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Literature in English, British Isles

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Full-Text Articles in European Languages and Societies

Translating The Hobbit (2023) By Mark T. Hooker, Arden R. Smith Aug 2023

Translating The Hobbit (2023) By Mark T. Hooker, Arden R. Smith

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Arden R. Smith, of Translating The Hobbit (2023) by Mark T. Hooker


Shakespeare’S Prince Of Denmark: Political Pandering In Hamlet, Moriah Theriault Aug 2023

Shakespeare’S Prince Of Denmark: Political Pandering In Hamlet, Moriah Theriault

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Shakespeare's Hamlet contains frequent cultural ties and insights into Danish tradition that depict intentional effort to represent Danish culture. These accuracies can be seen in the description of the castle in Elsinore, the deep-seated conflicts between Christian forgiveness and revenge, and the traditional cannon salutes featured in Hamlet. Shakespeare created these connections to Danish culture for a political maneuver to win the favor of King James and his wife, the Royal Queen Anne of Denmark.


“A Sick Eagle” And “I Am”: Hymns To Sculpture By Keats And Rilke, Ya-Feng Wu Jun 2022

“A Sick Eagle” And “I Am”: Hymns To Sculpture By Keats And Rilke, Ya-Feng Wu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

At the turn of eighteenth and nineteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sculpture came to serve as an emblem of humanity’s response to the challenges of the times. John Keats and Rainer Maria Rilke, felt compelled at their encounters with ancient Greek sculpture in the museum to reflect upon their vocation in an age disrupted by political upheaval and rampant commercialization respectively. Keats’s sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817), registers an intimation of his latent grandeur in the form of a “sick eagle,” confronting “a shadow of a magnitude.” To overcome this experience, Keats made attempts at epic on the …


Seeking Margaret Baker: Identifying The Author Of Three Manuscript Receipt Books, Kimberley G. Connor May 2022

Seeking Margaret Baker: Identifying The Author Of Three Manuscript Receipt Books, Kimberley G. Connor

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This paper uses recipe contributors named in three early modern manuscript receipt books (Sloane MS 2485, Sloane MS 2486 and Folger V.a 619) to identify the author as Margaret Baker, daughter of Richard Baker the Chronicler (c.1568-1645) and Margaret Mainwaring (died c.1652). A familial connection is also made to Wellcome MS 212. The Margaret Baker example is used to argue for the necessity of identifying a broader range of receipt, or recipe, book writers in order to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of recipe book production, and their social context. In the case of Margaret Baker, additional information about …


Eotenas And Hobbits: Finn And Hengest, And Tolkien’S Speculation About Origins, Nicholas Birns Mar 2022

Eotenas And Hobbits: Finn And Hengest, And Tolkien’S Speculation About Origins, Nicholas Birns

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay examines Tolkien’s Finn and Hengest, particularly concentrating on Tolkien’s interpretation of the word eotenas as meaning Jutes rather than ‘monsters’. As opposed to “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics,” where Tolkien emphasizes supernatural elements at the expense of history, Tolkien’s lecture on the Finnsburg episode in Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment seems to present Hengest as an English national hero, despite the bloodiness and vengeance of his reprisals against Hnaef and the Frisian court. The use of the word 'eotenas,' which can be constructed as either 'monsters' or 'Jutes,' is at the nub of the conflict here, …


Twenty-First-Century African And Asian Migration To Europe And The Rise Of The Ethno-Topographic Narrative, Nelson González Ortega, Olga Michael Jan 2022

Twenty-First-Century African And Asian Migration To Europe And The Rise Of The Ethno-Topographic Narrative, Nelson González Ortega, Olga Michael

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise in the publication of narratives concerning contemporary African and Asian migration to Europe, written individually or collectively, by Asian, African and/or European authors. While scholarly attention has increasingly turned to these texts, our purpose is to further investigate them from a pan-European perspective and to propose a model for their analysis as a distinct literary genre. We therefore introduce the "ethno-topographic narrative" to define, classify and systematically analyze twenty-first-century migration narratives published in Europe in relation to theory, method, corpus, generic type, individual or collective authorship, border and …


Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang Oct 2021

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …


“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González Mar 2021

“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.


Barnacle Geese And Sky Burials: Relativism In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Akasha L. Khalsa Nov 2020

Barnacle Geese And Sky Burials: Relativism In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Akasha L. Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

As a medieval travel narrative, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was immensely popular for everyone from bookworms to world travelers in 14th and 15th century Europe. Given its popularity, and the period in which it was produced, one might expect the fictitious travelogue to display an incredible level of intolerance towards the various peoples and cultures it depicts. However, the Travels frequently surprises modern readers with its message of tolerance towards greater humanity, and its recognition of the universality of human experience as it is mirrored in the lives of people of different ethnic and cultural groups. In order …


“A Lover’S Complaint”: Bad Shakespeare, Or Not Even That?, Madeline C. Duvall Apr 2020

“A Lover’S Complaint”: Bad Shakespeare, Or Not Even That?, Madeline C. Duvall

Global Tides

In this essay, author Madeline Duvall argues in favor of attributing "A Lover's Complaint" to William Shakespeare. She observes the publication history and historical context of "A Lover's Complaint," as well as its metaphorical, prosodic, and thematic similarities to other works of Shakespeare, most prominently his sonnets and "The Rape of Lucrece." To make her argument, the author cites other statistical and historical studies of "A Lover's Complaint," and provides her own line-by-line analysis of the work in order to find matching words.


Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley Oct 2019

Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article draws on methods from transgender theory, historicist literary studies, and visual analysis of medieval sealing practices to show that Empress Matilda of England was controversially styled as a female king during her career in the early to mid twelfth century. While the chronicle Gesta Stephani castigates Matilda’s failure to engage in sanctioned gendered behaviors as she waged civil war to claim her inherited throne, Matilda’s seal harnesses both masculine and feminine signifiers in order to proclaim herself both king and queen. While Matilda’s transgressive gender position was targeted by her detractors during her lifetime, the obstinately transgender object …


Shelley’S Frankenstein As A Book Of Love And Despair, Shun-Liang Chao Sep 2019

Shelley’S Frankenstein As A Book Of Love And Despair, Shun-Liang Chao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Influenced by Enlightenment philosophes like Rousseau and Smith, Romantic writers, such as Coleridge and Percy Shelley, celebrate the sublime power of sympathetic love to merge the self and the other (be it human or inhuman) into a wondrous whole, thereby precluding the dangers of solitude and solipsism. Not all Romantic writers, however, share the same sanguine view of love. In Frankenstein, for instance, Mary Shelley offers an alternative to the optimistic perspective on the capacity of (mutual) sympathy. She shapes the novel into tales of bitter solitude, one caused by the lack of sympathetic understanding between Victor and nature, …


Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck Oct 2018

Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck

The Hilltop Review

A late medieval mystic prone to violent bouts of sobbing, Margery Kempe suffers a range of verbal abuse in her titular text, ranging from simple rumors, to outright accusations of heresy and possession. While we might accept such accusatory speech as indicative of the era and Margery’s controversial role as a public “holy woman,” further investigation reveals a narrative strongly driven by the notion of “suffering by slander,” and the weight attributed to the spoken word. The Book of Margery Kempe shows us an oral culture filled with “deviant speech,” and within its own rhetorical construction as a text, elevates …


Covetousness In Book 5 Of Confessio Amantis: A Medieval Precursor To Neoliberalism, Jeffery G. Stoyanoff Sep 2018

Covetousness In Book 5 Of Confessio Amantis: A Medieval Precursor To Neoliberalism, Jeffery G. Stoyanoff

Accessus

In Book 5 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Genius’s extended discussion of Covetousness demonstrates how this subtype of Avarice leads to the ruin of the networks of collectives that make up society. Interestingly, the process by which Covetousness damages the collectives that make up these networks looks a lot like the neoliberalism that has come to dominate a number of governments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Gower’s tales trace the spread of this sin from the top of society to the bottom; from the highly public to the intimately personal. In all scenarios, Covetousness is a force of …


Intersex And The Pardoner’S Body, Kim Zarins Jan 2018

Intersex And The Pardoner’S Body, Kim Zarins

Accessus

Most scholars today have retreated from reading into the Pardoner's body in favor of more figurative readings that emphasize his lack of masculinity, and such lack is then linked to his dejection and despair. Other, more affirming readings center the Pardoner's performance, which allows him to model any sort of body desired through figuration. While such positions dominate and older theories like Beryl Rowland's proposal of an intersex Pardoner are dismissed, in fact, an intersex reading might be a more life-affirming interpretation, not only in terms of reframing the Pardoner's body as manifesting variation as opposed to lack, but also …


Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco Dec 2017

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …


The Sin Of Pride In Dressing Bodies In Spanish And Anglo-American Ballads, Ana Belén Martínez García Sep 2017

The Sin Of Pride In Dressing Bodies In Spanish And Anglo-American Ballads, Ana Belén Martínez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Sin of Pride in Dressing Bodies in Spanish and Anglo-American Ballads" Ana Belén Martínez García argues that trying to decipher the reasons for characters to dress in a certain way may help discover the underlying sociocultural mechanisms that prevail. The author aims to reveal the gender divide associated to clothing through a comparative approach towards popular literature in Spanish and English. She uses Judith Butler's theory of performative acts in order to conduct the text analysis. Clothes-related acts feature prominently in the case of popular balladry. Spanish "romances" and Anglo-American ballads are poems that were and …


Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.


Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Immigrant and Irish Identities in Hand in the Fire and Hamilton's Writing between 2003 and 2014" Dervila Cooke discusses the intertwining of Irish and immigrant identities. Cooke examines the connection between openness to memory and embracing migrant identities in Hamilton's writing both in the 2010 novel and as a whole. The empathetic and inclusive character of Helen in Hand in the Fire is analyzed in contrast to characters who have repressed memory including the Serbian Vid. Helen's ties to elsewhere, her openness to new influence, and her willingness to engage with traumatic elements of the past (Irish …


Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia Sep 2016

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …


Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon Aug 2016

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.


Human Cloning As The Other In Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Wen Guo Dec 2015

Human Cloning As The Other In Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Wen Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Human Cloning as the Other in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go" Wen Guo analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's novel with focus on Ishiguro's analogy between human cloning and people of marginality in contemporary society. Guo discusses the novel's ambience of doubt and suspense and elaborates on how the theme of otherness is addressed by Ishiguro's mock-realism in a landscape of science fiction. Further, Guo analyses the "unhomely" Hailsham of the novel, the clones' self-pursuit, and their ethical attitudes. Guo argues that in Ishiguro's novel a person's ethical choices are determined by his/her situation which confirms Ishiguro's beliefs with …