Cinderella Story Research Articles

Improved vocabulary production after naming therapy in aphasia: can gains in picture naming generalise to connected speech?

Naming accuracy for nouns and verbs in aphasia can vary across different elicitation contexts, for example, simple picture naming, composite picture description, narratives, and conversation. For some people with aphasia, naming may be more accurate to simple pictures as opposed to naming in spontaneous, connected speech; for others, the opposite pattern may be evident. These differences have, in some instances, been related to word class (for example, noun or verb) as well as aphasia subtype. Given that the aim of picture-naming therapies is to improve word-finding in general, these differences in naming accuracy across contexts may have important implications for the potential functional benefits of picture-naming therapies. This study aimed to explore single-word therapy for both nouns and verbs, and to answer the following questions. (1) To what extent does an increase in naming accuracy after picture-naming therapy (for both nouns and verbs) predict accurate naming of the same items in less constrained spontaneous connected speech tasks such as composite picture description and retelling of a narrative? (2) Does the word class targeted in therapy (verb or noun) dictate whether there is 'carry-over' of the therapy item to connected speech tasks? (3) Does the speed at which the picture is named after therapy predict whether it will also be used appropriately in connected speech tasks? Seven participants with aphasia of varying degrees of severity and subtype took part in ten therapy sessions over five weeks. A set of potentially useful items was collected from control participant accounts of the Cookie Theft Picture Description and the Cinderella Story from the Quantitative Production Analysis. Twenty-four of these words (twelve verbs and twelve nouns) were collated for each participant, on the basis that they had failed to name them in either simple picture naming or connected speech tasks (picture-supported narrative and unsupported retelling of a narrative). These were placed in a larger cohort of verb and noun sets for therapy. Post-therapy assessments examined naming accuracy and speed of target items in single-word picture-naming and naming accuracy in connected speech contexts. There was a step-wise decrement in naming accuracy over the three naming contexts following targeted therapy. Simple pictures elicited the most correct names, followed by picture-supported narratives and lastly unsupported narratives. Picture-naming accuracy significantly predicted naming in the connected speech contexts for the group as a whole. The speed of picture naming after therapy did not predict the extent to which items were named in composite picture description and narrative tasks. The findings suggest that gains in naming accuracy obtained through picture-naming therapy may generalize to naming of the same items in more linguistically and cognitively demanding connected speech tasks. Demonstrating this generalization is methodologically challenging and the method utilized in this study may serve as one starting point for gathering a larger database in order to answer the question posed by this paper more robustly.

Red Shoes: Linking Fashion and Myth

What is it about red shoes? Conjuring multiple images and responses like black or blue shoes never could, red shoes connect literature, fashion, and dress through meanings that are uniquely personal yet resonant across wider cultural and social groups. These symbolic meanings of red shoes are powerful, partly because they are encountered in childhood stories, partly because they are reiterated by fashion, which capitalizes on and reinterprets these meanings, and partly because we can choose to wear them, contributing both to their vitality and our self-image, in ambiguous but evocative ways. Red shoes are never neutral. Glass slippers are quite different, being never obtainable in the material world, and also somehow lacking as a metaphor for wish fulfillment, which is suggestive when we consider the content and intentions of their stories. The red shoes by Hans Christian Andersen and the much older story of Cinderella with her glass slippers demand commitment from their wearers to a course of action, one leading to wild and willful dancing which ends in terrible suffering and death, the other to union and recognition. Both red and glass shoes have a place in our shared childhood libraries and in the wardrobes of our imaginations. Their stories are about desire, envy, transformation, and sin, so have a clear relationship with the impulse and character of fashion. By exploring these themes I hope to discover more about the symbolic meanings of these shoes, and their links through myth to fashion, style, and the self.

Constraint‐induced language therapy for agrammatism: Role of grammaticality constraints

