“Passing a looped and knotted string between their hands”. The Bible, the Women’s Liberation Movement and Women’s Bonds in Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl

This paper claims that through a feminist rewriting of the Bible, Michèle Roberts’s novel The Wild Girl (1984) articulates the ambivalences and insecurities that emerged in the British Women’s Liberation movement after its initial period of great energy, hopefulness and enthusiasm of the 1970s. By rewriting the biblical insistence on female rivalry and competition, and revising biblical “gynotypes” and “fragmented women”, the novel not only exposes the patriarchal discourses of the Bible, but also critically revisits the WLM’s utopian visions of unity, and re-imagines the ways in which women can cooperate while preserving their differences. When juxtaposed with more recent women’s rewritings, often driven by (and catering to) market economy and consumer culture, Roberts’s novel is a useful remainder of the still consequential need to “look back in order to move forward” (Plate 406). The novel’s small-scale, grass-roots level sisterhood, never altogether free from tensions, is a quietly optimistic vision of women’s bonds, a “secret gospel” proclaiming the good news about the precarious and changeable relationship among women, and about the need of its incessant reworking.

The Salt of the Earth or the Murderess? The Problem of Femininity in the Novels of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s outlook on gender, as depicted in her novels, has been described as conservative or even criticised as anti-feminist. However, more recently, a growing number of feminist scholars (Alison Light, Susan Rowland, Merja Makinen) have begun to oppose this view and instead argue that Christie’s approach to the various social phenomena depicted in her novels, including gender, is more nuanced and ambiguous than previously assumed. This paper explores the role of domesticity in general, and of food, eating and cooking in particular, in constructing such ambiguous portrayal of femininity in three of Agatha Christie’s detective novels: Cards on the Table (1936), The Hollow (1946), and 4.50 from Paddington (1957). The novels depict three groups of female characters possessing varying degrees of power and independence: the salt of the earth, i.e., the conservative homemaker, the eccentric, and the murderess. It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate that, paradoxically, it is o en through these female characters’ roles within the domestic setting and their engagement with food that they are able to overcome the limitations imposed on them by patriarchal society and achieve a certain level of autonomy within it.

Strategies of Cognitive Estrangement in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140

This paper seeks to analyse the strategies of cognitive estrangement employed by the science fiction writer and literary scholar Kim Stanley Robinson in his New York 2140 (2017). I argue that the novel was written as a call to action to mitigate the effects of climate change, and rather than being merely a description of a particular vision of the future, provides a comment on the current ecological crisis, mechanisms of history, and human agency. Robinson’s unusual position at the intersection of the field of literary production and literature studies allowed him to apply the ideas developed for the analysis of the genre of science fiction in his creative work. The three main thematic areas in the novel are ecology, politics, and history. In each of these, allusions to the present, the past, and literary tradition, characterisation, and narrative structure are used as a means to convey the author’s message and sensitise the reader to issues connected with ecology and social justice, painting a realistic, yet hopeful vision where human civilisation carries on despite the consequences of global warming.

Disrupted Parenthood in Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage

In his debut novel The Final Passage, first published in 1985, Caryl Phillips (dis)connects the English and the Caribbean spaces simultaneously imposing this inbetweenness onto his continuously misplaced characters. This paper explores the novel through the lens of disrupted parenthood, demonstrating that the ties between the family members mirror the inability of the protagonists to belong or to sustain relationships. By applying a postcolonial framework and including both canonical and recent texts produced in the field, this paper analyses how racial labels and assumptions weaken fragile bonds and further displace the characters as it also attempts to fill a gap since aspects of distress and breakdown are often neglected in literary criticism. Finally, given the background of the West Indies, the paper incorporates social and anthropological works dedicated to the region and connects Phillips’s narrative to the stories of migrants in contemporary Britain.

Discourse, Cultural Capital and Power Relations in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending

The objective of this paper is to examine in which way the use of the oral and written discourse in Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending (2011) reflects, on the one hand, a social hierarchy based on classificatory cultural, intellectual, and educational competencies and resources and, on the other, dominance strategies and power relations developed among the principal actors. It will be investigated how trivial discussions and letters exchanged between friends are deployed in order to sustain or eliminate control over the other(s) and indicate status positions. The proposed methodological framework of analysis is founded on Bourdieu’s approach to cultural capital, according to which cultural preferences are markers of social stratification, while highbrow aesthetic judgment is both a means to, and a stake in, upward social mobility. Foucault’s theory of a “decentralised” and ubiquitous power, dispersed at all levels and defined as an action directed to other people’s actions, will also be applied.

