Scholarly Publications - English Language and Literature
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11693/115651
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Open Access Introduction: Mind, body, literature and psychology in the later nineteenth century(Edinburgh University Press, 2025-02-18) Thain, Marion; Viragh, AttiItem Open Access Mind and embodiment in late Victorian literature(Edinburgh University Press, 2025) Thain, Marion; Viragh, AttiShows how late-Victorian writers develop new understandings of the relationship between cognition and embodiment.- Addresses an interdisciplinary audience interested in literary studies, philosophy of mind, the history of ideas, cognitive psychology, and neurology.
- Recovers the participation of British literature in the birth and development of psychology.
- Corrects the disciplinary bifurcation between Victorian and modernist discourses about the mind.
- Explores problems of aesthetics, narrative, poetics, plastic arts, neurology, physiology, and food metaphors, as well as the legacies of empiricism.
Item Open Access Close reading and the hermeneutic circle of attention(Edinburgh University Press, 2026) Viragh, AttiItem Open Access Melancholic life: literary expression and the experience of history from Burton to Keats(Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2025-11-26) Williams, Jonathan ColemanA study of how 18th-century British literary writers deployed melancholic feeling to draw a complex web of relations between the embodied self and its historical present. Melancholic Life argues that what binds 18th-century melancholics such as the speaker of James Thomson, Sarah Fielding's David Simple, or William Cowper is a belief that critical thought is worth voicing whether or not it contributes to social change. That belief converges with 18th-century ideas of sentiment and loneliness, but it also syncs up in surprising ways with theoretical models of political subjectivity that emerge in the 20th and 21st centuries. Jonathan C. Williams thus proposes a new way of thinking about the critical importance of literary melancholy in the 18th century: as the language of melancholic social criticism, a solitary protest against exploitative features of social life, including global commerce and print capitalism. That form of melancholic life helps to trace a genealogy from Robert Burton's Democritus to Defoe's Crusoe to the Romantic period; it also yokes the early capitalist historical moment of Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling to the post-1968 modernity that characterizes the work of Theodor W. Adorno. As Melancholic Life shows, melancholic social criticism persists even when there is little hope. That spirit of persistence becomes a condition of literary expression in the 18th century. Attention to melancholic expression reveals resonances not only to medical, religious, poetic, and philosophical language, but also between 18th-century thinkers and your own historical moment.Item Open Access Thematic review: economics and industrialization(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025-11-19) Çelikkol, AyşeIn this thematic review essay, Ayşe Çelikkol offers an assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the nineteenth century as it relates to economics and industrialization. A full Bibliography of Recent Studies and price list of works for consideration can be found in the same issue.Item Open Access Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature Series Preface(Edinburgh University Press, 2025-04) Thain, Marion; Viragh, AttiThe closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the birth of psychology as a discipline. The question of the relationship between mind and body was a central topic of concern across an array of genres, media and textual forms during these years. In this collection we trace the role literature played in responding to fundamental questions within this interdisciplinary intersection. How do writers conceptualize perception, memory, sense-experience, understanding, empathy, cognition, and their relation to embodiment? What is the Victorian contribution to the new conceptions of the nature of thought and feeling developed by such figures as William James in America and Henri Bergson in France? Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature shows how writers grappled with pivotal intellectual and scientific developments of the nineteenth century-and how these ideas transformed Victorian literature itself.Item Unknown The domestic transformations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the formative years of the Turkish Republic(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) Köșker-Bevington, Ceylan; Öz, Seda; Can, TanerThis chapter explores the impact of the Turkish Republic’s use of domestication strategies to aid the westernisation project by utilising Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality. Through this theoretical lens, the domestication history of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the formative years of the Turkish Republic from 1928 to 1953 will be assessed. By examining Ali Rıza Seyfi’s reworking