Contemporary English Fiction Research Articles

Analysis of language used in Contemporary English Fiction: A Descriptive Analysis

Analysis of language used in Contemporary English Fiction: A Descriptive Analysis

Literature and globalization and Its impact on Contemporary English Fiction: A Qualitative Study

Literature and globalization and Its impact on Contemporary English Fiction: A Qualitative Study

Review of The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction, by Huw Marsh

Review of The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction, by Huw Marsh

Analysis of Language Used in Contemporary English Fiction: A Descriptive Analysis

This paper seeks to analyze the language used in contemporary English fiction in a descriptive manner. Stories set in the present that don't contain fantasy elements are considered contemporary fiction. Contemporary fiction aims to give readers a glimpse into a particular aspect of everyday life and what it's like to stand in someone else's shoes. Language analysis looks at strategies authors employ, including figures of speech, literary devices, choice of words, the structure of sentences, register, or tone, to convey meaning. Linguistic elements such as discourse, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, are examined. To further comprehend how language shapes literature and interpretation, this research seeks to highlight stylistic and functional elements of language in contemporary English fiction. The study can contribute to literary studies, linguistics, and language education, and guide the recommendation of reading materials for language learners and language education programs.

Marsh, Huw: The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who’s Laughing Now?

Marsh, Huw: The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who’s Laughing Now?

SEBASTIAN FAULKS’ HUMAN TRACES:A JOURNEY INTO THE DEPTHS OF THE HUMAN PSYCHE

Sebastian Faulk’s novel, Human Traces (2006), embarks on a new trend in contemporary English fiction. Through its representations of two main protagonists, pioneers in the field of psychology between the 1870s and 1918, Faulks traces the formative years of the development of the young discipline of psychiatry. Even though Faulks works in the realist traditions of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, yet he delves into such major questions as the role of unconscious motivations in human individual behaviour, the causes of mental illness, and the very attempt to understand the nature of the human being. The time frame of the novel expands from the portrayal of the struggles and relationships of a handful of individuals, to encompass the entire sweep of human evolution. Thus, Faulks in Human Traces introduces a radically new dimension in the development of the novel. This paper offers an attempt at evaluating the innovative thematic and technical achievement of a major work of modern fiction.

From Unparalleled “Greatness” to Predictable Insularity. A Composite Sketch of “Warped Britishness” as Drawn in Selected Works of Contemporary English Fiction

Brexit, as seen from the present perspective, is seemingly a success story. Taking into account a myriad of voices expressed in the public domain over the past few years, it is legitimate to make a cautious claim that some of the expectations people shared before/during the referendum have been inflated and deflated in the post-plebiscite reality. In 2016, across the majority that voted for the divorce, a growing consensus on the soundness and solidity of pro-Leave arguments about Britain being in crisis was seen. The proponents of change had endorsed the policy of restoring a sense of national dignity. That mode of reasoning, though still present within current “British” mindsets, has been confronted with the “unplanned” turbulence of national (re) adjustment. The whole process of bidding farewell to the European Union has led to sentiments of uncertainty/anxiety/regret, rather than to the anticipated sense of satisfaction/relief. Therefore, it seems both vital and interesting to juxtapose the passion about restoring people’s trust in Britishness/Englishness, and its “exceptionality” with more sobering projections of a new post-Brexit world. In order to discuss the consequences of this self-inflicted condition, I will here elaborate on selected English literary texts. They feature authors who draw conclusions running parallel to Anderson’s assumptions that in times of crisis a general predilection for self-deluding (re)constructions of collective identity can be observed, which are variously expressed in a merely referential, subversive or satirical manner.

