Dramatic Tale Research Articles

Przeoczony polski Faust („Ścibor” Tomasza L. Potockiego)

The article presents a forgotten drama Ścibor: baśń dramatyczna z drugiej połowy XVI wieku [Ścibor: a dramatic tale of the second half of the 16th century] (1911) by Tomasz L. Potocki. The author of the article collected and complemented data related to Potocki’s biography as the owner of the Zyple estate, a reformer in agriculture and forestry, and a social and educational activist in Suwałki Province. The author confirmed the authorship of the poems that Potocki published in “Tygodnik Suwalski” [The Suwałki Weekly]. The interpretation of the work involves an analysis of the motif of Faust and the theme of the Arian presence in Poland. The context, which explains the idea of the drama, is the analogy of the destruction of the nation and religion in the 16th century and during the Revolution of 1905. Through the combination of the Faust motif and the theme of the Arian sect, Potocki created his drama with its national and Catholic significance.

Художественный конфликт и характеры пьесы – сказки «Звездный камень» Нелли Лукоже-вой

The article explores the contribution of Nelly Lukozheva to the development of the genre in the Adyghe children’s dramatic tale. Until now, in Adyghe literary criticism, there is no research work on modern children’s literature, and many genres of Adyghe children’s literature and drama are still poorly studied. The appeal of the playwright-librettist Nelly Lukozheva to folklore mo-tives in globalization problems should be considered as a certain trend that has recently been not-ed in domestic multinational literature. Currently, the genre of literary fairy tale in the Kabardino-Circassian language occupies an important place in modern Adyghe literature. The world of the author’s artistic fairy tales reflects the life philosophy of the author and the moral and ethical norms and laws of society and the state, transmitted through symbols, signs, metaphors and vari-ous sentiments. The play-fairy tale “Starstone” by Nelly Lukozheva provides a relevant subject of research, because the author turns his close attention to the cultural, ethnic, lexical and social functions of fairy tales. Therefore, the emergence of recent works of drama makes it possible to touch the spiritual culture of the Adyghe people. Dramatic works as fairy tale plays are of special scientific interest both in theoretical terms and in studying the forms and features of the existence of folklore. The proposed article also draws attention to the presence in the fairy tale play of Nelly Lukozheva of ethnic information at the level of themes, ideas, style and some specific aspects, reveals artistic conflict and gives images of the heroes characteristics in her fairy tale play “Star-stone.”

Postcards from the past. How a fossil tree can picture the Peruvian Andes ten million years ago

Fossil plants found in the Peruvian Andes revealed a dramatic tale of past environmental change. This transformation was a response of the rapid mountain uplift that occurred millions of years ago in this region. These findings underscore the fundamental role that the Andean uplift play shaping South American past, present and future climate.

The Last Canyon Voyage: A Filmmaker's Journey Down the Green and Colorado Rivers

The Last Canyon Voyage: A Filmmaker's Journey Down the Green and Colorado Rivers

«Вий» Н. В. Гоголя на русской сцене конца XIX - начала XX века

The paper aims to study the early stage versions of Gogol’s novella “Viy”, their peculiarities and theatrical fate. The scientific originality of the research lies in the appeal to the insufficiently explored issue of the existence of dramatic adaptations of Gogol’s work on the Russian stage at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. Theatrical history of the first remakes of “Viy” is restored based on the periodicals of that time. As a result, the study has revealed that M. L. Kropivnitskii’s staged version performed in the Ukrainian language and E. A. Shabelskaya’s “dramatic tale” were the most popular. Despite all the difference between them, there was an obvious tendency to turn Gogol’s work into a “fairy play”, which left room for director’s and decorator’s creativity.

The Heroine's Rebellion and Frustration under Patriarchy

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening(1899) has been a solitary book. Generally recognized today as the first aestheticslly successful novel to have been written by an American women, it marked a significant epoch. The Awakening broke new thematic and stylistic ground as Chopin went boldly beyond the work of her precursors in writing about women s longing for sexual and personal emancipation. Events unfold against a back-drop of elegant homes and secluded resorts. The peculiarities of Creole life and temperament, and the sensuous atmosphere of life in New Orleans and at summer resorts on the Gulf, are happily sketched and outlined in this dramatic tale. Most of Edna’s awakening take place in the unconfined outdoors, in the sensual tropical paradise of Grand Isle. Chopin tells a story of Edna Pontellier who awakens to the injustice of her society and to her own sexsuality, who rebels against patriarchal restrictions, and attempts to realize her inner being through sensuality, love and art. Also, she shows a galaxy of women who adapt perfectly well to the unjust social order in a variety of different roles. Kate Chopin compares and contrasts Edna’s state with a number of others in the book, developing her theme through the polarities of self-absorption(Mademoiselle Reisz) and willing surrender of self to another(Adèle Ratignolle).

