant borrowings (mainly French, Italian, English and Spanish), as opposed to word-formation, phrasal and semantic neologisms. It also shows changeable status of numerous names of food which have existed in Polish for long, i.e. transformations of their stylistic shade, at other times - a weakening activity in the lexical capacity in use, until it moves to language archives. Excellent lexicographic tools, which continue Polish tradition at that point, allow better and more accurate registration of Polish language development.
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The article compares the vocabulary which, in the Dictionary of Polish Language ed. by Mieczysław Szymczak, was defined as „obsolete“, with the latest lexicons: Practical Dictionary of Contemporary Polish ed. by Halina Zgółkowa, Contemporary Polish Language Dictionary ed. by Bogusław Dunaj, A Different Polish Dictionary ed. by Mirosław Bańko and Universal Dictionary of Polish Language ed. by Stanisław Dubisz. The analysis shows that the lexis is still alive in the dictionaries. It is usually qualified chronologically. The vocabulary is accompanied by stylistic, expressive, specialist qualifiers, or those referring to frequency. A part of the analyzed lexis has lost the character of units getting out of use. It allows a conclusion that, according to the information provided by the latest lexicographic works, the obsolete vocabulary from the Dictionary of Polish Language ed. by Mieczysław Szymczak has not expired, yet, and does not really want to expire.
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In the article the author presents more than 550 words, phrases and language formulas which are connected with toys and childrenís games. The material was excerpted from general dictionaries of Polish, dictionaries of idioms, foreign words and language variations (pupil’s jargon, urban dialect), published in the 20th century. The author focuses on such problems as formal varieties of the described entries (word-formations, neosemantisms, borrowings, idioms) and their chronological strata (from the oldest vocabulary to the one published in the last decade of the 20th century).
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The article includes: 1) the presentation of the attitude of the main editors, i.e. Witold Doroszewski and Mieczyław Szymczak, towards dialectic vocabulary in analyzed dictionaries of standard Polish; 2) the description of the ambiguity of the notion dialectic vocabulary [ a) in basic meaning, it is applied referring to country dialects, b) in the broader sense, it includes country dialects and regionalisms, urban language variations and social vocabulary]; 3) the analysis of the gathered material, including particularly quantity and quality differences in the way dialectic vocabulary is presented in both the dictionaries; 4) general conclusions from the comparison of the capacity of dialectic lexis in the Polish Language Dictionary ed. by W. Doroszewski and in the Polish Language Dictionary ed. by M. Szymczak.
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This study analyzes the coverage of the 2013 September-October Roșia Montană protests provided by four local newspapers in Cluj-Napoca with regard to the type and intensity of the coverage, potential shifts in tunes, bias, and relevance of the content. The methodological design consists in media analysis of more than 493 articles identified, among which 84 were directly related to the protests in Cluj. To have a more in-depth perspective of the protesters claims, we have drawn a semiotic analysis of the protesters’ slogans. The study found that local coverage of protests is limited. Most of the articles related to anti-Roșia Montană protests are short, informative, objective articles, with live-updates, photographs, but very few offering protesters’ view through comments or opinions. The slogan analysis shows that contrary to the initial premises, anti-government slogans prevail over the eco-friendly ones.
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Currently, through its implications, the infringement of the intellectual property rights is one of the greatest issues regarding the photography industry. This also applies to press photography, and when taking into discussion this aspect, Romania makes no exception. However, not many are those who realize the legal implications and the result of the unauthorized usage of photography. Therefore, this study is meant to raise awareness regarding this particular problem of the infringement of the intellectual property rights in the Romanian press photography.
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Peter Gross, Mass Media in Revolution and National Development. The Romanian Laboratory Cornel Nistorescu, A Dangerous Story Getting out of Disaster
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The study aims at showing the main characteristics of the spirituality of secular priests in medieval Transylvania, investigating some manifestations of devotional character which do not belong to conventional everyday pastoral tasks. These manifestations are being used as secondary sources, because primary information about the theme is not available. The study contains five parts. The first part analyzes the participation of secular priests in religious associations (confraternitates) in different Transylvanian regions (Beszterce, Szászsebes, Segesvár), presenting the functioning and the participants of these associations. The next part deals with the participation of priests at pilgrimages. Investigating the sources it can name some priests who took part at pilgrimages to Rome, the Holy Land, Czestochowa. The details about the personal itineraries contain important information about the interests and mentalities of the period. The third part of the work deals with the activity of the priests within the hospitals, the most characteristic institutions of charity during the middle ages. The following part presents priests as supporters of sacral constructions, enumerating the written sources which mention the builders of churches and chapels by name. Finnally the fifth part makes a presentation of the rules and modes how secular priests used and were supposed to formulate their testaments.
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