Background: Aphasia therapy that involves a high weekly intensity, short overall duration, restriction of nonverbal communication, coupled with constraints on verbal complexity, has recently gained momentum (constraint‐induced language therapy, or CILT). The gains have been documented primarily for formal language tests, especially in lexical retrieval, repetition, and comprehension measures. Measures of grammatical well‐formedness, which have greater ecological validity, have not been commonly reported in prior studies. Further, it is as yet unclear if the nature of verbal constraints has any impact on expressive language outcomes, particularly when the primary deficit in verbal production is grammatical inaccuracy (as in the case of agrammatic aphasia). Aims: This study aimed to examine whether constraint‐induced therapy is applicable for individuals with agrammatic aphasia and if the addition of a morphosyntactic constraint would influence expressive language outcomes. Methods & Procedures: In this phase I study a single participant design was used with four chronic agrammatic aphasic individuals who received 24 hours of constraint‐induced therapy over 10 days, as per prior published protocols. Two of these individuals received additional morphosyntactic constraints regarding tense morphology. Formal aphasia tests, Cinderella story narration, and conversational samples were analysed at three time points: pre‐treatment, post‐treatment, and 3‐month follow‐up. Outcomes & Results: While all participants improved on at least some language measures, the overall changes were minimal and not maintained at 3 months. Participants who received morphosyntactic constraints dramatically improved on an elicited morphosyntactic test, but did not respond differently in other severity and discourse measures. Participants with lower initial language severity scores showed quantitatively larger gains after treatment. Conclusions: While constraint‐induced therapy was minimally effective for the agrammatic participants in this study, and addition of a grammaticality constraint did not significantly enhance the functional outcomes, the findings do indicate that initial severity and aphasic deficit patterns may be useful in determining candidacy for constraint‐induced therapy.

Text structure and patterns of cohesion in narrative texts written by adults with a history of language impairment

This paper examines text structure and patterns of cohesion in stories written by a group of adults with a history of childhood language impairment. The study aimed to extend our knowledge of writing difficulties in this group by building upon a study that examined clause level phenomena (Smith-Lock, Nickels, & Mortensen, this issue). Ten adults with a history of Language Impairment and 30 control participants were asked to write the story of Cinderella. Stories were analyzed for their generic structure and cohesion resources, both of which contribute to the organization and coherence of a text. Results revealed that patterns of text organization at the level of generic structure and measures of cohesion did not distinguish the performance of writers with a history of Language Impairment from the comparison group. A wide range of lexico-grammatical skills was evident within the Language Impaired group, with few individuals with Language Impairment falling outside the normal range of performance. It is suggested that generic structure and cohesion are a relative strength in the writing of adults with Language Impairment, within the constraints of their lexical and grammatical skills.

Story writing skills of adults with a history language-impairment

The purpose of this study was to investigate the story writing skills of adults with a history of oral language impairment. It was hypothesized that writing text would pose difficulty for adults with a history of language impairment (LI), and that this difficulty would manifest itself as reduced grammatical complexity and increased errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation. The story writing of 10 adults with a history of LI was compared to a group of 51 unimpaired individuals. Participants were asked to write the story of Cinderella. Stories were analysed for length, grammatical complexity and accuracy of grammar, punctuation and spelling. Data were analysed to determine group trends as well as individual profiles. As a group, the adults with LI showed no difference from the comparison group in the length of their stories as measured by total number of words. The LI group did, however, show reduced grammatical complexity in their writing, as measured by mean length of t-unit. The LI group made more errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation than the comparison group. Individual analyses indicated substantial variability within the LI group. It is concluded that LI in childhood is associated with writing difficulties in adulthood.

Carrie (review)

