Contemporary Texts Research Articles

Two Neuter Pronouns in Picard

In the Vimeu variety of Picard, a Gallo-Romance closely related to French, three different neuter subject clitic pronouns are found:a,ch’, and a null form. This paper examines the distribution of these forms in contemporary texts in order to determine the extent to which these pronouns resemble those found in other Gallo-Romance languages or whether their source must be sought in colloquial varieties of French. We argue, based on phonological, syntactic, and semantic criteria, that the French origin better accounts for the similarities between the two varieties. Based on their syntactic distribution, we argue that the three forms represent two different pronouns,aandch’, that the null form is an allomorph ofain certain phonological contexts, and that the distinction betweena/Ø andch’constitutes an innovation in Picard.

МЕТОДОЛОГІЯ ВИВЧЕННЯ СУЧАСНОГО АНГЛІЙСЬКОГО ТЕКСТУ ПРО ТУРИЗМ (МУЛЬТИМОДАЛЬНИЙ АСПЕКТ)

The article is devoted to the methodology of studying the modern English text on tourism. Scientific interest in a multimodal text on tourism indicates the emergence of a form of writing, which is characterized by the latest features and characteristic style, including a combination of verbal and nonverbal components. The study of tourism discourse goes beyond specific disciplines, attracting the attention of specialists from various fields, such as linguistics, sociology, cultural and critical geography, economics, etc. Nevertheless, theories and methodologies for the study of multimodal phenomena (semiotic resources, modes and their interaction in multimodal discourse) – just as there are theories of language in the field of linguistics. A multimodal text on tourism is a complex semiotic system that requires comprehensive research. It should be noted that such a text is characterized by non-standardized language, foreign borrowings, slang and foreign language inclusions, abbreviations, compression, the tendency to save nominative means or their redundancy, citation, inclusion of other texts, nonlinearity.While studying the text, we distinguish two main directions: from the author → the study of the formation of the idea and the creation of the text; or from the reader → an analysis of the perception of the text and its idea by the recipient. All elements of different semiotic systems presented in the English-language text on tourism interact and appear as a single structural, semantic whole. The aim of this article is to study the features of the methodology of studying the modern English text on tourism. The object of research is a multimodal text about tourism. The subject is to determine the methodology of studying the modern English text on tourism.To analyze the multimodal nature of the English text on tourism and its components, it is productive to use such methods as semiotic analysis, method of intermedial analysis and method of intertextual analysis. In this research we have analyzed verbal and non-verbal elements and their interaction in the English text on tourism, in particular, graphic images in contemporary text on tourism.

Introduction to Focus: Literary Activism

Introduction to Focus: Literary Activism Beth Miller (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Beth Miller, Focus Editor It’s the afternoon as I sit down with a brand new, long-awaited novel by my favorite author. I’ve been working all morning, a small part of my mind peering forward, anticipating this moment. I open the cover … and wonder if I should be doing something else. I know I’m not alone in this. Whether as part of a relaxing evening at home, prepping for a lecture, or following a chat at the local bookstore, many of us have wondered if we ought to be doing something “more” — practical, important, helpful, immediate. What purpose does literature serve in an era of climate change and the wide array of tragedy, injustice, and loss that it entails? Can literature, broadly construed, truly be activist? Can literature inspire effective, ethical, and productive thoughts, actions, and habits, especially regarding environmental concerns? Or should we, as readers, writers, and scholars, turn our thoughts and actions to something more beneficial? By the close of this special issue of the American Book Review, I hope your answer to that final question is no, or perhaps the more moderate “not necessarily.” This issue examines literary activism in contemporary texts with a specifically environmental focus. The slow violence of climate change, to borrow Rob Nixon’s term, intersects other forms of inequality, whether at a global or local level. Environmental injustice inherently provokes social, political, and economic injustice, an intermingling the reviews that follow will show. This shared theme resonates in the selected texts as well, where each author seeks to demonstrate this inherent interconnectivity and each reviewer finds spaces where we might push boundaries further, especially in fiction. It will not be news to anyone that, at some point, we need to move beyond textual worlds back into the physical spaces around us. But what I believe you will also see, both in this issue and in the coming years, is that ecologically oriented literature has an important part to play in environmental activism. This shift in perception begins with a re-examination of the reading process and approaching reading as a form of ecology. Environmentally engaging texts invite their readers to take a step back and see the world around themselves, and their place inside it, with fresh eyes. These books can help us find new understandings of how deeply embedded we each are in our own local environments and extend that recognition outward across the globe. Concurrently, readers can more accurately conceptualize how our present moment in history — including the individual person and his or her actions — reaches across vast stretches of time to the far-distant future and ancient past. This approach entails a duality in our reading practice: reading ecologically — for environmental issues — as well as an ecology of reading — a study of the ways in which literature allows us to more clearly see relationship and interconnection. As a new way of seeing, reading ecology emphasizes our mutual dependence on one another and the potential power of individual impact. Crucially, an ecology of reading results in a shift in imaginative scale. In this case, literature serves as a catalyst, expanding the measure by which readers comprehend and evaluate their place in the world and the ramifications of their daily actions for a global environment. The most readily apparent shifts in our imaginations occur across time and space, expanding our cognitive scales to allow us to better grasp the far-reaching ramifications of climate change. The texts surveyed in this special issue are not equally ecological in their scope or aim. In what follows, two openly environmentalist works of nonfiction bookend a selection of contemporary fiction. First, Kyle Bladow’s review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019) questions the practical activism side of ecologically oriented literature. Foer’s text invites readers to examine their own apathy: Why do our actions, even our emotional investment, fall so short of our ideals? On the opposite end of the issue, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) brings us full circle with its meditation...

