English-language Fiction Research Articles

Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.

Words in Collision: Multilingualism in English-Language Fiction by Michael L. Ross (review)

Words in Collision: Multilingualism in English-Language Fiction by Michael L. Ross (review)

Diachronic delta: A computational method for analysing periods of accelerated change in literary datasets

Abstract In his recently published book Distant Horizons (2019), Ted Underwood argues that literary change takes place incrementally. By analysing a dataset of English language fiction obtained from the digital research library HathiTrust, Underwood demonstrates that from the early 18th to the 21st century, literature written in English evinces a steady increase in words associated with physical description, concrete nouns as well as sensory perception and that this increase is accompanied by a proportional decrease in words associated with politics, economics as well as religion (Underwood 25). This article represents an effort to test Underwood’s incremental hypothesis by operationalizing Peter W.H. Smith and W. Aldridge’s cosine distance-based emendation to John Burrows’ ‘Delta’ method (Smith, P. W. H. and Aldridge, W. (2011). Improving authorship attribution: optimising burrows’ delta method. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 18(1): 63–88). By applying cosine Delta across time rather than as it is conventionally applied, across text (Evert, Stefan et al. Understanding and Explaining Delta Measures for Authorship Attribution. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32 (suppl_2) (2017): ii4–ii16), we can identify particular years as being associated with extensive amounts of ‘novelty’ (which years introduce the most amount of distance from their predecessors) and also possess extensive amounts of ‘resonance’ (are relatively proximate to their successors). According to Alexander T.J. Barron et al.’s method for analysing the parliamentary debates of the French revolution, agents within a dataset which have high amounts of novelty and high amounts of resonance are both innovative and influential, as they are significantly different from the years which come before and relatively similar to the years which come after. We might refer to these years as ‘breaks’ and contrast their behaviour with the longue-durée approach otherwise prevalent within the computational literary studies discourse. Though, as this article demonstrates, Underwood’s hypothesis of incremental change remains robust when considering the changes which come over the novel from the mid-18th to the early 20th century, applying this method to poetic and dramatic production over the same period of time, thereby examining the distinct ways in which novelty and resonance behave, allow us to modulate Underwood’s hypothesis and to understand literary history within a more conjunctural framework.

Too isolated, too insular: American Literature and the World

Are American authors homers? Do they devote too much of their attention to American concerns and settings? Is American literature as a whole different from other national literatures in its degree of self-interest? We attempt to answer these questions, and to address related issues of national literary identity, by examining the distribution of geo-graphic usage in more than 100,000 volumes of American, British, and other English-language fiction published between 1850 and 2009. We offer four principal findings: American literature consistently features greater domestic attention than does British literature; American literature is, nevertheless, significantly concerned with global loca-tions; politics and other international conflicts are meaningful drivers of changing literary attention in American and British fiction alike; and prize-nominated books are the only examined subclass of American fiction that has become significantly more international in the decades after World War II, a fact that may account for readers’ unfounded percep-tion of a similar overall shift in American literature.

Текстовая и дискурсивная лингвокреативность детской приключенческой повести в англоязычной литературе

The article explores the specificity of linguistic creativity in the discourse of children's English-language adventure fiction of the 1950s. The aim of the research is to develop the parametrization and vector-space method of discourse and text linguistic creativity assessment to evaluate the linguistic creativity potential of individual texts displaying similar discourse features. To serve as the research data three discourse fragments were selected, which represent three basic narrative types, Orientation, Complicating Actions, Evaluation and Resolution. To achieve the aim, the author applies the procedure of parametrization analysis followed by general and analytic statistics analysis and vector-space modelling. With the system of 52 parameters featuring linguistic creativity in phonology, word-formation, morphology, lexicology and phraseology, syntax, and graphics, the author manually annotates and processes the discourse fragments of similar size exemplifying three narrative types of adventure fiction literature, with the total sample size of 55,000 characters. General statistics analysis allowed revealing the absolute and relative parameter values in three discourse fragments and defining the relative parametric activity of single parameters and parameter levels. Analysis of variance helped define the correlation indices of parameter paired combinations, which resulted in detecting significant binary parameter groups . Individual parameter values and their binary groups served to construe the vector-space models of discourse and text linguistic creativity for the discourse narrative types under consideration. Thus, the author obtained an efficient instrument for discourse linguistic creativity evaluation and, furthermore, for assessing the potential of each individual text in terms of displaying stronger or weaker correlation with the vector coordinates of the discourse linguistic creativity vector-space model. With the frequency and variance analysis, the author disclosed two types of discourse linguistic creativity performance techniques, that is the individual parameter activation and the parameter synchronization. Both must be considered when the decision on linguistic creativity assessment in a concrete text is made. The resulting model shows that the parameter values of linguistic creativity in individual texts can manifest themselves in appearing both higher and lower than the reference parameter values of discourse creativity, which can contribute to disclosing new directions in creativity processing and understanding.