Reviewed by: Carrie Jordan Schildcrout Carrie. By Erik Jackson , adapted from the novel by Stephen King . Directed by Josh Rosenzweig . Theatre Couture, Performance Space 122, New York City. 1312 2006. Stephen King's first novel, Carrie(1974), tells the story of a teenage misfit with telekinetic powers who avenges herself on cruel classmates by turning prom night into a deadly inferno. Sissy Spacek won acclaim playing the title role in Brian De Palma's popular 1976 film adaptation, while theatre aficionados remember the disastrous 1988 stage musical version as one of the most notorious flops in Broadway history. The persistent fascination with Carrie, in all her various incarnations, is perhaps rooted in America's interest in the tension between individuality and conformity, between queerness and normalcy. Therefore Theatre Couture's queer reinterpretation of Carrie, with drag performer Sherry Vine (a.k.a. Keith Levy) playing the title role, uses camp comedy not simply to send-up Carrie, but rather to highlight the themes of gender and sexual difference inherent in the original story. The result is a playful revenge fantasy for anyone who ever felt awkward, lonely, or queer in high school. Set in 1979, the play follows the Cinderella story of Carrie White, a painfully shy girl who is taunted and bullied by all of her classmates, never more so than when she has her first period in the gym shower. She finds little comfort at home from her Bible-thumping mother, who tells her that menstruation is the result of sinful desires and then locks her in a closet to force her to pray to Jesus for forgiveness. But Carrie begins to notice that, at times of great stress or anger, she can move things with her mind: teacups break and lightbulbs burst. One classmate with a conscience, Sue Snell, decides to help Carrie, so she persuades her own boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom. At first Carrie assumes that the invitation is a prank intended to humiliate her, but once convinced of Tommy's sincerity, she allows herself to believe that she has found her Prince Charming. Defying her mother, she goes to the prom and gets elected queen, only to have her moment of triumph ruined when a cabal of students dumps a bucket of pig's blood on her. Stunned and enraged, her mental powers unleash hell, trapping everyone in the school and burning them alive in a horrific blaze. She returns home and crucifies her mother with kitchen knives before burying herself under an imploding house. The actors present their archetypal characters in quotation marks, and the best performers (such as Danielle Skraastad as the butch gym teacher and Matthew Wilkas as the dopey though good-natured jock) find variety within the broad characterizations. As written by Erik Jackson and directed by Josh Rosenzweig, the play often imitates the cinematic techniques of De Palma's film, with puppet master Basil Twist (best known for his Symphonie Fantastique) crafting special effects that translate the tropes of the horror movie into a theatrical medium. Carrie's telekinesis moves objects with the aid of hooks and wires, flames are represented by fan-blown orange and red fabric, and a box window upstage shows us cars flipping and houses collapsing in miniature. Such low-budget effects have the ability to charm with their simple though well-crafted artistry but also to inspire laughter as deliberately facile imitations of recognizable movie moments. Perhaps the most striking effect is the realistically designed pig puppet (created by Emily DeCola), whose gruesome slaughter functions as the finale of act 1, foreshadowing the blood bath to come in the second act. [End Page 519] Following the tradition of Charles Ludlam's Camille, Theatre Couture's Carrietakes a female character—a social outsider and victim who finds a reservoir of strength but is ultimately doomed—and reinterprets her as a drag diva, adding material that underlines the character's queerness. When being bullied into the prayer closet by her mother, Sherry Vine's Carrie whines, "But Momma, I don't wanna go in the closet!" and then gives the audience a knowing look. Later, Carrie's mother begs her not...

Multicultural Cinderella: A Collaborative Project in an Elementary School

This project was the result of a collaborative effort between the School of Library and Information Science and College of Education at the University of South Florida and the Egypt Lake Elementary School in Tampa, Florida. Versions of the Cinderella story from around the world were used in reading classes to stimulate awareness of cultural diversity and to serve as reading enrichment for 21 elementary students. According to feedback from students, reading teachers, library media specialists, and principal participants, the project resulted in students' increased interest in cultures and learning of general ontent information.

An analysis of thematic and phrasal structure in people with aphasia: What more can we learn from the story of Cinderella?

Sentence production difficulties are a common feature of aphasia. The aim of the current study was to investigate the processes involved in sentence production. An analysis of sentence production was designed which described thematic, phrasal and morphological structure. The sentence production of 22 speakers with aphasia was compared to that of 20 normal speakers. The study investigated: (i) the consistency of difficulties across individual speakers with aphasia (ii) the patterns associated with non-fluent and fluent speech and (iii) the relationship between different aspects of sentence production. Extensive variability was seen in the group of people with aphasia. Individual non-fluent and fluent speakers had widely varying patterns of performance suggesting that speech fluency is not a useful diagnostic measure. The production of thematic structure was independent of phrasal structure suggesting that distinct processes are involved in their specification. The processes involved in the elaboration of phrasal structure and the production of grammatical morphemes were more closely associated. Some independence was seen between the measures associated with particular levels of structure suggesting there may be sub-processes involved which can also be selectively impaired in aphasia.

Two Translations of the Chinese Cinderella Story

Tang writer Duan Chengshi's story of Ye Xian is generally regarded as the precursor of the Western Cinderella. This essay attempts to fill in a gap in folklore criticism by exploring two English translations of this Chinese story, to see how Arthur Waley's translation serves to build up a feminist tension in the translated text, especially when compared with Barbara Creed's more ‘correct’ translation, as well as highlighting the feminist potential of the original Chinese text, contrary to the meagre cultural criticism that tends to bring out the subordinate female position in the story. As such, Waley's translation predicts the ways with which the Chinese story has been appropriated by various feminist writers in different contexts.

