Imperial Aetiologies: Violence, Sleeping Sickness, and the Colonial Encounter

In this chapter Taylor-Pirie examines how one particular tropical disease—sleeping sickness—was conceptualised as a form of tropical violence across a range of medical and nonmedical genres. Using the repetition of an African curse ‘owa na ntolo’ as an access point, she reveals how sensational literary depictions of sleeping sickness circulated between newspaper reports and clinical case studies, augmenting debates about racial susceptibility. Depictions of African sleeping sickness, she argues, were filtered through an emotional register that produced new aetiologies of race and illness visible in Henry Seton Merriman’s hugely popular imperial romance novel With Edged Tools (1894), as well as in medical essays and tropical travel guides. The melodramatic mode and a flexible approach to representations of disease transmission produced Africa as a place productive of illness and immorality in equal measure. Ultimately, she demonstrates how Britain’s encounters with tropical disease—fictional and nonfictional—were used to map not only the epidemiological but also the sociocultural topographies of empire.

ENGLISH HYPERBOLE IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION PROSE (A STUDY OF SOPHIE KINSELLA’S NOVELS)

The article presents findings of the ongoing project on the use of hyperbole in contemporary women’s fiction prose, as one of the peculiarities of this genre. The novelty of our study consists in the fact that the genre characteristics and plot devices of romance novels have been abundantly dwelt upon in scholarly researches while the stylistic aspects of the genre have not been explicated enough. The texts constituting the empirical material for the research are the novels “Twenties Girl” and “Can You Keep a Secret?” by Sophie Kinsella, one of the bestselling contemporary English writers. The theoretical background of the research is based on the studies that were carried out by scholars whose field of expertise combines the issues related to literary criticism, context and rhetorical devices. Hyperbole being a typical feature of female writing, and there existing multiple taxonomies of hyperboles, the present study aims at defining peculiarities of the target trope, which is typical of female romance novel. Therefore, the focus in the given study is on the types of hyperbolic expressions, which prevail in the analysed text, i.e. quantitative hyperboles and adjectives-in-thesuperlative-degree hyperboles. The research confirms that hyperbole is a context-dependent linguistic phenomenon. The results of the study are reflected in the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the hyperbolic occurrences. The former shows that among hyperboles-numerals, million is most frequently used in the female writing by contrast with the numerals fifty, ten thousand, bazillion, which are least frequently used. Qualitative analysis presents the taxonomy of semantic fields formed by adjectives-in-the-superlative-degree hyperboles (e.g. inanimate objects, behavior, relationships) and displays a high prevalence of occurrences of those from anthropological domain. Moreover, the study demonstrates that the numerical hyperbole’s literal, objective-logical meaning denoting quantity becomes an intensifier and merges with the acquired in the context subjectiveevaluative, more expressive meaning, with a positive or negative connotation.

Qu’ont en commun Mimi Estival, Roxanne d’Avril et Georgette Mars?

Des années 1940 au milieu des années 1960, le Québec a assisté à l’essor des collections de romans populaires publiés en fascicules, écrits par des auteurs locaux et se déroulant dans La Belle Province. Signés d’une multitude de pseudonymes, ces objets sont extrêmement révélateurs du fonctionnement de l’auctorialité, sous le mode de la lecture sérielle. En s’intéressant à la collection « Roman d’amour » des Éditions Police-Journal, cet article souhaite explorer plus spécifiquement le fonctionnement du nom d’auteur en lien avec le pacte de lecture établi par le roman sentimental. --- From the 1940s to the mid-1960s, Quebec witnessed a boom in series of popular novels published in instalments, written by local authors, and set in La Belle Province. Appearing under a multitude of pseudonyms, these books tell us a great deal about the workings of authorship in the reading of serialised publications. In its examination of the series “Roman d’amour” put out by Éditions Police-Journal, this article seeks to explore in a more specific way how the author’s name functions in relation to the reading contract established by the genre of the romance novel.

