Women’s Voices in the Victorian Era – Feminist Consciousness in the Bronte Sisters’ Works

Before the Victorian era, it was rare for women to be authors and writers to fix the protagonists of their works as female characters. However, in the 19th century, there was a rapid increase of women writers and emphasis on feminist consciousness. Among all the works of women writers, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights which were written by the Bronte sisters were distinctive. The Bronte sisters conveyed their feminist consciousness and described the society in their works. Both works emphasized romantic relationships as the narrative thread. By shaping the female characters in their works as self-reliant women who fought for equivalence and freedom in the era where male chauvinism occupied leadership roles, the Bronte sisters conveyed their eagerness for freedom, equality, and their feminist consciousness. This paper combines features of the Victorian era and the Bronte sisters’ life experiences to analyze feminist consciousness in these two works and make comparisons between them.

Punjabi Immigrant Mothers' Experiences of Postpartum Depression: a Narrative Inquiry

Postpartum depression can adversely affect not only a woman’s health and well-being, but also the health and development of her infant, as well as her family relationships. Research reveals immigrant women have higher risk factors for postpartum depression. The purpose of this Narrative Inquiry is to give voice, to Punjabi immigrant mothers who have experienced symptoms of postpartum depression. Connelly and Clandinin’s Narrative Inquiry approach was used to explore the experiences of two Punjabi immigrant mothers with self-identified symptoms of postpartum depression. Participants engaged in a narrative interview and an adaptation of the Narrative Reflective Process, a data collection tool that allows creative self-expression and reflection. Womens’ stories were re-constructed and analyzed using Narrative Inquiry’s three levels of justification (personal, practical and social). Findings reveal three key narrative patterns: motherhood, relationships and loneliness, each informed by the narrative thread of immigration. The outcomes of this inquiry suggest that, as healthcare professionals and policy makers, we need to broaden and deepen our understanding of postpartum depression from the immigrant mothers’ perspective, so that we can provide them with a more effective support during this significant time in their lives. Such sensitive and thoughtful care has the ability to improve their well-being and the health of their infant, as well as that of the whole family.

Punjabi Immigrant Mothers' Experiences of Postpartum Depression: a Narrative Inquiry

Postpartum depression can adversely affect not only a woman’s health and well-being, but also the health and development of her infant, as well as her family relationships. Research reveals immigrant women have higher risk factors for postpartum depression. The purpose of this Narrative Inquiry is to give voice, to Punjabi immigrant mothers who have experienced symptoms of postpartum depression. Connelly and Clandinin’s Narrative Inquiry approach was used to explore the experiences of two Punjabi immigrant mothers with self-identified symptoms of postpartum depression. Participants engaged in a narrative interview and an adaptation of the Narrative Reflective Process, a data collection tool that allows creative self-expression and reflection. Womens’ stories were re-constructed and analyzed using Narrative Inquiry’s three levels of justification (personal, practical and social). Findings reveal three key narrative patterns: motherhood, relationships and loneliness, each informed by the narrative thread of immigration. The outcomes of this inquiry suggest that, as healthcare professionals and policy makers, we need to broaden and deepen our understanding of postpartum depression from the immigrant mothers’ perspective, so that we can provide them with a more effective support during this significant time in their lives. Such sensitive and thoughtful care has the ability to improve their well-being and the health of their infant, as well as that of the whole family.

Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel

Quo vadis?, directed by Enrico Guazzoni in 1913, is still one of the most faithful film adaptations of the novel by Sienkiewicz. When the silent feature came to cinemas around the world, the story was already familiar to the majority of the audience, due to the popular success of the book and a proliferation of many derivative works, especially theatrical. In various ways, these adaptations developed audiences’ previous knowledge of the plot and the characters. Some of them were set in an openly illustrative relationship; others focused on a single narrative thread of the novel. The most complex examples, especially the 1909 opera by Jean Nouguès, offered a skilled concentration of the plot in a few scenes that were complex both in terms of narrative and staging. The director Guazzoni was quite familiar with the ‘horizons of expectation’ that adaptations of such a popular novel created, but he decided to use them differently. In his film, faithfulness to the original text became the most important trait of a new, ambitious staging strategy: the protection of the plot’s complexity and its spatial fragmentation. Performing a comparative analysis of the narrative spaces in Guazzoni’s film and in a few theatrical adaptations, this chapter delves into two different examples of interaction between the original novel, the adaptation, and viewer expectations: the centripetal model, in which the most important quality is the ability to synthesize, and the centrifugal one, based precisely on fidelity to the original text and to historical accuracy.