Women's Search for Stability: A Case Study of the Cinderella Story in the Arabian Gulf

Women's Search for Stability: A Case Study of the Cinderella Story in the Arabian Gulf

Belinda and the Glass Slipper (review)

Reviewed by: Belinda and the Glass Slipper Deborah Stevenson Young, Amy Belinda and the Glass Slipper; written and illus. by Amy Young. Viking, 200632p ISBN 0-670-06082-8$15.99 R 6-9 yrs Though Belinda (from Belinda the Ballerina, BCCB 4/03) is grandly sized, she's a talented ballerina, so she wins the role of Cinderella over petite little Lola. Jealous Lola locks Belinda in a closet on opening night and goes on instead; after the Fairy Godmother (well, the dancer playing the part of the Fairy Godmother) releases Belinda, the two ballerinas dance it out onstage, with only Belinda successfully fitting into the glass slipper. The Cinderella-within-Cinderella plot is that rare thing, a genuinely new twist on an old tale, and the ballet theme, with its ruffly French phrases ("Belinda pirouetted out of reach . . . protected herself with a well-executed battement . . . and she escaped with a stunningly brilliant tour en l'air"), has the same pink princessy appeal as the Cinderella story itself for a double-dip of girly goodness, with enough humor to keep things from cloying. The illustrations feature a bevy of attenuated ballerinas who seem to be crafted from pipe cleaners save for their round, solid heads; though the predominance of pastel shades undercuts the punch of some scenes, the visuals still offer delicate comedy that works with rather than against traditional ballet aesthetics. Ballet-lovers, Cinderella fans, and the many who are both will warm up to this tale that takes folkloric rivalry onto the dance floor. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears: From Oscar to consolation prize

The article traces the changing status of Vladimir Men'shov's Oscar-winning film, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979). This film, lauded by Hollywood for its ‘apolitical’ celebration of three women in Brezhnev's Russia, has nonetheless gone through various, more complex interpretations by various audiences, both at home and abroad. A movie known in the West as a Soviet success on the red carpet, this film has today inspired a new, very different generation of Russian television heroines in serialized dramas. What appears to us a Cinderella story is now seen at home as the foundation for sadder, ‘consolatory’ tales. Ironically, the ability to forge a career and find a husband has become so difficult in modern Moscow that Men'shov's film is today endlessly, ironically referenced as a tale that should come true — but. never does.

Clinging to One Spot: Hawthorne’s Native-Born Settlers

Old Man of;the Mountain, VVhite Mountains, New Hampshire. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-D4-11785. Clinging to One Spot: Ilawthorne's N ative-Born Settlers YAEL BEN-ZVI In 1853, having published numerous stories and three novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne reflected on the ];'oken, an annual magazine where his early tales were published. "It was a sort of hothouse ," he wrote, "where native flowers were made to bloom like exotics. "I Implying a supernatural transformation, Hawthorne presupposed that U.S. texts-and, by extension, their writers-were literally "native." In this imagery, the term "native " connotes the mundane, ordinary existence of unrealized potential. As in a Cinderella story, the Token brings to light the "exotic" essence ofhitherto unattractive "natives." Hawthorne's contrast may SeeI1Cl puzzling in the wake of colonial practices and discourses, whose exoticization of colonized indigenous people made "native" and "exotics" almost synonymous. Whereas today the primary connotation of "native" in the U. S. is "Native American," in Hawthorne's works "native" often pointed to white U.S. subjectivities, playing a key role in characters ' identities, motivations, and predicaments. This essay focuses on Hawthorne's persistent use of the term "native" as the property of whites in two of his largely neglected works, "The Great Stone Face" (1850) and The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), in order to analyze its broader implications for his work in general. 2 In "The Custom-House," his introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne discusses his relationship to Salem and tries to understand the "kindred between the human beESQ / V. 52 /lST-2ND QUARTERS I2006 17 YAEL BEN-ZVI ing and the locality," which has stemmed from the "long connection of the family with one spot." Struggling to define this "kindred," Hawthorne comes to understand it as an innate, inevitable, and undesirable condition of ~(not love, but instinct ." _,Associated with "mud," "dust," "chill," "curse," and "spell," this prolonged, instinctive attachment is "unhealthy," and Hawthorne attempts to break it by giving his children ~~other birthplaces" (GE, I:II-I2). While in "The Custom-House" Hawthorne invokes this relationship through the "oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler ... clings" to one "spot," in The Scarlet Letter proper the young settler Arthur Dimmesdale seems always-already bound by the ties elaborated in the preface , trapped by "the compass of yonder town," and incapable of leaving Boston even though Hester Prynne suggests Europe and "the wilderness" as two alternatives (GE, I:II, 197). Native status is thus represented as a heavy burden restricting one's choices and possibilities. In The House ofthe Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne further portrays the native status of New England settlers as a "curse" and naturalizes it as an inevitable inheritance that cannot be shaken off (see GE, 2:2I, 46, and elsewhere). In the much earlier tale "Young Goodman Brown" (1835), a native-horn settler whose "instincts" seern to promise a liberating sense of individualized "evil" gradually realizes that this evil has already been defined by his Salenl ancestors and contemporaries, with whom he shares ~(one m.ighty blood-spot"-and this understanding stains the rest of his life (GE, 10:83, 87). At the end of "My Kinsman, Major rV10lineux" (1832), by contrast, opportunities suddenly open up in Boston for Robin because he had an "other birthplace." Aligned as he is with the "native woods" of a frontier settlernent, Robin does not share the major's doom: the tale's anti-royalist stance refutes the significance of family ties and erects the importance ofspatial belonging instead (GE, II:222, 226). Hawthorne's insistence on this nativeness can be read as an attempt to secure native status exclusively for native -born settlers while marginalizing Native Americans-and discounting African Americans almost entirely.3 "The Great Stone Face" and The Life ofFranklin Pierce evidence Hawthorne's construction of native status in particularly tell18 CUNGING TO ONE SPOT ing ways. Written within two years of one another, both texts tell the story of a native-born, natural leader. The representations of place and spatial belonging in these works demonstrate Hawthorne's contribution to the transformation of the concept "native," which became central for nineteenth-century...

