Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel by Nicole Mansfield Wright

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-116
Author(s):  
Anne Frey
Keyword(s):  









2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-738
Author(s):  
Ralf Schneider

Abstract A sizeable segment of the contemporary British fiction market for adult readers consists of novels that focus on children and childhood. In accordance with interdisciplinary Childhood Studies, such texts can be understood as contributions to the social construction of children and childhood, or ‘childness’. Such constructions appear to be in particular demand in this phase of late modernity, when childhood is conceptualized as an antidote to the many uncertainties contemporary post-industrial societies are faced with. While on the level of societies, public constructions of childhood are best understood in terms of a Foucauldian notion of discourse, discourses are not what individual readers and book-buyers actually have in their minds when choosing a title. Rather, this article argues that the cover illustrations of these novels both activate and reinforce cultural models of ‘childness’ that readers have stored as schemata shared with their cultural community. On the basis of this alignment of discourse theory with a concept from cognitive anthropology, the article demonstrates that book covers play a role in maintaining particular conceptions of ‘childness’, and in feeding them back into the minds of the readers. Furthermore, the relevance of the book as a material artefact is once again acknowledged.1



Author(s):  
Kyu Hyun PARK

This paper is an investigation how cultural perception could be embedded in language and literature and how this helps different analyses on a same historical event. The article includes the comparison between a work of classical Korean literature, Hanjungnok (한중록), and an English-translated version of it, The Memoirs of Lady Hyekyŏng, translated by Kim-Haboush, and a work of a British novel, The Red Queen, written by Margaret Drabble. The comparison is to explore the language use regarding a perception of family relations and of gender in each version of writing. This paper concludes that authors’ and audience’s language and cultural background would influence on perceiving and analysing literature and its context so that each interpretation could be differentiated, even with the actual historical event.



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