Scholarly Publications - English Language and Literature
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Item Open Access The domestic transformations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the formative years of the turkish republic(Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2024-12-01) Köșker Bevington, CeylanThis 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 Open Access 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 Open Access Dangerous Drugs: The Self-Presentation of the Merchant-Poet Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620-1695)(Brill, 2024-07-18) Bicak, IvanaItem Open Access The roots of Wilde’s tuberose(Oxford University Press, 2024-07-27) Selleri, AndreaItem Open Access The African novel of ideas: philosophy and individualism in the age of global writing(Duke University Press, 2023-03-01) Wright, TimothyItem Open Access Free will(Cambridge University Press, 2023-09-18) Selleri, AndreaItem Open Access Stages of loss: The English comedians and their reception(Cambridge University Press, 2022) Kurtuluş, GülItem Open Access Melancholy's ends: Thomson's reveries(Wayne State University Press, 2022-12-01) Williams, Jonathan C.Item Open Access Remains of the social: Desiring the post-apartheid(University of Minnesota Press, 2022) Wright, TimothyItem Open Access 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 Open Access 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 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 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.Item Open Access The Cambridge handbook of literary authorship(Oxford University Press, 2021-05) Selleri, AndreaItem Open Access Oscar Wilde and the Freedom of the Will(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021-03-09) Selleri, AndreaItem Open Access Thomas Gray's elegy and the politics of memorialization(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) Williams, Jonathan C.In this article, I argue that Thomas Gray's use of the elegy form in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) reveals poetry's struggle to know or comprehend the historical present. Not knowing how to memorialize the poor who have been presumably lost to history, Gray's elegist imagines alternate lives for the dead, thus recasting fictional imagination as historical remembrance and illustrating a divide between literary thought and historical reality. The Elegy thus bears witness to a form of poetic power that relies on obscuring rather than illuminating modernity and its mechanisms.Item Open Access Updating Shakespeare: reflections on the possibilities of reading and teaching Shakespeare today(Truman State University Press, 2019) Kurtuluş, GülThe author discusses the interpretation of William Shakespeare's plays in contemporary society. Topics include the availability of online resources to be an active reader of Shakespeare's plays, the adaptations of the plays to reflect contemporary society, and the variety of readings that were not possible in Shakespeare's time.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 Unknown Surviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s mutational aesthetics(Indiana University Press, 2019) Wright, TimothyMatthew Omelsky has recently coined the term “African Anthropocene” to describe how the intertwined crises wrought by global capitalism and man-made ecological disaster have disproportionately affected the African continent. This paper discusses a short story collection by the Ugandan writer Dilman Dila, A Killing in the Sun (2014), as one instance of an African aesthetics that uniquely registers and responds to this dual crisis. I focus in particular on the “vampire story” that opens this collection, arguing that Dila not only reinvents, but, in critical ways, “mutates” the canonical Euro-American vampire figure. In reimagining the aristocratic European vampire as a mutant, genetically modified swarm of mosquitos, Dila’s story suggests new, environmental forms of the monstrous emerging at the confluence of ecological catastrophe and corporate neocolonialism. At the same time, I show how Dila’s fiction draws on the history of colonialism in Africa in imagining modes of survival within this vampiric ecology. In order to unpack the political implications of what I call Dila’s “mutational aesthetics,” I trace Dila’s attempts to imagine forms of human-nonhuman entanglement that delink from a Western episteme and its ideological carapace of “the human,” providing instead post-humanist visions of survival and refuge.