An English Composer and Her Opera: Harriet Wainewright’s Comàla (1792)

ABSTRACT This paper discusses an opera by the English composer Harriet Wainewright (ca.1766-1843), namely Comàla, which received its premiere at the Hanover Square Rooms, London on January 26, 1792. The composer was from a Liverpool family of Wainwright (variable spelling). In her Critical Remarks on the Art of Singing (1836) she describes her musical ability as a young woman. Moving to London she cultivated an introduction to influential figures in society and attended opera performances, where the singing of stellar castrati such as Pachierotti or Marchesi fascinated her. Possessed of a fine soprano voice she studied harmony and counterpoint with John Worgan, an organist at Vauxhall Gardens. She decided to compose an opera herself and spent about a year writing Comàla, a dramatic tale from the poems of Ossian. But she was unable to find a theater in London that would stage the opera; it had to be performed as a concert piece, the lead roles being sung by Sophia Corri and James Bartleman. Critics, including Burney, were fulsome in their praise of the work, and Haydn’s publisher William Napier eventually brought out a full score in 1803. Disappointed at not securing staged performances of Comàla or her earlier opera (Don Quixote) Harriet left for India in 1796 where she married Col. John Stewart, an officer in the British Army (East India Company) in 1801. She had Comàla performed in Calcutta by amateurs, singing the main role herself. Returning to England as “Mrs. Col. Stewart” she continued to compose songs and choruses after her husband’s death in 1820. She died in London at the end of 1843.

Особенности русской сказочной драматургии первой половины XIX в.: к постановке проблемы

The paper deals with the issue of forming of fairy tales artistic model in Russian drama. Currently, one considers dramatic fairy tale mainly in a general context of development of the author's literary fairy tale, although it has its own specifics. The study reviews some questions on the style and genesis of the Russian literary fairy tale for children in relation to the development of author's literary fairy tale as such. The author analyzes the influence of poetics of romanticism on the specifics of dramatic fairy tale, as well as the features of dramatic works by V. F. Odoevsky, who significantly influenced children's literature. His play “The Tsar-Maiden,” intended for children, is considered in comparison with a play by E.-T.-A. Hoffmann “Princess Blandina,” with similarities found in the system of characters, motif of matchmaking and some plot features associated with this motif. The fairy-tale play for adults “Segeliel or Don Quixote of the 19th century” analyzes the motifs of personified confrontation of good and evil and the interpenetration of magic and the ordinary, which was characteristic of romanticism in general and embodied both in other works of Odoyevsky and in later, mainly children's fairy-tale drama. The author suggests the possibility of influence of Odoevsky's plays on the development of children's drama. In both plays, we see the conventionality of artistic reality, resonating with humorous or ironic author's intonation. The paper also addresses I. A. Krylov's magical comic opera “Ilya Bogatyr,” revealing many characteristic features of Odoevsky's plays. At the same time, a distinction is made between Krylov's work and romantic direction, since the tradition of classicism is more clearly manifested in it. One may consider a reduction in pathos owing to humorous playing of heroic and mystical motifs as a feature of the comic opera. The analysis of these works allows us to formulate some characteristics of artistic model of the fairy-tale play, including conventionality of a fictional world, unexpected turns, personification of good and evil, unsteadiness of boundaries between the miracle and the ordinary, as well as humor and irony.

Psychopath Balram in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

The White Tiger is the 2008 Man Booker Prize winning novel in which the psychopathic character plays a role in telling the dramatic tale of his life. The protagonist Balram’s unpredictable journey from the underprivileged to the wealthy tycoon in India is amazing. The novel is a psychopathic story of murder and success. The genius memory of psychopath Balram sparks not only to map an excellent text space, but more than this, regulates Balram’s nerves. His struggle to be wealthy is full of compassion and sympathy. Balram is a blazingly savage, brilliant, and psychopathic on his journey. In the new alien world, he experiences a state mental disorder. That's why Balram, the narrator of the letter, has the mark of a Psychopath. The present research is an effort to examine and investigate the dimension of Balram's psychopathic character. This will give another heading to rising literary examination to character in an alternate psychopathic style.

