British Culture Research Articles

Speaking on the Way: A Simulation-Based Proposal for Primary-School EFL Learners

The main purpose of this case study was to investigate the possibilities of simulation-based learning in Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Greek Primary Education by focusing on the speaking skill. Following a thorough evaluation of the speaking section of the sixth grade’s coursebook, it became evident that the simulation-based activities had shortcomings that needed improvement. An alternative proposal of a simulation-based activity with a cultural focus revealed the complications of achieving successful implementation when it comes to simulation-based experiential learning. The findings that came from the recording of a specific learner’s responses revealed that the learner took up the challenge to try a different approach to communicating in English within the context of the EFL lesson. What is more, the proposed lesson plan created implications for exploring the EFL learners’ relationship to English-speaking cultures, i.e., British culture. Limitations of the study and directions for further research were also provided.

The Subcultures Network. Let's Spend the Night Together: Sex, Pop Music and British Youth Culture, 1950s–80s Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. Pp. 336. $150.00 (cloth).

The Subcultures Network. Let's Spend the Night Together: Sex, Pop Music and British Youth Culture, 1950s–80s Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. Pp. 336. $150.00 (cloth).

Writing Confucian History in an Indian Language

Abstract This article uses a case study of an Urdu translation of the classical Chinese Shujing (Book of Documents) to bring to light a process of multiperson, mediated, and ultimately transimperial translation in which European source texts played crucial roles in transmitting detailed knowledge of China to the Indian public sphere. After outlining the theoretical approach of transimperial history and its value for Asian intellectual history, the article positions the Urdu Shujing in relation to earlier Indian and Middle Eastern accounts of China whose triangulated transmission—from East Asia to Europe and thence to South or West Asia—set various precedents for the translation of the Shujing from a prior English translation. The article then focuses on the Urdu version to reveal the transimperial mechanisms it used to not only translate and transliterate classical Chinese, but also to “transcalculate” dates and render Chinese history comparable to both Europe's and India's past. The conclusions argue that, from Ming China via the early modern Catholic empires to the occult subcurrents of British colonial culture, the transimperial pathways along which Confucian history reached India were ultimately Eurasian rather than narrowly inter-Asian in scope. This reliance on earlier European translations would later recur with the spread of “world literature” in the postcolonial era.

Demographic History and English Culture

In England, the period from the late Middle Ages through early modernity was bookended by demographic change. On one edge, there was the Black Death and subsequent plague pandemics, which halved the population, reshaping English society in their wake. On the other, there was the demographic transition of the mid-eighteenth century, which reduced death rates and led to modern family structures. Between these two epochal events, demographic trends shaped English customs and values, and were in turn shaped by them. The articles in this special issue draw on cutting-edge demographic research to offer new interpretations of the effects of plague, patterns of marriage, evolving forms of labor, and the morality of crime and charity, among other subjects. Together, they illustrate how quantitative studies in historical demography can shed light on key transformations in culture and society—and vice versa.

Frames of Glass: Goldfish and Gender in Paint, Performance, and Print, 1870–1914

Abstract: This article draws upon examples from fiction, popular journalism, travel writing, theatre, and fine art from 1870 to 1914 to trace the evolving representation of goldfish in relation to shifting attitudes toward women in British and American culture. Beautiful and domesticated, yet quiet, unobtrusive, and often confined to its own miniature domestic "sphere," the goldfish seemed initially to parallel the domestic wife and had been used to naturalize domestic ideology. In the 1870s and 1880s, however, the importation of fancy goldfish with different and exaggerated morphological traits unsettled what the Victorians had taken to be self-evident and natural about this species and, by extension, their own. I argue that, at a time when the gender debate was inflected by biologically deterministic arguments about women's "natural" societal roles, the figure of the goldfish became a remarkably flexible discursive tool to grapple with (or endorse) the changing economic and social trajectories of Anglo-American women. A hitherto unexamined alternative to the quintessential Victorian image of the "bird in the cage," this study of the goldfish and its bowl provides insight into how the Victorians' confrontation with other species encouraged them to look more critically at themselves.

