Department of English Language and Literature

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Open Access
A formalist in the trenches: Graham K. Riach’s The Short Story After Apartheid
(Routledge, 2024-09-03) Wright, Timothy Sean
This essay offers a brief assessment of the potential of a formalist approach to the criticism of South African literature. Examining Graham K. Riach's recent study The Short Story After Apartheid, it suggests that the "New Formalism" Riach employs provides an innovative mode of criticism that sees the literary text as interactive with its context rather than as a space of passive representation. Viewing the literary text as a spur to insight allows for a creative engagement with and vivification of many of the sedimented categories of South African critical thought. The essay expresses misgivings, however, about, first, the possibility of harnessing this mode of reading to a determinate political end, and second, its general bias toward the conceptual aspects of literary experience over and against the affective.
Open Access
Addiction, empire, and narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle's the sign of the four
(Duke University Press, 1999) Randall, D.
Open Access
Autobiographical truth refecting the social truth of male and female subjectivity in Charles Dickens’s no thoroughfare
(Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dekanlığı, 2013) Kurtuluş, Gül
When Charles Dickens’ less known partner Nelly’s life story is scrutinized it can be seen that her life reflects the problematic theme of female subject formation linked with parental relation. In the social world, however, it is the laws of the society that determine the subjectivity of a child. In other words, the world the child exposed to is already interpreted and/or formulated. This forecloses the possibility of becoming either a free or a ‘true’ subject. Moreover, the subject formation of women in society is more problematic than men since they do not have the privileges men have in the patriarchal society, particularly in the Victorian society. Nelly being an actress, a profession she inherited from her mother and her grandmother had an undeniable influence on Dickens’ interest in drama especially after 1850s. This paper dwells on motherdaughter relationship with respect to the child’s perception of subject as an independent being or as a restricted being as seen in Nelly’s life and explores its traces in Dickens’ play, No Thoroughfare. The play indicates how females are defined in terms of their sexuality in society. In the play, female characters, who are fictional reflections of Dickens’ partner, Nelly, her mother and two actress sisters demonstrate subject formation by confining them to the role of Victorian ladies, and displays the widely accepted association of femininity with compassion, sympathy, intense emotional state as well as their mercenary side against unfeeling, cruel and patriarchal mindset represented by the male characters.
Open Access
Autumn 1857: the making of the Indian "mutiny"
(Cambridge University Press, 2003) Randall, D.
Open Access
Beginning scholars for the future
(Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 2019) Karant-Nunn, S. C.; McClendon, M. C.; Nivre, E. W.; Nelson, E.; Kurtuluş, Gül; Hamlin, H.; Clulow, A.; Rose, C.; Balserak, J.; Puf, H.; Daybell, J.; Ryrie, A.
Open Access
Bracket and voice: Drummond of Hawthornden’s lunular poetics
(Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2020) Hart, Patrick
Taking the proliferation of brackets in his Petrarchan verse as its starting point, this essay argues for a reevaluation of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s poetic voice. While even his admirers have tended to characterise his sonnets as operating at a single high rhetorical pitch, Drummond’s deployment of lunulae and crotchets serves to complicate the voice that emerges both from individual poems and from the collection as a whole, establishing a ‘lunar’ counterpart to the sequence’s Apollonian magniloquence, a sottovoce that functions as a distinctive correlative of the Petrarchan locus amoenus. Moreover, in setting ear against eye and text against tongue, Drummond’s brackets also pose difficult questions regarding what it might mean to talk of the text’s ‘voice’ at all. Attending to how Drummond’s punctuation establishes a radical incommensurability of melic and opsic, while setting the readings that emerge within the context of recent scholarship on the role of the voice in early modern reading practices, also means reframing Drummond’s relationship to the Baroque. Rather than focusing on the extremes to which he takes the Petrarchan conceit, we start to see Drummond as belonging to the early seventeenth-century transnational Baroque associated by historians such as Peter Burke with a crisis of representation. This recontextualisation might ultimately point (this essay concludes) towards Petrarch’s own proto-Baroque tendencies.