If Sages Worked in Tech: Ancient Wisdom for Future‐Proof Leadership

Leadership and its definition is on a continual evolution that is often no more than exchanging one outdated characteristic (goodbye “Charismatic Leadership” ‐ the idea that one figurehead inspires and directs the company) (Vergauwe, Wille, Hofmans, Kaiser, & De Fruyt, 2018) for more progressive examples, (hello “Servant Leadership” ‐ the idea that the purpose of leaders it to serve those who deliver the ‘product’) (Linuesa‐Langreo, Ruiz‐Palomino, & Elche‐Hortelano, 2017); without fully explaining the transition. Partly due to the newness of the field compared to other academic disciplines, and partly to the acceleration of business behavior; academic and business definitions of leadership seem to be struggling to keep pace. The current article presents evidence to support a more enduring lens of leadership, with particular attention to leadership definitions from Taoism and contemporary texts that describe the Tao. In the context of “second‐tier” leadership, a relatively modern concept, it suggests approaches to the attainment of the Tao style may be another route to a post‐conventional worldview more applicable in the modern age. The future‐proof leader has a greater capacity to wrestle the complexities of the modern world (Kegan, 1994) and take multiple perspectives on any given problem. Future‐proofed “wise” leadership is agnostic of the change speed of technology, yet the momentum of technology, globalization, and instant communication are what makes its understanding a modern necessity.

Visões de Lisboa em dissonância: dinâmicas do poder no espaço urbano e escritas em trânsito

This article aims to analyse the literature produced in Europe and in Portugal in particular, by people in transit, contemporary migrants, focusing on the dissonances present in these texts in relation to the he-gemonic collective imaginary. Considering the urban dynamics and the action of public power in Lisbon, as well as the representation of the city space in contemporary literary texts - including the novel Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida -, this article highlights the relationship between contemporary capitalist development and colonial persistence in the daily life of the city of Lisbon.

Huurlingen, mobiliteit en reizigerslatijn

Summary The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it argues that the Mycenaean Greek world served as a nexus for international trade between the Near East and Europe during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 to 1100 BCE). Rather than a barbarian periphery, Europe – and in particular regions such as the Carpathian basin and the southern Baltic (Denmark and Scania) – was an integral part of the much better known ‘civilised’ world of the ancient Near East. Second, it argues that ‘mercenaries’ (a term that I will use rather loosely, and which includes both private entrepreneurs and military captives) served as a hitherto overlooked conduit for knowledge exchange between Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Near East. It will do so by highlighting a number of remarkable archaeological finds, and by discussing these against the backdrop of contemporary (Late Bronze Age and Iron Age) texts as well as later legends.

Дискурс-«логофаг»: границы лингвокреативности и стереотипности в рекламе

The paper deals with the boundaries between linguistic creativity and linguistic stereotyping in relation to advertising discourse. Advertising discourse borrows language techniques and units from other discourses that allow defining the “secondary” nature of its semiosis and language. Taking it into account, the study compares advertising with the avant-garde artistic discourse which is genetically and typologically one of the main discourses-“donors” of advertising which can be described as discourse-“logophagus”. In the comparison of discourses, the paper reveals two types of linguistic creativity: linguistic and discourse creativity. Linguistic creativity is the creation of new linguistic units with the aim of forming a new language or updating existing one. Dis- course creativity is updating at the “microstructure level” of discourse aimed at the most successful achievement of discourse goals and increasing the effectiveness of communication. Discourse creativity is basic to advertising discourse. The study proposes a two-stage model of language manipulation. The aim of the first stage is “deautomatization” of the recipient’s perception that meets the criteria of linguistic creativity, while the aim of the second one is recipient’s “automazation” that corresponds to stereotyping. The paper explores the features of linguistic creativity and stereotyping in poetry and advertising on the basis of three text types: the avant-garde poetic text (“In the Car” (1913) by Mayakovsky), the hybrid avant-garde and advertising texts (“The White Red Wedge of White” (1920) by Lisitzky and “Soviet Alphabet” (1919) by Mayakovsky and Jakobson) and the contemporary advertising text. As a result, the study models a scale of linguistic creativity in advertising discourse. Linguistic creativity is a gradual phenomenon, the degree of which can increase or decrease depending on the existence, frequency and degree of manifestation of a particular parameter in the discourse. The main features of linguistic creativity are structural (the existence or not of linguistic anomalies), semantic (the existence or not of polysemy; explicit / implicit expression of information) and pragmatic (“strong” / “weak” communication) criteria.

