English Literary History Research Articles

‘Ofer eall wifa cyn’: Cultivating Female Agency in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Cynewulf’s Juliana

ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace situates “Infinite Jest” within the tradition of English literary history by mirroring the narrative of Hamlet. This literary-historical grounding intensifies the critical allure of Wallace’s reference to Old English by way of Cynewulf’s “Juliana.” I contend that, in “Infinite Jest,” Joelle van Dyne’s struggle for an independent identity can be read as a parallel to Juliana’s cultivation of an autonomous self through social defiance. For both women, their struggles for autonomy are marked by continued reliance on male figures: Joelle must socially and psychologically maneuver male relationships in order to fashion a sense of independence; similarly, Juliana attempts to construct a strong identity founded on her Christian faith, but this is potentially undercut by her reliance on a specifically male God. The women’s narratives are distinguished by their successes rather than their failures, which are reinforced through tropological elements of Old English exile. The duality between Joelle and Juliana highlights Wallace’s attempt to depict the perpetuation of historical gender roles, while the self-consciousness of his postmodern prose indicates his deep desire to grapple with the social issues that not only pervade literature today but have been woven into the fabric of English literary and social history.

A Literary Stylistic Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill

Katherine Mansfield, one of the most renowned female writers in the world of literature, created 93 works in her brief lifetime, many of which are considered classics by posterity. Mansfield’s outstanding contribution to literature lies in her innovation in the realm of short stories, and she is widely recognized as one of the finest short story writers in the history of English literature. Miss Brill is one such masterpiece, depicting the story of Miss Brill as she dresses neatly and goes to the park on a Sunday, sitting on a bench and observing the people passing by, listening to their conversations and the band playing. She imagines herself as a part of their world, but her illusions are shattered by a young couple, and she returns home, disheartened, to what feels like a cupboard of a home. This short story exemplifies the artistic techniques in Mansfield's storytelling, with one of the prominent features being the charm emanating from the stylistic choices in her works. Literary stylistics is concerned with the language features of literary works, exploring how authors use language to express the themes of their works and enhance their aesthetic value. This paper will delve into literary stylistics, focusing on the text of the short story Miss Brill, examining its lexical features, grammatical features, and figures of speech to explore how Mansfield uses specific language choices to convey and enhance the thematic significance and aesthetic effects of her work.

Analysis of the Causes of Tess’s Tragedy from Multi-perspectives

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is one of the greatest rustic novelists as well as a great poet in English literary history. He is very good at looking at life in a tragic way and describing the human suffering in the tragic sentiment and a unique manner, so he is regarded by critics as " Shakespeare in English fiction ". His representative masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, tells the tragic fate of Tess, a very pretty rural girl who is seduced by one man, then deserted by the other and finally propelled to murder for which she is hanged as a miserable consequence. Any tragedy is not isolated or accidental, but the result of many factors. Tess’s tragedy happens with a lot of causes. This paper aims to analyze the causes which lead to Tess’s tragedy from three perspectives: characters’ factors, social factors and writer's factors.

Traversing Boundaries: An Analysis of the Unremitting Psychic Unity in The Waste Land

Known as ‘Pope of Russel Square’ in the history of English literature from the 20th century, T. S. Eliot’s, literary ingenuity augmented the modernist writings. ‘The Waste Land’ is one such eventuality that, retrospectively from the publication, permuted worldwide, giving boundless definitions and ceaseless critical appraisals. Contriving the idiom of modern poetry, his career as a part never went over the hill since it was chiselled out of the emotional and intellectual retaliation to a gest which was his life itself. The close-grained, fragmented study of his works, has seemingly been immense and comprehensive. Being portrayed as the literary arbiter, his personal life was lucid and full of drama. The oeuvre hence hollers the zeitgeist of his era. As a philosopher, his happy hunting ground was both religion and the emphasis on conforming to the basic moral values of life. His ethical involvement with life emanates from the underlying desolation and devastation regarding his personal life. When he assiduously carried his position in poetry, politics, and literature, he was tagged as heedless in his personal life. The childhood limitations sprouted out from the complications of inguinal hernia, later when he was at Harvard while studying Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, the commencement of WWI and the escape from Oxford after witnessing a society which was wartorn, a love affair with Emily Hale which closed out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail and the hasty entry into wedlock with Vivienne Haigh-Wood whose alleged adultery with Bertrand Russel and her ailment that followed took a toll on his burgeoning literary career. The shuffling was wilfully implemented, as alluded to by many critics. But for a feeler who, exasperated by the atrocities of war, could not necessarily keep the word restrained to the end and the overscrupulous side of Eliot could not have missed the slightest of the change either.

