scholarly journals A Winter in Bath, 1796-97: Life Writing and the Irish Adolescent Self

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 18-40
Author(s):  
Amy Prendergast

The diary form affords multiple generations of women with a vehicle for expressing themselves, and is particularly germane to younger writers, developing a voice, and shaping a sense of self as they emerge from childhood. Charting her travels from Ireland to Bath, the manuscript diary (1796–97) of Charity Lecky is exceptionally useful in exploring intersections with other genres, particularly the novel, while also affording us with an adolescent’s observations on life, and on Bath as international marriage market. The categories of youth, gender, and nation all play strong roles in Charity’s evolving sense of self, and enable us to explore these intersections and how they can inform a young person’s sense of worth. Frequently dismissed by male contemporaries as preoccupied only with balls and marriage prospects, the voices of such figures were repeatedly marginalised. This article prioritises both these voices and the diary form itself, and fuses their legitimate interest in courtship with a concern and fascination with national identity, recognising the value of young women’s opinions, and demonstrating how we might better understand the evolution of personal identities through inclusion of such source material.

Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Baydalova ◽  

The novel by Volodymyr Vynnychenko I want! (1915) was, on one hand, his literary answer to the discussion on the national question in Ukrainian society, and, on the other, it was his reaction to the accusations of him being a renegade resulting from his shift towards Russian literature. In 1907-1908, after the publication of his dramas and novels which were impregnated with the idea of “being honest with oneself” (it implied that all thoughts, feelings, and acts were to be in harmony), his works could be more easily published in Russian than in Ukrainian. This situation was taken by his compatriots as a betrayal against his native language and the national cause. In the novel I want! the problem of language identity is directly linked with national identity. In the beginning of the novel the main character, poet Andrey Halepa, despite being ethnic Ukrainian, spoke, thought, and wrote poems in Russian, and consequently his personality was ruined and his actions lacked motivation. It seems that after his unsuccessful suicide attempt and under the influence of a “conscious” Ukrainian, Halepa got in touch with his national identity and developed a life goal (the “revival” of the Ukrainian nation and the building of a free-labour enterprise). However, in the novel, national identity turns out to be incomplete without language identity. Halepa spoke Ukrainian with mistakes, had difficulty choosing suitable words, and discovered with surprise the meaning of some Ukrainian words from his former Russian friends. The open finale emphasises the irony of the discourse around a fast national “revival” without struggle and effort, and which only required someone’s will.


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):  
Stalo Georgiou ◽  
Christos Papademetriou

Music education as a systematic and complex process of transmitting knowledge and skills, as well as cultivating mental, intellectual, and artistic abilities, referred to a specific cultural result of an apprenticeship system. Music is also inextricably linked with the cultural and national identity of individuals as it offers a sense of self within a social context. It symbolizes and offers an experience of collective, social, and cultural identity. This study, through the analysis of the pertinent literature in a descriptive way, will try to prove that the position of music must be fundamental in education and therefore in the formation of human personality. The main conclusion of the chapter is the significant importance of the expression of children through music, the ability to express their musicality with the help of his body and voice, the perception of the concepts of music, as well as the development of a positive image and attitude towards music.


2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Ylagan

There exists a sociocultural function to humour that is geared towards maintaining order through a subversion (or inversion) of the more serious, structured status quo, and while there is a pragmatic side to the dispensation of humour across any given society, humour can also serve a fundamentally ontological function in determining and representing a group’s identity. Though notions of social organization and culture exist and are perpetuated primarily within a group’s literary canon, as espoused for example in the privileging of genres such as the epic or the novel as loci of national identity, this paper argues that such identities can be just as effectively – if not better – constructed through popular representations in humour, especially in satirical content found in “ephemeral” mediums such as comic strips. Such representations in turn can be mobilized to complement or even dismantle the status quo and offer alternative paradigms of understanding national identities and cultural affiliations.


PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 782-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto Javier Martínez

This article examines the prevalence of confusion and incoherence in James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country, arguing that the novel should be read as an extended and theoretically rich meditation on the difficulty of gaining self-knowledge in oppressive social contexts. Its central thesis is that the novel is motivated less by the tragedy of Rufus Scott's suicide early in the novel than by the ethical imperative that compels all the characters to risk their sense of self (to figuratively commit suicide) in order to better understand the circumstances they face. Through this “suicidal” sensibility, Baldwin examines how self-knowledge in oppressive contexts frequently depends on people making extreme shifts in their conception of self—of who they are in relation to their society. These shifts are often dreaded and appear self-menacing, but Baldwin ultimately implies that they hold liberatory promise.


2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 529-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McBratney

It has recently been suggested, in various quarters, that cosmopolitanism, a concept that has proved broadly useful and popular in Victorian studies in the last several years, may have entered its critical senescence. The reports of its decline are, I believe, greatly exaggerated. I would like to prove the continuing vigor of the concept by using it in a reading of Dickens'sGreat Expectations(1860–61). Conceiving of the cosmopolitan figure as a mediator between native English and colonial subjectivities, I will argue that Pip and Magwitch are reluctant cosmopolitans of indeterminate national identity. Although their final lack of a home country represents a psychological loss, the sympathy they learn to feel for each other – a fellow-feeling between gentleman and convict produced by a transnational irony enacted across class and cultural divides – represents a clear ethical gain, the attainment of a partial universalism that goes to the heart of the moral vision of the novel. Throughout this study, I will seek to extend that “rigorous genealogy of cosmopolitanism” that Amanda Anderson has urged (“Cosmopolitanism” 266).


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (Extra-B) ◽  
pp. 149-154
Author(s):  
Rezeda Mukhametshina ◽  
Kadisha Nurgali ◽  
Svetlana Ananyeva

In the context of the new bi- and polylingual picture of the world, the novel continues to hold leading positions as the leading genre of prose. The Kazakh novel generalizes the aesthetically immanent factors of identity and is created in the Kazakh and Russian languages. Ethno-national identity is important for both the author and the characters. The modern phenomenology of perception actualizes not only the role of the anthropological turn, but also the role of the subjective factor - the reader. Comparative analysis allows you to look at the novel from different conceptual points of view. Transnational tendencies are intensely manifested in the work of prose writers. The search for answers to the most important questions of our time, the challenges of globalization contributes to the disclosure of the ethnocultural world. Opposition one's own/other, one's/another's allows to convey the national attitude and reveal the national image.    


Litera ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 78-88
Author(s):  
Tatyana Yuryevna Kolyagina

The subject of this article is the problem of identity of the characters in the novel “In Search of the Primordial Land” by the regional Khanty writer Eremey Aipin. The goal is to describe the key vectors of reflections of the main characters on personal and national identity. The author aims to analyze the path of spiritual and social becoming, as well as finding true identity in the world and society of the protagonists of the novel — “man of the kin” Matvey Taishin and the hero “without kith or kin” Roman Romanov. The study leans on the interdisciplinary comprehensive approach, with the use of cultural-historical, typological, ethno-cultural, axiological and imagological methods of analysis. The scientific novelty lies in examination of the characters of the literary work from the perspective of their identity and identification. Analysis is conducted on the two ways of finding true identity by the characters in the small and big world. Path of “man of the kin” is the cognition of capabilities of staying in the world, strengthening of inviolable faith as the essential link in the chain of life, nature, Cosmos, and humanity. Path of the hero “without kith or kin” is a series of initiations (according to V. Y. Propp), as a result of which he gradually assimilates to the “earthly world”, having acquired the experience of merging with society. It is proven that solution of the questions on personal, social and national identity of the characters of the novel is interrelated with the author's traditionalistic worldview. The conclusion is made that in a crisis historical situation, the characters of the novel intuitively tilt towards ancient cultural memory of humanity, seeing its as a basis for reconstruction of identity.


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