INTERTEXUAL CONNECTIONS OF JEANETTE WINTERSON’S “FRANKISSSTEIN” AND MARY SHELLEY’S “FRANKENSTEIN: OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS”

Постмодернистский роман Дж. Уинтерсон “Frankissstein” балансирует между жанрами, являя собой причудливый сплав научной фантастики, сатирического памфлета, готического, любовного романа; психологического романа о трудностях взросления. В диалоге с претекстом, романом «Франкенштейн, или Современный Прометей» (1818) авторства Мэри Шелли, современная писательница размышляет о возможности и оправданности человеческого вмешательства в природу, в том числе половую, уже на новом витке развития цивилизации, в разгар очередной научно-технической революции. Действие романа “Frankissstein” разворачивается в двух временных и пространственных плоскостях, связанных системой героев-двойников. Первая отсылает к истории создания романа «Франкенштейн, или Современный Прометей» и биографии его автора Мэри Шелли. Второй пласт повествования рассказывает о мире, похожем на современный, где доктор Виктор Штейн задействован в долгосрочном научном проекте, связанном с сохранением в замороженном виде тел добровольцев, с целью их дальнейшего воскрешения силами науки, а также делает опыты по восстановлению, в автономии от тела, интеллекта умерших. Феминистская проблематика представлена в романе в оригинальном ключе. Протест против гендерной стереотипизации в романе соседствует с раздумьями о гендерной и сексуальной идентичности и сопряженной с ними дискриминации. The postmodernist novel “Frankissstein” by Jeanette Winterson balances between genres, presenting a fusion of science fiction, satirical pamphlet, gothic, romance novel; psychological novel about growing up, coupled with trauma. In a dialogue with the pretext, “Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus” (1818) by Mary Shelley, Winterson reflects on the possibility and justification of human intervention in nature, including sexual, already at a new stage of development of civilization, in the midst of another scientific and technological revolution. The novel “Frankissstein” takes place in two temporal and spatial planes, connected by a system of double heroes. The first refers to the history of the creation of the novel “Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus” and the biography of its author Mary Shelley. The second layer of the narrative tells about a world similar to the modern, where Dr. Victor Stein is involved in long-term research project related to preserving frozen bodies of volunteers, with a view to their future resurrection of the forces of science and doing experiments on the restoration of the autonomy of the body, the intellect of the dead. Feminist issues are presented in the novel in an original way. The protest against gender stereotyping in the novel is juxtaposed with reflections on gender and sexual identity and the discrimination associated with them.

From the Plant of Life to the Throat of Death: Freakish Flora and Masculine Forms in Fin de Siècle Lost World Novels

This article explores the representation of “plant horror” in fin de siècle “lost world” novels, from hideously dynamic carnivorous trees to mysterious plant-based drugs with the power to send their victims into torpid apathy. Such freakish flora can contribute to new understandings of the imperial romance novel, specifically in relation to its depiction of threatened masculinities. Combining modern ecocritical research into plant horror with readings of the imperial gothic, this article sheds new light on both fields by challenging the common assumption that both genres often associate the uncanny with moments of accelerated violence. Rather, I argue that these texts are instead most interested in questions of lassitude and stasis, and in problematizing the ideologies of conquest and control that animated British imperialism. Nuancing the ecophobia that is often identified with moments of plant horror, this article interprets nature not as phobic object but as sublimated metaphor for a specifically gendered anxiety. Encounters with the monstrous vegetal serve as an unsettling reminder that male bodies were ultimately disposable, controllable, and replaceable within the flawed economies of Victorian imperialism.

Cum iubim? Coduri de gen în romanul de dragoste românesc

My paper aims to present how the Romanian romance novel written between late 19th century and the Second World War fictionalized some of the gender codes active in that particular timeframe in social and familial contexts. A very popular subgenre amid the unprofessional readers, romance fiction rises a new kind of responsibility for literary critics and historians, that traditionally gave little to no attention to the matter of toxic gender codes found in these novels. This article attempts to analyse, by means of both close and distant reading tools, a few narrative aspects that encoded gender inequality.