New Futures, same old Fear: Gender-based Violence and Victim Coping in Contemporary Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

The ability of dystopian fiction to offer critical views of futures riddled with the devastating consequences of today’s failures is pervasive also in its literary subgenre targeting young readers. While scholarship on these novels is extensive, the prevalence of sexual assaults in this subgenre requires attention. This study offers an introductory analysis of two contemporary young adult dystopian trilogies, Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011-2013) and Beth Revis’ Across the Universe (2011-2013), with a focus on the sexual assaults the protagonists endure. The discussion draws on trauma and sexual abuse research to ascertain how and if these future societies and heroines challenge traditional representations of this crime.

Contemporary Adaptations of King Lear: Power and Dramatic Space in William Shakespeare, Edward Bond and Elaine Feinstein

In his tragedy King Lear (1605) William Shakespeare explores the human psyche through a story of an old king who gives up his land to his two eldest daughters and finds himself forced to wander in the space of the outcasts. In his modern version of this play entitled: Lear, Edward Bond resumes Shakespeare’s analysis of space and power in the figure of a monomaniac father who raises a wall against his enemies. The division of inner-outer spaces present in Bond is further explored in Elaine Feinstein’s and the Women Theatre Group’s work: Lear’s Daughters, which immerses the audience into the early years of Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. In this contemporary prequel to Shakespeare’s play the three princesses discover the world and the space they occupy in it from their seclusion in the castle.

Gendering Madness and Doubling Disability in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre has a well-designed structure of a bildungsroman that focuses on the pursuit of Jane’s desire and ignores the same for Bertha. The conceptual structure conveys a linear discourse to determine a prefixed understanding of Bertha, Jane, and Rochester. In Bertha’s context, the bildungsroman operates to deliver issues of race, gender, and disability in an existential quest to ascertain and establish her madness. There is a well-designed structural correspondence of bildungsroman, interplay of dark and light binary, the desire of Jane against the asexual Bertha, and the metaphor of fire in mapping the doubling. The literary devices serve as a dominant metaphorical barrier to normalcy in Thornfield. The paper considers this authorial viewpoint on Bertha’s sickness as a construct of a parallel gendered and a more potent conceptualisation of madness. In problematising madness, the paper argues a cultural narrative of representation that is affected by the impaired mind of Bertha. It will interrogate how the narrative systematically forges a doubling within which she is objectified, influenced, muted, bounded and characteristically disabled.

Read Some Auden With Me

“Read Some Auden With Me” is a poem written in free verse that combines postmodernist responses to reading poetry and the surrealist engagement of experiencing poetry through an ironically intimate interaction of the poet and their personal audience.

Review of Taína: Una novela

Taina: Una Novela makes strong statements about how social justice, individual determination, education, and compassion can overcome urban poverty. The main character, Julio is a half Ecuadorian/half Puerto Rican teenager who was born and raised in East Harlem. He has good grades and aspires to get into Princeton University. Julio gets the support he needs for his future from his parents and a couple of good teachers from his school. Clearly, Quiñonez makes an important statement as an educator on the things that are needed to deal with issues of urban poverty. Julio ends up believing Taina, a girl marginalized by the whole neighborhood, has an immaculate pregnancy. Taina and her mother are poor, and Julio does criminal acts to support her and her mother. Quiñonez explores the effects of marginalization on mental health, as Taina and her mother become crude, hostile people in their isolation from society.

The Post-Postmodern Turn: Challenging the Application of Kuhn's Model

The point of departure for this article is the much-debated death of postmodernism, heralded by influential experts on the subject such as Linda Hutcheon or Ihab Hassan at the beginning of the new millennium. Although the academic community as a whole has not agreed with this fact, there was an intense debate during the first years of the twenty-first century that was evidence of a change of attitude towards this cultural phase. With this in mind, the aim of this study is to provide a theoretical framework for the change in order to understand its nature. Analysing the theories developed by Thomas S. Kuhn on paradigm shifts in the field of science and applying them to the context of critical theory at the beginning of the millennium serves to challenge the very idea of postmodernism as a paradigm in the terms developed in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Language of Persuasion: Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in Political Discourse

The aim of this article is to study the scope of conceptual metaphors as a persuasive tool inherent to political discourse in English. In particular, it dwells upon the use of four conceptual metaphors such as NATION IS A FAMILY, STATE IS A BODY, POLITICS IS A WAR, and POLITICS IS A GAME. For this purpose, the transcripts of twenty-eight public speeches delivered by David Cameron, Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, and Donald Trump were analysed. The results revealed numerous functions of these metaphors in the process of persuasion. Apart from that, the analysis showed that the majority of the analysed politicians resort to the source domain of WAR to conceptualise their political activities, while the source domain of GAME is the least frequently used.

Thomas More’s Portrayal in a Twentieth-Century Translation of Utopia

Ramón Esquerra i Clivillés (1909-1938), a Spanish intellectual born and raised in Barcelona, published in 1937 Utopia (El Estado Perfecto), a translation of Utopia (1516) by Thomas More. The translator prepared a large prologue in which he minutely details the life and personality of the humanist and introduces Utopia and its reception in Spain. As a result, this illuminating introductory section becomes a brief piece of literary criticism. The way More is presented and how Esquerra emphasizes some of his most personal features creates a particular image of the humanist: that of a saint. The information shown was carefully chosen by the translator, serving from of More’s latest published biographies to construct a useful context for the reader.

Resilience and Memory in the Poetics of Africadia: Sylvia D. Hamilton's And I Alone Escaped To Tell You

Sylvia D. Hamilton’s collection of poems And I Alone Escaped To Tell You (2014) revolves around the vindication of the little remembered legacy of slavery of Africadians – George Elliott Clarke’s neologism to refer to African Canadians from the Maritime provinces – which acts as a metaphor of the silenced history of Black Canadians. To do so, Hamilton relies on memory work through the lens of resilience and, hence, participates in the recent post-trauma paradigm that is intent on highlighting resistance rather than victimhood. Thus, the resilient memory that emerges from the collection dismisses the position of victims for Africadians and, contrarily, focuses on the capacity to ‘bounce back’, to withstand historical adversities, to endure by being malleable and to adapt to conditions of crisis. Simply put, this resilient memory acts in the poems as the dignified exercise to keep on reinstating and vindicating the silenced history of Black Canada.