British Fiction Research Articles

Right to Intimacy as an Expression of Feminism in the Works of Writer Manju Kapur

This paper analyses the right to intimacy and love in the novels of Indian writer Manju Kapur, considering it as a strong dimension of Feminism. Being bold and audacious enough to break the barriers of orthodox prudery, Manju Kapur gives voice to the hitherto subdued feminism in Indian English fiction. The twenty first century fiction firmament has seen the rise of certain brilliant stalwarts like Khaled Husseini and Paulo Coelho but when it comes to Indian writing in English, we find Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai and Manju Kapur, making a distinct place for themselves. But my focus is on Manju Kapur as she resides in India and especially because she has graduated with more poise and panache in the cosy canopy of intimacy in her last three novels. It is a psychologically proved fact that Intimacy is beneficial for individual health and well being. Individuals who perceive their spouses to be supportive confidantes are buffered from the pathogenic effects of stress. In contrast, people whose intimacy needs are not met feel lonelier (Rubenstein and Shaver 1982) and their relationships are more prone to dissolution (Hendrick 1981). Its course can be seen working in the marital journey of Astha and Hemant, Nina and Ananda, Virmati and Professor Harish and the families of Sona and Rupa. We have to look at intimacy from the marital point of view because of the socio-cultural context of India where Manju Kapur writes. “Even marriage, in the true religious sense of Holy Matrimony, does not depend on a romantic attraction to hold it together; instead it derives its meaning as an unbreakable act of family and societal service between a man and a woman to a mutual divine love.”3 But then peeping deep into the philosophy of intimacy and especially the politics of marital intimacy, we fathom how difficult it gets to achieve that much-idealised and over-hyped divine love as the stark individuality of both husband and wife starts coming to the fore. Hemant in A Married Woman is busier in his business of making TVs while Astha keeps pining for his attention. Similarly, Ananda in The Immigrant tries to camouflage his sexual impotency by being busy in his work, not realizing the fact that how much Astha missed Anand especially because he was his anchor in this country. Neena needed more of this intimacy as she left her career and her country for him. And no doubt things get aggravated when in a foreign country. She confesses, “I don’t know what I want. At home it was much clearer. I feel so lost here.’

<em>Ngo Mai Lou</em> Cryptogram

Ngo Mai Lou Cryptogram by Jason S. Polley The meaty gweipo complete slippery scolds assailant aplenty The meaty miasma of North Point’s postcard avenues, where Big-Leaf Fig bases are painted gweipo white, and a security guard languidly engages in a funeral-paced Gong Fu fracas, complete with two-by-fours forearmblocked , arms that tumble & cross when they kiss the slippery cement, as a fancy-booted LV handbag-bearing bureaucrat, his gold umbrella aquiver, scolds the crook, and heel strikes echo down an oily alleyway as kaai hai tos punctuate the assailant’s escape, a minor spectacle superseded by the spicy scent of laat chui tseung plopped aplenty atop semitransparent, green-onion seasoned , steaming wontons, insignia of slowpokes. Sharps, artistes, bhaiji, baksheesh, chai-wala alchemy The heady odor in Chungking’s crowded cinematic arcades, where tidy tailors, SIM-card sharps, greymarket merchants, flophouse pornographers, catholic procuresses, sweets artistes, pokerfaced financiers, hash & charlie architects, and curry-house touts contest , Ji, Angrez bhaiji, at the scarlet heart of the dispossessed narcotic wonder maze for blessèd bloodstained baksheesh, a tumultuous overture stilled by an openhanded thumb to sternum as an idle nod to the chaiwala promises the sweet & salt science silence of Vada, Tukdi, and Khulfi, exultant high-tea alchemy. The Laam Mui ng goi ah salutes epic congregation The Laam Mui & Marlboro tinge & tang humanly heralds Sheung Shui Cooked Food Market’s lyrical clamor, clatter, & clang, where commonplace politesse, Ng goi, pang jao, ng goi ah, salutes the secular Gon bui ceremony of chopstick-transected bicker & banter, a chitter & chatter trafficked in Putonghua, Guandonghua, Hakka, & Hoklo, indigenous tongues cavorting, an epic congregation in Holy roar, ha & hai, shrimp & crab, a ga yau rabble Babel add oil communion. Pyramids of oranges gaai hustling The sandalwood breaths from countless Mong Kok backstreet altars, balancing pyramids of oranges for ancestors, camouflage open kitchen-sewer mashes of oil, skin, and bone while tourists gawkily wrangle over “I’m Lost in Hong Kong” T-shirts metres from too-perfumed gaai hustling hell-house entries, lusty cyclorama to Sinigang and Sizzling sisig, adobo abode of ardor. Dulcet passerby magic The dulcet coconut cores commingling with loud lemongrass and laughing hot-fruit, aromatic palimpsest pushing passerby to quickstep, Fai di laaa, hawker and haberdasher into any of many Kowloon City ran xahar, magic proscenia to Kai jeow and Khao soi, sunrise to sanity’s revelries. Bloom in the troupes The pure surrender of belonging’s boom bloom in the uncalculated cosmopolitanism of a Canton banquet, Sik faan, Globe of tastes and troupes, perpetual polyvocal trove, baby-smile baptism. Heung Gong Fragrant Harbor, playhouse polyphony sense-citadel, empyrean promise of great-grandma grins. Jason S. Polley teaches comics, literary journalism, experimental criticism, and Indian English fiction at Hong Kong Baptist University. His publications include the books refrain and cemetery miss you. PHOTO: RUSLAN BARDASH/UNSPLASH WORLDLIT.ORG 73 ...

Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800 by Birgit Tautz

Reviewed by: Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800 by Birgit Tautz Leonard Von Morzé Birgit Tautz, Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). Pp. 266. $89.95 cloth. It has long been recognized that the wider world was, for eighteenth-century Germans more than for any other major linguistic community in Europe, mediated by texts translated from other languages. Acknowledged (and often decried) by contemporaries, the pervasiveness of translation in the German-language book market was demonstrated by twentieth-century scholarship on the history of the book, particularly Bernhard Fabian's authoritative studies of the importance of English fiction for German readers. Despite the advances made by subsequent scholarship, however, the notion that translation is a mere subplot in the larger story of the ultimate emergence of a distinctive German national culture remains implicit in the work of many scholars. The accomplishment of Birgit Tautz's Translating the World is to treat translation in German literature circa 1800 more expansively than previous scholars have done. Readers of Tautz's book will miss the clarity and empirical rigor of Fabian's analysis, but they may welcome her broader view of translation, in which the concept is in effect spatialized to encompass a geographic as well as a linguistic sense of the term. While not the first scholar to use the term "glocalization," Tautz applies it to translation, as a way of describing the way global concerns were transposed to the scale of the city and represented for urban readers and audiences. Given the book's theme of translation, its emphasis on urban spaces where commercial necessity melted away differences in favor of a lingua franca makes sense. Throughout the book, Tautz returns to Hamburg and its sometimes now-obscure literary figures, using Weimar's better-known writers as foils. While the global commerce that flowed through Hamburg made it the major port of Central Europe, its literary importance has been less well established, in obvious contrast to Weimar. The first chapter investigates the way Hamburg writers circa 1770 translated global issues, particularly concerning the European empires in the Americas and racial slavery, onto the stage. The book's implicit debts to network theory become evident here, as the material practices of circulation and exchange guide Tautz's analysis, rather than a class-based history grounded in social relations, though she does allude to the role of the mercantile elite in the Hamburg theater. An all-too-brief look at the ideals of the Hamburg Trade Academy (where the Americanist Christoph Daniel Ebeling was co-director) elucidates the importance of translation as a mode of information collection (in stark contrast to the later development of translation theory and philology in the German university) and demonstrates the predominance of commercial and sentimental values in the northern part of Germany. When Tautz turns to textual analysis of specific plays, some clarity is lost. For example, her insistent representation of Ernst Lorenz Michael Rathlef's The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg (1775) as "a quintessential Hamburg play" (48, 195) is undercut when we learn, at the end of a lengthy exegesis, that the play was never actually performed in the city. And readers will struggle to untangle the differences between two translations (by Johann Christoph Bode and by August von Kotzebue), separated by thirty-three years, of Richard Cumberland's The West [End Page 371] Indian (1771); a distinction between the former's glocalization and the latter's bid for universality is claimed but not demonstrated, with the interpretation relying too heavily on the received interpretation of Kotzebue as kitsch. The second chapter, the most clearly written in the book, offers an engaging social history of the Hamburg National Theater and interprets Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous series of essays on this short-lived experiment. Tautz takes critics to task for finding in Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69) "a manual on how to achieve a German national theater" (84). Instead of reading Lessing as arguing for a Kulturnation, Tautz reads the essays as formulating an aesthetic theory in which translation has a central role. Insightful pages...