Four Offaly saints. The Lives of Ciar�n of Clonmacnoise, Ciar�n of Slm�n of Lynally and F�on�n of Kinnitty by P�draig � Riain (review)

244 North American journal of Celtic studies The final chapter, ‘Dogs in the nighttime’, constitutes all of the third section of the book proper. Here the author invites us to pay attention to subjects where the lawbooks are particularly silent. In this case, it is noted that despite the fact that the medieval literature is full of graphic scenes of violence, the lawbooks are strangely reticent on the subject. This silence is even more striking when compared to the Welsh chronicles, such as Brut y tywysogion, and contemporary laws in England, which are very detailed in their descriptions of violent acts and the resulting compensation and/or punishment. This is not to say that the Welsh lawbooks do not have detailed schemas for compensation for various types of injuries; they do, the Value of Limbs, (183–185). But why the silence on violence? The author suggests that the silence is deliberate on the part of the redactors (201). The purpose of this silence seems to be a deliberate effort to contrast contemporary depictions of the Welsh as ruled by violence, and instead to depict the Welsh as strong, yet ‘ruled by law and grounded in agriculture’ (211). The conclusion reminds readers of the multiple realities depicted in the Welsh lawbooks and of the ways that symbolic interpretations, and not necessarily literal ones, can further our understanding of the Welsh legal material. Most of us who work with medieval legal texts are trained to approach the law with an eye towards a literal interpretation of what the texts say. Surely, what they say must be ‘true’. As Robin Chapman Stacey demonstrates, ‘true’ does not have to mean ‘literal’, although it sometimes can mean just that. ‘True’ can also mean metaphorical and symbolic . And the ‘truths’ presented in the lawbooks are never too far away from contemporary literary texts, or political events, or current intellectual trends within a wider European context. Only a scholar of Robin Chapman Stacey’s caliber could have produced such a scholarly work as this. She has broadened and deepened our understanding of not just the Welsh legal texts, but also the ways in which the literary texts interact with and inform our understanding of the laws. By combining both points of view, new ways of interpreting both types of texts emerge. The analytical model presented here will inform future generations of scholars both within and outside the field of Welsh law. Four Offaly saints. The Lives of Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, Ciarán of Seir, Colmán of Lynally and Fíonán of Kinnitty, comp. & trans. Pádraig Ó Riain. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-84682-704-4. xvii + 142 pp. $19.95 (paper). Gregory J. Darling Hostos Community College and Fordham University Gregory J. Darling [gregorydarling@msn.com] obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of English at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2003. His dissertation was based on a medieval Irish manuscript. He currently teaches in New York City at Hostos Community College and Monroe College. Reviews 245 In Four Offaly saints, Pádraig Ó Riain presents the reader with a masterpiece of hagiography —replete with photographs and maps—grounded in careful and thorough scholarship on the lives of St. Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, St. Ciarán of Seir, St. Colmán of Lynally, and St. Fíonán of Kinnitty—four early saints associated with the modern-day county of Offaly in the center of Ireland. Ó Riain notes that, after the publication of his Four Tipperary saints, he was asked to write on the saints of Offaly. He begins by pointing out in the Introduction the value of hagiography if it cannot be considered history per se: If hagiography is not history, as is now generally held, what value attaches to Lives of saints? Largely confined to patrons of substantial churches, Irish saints’ Lives can be of considerable value, not because they throw much light on their subjects but because they reveal how the traditions surrounding the saints might be used to protect and promote the interests of the communities that hold them in high regard (xiii). Hagiography, in other words, can highlight the ‘interests’ of groups holding traditions about the saints in...

