Department of English Language and Literature
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Browsing Department of English Language and Literature by Author "Çelikkol, Ayşe"
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Item Open Access Capitalism in the pastoral mode and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd(Taylor & Francis, 2021-01-05) Çelikkol, AyşeItem Open Access Globalization and economics(Oxford University Press, 2016) Çelikkol, Ayşe; John, J.Facing rapid capitalist expansion in the nineteenth century, Britons reflected on the webs of commercial exchange in which they were embedded. Focusing on John Stuart Mill’s notion of the perpetual reproduction of capital alongside literary forms and tropes (Gothicism, mythological imagery, the theme of speculation, and treasure-hunt plots), this essay explores Victorian global consciousness. The past employment of slave labour in the colonies haunted the Victorians, who were also increasingly alarmed by finance capitalism’s reliance on abstractions. Cosmopolitan sympathy for the nation’s trading partners flourished in literature alongside the effort to obscure the foreign sources of the nation’s wealth.Item Open Access The planetary in William Morris's late romances(William Morris Society, 2018) Çelikkol, AyşeThe metaphor of the wet highway, which Morris had rehearsed in the Water of the Wondrous Isles prior to its appearance in The Sundering Flood, ascribes to the flood the qualities associated with an artifice. The flood functions more effectively than its human-made counterpart, the road. In this description, connection to distant lands appears as natural as the rivers, seas and oceans themselves – it does not have to be mediated by technological developments that are shaped by the capitalist mode of production. Morris’s approach here resonates with today’s discourse on planetarity, which focuses on ecological networks that rival capitalist globalisation. As Amy Elias and Christian Morale write, the planetary indicates ‘a historically unprecedented web of relations among peoples, cultures, locales’ that have an ecological basis.2 This essay argues that William Morris’s late prose romances construe the planetary, and that, for Morris, such webs have a primeval character rather than constituting a recent development.Item Open Access Poverty, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and J. R. McCulloch(Selçuk Üniversitesi, 2021-06-07) Çelikkol, AyşeAs the precursor to the science of economics, political economy concerned some topics that also preoccupied novelists, such as poverty and wealth. Literary criticism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been charting the ways in which the discourses of literature and political economy intersect, despite the Romantic disavowal of their commonalities. Aiming to contribute to this ongoing scholarly effort, this essay pinpoints an unexpected affinity between Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, a novel which addresses the plight of the poor under the New Poor Law of 1834, and the political economist J. R. McCulloch’s writing on that piece of legislation. Both mistrust theoretical knowledge and privilege the particular as the basis on which one must make decisions. This affinity is unexpected because Oliver Twist repudiates political economy. Recognizing McCulloch’s and Dickens’s common epistemology alerts us to the ways in which the preference for the particular over the systemic shapes Oliver Twist. The common ground between Oliver Twist and McCulloch’s writing on the New Poor Law attests to the interconnectedness of literature and political economy.Item Open Access Secularity and the limits of reason in Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man”(Cambridge University Press, 2021-06-11) Çelikkol, AyşeAs the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, some experiences of the secular have surprisingly little to do with the “self-sufficient power of reason” that Kant celebrates in “What Is Enlightenment?” This essay argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne offers such a novel strand of secularity in his “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man.” In these poems, time is a power external to the self that is not transcendent yet which the mind cannot fully grasp. Exploring the age of the Earth and the process of evolution, Victorian scientists had been suggesting that the depths of time lie beyond what the human mind may observe or understand, and this notion of time surfaces in Swinburne's poetry. “Hymn to Proserpine” attends to the limits of reason as it evokes deep time. “Hymn to Man,” in which humans channel the power of time, presents logos as both external and internal to the individual subject. By representing and formally registering deep time, Swinburne's poems restore awe and wonder to a world in which God remains absent. Swinburne presents an enchanted vision of the secular and contributes to the pluralization of nontheistic perspectives.Item Open Access World ecology in Martineau’s And Gaskell’s colonial pastorals(Oxford University Press, 2020) Çelikkol, AyşeThe pastoral tends to offer a retreat from modern life, but Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell reverse this pattern. They both turn to the colonies to reconcile the pastoral mode with capitalism, and, in their pastoral depictions of colonial life, we witness that mode’s peculiar capacity to narrate what the environmental historian Jason W. Moore calls ‘the capitalist world ecology’ – the globally systemic way of putting nature to work in the service of capitalism. Set in natural environments marked by human influence, the pastoral is a mode that can register economic relations with their ecological dimensions. In Martineau’s Homes Abroad and Cinnamon and Pearls – tales in Illustrations of Political Economy – and Gaskell’s Mary Barton, the pastoral aestheticizes the role that natural environments play in the development of capitalism. Homes Abroad presents peaceful agrarian life in Van Diemen’s Land as a lucrative enterprise in accord with modernization. Turning to Ceylon, Cinnamon and Pearls imagines an organic capitalism in which the celebration of plant life goes hand in hand with emergent property borders. In Mary Barton, the final pastoral setting in Canada is home to peace and progress. The felled trees in that setting signal the appropriation of nature for profit in the timber trade. These works of fiction capture the accumulation of capital in rural and suburban areas, which was historically key to the emergence of capitalism. The pastoral’s ability to depict the capitalist world ecology reflects a preoccupation with historical forces that is already present in the mode’s roots in antiquity.