Ngo Mai Lou Cryptogram

Ngo Mai Lou Cryptogram by Jason S. Polley The meaty gweipo complete slippery scolds assailant aplenty The meaty miasma of North Point’s postcard avenues, where Big-Leaf Fig bases are painted gweipo white, and a security guard languidly engages in a funeral-paced Gong Fu fracas, complete with two-by-fours forearmblocked , arms that tumble & cross when they kiss the slippery cement, as a fancy-booted LV handbag-bearing bureaucrat, his gold umbrella aquiver, scolds the crook, and heel strikes echo down an oily alleyway as kaai hai tos punctuate the assailant’s escape, a minor spectacle superseded by the spicy scent of laat chui tseung plopped aplenty atop semitransparent, green-onion seasoned , steaming wontons, insignia of slowpokes. Sharps, artistes, bhaiji, baksheesh, chai-wala alchemy The heady odor in Chungking’s crowded cinematic arcades, where tidy tailors, SIM-card sharps, greymarket merchants, flophouse pornographers, catholic procuresses, sweets artistes, pokerfaced financiers, hash & charlie architects, and curry-house touts contest , Ji, Angrez bhaiji, at the scarlet heart of the dispossessed narcotic wonder maze for blessèd bloodstained baksheesh, a tumultuous overture stilled by an openhanded thumb to sternum as an idle nod to the chaiwala promises the sweet & salt science silence of Vada, Tukdi, and Khulfi, exultant high-tea alchemy. The Laam Mui ng goi ah salutes epic congregation The Laam Mui & Marlboro tinge & tang humanly heralds Sheung Shui Cooked Food Market’s lyrical clamor, clatter, & clang, where commonplace politesse, Ng goi, pang jao, ng goi ah, salutes the secular Gon bui ceremony of chopstick-transected bicker & banter, a chitter & chatter trafficked in Putonghua, Guandonghua, Hakka, & Hoklo, indigenous tongues cavorting, an epic congregation in Holy roar, ha & hai, shrimp & crab, a ga yau rabble Babel add oil communion. Pyramids of oranges gaai hustling The sandalwood breaths from countless Mong Kok backstreet altars, balancing pyramids of oranges for ancestors, camouflage open kitchen-sewer mashes of oil, skin, and bone while tourists gawkily wrangle over “I’m Lost in Hong Kong” T-shirts metres from too-perfumed gaai hustling hell-house entries, lusty cyclorama to Sinigang and Sizzling sisig, adobo abode of ardor. Dulcet passerby magic The dulcet coconut cores commingling with loud lemongrass and laughing hot-fruit, aromatic palimpsest pushing passerby to quickstep, Fai di laaa, hawker and haberdasher into any of many Kowloon City ran xahar, magic proscenia to Kai jeow and Khao soi, sunrise to sanity’s revelries. Bloom in the troupes The pure surrender of belonging’s boom bloom in the uncalculated cosmopolitanism of a Canton banquet, Sik faan, Globe of tastes and troupes, perpetual polyvocal trove, baby-smile baptism. Heung Gong Fragrant Harbor, playhouse polyphony sense-citadel, empyrean promise of great-grandma grins. Jason S. Polley teaches comics, literary journalism, experimental criticism, and Indian English fiction at Hong Kong Baptist University. His publications include the books refrain and cemetery miss you. PHOTO: RUSLAN BARDASH/UNSPLASH WORLDLIT.ORG 73 ...

THE TITLE AS AN ELEMENT OF STRONG POSITION IN SHORT STORIES BY SOMERSET MAUGHAM

The paper deals with functioning of strong position elements, particularly, the title in short stories of the English fiction. The analysis is based on 60 short stories of a famous English writer S. Maugham. Strong position is understood as completeness of a fictional text in the title, epigraph, beginning and the ending, organizing the decoding strategy and facilitating the perception of the main idea of the text. Different approaches to the issue of strong position (as a type of foregrounding or actualization in the decoding stylistics or as a frame element in literature studies) are considered. An attempt is made to classify the titles of the author’s short stories as the title-symbol, the title-thesis, the title-citation, the title-message, the title-narration. A more detailed analysis of the short story «Rain» revealed that the foregrounding elements have a symbolic character, determine the interrelations between the text fragments and provide for a holistic concept of the text. The title-symbol «Rain» becomes the key image of the work. Constant repetition of the key word «rain», its strong position as a title extends the meaning of the word to the symbolic meaning, creates the imagery perspective of the story. The word itself undergoes semantic changes resulting in a new individual artistic meaning which is realized retrospectively. The analysis of peculiarities of strong position elements proved that one of their main functions is foregrounding the most important information. The title has a decisive position in the content structure: it performs nominative, informative, communicative, expressive-appealing, delimiting, symbolic, evaluative functions. Consideration of the elements of strong position and, primarily, the title enhances the decoding of structural integrity and completeness of the text, understanding of its deep level meaning encoded in the title.