NATIONAL CLOTHING IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK CULTURES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE NAMES OF CLOTHING

National clothing plays a significant role in expressing cultural identity, historical legacy, and social norms in both English and Uzbek cultures. This study aims to compare the evolution and cultural importance of traditional attire in these two nations by examining historical records, dictionaries, and modern practices. We utilized explanatory dictionaries in both languages to define key clothing terms and analyze their social and symbolic roles. The results demonstrate how English traditional attire evolved from functional to ceremonial use, while Uzbek clothing retains a strong connection to national identity and craftsmanship. The study highlights the significance of national clothing as a form of cultural expression, emphasizing how it shapes and reflects the identity of both nations.

British Authorship and Americanization in the Age of Silent Cinema

How did the rise of cinema affect authorship in Britain? This essay examines the question in relation to both new and established writers. Referring to manuals of authorship and fiction writing as well as to the archives of the Society of Authors, it places the rise of cinema after 1906 in the context of the wider “Americanization” of the British culture industry and illustrates the ways in which cinema drove changes to readerly expectation, advertising, and the marketing of literature. It also examines how the business of writing for the cinema came to be incorporated into the broadly professionalized concept of “authorship.” In addition to drawing from the experiences of fiction writers including W. Somerset Maugham, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Elinor Glyn, Arnold Bennet, and Edgar Jepson, it also considers cinema authors, Herbert Langford Reed and Eliot Stannard, who sought to integrate screenwriting with the other disciplines traditionally described by the term authorship, widening our sense of what that category might mean.

‘Welch eine Lage für die armen Frauen!’: Emilie von Berlepsch’s Travelogue Caledonia (1802–04) as a Medium of Reflection on the Role of Women

ABSTRACT Emilie von Berlepsch was the first German woman to travel to Scotland and write a travelogue about it. From 1799 to 1800 she toured the country and published her experiences and thoughts in her travel book Caledonia (1802–04). This article illustrates von Berlepsch’s endeavour to spread knowledge of British culture in her home country by means of the travelogue, with a particular focus on women. It argues that Caledonia can be considered a further example of von Berlepsch’s advocacy of women’s rights. Using the account of her voyage as a tool to reflect on the role of women both in Britain and Germany, von Berlepsch encourages her fellow countrywomen to increase their independence from men through intellectual pursuits such as writing.

‘This modern Cinderella’: Railway Queens, mass media, and British civic culture, 1925–75

Abstract Between 1925 and 1975, the British railway industry elected beauty queens from the daughters of employees. Focusing upon the Railway Queens, this article will reveal the importance of beauty queens as ‘civic celebrities’, a novel role for public figures that emerged between the wars and helped to sustain a vibrant civic culture across the early to mid-twentieth century. It combined the traditional ceremonial function of ‘civic’ representative with the modern consumerist ethos of media ‘celebrity’. Despite the gendered constraints of such competitions, this article posits that serving as a beauty queen enabled young working-class women to become legitimate representatives of various civic communities for the first time, whilst also enabling participation in the media’s image-making of glamorous, consumerist femininities. As such, the role rendered civic and consumer cultures more inclusive and increasingly inextricable. This article further suggests that civic celebrities altered how communities were represented to themselves within British civic culture. If elites continued to represent hierarchical communities of authority and deference, then from the 1920s onwards, civic celebrities such as beauty queens began to represent relatively democratic communities of non-partisan inclusivity and consumer aspiration.

