scholarly journals The Historically Changing Notion of (Female Bodily) Proportion and Its Relevance to Literature

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Takayuki Yokota-Murakami
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Poetic Prose ◽  
Foreignizing Translation ◽  
Early Translation ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractFutabatei Shimei (1864-1909) was an early modern Japanese novelist, translator, and critic. He wrote what is now generally conceived of as the first Japanese ‘modern’ novel, Drifting Clouds (1887-89). He translated works by Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Garshin, Gorky, and others. He also published a number of critical essays, treatises on literary theory, political papers, and so forth. His early translation of Turgenev’s short stories: Aibiki (Rendevous, 1888) and Meguriai (Three Trysts, 1889) were extremely influential on the contemporary literati, who were amazed at the fresh, poetic prose used in stark contrast to the traditional Japanese fiction in the pre-Reformation period. These translations, seen in the light of the present-day readers, were unique in what we might term today ‘foreignizing translation’. Lawrence Venuti in Invisibility of the Translator argues that the ideal of (English) translation has been to conceal itself as a translation, i.e. to present itself as an original text (chap I and passim). In that sense, Futabatei’s translations, scandalously presenting itself as a translation, that is to say, as an alien text, is extremely ‘foreignizing’.

Staging Romance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Spatial Grammar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter explores the mostly overlooked history of romance on the early modern stage. Analysing the geographies of two little-known plays, Clyomon and Clamydes (1580s?) and Guy of Warwick (early 1590s?), it argues that, in its imaginative openness and its flexible staging of space, the early modern theatre was the ideal environment in which to stage romance’s extravagant spatial and ethnographical imaginings. Further, the chapter demonstrates how a theatrical tradition of clowning enabled these late-Elizabethan dramas to contest the values of the very romance-worlds they had established. It closes with a fresh reading of Francis Beaumont’s parody of romance, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, arguing that the play satirizes dramatic romance’s spatial grammar as well as its narrative strategies.

Pamela

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Young Girl ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Voice

‘Pamela under the Notion of being a Virtuous Modest Girl will be introduced into all Families, and when she gets there, what Scenes does she represent? Why a fine young Gentleman endeavouring to debauch a beautiful young Girl of Sixteen.’ (Pamela Censured, 1741) One of the most spectacular successes of the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteeent-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world ‘into two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists’, even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached up for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant’s long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born heroine, but by a printer who fifteen years earlier had narrowly escaped imprisonment for the seditious output of his press, Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity, but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse. Based on the original text of 1740, from which Richardson later retreated in a series of defensive revisions, this edition makes available the version of Pamela that aroused such widespread controversy on its first appearance.

Sophocles: Ajax

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. F. Garvie
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Simple Solution ◽  
Greek Text ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Easy Answer ◽  
In The Beginning

Ajax, perhaps the earliest surviving tragedy of Sophocles, presents the downfall and disgrace of a great hero whose suicide leads to his rehabilitation through the enlightened magnanimity of one of his enemies. This edition attempts to show that Sophocles offers no easy answer to the question of why Ajax falls, and no simple solution to the problem of how we ought to live so as to avoid tragedy in our own lives. The introductory chapter focuses on Ajax, as one of the major characters in Homer's Iliadand the only hero in the story that never received direct help from a god. It looks into the Odyssey, which provides the earliest reference of Sophocles being concerned with Ajax. The next chapter provides the original text of Sophocles's play about Ajax. It talks about how the play began with the death of Achilles and Ajax's desire to be rewarded with his armor. It also mentions Ajax's shame and intention of suicide after killing Agamemnon and Menelaus when they gave Achilles's armor to Oddyseus. The chapter discusses the ending of the play in which Odysseus insisted that Ajax should be buried properly. The final chapter gives the commentary for the play. It talks about how Sophocles began his plays with dialogue in order to provide the audience with information about the story. It also mentions the introduction of Odysseus and reveal of Athena as the goddess in the beginning of the play. This chapter analyses the relationships among Ajax, Odysseus, and Athena. The book presents Greek text with facing-page English translation, introduction and extensive commentary.

scholarly journals MALĒCIYĀVIṈ MU.AṈPUCCELVAṈ ILAṄKAIYIṈ TI.NYĀṈACĒKARAṈ ĀKIYŌRIṈ CIṞUKATAIKAḶ ŌR OPPĀYVU [COMPARISON OF THE SHORT STORIES OF M.ANBUCHELVAN (MALAYSIA) AND T.NYANASEKARAN (SRI LANKA)]

2021 ◽  
pp. 157-164
Author(s):  
KUNASEELAN SUBRAMANIAM
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Plantation Life

The objective of this study is to identify and compare the education issues of the plantation communities in selected Tamil short stories of Mu.Anbuchelvan (Malaysia) and T.Nyanasegaran (Sri Lanka) as well as to analyse the parallel elements in these issues. These short stories are selected based on the similarity of intrinsic elements that reflect plantation life and socioeconomic status. The analysis and discussions are based on comparative literary theory. The findings of this research shows that education issues are very similar among plantation communities in Malaysia and Sri Lanka. The implications of this study are important to understand the importance of Tamil short stories as historical sources of plantation communities in Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

scholarly journals Possible Worlds in Translation: Coleman Barks’s Rendition of a Story from Rumi’s Masnavi

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vahid Medhat ◽  
Hossein Pirnajmuddin ◽  
Pyeaam Abbasi
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Narrative Worlds ◽  
The Way

