scholarly journals Intertextuality and Arthurian Women in David Lodge’s Small World (1984)

Author(s):  
Anastasija Ropa ◽  

The present article analyses intertextual references in David Lodge’s Small World. An Academic Romance (1984), focusing on allusions to the corpus of medieval and twentieth-century Arthuriana in the representation of women characters. An analysis of Arthurian allusions in the portrayal of women characters shows that Lodge introduces Arthurian women to his academic ‘Camelot’ in response to medieval and post-medieval literature about King Arthur and the Grail quest. In this respect, his representation of academic women in Small World is different from the way they are described in Lodge’s other academic novels, Changing Places and Nice Work. Lodge rarely recasts Arthurian women characters as his heroines with the exception of Prof Fulvia Morgana, who is modelled on the Arthurian sorceress Morgane/Morgause. Nevertheless, in Small World, women appear in the traditional roles of being the object of a ‘knight’s’ quest, such as Persse’s beloved Angelica and Swallow’s lover Joy, and wise advisors (Miss Maiden). Alternatively, women are portrayed as antagonistic or negative characters, the so-called ‘whores’ or ‘demonic temptresses’: such are Angelica’s twin sister Lily and the lusty Fulvia Morgana.

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. LAVERS ◽  
M. KNAPP

Khutū was a material derived from an animal used by Medieval Asian peoples in the manufacture of knife handles and as an alexipharmic. Al-Bīrūnī (973–1048) made extensive enquiries into the origin of khutū but reached no definite conclusion. Literary scholars in the first half of the twentieth century identified the walrus and narwhal as probable sources, but in ignoring aspects of the literature on khutū’s appearance and provenance left a number of questions unanswered. We clarify and extend this research and identify further clues to the identity of khutū. We concur that walrus ivory was one source of khutū, suggest that the remains of “Ice Age” mammals may have influenced development of the medieval literature on khutū more than previous investigators realized, and offer a new hypothesis of khutū’s origin.


Author(s):  
Mónica Pachón ◽  
Santiago E. Lacouture

Mónica Pachón and Santiago E. Lacouture examine the case of Colombia and show that women’s representation has been low and remains low in most arenas of representation and across national and subnational levels of government. The authors identify institutions and the highly personalized Colombian political context as the primary reasons for this. Despite the fact that Colombia was an electoral democracy through almost all of the twentieth century, it was one of the last countries in the region to grant women political rights. Still, even given women’s small numbers, they do bring women’s issues to the political arena. Pachón and Lacoutre show that women are more likely to sponsor bills on women-focused topics, which may ultimately lead to greater substantive representation of women in Colombia.


Author(s):  
Jeremiah Mutuku Muneeni

There has been an intense debate with regards to Chinua Achebe’s (mis)representation of women in his creative works, especially his first four novels. Some scholars have argued that Achebe is a patriarchal writer who has relegated women to the periphery. Nevertheless, a few have read subtle nuances of gender balance in his works. This paper is a continuation of this debate. Specifically, it argues that Achebe has created Mother Archetypes in his novels and if the same is not recognized, he will continue to be demonized as a gender insensitive writer. The unit of analysis is three of the five Achebe’s novels namely: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and A Man of the People. The paper interrogates the aforementioned novels within the framework of archetypal criticism, with the aim of unearthing and examining Mother Archetypes inherent in them. The paper identifies religion, education, and justice as the spheres of life in which Achebe has created, empowered and elevated Mother Archetypes to be at par with their male counterparts. However, owing to the breadth of the subject, the paper dwells on education. The paper concludes that creation of empowered Mother Archetypes in Achebe’s novels is a symbolic relay in which women characters hand in the symbolic empowerment baton to the next woman in the next novel until the last one where the creation of a woman major character, Beatrice, wins the race against male dominance.


Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 229-243
Author(s):  
Alicja Piechucka

The article focuses on an analysis of Hart Crane’s essay “Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros.” One of Crane’s few art-historical texts, the critical piece in question is first of all a tribute to the American poet’s friend, the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. The author of a portrait of Crane, Siqueiros is a major artist, one of the leading figures that marked the history of Mexican painting in the first half of the twentieth century. While it is interesting to delve into the way Crane approaches painting in general and Siqueiros’ oeuvre in particular, an analysis of the essay with which the present article is concerned is also worthwhile for another reason. Like many examples of art criticism—and literary criticism, for that matter—“Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros” reveals a lot not only about the artist it revolves around, but also about its author, an artist in his own right. In a text written in the last year of his life, Hart Crane therefore voices concerns which have preoccupied him as a poet and which, more importantly, are central to modernist art and literature.