РОЛЬ ПУНКТУАЦИИ В ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНОГО ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ДИСКУРСА

The article considers the role of punctuation marks in delivering and perceiving the purport in fiction discourse. The core of the study is the interrelation between the punctuation arrangement of the text and its prosodic embodiment. Contemporary English fiction in both written and audio forms is exploited as the material for the investigation. The key goal of the study is to demonstrate the so-called ‘highlighting function’ of the semicolon (the stop of inner controversy) and to analyse its role in emphasising the text fragments of special prominence. Three major types of the function are discussed: bringing out particularization to follow, which appears to be vital for interpreting the purport; marking off the afterthought; bringing out the ‘effective’ conclusion - a concise and catchy phrase summing up the previous statement. The results show that in all the three contexts in which the semicolon signals the information significance, its typical prosody gets modified. Namely, the part of the sentence after the stop is largely produced in the higher section of the diapason as compared to the recommended parameter. Among other prosodic characteristics to be altered are timbre and tempo. Adding more expressivity not infrequently may enable the performer to highlight the clause to follow.

СРЕДСТВА АКТУАЛИЗАЦИИ СРАВНЕНИЯ В ЯЗЫКЕ СОВРЕМЕННЫХ СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ ГРУПП АНГЛИИ

The purpose of the article is to reveal the means of expressing simile in the speech of characters belonging to modern upper, middle and lower classes, based on the texts of contemporary English fiction: Caryl Churchill «Top Girls», Patrick Marber «Dealer’s Choice» and India Knight «Comfort and Joy». Conducting speech analysis, the authors use the sociolinguistic approach, allowing to take into account the social class of the speaker. The article demonstrates that the choice of different language means for conveying simile is dictated by such specific characteristics of the social layer to which communicants pertain as leading values, level of education, income, and the degree of freedom in expressing emotions. The article concludes that simile in speech of upper class representatives is expressed by neutral vocabulary to convey positive emotions and informal vocabulary to demonstrate hyperbolized negative evaluation, reflecting a critical and ironic evaluation of everyday events. Simile in the statements of middle class speakers is expressed in formal vocabulary, French words, rhymes, political terms, clichés, deformed phraseological units, which reflect the desire to imitate the upper classes, indicate modesty and self-doubt of the communicants. Simile in the judgments of lower-class Englishmen is conveyed by argotisms, helping to express an outburst of negative emotions, as well as by religious and literary allusions that are misused and contain an abundance of logical errors.

Концептуализация чрезмерного действия через метафору Shower в английском языке

The article presents the results of the research into the functioning of the “Excessive action is Shower” metaphor used to express the aspectual semantics of excessive action in contemporary English fiction texts. To reveal how such metaphors are built, the research investigated their semantic structure, i. e., the relations between the source and targets involved in metaphorical mappings. The results indicate that both meanings of the word Shower, i. e., the direct one (rain) and the one derived from it (device for washing) get into metaphorical relations to name excessive action.The study identified five foci of metaphorical projections. They come to the fore when Shower is used metaphorically. The article provides a detailed classification of nouns collocating with Shower to express excessive action. It was found that the majority of such nouns name heavy or light objects, objects of material well-being and attitude, while nouns naming emotions and time rarely function as targets.The article analyses contextual conditions to describe the functioning of the Shower metaphor. In particular, it focuses on most common syntactic structures of the Shower metaphor, prepositions it combines with, and accompanying linguistic phenomena. These include the following that appear regularly: a) the use of other Water metaphors in the close context as subtypes of the general conceptual metaphor “Excessive action is Water” (a “burst” of metaphors); b) semantic changes when a word with a positive meaning acquires a negative one when it functions as a target (axiological clashes).The study identified the pragmatic potential of the Shower metaphor. It concluded that its prevailing evaluative connotation is negative. The study also found that the conceptual metaphor “Excessive action is Shower” is productive in English and is culturally specific.

