British Fiction Research Articles

Narratives of Disposability in Contemporary British Fiction: Monica Ali's In the Kitchen and John Lanchester's Capital

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to analyse Monica Ali's In the Kitchen (2009) and John Lanchester's Capital (2012). I draw on the notion of disposability (Evans and Giroux, Standing, and Bauman) to delve into the concepts of neoliberal subjectivity and exclusion for the analysis of the characters that in the novels embody subjectivities shaped by the logic of finance (economic migrants or asylum seekers). I argue that both works narrate different personifications of disposability resulting from neoliberal violence. In In the Kitchen and Capital, both Ali and Lanchester map a dark cartography of neoliberal British society. Both novels picture a society that is either indifferent to the violence provoked by neoliberalism, or unable to fight it back; the two works map a journey that slides from an apparently multicultural and opulent society down into a kind of dantesque social Inferno.

Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight‘ by Meyer Priscilla (review)

REVIEWS 565 study opens up a new area of Gulag research and adds considerably to our knowledge of the literature of the Soviet labour camps. UCL SSEES Sarah J. Young Meyer, Priscilla. Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2018. x + 188 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). When you think of indeterminacy and ambiguous authorship in Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, Pale Fire is usually the first title that comes to mind, but we also know that there are precedents. In Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’, Priscilla Meyer’s analysis spirals outward from Nabokov’s first novel in English to show how it can assist our interpretation of his later novels. The conventional response to the complexity of structure and narrative authorship in much of Nabokov’s work has been to undertake an exercise in solving riddles. Instead, as Meyer demonstrates, this complexity is carefully set to foreground the ‘unattainability of reality’ (p. 131). This is why Nabokov’s indeterminacy differs so much from the so-called postmodern notion with which, after Pale Fire, it has often been associated, for Nabokov’s personal take on indeterminacy is linked to his experience of loss as an exile. The writing of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Meyer argues, dramatizes this loss as Nabokov has to relinquish his language and culture and appropriate new canons and techniques to develop his own means of survival through art. The tripartite and progressive structure of Meyer’s book relies on what she identifies as ‘three pairs of parallel binaries’ that Nabokov incorporates into his texts only to subvert them: art and reality; Russian and English; life and death. In each section, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is discussed through the prism of Nabokov’s work — Despair, Lolita, Pale Fire, ‘The Vane Sisters’— or the work of other writers — Virginia Woolf, Tom Stoppard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James — which, relying on Kiril Taranovsky’s definition, Meyer calls ‘subtexts’ (p. 15). Meyer’s method relies on her ability to develop extremely rich dialogues between The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and his other works (most notably Despair, Lolita and Pale Fire) from which she retraces Nabokov’s maturing development of his favourite concerns: art and life, immortality and the possibility of an afterlife. The parallel analysis of Despair and Sebastian Knight is the subject of the first chapter, entitled ‘Mirrored Worlds’, in part one (‘Art/Reality’). Through a SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 566 detailed analysis of the motifs both novels share, Meyer contrasts the figure of the author and the narrators they develop. While Hermann’s materialism and flawed relation to art precipitate his failure, Sebastian’s idealism enables him to transcend loss and nostalgia. Meyer shows the novels as ‘paired’, Sebastian Knight reading as a positive variant of Despair on art and immortality and ‘the unknowability of what comes after this life’ (p. 35). A second section of this chapter examines Tom Stoppard’s dramatization of The Prismatic Bezel in The Real Inspector Hound to enlighten further the sense of indeterminacy in Nabokov’s novel as viewed from the perspective of this English playwright. Part two, ‘Russian/Anglophone’, focuses on the turning point in Nabokov’s career and the progressive creation of a new set of Anglo-American referents that would inform his later works. In line with Marijeta Bozovic’s contention that Nabokov invented a new literary canon (Nabokov’s Canon: From ‘Onegin’ to ‘Ada’, Evanston, IL, 2016), Meyer argues that Nabokov not only substituted Russian and European settings in his English fiction, but also alluded ‘by quotation and plot parallels to English and American writers to create his own English medium’ (p. 47). In chapter two, ‘British Subtexts’, she first draws a set of very precise connections between Sebastian Knight and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that foreground the diverse ontological layers of authorial responsibility in Nabokov’s novel. With a leap forward to European modernism and a focus on Virginia Woolf, a writer rarely acknowledged as a subtext in...