Enculturation-Acculturation Screening Tools for Empirical Aesthetics Research: a Proof of Principle Study

Abstract Grouping research participants by culture or language proficiency may no longer suffice to investigate cognitive universals and differences cross-culturally, due to the interconnectedness of our multicultural world. Based on immigration psychology research, we provide a ‘proof of principle’ for three culture screening tools. Across five online experiments (total N = 440), we developed (1) The Cultural Traditions Questionnaire (CTQ), (2) the Arts Engagement in Childhood Questionnaire (AECQ), and (3) the Enculturation and Acculturation Quiz (EAQ). While these screening tools are tailored to Iranian and English cultures, the procedures provided here are expandable to other cultures. The screening scores predicted emotional attachment to a culture better than traditional variables used in cross-cultural research (self-ascribed culture group, country of residence during formative years, mother tongue). Continuous measures of enculturation and acculturation are potentially better predictors for downstream variables of interest, due to their finer granularity and capability to capture multifaceted cultural identities.

The Human Names Concept in English Language and Culture

The article is devoted to the study of the Human Names concept and anthroponyms in English language and culture and their places in linguistics. The information on its semantic features and its function in speech are defined as well. The scientific novelty is determined by a new point of view concerning the problem of the lexical meaning of proper names that consists in the fact that the structure of the lexical meaning depends on the specific type of anthroponyms.

On the Development History of the Human Names Concept in English Language and Culture

Throughout the whole space of language, in every word, in its semantics, sentence structure and the organization of different types of discourse "one can detect the traces of man". Anthroponyms play a special role among the ways of linguistic representation of a person. In the article the authors investigate the history of the development of the concept of human names in English linguoculture.

Radical Thought and Political Practice: Officeholding and Accountability in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Abstract This article connects changes in administrative and bureaucratic processes that historians associate with state formation in early modern Britain with overlooked developments in thinking about political accountability. It blends the social history of state administration with intellectual history, and involves synoptic analysis as well as striking case studies. It argues that innovative political thinking emerged from new forms of political practice, and from the experiences of humble officials in the localities. Such individuals were increasingly professionalized and specialized, and their work was increasingly described using the language of trust, public interest, and state’s service. The mid-seventeenth century accentuated the process by which they came to be accountable to a centralized state, not least through the routinization and intensification of quotidian practices associated with enhanced communication between center and locality. Ultimately, the article argues that such processes, as well as more regular and direct interactions between political elites and humble officials, encouraged new kinds of political thinking. These were not quite unintended, but they may not have been fully anticipated either, and they involved innovative attempts to subject higher officials to oversight from “below,” and to legitimize their accountability to an adjudicating public, in ways that may even have had a lasting effect on English political culture.

Difficulties Encountered by Students of Translation in Rendering English Cultural Expressions into Arabic: Perspectives of Teaching Staff

Difficulties Encountered by Students of Translation in Rendering English Cultural Expressions into Arabic: Perspectives of Teaching Staff

Aesthetic Tradition and Cultural Temperament

British and American literature is one of the bright gems in the history of world literature, which has formed a unique literature after many times of historical evolution and integration of national culture. This paper makes an in-depth study of the historical development of Britain and the United States, starting from the three dimensions of "aesthetic tradition", "cultural temperament" and "translation of British and American literature", and discussing from two aspects of literary criticism and aesthetic perception. It is helpful to understand the unique cultural connotation and temperament of British and American culture, so as to better understand the cultural connotation of British and American classics and improve the translation quality of British and America literary works.

SEMANTIC PORTRAIT OF WAINAMOINEN IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF “KALEVALA”

The article presents a comparative analysis of the semantic portraits of the singer and the cultural hero Wainamoinen in two English translations of the epic “Kalevala” made by William Forsell Kirby and John Martin Crawford. Following a certain algorithm, the different-structured nominations of the hero are classified and subjected to component analysis, through which an inventory of semes and semes’ specifiers is fixed, which allows to identify isomorphic and allomorphic characteristics in the portraits of the hero. The study shows that the dominant position in the semantic portrait of Wainamoinen is occupied by the so-called song space of the hero, since singing is the main activity of Wainamoinen by means of which he influences the surrounding world. The semantic portrait of Wainamoinen is a four-level structure, including nominations (1) characterizing him as a singer, (2) characterizing his singing, (3) characterizing the process of his singing and (4) characterizing functions of his singing. The study also demonstrates an importance of nominations which have the structure of a sentence and super-phrasal unity. They allow to fix additional semes in lexical nominations. The article concludes that the semantic allomorphs of Wainamoinen’s portrait characteristics are determined by both linguistic aspects (the choice of the source text for translation: original text in the Finnish language and the interlinear translation in German) and extralinguistic aspects: differences between British and American lingua cultures and personal preferences of each translator.

