scholarly journals Intertextual dialogue with Victorian literature in the novels by Sarah Ann Waters as a means of implementing feminist issues

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-146
Author(s):  
Anna A. Ilunina

The article presents an analysis of the implementation of the category of intertextuality in the novel «Affinity» (1999) by the British writer Sarah Ann Waters. The aim of the work was to trace how the intertextual dialogue with the Victorian literature contributes to the formation of the feminist issues of the work. It is revealed that the main pretexts when creating a novel for Waters were «Little Dorrit» by Charles John Huffam Dickens, «Aurora Leigh» by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, «The Turn of the Screw» by Henry James, and novels by William Wilkie Collins. «Affinity» has elements of Gothic narrative, a detective, a sensational novel, the Newgate novel, picaresque novel, contributing to the formation of women's issues. The dialogue with Victorianism allows Waters to raise issues of gender inequality in the past and present, the exploitation of women, and the rights of individuals to realise their sexual identity. For Waters, turning to Victorianism is a way to draw attention to issues that, according to the writer, are still topical in British culture, such as sexuality, class and gender.

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-94
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.


2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-61
Author(s):  
Pooja Mittal Biswas

AbstractThis paper studies how the novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf deconstructs the male / female gender binary by deconstructing the past / future time binary. The protagonist’s sex change disrupts the linearity of ‘straight time’, in which the causality of gender is monodirectional, queer agency is impossible, and a false equivalency is drawn between gender identity and biological sex. The text instead leads Orlando (and the reader) away from straight time and into queer time, which is multidirectional, non-linear and non-heteronormative, and which unhitches gender identity at least partially from biological sex through a process that I call ‘gender lag’. This lag grants queer agency to Orlando in terms of his / her own gender identity and gender performativity. In exercising queer agency, Orlando’s changing body becomes a queer ‘chronotope’, that is, a queer expression of time and space within the narrative. Explored in the paper are the various means employed within the text to queer time and gender. The cultural context within which Orlando was written is also considered as a contributing factor to the subtextuality of its queerness. Finally, the text’s transgender connotations are analysed.


Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature were at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire. The Roman parallel was used to capture the martial virtue of Wellington just as it was used to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde. Using approaches from literary and cultural studies, reception studies, and gender studies, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome for Victorian ideas about masculinity. With chapters on education, politics, empire, and late Victorian decadence, it makes sense of the manifold and often contradictory representations of Rome—as distinct from Greece—in authors like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and others.


1990 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 131-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Morlier

During the past two decades Elizabeth Barrett Browning has become most appreciated for her 1856 feminist epic Aurora Leigh, a poem in which she asserted her “highest convictions upon Life and Art.” Before publishing Aurora Leigh, however, she said that one of her most important poems was “The Dead Pan.” When she published her two-volume collection of Poems in 1844, she insisted that “The Dead Pan” be placed last for emphasis. This poem of thirty-nine stanzas, each ending with some variation of the phrase “Pan is dead,” is often overlooked today in discussions of Barrett Browning's development probably because its theme appears outdated to modern readers. Beginning with a catalogue of classical deities—such as Juno, Apollo, and Cybele—shocked by the crucifixion of Christ, the poem depicts the death of these classical gods along with their representative, Pan. In the final third of the poem they are replaced by the Christian god and his martyred son. Then the refrain “Pan is dead” changes in meaning: no longer the lament of the classical gods, the refrain becomes a joyful proclamation of the Christian poet. On a first reading, “The Dead Pan” seems simply to celebrate orthodox Christianity; it is still generally remembered as a Victorian expression of pietism or, in Douglas Bush's facetious words of 1937, a poem in which the “Greek gods are brought face to face with Christian truth and put to rout” (268).


Author(s):  
Fahim Aslam

COVID-19 has become a part of everyone's day-to-day life, since the outbreak in 2019 the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused more than 4.5 million deaths with over 200 million cases reported globally. Currently, the number of infections and deaths are gradually lowering in different countries however the underlying challenges still exist. COVID-19 threatens human life, social functioning and development. Although numerous studies have been carried out in the past to highlight the key challenges very limited studies have been conducted from an ordinary person's viewpoint. In the fight against COVID-19, humanity has been pushed to a level which cannot be accepted where establishing that balance is a priority. This study focuses on highlighting the common issues faced by the ordinary public in the current era. Five key areas were identified to be the most essential; education, technological adaptation, transportation, mental health and gender-based violence (GBV).


Fabula ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 172-184
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen

Abstract Feminist perspectives have strongly influenced the fairy-tale rewritings of the past decades, but the intersection of gender with other identity markers deserves more attention. This article applies the conclusions of Sylvia Henneberg’s critical examination of age and gender in fairy tales to Gillian Cross’s Wolf (1990), an award-winning rewriting of “Red Riding Hood.” While Wolf presents Nan, the counterpart of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, as a determined and cunning older woman at first, in the course of the novel, the narrative lapses into the ageist stereotypes of the ineffectual crone and the wise old mentor.


2018 ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Willi H. Hager

The Hydraulic Laboratory of Liège University, Belgium, is historically considered from its foundation in 1937 to the mid-1960s. The technical facilities of the various Buildings are highlighted, along with canals and instrumentation available. It is noted that in its initial era, comparatively few basic research has been conducted, mainly due to the professional background of the professors leading the establishment. This state was improved in the past 50 years, however, particularly since the Laboratory was dislocated to its current position in the novel University Campus. Biographies of the leading persons associated with the Liège Hydraulic Laboratory are also presented, so that a comprehensive picture is given of one of the currently leading hydraulic Laboratories of Europe.


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