The Dandy in the Pink Waistcoat: Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Journal of a Frenchman’

IN DON JUAN, BYRON MENTIONS A FRENCH JOKE THAT EXPLOITS ACCENT TO mispronounce Wellington as Vilainton and, thereby, pun[] down to this facetious phrase the name could not [] conquer. The joke, Byron shows, allows defeated France to attain satiric superiority over its English conqueror: Beating or beaten [France] will laugh all the same (IX.1). A similar type of Francophonic humor occurs in the work of James Hogg, the rustic Scottish novelist--also frequently given to puns-whose origins in the Border country likewise ensured that accented English would be personally-meaningful issue. In an 1823 letter to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, example, Hogg misidentifies the term as a French word. (1) In fact, this curious Gallic emphasis by Hogg further resembles Byron's in anti-imperial feeling. Where Don Juan repeats the French joke against Wellington, Hogg sides with the Duke's defeated opponent by invoking specifically Napoleonic interest in Egyptology. The Blackwood's letter describes the phenomenon of an undecayed, century-old corpse unearthed in the Borders. This tale of Scots mummy, of course, also surfaces in the conclusion to Hogg's enigmatic novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner (1824); hence both letter and novel beg the question of what French Egyptology has to do with the rural Scottish region from which Hogg and his fictional mummy both hail. One answer to this question lies in Hogg's echo of Byron's Napoleonic humor. That is, the similar preference French language and culture that Hogg's Blackwood's letter exhibits suggests his comparable animosity to the sites of British imperialism. His antipathy to (the) English extends to literature itself and, as I will show, is both the subject and discursive characteristic of Hogg's best-known, and most baffling, work. The Private Memoirs is usually interpreted as an autobiographical allegory of Hogg's experience with Blackwood's Magazine, when Hogg, who was satirized in character in one of the magazine's series, had to compete with the notoriety of his fictional alter ego. (2) While this essay concurs with these interpretations and, particularly, the conflict between oral and print literature that Ian Duncan locates in Hogg, it does so by elucidating Hogg's thematizing of French Egyptology--a curious aspect of the Gothic novel which has not yet been accounted for. (3) That Egyptian antiquities are emblems of literary immortality Hogg is evident in both The Private Memoirs and in the earlier Translation from an Ancient Chaldee (1817), Hogg's first contribution to Blackwood's. In the novel the aforementioned mummy surfaces bearing manuscript whose yellowing, tightly wound pages resemble papyri; the body itself is said to have survived solely for the preservation o' that book (252-53). (4) Similarly, the Chaldee Manuscript purports to be one of the many pieces of ... supposed to be lost forever, but which the present seems destined to witness the of. (5) As I will argue, this present age that the Chaldee Manuscript invokes is both the contemporary craze Egyptology spurred by Napoleon's recent North African campaigns and the fierce competition in the current magazine industry that definitively formed the Blackwood's culture. In this conceit, Hogg's Egyptian metaphors suggest the epochal moment that he occupies, where expanding print capitalism transforms obscure authors into admirable pieces of writing whose recovery are triumphs that the industry imagines are tantamount to Napoleonic discovery itself. These political dimensions to the tropes of Hogg's literary ambition reveal the author as more complicated instance of Scottish resistance to English colonization by way of print capitalism, such as has been detailed by Leith Davis and others. (6) As an autodidact and former shepherd whose second career as an author was partly necessitated by the Highland clearances conducted by England to consolidate dominion in Scotland, Hogg was ambivalent about the vibrant literary environment that offered cultural ascendency at the cost of individual and national autonomy. …