Reveling in Restraint: Limiting the Neo-Victorian Girl

Reveling in Restraint:Limiting the Neo-Victorian Girl Michelle Beissel Heath (bio) There is an inherent tension in neo-Victorian fiction1 between deviance and comfort. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn refer to this as the appeal, on the one hand, of the "dangerous edginess of nineteenthcentury fiction," "the possibilities nineteenth-century fiction always contained within itself for subversion" (4), and, on the other hand, what many neo-Victorian critics observe as comforts inherent in the nostalgia the genre has the potential to provide.2 This tension is both defused and elevated in contemporary children's fiction depicting or alluding to the long nineteenth century. Except for a special edition of Neo-Victorian Studies, The Child in Neo-Victorian Arts and Discourse (2012), put together by Anne Morey and Claudia Nelson, and a recent collection, The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children's and Adolescent Literature and Culture (2018), edited by Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day, the vast majority of criticism focusing on neo-Victorian texts over the last few decades has centered on texts designed primarily for adults. Yet growing numbers of neo-Victorian texts take children as their primary audience.3 It is to these understudied texts this article will turn, tracing some of the contradictions and critical commonplaces of neo-Victorianism to examine portrayals of gender and especially girlhood in a range of neo-Victorian children's texts: adaptations, realist texts, and a notably long-lasting, slowly evolving, children's neo-Victorian fantasy series. In their consideration of contemporary children's neo-Victorian texts, Morey and Nelson reference the nineteenth century's seemingly unfettered imperialist practices to acknowledge that "part of the past's appeal may be the lack of restraint that it promises to those pursuing artistic and financial success" ("Secret Sharer" 6). As ideas of "dangerous edginess" and "subversion" highlighted by Heilmann and Llewellyn suggest, adult neo-Victorian texts and even Young Adult (YA) neo-Victorian texts often take as their focus this seeming "lack of restraint": liberating explorations of what is typically repressed, oppressed, dark, and/or hidden in nineteenth-century texts—such as explicit sexuality and deviations from heteronormative expectations. The very nature of their audience ensures that adult publishers and purchasers would likely frown on children's texts that, say, offer overt [End Page 80] explorations of sexuality. As a result, children's neo-Victorian texts, unlike their adult counterparts, are frequently left both grappling with and reveling in restraint rather than enjoying a lack of it, a fact that is perhaps most forcefully clear with the case of children's literature featuring girl protagonists. Girlhood, and the space between childhood and adulthood (including but not limited to today's notions of adolescence), were challenging concepts for the Victorians, especially in the latter part of the century and at the turn of the century when, increasingly, ideas of what girls and women could be and do were under vigorous debate. This fact has been observed by a variety of children's literature scholars, including Sally Mitchell in her groundbreaking The New Girl and Beth Rodgers in her recent revisiting of the idea of the "New Girl" (or really, the "modern girl") and ambiguous notions of adolescent girlhood. Indeed, in their consideration of Katie Kapurch's analysis of Jane Eyre adaptations today, Morey and Nelson echo such ideas and state the situation bluntly: "girlhood was a troubling, ambiguous concept for the Victorians" ("Secret Sharer" 8). They note, though, that the Victorians' difficulty in pinpointing "girlhood" may help "to explain the popularity of the neo-Victorian for modern girls, who must confront similar ambiguities in social status," if not in "negotiating agency" (8). It is with this notion of ambiguous girlhood that I return to Morey and Nelson's comment about nineteenth-century settings as a place of "lack of restraint" today. For realist neo-Victorian texts, or texts adapting original nineteenth-century literature (whether realist or fantastic in origin), negotiating nineteenth-century limitations is seemingly inevitable if one wishes to remain faithful to the period or to the origin text. Indeed, realist or adapted neo-Victorian texts' focus on historical accuracy aligns with Kate Mitchell's argument for "[p]ositioning...

Gianina Cărbunariu: 20/20 : A kortárs erdélyi magyar színházi szövegalkotás kérdései

Gianina Cărbunariu’s performance titled 20/20 serves as a point of reference both in the oeuvre of the writer-director, and in the history of Romanian experimental theatre, political theatre, Romanian-Hungarian co-productions, and the history of the Targu Mures Studio Yorick. Analysing the performance allows us to examine some key questions of contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian theatrical text creation.

A Hybrid Classification Method via Character Embedding in Chinese Short Text With Few Words

Last decades have witnessed the significance development of research in short text classification. However, most existing methods only focus on the text which contained dozens of words like Twitter or MicroBlog, but not take the short text with few words like news headline or invoice name into consideration. Meanwhile, contemporary short text classification methods either to expand feature of short text with external corpus or to learn the feature representation from all the texts, which have not take the difference between words of short text into full consideration. Notably, the classification of short text with few words are usually determined by a few specific key words contrary to documents classification or traditional short text classification. To address these problems, this paper propose a hybrid classification method of Attention mechanism and Feature selection via Character embedding in Chinese short text with few words, called AFC. More specifically, firstly, the character embedding is computed to represent Chinese short texts with few words, which takes full advantage of short text information without external corpus. Secondly, attention-based LSTM is introduced in our method to project the data into feature representation space with weighting, which make the keywords in classification have more subtle value. Furthermore, the semantic similarity between content and class label information is calculated for feature selection, which reduces the possible negative influence of some redundant information on classification. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to other competing methods.