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT’S LITTLE WOMEN: HUMANISING DISEASE AND DECAY

Whenever a disease is widespread like an epidemic or pandemic its apocalyptic nature fails to escape the creative imagination of literary writers. Beginning from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man are some of the precursors of the literary fiction in English which captures apocalyptic events and their impact on the society. A pandemic affects not only elders but also children, not only rich but also poor, not only upper class but also the workers. A lot of literature focuses on the affliction of the first and their response to the pandemic. In addition to the epidemics like cholera and plague which recurred from time to time and afflicted a large section of the population, there was the pandemic scarlet fever which rarely made the adult population suffer as it primarily struck the children aged between five and fifteen. The number of works which focus on scarlet fever are few and one of the prominent ones which this paper intends to look at is by an American novelist. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69) captures influences that shape the lives of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March from childhood into womanhood. One such influence, scarlet fever which is said to have spread across Europe and America during the 19th and early 20th century victimising and causing death of several infants and young children affect the March family too. The paper attempts to capture the pandemic and tries to humanise disease and decay and its impact on the lives of the March sisters.

Aggressive but loyal

Language powerfully impacts the construction of our gender identities. In the mid-twentieth century gender stereotypes were strong, but at the same time feminism was giving rise to new ideas and becoming increasingly mainstream. What gender-related discourse prosodies did children encounter in popular literature? Did these merely reinforce the conventional stereotypes or did they contain the seeds of change? This study of British children's fiction published in the 1940s-60s seeks to answer these questions through an analysis of personality descriptors collocated with female and male characters in eight books by four prolific children's writers. Although gender stereotypes (as represented by the Bem Sex-Role Inventory) are to some extent reinforced in these books, there are also considerable discrepancies. Children were meeting a range of positive models which did not always match ‘feminine' or ‘masculine' stereotypes.

Syntactic Analysis of Sentence Adverbials Observed in the Victorian Novel Jane Eyre

The sentence structure complexity and clause positioning (Staveley, 2013) represent the striking features of the writing style of the 19-th century British fiction writers. The present syntactic study brings detailed quantitative and qualitative syntactic analyses of peripheral sentence elements, sentence (stance) adverbials, occurring in the Victorian novel Jane Eyre (1847), and offers their classification into style and content disjuncts. As the latter ones are generally employed by fiction in the novels’ dialogues and main characters’ reflections (Biber, 1999), the research questions focus predominantly on their function and frequency of use. Content disjuncts help to express the possibility or the doubt of the utterance and explain the outcome of the actions and events happening in the story. The research outcomes have confirmed that content disjuncts considerably contribute to understanding the writing style of Charlotte Bronte. This phenomenon can be further studied and developed in the syntactic analyses of other remarkable 19th century novels and novelists. The research results will find their application not only in the theory and practice of syntax but also in the process of teaching/learning English as a foreign language.

Imagining Colonial Environments: Fire in Australian Children's Literature, 1841–1910

This article examines children's novels and short stories published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that feature bushfires and the ceremonial fires associated with Indigenous Australians. It suggests that British children's novels emphasise the horror of bushfires and the human struggle involved in conquering them. In contrast, Australian-authored children's fictions represent less anthropocentric understandings of the environment. New attitudes toward the environment are made manifest in Australian women's fiction including J. M. Whitfield's ‘The Spirit of the Bushfire’ (1898), Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), Olga D. A. Ernst's ‘The Fire Elves’ (1904), and Amy Eleanor Mack's ‘The Gallant Gum Trees’ (1910). Finally, the article proposes that adult male conquest and control of the environment evident in British fiction is transferred to a child protagonist in Mary Grant Bruce's A Little Bush Maid (1910), dispensing with the long-standing association between the Australian bush and threats to children.

Phraseology for characteristics of personal and status position (on the example of fiction literature for teenagers)

This article examines the modern phraseological units in the aspect of pragmatics on the example of modern British fiction literature. Phraseology of English language being enriched with new lexical units of idiomatic character, which serve the pragmatics of expression according to narration of the text. The paper analyzes a number of modern phraseological units (phraseologisms, derivatives of phraseologisms, and authorial formulations), aimed at designation of personal or generally recognized status of heroes in the society. Authors of the analyzed literary works are the representatives of modern British linguistic community, with different life experience and views, whose work were displayed in various literary nominations and received positive assessment from the critics. All presented phraseological units are viewed in accordance to the context. The results demonstrate that the pragmatics of expression of modern phraseology is relevant not only within the framework of the described situation. Phraseological units, used for characterizing personal traits of the hero, convey his positive attitude or judgment of others, as well as cultivate formation of a certain image of the hero among audience. This research contributes to the development of principles and approaches towards studying phraseology of English language, its enrichment, and understanding of phraseology in a broader sense.

