Introduction

Barber began his life as a composer in the 1930s, with his music veering into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European traditions. There were three major influences in his career. The first was his formal musical education at the newly founded Curtis Institute of Music, which provided a sturdy structure to his work and was also known to be European-oriented. The second was his travels to Europe, where his acquaintances as well as the culture itself were infused into his work. The last influence was the mentoring and guidance of his uncle, composer Sidney Homer, who was married to Barber’s maternal aunt, the famous opera singer Louise Homer. For more than twenty-five years, Sidney Homer had the most profound influence on Barber of all, encouraging him to “listen to his inner voice,” which enabled him to infuse the very soul of his compositions with the romantic passion that ultimately deeply moved his audience.

From erotic desire to egalitarian romantic passion

Informed by the sociological theory of “Conventionalization” developed by Frederick Bartlett, the article examines transformations the expression “love” brought to the indigenous Chinese socio-moral-emotive paradigm during the early twentieth century. It focuses on examining usages and semantic connotations of “愛”, a loose Chinese equivalence of love, in Yínbiān yànyǔ 吟邊燕語 (Chanting the Swallows’ Talks), a translation by Lín Shū 林紓 (1852–1924) of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare published in 1904, a time that witnessed a vast number of translation projects as well as the transformative impacts they brought to China. By illustrating how “ai” in Lin’s translation has departed radically from its traditional usages as depicted in the mid-Qing novel The Story of the Stone (紅樓夢 Hónglóu mèng) and become a close equivalence of the western notion of love, the article shows that the Chinese’s emotional experiences during the early modern period may in all likelihood be different from those of the West, but the two seem to have become increasing comparable. When we seek to understand modern Chinese emotional experience, apart from asking how it is ethnically, socially, culturally, historically different, it might be equally important to ask in what ways the West has made it different from before, and how it has managed to retain its unique identity during a time of radical transformation.

“A WRITER — A NERVE CELL OF THE NATION”: SPECIFICITY OF THE AUTHOR’S NATIONAL SELF-IDENTITY IN THE “DIARIES” OF OLES GONCHAR

The article is devoted to researching of “Diaries” written by Oles Gonchar through the prism of the author’s national self-identity. The first diary entry is dated June, 1943 and the last entry dated July, 1995. The Ukrainian national features are found out to be revealing in a diary prose of Oles Gonchar both at the content and the form levels through the system of interrelated dominants; the signs of these specific dominants can be traced in the reflection of its characteristics in the writer’s chronological notes. The author of the paper has conducted an analysis of the main motives revealed in the diary entries being realized in the image palette, archetypes, place names — all these are combined with ethnic specificity. The author summarizes the writer’s ideological viewsthat identifiedthe genesis of popular perception of reality incorporating sincere apologetics of socialism in prewar time, romantic passion (enthusiasm) for European revolutionary ideas throughout losses, tragedies, frustrations and failures of war, gradual awareness of the essence of the Soviet power, Stalin’s bloody crimes against his own peopleas well as the genuine admiration for a short “Khrushchev Thaw” elimination of which in Brezhnev “stagnation period” convinced Gonchar in the necessity of democratization of society. The results of the conducted research determinesome factorssuch as: the Chernobyl disaster, degeneration of national spirituality, displacement of the Ukrainian language on the margins of being — all these key factorsmade Gonchar a leader of spiritual revival of Ukraine.

Shelley’s Romantic Passion in ‘Ode to the West Wind’: Its Impact on Farrukh Ahmad

The paper intends to explore a parallel between Shelley and Farrukh Ahmad through a minute analysis of some of their celebrated poems pregnant with romantic passion. ‘Ode to the West Wind’, which has been considered as one of the most significant poems of Shelley, conceives his utmost romantic idea that corresponds to the romantic spirit of Farrukh Ahmad expressed in ‘Jhod’ and ‘Boishakh’, two of his famous poems. In ‘Ode to the West Wind’ Shelley urges the west wind to destroy the aged old society full of corruption and injustice and at the same time pleads it to preserve the society by spreading the seeds of new hope and regeneration. So does Farrukh Ahmad in his ‘Jhod’ and ‘Boishakh’. Though their beliefs and ideologies are not alike, they have taken the west wind as an emblem of destroyer and preserver.IIUC Studies Vol.12 December 2015: 63-70