Peter Ackroyd’s Distorted Psychogeography

This paper focuses on Peter Ackroyd’s unique type of psychogeographical writing. Therefore, apart from an overall elaboration on his works about London, it addresses his historiographic metafictional novels Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993). These esoteric novels provide insight into Ackroyd’s writing about the city in different time periods and make it possible to delve deeper into what this paper argues is his distinctive manner of implementing the notions of psychogeography. At the same time, it draws parallels from classical and contemporary psychogeography where appropriate and highlight his utilisation of it. The main aim of this paper is to reveal the ways in which Peter Ackroyd uses walking in the city to reflect its manipulative power over his characters which results in the transformation of their identities.

Understanding the Function of Empathy through Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan

Arab American fiction has received great attention in the post-9/11 period. This ethnic literature has been put under a critical lens due to the aspects that shape it and the issues discussed in it. One of the main objectives of Arab American fiction is to bridge cultural differences and appeal to its readers, both Arabs and non-Arabs. This particular objective is achieved by the authors’ willingness to trigger empathetic engagement with their characters. As such, this paper looks at how Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2003) functions in accordance with the poetics of empathy. In other words, the aim of this paper is to show how fiction appeals to its readers through empathy and how empathetic engagement sustains the characters-readers connection, taking West of the Jordan as a literary example. This paper suggests that empathy in fiction is multi-layered and serves different purposes. The arguments are based on a conceptual framework supported by scholarly perspectives of prominent critics and theorists such as Chielozona Eze, Heather Hoyt, and Suzanne Keen, to name just a few.

Strangers in Togetherville – Women, Physics and Popular Culture

By drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s cultural theory this paper aims to show how contemporary popular culture tells the stories of scientifically talented women of the past. In the course of my argument, I refer to books and films set in the past and focus on the women-and-science motif. Firstly, the stories of individual female scientists living long ago are analysed (Mileva Einstein, Joan Clarke), then, the collective female protagonists – wives of scientists living together in “togethervilles” (Los Alamos, Atomic City), and women scientists pictured in speculative fiction – are discussed. The cliches used in these texts – lonely forgotten geniuses, female worthies taken advantage of, ostracised women accused of not being feminine enough and devoted wives who help their men and their countries in World Wars I and II or the Cold War – reflect ideologies that Western culture used to believe in. Conversely, the two original presentations of past female scientists that I found both come from speculative fiction concerned with science and heavily influenced by the ideologies of science: science and pacifism, science and a sense of guilt, and science as a weapon in the quest for democracy and freedom.

The Trauma of Loss as a Turning Point in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Works

The aim of this paper is to look into how Elizabeth Gaskell reflects trauma in her literary works and what she may have been trying to teach her audience through them. As a social and realist writer, she used narrative as a means to denounce the evils of her time, many of which give rise to social traumas. However, this paper will focus on more personal traumas, particularly the trauma of loss, and also how Gaskell handles these traumatic experiences in her writings. With this purpose in mind, it is important to consider Gaskell’s own experience, how she overcame her own traumatic losses and how she used fiction both to reflect her experience and as a form of therapy. At the end of this paper, we will establish how Gaskell uses traumatic losses as turning points throughout her literary works.

The Use of Discourse Markers in Academic Writing by In-Service Primary School Teachers of English

This paper presents and discusses a computer-assisted study that seeks to investigate the use of discourse markers (“DMs”) in academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (“EFL”) by a group of in-service primary school teachers (“participants”). The aim of the study is to establish whether or not there would be differences in the use of DMs in the corpus of academic writing in EFL in literature and linguistics written by the participants, who concurrently with teaching EFL at a range of primary schools are enrolled in an in-service tertiary course in English. The corpus of the study consists of the participants’ i) reflective essays in English linguistics and children’s literature in English, respectively, and ii) analytic explanatory essays in English linguistics and children’s literature, respectively. The corpus of the participants’ essays was analysed quantitatively in order to identify the frequency of DMs per 1,000 words. The results of the quantitative data analysis indicated that the participants’ use of DMs seemed to be, primarily, determined by i) genre conventions of academic writing in English associated with reflective essays and analytic explanatory essays and ii) the participants’ individual preferences. These findings are further presented and discussed in the paper.