Reviewed by: Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel by Matthew Carey Salyer Ruth M. McAdams (bio) Matthew Carey Salyer, Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel (New York: Lexington Books, 2020), pp. xii + 227, $95/£73 hardcover. Matthew Carey Salyer’s Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel traces connections between nineteenth-century British and American historical novels and eighteenth-century imperial figures who mediated and brokered value between the metropole and the periphery. These imperial interlocutors were a motley crew of individuals excluded from or resistant to the Whig account of historical progress, including “High Tories, Catholics, (‘crypto-’) Jacobites, and other malcontents . . . displaced, whether directly or indirectly, by Britain’s eighteenth-century nation-building—whose peripheral status in the dominant national narrative meant that the terms of their ‘Britishness’ were more fraught at ‘home’ and more easily renegotiated abroad” (3). Salyer argues that the stories of these eighteenth-century imperial agents or “factors,” and the various texts they produced in their negotiations for power, influenced the development of the historical novel in the nineteenth century (4). In this way, he contests Georg Lukács’s influential understanding of the genre as forged by the mass experiences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, pointing instead to earlier contexts. This argument, promised in the introduction, best encapsulates the claims made in the first three chapters. Each traces the way that eighteenth-century imperial contexts or events in Scotland, Ireland, and North America reverberate in early nineteenth-century historical novels. Chapter 1 observes striking parallels between the early life of the fictional protagonist of Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and that of Edmund Burke, who was raised in a Jacobite milieu in the west of Ireland. Salyer charts prismatic connections among the 1745 uprising, Jacobite literary culture more broadly, Burke’s writing, and Scott’s novel. The second chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) alongside the famous mid-eighteenth-century Irish case of James Annesley, who claimed that his baron father had sold him into indentured servitude in North America. Chapter 3 analyzes James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41) in the context of the quasi-legal concept of locum tenens, meaning a person who holds the place or substitutes for another. From the fourth chapter onward, the relationship between the individual chapters and the book’s overall argument becomes more gestural. Additional synthetic commentary, cross-references, or explanatory sign-posting would have been valuable. One subtle thread relates to metaphors of imperial community. Chapter 4 suggests that Frederick Marryat’s The [End Page 383] Phantom Ship (1839) figures the ship’s multi-ethnic community as a microcosm of the empire, though the chapter also discusses the novel’s refraction of the Lower Canada Rebellion (1837–38). The fifth chapter explores two real-life, failed attempts to bolster modern claims for power by drawing upon historical myths: Emperor Téwodros II of Ethiopia’s use of the “Prester John” myth in diplomatic negotiations, and the North American adventurer William Augustus Bowles’s use of the Madoc myth in efforts to establish a sovereign British–Native American state on the Gulf Coast. Readers of Victorian Periodicals Review might be drawn to chapter 6, which focuses on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Salyer argues that Blackwood’s conceived of the collaborative, polyphonic nature of periodical writing as a metaphor for heterogeneous inherited traditions that resist the dominant metropolitan worldview. He suggests briefly that the magazine’s model of “Greater Britain” may have accorded with the way that the “service classes” conceived of their place in the empire (168). The seventh chapter, the coda, analyzes Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) as anachronistic historical fiction that refigures the political adventurism of young British men in central Asia in the 1830s through the 1850s. The book’s relative disengagement with the racist violence of British imperialism is troubling. Salyer might reasonably observe that his analysis concerns a particular kind of misfit British man (always a man) whose perceived exclusion from dominant historical narratives led him to find personal and professional fulfillment in the empire, resulting in a...

The article aims to highlight the creative ways of developing oral and written receptive competences employed during the last week of activities that preceded the winter holidays. The target group consisted of the foreign students from the preparatory year, their level in Romanian language being A1-A2. The innovative side of the activity was enhanced by designing and organising it together with the Romanian students specialised in English and French language and literature. They joined the foreign students in writing the Christmas and the New Year cards. I took into account the multiethnic dimension of the target group of foreign students, characterised by diverse linguistic and cultural features, as well as different religious beliefs, as these young men come from Cuba, Gabon and North Korea. Generally speaking, these students are open to Romanian traditions, willing to know more about them, to experience authentic customs, which helps them to better adapt to Romania during their studies, and at the same time to interact with the Romanian students from our university.