Baśń dramatyczna − zapomniane ogniwo

A dramatic fairy tale is the expression of a specific historical moment. At the turn of the 19th and 20th century original forms of dialogue with tradition and new ways of developing literature were searched at the same time. It seems that the dramatic tale — absent in most compendiums devoted to the literature of modernism — is one of the best examples of unstable forms that reflect in their structure the dilemmas accompanying the writing at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. What matters here is a specific type of folklore and links with the fairy-tale play and commedia dell’ arte.

“The Malady of Ideality”: Mallarmé’s Igitur in John Ashbery’s “Fragment”

Abstract This essay argues that John Ashbery’s long poem “Fragment” (1965) dramatizes an encounter between two poetic-philosophical traditions: the first is represented by William Wordsworth and William James and the second by Stephane Mallarme, whose dramatic tale Igitur Ashbery had been translating as he composed the poem. While a central principle of the first tradition is what James calls “continuity of experience,” Mallarme’s work allows Ashbery to test his impulse toward an extremity of poetic vision in which the world of experience is eclipsed by a sublime Idea.

Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey by Peter Carlson (review)

Reviewed by: Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey by Peter Carlson Lorien Foote (bio) Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey. By Peter Carlson. (New York: Public Affairs, 2013. Pp. 268. Cloth, $26.99; paper, $15.99.) It is fitting that a former Washington Post journalist would write a book about the grand adventures of the Civil War’s most famous journalists, Junius Henri Browne and Albert Deane Richardson. Peter Carlson shares with his subjects a flair for narrating a dramatic tale, albeit in a literary style more suited to his twenty-first-century audience’s taste, and a wry, dry wit that survived the experience of living in, or in Carlson’s case writing about, Civil War prisons. Basing his narrative mainly on the separate book-length accounts that Browne and Richardson published in 1865, Carlson tells the intrinsically exciting story of two self-styled Bohemians who escaped from Salisbury Prison on December 18, 1864, and successfully reached Union lines at Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, in mid-January 1865. They were guided and helped along the way by slaves, children, bushwhackers, entire branches of Unionist families in the Appalachian Mountains, a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, and the famous pilot Dan Ellis. All of this makes for page-turning reading, and Carlson proves himself to be a capable historian in piecing together the identities of individuals that Browne and Richardson encountered and in tracking down letters and other primary sources that fill in the story his heroes told. Browne and Richardson’s Civil War odyssey began when they were writers for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Richardson conducted a secret tour of several southern states during the secession crisis and sent anonymous reports to the newspaper with scathing criticisms of slavery and of [End Page 611] southern bombast, ignorance, and closed-mindedness; in the first two years of the war both men were part of the pioneering cadre of war correspondents who termed themselves the “Bohemian Brigade.” Carlson is at his best in his depiction of the lifestyle of Civil War journalists and of their attitudes toward their craft. In particular he brings to life Browne’s purposely eccentric and self-consciously cynical personality. Confederates captured the two Bohemians on May 4, 1863, on the Mississippi River and shipped them to Richmond. Although they had paroles from their Vicksburg captors, the Confederate agent of exchange, Robert Ould, refused to release them. Indeed, at one point he claimed they were hostages for every single southern noncombatant that the Union held. Imprisoned first in Libby, then in Castle Thunder, Browne and Richardson were transferred to Salisbury in February 1864, where they witnessed that prison’s transformation from relatively comfortable quarters to a squalid death trap when nearly ten thousand prisoners arrived in the early fall. Living in comparative privilege indoors, Richardson and Browne helped their fellow inmates as much as they could before their escape in December. Carlson comments in an appendix that “this isn’t an academic book so I see no need for footnotes,” but this reviewer is tasked with the job of writing a review for an academic journal (257). Keeping in mind that the intention behind this book is simply to tell a good story with factual accuracy, I have a few observations about the historical context that informs Browne and Richardson’s story. Carlson consulted a minimal number of scholarly works, judging by his appendix, and these were concentrated on Civil War journalism and guerrilla violence in the Appalachians. Broader reading would have enriched Carlson’s depiction of Browne and Richardson’s world. The journalists experienced the momentous burgeoning and subsequent collapse of the entire Confederate prison system that resulted in thousands of escapes from North and South Carolina prisons in the winter of 1864–65. Carlson attributes conditions at Salisbury to the simple fact that the Confederates were “running out of food” and is seemingly unaware of the mass movement of escaped prisoners from South Carolina prisons toward Knoxville that occurred at the same time his story takes place (144). African Americans appear in this tale as heroic and generous friends to Yankees, but...

