Analysing Linguistic Stylistic Devices in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and So Long a Letter: A Comparative Appraisal

This research work focuses on linguistic stylistic analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. It aims to identify the various translation procedures used in each novel in order to establish a comparison between the different translation procedures and style of each translator of modern and old English. A sampling method has been used to carry out this research work. Thus, one extract has been selected with its corresponding translation from the French and English versions of each novel. The results show that, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the translator has used predominantly adaptation for his translation representing 32.32% in both selected extracts whereas in So Long a Letter, the translator has adopted predominantly literal translation representing a proportion of 28.48% in order to preserve the sustained register of the source text. However, both translators have also used other translation procedures in lower proportions depending on the context orientation. It has been noted that translation methods such as calque has been used only once whereas borrowing is nonexistent in the selected extracts from both literary works.

Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of The Winton Domesday

London and Winchester were not described in the Domesday Book, but the royal properties in Winchester were surveyed for Henry I about 1110 and the whole city was surveyed for Bishop Henry of Blois in 1148. These two surveys survive in a single manuscript, known as the Winton Domesday, and constitute the earliest and by far the most detailed description of an English or European town of the early Middle Ages. In the period covered Winchester probably achieved the peak of its medieval prosperity. From the reign of Alfred to that of Henry II it was a town of the first rank, initially centre of Wessex, then the principal royal city of the Old English state, and finally `capital’ in some sense, but not the largest city, of the Norman Kingdom. This volume provides a full edition, translation, and analyses of the surveys and of the city they depict, drawing on the evidence derived from archaeological excavation and historical research in the city since 1961, on personal- and place-name evidence, and on the recent advances in Anglo-Saxon numismatics.

Nebuchadnezzar’s Mind and Memory in the Old English “Daniel”

As Mary Carruthers observes in her seminal Book of Memory, the cultivation of memory was considered a mark of superior ethics in the Middle Ages. She claims, for example, that “the choice to train one’s memory or not, for the ancients and medievals, was not a choice dictated by convenience: it was a matter of ethics. A person without a memory, if such a thing could be, is a person without moral character and, in a basic sense, without humanity” (Carruthers 14). In the present article, which aims to discuss the Old English biblical paraphrase Daniel, I argue that memory plays an important, if not essential, role in Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion. The poet expands on the biblical source, the Old Testament Book of Daniel, to depict the Babylonian king as commencing a process of rectification of the self by incorporating and internalizing the word of God, mediated in the poem by Daniel the prophet, as part of his self.

‘The Axile Tree’

Chapter 5 asks how Jones’s vision of an early medieval culture in which Welsh and English tradition are equally dominant resonates throughout the poem’s eight poetic sequences in the image of the cross. The chapter traces a history of Jones’s encounters with The Dream of the Rood, the Ruthwell monument, and the history of early medieval Northumbria during the 1930s, and explores how this experience of the landscape and history of Northumberland informed his reading of the Old English Dream of the Rood tradition. Jones’s visual and verbal engagement with the Ruthwell monument at the climax of The Anathemata in ‘Sherthursdaye and Venus Day’ allows for the creation of a new sign of the cross for the twentieth century, a sign which draws together the English and Welsh traditions that have informed the institution of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, as well as the poet’s own Catholicism.

Reading with David Jones

Chapter 1 represents a major archival reassessment of Jones’s knowledge of and interest in early medieval culture and history produced in England, demonstrating that Jones knew many Old English texts in the original language and was engaged with the historiography of the period. The chapter sets out the findings of new archival research with The Library of David Jones, National Library of Wales, and in particular with The Anglo-Saxon Library (Appendix 1). This archival research facilitates a new methodology for reading with Jones and brings evidence from his reading, including previously uncatalogued marginalia, together with the drafts and manuscripts for The Anathemata. This chapter also places Jones’s innovation within the wider context of his reading of historical scholarship on the early Middle Ages, tracing the development of a scholarly poetics with which Jones reshaped a British historical and cultural inheritance for the imagined community of The Anathemata.