The Politics of the Past in Early China by Vincent S. Leung

Reviewed by: The Politics of the Past in Early China by Vincent S. Leung Lothar von Falkenhausen The Politics of the Past in Early China. Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Hardcover US $100, ISBN 9781108425728; Paperback US $30, ISBN 9781108443241; E-book US $80, ISBN 9781108619196. In his introductory chapter, Leung forcefully dismantles the essentializing notion, pervasive in older Sinological writings, that references to the past in early Chinese texts were overwhelmingly didactic in their motivation. He instead proposes to focus on the “deliberate mobilization of the field of the past as ideological capital toward the construction or deconstruction of various political arguments and ethical ideas” (p. 13). So far, so good, but can anyone come up with a new and truly superior understanding? As one reads on, such initial doubts are quickly dispelled. Chapter by chapter, Leung carefully builds a compelling and, as far as I am able to judge, quite original argument that does justice both to the diversity of the texts and the agency of their authors in their historical and sociopolitical circumstances. The textual loci adduced in support of this new narrative are judiciously chosen and conscientiously translated. Rather than attempting to cover every pertinent text, Leung deliberately restricts himself to a limited range. The result is a slim but intelligent volume that is eminently worth reading. Chapter 1, by far the longest in the book, ranges from the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions to the Confucian Analects and the Mozi. In contradistinction to the protagonists of the Bronze Inscriptions, who dwelled upon their genealogical links to illustrious ancestors in ritual settings, Confucius—in what strikes one as an astonishingly modern gesture—was the first to treat the past as a veritable smørgåsbord of precedents available to all comers, regardless of background, to help them determine their course of action as autonomous moral agents in the present age. The authors of the Mozi, while sharing a similar outlook on the past, flipped Confucius’s vision by treating the past as a series of negative examples illustrating the chaos that would ensue if individuals were to exert their autonomy instead of submitting under the discipline of an orderly régime imposed by a sage ruler. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the Laozi (as represented in the manuscript text excavated at Guodian, Jingmen [Hubei]) and the Mengzi. According to Leung, these two approximately contemporaneous texts both implicitly deny the relevance of any historical reference: the Laozi by initiating a “cosmogonic turn” and tracing the origins of the world way back to a patently mythical female figure; and the Mengzi by insisting that it is only one’s inborn moral nature, rather than any precedent from history, that will determine human action in concrete situations of the present. Chapter 3 treats the attitudes to the past espoused in the writings of the Warring States-period Legalist thinkers and the imperial Qin ideologues. While the former constantly referred to the past as a way of emphasizing that times had changed and historical precedent was useless in dealing with new circumstances, the latter proclaimed [End Page 485] the end of all history. The Qin world order was intended to work like mechanical clock-work, creating a never-varying pattern that accommodated all conceivable situations and events, and that, if successfully imposed, would have removed all need to account for individual cases; in other words, it would have assimilated human life to natural history. In chapter 4, Leung describes how the early Western Han thinkers Jia Yi and Lu Jia reacted to the failure of Qin by reviving, in Jia’s case, a Confucian vision of autonomous agency guided by historical precedents (which now included the failures of the Qin), or anchoring, in Lu’s case, a new view of the world in the study of the Confucian classics, which were now reinterpreted as revealed knowledge transmitted from the sages of the past. Chapter 5 zeroes in on two chapters in the Shi ji that deal with economic issues. Leung juxtaposes the anarchist model of a natural economy that works best without any institutional interference presented in the “Huozhi liezhuan [Biographies of the money-makers]” chapter against...

Hybrid Distance-based, CNN and Bi-LSTM System for Dictionary Expansion

Dictionaries like Wordnet can help in a variety of Natural Language Processing applications by providing additional morphological data. They can be used in Digital Humanities research, building knowledge graphs and other applications. Creating dictionaries from large corpora of texts written in a natural language is a task that has not been a primary focus of research, as other tasks have dominated the field (such as chat-bots), but it can be a very useful tool in analysing texts. Even in the case of contemporary texts, categorizing the words according to their dictionary entry is a complex task, and for less conventional texts (in old or less researched languages) it is even harder to solve this problem automatically. Our task was to create a software that helps in expanding a dictionary containing word forms and tagging unprocessed text. We used a manually created corpus for training and testing the model. We created a combination of Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory networks, convolutional networks and a distancebased solution that outperformed other existing solutions. While manual post-processing for the tagged text is still needed, it significantly reduces the amount of it.

Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris

Reviewed by: Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris Amanda Joan Wetmore carissa m. harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 285. isbn: 1–5017–3040–1. $42.95. Harris analyzes a selection of Middle English and Scots texts in a compelling and relevant monograph. Sexual obscenity’s didactic power to agitate and provoke thought connects her readings of literary sexual encounters. Obscenity reinforces medieval patriarchy by deigning women corporeal, sexually gluttonous objects. Many of Harris’ female speakers, however, adopt the language of their debasers and turn it around on them in a feminine heteroglossia. Harris’ first two chapters explore how men perpetuate rape culture and misogyny in same-sex environments, even as they petition for and against sex with women. In Chapter One, ‘Felawe Masculinity,’ manhood is established through narratives of sexual conquest among the ‘mercantile-artisan’ Canterbury pilgrims. Focusing primarily on the Reeve’s Tale, in which two clerks rape a mother and daughter based on the projected reaction of their peers, obscene talk among men mutually authorizes and encourages sexual aggression toward women. Harris brings in evidence from the North Wales Ched Evans rape trail (2016), showing similar discourses among modern same-sex peers in their justification of rape. Chapter Two, ‘With a Cunt,’ introduces poetry battles of the sixteenth-century Scottish court. In the context of Mary Stuart’s rumored adultery and young James V’s series of illegitimate children, these texts present a misogynist disgust with female bodies as inherently destabilizing for the male body politic. Instead, libidinal energies are turned inward as poetic prowess substitutes for the sexual act. Harris relates this rhetoric to modern freestyling, in which a rapper insults his opponent by degrading the women close to him. The final three chapters focus on women’s fictive voices and examine their ability to teach men about their pain and pleasure, and other women about navigating the sexual world: negotiating desire, obtaining pleasure, and avoiding rape and its effects. Chapter Three’s ‘Pastourelle Encounters’ presents idyllic debate poems between men and women over a typically forced sex act. Although the narrator is usually male and first and last to speak, women voice their non-consent, fear, and pain. Some resist through verbal sparring, some eventually succumb but protest systemic inequality, others are brutally raped and decry their injuries. Chapter Four, ‘Pedagogies of Pleasure,’ focuses on understudied English women’s songs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, helpfully placed in the Appendix. After the Black Death, young single women’s rise to the urban working class left them [End Page 72] especially vulnerable. Women’s objectification in the workplace was often expressed in the language of capital, which women seized upon as a model for negotiation. Harris then compares the same-sex education these sexually explicit lyrics offered to modern abstinence-only education, which, by limiting knowledge, limits the possibility of female agency. Finally, Chapter Five, ‘Songs of Wantonness,’ offers a selection of lyrics from two early Tudor anthologies, MS Ashmole 176 and the Ritson Manuscript. Polite and obscene lyrics about consensual and forced sex acts register meaningfully together as they are juxtaposed, exposing courtly ideology’s violent distortions—especially in the fiction of women’s power and men’s pain. Fictive women’s voices offer narratives that evoke ‘educational empathy’ for sexual victims, portraying the emotional, physical, social, and psychological repercussions of rape. Harris is a delicate close-reader, employing etymology and colloquial usage to bolster her vivid readings of obscene metaphors in mostly understudied texts. She also argues from codicological evidence to consider textual transmission and reader response. Harris ties all of her material to the present day, providing readings of contemporary texts in parallel with her analysis of a ‘usable’ medieval past. She concludes with a reading of Trump’s infamous ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ recording, revealing many of the same long-standing misogynist paradigms. Obscenity authorizes misogynist stereotypes, but it can also be used to challenge systemic violence and inequality. Amanda Joan Wetmore University of Toronto Copyright © 2020 Arthuriana

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Review

Concept of Sakuni Bala Graha with special reference to impetigo -A Review

Background: Graha Chikitsa is one among Astanga Ayurveda which deals with the management of Graha roga. Sakuni is a type of graha which affects skin. By nature Graha are not visible by naked eye due to which they can be understood as microorganisms causing various diseases. According to the contemporary system, Shakuni graham can be compared to Impetigo. Prevalence of Impetigo in childhood is 40.2 % in 2015. It is affected more in children than adults.Aim & Objectives: To review sakuni graha and its similarities and differences with Impetigo in children.Methodology: Review of classical Ayurveda literature along with contemporary text books, journals and internet sources were reviewed.Discussion: Sakuni graha roga is described by Acharya Vagbhata and Sushruta. Clinical features of Sakuni graha are flaccidity on extremities, loose stools, ulcers on tongue, palate and throat along with papules/pustules on joints, excoriations on anal region and buccal cavity, frightened look, fever, smell of birds.Impetigo is the commonest bacterial infections in children. It is caused by bita-hemolytic streptococci or staph ,aureus, typically begin exposed part of the body after a breach in skin continuity. Initial lesions appear as a tiny vesicle or pustule, which rapidly develops in to a honey colored crusted plaque without much pain/ erythema. Conclusion: Sakuni is a graha roga which is manifested as skin disease. It can be correlated with Impetigo due to same features like pustules on skin seen in infant. But it can different other features like diarrhea, arthritis.