Multimodal Conflict Management in English Fictional Discourse

Multimodal Conflict Management in English Fictional Discourse

Специфика описания имплицитного конфликта в англоязычном художественном тексте

Специфика описания имплицитного конфликта в англоязычном художественном тексте

Morphological Integration of Urdu Loan Words in Pakistani English

Pakistani English is a variety of English language concerning Sentence structure, Morphology, Phonology, Spelling, and Vocabulary. The one semantic element, which makes the investigation of Pakistani English additionally fascinating is the Vocabulary. Pakistani English uses many loan words from Urdu language and other local dialects, which have become an integral part of Pakistani English, and the speakers don't feel odd while using these words. Numerous studies are conducted on Pakistani English Vocabulary, yet a couple manage to deal with morphology. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the morphological integration of Urdu loan words in Pakistani English. Another purpose of the study is to investigate the main reasons of this morphological integration process. The Qualitative research method is used in this study. Researcher prepares a sample list of 50 loan words for the analysis. These words are randomly chosen from the newspaper “The Dawn” since it is the most dispersed English language newspaper in Pakistan. Some words are selected from the Books and Novellas of Pakistani English fiction authors, and concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition. The results show that, when the Urdu language loan words are morphologically integrated in Pakistan English, they do not change their grammatical category. Moreover, four distinguished morphological process are identified in integration of these loan words. The results also reveal that deficit hypothesis is the main reason of this lexical borrowin.

Атрибутивное словосочетание в традиционном и когнитивном аспектах изучения (на материале английского языка)

The article provides theoretical description of the English attributive word combinations from the positions of traditional and cognitive linguistics. Novelty of the study lies in the fact that the function of attributive word combinations in language and speech is considered from the viewpoint of the format of knowledge they represent. The conclusion is made that attributive constructions play an important role in formation of the English fiction discourse due to their configuration at the mental level by attributing certain properties to objects and phenomena of the surrounding world.

Keymer, Thomas, ed. Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Keymer, Thomas, ed. Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

When emotions cannot “speak”: a pragmatic analysis of cases of alexithymia in English fiction

The article focuses on the analysis of cases of alexithymia in English fiction in order to reveal their pragmatic potential. Alexithymia is studied from a linguistic perspective and is defined as the inability or difficulty to express emotions verbally. Emotions are viewed as a type of language identity that functions within specific ways to exchange communicative information. Emotions are recognized as social phenomena that are embedded in social contexts. The article strives to provide a novel insight into the study of emotions in the field of linguistics. For the first time, alexithymia is addressed not as a psychological disorder, but as a linguistic attempt to create and increase a pragmatic effect on the reader by implying additional information and emotional and evaluative overtones. Research methods include definition, semantic and pragmatic analyses of emotional and evaluative utterances, expressing or implying alexithymia, and selected from English fiction by the continuous sampling method. The author comes to the conclusion that emotions can still be revealed and comprehended by the reader without being expressed or implied in the text. It is the context that helps to determine the emotion, its intensity and polarity, as well as its pragmatic potential.

Structural and Semantic Features of Parenthetical Constructions: Evidence from Modern English Literature

The present article studies structural models and semantic content of parenthetical insertions in modern English fiction. The relevance of the research is determined by its focus on the study of the corpus of parenthesis in the modern English language within the framework of the general science issue ‘man and the language’. The study is novel in that it is carried out using evidence from modern English literature (texts written by S. King, J. Barnes, I. McEwan, D. Mitchell, J. Coe). The new language material and the use of methods of component, distributive, transformational and contextual analysis as well as the method of quantitative calculations allowed us to deepen the existing understanding of the structure and semantics of parenthetical constructions in the English language. This article will be of interest to researchers dealing with problems of parenthesis in modern English and to specialists in semantic syntax.

Translation Strategies for Speech Features of Characters in Fictional Texts (a Case Study of Speech of Upper Class Representatives)