In its initial outbreak and enduring impression the revolution controversy in Britain has been considered a pamphlet controversy, precipitated by the dual flashpoints of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the two parts of Paine's Rights of Man (1791, 1792), and driven forward by the pamphleteer's dialectical logic of provocation and response. While such newspapers as The Times, the Morning Post, the Courier, the Sun, the Oracle, and the True Briton were careful observers of contemporary events as well as vigorous participants in controversy, periodical forms have on the whole been less closely identified with the first phase of debate over the French Revolution and domestic radical organization. Periodical expression then breaks through spectacularly with the appearance of the Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner of 1797 and 1798. In its heterogeneous weekly format, its slashing and reckless satirical manner, and its coterie production by a group of energetic young men associated with the future foreign secretary and prime minister George Canning, this first Anti-Jacobin can seem altogether too distinctive to be the inaugural moment for a subsequent lineage of conservative magazines and reviews. Yet it was invoked in just those terms by later writers and editors, and its appearance towards the end of the 1790s, after the effective suppression of the distinctive radical movement associated with the London Corresponding Society, suggests a shift from pamphlet warfare to the sequence of important reviews and magazines that conducted conservative political expression through the early nineteenth century, including the second Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (1798–1821), the Quarterly Review (1809–), and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1817–).

十六∼十七世紀以來，新法蘭西地區長期受到法國的殖民，當地人民的生活方式、宗教信仰．．．等，深受到法國影響。十八世紀中葉，英國與法國開始長達七年(一七五六∼一七六三)的戰爭，最後法國戰敗。英國開始統治新法蘭西，把它變成今日加拿大的一省。 魁北克在英國統治下，木材工業普遍發達。當時農村年輕力壯的男子收割完穀物後，待在家裡覺得無聊，於是離家賺外快貼補家用，一群人便相約一窩蜂往森林伐木工地跑。這樣的社會環境，造成十八世紀中葉魁北克各地伐木工業蓬勃發展，所有魁北克口述傳說，例如天馬行船、惕讓，就是這樣從森林流傳出來，最後隨著時間的流逝，變成今日加拿大法語區人民耳熟能詳的童話故事。 這些魁北克的童話、小說、故事、傳說，都是經過世世代代口耳相傳下來的。直到今天還有很多童話故事，被以錄音的方式保存在加拿大、魁北克、蒙特婁大學及國家圖書館和阿卡地等檔案資料室。在本論文中筆者將把這些豐富多樣的法語區經典童話故事介紹研究、分析於後。 本文透過探討魁北克經典童話(惕讓、天馬行船、殺夫累犯、狼人)等故事，以主題學研究方式，探討相同故事題材、差異版本內容。從故事寫作手法中，了解故事中的哲理，是否隨著版本的不同，而產生變異，亦或延續原著作品的精神意涵及說理敘事。根據俄國學者普羅普的童話型態學理論，分析魁北克典型童話人物的個性、出場安排、情節發展、懸疑等情形，有助於我們理解童話故事的來龍去脈。 然後從閱讀欣賞童話，了解當時美洲印第安人、愛斯基摩人部族的生活方式、飲食習慣、社會型態、宗教信仰等地理人文特色之間的關係。同時從魁北克千年童話中著手欣賞新穎洗鍊故事內容、了解其傳統文化的精髓，並對法語語言的歷史演變應用，做深入的分析及研究。

Translation was a key educational tool in French schools in the early modern Low Countries, where Dutch-speaking children of merchants learned the international language of commerce. It is well known that, by using dictionaries, vocabulary books, conversation manuals, and bilingual literary works on fictional or biblical characters, boys and girls expanded their knowledge of French vocabulary and grammar. This contribution argues that such translation practices, which were omnipresent in these schools, had a much broader educational value. Next to the basic oral and written expression required for commercial transactions, the bilingual language manuals used in this environment also promised to teach their students the art of eloquence, grace, and style. This not only concerns the French target language, but also the mother tongue, which benefits from the growing plurilingualism of the students. Furthermore, other innovative forms of translation, not from one language into another, but from one medium into another, were applied in the French schools in Antwerp and elsewhere. Through these multimodal exercises, replacing text with image, young men and women practised linguistic creativity, wit, and visual literacy. Focusing on these multilingual and multimodal pedagogical forms, this chapter sheds light on the full potential of translation in the classroom.

