Deeds and Words: The Holloway Jingles and the Fight for Female Suffrage

This article explores the importance of the written word of the Holloway Jingles in the fight for female suffrage through the analysis of the Foreword, “There’s a Strange Sort of College” and “L’Envoi.” Firstly, it will focus on the importance of writing as a venting tool for the suffragettes and it will demonstrate the idealization of imprisonment in the collection by comparing it to realistic and autobiographical accounts of life in Holloway Gaol, as well as the relevance of such an idealization in order to strengthen the bonds between the suffragettes both inside and outside of prison. Secondly, it will explore the impact of the collection within the feminist movement relating it to Virginia Woolf’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas, thus focusing on a wider notion of justice and freedom that was essential for their emancipatory fight.

“Love is the mystery inside this walking”: Anne Carson on the Road to Compostela

This paper explores Anne Carson’s “Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela,” the author’s journal on her pilgrimage to Santiago. Taking water as a metaphor for the Camino, the text reflects the creative dimension of the pilgrimage both from an artistic and personal standpoint. Alternative discourses of the female writer and pilgrim occur in a text that is an essay and a meditation on the forms of resilience put into practice by Carson after facing a series of personal losses. The progressive construction of self-knowledge is seen as an emancipatory act that transcended Carson’s mourning period in her experience, which she took as an opportunity to embrace personal transformation. I suggest that my approach can bring useful perspectives not only to further and refine knowledge on Carson in Spain but also for the consideration of resilience as an aspect that contributes to the critical understanding of narratives of individual and social transformation.

“I would have to be mad to leave this bed.” A Female Heterotopia of Self-confinement in Sue Townsend’s The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year

What happens when a woman, housewife and mother, decides to take to her room and stay in bed for a whole year? This scarcely plausible proposition opens the last published work by the late British author Sue Townsend. This paper aims to explain the main coordinates of the narrative by using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia; an effective, theoretical tool when applied to the analysis of a contained, physical space which is eventually turned into a site of contestation by means of the protagonist’s self-imposed confinement. This implies further questioning on the degree of agency she displays within her environment and, in addition, raises doubts about whether the novel responds to a feminist stance on the part of the author or to a literary depiction of her unavoidable withdrawal from the outside world due to her personal circumstances.

Celebrating Cultural Hybridity Through Storytelling: Othello as a Borderlands Character in Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood

This paper provides a new approach to Othello’s story in Caryl Phillips’ polyphonic novel The Nature of Blood (1997). The fictional Othello finds himself at the crossroads between different cultures and is struggling to define his identity. Making use of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory as exposed in her work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), this study explores Phillips’ Othello as a borderlands character. Accordingly, it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that, as a borderlands character-narrator, Othello succeeds in bringing together the two hitherto conflicting cultures that he knows (Africa and Venice) through storytelling. Indeed, his narrative proves a transborder testimony that contributes to creating a debate forum where cultural hybridity is celebrated.um where cultural hybridity is celebrated.

Modelling through Modality: (Re)shaping Brexit

Due to Brexit, the UK has been involved in a continuous political debate between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition. This paper compares and analyses the modality used in a corpus consisting of their political speeches until Brexit day. Modal verbs are used to express ability, possibility, willingness, certainty, obligation and necessity. Politicians’ choice of certain words can be a useful tool to affect voters’ decisions and modality is a resource which reinforces that influence. The findings show remarkable similarities between both politicians and reveal that possibility is the most frequent meaning of the modal verbs used in the corpus.

Dante’s Influence on Seamus Heaney’s Poetry on the Troubles in Northern Ireland: “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “An Afterwards” and “Ugolino”

Dante’s Divine Comedy had an enormous influence on Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre, especially from Field Work (1979) onwards. Heaney exploits the great Dantean epic poem to create a framework that allows him to contextualise some of the most painful political and social episodes in Irish history, namely the Great Hunger and the secular clashes between Protestants and Catholics. Heaney pays special attention to the problems originating from the outburst of the atavistic and sectarian violence—euphemistically known as “the Troubles”—between the unionist and nationalist communities in Northern Ireland as from 1969, causing great suffering and wreaking havoc on the Northern Irish population for decades.

Reflexive Identity Construction in South Asian American Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Cultural identity in contemporary diasporic communities is dynamic, multifaceted, and cyclical. In the age of reflexive modernity, it is imperative to think about new ways of conceptualizing the experience of individuals straddling multiple geographies. A model of identity for such individuals should not only explain the plurality of “being” but also the fluidity of “becoming.” In this article, the question of multiple and shifting identities of the four main characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s intergenerational novel, The Namesake, is explored using an interdisciplinary model from the field of business management based on Giddens’ theorization of reflexivity. The inward reflexive relationship between the “self” and the “other” through the discursive articulation of the ontological journey of the novel’s characters highlights the complex nature of diasporic identity construction.