Структурно-семантические особенности парентетических конструк- ций (на материале современной английской художественной литературы)

The article is devoted to the study of structural models and semantic content of parenthetical structures presented in the texts of modern English fiction. The relevance of the study is due to its focus on studying parenthetical corpus of modern English language in the framework of general scientific problem “a man in a language.” The novelty of the study lies in the fact that it is made on the modern language material (texts by S. King, D. Barnes, Y. McEwan, D. Mitchell, D. Coe), not studied previously in terms of parenthetical structures functioning. Attraction of new language material presented by 736 contexts and the use of component, distributional, transformational, contextual analysis methods and method of quantitative calculations have allowed to deepen the existing knowledge about the structure and semantics of parenthetical constructions in the English language. In particular, it was found that the most typical structural models of parenthetical constructions in modern English prose are word forms, phrase and simple sentence. The most characteristic for the semantic content of the considered constructions is refinement / detailing (of a character’s image, its state or a situation), the expression of the author’s position, as well as the introduction of additional rema. The functions of concretisation and explanatory comment can be recognized as the most frequent functions of parenthetical constructions.

The aviation of the Makhno movement (1918–1920)

The article explores the history of the air forces of the Makhno movement in a period from 1918 to 1920 during the existence of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine (the Makhnovists) and provides a short historiographical review of the existing publications on the topic. It describes the attitude of the anarchist insurgents towards the advanced technological military equipment of the beginning of the twenty-first century and its usage in warfare. It talks about constant and persistent attempts of the rebels to capture aeroplanes as trophies, their usage for their own purposes and ways to hide or destroy them in case of adverse circumstances. The major part of the article is a narrative about the rebels’ attempts to initiate mass production of the “Farman HF. 30” aeroplanes at the “Widow Mathias & Sons” factory in Berdiansk in the spring of 1919, the characteristics of the process and general results of this activity. The number of aeroplanes produced by the factory and their distribution between the insurrectionary forces and the Ukrainian Red Air Fleet is calculated. Among other things it talks about legal problems tied to the handing of the aeroplanes to the Makhnovist 3rd Zadniprovska brigade and the 1st Ukrainian insurrectionary division. A certain part of the article is dedicated to the visit of the division commander Dybenko P. to Berdiansk tied to the problems mentioned before, the role of the “plane of anarchy” in the attack on Mariupol on March 28–29, 1919 and in the suppression of Padalko’s anti-Makhnovists putsch arranged on March 31, 1919. The author talks about different ways in which the rebels had solved the problem of the lack of aviation fuel in 1919–1920 by following a requisition practice. The article informs about the cases when the Red Army (reconnaissance air squads) was used for the benefit of the Makhnovists during their politico-military treaties with the Bolsheviks. A certain place is devoted to the description of the first flights of the insurrectionary leader Nestor Makhno. The article mentions the theme of the Makhnovists’ aviation in English fiction of the latter half of the twentieth century.

African Folklore: A Catalyst in Contemporary African Fictions

African folklore which are said to be active traditions have had immense influence on the growth and development of African literature. This claim is aptly demonstrated in the works of successful early African writers as in the case of Amos Tutuola and Daniel O. Fagunwa of Nigeria, Violet Dube in Zulu, S.E.K. Mghayi in Xhosa and a host of them. These literary artists draw their inspiration from the oral tradition by translating their structures and images to literary mode. It is on this platform that the article seeks to examine this claim in the light of the state of African literature today. This paper adopts Cyprian Ekwensi’s African Night’s Entertainment as a case study to demonstrate how present African writers build on that trend to success. Ekwensi is considered one of the pioneers of African literature and writing fiction in English in West Africa. Ekwensi’s works observed oral conventions in terms of themes, style and other motifs; but literary in its form. The book adopts tales from African cultural background. This article establishes that contemporary African writers owe much to African oral tradition in their various domains of literary inspirations.