Author(s):  
Diyar Mohammed

This paper investigates the concepts of Feminism and Feminist Criticisms to identify their features in two novels; Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Ibrahim Ahmed’s Janî Gel. The theoretical and historical backgrounds of Feminism and the other Feminist Criticisms are presented according to their importance. The paper then introduces the two novels by presenting their plot summary. This paper tries to answer how two prominent writers, one British and one Kurdish, discuss women issues. The author wants to investigate whether both writers’ cultural upbringing and social background affect the way they present women in their respective novels. Through quotations taken from the novels, one learns about the writers’ ideas regarding women’s issues; economic, social, psychological, and political. In conclusion, the present study argues that women’s experiences in English society and Kurdish society have many similarities; however, despite the many similarities, there lay differences regarding the attitudes of both writers towards women issues and representation. For instance, Wood presents an ideal female character to oppose women’s traditional roles in society in her novel. On the other hand, Ahmed paints vivid imagery of what women go through without solid women characters. Thus, this paper hopes to provide future students and researchers with helpful material on Feminism, Feminist Criticisms, and the analysis of both novels, especially the Kurdish one, since research is scarce on it.


Author(s):  
Rajinder Singh

In India the development of modern science is closely related to its colonial background, a subject well documented by historians. So far as the prestigious Nobel Prizes are concerned, little has been mentioned in the colonial context. This article shows that in the first half of the twentieth century only a few Indian physicists and chemists were either nominees or nominators. Some of them were Fellows of the Royal Society. A comparison of Indian Nobel Prize nominators and nominees with other so-called Third World countries and colonies suggests some interesting results, for example the similarities of development of physics and chemistry in the colonized and ruling countries. The present article also suggests that the election of the Fellows of the Royal Society from India, in the fields of physics and chemistry, reveals a pattern comparable with that of Nobel Prize nominations and nominees.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
Vijayakumar M. Boratti

Literary writings such as poetry, drama or novel in colonial India manifest themselves into, react or subscribe to the larger discourse of colonialism or nationalism; rarely do they hold uniformity in their articulations. As colonial experiences and larger nationalist consciousness varied from region to region, cultural articulations—chiefly dramas—not only assumed different forms but also illustrated different thematic concerns. Yet, studies on colonial drama, thus far, have paid attention to either colonialism/orientalism or nationalism. There is a greater focus on British India in such studies. However, the case of princely states demands a momentary sidestep from the dichotomy of colonialism versus nationalism to understand the colonial dramas. The slow and gradual entry of nationalism in the princely states did not have to combat the British chiefly and directly. Much before its full blossom in the princely states, it had to grapple with a range of issues such as monarchy, democratic institutions, constitutionalism, bureaucracy and other pressing issues locally. In the present article, the Kannada dramas of Devanahalli Venkataramanaiah Gundappa (DVG) in the early decades of the twentieth century are examined to throw light on the ways in which they act as political allegories which imagine and debate democracy and its repercussions in the social and political spheres of the Mysore princely state.


2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Battier

AbstractSixty years ago, musique concrète was born of the single-handed efforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did the first experiments become a School and produce so many rich works? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses various aspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years of musical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughts behind the advent and the development of the music created and theoretised at the Paris School formed by the Schaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to the early twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds and how poets, artists and musicians were expressing their quest for, as Apollinaire put it, ‘new sounds new sounds new sounds’. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture, processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughly revisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what is known as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such as Teruggi's, give readers insight into the technical environments and innovations that took place at the GRM. This present article focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. This unity has existed alongside sixty years of activity and dialogue with researchers of other fields and constant attention to the latter-day scientific, technological and philosophical ideas which have had a strong influence in shaping the development of GRM over the course of its history.


1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (35) ◽  
pp. 230-232
Author(s):  
Irini Charitou

DEBORAH LEVY wrote Pax as the result of a commission from the Women's Theatre Group to write an ‘anti-nuclear’ play. In her own words, she detests ‘those last-two-minutes-in-a-bunker-type scenarios’, so she decided to write an epic play with Europe in the twentieth century as a focal point. Pax takes on board Europe's past, present, and future. There are four women characters in the play, The Keeper, The Hidden Daughter, The Mourner, and The Domesticated Woman. In the published edition of Pax (Plays by Women, Vol. VI, ed. Mary Remnant, Methuen, 1987), Levy describes how she envisaged these characters:I found four archetypes, who represented twentieth-century Europe for me.


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