“Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”

Pólemos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-312
Author(s):  
Tania Zulli
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
The Social

Abstract Over the last few decades, the field of law and literature studies has increasingly focused on the importance of literary texts in the interpretation of legal doctrines developing wider perspectives on society and on the law’s effect on the community itself. By considering the dynamic relationship between narrative works and legal documents, the present analysis proposes a reading of Joseph Conrad’s short story “Amy Foster” (1901), which focusses on the investigation of the social and political aspects of migration in late nineteenth-century Britain. Echoes of the migrant figure as represented in Conrad’s story can be found in the Aliens Act, the law passed by the British government in 1905 to regulate the flux of migrants from Eastern Europe. Taking into account the legal value of the Aliens Act and the social consequences of its application, the article will first examine general views on migration at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will later explore the language used in the statute and its relevance in the short story. To this end, the notion of “undesirable immigrant,” first introduced to describe migrants with well-defined characteristics, is anticipated by Joseph Conrad in “Amy Foster” whose protagonist, Yanko Goorall, is an emigrant from Eastern Europe. Conrad’s fictional representation of Goorall as an “undesirable immigrant” allows us to reflect on how his writing deals with (and anticipates) events and socio-cultural trends.

Classless: On the Social Status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 509-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eli Lederhendler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
East European ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social

In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organized labor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.

scholarly journals Madurese Women and Binding Culture in Muna Masyari’s Martabat Kematian: Gynocriticism Analysis

HUMANIKA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-169
Author(s):  
Erika Citra Sari Hartanto ◽  
Miftahur Roifah
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Arranged Marriage ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women's Culture ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
National Newspaper ◽  
Women’S Writing

Muna Masyari is a famous female author from Pamekasan, Madura, whose one of her short stories, Sortana, won an award from Kompas, a national newspaper, as the best short story in 2017. Through her short stories, she consistent in depicting the social problems, particularly, related to Madurese women. This article discusses the portrayal of Madurese women in four short stories, namely Kembang Pengantin, Rumah Hantaran, Are’ Lancor, and Topeng Gelur. This article focuses on Madurese women as daughter and mother and their relation to nature and oppressed culture. This study uses descriptive approach with close reading method. Data collection is in the form of words and the data analysis is done by interpreting the data based on Elaine Showalter’s Gynocriticism which concerns with women as writer as well as the producer of literary texts. Gynocriticism mostly deals with four models; they are women’s writing and women’s body, women’s writing and women’s language, women’s writing and women’s psyche, and women’s writing and women’s culture. The results show Masyari reveals many problems attached to Madurese women through women’s body, language, psyche and culture. Madurese early arranged marriage and myths has placed Madurese women in oppressive and unfortunate conditions due to the binding culture that has dominated women. Muna Masyari, yet, places her female characters who are daring to speak their voice to have their own authority in searching their destiny in the future.

scholarly journals Fazekas Mihály költői és szerkesztői munkásságának folklór és populáris irodalmi kapcsolataihoz

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3–4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Éva Mikos
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Moral Orientation ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The Social ◽  
Marxist Approach ◽  
History Of

The article aims to assess the social and mentalistic history of the Debreczeni Magyar Kalendáriom (“Hungarian Calendar of Debrecen”), edited by Mihály Fazekas for ten years, based upon its short prose texts. The predecessors of the stories in the calendar are mostly German literary texts, or they were taken over from German calendars and anecdote collections, most of which were parables. The majority of the texts belong to the genres of anecdote, but there are also fables, paramyths, short story tales, jokes and crime stories. The purpose behind rewriting the texts in a parable form was to educate the readers to have a practical point of view, as well as to help them with moral orientation. The ideology of Volklsaufklärung is behind the writing of the texts. Fazekas’s knowledge of German literature also takes us closer to the source of his masterwork, Lúdas Matyi, an epic poem. At the turn of the 19th-20th century positivist and literary historical researches connected the work with literary predecessors. The work having a peasant oral tradition would have suited better the Marxist approach in the 1950s, which tried to focus the understanding of the work to the plebeian-patrician conflict, however, only one folklore data was collected to support their claim. The article argues that the story had various written versions in Hungary and Europe in Fazekas’s age, and Fazekas willingly borrowed from contemporary literary pieces and popular readings, thus the written origin cannot be excluded. At the same time, the written sources may indicate the presence of the story in oral form, therefore it is not unlikely that the author might have heard it at one of his posts.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Towards a GIS Analysis of Literary Cultures: The Making of the Slovenian Ethnoscape Through Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-218
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan ◽  
Joh Dokler
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Reciprocal Influence ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Ideology