This article applies the theory of possible worlds to the field of translation studies by examining the narrative worlds of original and translated texts. Specifically, Marie-Laure Ryan’s characterization of possible worlds provides an account of the internal structure of the textual universe and the progression of the plot. Based on this account, one of the stories from Rumi’s Masnavi is compared to Coleman Barks’s English translation. The possible worlds of the characters and the unfolding of the plots in both texts are examined to assess the degree of compatibility between the textual universes of the original and the translated texts and how significant this might be. It also examines how readers reconstruct the narrative worlds projected by the two texts. The analysis reveals some inconsistencies in the way the textual universes of the original and translated texts are furnished and in the way readers reconstruct the narrative worlds of the two texts. The inability of translation to fully render the main character results in some loss in terms of the pungency and pithiness of the original text. It is also shown that the source text presents a richer domain of the virtual in comparison, suggesting a higher degree of tellability in the textual universe of the Masnavi’s narrative.

scholarly journals Shakespeare in Hawai‘i: Puritans, Missionaries, and Language Trouble in James Grant Benton’s "Twelf Nite O Wateva!", a Hawaiian Pidgin Translation of "Twelfth Night"

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (33) ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Rhema Hokama
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Original Play ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Class Hierarchy ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Social Privilege

In 1974, the Honolulu-based director James Grant Benton wrote and staged Twelf Nite O Wateva!, a Hawaiian pidgin translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In Benton’s translation, Malolio (Malvolio) strives to overcome his reliance on pidgin English in his efforts to ascend the Islands’ class hierarchy. In doing so, Malolio alters his native pidgin in order to sound more haole (white). Using historical models of Protestant identity and Shakespeare’s original text, Benton explores the relationship between pidgin language and social privilege in contemporary Hawai‘i. In the first part of this essay, I argue that Benton characterizes Malolio’s social aspirations against two historical moments of religious conflict and struggle: post-Reformation England and post-contact Hawai‘i. In particular, I show that Benton aligns historical caricatures of early modern puritans with cultural views of Protestant missionaries from New England who arrived in Hawai‘i beginning in the 1820s. In the essay’s second part, I demonstrate that Benton crafts Malolio’s pretentious pidgin by modeling it on Shakespeare’s own language. During his most ostentatious outbursts, Malolio’s lines consist of phrases extracted nearly verbatim from Shakespeare’s original play. In Twelf Nite, Shakespeare’s language becomes a model for speech that is inauthentic, affected, and above all, haole.

scholarly journals Brother-Sister Relationships in Early Modern Drama

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Salim E. Al-Ibia ◽  
Ruth M.E. Oldman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Sister Relationship ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
Sister Relationships ◽  
The Ideal

This study aims to evaluate the commodified brother-sister relationship in Early Modern drama. It examines three different samples from three major playwrights of this time period: Isabella and Claudio in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603), Charles and Susan in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), and Giovanni and Annabella in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632). The three aforementioned cases are closely evaluated through a Marxist-feminist lens. The study finds out that the brothers in the three examined plays are not very different since they all encourage their sisters to sacrifice their chastity to achieve some sort of personal interest. Interestingly enough, the sisters vary in their responses to their brothers’ requests of offering their bodies to help their brothers. Obviously, Shakespeare offers the ideal version of a sister who does everything in her power to save a brother. Yet, she refuses to offer her body in return to his freedom in spite of her brother’s desperate calls to offer her virginity to Angelo to save the former’s life. Susan of Heywood is also similar to Isabella of Shakespeare since she refuses to sell herself in return to the money needed to save her brother. However, Ford offers the ugliest version of a brother-sister relationship. The brother wants to have a love affair with his sister who yields to his sexual advances and eventually gets pregnant.

The Longue Durée of Deathbed Rites

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline I. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Buddhist Temple ◽  
Kamakura Period ◽  
Funeral Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Ideal

During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal of mindful death was accommodated to warriors heading for the battlefield and was incorporated into war tales. It was reinterpreted in emergent Zen communities by such figures as Enni, Soseki, and Koken Shiren; within the exclusive nenbutsu movements, by Hōnen, Shinran, Shinkyō, and others; and by Shingon adepts such as Kakukai, Dōhan, Chidō, and others who advocated simplified forms of A-syllable contemplation (ajikan) as a deathbed practice naturally according with innate enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about contemporaneous funeral practices. Deathbed practices declined markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a casualty of modernity and changing afterlife conceptions.

The Two Worlds of Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying-shih Yü
Keyword(s):  
Literary Study ◽  
Imaginary World ◽  
Ideal World ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Honglou Meng ◽  
The Ideal

This is a thematic literary study of the “Utopian world” and the “world of reality” in China's greatest pre-modern novel. It shows how an ideal imaginary world where youth, beauty and love are kept safe is closely connected with the harsh, ugly and lustful world of reality. Thus, the collapse of the ideal world is seen as inevitable because it can never resist the erosion and invasion of the world of reality.

The Rhetoric of the Passions

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-117
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

In the Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon complains that there was no adequate science of the passions: in the place where the passions should be discussed—ethics—they were generally handled only in summary or inadequate ways; the most extensive and particularized accounts of the passions belong to poetry and history as they are informed by rhetoric; but neither poetry, history, nor rhetoric turned their observations into the basis of systematic investigations. This chapter describes the rhetoric of the passions, tracing it to works by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, textbooks like the progymnasmata—basic exercises in rhetoric—and early modern literary theory. The chapter argues that the heart of this rhetoric of the passions lies in an account of narrative as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions in their particularity, producing what Bacon calls “active and ample descriptions and observations.” The chapter uses that rhetoric of the passions as a lens for interpreting the early modern treatises on the passions as well as Montaigne’s essays. Finally, it reads Milton’s Paradise Lost as a serious confrontation with narrative as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions. Milton forges his poetry into an instrument for investigating minute fluctuations of affective experience as they drive conversational exchanges; but he also raises questions about the implications of that narrative mode of understanding for his theological principles of absolute freedom and responsibility.

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