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? Nordic Ecocritical Approaches to Children’s Texts

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? Nordic Ecocritical Approaches to Children’s Texts Catherine Olver (bio) Goga, Nina, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Bjørg Oddrun Hallås, Aslaug Nyrnes, editors. Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues. Palgrave, 2018. 299 pp. $119.99 pb. ISBN 9783319904979. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures revisits the connections between cultural constructions of “nature” and “child.” The collection asks to what extent texts use traditional tropes “to place the child in an idyllic and romantic relation to nature” (6) and whether they reflect and engage with contemporary environmental challenges. Along with the expected analyses of picture books and novels, Nina Goga, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Bjørg Oddrun Hallås, and Aslaug Nyrnes’s collection features a chapter on picture-book apps and another on a television series, as well as a pleasing amount of attention to illustrated poetry from several traditions. It focuses on contemporary Nordic texts but also includes chapters on Ted Hughes, Catalan poetry, The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, and novels by Mordicai Gerstein, Philip Pullman, and David Almond. The reference to “cultures” in the title acknowledges the specificity of cultural links between nature and the child, such as the Nordic emphasis on children’s nature competence, while highlighting the need to compare different cultural concepts of nature if humanities scholars wish to facilitate international co-operation on environmental issues. Most chapters are written by scholars associated with the research group “Nature in Children’s Literature: Landscapes and Beings—Fostering Ecocitizens,” led by Nina Goga and based at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. This edited collection makes the group’s productive discussions available to the wider community of ecocritics and scholars working in young people’s texts and cultures. The volume is [End Page 215] usefully organized into sections on “Ethics and Aesthetics,” “Landscape,” “Vegetal,” “Animal,” and “Human.” Marianne Røskeland opens the section on “Ethics and Aesthetics” by tackling the dilemma that, on the one hand, the desire to master nature is a cause of our environmental problems, and on the other, that “[m]astering one’s surroundings is also central in any child’s development . . .” (28). Her reading of the Norwegian picture book Sånt Som Er (Things That Are) details how the book challenges the reader’s anthropocentric process of categorizing objects; Røskeland brings Wolfgang Iser’s “gaps” and “negation of expectations” (138) to bear on James J. Gibson’s “affordances” (119) through her argument that a child reader perceives possible ways of using natural objects depicted in the book according to their own personal interests and physical limitations. The root meaning of “aesthetics,” relating to perception, arises again in chapter 3 as Gunnar Karlsen considers what it means to appreciate nature aesthetically and why it matters for the development of ecocitizens. He argues for a moderate cognitive view which combines some knowledge of the natural world with the multisensory experience of being in it—though when reading, emotional responses matter more than multisensory experiences for readers to develop moral skills. Nina Goga’s chapter demonstrates how the aesthetics of the novel Ishavspirater (The Ice Sea Pirates) and its environmental ethics are bound together in plot and character development. She extends Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” to propose that the protagonist of The Ice Sea Pirates is “a hero collector; one who collects and gathers experiences through her travels and encounters . . .” (60), moving from inherited knowledge about interspecies ethics to the understanding that comes from experience. In the second section on “Landscape,” Aslaug Nyrnes and Ahmed Khateeb each return to Rousseau, partnering Émile with the contemporary texts Tonje Glimmerdal (Astrid the Unstoppable) by Maria Parr and Stian Hole’s Garmann Trilogy. Both chapters explore contemporary children’s growth in pastoral landscapes using Terry Gifford’s concept of the “post-pastoral,” which “successfully suggests a collapse of the human/nature divide while being aware of the problematics involved” (26). Kristin Ørjasæter continues the investigation of post-pastoral and anti-pastoral landscapes by jumping into the jungles of Svart elfenben [End Page 216] (Black Ivory) and Skriket fra jungelen: En filmroman...