Sexuality, Stoning, and Supersessionism in Biblical Epic Films of the Post–World War II Era

Several biblical epics from the 1950s and 1960s with strong female heroes contain a narrative thread involving the stoning or threat of stoning of these protagonists. Notably, this motif is entirely absent from the biblical stories on which the films are based. This essay examines this feature in three films: David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1950), Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959), and The Story of Ruth (Henry Koster, 1960). I argue that the motif of stoning is adopted from the New Testament story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), and that this use contributes both to the subtle denigration of traditional Judaism and the reinforcement of gender hierarchies that are evident in many Bible films from the post–World War II period.

Seeking sustainable futures in marketing and consumer research

Purpose Seeking ways towards a sustainable future is the most dominant socio-political challenge of our time. Marketing should have a crucial role to play in leading research and impact in sustainability, yet it is limited by relying on cognitive behavioural theories rooted in the 1970s, which have proved to have little bearing on actual behaviour. This paper aims to interrogate why marketing is failing to address the challenge of sustainability and identify alternative approaches. Design/methodology/approach The constraint in theoretical development contextualises the problem, followed by a focus on four key themes to promote theory development: developing sustainable people; models of alternative consumption; building towards sustainable marketplaces; and theoretical domains for the future. These themes were developed and refined during the 2018 Academy of Marketing workshop on seeking sustainable futures. MacInnis’s (2011) framework for conceptual contributions in marketing provides the narrative thread and structure. Findings The current state of play is explicated, combining the four themes and MacInnis’s framework to identify the failures and gaps in extant approaches to the field. Research limitations/implications This paper sets a new research agenda for the marketing discipline in quest for sustainable futures in marketing and consumer research. Practical implications Approaches are proposed which will allow the transformation of the dominant socio-economic systems towards a model capable of promoting a sustainable future. Originality/value The paper provides thought leadership in marketing and sustainability as befits the special issue, by moving beyond the description of the problem to making a conceptual contribution and setting a research agenda for the future.

Privatizing Refugees’ Human Rights in Hamid’s Exit West, Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, and Hosseini’s Sea Prayer

The contemporary novel seems to be complicit with neoliberalized and economized human rights. It is, time and again, a narrative that attempts to structurally adjust humans’ emotions to further the elitism and exclusiveness of human rights to citizens of Western countries. I argue that some modern neoliberal novels are a part of sentimental adjustment programs that strip refugees of their basic human rights, while at the same time celebrate Western societies and their aggressive and negative attitudes towards displaced individuals as equitable. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, and Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer are novels that function as examples of sentimental adjustment programs in which the narrative thread and structure elucidate how refugees struggle to maintain autonomy as they are excluded from human rights discourses as non-citizens. Namely, the aforementioned novels shed light on the failure of human rights ever being established in their storylines because human rights are being obliterated through the introduction of Western compassion as a rectitudinous result.

Transitivity Analysis of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

The present document will offer an analysis of the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture delivered by the former Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, from the fundaments of the transitivity system provided by the Systemic Functional Grammar theory. To attain this goal, a quantitative and qualitative research method approach was applied. Findings indicated that among the six transitivity process types, the material processes (54% - 205 realizations) dominate the speech whereas the verbal, existential, and behavioral processes are relatively low all together representing an overall occurrence of 10% (41 realizations). This reveals that the speaker’s main goal is to emphasize the actions that led to consolidating the Colombian peace process, placing him as the core actor of this achievement. Furthermore, by employing a narrative thread that connects the past, the present, and the future time, he can demonstrate to the world his capability as a governor who deserves to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

Daughters of Trauma

This paper attempts to delineate and focus on the common narrative thread running through subsequent cinematic treatises on the situation of women during the Partition, particularly those kidnapped and sexually violated during the vivisection. It proposes to construct a cultural and memorialized history of the Partition through a reading of mediated representations of literary engagements with the event, particularly the narrativization of the cinematic trope of the ‘radicalized’ Muslim and his involvement in the abduction of “chaste” Hindu women during the cataclysmic event. In doing so it considers films such as 1947-Earth (1999), Pinjar (2003), and Khamosh Pani (2003) as seminal films addressing female abductions during the Partition and the memorialization of trauma through cinema. The paper takes a feminist approach to addressing the question of the possession of the female body as the symbolic occupation of the nation.

Introduction

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.