Where histories of the Grand Tour emphasise movement, this chapter places settled learning at the heart of elite travel culture. Indeed, contemporaries only used the word ‘tour’ to describe bounded periods of heightened mobility, rather than one’s whole time abroad. It was over months or even years at French, Dutch and German universities and academies that young men acquired the French language and physical exercises for which they had been sent across the Channel. These ‘settlements’ have been greatly underestimated, not least because travellers tended only to keep journals during mobile periods, but they were the bedrock of encounters with the Continent, to which some – but by no means all – travellers added Italian tours. Families blended universities and academies in a mixed economy of education, as they had at home, with these institutions preparing some for onward travel and others for an immediate return. Although historiography is still dominated by the Italian Grand Tour, educational travel between 1650 and 1750 was primarily about pursuing Francophone culture in France or neighbouring territories. The gentry was far more familiar with the Continent than is usually recognised, and the French language and manners far more important aspects of landed culture.

Background: Conversational agents (CAs) are a novel approach to delivering digital health interventions. In human interactions, terms of address often change depending on the context or relationship between interlocutors. In many languages, this encompasses T/V distinction—formal and informal forms of the second-person pronoun “You”—that conveys different levels of familiarity. Yet, few research articles have examined whether CAs' use of T/V distinction across language contexts affects users' evaluations of digital health applications.Methods: In an online experiment (N = 284), we manipulated a public health CA prototype to use either informal or formal T/V distinction forms in French (“tu” vs. “vous”) and German (“du” vs. “Sie”) language settings. A MANCOVA and post-hoc tests were performed to examine the effects of the independent variables (i.e., T/V distinction and Language) and the moderating role of users' demographic profile (i.e., Age and Gender) on eleven user evaluation variables. These were related to four themes: (i) Sociability, (ii) CA-User Collaboration, (iii) Service Evaluation, and (iv) Behavioral Intentions.Results: Results showed a four-way interaction between T/V Distinction, Language, Age, and Gender, influencing user evaluations across all outcome themes. For French speakers, when the informal “T form” (“Tu”) was used, higher user evaluation scores were generated for younger women and older men (e.g., the CA felt more humanlike or individuals were more likely to recommend the CA), whereas when the formal “V form” (“Vous”) was used, higher user evaluation scores were generated for younger men and older women. For German speakers, when the informal T form (“Du”) was used, younger users' evaluations were comparable regardless of Gender, however, as individuals' Age increased, the use of “Du” resulted in lower user evaluation scores, with this effect more pronounced in men. When using the formal V form (“Sie”), user evaluation scores were relatively stable, regardless of Gender, and only increasing slightly with Age.Conclusions: Results highlight how user CA evaluations vary based on the T/V distinction used and language setting, however, that even within a culturally homogenous language group, evaluations vary based on user demographics, thus highlighting the importance of personalizing CA language.