Book Review: Ideas and Methods: The Writing of British Literary History Within the Framework of Chinese Discourse by Dongmei Wang

Book Review: <i>Ideas and Methods: The Writing of British Literary History Within the Framework of Chinese Discourse</i> by Dongmei Wang

MARY SHELLEY’NİN MATHILDA ADLI ESERİNİN EKOFEMİNİST ANALİZİ: KENDİ TABU KURGUSUNU YAZAN KADIN ANLATICI

Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novelette, Mathilda, in the twenty-first century from an ecofeminist perspective sheds a new light on contemporary criticism, opening up multifaceted perspectives. There was a critical moment in British literary history when Elizabeth Nitchie transcribed Mathilda from the microfilm of the manuscript and published it in 1959, which unveiled this piece of revolutionary taboo fiction suppressed for over a century by the author’s male relatives, chiefly Shelley’s father, William Godwin. Written in 1819-1820, Mathilda is the only work completed during Shelley’s lifetime. It is an artfully crafted epistolary work depicting the traumatic confessions and suicidal tendencies of the protagonist, Mathilda, a woman who isolated herself from society by integrating herself with nature due to her father’s confession for his incestuous passion towards her. Regarded as an underrated work, Mathilda has often been interpreted from biographical and incest-related perspectives by literary critics, which relegates its literary merits although it is in accordance with feminist and ecological theories and feminine writing. This paper, avoiding biographical accounts and the author’s life experiences and with theories consistent with those of ecofeminism, intends to show how nature functions as an effective instrument for the female writer to fictionalize her taboo story. By blending ecofeminism with feminine writing, this paper also investigates the interplay between woman and nature, and navigates how a female character courageously relocates her taboo story on a textual level from a feminist perspective in a natural setting, challenging the male-dominant Romantic tradition of the nineteenth century.

Handling Islamophobia in Edmund Spenser’s Poem The Faerie Queen

Being a growing religion throughout the world, Islam isincreasingly becoming the ghost which threatens to shatter the establishednorms of the Western thinking. Islamophobia, hence, grew as a doctrine whichdesignates fear and antagonisms towards Islam as a religion and a system ofcultural behavior. It has been widely represented in English literaturethroughout various literary ages. This paper is concerned with Islamophobia inEdmund Spenser‟s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1595), which is rankedamong the greatest works in the history of English literature. Spenser employsthis work to represent his biased attitude to Christianity and to portray thetyrannous reign of Muslims. The paper argues that Islamophobia, as a concept,is recently conjured; however it is very old as an ideology in the history of thehuman race since it represents the Western mindset which is based on theprejudice and hatred of the „other.‟ The faerie Queen, which is set in themedieval ages, reflects a religious antagonism towards Muslims who achievedgreat victories over the Crusaders in Jerusalem. The paper, for this reason,questions whether the term of Islamophobia which is a modern one is fit todescribe the prejudiced tone against Muslims in a sixteenth century work. Itemploys Edward Said‟s discourse of the binary opposition, which has beentackled in his outstanding book Orientalism, as a theoretical framework. It alsocomes across his book covering Islam in order to argue that Islam has beenportrayed as a „form of heresy‟, synonymous with terrorism and religioushysteria.

GENRE PECULIARITIES OF THE LITERATURE OF THE NORMAN PERIOD (12TH 13TH CENTURIES)

The period of French domination left an important mark on the later history of English literature, which, in some cases, is more common with the artistic devices and style of French literature of the Norman period than with the study of Anglo-Saxon literature, from which it was artificially divorced. The Norman conquest conditioned certain specific features of language development. The main one was the spread of three languages in the Kingdom of England – French among the ruling class, English among the broad masses of the population, and Latin in church affairs and administration. This affected the linguistic and genre character of English medieval literature.Methods used in the study: general scientific (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction), methods of theoretical research (from abstract to concrete), historical method Among the feudal lords, the most popular genre was chivalric poetry, which was brought from France by trouver singer-poets. The most common manifestation of chivalric poetry was the rhyming chivalric novel, which reflected the customs of the upper feudal class, promoted heroic deeds, the code of chivalric morality, and examples of human virtues. The novels about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table became the most popular.