Metamorphosis of the Japanese Girl: The Girl, the Hyper-Girl, and the Battling Beauty

Metamorphosis of the Japanese Girl:The Girl, the Hyper-Girl, and the Battling Beauty Mari Kotani (bio) In the 1980s Miyasako Chizuru coined the term chô-shôjo, or "Hyper-Girl," to conceptualize the emergence of a new kind of girl in manga and anime, one with powers and attributes beyond those of prior shôjo figures. Since then, Girls and Hyper-Girls have continued to transform, and I would like to trace some of those changes, especially in the context of the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena (Shôjo kakumei utena), which presents not only a revolutionary girl but also revolutionizes the Japanese Girl. Revolutionary Girl Utena Tokyo's Channel 12 broadcast Revolutionary Girl Utena for thirty-nine weeks, from April 2 through December 24, 1997. The series followed the popular manga series written by a woman artist, Saitô Chiho, who collaborated with the artists at the studio collective Be-Papas and with the director Ikuhara Kunihiko, known for his previous work on the anime series Sailor Moon. In the television version, the heroine is a fourteen-year-old girl, Tenjô Utena. Utena continues to cherish the memory of her encounter with a [End Page 162] prince, who offered her consolation when she lost both her parents (Figure 1). When she enters a private middle school, Ohtori Gakuen (an alternate romanization of "Ôtori Gakuen"), she hopes that she might once again meet the prince there. Naturally, given such a setup, viewers might well expect a variation on the Cinderella story. Yet, as the story advances, Utena adopts a male school uniform, complete with short pants. While instructors at the school try to dissuade her, their protests are in vain (Figure 2). Utena insists on male attire, and viewers who expected Utena's story to conform to that of a helpless girl seeking her prince charming may well feel betrayed. Whence Utena's insistence on male attire? The answer is simple. Utena wishes to become a prince, which (interestingly enough) is not exactly the same as being a boy (in case anyone might think she desires to be a boy). In fact, when Utena duels with Saionji Kyôichi, he (Saionji) notices her breasts and expresses his surprise that Utena is a girl. Utena retorts that she never said she wasn't a girl. Her adoption of male garb could be called cross-dressing, for she is seen as a boy, yet she does not take herself as one. She is a girl prince. Now, on the surface, Utena's middle school, Ohtori Gakuen, is just another prep school for rich kids. Yet it turns out that members of the student council control the school. Only members of this elite group are eligible to become duelists. An unseen person known only as "End of the World" chooses students to serve as council members and duelists, and this status allows them to challenge and battle one another. Students enter duels to compete for Himemiya Anthy, the Rose Bride, who holds the secret of the power to revolutionize the world. It is this power that duelists seek. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Tenjô Utena Utena in Revolutionary Girl Utena. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Revolutionary Girl Utena. When Utena enters this rigidly hierarchical school society, she is clearly an outsider. Moreover, her goals are entirely different from the other duelists. [End Page 163] Her aim is not to fight and gain the Rose Bride. Yet, to achieve her goals, she must enter into the world of duels, which amounts to a transgression of the school's hierarchies. In the end, Utena proves victorious, insofar as she defeats all the other student duelists. She never defeats Ohtori Akio, however, the school headmaster who becomes Utena's most dangerous opponent in the series' final episodes. What is important is her status as an outsider, or an other. It is this status that allows her to unravel the school's mysterious hierarchies. Transgression Fights in this series appear highly ritualized. As a world apart, the battleground becomes an object of intense curiosity and interest. Only duelists may enter the battleground, which truly stands apart from the school...

