scholarly journals Miss Jane and Miss Eyre: From student to teacher in Jane Eyre

Author(s):  
Noelia Galán Rodríguez

Jane Eyre is considered to be one of the most significant Victorian novels within the English literary canon as well as a governess novel. However, apart from her experience as governess, it must not be forgotten that, first of all, Jane was a student. Education has shaped the protagonist’s life and the plot of the novel making it one of the main topics of Jane Eyre and other Charlotte Brontë’s literary works such as The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853). The main aim of this essay is to study how education has shaped Jane Eyre both as a student and a teacher and how it has affected the outcome of the novel. In order to do so, a close reading of the novel is carried out along with a sociocultural background of Victorian society.

Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 103-116
Author(s):  
Irena Samide

The present paper addresses the novel Hanka written by Slovene writer Zofka Kveder, published in Croatian in 1917 and translated into Slovene in 1938. The paper shows that this little-known war novel differs substantially from other war narratives and that it can be ranked among the eminent pacifistic literary works of the first two decades of the 20th century. At the same time, the paper questions the role of the texts of Slovenian authors written in a foreign language, and stands up for the view that the national literary sciences should consider the more appropriate placement of these texts in the literary canon.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Αθηνά Κορούλη

The shift of the short story from the center to the periphery of the Modern Greek literary canon is part of the complex literary and cultural revisions that occurred in Greece during the Interwar years. The thesis, based on the theoretical, historical and critical approach of the study material (literary works, critical essays, articles and literary reviews), explores the following issues: the context of the “short story - novel” juxtaposition, the problems and the intentions that were related to the hierarchical downgrading of the short story, the critical opinions on short story poetics, the impact that the broader intellectual and literary pursuits of the period had on the Greek short story, those features that the literary criticism of the period perceived and commented on as a manifestation of change in the field of the Greek short story; furthermore, literary works that follow the directions recognized as signs of the renewal of the genre poetics are examined. With regard to the last issue, it should be noted that in parallel with the recurrent severe criticism of the short story and the turn towards the novel, there were signs that the Modern Greek short story of the Interwar period had also made a turn whose direction can be detected through a new critical commentary that was being frequently repeated, describing features of an interesting thematic and formal renewal that was recognized as the “new impetus” of the genre.


PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (5) ◽  
pp. 1187-1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus Connell Brown

Why did it take so long to start writing the history of close reading? For the best part of a century, close reading has grounded literary studies in the university, structuring assessment, teaching, employment, and publication. A basic proficiency in close reading has long been a professional obligation for faculty members and a course requirement for students. It makes sense, then, that Caroline Levine's Forms begins with a description of our method in action. A reader is settling down to work with a copy of Jane Eyre. She has a lengthy education behind her and a wealth of interpretive techniques for the book in front of her. Still, one thing is certain: our critic will broach the forms of the novel by drawing from “close reading methods” while using “historical research methods to analyze sociopolitical experience.” “But,” Caroline Levine asks, “would our critic be right to distinguish between the formal and the social?” (1).


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Varela

In the present essay, I argue that taxidermy is a fundamental element in Brazilian novelist Santiago Nazarian’s Neve negra (2017). To do so, I frame my argument by using studies on anthropocentrism and the relationship between the human and the non-human through taxidermy. The first part of the essay examines recent studies on taxidermy and primary sources from the nineteenth century that center on the art and science of skinning, preparing, and mounting dead specimens. The second part focuses on a close reading of Nazarian’s novel by studying the narrator’s patriarchal and masculine anxieties in conjunction with taxidermy and the non-human characters that appear in the novel.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Amine Belaid ◽  
Wassila Hamza Reguig-Mouro

The relationships between the literary texts have recently occupied the center of debate and discovery in the literary sphere. With a so ancient a practice as intertextuality; influence, allusion and quotation seem to smolder the old assumptions about originality and creativity. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore the utilization of intertextuality in the novel entitled The Lonely Londoners (1956) by the Trinidadian postcolonial writer Sam Selvon (1923-1994). To do so, a survey on the provenance of intertextuality is displayed, with reference to its pioneers who claimed that the text is a heterogeneous combination of texts, namely Kristeva and Bakhtin. Additionally, the article introduces several models of the concept that are relevant to the analysis of the aforementioned novel along with a brief overview on the cultural and social parameters leading to its creation. This inquiry shows that The Lonely Londoners textually intertwines with a few works of the literary canon, biblical characters and eminent legal cases via some names of its characters, in addition to other direct quotations. As this paper submits, the audience should reach a rational stance on the use of intertextuality in the postcolonial novel to relate to universally shared images about racial prejudice and alienation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Novita Dewi

<p>The novel <em>Putri Cina</em> or <em>The Chinese Princess</em> by Sindhunata builds on the intertextuality of various texts such as myths, chronicles, history, and pop culture. In the light of René Girard’s theory of desire, revenge, and scapegoating, this study aims (1) to show the inter-relationship among the texts in question; and (2) placing this novel in the work of World Literature. Through qualitative research methods and close reading techniques, this study finds out that <em>Putri Cina</em> recounts the history of conflicts to promote peace rather than revenge. The novel narrates such conflicts as the war between the descendants of the Javanese kings; the feud between the Chinese and Javanese people in colonial time; and the May 1998 ethnic riots in Indonesia. It concludes that it is necessary to circulate the narrative of the Chinese Princess as a peace ambassador in World Literature through the process of adaptation and translation. In a world prone to conflict, literary works can be effective agents of transformation.</p>


2020 ◽  
pp. 182-197
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Goral

The aim of the article is to analyse the elements of folk poetics in the novel Pleasant things. Utopia by T. Bołdak-Janowska. The category of folklore is understood in a rather narrow way, and at the same time it is most often used in critical and literary works as meaning a set of cultural features (customs and rituals, beliefs and rituals, symbols, beliefs and stereotypes) whose carrier is the rural folk. The analysis covers such elements of the work as place, plot, heroes, folk system of values, folk rituals, customs, and symbols. The description is conducted based on the analysis of source material as well as selected works in the field of literary text analysis and ethnolinguistics. The analysis shows that folk poetics was creatively associated with the elements of fairy tales and fantasy in the studied work, and its role consists of – on the one hand – presenting the folk world represented and – on the other – presenting a message about the meaning of human existence.


Author(s):  
Svetlana Morozova ◽  
Dmitrij Zhatkin

The article is devoted to the perception of K.I. Chukovsky’s works by a famous English writer G.K. Chesterton. K.I. Chukovsky was one of the first to point out the ambiguity of the literary works by the English writer and called his journalistic activity more convincing. Describing G.K. Chesterton’s essays, K.I. Chukovsky believed that the writer is second to none in this genre. He praised G.K. Chesterton’s journalistic talent in responding to all the phenomena of contemporary social life. K.I. Chukovsky considered it obligatory for the Russian readers to familiarize themselves with the critical works of the English author. In the essay «Gilbert Chesterton. Manalive» (1924) K.I. Chukovsky substantiated why, for all the variety of genre forms that G.K. Chesterton used, Russian readers were familiar with only a few of his works. K.I. Chukovsky’s critical attitude to the novel «Manalive» is explained by his rejection of G.K. Chesterton’s utopian attitude to the social situation in England at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. In G.K. Chesterton’s works K.I. Chukovsky saw a simulation of revolutionary pathos that did not solve pressing issues of social disorder.


GeoJournal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Gabellieri

AbstractScholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.


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