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart

Reviewed by: That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart Taylor Patrick O'Neill That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 222 pp. What can one say about David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved? It does not seem to be a text which admits of moderate responses. Its readers seem almost exclusively to laud it as a new epoch in Christian theology or to condemn it as a screed of ad hominems which rejects the vast majority of Christians throughout history. Still, one wants to be as positive as one can, if for no other reason than that after reading That All Shall Be Saved one thirsts desperately for even a drop of irenicism. I have three major thoughts about Hart's work, which is broken up into four "Meditations." My first thought deals with the mode of Hart's prose and argumentation; the second and third deal briefly with two of the arguments themselves. First, much has been made about the form of Hart's delivery (both here and in previous works), and I think justifiably so. Even after completing the work, I am still unsure as to what Hart's intentions with the book were. It often reads more like a personal journal or the beginnings of a comprehensive work which is still gestating than a work of speculative theology. Hart spends substantial time earlier in the book discussing his own experiences and history. He never directly engages any particular theological text, historical or contemporary. Names and ideas are referenced in passing but never cited. A single contemporary text is mentioned but hardly explored (Brian Davies's The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil takes that honor). One keeps expecting the rhetorical setup to punch through to a complete argument on the next page, but the blow never lands. There are the beginnings of very interesting ideas here, but the times in which they are argued forcefully or even fleshed out are few and far between. The work concludes with a basic re-hashing of the post-modern trope on the genesis of the doctrine of hell: the Church, especially when it mixed with temporal powers, duplicitously concocted an error to keep the rabble in line. The rhetoric is rich, but there is not an ounce of historical evidence to back up the claim. On the very final pages of the book, Hart seems to be alert to [End Page 1399] the lack of argumentation, saying: "I could go on. I could, if nothing else, spend a few hundred pages more dealing with certain highly technical issues of Christian metaphysical tradition. … But I do not think that it would actually add anything to the essential arguments of these pages," (207–8). It is hard to overstate how frustrating it is to find this statement nestled at the end of over two hundred pages. Indeed, the debate about the existence of an eternal hell is in so many ways a debate which absolutely must take place upon the metaphysical level. I would like to see this argument in its fullest and most robust form. Instead, all we receive is, frankly, a lot of preaching to the choir with rhetorical flourishes. Hart's grasp of the English language is probably unmatched by any living theologian, and yet he transgresses the fundamental principle of writing: show rather than tell. One particularly disappointing trend throughout the work is the use of false dilemmas. Hart tends to pick the lowest hanging fruit as a bogey man, threatening you with the most radical of positions as the only alternative to his own. One is either a Hartian or a double-predestinarian, Calvinist infernalist. And gleeful about it too! One agrees with Hart that St. John's Revelation is "hazy to the point of unintelligibility" or else one is looking for "some kind of visionary script for the end of time, a magic mirror for scrying out things yet to come" (108). Either universalism or else radical individualism where "the ethos of heaven turns out to be 'every soul...

Anakronizam hrvatske lezbijske književnosti

Although queer literature can fit into common timelines of the history of literature, this essay discusses ways in which Croatian lesbian fiction challenges and sabotages such attempts. It combines interpretations of fin-de-siècle early lesbian writing (novels the Widow by Josip Eugen Tomić and the Passion by David Pijade) with those of contemporary texts. As for recently published texts, the essay analyzes short story collection Posudi mi smajl (Lend Me Your Smile) and novel Do isteka zaliha (Until the Supplies Run Out) by Nora Verde, the short story "Vrata Pakla" ("the Gates of Hell") by Ružica Gašperov and the postmodernist short story collection Moja ti (My You) by Jasna Jasna Žmak, in order to show that foreign model should not be uncritically applied to Croatian literature. These texts were published almost simultaneously, which prevents a simple understanding of Croatian lesbian fiction as developing from suffering and secrecy towards affirmation and open displays of identity. Also, the authors appropriate and reinterpret older genre models - in the essay, I show that the timeline of Croatian lesbian fiction is a queer (nonnormative) timeline. Like the coherent chronology, coherent identity also comes under question: Žmak destabilizes it through her postmodernist textuality. The authors of Croatian women's prose treat lesbian relationships as parts of female self-actualization narratives. This shows that Croatian lesbian (and, more generally, queer) literature cannot be reduced to gay and lesbian confessions targeting a similar audience.

Canadian Wild Animal Stories: Structuring Ecological Education Contents

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Canadian wild animal stories are formed and are constructed as literary contents. Wild animal stories are one of the most distinctive genres of Canadian literature. As an alternative to Kiplingian anthropomorphism, Charles Roberts created the realistic animal story and Ernest Thompson Seton established it as a distinctive literary genre. Its influence is realized in the contemporary literary texts like Farley Mowat’s novel, which has a powerful impact upon our daily life. In addition to the narratives of exploration and travel, Canada has a strong literary tradition of settlement and domesticity narratives. Under this literary legacy, an animal as the other self is constructed and Margaret Atwood’s works lies at the apex of it. Canadian imagination is characterized by the coexistence of human beings and wild animals, and is fully realized in the literary texts based upon preserving human kinship with wild animals and establishing an empathic relationship through realistic storytelling. Canada developed this particular genre, and a study and education of wild animal stories contributes to both literary studies in English and Canadian studies.