of Dracula, entitled Kazıklı Voyvoda (Vlad the Impaler, 1928), and its cinematic adaptation, Drakula İstanbul’da (Dracula in Istanbul, 1953), this chapter argues that the linguistic, diegetic, and pragmatic transpositions made in these Genetteian heterodiegetic hypertexts reveal an impulse towards a culturally specific form of domestic transformation. Moreover, it will be argued that domestic transformations occur within the field of literary adaptation when a state that has been subjected to imperial exploitation takes on the cultural artefacts of its coloniser and recreates them for purposes beyond those for which they were originally intended. Thus, rather than being direct translations or outlandish adaptations of Stoker’s Dracula, each piece that will be discussed in this chapter represents a form of literary transformation that reveals complex interactions in regard to ideas surrounding cultural imperialism.Item Unknown A formalist in the trenches: Graham K. Riach’s The Short Story After Apartheid(Routledge, 2024-09-03) Wright, Timothy SeanThis 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.Item Unknown Dangerous Drugs: The Self-Presentation of the Merchant-Poet Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620-1695)(Brill, 2024-07-18) Bicak, IvanaItem Unknown The roots of Wilde’s tuberose(Oxford University Press, 2024-07-27) Selleri, AndreaItem Unknown The African novel of ideas: philosophy and individualism in the age of global writing(Duke University Press, 2023-03-01) Wright, TimothyItem Unknown Free will(Cambridge University Press, 2023-09-18) Selleri, AndreaItem Unknown Stages of loss: The English comedians and their reception(Cambridge University Press, 2022) Kurtuluş, GülItem Unknown Melancholy's ends: Thomson's reveries(Wayne State University Press, 2022-12-01) Williams, Jonathan C.Item Unknown Remains of the social: Desiring the post-apartheid(University of Minnesota Press, 2022) Wright, TimothyItem Unknown Swinburne’s boyishness(Oxford University Press, 2022-02-12) Selleri, AndreaThis article reconsiders the early critical reception of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1866 collection Poems and Ballads with a view to articulating the extent to which the critical hostility that famously greeted the book upon publication was mediated by the category of ‘boyishness’. I show that the complaint that the 29-year-old Swinburne wrote, and by implication thought and felt, too much like a boy and not enough like an adult man lay at the core of the critical onslaught and contributed to underpin critics’ various complaints of obscenity, blasphemy, bad taste and so on. After considering the nature of the connection between the boyish quality often associated with Swinburne as a person throughout his life and the poetical ‘boyishness’ critics perceived in his work, I propose a taxonomy of three main meanings of boyishness that emerge from the early critics’ attacks: boyishness as lack of virility, boyishness as lack of self-restraint, and boyishness as lack of intellectual maturity. By analysing these critical readings in the context of various medical, pedagogical and more broadly cultural discourses of the time, I make the case that Swinburne found himself cast as someone who presented precisely the characteristics of boyhood of which a functioning adult man was supposed to rid himself. The broader argument is that by giving close attention to age-based slurs, we can gain a more fine-grained account of mid-Victorian attitudes to childhood and maturity, and society’s self-image more generally.Item Unknown Eastern exoticism: Thackeray as tourist and anti-tourist(Istanbul Universitesi, Edebiyat Fakultesi - University of Istanbul, Faculty of Letters, 2021) Kennedy, ValerieWilliam Makepeace Thackeray’s 1846 Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo exemplifies the complexity of nineteenth-century travel-writing where exploration exists alongside tourism (and anti-tourism). In key Ottoman locations like Smyrna, Constantinople, and Cairo, the narrator’s desire for Oriental exoticism is sometimes realised but often disappointed as the East becomes increasingly modernised and Westernised. These conflicting perspectives are expressed through allusions, East-West comparisons, and irony and satire in a self-conscious and unstable narrative. William Makepeace Thackeray’in 1846 tarihli Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo keşfin turizmle (ve turizm karşıtlığıyla) birlikte yer aldığı on dokuzuncu yüzyıl seyahat yazılarının karmaşıklığına örnek teşkil eder. İzmir, İstanbul, Kahire gibi Osmanlı şehirlerinde yazarın Doğu egzotizmi hevesi, Doğu’nun giderek modernleşmesi ve Batılılaşmasıyla ancak bazen gerçekleşmekte, fakat çoğu zaman hayal kırıklığıyla sonuçlanmaktadır. Bu çelişkili bakış açıları imalarla, Doğu-Batı karşılaştırmalarıyla, mahcup ve güvenilmez bir anlatı dâhilinde ironi ve taşlamayla aktarılır.Item Unknown 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 Unknown Capitalism in the pastoral mode and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd(Taylor & Francis, 2021-01-05) Çelikkol, AyşeItem 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.