Narrative strategies for the realization of the image of nature in English-language fiction of the XIX–XX centuries

Narrative strategies for the realization of the image of nature in English-language fiction of the XIX–XX centuries

Metaphor as the refection of culture determined cognition

The article belongs to the cognitive dimension of contemporary cognitive linguistics based on the idea that the processes of the world conceptualization take place in the context of a certain culture and language imparting culturally determined character to our cognition. The ethnocultural specificity of cognition has various forms of manifestation in language, the most explicit of which is metaphor because the very nature of our thinking is metaphorical and reflects the correspondence with experience which is also culture-specific. The study aims to investigate how culturally determined cognition finds its manifestation in metaphor. The main goal of the article is to point out and characterize the forms of manifestation of ethnocultural specificity of metaphor in the text. The analysis is based on a corpus of 860 metaphorical expressions obtained from 34 English-language fiction texts. The main methods of analysis are conceptual, comparative-culturological and contextual analyses. The introduction contains a short survey of theoretical works related to the interaction of language, cognition and culture and describes the way methods are applied. In the second part the author analyses the interrelations between three branches of linguistics: ethnolinguistics, linguoculturology, and cultural linguistics united on the basis of their interest in the study of language in the cultural aspect. The main body of the article presents the analysis of metaphor in the aspect of culture specific cognition which results in the identification of three forms of representing the culturally determined cognition in metaphor: 1) the degree of metaphorical density of the text and the manner of metaphorical representation from the perspective of explicitness/implicitness; 2) the specificity of conceptual spheres which serve as the source of metaphors; 3) the choice of objects of metaphorical description determined by the sociocultural conventions of a linguocultural society. By way of conclusion, the author outlines the prospects of metaphor studies in the aspect of culture specific cognition.

Communication peculiarities of negotiation language on the example of texts of English-language fiction films

 The object of this research the communicative peculiarities of negotiation language on the example of English-language movies. Due the growing attention to the means of successful negotiations, the authors raise the relevant question on the need to consider speech aspects of negotiation process. The goal of this work is to analyze the communicative strategies and tactics (“pressure”, “high opening offer”, “disqualification”, “guilt”, “salami”) in the process of negotiations from the perspective of their effectiveness in achieving desired communicative goals. Combination of theoretical overview of the strategies and tactics of negotiation, as well as analysis of the effectiveness of applying tactics to achieve goals of negotiating parties were chosen as the methods for this research. The novelty of this article consist in reference to communicative peculiarities of negotiations in movies that have not previously been the object of analysis in the area of communication studies. The results of this research allowed determining the key strategies and tactics of negotiation in the analyzed films, as well as defining their effectiveness in the negotiation process.

NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009

This report accompanies a collection of 210,305 volumes, predicted to be fiction, that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. We divide the collection into seven subsets with different emphases (for instance, one where books written by men and women are represented equally, and one composed of only the most prominent and widely-held books). Comparing the pictures produced by these different subsets allows us to assess the resilience or fragility of recent quantitative arguments about literary history. Readers can also simply browse the report as a description of English-language fiction in HathiTrust Digital Library.

Комплексный анализ процессуальных фразеологизмов в русскоязычных и англоязычных художественных произведениях

The article provides a comparative analysis of procedural phraseological units in the modern Russian-language and English-language fiction. A seme analysis (description of categorial and sub-categorial semes) and a structural analysis of phraseological units are conducted, their positive and negative connotation is considered. The conclusions are made about differences and similarities of stable units in the languages under study. The differences are explained from the viewpoint of specificity of national mentality.

Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Priscilla Meyer

Reviewed by: Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Priscilla Meyer Leona Toker Priscilla Meyer, Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 188 pp. The growing recognition of the thought-suffused texture and artistic excellence of Vladimir Nabokov's work has in recent decades gained expression in books wholly devoted to one of his novels—Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Ada— or even to a single short story such as "Signs and Symbols." In the past few years three books have been devoted to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a novel once regarded by many (including, regrettably, my younger self) as brilliant but flawed and mainly transitional from Nabokov's writing in Russian to his English-language fiction. This new interest in the novel has been partly stimulated by a growing corpus of biographical materials—in the first place, Brian Boyd's biography of the novelist. The first two of these books annotate the text chapter by chapter and offer solutions to the enigma represented by the novel's mysterious co-protagonist, the English writer Sebastian Knight, whose "real life" is being sought by his Russian half-brother V., the narrator of the novel. In Absolute Solution (2013) Andrew Caulton foregrounds the echoes of British detective fiction, especially that of Arthur Conan Doyle, in Nabokov's text in order to argue that Sebastian's secret is that he is a British intelligence agent, a version of the Scarlet Pimpernel (and that V. almost gets killed by spies of a hostile power in one of the novel's central episodes). In Silent Love (2016), Gerard de Vries makes a different tentative suggestion: the secret behind Sebastian's seemingly cruel break-up with Clare Bishop is his homosexuality (a criminal offence in antebellum Britain and hence, indeed, to be kept moot even should V. become aware of it). The most recent book, Priscilla Meyer's Nabokov and Indeterminacy, abstains from offering a solution to the enigma of the protagonist's character and conduct and, on the contrary, discusses different aspects of indeterminacy in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in relation to Nabokov's other novels, in particular Despair, Lolita, and Pale Fire, showing that the themes and techniques of this novel, written in 1938–1939, are integral features of Nabokov's larger corpus. Whereas in Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale places Nabokov on the borderline between modernism and post-modernism (modernism being dominated by epistemological concerns and post-modernism by ontological ones), Meyer traces the post-modernist features of Nabokov's work, which gain the clearest [End Page 182] articulation in the 1962 Pale Fire, back to his last pre-war novel, and associates them with Nabokov's view that the term "reality" makes sense only in quotation marks. For Meyer this view of reality is not merely an epistemological issue but also a matter of metaphysical uncertainty staged in Nabokov's worlds. Her book belongs to the stream of Nabokov scholarship that foregrounds the theme of the "otherworld" and argues that search for a metaphysical insight, ineluctably incomplete, characterizes the bulk of Nabokov's corpus: "Nabokov has set his linguistic and cultural worlds into tension with the unknowable beyond; he cannot know if he can ever return in the next world to what he has lost in this one, but assuages the pain of that uncertainty by dedicating his work to optimysticism" (18). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, however, the coinage "optimystic" is used ironically, and mainly in application to believers in the "golden paradise" of established religions (1959: 177). At the beginning of Speak, Memory Nabokov protests against "the walls of time" that separate him and his "bruised fists" from the "free world of timelessness" (1966: 20). Did his fists make a dent in the walls? Meyer's book associates the indeterminacy of Nabokov's plots and layers of meaning with the unavailability of an answer to this question. Yet in first-rate literary works indeterminacy can be an achievement rather than a failure and is accompanied by overdetermination: the reader is stimulated to set...

Fostering Language Learning in the University EFL Classroom through Literature: A Task-Based Approach

The role of literature as a teaching and learning tool in English as a Foreign Language has long been acknowledged. Literary texts offer teachers opportunities to provide students with authentic materials to heighten their motivation by involving them in challenging Task-Based activities in which they interact with authors and learn about features of these authors’ society. The purpose of this research study was to investigate the role of literature as a pedagogical tool in the EFL class and see how this can be advantageous in fostering learners’ language skills and intercultural awareness. The sample population encompassed 26 sixth-semester students enrolled in a Reading course who are completing their BA in Foreign Languages at a public University in Colombia. A semi-structured questionnaire and a Reading Guide were designed to elicit information from students who were asked to read an unabridged English language fiction novel. The findings show that the participants’ motivation to complete the Task-Based Reading and Writing Project was high as well as their language skills. Keywords. EFL, ESL, Task-Based Approach, Literature, intercultural Communicative Competence

Borges as Translator

Jorge Luis Borges, primarily known for his original short fiction, also published many translations of other authors’ works over the course of his life, as well as essays on translation theory. Borges proclaimed his own ‘periphrastic’ approach to translation, taking the opportunity to effect changes in his versions of other writers’ works rather than simply attempting to render the source texts into Spanish. In order to examine the strategies employed by Borges in his translations of English-language prose fiction, this paper will consider three texts translated by Borges alongside the original versions: “The Red-Headed League” by Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “The Purloined Letter.” Analysis of these texts will demonstrate the extent to which Borges is prepared to put into practice the theory of radical innovation that he outlines in his essays on literary and translation theory.