Technology-empowered Blended Learning: A Case Study of Contemporary American Society and Culture Course

Under the background of integration of technology and higher education, this paper probes the question whether technology can advance liberal education, especial the critical thinking capability required by liberal education, in English major. The paper first identifies English major as a part of the humanity and social science disciplines, in which liberal education is essential and indispensable. Since liberal education emphasizes the capability of critical thinking, the paper then asks whether the integration of technology can promote the student’s critical thinking and therefore facilitate liberal education. The paper then applies the eight principles of critical thinking (TERRIFIC Principles) to evaluate the blended teaching of Contemporary American Culture and Society (CACS), a core course of English major at the Faculty of English Language and Culture, GDUFS. After examining the textbook, syllabus, program setting, teaching practice and assessment of CACS, it is found that blended online and offline teaching is better at developing the student’s capability of critical thinking than traditional offline teaching. The paper concludes that technology-empowered learning is conducive to liberal education.

A Related Study between Language and Gender

Nowadays as we all know, English is one of the most widely used languages in the world and Chinese is also the language that is used by most population in the world. English is a part of the Indo-European while Chinese belongs to Han-Tibetan languages. They have different historical development trajectories and choose different written systems. English and Chinese are both important representatives of Eastern and Western cultures. If you conduct comparative study of these two languages, it is helpful to understand the essential features of the language and reveal the deep structure of the Eastern and Western cultures. Studying gender discrimination in English and Chinese languages comprehensively and systematically, which is contrasting the similarities and differences between languages and cultures of English and Chinese, can provide a reference for understanding language, culture, thinking and national psychology. It can also improve the understanding of languages and cultures.

Cash Cows and Dogs with Dentures: Prostheses for Animals in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Abstract This article shows how the history of prostheticized animals is much deeper and richer than one might think. Investigating the interest in fitting animals with prostheses throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, this article explores the emergence of animal prostheses in bovine agriculture through to their use in late Victorian pet keeping. The key concern of this piece is the varied responses to prostheticized animals in print culture. As this article shows through an analysis of magazine and newspaper contributions, reactions to animal prostheses varied from admiration and amazement to annoyance and disgust. By analysing this coverage, the article reveals how representations of animal prostheses brought into collision a surprising variety of important social discourses, including those related to economic productivity, prosthesis access, food adulteration, professional recognition, social norms, class hierarchies, and gender relations. Animal prostheses proved a novel yet apt image that distilled a wide variety of societal concerns. Redirecting the critical momentum established by recent scholarship that unites disability studies and critical animal studies, this article uses nineteenth-century animal prostheses as a case study to demonstrate how the concepts of disability, ableism, classism, and misogyny have been extended by humans across species boundaries and how our approaches to nonhuman care are impacted by them. It therefore establishes a new field of inquiry within Victorian studies for scholarship on the interface between discourses of disability and nonhuman animals.

‘A fool upon record’: the redefinition of the Caroline stage fool

ABSTRACT In the 1630s, two central cultural arbiters sought to eliminate the figure of the fool from English culture. Both the city and court decried fools as figures of past barbarism. Yet, as this article seeks to demonstrate, rather than eliminating the fool from plays, Caroline playwrights rework the fool to go undetected within the social reform of the court and by the more radical anti-theatrical writers. By doing so, Caroline playwrights in effect allowed any intellect in early modern London to fool. The article examines three bodies of writing (court censorship records, antitheatrical writing and the Caroline plays themselves), to trace how this modified fool becomes rearticulated as a city wit, who still maintains the responsibilities of a fool.