THE SITE OF WESTERN MODERNISM IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICAN IDENTITY: NANGA, GIDE, KRISTEVA, AND THE OVERCOMING OF BETRAYAL Donald R. Wehrs Bernard Nanga's 1984 Cameroonian novel La Trahison de Marianne describes an African student's disülusionment with a France he has idealized from afar. As a schoolboy in colonial Africa, the protagonistnarrator had identified France with "Marianne," the figure on the franc, the feminized emblem of Western humanistic republicanism, and had structured his own identity around desire for Marianne, that is, desire for a fictive Other anchoring a symboUc order. La Trahison de Marianne describes how the narrator, as a university student in provincial France, encounters not the ideal unknown country Marianne seemed to promise, but an impersonal, mechanistic society marked by unthinking, pervasive racism; in doing so, the novel evokes the mood and themes ofnow-canonical works recounting the disenchantment of young African men with Western modernity, such as Bernard Dadié's Un Nègre en Paris (1959), Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambigue (1960), and Cámara Laye's Dramouss (1966). At the same time, however, Nanga delineates how the protagonist's identity is shaped positively as weU as negatively by the naive and colonizing love for Marianne that leads him to value French modernist culture . In particular, his devotion to André Gide proves crucial to his overcoming the depression into which he is plunged by Marianne's "betrayal" —that is, the betrayal of the ideals of French humanism and republicanism —as expressed by the slogans of 1789—by French racism and Eurocentricism. Instead of suggesting that the unmasking of betrayal leads the hero unproblematicaUy to a better, "decolonized" consciousness , Nanga portrays the narrator's depression over betrayal in terms quite simUar to JuUa Kristeva's analysis of melanchoUa in Black Sun. Loss of trust in the Other that structures the symboUc order in which identity is situated leads to a loss of meaning, a postmodern severing of signifier from signified that coUapses the distinction between signification and counterfeiting. This coUapse in turn disaUows the psychic investments necessary to sustain love (3-68; Soleil noir 13-78; also, Kristeva , New Maladies 3-63). Surprisingly, Nanga valorizes Gide's influence in restoring the protagonist to psychic health after a season in postmodern heU; it is Gide who aUows him to regain the faith in meaning upon which the possibUity oflove, and ethical engagements that are not counterfeit, is shown to rest. Such an unexpected plot turn, making the novel appear eccentric and inexpUcable except in terms of biography,1 involves more than rejecting uncritical nativism, simpUstic individuaUst/communaUst oppositions , and postmodern hopes that resistance, or oppositional/shifting/ Vol. 25 (2001): 22 ??? COHPAnATIST sUding "positionaUties," can take the place of"grounded" identities in the brave new world offoundationlessness. Rather, Nanga's depiction ofhow Gide "saves" the hero affirms—in the teeth ofboth postmodern readings ofmodernism and postmodern notions ofwhat postcolonial identity must entaU—that at least some of the values or self-understandings peculiar to Western modernity are, as Charles Taylor puts it, not only "very worthwhüe" but also "unrepudiable" (23). Indeed, the portrait ofthe narrator 's depression and recovery combines Kristeva's stress upon the role of an Other in organizing psychic space so as to aUow meaning and love, and Taylor's stress upon how, in modernity, "I am caUed upon to Uve my Ufe" in "my way," "not in imitation of anyone else's," for otherwise "I miss what being human is for me" (28-29).2 Nanga's novel describes how the narrator comes to learn that his way must involve making the West part of himself, making Western modernism a site within postcolonial identity , without letting the West, as it did both in his days of naive trust in Marianne and in his days ofnihüistic despair, colonize him by inducing him to take on credit various forms of counterfeit cultural currency. The narrator's desire for Marianne is Unked to the symboUc murder of a father. His French school in Africa had so weU assimüated its pupüs to coloniaUst ideology that when an old man in African dress accused them ofbeing degenerates, his classmates responded with the taunt, "Il...

What would become the Académie Française had modest beginnings as an informal weekly gathering of young men in Paris to discuss literary matters. Although its members tried to keep their meetings secret, Richelieu learned of the group’s existence and appropriated it. In 1635 it became the nucleus for the founding of the new Académie. Although its charter stipulated four responsibilities, the Académie ultimately undertook only one—the creation of a dictionary of the French language. The task of creating a dictionary proved difficult and the first edition did not appear until nearly sixty years later, in 1694. It was widely criticized, particularly for its organizational structure.