Politics of Religion in Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy

Generally regarded as one of the most influential factors in the human history, religion has frequently been used as a strong political force by the ruling pundits. In the hands of retrogressive elites, religion has often been operated as an aggressive tool to subdue the voices of the common. In the recent political history of the subcontinent, the aforementioned political role of religion can hardly been overemphasized. Made on the rhetoric of Islam, Pakistan has frequently identified herself as Islam ka Qilla (fortress of Islam) since the very inception till date. Such a monolithic approach of religion has substantially shaped the individual and collective socio-political consciousness of people in Pakistan. Driving the country’s contemporary sensitivities, the politics of religion pivots Pakistani society. The contemporary English fiction in Pakistan largely represents the cultural issues, deeply rooted in religion. Tehmina Durrani, one of the most acclaimed Pakistani novelists, frequently writes about the religiosity and the status of women in Pakistan. Setting against this socio-political preference of religion in Pakistani society, it is proposed that Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy can be read as a critique of the retrogressive roles of clergy and aristocracy in Pakistan. Highlighting Pakistan’s patriarchal and religious society, it is contended that Blasphemy is a realistic representation of the wretched conditions of women. Investigating the politics of religion in Pakistan’s rural setting, the paper foregrounds Tehmina’s bold stance on issues of women in the harsh social conditions caused by the nexus of retrogressive clergy and oppressive feudal aristocracy.

‘The Delightful Logic of Intoxication’: Fictionalising Alcoholism

Alcohol invariably connotes different, often conflicting, feelings. As Iain Gately rightly observes in Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (2009), it “has been credited with the powers of inspiration and destruction” (1). This reflection is as relevant to classical antiquity, when wine was savoured during the Greek symposia, as to the modern world, in which alcohologists study the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. However, much as sociological, psychological, and medical research into alcoholism provide statistics, problem-analysis, and therapeutic approaches, literature offers representations of alcoholism which allow for a more profound insight into alcohol dependence and its many implications. This article focuses on how alcoholism is dissected and contextualised in literature, predominantly in contemporary English fiction.

Comparing n-gram-based functional categories in original versus translated texts

This study outlines and tests a method for comparing the use of functional categories consisting of high-frequency 3-grams in original and translated texts. The 3-grams are extracted from a corpus of contemporary English fiction texts (EO) and a comparable corpus of fiction texts translated into English from Norwegian (ET). The two varieties contain the same number of texts, thirty-nine, and about the same number of words, 1.3 to 1.4 million. Several different baselines against which to normalise the 3-gram frequencies are tested and a way of evening out the initial differences between the token counts of EO and ET is proposed. These last two points have an impact on the extent to which some of the categories differ statistically. On the basis of the comparison of the token counts of the 3-grams extracted for the study, it seems that most differences are a matter of degree, rather than being systemic at the level of the functions investigated.

Revealing Humanity: the Flexible Language of Literature

The article features the linguistic peculiarities of four novels the author uses in her course on Contemporary English Fiction: Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate, Jim Crace’s Quarantine, Graham Swift’s Last Orders, and Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. The novels probe deeply into some of the stranger aspects of human experience. Hilary Mantel writes of people who try to behave as balanced, rational beings, but to whom irrational and terrible things happen that have to be dealt with. The metaphorical language illuminates this philosophical exploration, which would otherwise be dull or unconvincing. The novel might seem strange for English readers, but the language carries the conviction of the true storyteller. J. Crace has a wonderful sense of exact words for an exact rhythm. Graham Swift’s novel is written as though it were the thoughts and memories of seven different characters. The language here is the colloquial vernacular, the language of elderly and middle-aged men and women with little education from south-eastLondon. The most extraordinary book of these four is Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. It consists of twelve chapters, which are a chronological set separate ‘stories’ that happened between 1650 and 1988. Each chapter uses a different literary genre for the story-telling: for example, a simple first-person narrative, a sermon, a journal, letters to a lover, lecture notes, an internal monologue, and – ending the novel – a television script. Thorpe has therefore set himself a colossal task: to render into lively readable English, the concerns and passions of individuals, often illiterate individuals, while retaining a sense of the language appropriate to a particular era and a particular genre.Literature is an act of communication between writer and reader which does justice to humanity through expressive, imaginative language. Nobody would be so arrogant as to say that reading literature is the only way of ‘being human’ but more than most activities it forces us to think about people other than ourselves.Readers who would like to read more have available many other fine examples of contemporary English literature, provided by the Oxford Russia Fund for those taking part in the project on Contemporary English Literature in Russian Universities.

