Black, White, Colourful, Gray: Visual Effects in the Children’s Book Mimi & Liza

The study presents the reader with an intermedial interpretation of the storybook Mimi & Liza written by Katarína Kerekesová – Katarína Moláková – Alexandra Salmela (2013). The storybook follows the story of the friendship of two little girls, Mimi, who sees the world proliferating in mad colours, and the blind Liza, who is immersed in inner seeing. The two girls are presented as each other’s opposites through the semiotics of two counterpointing colour schemes. The analysis is based on Mitchell’s conception of media (Mitchell, 1994), that is, it sets out by acknowledging the intermedial state of the culture of children’s books, and then it follows the unfolding of the visual elements up through the investigation of expressive visual effects created by the text’s rhetoric. The visualization happening with the help of language is the condition of the common worldview of the blind and seeing characters as well as the guiding principle and goal of the volume; therefore besides the visual representation characteristic of children’s books, an emphasized role is given to the validation of the ekphrastic perspective in the analyzed work. The ekphrases of the text are presented as intermedial references (Rajewsky, 2010) based on Irina O. Rajewsky’s interpretation of intermediality. A unique feature of the interpretation is that the ekphrases of the volume read as sort of imaginary/imagination ekphrases which create the special, children’s book version of ekphrasis. It is characteristic for this imagination ekphrases that the order of the imaginary image and its linguistic description create an undecidable symbiosis. These images, however, can also be interpreted as inverted ekphrases, since they function not merely as descriptions of imagination ekphrases, but also as the visual world representations of linguistic imagination. Through several examples the study introduces and analyzes the mechanisms of the visualization happening with the help of language as well as the scenery painted with words.

Never mind the city guides: The topos of a city in urban fantasy (with interpretative emphasis on Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere)

The paper focuses on the phenomenon of urban fantasy with a particular interest in the topos of a city, which assumes great significance as a thematic and motivic element in the subgenre. The authors touch upon the relation between (sub)genre and topos/topoi in general, but also more specifically, between urban fantasy and the city, regarding the urban area as a distinct setting with a specific atmosphere, character or genius loci. Within this frame, the paper seeks to exemplify the aforementioned relations through an interpretative study of Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, which breathes life into the London underground scene. London Below comes to personify, literally, the vices of London Above via the use of anthropomorphic strategies. Moreover, the spatial peculiarities of the novel not only contribute to the creation of the fantastical atmosphere but they also function as a vehicle of social critique and a constitutive element of the protagonist’s transformation.

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project and Ian McGuire’s The North Water

The neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

Text, context, affect and effect: Fairy tales in the UNICEF advertising campaign against paedophilia

By conveying traditions and moral values fairy tales constitute an important part of our lives and cultural identities. Fairy tale motifs and allusions have been repeatedly employed for commercial and non-commercial purposes by advertisers around the world. This paper looks at the UNICEF anti-sexting advertising campaign that features two classic fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood. Sexting is a growing problem among young people these days. According to the recent EU Kids Online 2020 survey carried out in 19 European countries, 22 percent of children aged 12-16, on average, have had some experience with receiving sexual messages or pictures. Through an analysis of the visual and verbal content of selected advertisements, the present study investigates how the advertisers creatively make use of the famous fairy tales to raise public awareness of the issue.

Female Island: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Two leading articles of feminist hue – “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) and “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” (1981) – by two seminal figures, Hélène Cixous and Elaine Showalter respectively, grant a new look at Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Two main themes that come to the fore from these two articles with reference to Rhys’s novel are the male-dominated female zone and the importance of female writing for women. Both critics mention the strong hold of patriarchy on women, which is quite obvious in Antoinette’s condition in Rhys’s novel. Next, both Cixous and Showalter claim that while men see the female domain as a dark space, women should stick to their female domain and express themselves through writing. And this is what Rhys does in her novel; she gives a voice to the mad woman in the attic, Antoinette, who has been put there and tagged mad by her husband. By exploring the similarities between feminist criticism in Cixous’s and Showalter’s articles and Rhys’s novel, this study aims to show that although Wide Sargasso Sea is a revolutionary novel with its ability to give the mad woman back her individuality, it is not strong enough to create a world where this woman can experience her individuality.

The women of N. K. Jemisin: Representations of women and gender roles in the science-fantasy The Fifth Season

The following paper deals with representations of women and gender roles in science-fiction and fantasy. It briefly discusses the issue in these genres in general, but it is primarily concerned with one specific example, i.e. N. K. Jemisin’s science-fantasy novel The Fifth Season. The paper’s main aim is to highlight the changing nature of representations of women in science fiction and fantasy and pay tribute to a literary work depicting women from a modern perspective. Thus, it presents the analysis of said novel from the perspective of feminist criticism and gender studies, focusing on how the novel explores through its main and side women characters, ideas of representation, biological sex versus “gendering”, and related notions of femininity, gender roles and gender stereotypes and myths.

A Critical Inquiry into the Character Strengths of Alexandra Bergman in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!

The paper focuses on the strengths and virtues of Alexandra Bergson, the central character of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1913). The novel deals with the harsh life of immigrants in America at the turn of the 20th century and describes the ways by which the pioneers sought to establish their existence and cope with their life’s tragedies. Using the VIA-IS (Values in Action Inventory of Strengths) classification, the paper attempts to show how Alexandra Bergson’s character strengths contribute to the value-based paradigm represented in the novel.

Motifs of homosexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

To avoid the stigma of societal dissaproval, love for somebody of the same sex has often been hidden from the declinatory views of the public; however, it has also been secretively transcribed into a broad spectrum of art. Virginia Woolf embroidered her homosexuality into the grotesque lines of Orlando. At the time, Woolf was engaged in an intense lesbian relationship with author Vita Sackville-West, who served as a model for the work’s main character. Woolf proclaimed her masterpiece “A Biography”, mirroring the duality of her own and Vita’s character, the perpetual beauty of the book’s hero, enduring for centuries, and his subtle gender transition. In the paper, we discuss some of the homosexual motifs in Orlando, which were formed by different influences, including the queer movement, ancient Greek literature and feminism.

Animal symbolism in works of H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of modern horror fiction and one of the main pioneers of the genre in its current form. One of the less discussed attributes of his work is his use of animal symbolism, despite how common it is, and serves several important functions. We will examine the different forms of animal symbolism in Lovecraft’s writing, their use and their respective functions. Our main goal will be to examine how animal symbolism in Lovecraft’s work was influenced by cultural and mythological sources and his own opinions towards different creatures and what they represent, in which case we will examine how his knowledge and beliefs may have influenced his depiction of animals. Our focus will be on the depiction of cats, dogs, snakes, aquatic, and amphibious animals as these play a significant role Lovecraftian fiction. We will also examine how animal symbolism connects to the key themes in cosmic horror, such as its negation of anthropocentrism.

Outsiders in current Slovak literature for children and youth

Within the solution of the project APVV-17-0071 Support of Reading Literacy in the Mother Tongue and Foreign Language, it is also important to reflect on outsidership as a certain ambivalent phenomenon, which appears after 1989 in contemporary Slovak literature for children and youth in various analogies. One of the aims of the study is to define the initial concept of outsider from various professional perspectives. We will also focus on the methodological basis of research of outsiders (social status, otherness, disadvantage, bullying, rebellion), not only in contemporary artistic texts but also in working exercises with regard to the learning language style.