Gender associations in the twentieth-century English-language literature

Gender associations may be partly learned from print media, including literature. Using Google Books Ngram corpus, we explored the depiction of male and female characters in the twentieth-century English-language fiction. By analyzing adjective-noun bigrams, we examined adjectives used in association with “man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl”. Men were described in more positive terms than women. Girls were depicted more positively than boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the tendency reversed in the middle of the century. Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls; however, men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women. Despite limitations of interpretability of the results, the study presents a possible approach of exploring past characterization of the two genders.

Future Fluctuations: Economy, Exchange, and Subjectivity in Recent English-Language Speculative Fiction

Future Fluctuations: Economy, Exchange, and Subjectivity in Recent English-Language Speculative Fiction

ЯЗЫКОВЫЕ СРЕДСТВА СОЗДАНИЯ ОБРАЗА ДЕЛОВОЙ ЖЕНЩИНЫ В АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНОМ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОМ ДИСКУРСЕ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ РОМАНА Л. ВАЙСБЕРГЕР “THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA”)

The article is devoted to the topical problem of studying the image of a businesswoman. The purpose of the work is to identify the system of linguistic means, by which the representation of the image of a businesswoman in L. Weisberger’s novel “The Devil Wears Prada” is shown. The research novelty is in the attempt of the comprehensive analysis and systematisation of the linguistic means used to realise the image of a businesswoman in an occupational novel. The author uses vocabulary definitions. The results have shown that the actualisation of the components of a businesswoman’s image in the English-language fiction discourse is implemented through lexical-stylistic and syntactic means, author’s neologisms, original nominations, as well as terms and specific vocabulary of glossy publications. Image and evaluation characteristics are expressed both explicitly and implicitly. The functioning specificity of the identified units, divided into thematic groups, is revealed.

Social Characters: The Hierarchy of Gender in Contemporary English-Language Fiction

Across a variety of cultural fields, researchers have identified a near ubiquitous underrepresentation and decentralization of women. This occurs both at the level of who is able to produce cultural works and who is depicted within them. Women are less likely to be directors of Hollywood films and also less likely to have starring roles.

ON RENDERING ODESA REALIA IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE FICTION AND NON-FICTION TEXTS

The article focuses on rendering non-equivalent lexis in English language fiction and nonfiction texts. Research has been done on the basis of the following texts: Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel, Moonlight in Odessa by Janet Skeslien Charles, journals – The Odessa Review and The Awesome Odesa and Internet resources. The final objective of the work is to describe local Odesa realia and systematize the ways of their rendering. The objective determined the tasks of the research: to analyse different scholar definitions of the term “realia” and formulate own definition; to outline relevant for linguistics and translation studies classifications of realia and the ways of their rendering, to single out 400 examples (obtained by random selection) from the texts given; to determine the place of each realia in semantic classifications and the classification of rendering realia. Our study relies substantially on the application of linguistic descriptive methodology and devices. The research gives recommendations to the enhancement of the S. Vlahov and S. Florin’s classification as it ignores some reality phenomena. The paper singles out the most frequent kinds of Odesa realia-localisms and the ways of their rendering. The work discovers that realia concerned society and politics and loan translation, half-calque and mix translation as ways of rendering realia are the most frequently used in fiction as well as non-fiction texts. The research highlights the ways of rendering realia which occurred to be omitted in the S. Vlahov and S. Florin’s classification. The prospects of the research lie in elaborating a bilingual glossary of the Odesa realia to fulfil professional needs of translators, interpreters, guides, culture and history researchers.

Some Examples of the Ecogothic in Contemporary English Language Fiction

Some Examples of the Ecogothic in Contemporary English Language Fiction

‘Damn these printers … By heaven, I'll cut Hoey's throat’: The History of Mr. Charles Fitzgerald and Miss Sarah Stapleton (1770), a Catholic Novel in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

The History of Mr Charles Fitzgerald and Miss Sarah Stapleton (Dublin, 1770) is a satirical marriage-plot novel, published by the Roman Catholic bookseller James Hoey Junior. The essay argues that the anonymous author was himself a Roman Catholic, whose work mischievously interrogates the place of English-language prose fiction in Ireland during the third-quarter of the eighteenth century. By so doing, the fiction illuminates the issue, so far neglected by Irish book historians, of how the growing middle-class Roman Catholic readership might have read the increasingly popular ‘new species of writing’, as produced by novelists in Great Britain and Ireland. The essay concludes by reviewing the question of the authorship of The History and offering a new attribution to the Catholic physician and poet, Dr Dominick Kelly, of Ballyglass, Co. Roscommon.