ENGLISH PRESENT PARTICIPLES AND GERUNDS FUNCTIONING AS ADVERBIALS AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS INTO CZECH

The paper presents a comparative study of non-finite -ing forms with the aim of justifying their classification into gerunds and present participles. The empirical part focuses on -ing forms functioning as adverbials in contemporary English fiction and their corresponding Czech translations. The study is based on a manually excerpted corpus of works of contemporary English fiction and their translations into Czech. The results have shown present participles are more frequent than gerunds when functioning as adverbials, suggesting functional differences even in the area where they theoretically share a common function. As far as the translations into Czech are concerned, significant differences have been noticed between the two -ing forms, present participles being most commonly translated by means of clauses in a coordinate relation while for gerunds a way of translation which would so significantly prevail has not been identified, but nouns or verbal nouns have been the most common counterparts.

Performance and Performativity in Contemporary English Fiction in English

A review of Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru's recent study of the work of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Chandra

Images of the Russian People and Russia in the Contemporary English Novel

The mythological image of Russia in English fiction has been shaped and repeated over the course of many centuries. Russia was traditionally viewed as a distant, cold, unpredictable, and wild country. The aim of the article is to examine a new Russian cultural discourse that first appeared in English fiction in the early twentieth century and developed during the last decades of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries. Russia’s history in the twentieth century had a powerful impact on Russian themes in English literature. To prove this point, novels by three contemporary female English writers are analysed. In Penelope Lively’s The Moon Tiger (1987), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (1988), and Helen Dunmore’s The Siege (2001) and The Betrayal (2011), Russian history is viewed sympathetically through the dramatic fates of normal people. The characters break down stereotypes and create a complex image of Russia and its people in contemporary English fiction.

Proverbs as Vehicles of Truth in Contemporary English Fiction

The article addresses one of the key issues of the studies of proverbs which refers to the use of proverbs in literature. The article is an attempt to reveal the attitude of the author and the character towards the proverbial truth. The traditional wisdom contained in a proverb can be either accepted or totally rejected. Besides these extremes, there is another situation when the characters of a literary text and/ or the author accept the proverbial truth to a certain extent. A proverb is applied in most diverse ways in literature starting from traditional interpretations to literary reinterpretations which serve the specific needs of the author.

A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction

ecent criticism published on contemporary English fiction has laid special emphasis on the historiographic and intertextual dominant of novels struggling to come to terms with a failing sense of historical congruence. Little has been said about the revival of allegory and the almost coincidental emergence of a postmodernist form of the sublime in the works of such writers as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, D. M. Thomas, and Jeanette Winterson. Yet an exploration of this paradoxical polarity may allow us to reconsider the metafictional interrogation of these novelists on the exhaustion of representation and on the aporia stemming from the sometimes paralyzing knowledge that transparency has been radically put into question. Acknowledging this lack of transparency is but the initial step in the reassessment of the fictional agenda, as, for many English writers, the ensuing self-referentiality does not make allowance for two crucial elements of fiction: transience and loss. I would like to suggest here that although they are aware that, in Mihai Spariosu's words, all language is 'allegorical,' being an infinite network of deferments, displacements, and substitutions that point to and stand in for an absent, perhaps imaginary, referent or (60), many contemporary English writers still insist on staring this same absent origin in the face, even if the literary price to pay for this crime of lese postmodernism is the speechless terror of an apocalyptic sublime.

Contemporary English Fiction

Contemporary English Fiction