This article presents methodological starting points, heuristics and the results of a GIS-based analysis of the history of Slovenian literary culture from the 1780s to 1941. The ethnically Slovenian territory was multilingual and multicultural; it belonged to different state entities with distant capitals, which was reflected in the spatial dynamic of literary culture. The research results have confirmed the hypotheses of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture,’ which were based on postulates of the spatial turn: the socio-geographical space influenced the development of literature and its media, whereas literature itself, through its discourse, practices and institutions, had a reciprocal influence on the apprehension and structuring of that space, as well as on its connection with the broader region. Slovenian literary discourse was able to manifest itself in public predominantly through the history of spatial factors: (a) the formation, territorial expansion and concentration of the social network of literary actors and media; (b) the persistent references of literary texts to places that were recognized by addressees as Slovenian, thereby grounding a national ideology. Taking all of this into account, and based on meta-theoretical reflection, the project aims to contribute to the development of digital humanities and spatial literary studies.

D?r al-?arb as the Motherland? The Muslim Tatars of (the Grand Duchy of) Lithuania and Social Contract

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Muslim Minority ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Grand Duchy

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.

POLIVARIABILITY OF THE BASTARD MOTIF IN THE SHORT STORIES BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT: CHARACTER IN SEARCH OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Oksana Galchuk
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Guy De Maupassant ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
The Social ◽  
Role Of It ◽  
Structural Methods

The theme of illegitimacy Guy de Maupassant evolved in his works this article perceives as one of the factors of the author’s concept of a person and the plane of intersection of the most typical motifs of his short stories. The study of the author’s concept of a person through the prism of polivariability of the motif of a bastard is relevant in today’s revision of traditional values, transformation of the usual social institutions and search for identities, etc. The purpose of the study is to give a definition to the existence specifics of the bastard motif in the Maupassant’s short stories by using historical and literary, comparative, structural methods of analysis as dominant. To do this, I analyze the content, variability and the role of this motive in the formation of the Maupassant’s concept of a person, the author’s innovations in its interpretation from the point of view of literary diachrony. Maupassant interprets the bastard motif in the social, psychological and metaphorical-symbolic sense. For the short stories with the presentation of this motif, I suggest the typology based on the role of it in the structure of the work and the ideological and thematic content: the short stories with a motif-fragment, the ones with the bastard’s leitmotif and the group where the bastard motif becomes a central theme. The Maupassant’s interpretation of the bastard motif combines the general tendencies of its existence in the world’s literary tradition and individual reading. The latter is the result of the author’s understanding of the relevant for the era issues: the transformation of the family model, the interest in the theory of heredity, the strengthening of atheistic sentiments, the growth of frustration in the system of traditional social and moral values etc. This study sets the ground for a prospective analysis of the evolution the bastard motif in the short-story collections of different years or a comparative study of the motif in short stories and novels by Maupassant.

ANALISIS STRUKTUR SOSIAL CERITA DALAM CERITA PENDEK ANAK “ANGGREK RARA” (SEBUAH KAJIAN SOSIOLOGI SASTRA TERHADAP SASTRA ANAK)

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 184
Author(s):  
Sari Herleni
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Home

This article describes about the figure of children world in a short story “Anggrek Rara” written by Ina Inong, by connecting the social structure in the text and in the real life. After analyzing the social structure in the story, it is found that the plot of this story was the progressive plot, the background was from the social fact that came from inner house and outer house, otherwise the central character were Rara and Bunda. By analyzing social structure of text, it was found that a family (home) is the serious and formal environment while outer house is free and non formal. The result of the research showed that the children short story “ Anggrek Rara” was expected to give the figure outlines of the children world.AbstrakPenelitian ini membahas tentang gambaran dunia anak dalam cerita pendek anak “Anggrek Rara” karya Ina Inong dengan menghubungkan struktur sosial teks dalam karya dan struktur sosial teks dengan realitas. Melalui analisis struktur sosial dalam karya terungkap bahwa alur cerita ini merupakan alur lurus, latar terdiri dari fakta sosial yang bersumber dari rumah dan di luar rumah, sedangkan tokoh Rara dan Bunda adalah tokoh sentral. Melalui analisis struktur sosial teks dengan realitas terungkap bahwa keluarga (rumah) merupakan lingkungan yang sifatnya serius dan formal, sedangkan di luar rumah bahkan bersifat bebas dan non formal. Hasil yang diperoleh dari analisis ini menunjukkan bahwa cerita pendek anak “Anggrek Rara” dianggap mampu memberikan garis-garis besar gambaran kehidupan dunia anak.

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