English verb regularization in books and tweets.

The English language has evolved dramatically throughout its lifespan, to the extent that a modern speaker of Old English would be incomprehensible without translation. One concrete indicator of this process is the movement from irregular to regular (-ed) forms for the past tense of verbs. In this study we quantify the extent of verb regularization using two vastly disparate datasets: (1) Six years of published books scanned by Google (2003–2008), and (2) A decade of social media messages posted to Twitter (2008–2017). We find that the extent of verb regularization is greater on Twitter, taken as a whole, than in English Fiction books. Regularization is also greater for tweets geotagged in the United States relative to American English books, but the opposite is true for tweets geotagged in the United Kingdom relative to British English books. We also find interesting regional variations in regularization across counties in the United States. However, once differences in population are accounted for, we do not identify strong correlations with socio-demographic variables such as education or income.

Pakistani undergraduate students learning English fiction: an insight into perceptions of identity, rights and duties in relation to four novels

ABSTRACTThis paper presents original research which investigates university students’ perceptions of identity, rights and duties in relation to four novels at a public-sector university in Sindh, Pakistan. Reader-response framework and model of citizenship are used as theoretical frameworks guiding this study. The findings are based on data supplied by 26 participants through interviews. The key arguments based on findings of this study are that the participants discussed and connected to identity, rights and duties in the novels that were geographically, socially and temporally close in terms of their context which was as expected in light of Rosenblatt’s framework. These results are important for curriculum designers, teachers and researchers of citizenship, fiction and education in the context as they provide significant insights into students’ perceptions in relation to fiction.

A.S. Byatt and the “perpetual traveller”: a reading practice for new British fiction

While most readers enjoyed, or at least admired A.S. Byatt’s Booker prize-winning novel “Possession”, many are puzzled by her work before and since. This essay argues that the problem is not the novels themselves, but rather the way that readers approach them. Conventional reading practices for experimental or postmodern fiction do not enable the reader to understand and enjoy her dense, dizzying work. By examining the intertexts in her novella “Morpho Eugenia,” in particular two imaginary texts written by the protagonist William Adamson, this essay demonstrates how the novella generates a different kind of reading practice. Using Byatt’s metaphor, the essay recommends that readers become “perpetual travelers,” a global model of readership that will enable readers to navigate not only Byatt’s oeuvre and the realm of neo-Victorian fiction, but also the field of new British fiction and the crowded media landscape in which it resides.

Re-run and Re-read Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as an Archeology of the Present

Hailed by critics as breaking paths for the direction of British fiction, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2005) has been described as a way of re-thinking literature in terms of intermedial spaces, be they installations, performance artworks or a ‘remix’ of writing and film. The newness of Remainder seems to hinge on its imitation of a contemporary mediascape saturated with technical images and simulacra, in which reality is totally metamorphosed into a filmic phantasmagoria that novel writing is striving to mimic. Following McCarthy’s eschewing of the rhetoric of the ‘new’, this essay discusses the practice of re-enactment described in Remainder as a way digging up images from the past to read the myth of postmodern hyperreality against its grain. McCarthy’s ‘archeology of the present’ takes the concern with mediation and visual culture back to the unfinished business of modernism and its encounter with cinematic technology, reproposing the materialist aesthetics of embodiment that emerged from the conversation among literature, film and medicine in writers such as Joyce or T.S. Eliot, down to Samuel Beckett.

Re-run and Re-read Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as an Archeology of the Present

Hailed by critics as breaking paths for the direction of British fiction, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2005) has been described as a way of re-thinking literature in terms of intermedial spaces, be they installations, performance artworks or a ‘remix’ of writing and film. The newness of Remainder seems to hinge on its imitation of a contemporary mediascape saturated with technical images and simulacra, in which reality is totally metamorphosed into a filmic phantasmagoria that novel writing is striving to mimic. Following McCarthy’s eschewing of the rhetoric of the ‘new’, this essay discusses the practice of re-enactment described in Remainder as a way digging up images from the past to read the myth of postmodern hyperreality against its grain. McCarthy’s ‘archeology of the present’ takes the concern with mediation and visual culture back to the unfinished business of modernism and its encounter with cinematic technology, reproposing the materialist aesthetics of embodiment that emerged from the conversation among literature, film and medicine in writers such as Joyce or T.S. Eliot, down to Samuel Beckett.

