The Box of Delights and The Chronicles of Narnia

The present paper will consider the influence of Masefield’s The Box of Delights on Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis himself openly acknowledged his admiration for and indebtedness to Masefield’s work, and the influence of the earlier novel is clearly evident on several occasions in the Chronicles. However, certain key differences in the two authors’ handling of similar themes and motifs reveal fundamental divergences in their attitudes to childhood and their vision of the function of children’s literature.

The Work of Art in the Age of Political Correctness

This article sets to examine some of the impacts the notion of “political correctness” has on the art world today. It argues that what started as the noble attempts to compensate for the grievous history of racism by way of inclusive speech and affirmative action has, in the end, generated new forms of discrimination and closure. In this context, instead of pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in social, moral or aesthetic terms, art is itself being pushed back within these boundaries and rendered inert and ingratiating.

Alle donne di Inghilterra: le Rural Walks di Charlotte Smith

To the Woman of England: Charlotte Smith’s Rural Walks – Charlotte Smith proposes her children’s literature as a genre shaped by reflections on gender. The work Rural Walks depicts the mother figure as an educational mentor who nurtures and directs the growth of her young girls and as a heroine of daily life. Smith wants to give her female readers a revolutionary version of motherhood, for women are the primary recipients of Mrs. Woodfield’s lessons. While focusing on the mental and moral development of young women, she also attends to her own social and moral responsibilities. Her educational program is comprehensive of unusual fields of knowledge and addresses social issues. In her children’s books Smith instructs her female readers how to apply the social lessons of her literature to their experiences in the real world and how to become politically active citizens. In Rural Walks the dialogues illustrate the overlapping theories on the formation of the self and the education of the woman.

The Hidden Fairy Tale: Oskar Kokoschka’s Die träumenden Knaben

Kokoschka’s first literary work The Dreaming Youths (Die träumenden Knaben) was published in 1908. The work includes a poem with eight colored and two black and white lithographs. Although the young artist was commissioned by the Wiener Werkstätte to make a children’s picture book, the end result seemed quite different: a sort of personal tale of self-discovery and sexual awakening during puberty placed in a dream scenario. Kokoschka himself remembers in his autobiography only following the task in the first lithograph. The aim of this paper is to show how Kokoschka actually continued to draw on the language of fairy tales, although apparently taking distance from it. The crucial role of children’s literature in adult life emerges especially within the process of shaping childhood memories and approaching traumatic experiences. The use of fairy tales becomes, therefore, an autobiographical urge and a means to tell personal experience through a universal language.

Lo jurodivyj in Nostalghia. Genesi ed evoluzione di Domenico nella sceneggiatura di Tarkovskij e Guerra

This article aims to analyze the evolution of Domenico’s character in the different versions of Nostalghia’s script, written by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra. By comparing the director’s diaries with the twelve original typescripts kept in the Tarkovsky’s archive, it is possible to trace the origin and the evolution of the character, which has some similarities with the holy fool of Russian tradition. In the first versions of the script, in which the character is still vague and undefined, there are some quotes from Dostoevsky’s works that refer to the theme of madness. These references disappear in the latest versions, when Domenico begins to acquire more importance in the narrative and often expresses himself about madness with quotes from Guerra’s works.

Quando manca il detective. La presa in carico dell’investigazione in due racconti americani di fine Ottocento

A Whisper in the Dark” by Louisa May Alcott (1877) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) offer an interesting, and not sufficiently investigated, perspective from the point of view of crime studies. Too intelligent and complex to be labelled as simple genre literature, and courted by gender studies, the two stories more aptly belong to Literature tout court, although many features normally lead to place them on the shelves of sensational, thriller, or mystery. The reading I propose stems from the desire to give voice to the two protagonists not only as victims of physical and psychological violence, but as active subjects and real Private Eyes within the narrative.

E-learning e futuri studenti in mobilità internazionale. Riflessioni su aspetti e potenzialità di un corso di lingua italiana

The A1 online Italian course offered by the CLA (University Linguistic Centre) of the University of Perugia, is one of the results achieved during various research projects, which has contributed, on the one hand, to the internationalization of the Institution, on the other, to the enhancement of digital technologies providing future university mobility students with the opportunity to acquire linguistic-cultural knowledge, even before the beginning of their mobility exchange programme in Italy. The experience reported in this article reflects on an evolving work, describing its design phase – course structure, selection and creation of linguistic and didactic materials, tools available in the Moodle open-source learning platform – and its subsequent phases of course activation and verification. Throughout the entire project, we focused on two fundamental aspects: inspiring and maintaining student motivation in addition to constructing an assisted, and above all, interactive self-learning path.

Danza, lingua e potere: (s)cortesia ne La dodicesima notte di Shakespeare

Dance in Elizabethan and Jacobean England was a practice closely linked to the notion of power, understood both from a political point of view – especially in relation to courtly dances – and from a gender perspective – as regards popular dances in particular. The purpose of this article is to conduct a linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night 1.3, where two secondary characters, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, compete for the woman they both love – countess Olivia – by displaying absurd terpsichorean skills. With the support of conversation analysis and cognitive linguistics, this article underlines how the concept of power (intended both as man-man and man-woman relationship) is expressed at the linguistic level with a series of lexical and morphosyntactic strategies in the discourse about Renaissance dances.

“Lay down branch roads, provide town sites, build barracks”: A Practical Stylistic Investigation of Hyde Clarke’s Colonization, Defence, and Railways in Our Indian Empire (1857)

In his treatise Colonization, Defence, and Railways in Our Indian Empire (1857), Hyde Clarke wholeheartedly approves of Indian colonial railways and advocates the need for the British to bring about technological progress in the subcontinent. The main research purpose of this article is to provide stylistic evidence of how Clarke relays and constructs his Anglocentric and imperial viewpoint on Indian railways. The article firstly introduces the figure of Clarke and his railway pamphlet, and discusses the keywords colonialism and colonization as defined in two authoritative nineteenthcentury dictionaries of the English language and in colonial and postcolonial studies. Secondly, moving from this field and from the field of postcolonial stylistics, the stylistic methodology defined by Ron Carter as “practical stylistics” is applied to thirteen sequences from the treatise including the keyword colonization. Finally, the definitions of colonialism and colonization are compared with Clarke’s notion of colonization as emerging from the text. This linguistic analysis hence identifies and explores the stylistic strategies utilised by the author – mainly stylistic choices at word- and phrase-level, syntactic structures and the pragmatic functions of these devices – and reveals the ways in which he conveys his colonial mental attitude to the Indian reality.