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Tales from a revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the transformation of early America

In the spring of 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, a hotheaded young newcomer to Virginia, led a revolt against the colony's Indian policies. Bacon's Rebellion turned into a civil war within Virginia--and a war of extermination against the colony's Indian allies--that lasted into the following winter, sending shock waves throughout the British colonies and into England itself. James Rice offers a colorfully detailed account of the rebellion, revealing how Piscataways, English planters, slave traders, Susquehannocks, colonial officials, plunderers and intriguers were all pulled into an escalating conflict whose outcome, month by month, remained uncertain. In Rice's rich narrative, the lead characters come to life: the powerful, charismatic Governor Berkeley, the sorrowful Susquehannock warrior Monges, the wiley Indian trader and tobacco planter William Byrd, the regal Pamunkey chieftain Cockacoeske, and the rebel leader himself, Nathaniel Bacon. The dark, slender Bacon, born into a prominent family, soon earned a reputation in America as imperious, ambitious, and arrogant. But the colonial leaders did not foresee how rash and headstrong Nathaniel Bacon could be, nor how adept he would prove to be at both inciting colonists and alienating Indians. As the tense drama unfolds, it becomes apparent that the struggle between Governor Berkeley and the impetuous Bacon is nothing less than a battle over the soul of America. Bacon died in the midst of the uprising and Governor Berkeley shortly afterwards, but the profoundly important issues at the heart of the rebellion took another generation to resolve. The late seventeenth century was a pivotal moment in American history, full of upheavals and far-flung conspiracies. Tales From a Revolution brilliantly captures the swirling rumors and central events of Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath, weaving them into a dramatic tale that is part of the founding story of America.

The Quest for a Sustainable Future and the Dawn of a New Journal at Michigan Law

When I joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 2007, the first assignment I gave students in my Environmental Law and Policy class was John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. It must have seemed like a curious choice to them, particularly coming from a professor who just three months earlier had been the Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. The book was not a dramatic tale of courtroom battles. In fact, the book was not even about the law, and the clash of environmental values it depicted pre-dated the environmental statutes that were the focus of the course. Encounters with the Archdruid chronicles outings McPhee organized during the 1960s with David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club and one of the most influential environmental activists of his generation. Brower was an unapologetic advocate for conservation at a time when we still believed that anything was possible in the United States and that America had an endless bounty of natural resources to support economic growth. McPhee paired Brower with three antagonists who had very different ideas about our relationship with the environment: Charles Park, the former Dean of Stanford University's School of Earth Sciences and a proponent of mining in the Cascade mountains; Charles Fraser, the developer of Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, who had similar plans to develop Cumberland Island off the Georgia coast; and Floyd Dominy, the indomitable Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who wanted to dam the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon. The stories in Encounters with the Archdruid occurred more than forty years ago, but I assigned the book to my students both for historical context and because the disagreements it describes about our environmental values remain potent today. As they hiked in the Cascades, Brower and Park argued about whether copper mining should be allowed in protected wilderness near Glacier Peak. Brower observed that the Cascades are "one of the few remaining great wildernesses in the lower forty-eight" and asked, "Would America have to go without much to leave its finest wilderness unspoiled?" Park countered that "[m]inerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It's criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them." For anyone who has followed the debate over proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the conflict and the language are familiar (only now the argument is about oil rather than copper, and the wilderness is in Alaska instead of Washington).

Medical 'Emplotment' and Plotting Medicine: Health and Disease in Late Medieval Portuguese Chronicles

In recent years, historians of medicine in the Middle Ages have tried to decode narratives of health and illness in their original context, attempting to uncover the meanings they may have had for the original audiences, rather than simply using these narratives to plot disease incidence. This article is a study of health, illness and traumatic injury in the chronicles of Fernão Lopes, who wrote in Portugal in the first half of the fifteenth century, focusing on the events of 1383–5, a period of civil war and foreign invasion. Arguing that Lopes made use of a series of medical ‘emplotments’ to construct his history, this study approaches medieval medicine in as broad a sense as possible engaging with the role of moral and bodily health in a dramatic tale of political ambition and national resurgence.