Traumatic Re-enactments: Portraits of Veterans in Contemporary British and Canadian First World War Fiction

The paper focuses on the portrait of the First World War veterans in selected British and Canadian novels published at the turn of the twenty-first century. The authors use various means to depict the phenomenon of trauma: from flashbacks disrupting the present, through survivor guilt, nightmares and suicide, to aporia and the collapse of representation. The comparative approach used in the article highlights national differences, yet also shows that the discourse of futility and trauma provides a trasnational framework to convey the suffering of the First World War. As a result, although resulting in social castration and disempowerment, trauma serves here as a vehicle for a critique of the disastrous aftermath of the 1914-1918 conflict and the erasures of collective memory. Re-enacting traumatic plots, the British and Canadian novels under consideration explore little known facets of the 1914-1918 conflict, while simultaneously addressing some of our most pressing anxieties about the present, such as social marginalization, otherness, and lonely death.

“Prefer not, eh?”: Re-Scribing the Lives of the Great War Poets in Contemporary British Historical Fiction

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.

To the Indian Manner Born: How English Tells its Stories

Writing from outside the Anglo-American world is appreciated largely for the social life of English in worlds elsewhere, the linguistic oddities of its non-native cast of characters that spot poor translations. While English is easily granted inordinate powers of cultural assimilation, the languages of erstwhile colonies, the bhashas of India for example, from which this ‘translation’ presumably takes place, are seen to be rather weak and ill-equipped to meet the challenging demands of western narrative gambits. This essay offers three concrete examples of English fiction where its Indian writers afford us glimpses of a phenomenon critics have barely begun to notice. The passages examined here show how the bhashas sound differently when cast in English, or how English begins to breathe an unmistakable Indian ethos and idiom. When the Indian bhashas and English so happen together, there is no discrete language from which or into which translation occurs. It is evident that the writers here are no ‘Indianizers’ of a language whose fortunes now are global in reach and affect. For readers in India, English is still a bhasha-in-the-making, which is neither set in a ‘colonial’ far away and long ago, nor yet within current precincts of some ‘postcolonial’ felicity. If the efforts of these writers at resisting translation win, it is because they have asserted their right to imagine a language as a form of global life toward which English has taken them.

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

PASHTUN IMAGES IN CONTEMPORARY PAKISTANI FICTION IN ENGLISH

Living in an area that has long been a battlefield where various world powers have often been at loggerheads, Pashtuns have frequently drawn the attention of several works of fiction. Yet literary scholars have largely ignored the importance of these works of fiction looking into the lives of Pashtuns. This paper proposes that from the times of the Cold War to those of the War on Terror, Pashtun identities have been clouded by the hegemonic discourses of the contesting global powers, leading to gaps and silences in their depiction in literature.This paper argues that the Pashtun images in contemporary Pakistani fiction in English exhibit strong influences of the dominating narratives; simultaneously, however, they seem to offer various patterns of subversion of the prevailing power narratives. Despite the fact that Pashtuns are generally regarded as the most subversive people of South Asia and that their lands have been regarded significant strategically as well as geographically, yet they are portrayed as the Others of the mainstream cultural discourses. This paper aims to highlight the contours of the socio-cultural and political valuation of Pashtuns in contemporary Pakistani fiction in English.

The Concept of Construction in the Description of Interpersonal Relations in British Fiction

The Concept of Construction in the Description of Interpersonal Relations in British Fiction

The Curricular Canon of Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century British and Irish Literature at Polish Universities

In 2007 Philip Tew and Mark Addis released Final Report: Survey on Teaching Contemporary British Fiction, whose aim was to establish the most popular authors and works as taught by academics at British universities. The purpose of this article is to present the results of a similar survey, which examines the reading lists of British and Irish literature courses offered in the Eng­lish departments of chosen Polish universities in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Toruń, Poznań, Łódź, Lublin, Wrocław, Opole and Kraków. A discussion of the results — most commonly taught writers and texts — is accompanied by an analysis based on an online survey of the lecturers’ motivations behind including certain texts and omitting others. I will argue that whereas the teaching canon of modernist texts appears fixed all the reading lists include works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the canon of post-war and contemporary literature is yet to emerge. I shall also assert the appearance of the so called “canon lag” and review the selection criteria for the inclusion of canonical texts. The article concludes with a consideration of the texts that appear most likely to join the curricular canons at Polish universities in the near future. All the discussions are set in the context of critical contributions to the study of canonicity made by Harold Bloom, Nick Bentley, Dominic Head and others.