Introduction. The paper analyses different means used for conveying the phonetic features of the speech of upper class representatives in English fiction, in particular in the works of Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy. The author focuses on functions of phonographic stylisation of the aristocratic speech and discusses the techniques and strategies for rendering this phenomenon into the Russian language.Methodology and sources. When selecting examples for analysis, we used the method of corpus analysis, which made it possible to establish the frequency of using a particular phonographic means, as well as the continuous sampling method used to analyse a specific technique of phonographic stylisation. Methods of linguistic, sociolinguistic and translation analysis were used to analyse specific examples of phonographic stylisation and their translations into the Russian language. The novels by Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy were used to carry out the research.Results and discussion. When translating the speech of upper class representatives into the Russian language, phonographic means can be rendered only in those cases when they perform a parody function. Otherwise, phonographic means are not conveyed but might be substituted or compensated by lexical and syntactical means, which can be considered a natural consequence because of the difference in the traditions of representing the speech of aristocrats in English and Russian literary traditions.Conclusion. Phonographic means and phonographic stylisation are the most important component of the artistic representation of character’s speech in general, and the speech of upper class representatives in particular. Consequently, this phenomenon is a multifaceted linguistic problem in the theory of translation. This study outlines the main directions of analysis of phonographic stylisation while rendering the speech of aristocrats, but this problem is far from being solved. Other cases of using phonographic stylisation may be the subject of further research into contrasting and translation aspects.

Keymer, Thomas, ed. Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Keymer, Thomas, ed. Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

КОНЦЕПТУАЛЬНА МЕТАФОРА ЯК ЗАСІБ РЕАЛІЗАЦІЇ КОНЦЕПТУ SELF-ALIENATION / САМОВІДЧУЖЕННЯ В АНГЛОМОВНОМУ НАУКОВО-ФАНТАСТИЧНОМУ ДИСКУРСІ


 
 
 
 The article deals with the investigation of conceptual metaphors as a means of realizing SELF-ALIENATION concept in the English science fiction. The study is based on the conceptual metaphor theory which states that metaphors incorporate thought, language and speech (Lakoff &Johnson, 2003). Conceptual metaphor modelling appears to be productive to analyze the structure of metaphors, since it is based on the interrelation between source and target domains and their mapping. SELF-ALIENATION concept is characterized by the range of conceptual metaphor models, among which SELF IS CONTAINER, SELF IS DISCLOSURE, SELF IS LIQUID and SELF IS DIGITAL UNIT are most frequently used in the English science fiction. SELF IS CONTAINER model is represented by the lexemes ‘personality’, ‘body’, ‘identity’ and ‘individuality’ which best represent the essence of the SELF-ALIENATION concept revealing implicit author’s intentions.
 
 
 

Kurmacada Kuir'in Kanonlaşması: Alan Hollinghurst'ün İngiliz Romanındaki Yeri

The present study aims at contextualizing the British novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction in the modern British Novel dealing with themes of homosexuality. The study will focus on the novels of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood and Ronald Firbank and relate them to the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. Such a comparison will shed light on the evolution of themes of homosexuality and the depiction of queer characters in the British novel. Different from his predecessors, Hollinghurst focuses on homosexuality not only as a concealed or revealed identity, but as a textual phenomenon. Thus, Hollinghurst offers a wider fictional realm for the understanding of homosexual selfhood and identity. It could be argued that Hollinghurst’s fiction builds up a ‘queer’ canon in British fiction that deals with the homosexual experience not as a reason for alienation, but as a lens which opens up to a wider human experience and identity.

Multiplicity of History in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Through Historiographic Metafiction

English fiction, in the recent decades, has significantly manifested its deepest concern for postmodern transformation of history through subversion of the traditional historical narratives. The current research paper aims to highlight the postmodern transformation of history in the selected English novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti written by Muhammad Hanif. The selected novel as postmodern historiographic metafiction highlights that contemporary fiction manifests and retells the traditional history through memory, parody, self-reflexivity and intertextuality. The current research study generates a better understanding of the present interdisciplinary relation of fiction with that of other disciplines especially history. The postmodern theoretical concepts of Linda Hutcheon are incorporated in this current study. This research is qualitative and exploratory, while textual analysis has been used as a research method. This research ends with the findings and recommendations for further research.

Sir John Fielding (1721–80) we współczesnym kryminale anglojęzycznym

This article discusses the ways in which the life and achievements of Sir John Fielding are reconstructed in contemporary crime fiction in English. The material under scrutiny consists of selected examples of the so-called Georgian crime/mystery, that is, crime narratives set in Georgian England (1714–1837, the reign of George I, George II, George III and George IV). The discussed works include those in which Fielding functions as a secondary character — the series Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector by Lillian de la Torre and The Demoniacs by John Dickson Carr — as well as those in which he becomes the protagonist — the series Sir John Fielding Mysteries (Bruce Alexander, 1994–2005) and John Rawlings Mysteries (Deryn Lake, 1994–2000). The offered reading of these texts is contextualized historically as well as being informed by Michel Foucault’s ideas put forward in Discipline and punish.