Architecture, Environment and ‘Scenic Effect’ in May Sinclair’s The Divine Fire

Author(s):  
Terri Mullholland

Published in 1904, The Divine Fire was May Sinclair’s third novel and the one that was to make her name. Ironically, as Suzanne Raitt notes, ‘The novel which made her both famous and relatively wealthy [is] a critique of the bookselling industry in which she was now earning her living’. Sinclair’s novel is, in fact, an astute engagement with the commercialisation of modern life and consumer culture. In this chapter I examine how Sinclair uses carefully staged representations of architectural space in order to highlight the play between illusion and reality, exterior and interior, and the commercial versus the domestic. Throughout The Divine Fire Sinclair wants us to look beneath the surface of her textual realism, to realise that what is seen should not necessarily be believed. Sinclair was writing at a time of rapid change, and in her use of the imagery of modernity – the commodities, the dazzling lights, the decor – Sinclair reveals society’s growing obsession with surface illusion and ‘the new’. But alongside this, Sinclair also reveals an alternative world that holds art, and the spiritual values it represents, in high esteem; a world she hopes can survive the bright lights of commercialisation now dominating modern life.

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Oksana Anossova

Fanny Burney at 15 wrote in her diary addressing her thoughts to ‘Nobody’, to her silent ‘self’ and interlocutor. Nobody learnt about this fact until her diaries were published. She became famous with her first epistolary novel about a young lady entering the world, though in the Preface to the novel the author pretended to be an editor of the letters. Her writing could be compared to contemporary blogs. Novelty and variety of subjects, personally coloured irony and wit, acute eyesight, ability to entertain a reader with an unusual insight of the ordinary event or situation (e.g., ‘Directions for Coughing, Sneezing, or Moving Before the King and Queen’), a dramatist talent to create dialogues and remember speaker’s intonation and other speech parameters, a lot of short fragments imprinting emotions and restoring the epoch in diaries and letters, - everything features her style and specifies her as a Romanticism writer. Some of the subjects could be accepted as obsolete though regarding different situations, circumstances and the performance the given descriptions of the royal household politely discussed by the Keeper of the Robe to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and a close acquaintance of British famous actor David Garrick (1717-1779) and even world-known painter Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) some of the episodes described in diaries could be praised for their author’s dramatic playwright talent. Blogging in its well-written form, the one possessing style and distinguishing good literature characteristics, could be compared to diaries reflecting every instant of modern life and becoming immediately public. Freedom of female voice in Romantic era and freedom of mass-media writer and reader on the verge of Millennium are manifested in both epochs


Author(s):  
Barbara Green

THE ASSOCIATION OF fashion with the modern runs deep, permeating both popular and academic culture as the one enduring truth within an environment that values the novel above all else. Rita Felski defined fashion as a key element in modernité’s ‘general experience of the aestheticization of everyday life’ (1995: 13)...


Author(s):  
Frode Helland

In Minima Moralia Theodor W. Adorno included three fragments or aphorisms on Ibsen. Here Adorno discusses Ibsen’s modernity, and the actuality of the realist dramas for Adorno’s own modernity six decades later. In this chapter I take Adorno’s reflections on Ibsen as a point of departure, and focus on the protagonist, her distance, her thinking, her reflection, as they are expressed in some of the central scenes in the play. In order to understand the play one has to take Hedda’s past into account, and see the importance of her ideals of “vine leaves in the hair,” on the one hand, and “beauty,” on the other, and not least to see how they relate to past and future—with consequences for a possible interpretation of the end of the play. Adorno’s reflections on the play bring out its negativity, and its relevance today.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ngo Quang Son ◽  
Nguyen Thi Phuong

Traditional culture of ethnic minorities is the material and spiritual values that are accumulated and preservedin the whole history of ethnic minority development. In thatcommon cultural flow, every ethnic minorities group in ourcountry has its own characteristics in traditional culture.That identity is expressed firstly in language. Language is animportant element of the ethnic minorities character, therefore,the loss of language is the loss of a great asset, thereby leadingto the erasure of art literature, religious beliefs and the custom,customary law.Therefore, in the context of modern life, preserving andpromoting the cultural and linguistic identity of ethnicminorities is an urgent task. In particular, pay specialattention to the method of cultural preservation through thedevelopment of Information, Education and CommunicationModel in ethnic minorities languages in schools and localcommunities.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.


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):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dennis Walder

Dombey and Son ... Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light.' The hopes of Mr Dombey for the future of his shipping firm are centred on his delicate son Paul, and Florence, his devoted daughter, is unloved and neglected. When the firm faces ruin, and Dombey's second marriage ends in disaster, only Florence has the strength and humanity to save her father from desolate solitude. This new edition contains Dickens's prefaces, his working plans, and all the original illustrations by ‘Phiz’. The text is that of the definitive Clarendon edition. It has been supplemented by a wide-ranging Introduction, highlighting Dickens's engagement with his times, and the touching exploration of family relationships which give the novel added depth and relevance.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. P. Li

Energy-efficient processing of TiB compound with nanowhiskers by micropyretic synthesis is investigated in this paper. Micropyretic synthesis not only offers shorter processing time but also excludes the requirement for high-temperature sintering and it is considered as the one of the novel energy-saving processing techniques. Experimental study and numerical simulation are both carried out to investigate the correlation of the processing parameters on the microstructures of the micropyretically synthesized products. The diffusion-controlled reaction mechanism is proposed in this study. It is noted that nanosize TiB whiskers only occurred when the combustion temperature is lower than the melting point of TiB but higher than the extinguished temperature. The results generated in the numerical calculation can be used as a helpful reference to select the proper route of processing nanosize materials. The Arrhenius-type plot of size and temperature is used to calculate the activation energy of TiB reaction. In addition to verifying the accuracy of the experimental measures, the reaction temperature for producing the micropyretically synthesized products with nanofeatures can be predicted.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


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