Small(pox) success?

The 30th anniversary of the World Health Organization's (WHO) official certification of smallpox eradication was marked by a slew of events hailing the campaign's dramatic tale of technological and organizational triumph against an ancient scourge. Yet commemorations also serve as moments of critical reflection. This article questions the acclaim showered upon smallpox eradication as the single greatest public health success in history. It examines how and why smallpox eradication and WHO's concurrent social justice-oriented primary health care approach (following from the Declaration of Alma-Ata) became competing paradigms. It synthesizes critiques of eradication's shortcomings and debunks some of the myths surrounding the global eradication campaign as a public health priority and necessity, and as a Cold War victory of cooperation. The article concludes with thoughts on integrating technical and social-political aspects of health within the context of welfare states as the means to achieving widespread and enduring global public health success.

Artillery of heaven: American missionaries and the failed conversion of the Middle East

The complex relationship between America and the Arab world goes back further than most people realize. In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi presents a foundational American encounter with the Arab world that occurred in the nineteenth century, shortly after the arrival of the first American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East. He tells the dramatic tale of the conversion and death of As'ad Shidyaq, the earliest Arab convert to American Protestantism. The struggle over this man's body and soul-and over how his story might be told-changed the actors and cultures on both sides. In the unfamiliar, multireligious landscape of the Middle East, American missionaries at first conflated Arabs with Native Americans and American culture with an uncompromising evangelical Christianity. In turn, their Christian and Muslim opponents in the Ottoman Empire condemned the missionaries as malevolent intruders. Yet during the ensuing confrontation within and across cultures an unanticipated spirit of toleration was born that cannot be credited to either Americans or Arabs alone. Makdisi provides a genuinely transnational narrative for this new, liberal awakening in the Middle East, and the challenges that beset it. By exploring missed opportunities for cultural understanding, by retrieving unused historical evidence, and by juxtaposing for the first time Arab perspectives and archives with American ones, this book counters a notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations and thus reshapes our view of the history of America in the Arab world.

Frozen Fire (review)

Reviewed by: Frozen Fire Deborah Stevenson Bowler, Tim Frozen Fire Philomel, 2008 [336p] ISBN 978-0-399-25053-8 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7–10 It starts with a phone call when Dusty’s home alone; she’s completely freaked out by the boy on the other end of the line, who claims to be committing suicide and who coincidentally drops names—like that of her brother, Josh, who disappeared two years ago—meaningful in Dusty’s life. When she tries to find the mysterious boy, she encounters a frightening trio of guys intent on chasing him down, who are now convinced she’s his ally. As her contact with the boy increases, she learns that he’s a suspect in a local rape, and even the authorities begin to suspect that she’s shielding him; Dusty, though, remains skeptical of the claims and mesmerized by his supernatural presence, convinced that he knows something about her beloved Josh. English author Bowler has a nice touch with his spooky motifs here, with ghostly phone calls and frosty face outlines at the window effective for raising those back-of-the-neck hairs. Dusty is an unusual heroine, a bellicose teen inclined toward feuds and the alienation of her friends, and her father’s vacillation between neediness and anger is credible and draining. The book talks away much of its tension, [End Page 417] however, so the ghostly effects lose impact; there’s also considerable contrivance in the police’s easy acceptance of the boy’s impossible characteristics and in the random involvement of a family of Gypsies. Nonetheless, fans of offbeat ghost stories may be drawn to this dramatic tale of different kinds of haunting. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Polio: an American story

All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines-and beyond. Here is a remarkable portrait of America in the early 1950s, using the widespread panic over polio to shed light on our national obsessions and fears. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. Indeed, the competition was marked by a deep-seated ill will among the researchers that remained with them until their deaths. The author also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family. As backdrop to this feverish research, Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor. The National Foundation revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America, using poster children and the famous March of Dimes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from a vast army of contributors (instead of a few well-heeled benefactors), creating the largest research and rehabilitation network in the history of medicine. The polio experience also revolutionized the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in baby-booming America-increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed-the spectre of polio, like the spectre of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of terror over daily life.