The Cinderella story of metabolic profiling: does metabolomics get to go to the functional genomics ball?

To date most global approaches to functional genomics have centred on genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. However, since a number of high-profile publications, interest in metabolomics, the global profiling of metabolites in a cell, tissue or organism, has been rapidly increasing. A range of analytical techniques, including 1H NMR spectroscopy, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), Fourier Transform mass spectrometry (FT-MS), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and electrochemical array (EC-array), are required in order to maximize the number of metabolites that can be identified in a matrix. Applications have included phenotyping of yeast, mice and plants, understanding drug toxicity in pharmaceutical drug safety assessment, monitoring tumour treatment regimes and disease diagnosis in human populations. These successes are likely to be built on as other analytical and bioinformatic approaches are developed to fully exploit the information obtained in metabolic profiles. To assist in this process, databases of metabolomic data will be necessary to allow the passage of information between laboratories. In this prospective review, the capabilities of metabolomics in the field of medicine will be assessed in an attempt to predict the impact this 'Cinderella approach' will have at the 'functional genomic ball'.

Cognition and discourse production in right hemisphere disorder

This study sought preliminary relationships between discourse deficits and cognitive abilities in persons with right hemisphere disorder (RHD). Seven participants with RHD were matched with a non-neurologically impaired control group. One narrative and two procedural samples were elicited: the story of Cinderella and two procedural discourse samples based on familiar tasks. Macrostructural and microstructural measures of the discourse samples were correlated to cognitive domain scores achieved on a cognitive assessment, the Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test ( CLQT [Helm-Estabrooks, N. (2001). Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation]). Two-tailed t-tests indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in cognitive scores between the RHD and control groups, nor were there differences in discourse measures between the two groups on either procedural task. The narrative production task yielded significant group differences on four measurements—CIU, CIU/minute, total main concept points, and number of absent main concepts. Within the RHD group, there were correlations between the attention, clock drawing, and visuospatial domains of the cognitive measure and narrative measures. The results of this study indicated that although there were no significant differences between the two groups on the cognitive measure, the RHD group produced insufficient narratives. Narrative discourse appears to be a sensitive context in which to pursue the exploration of cognitive–discourse relationships in RHD.

A Central Asian Cinderella: The Tale of Bibi Seshambe

A Central Asian tale found in a typewritten risola guild text of the early 20th century parallels the well-known story of Cinderella. In Central Asia, the telling of this story often takes place in the context of an exclusively female ritual feast honoring a patron known as Bibi Seshambe.

Character study

A character study based on the traditional story of Cinderella.

Literary Biography: The Cinderella Story of Literary Studies

There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the chores for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular? One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped. Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education. Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily...

Irish Theatre Criticism: De-territorialisation and Integration

During the 1990S Ireland underwent a much-publicised transformation and highly dramatic transformation in status. Whether conceived as a Cinderella story or a tale of tiger economy, this devout, under-privileged, and perhaps rather peripheral European state, apparently overnight, "definitively joined the rich world [becoming] the icon of the globalisation process”. The speed of transformation has opened much debate as to what is being gained and lost, and - apart from its much-debated impetus and effects — this process of social and economic change in Ireland inevitably bears far-reaching implications for cultural discourse. Specifically, in terms of theatre, the 1990S was a decade of significant activity for both playwrights and practitioners, critics and commentators.