Open Access
The Cambridge handbook of literary authorship
(Oxford University Press, 2021-05) Selleri, Andrea
Open Access
Capitalism in the pastoral mode and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd
(Taylor & Francis, 2021-01-05) Çelikkol, Ayşe
Open Access
Changez/Cengiz's changing beliefs in the reluctant fundamentalist
(Purdue University Press, 2018) Kennedy, Valerie
In her article, “Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist” Valerie Kennedy analyzes the interrelation of individual subjectivity and global capitalism and the conflict between two belief systems in Mohsin Hamid’s novel. These are, first, a neoliberal system that sees individuals as rationally self-interested, mobile, economic units, and, second, a system based on a humanist definition of individuals as defined by nation, family, and tradition. Changez, the novel’s protagonist, initially endorses the first, but later rejects it for the second, due to his growing awareness of the impact on Pakistan of American geopolitics after 9/11. The essay also examines the Western gaze upon the East in the novel—Changez both criticizes and, paradoxically, sometimes endorses Orientalist stereotypes—and it concludes that Changez’s later counter-capitalist beliefs seem unlikely to seriously challenge the disciplinary power of global capitalism.
Open Access
Charismatic masculinity in David Malouf's fiction
(2010) Randall, D.
This examination of charismatic masculinity and the representation of gender in Malouf’s fiction concentrates on the short story collection Every Move You Make.
Open Access
'Close up from a distance': London and englishness in ford, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle
(Brill Academic Publishers., 2005) Schutt, Sita A.; Haslam, S.
Open Access
The community of sentient beings: J. M. Coetzee's ecology in disgrace and Elizabeth Costello
(University of Toronto Press, 2007) Randall, D.
[No abstract available]
Open Access
The concept of literary genre
(sdvig Press, 2018) Olsen, Stein Haugom
Genre theory, as it has developed in the last forty years, hasmade use of what I call a constitutive concept of genre, a concept that hasbuilt into it the assumption that genre plays a central epistemic role in theinterpretation of verbal discourse. In this paper I argue that there aretheoretical problems with such a concept that have not been recognizedand that make it unsuitable as a critical instrument in literary history andliterary studies. A fruitful concept of literary genre needs to be pragmaticwith only a heuristic and not an epistemic function. As an example, thearticle looks at the criticism produced in connection with the picaresquenovel and in particular at the account given of the origin of the genre, anaccount that could not have been given if one had employed a constitutiveconcept of genre
Open Access
Conrad, efficiency, and the varieties of imperialism
(Texas Tech University Press, 2012) Kennedy, V.
The article examines 18th century Polish novelist Joseph Conrad's fiction in relation to different conceptions of imperialism and capitalism. Topics covered include his attitude towards "Englishness," the value of efficiency and on the British "work ethic." Also analyzed are his representation of Russian and German imperialism in the political essays and the suggestion that his fiction undermines the opposition in his nonfiction writings between different types of imperialism.
Open Access
Conradian quest versus dubious adventure: Graham and Barbara Greene in West Africa
(Taylor and Francis., 2015) Kennedy, V.
Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps (1936) largely conforms to the masculine tradition of imperialist travel writing, where the male protagonist emerges as the (sometimes conflicted) hero of his own narrative. Much of Journey Without Maps explores Liberia and Greene's psyche, creating parallels between Africa, the narrator's childhood, and the childhood of the human race, and embodying these parallels in a dense web of tropes and allusions. By contrast, as a woman, Barbara Greene is much less implicated in the imperialist tradition of travel writing, and at times Too Late to Turn Back disrupts some of the assumptions of this tradition through the demystification of the trope of adventure and excitement, the sporadic mockery of self and others, the self-deprecation, and the greater emphasis on reciprocity than is to be found in Journey Without Maps.
Open Access
Creating ethnic memory: takuhi tovmasyan’s “merry meals
(Syracuse University, 2013) Pultar, G.
Open Access
Dangerous Drugs: The Self-Presentation of the Merchant-Poet Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620-1695)
(Brill, 2024-07-18) Bicak, Ivana
Open Access
Demythologizing history: Jeanette Wintersone’s fictions and his/tories
(Universidad de Alicante, 2004) Kılıç, M. Ö.
Open Access
Dickens and englishness: a fundamental ambivalence
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) Kennedy, Valerie; Reviron-Piégay, F.
Open Access
Dickens and Savagery at home and abroad-part I
(The Dickens Fellowship, 2008) Kennedy, V.