Entertainments from a Medieval Minstrel’s Repertoire Book

Abstract National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.3.1 (the Heege Manuscript) is a large, late-fifteenth-century English miscellany manuscript from the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Its first booklet, which existed independently of the manuscript’s other eight booklets throughout much or all of its medieval life, contains three texts: the tail-rhyme burlesque romance The Hunting of the Hare, a mock sermon in prose, and the alliterative nonsense verse The Battle of Brackonwet. This essay proposes that Richard Heege, the booklet’s scribe, copied these texts from the repertoire of a local entertainer, be that a gifted amateur or, very plausibly, a travelling minstrel working a regular beat. In this light, the booklet’s comic, crude, and sometimes frivolous contents take on new significance in the history of English literature, as they provide close evidence for what made up the entertainments of English oral culture—or minstrelsy—at the end of the Middle Ages.

J. T. Fraser and the Temporal Texture of Narrative, an Intersection of Disciplines

Abstract This paper tracks the intersection of three disciplinary areas: J. T. Fraser’s theory of time as nested temporalities, M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, and English literary history. Narrative theorists claim that narrative is a use of language that organizes the human understanding of time. However, narrative is not limited to only one temporality but can include the multiple temporalities that appear in Fraser’s model. This approach repudiates studies of narrative, such as those in the structuralist tradition of dual discourse and story, which assume “time” has a singular meaning equivalent to Fraser’s “biotemporality.” Each temporality can be associated with a different type of coherent story, and thus the one narrative can weave together stories with different temporalities, its “temporal texture.” Fraser and Halliday both recognize Gerald Edelman’s dual model of the brain and the emergence of language through the evolution of the human brain from “primary consciousness” to “higher-order consciousness.” Language evolves in the “human umwelt” of everyday experience of material, mental and social worlds in the gravitational context of this earth. Thus pre-twentieth century narratives, with various textures, tell stories of Fraser’s temporalities of human earthly experience. Fraser’s model also describes the “unearthly temporalities” that, from the twentieth century, modern science and technology have added to human understanding, producing what he calls the “extended human umwelt.” The twentieth century narratives of modernism and postmodernism may include these temporalities in their texture. However, the digital culture of the twenty-first century already reshapes the human umwelt; the paper ends with some speculation on changes in organization of temporal meaning in the evolving context.

Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature: Authority, Exemplarity and Femininity, by Juliette Vuille

Juliette Vuille investigates the figure of the holy harlot in medieval English literature: those female saints who, following a sinful (read: sexual) youth, repent in favour of a particularly ascetic spirituality. Vuille’s ambitious project encompasses English literary history from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries and considers works in three of England’s vernacular languages: Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman. She argues that the holy harlot offers a ‘much more inclusive and overarching presentation of femininity’, one that allows womanhood to symbolise both the best and worst in humanity (p. 223). Medieval English literature constructs the holy harlot with such capaciousness, she contends, that she comes to represent Everyman, a symbol of humanity writ large as both fallen and redeemed. The first chapter investigates the earliest Old English lives of holy harlots from the ninth and tenth centuries. Vuille posits that pre-Conquest England provided particularly fertile ground for lives of holy harlots to flourish, given the multiplicity of non-traditional paths for women to religious life, and the pre-existing literary traditions for heroic women. She argues that, contrary to their Latin sources, these Old English texts represent the holy harlot’s conversion to sanctity as a queer transcending of gender, allowing any reader to ‘move beyond trajectories set by one’s gender’ (p. 56). These queer possibilities were closed off, however, after the Norman Conquest, as Vuille discusses in her second chapter. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Vuille contends, hagiography had been deeply affected by the rises of romance and affective piety. As both harlot and lady of romance, the saint could therefore represent the worst and best of femininity, transforming from prostitute into bride of Christ. Rather than transcend femininity, the harlot saint embraced it, thereby aligning herself fully with Christ’s feminised humanity. In her third chapter, Vuille demonstrates how the lives of holy harlots changed following the advent of Wycliffism. In response to Mary Magdalene’s prominence in the Wycliffite defence of lay preaching, she argues, John Mirk wrote a version of the Magdalene’s life that minimised her radical preaching, while Osbern Bokenham, more sheltered by the influence of his powerful patroness, instead presented a Magdalene who retained her persuasive speech but worked in harmony with clerical authority. The multivalent possibilities of the holy harlot come into full bloom in Chapter Four’s discussion of the Digby Mary Magdalene. In rendering the Magdalene as simultaneously fallen and sanctified, Vuille argues that the play ‘stages the universality of the holy harlot mode to represent Everyman’ (p. 141). Vuille demonstrates the availability of that mode to women in particular in her final chapter, which focuses on how Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Barton took inspiration from Mary Magdalene in order to sanctify and justify their public spiritual lives.

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry

Reviewed by: Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry Peter Degabriele Melissa Mowry, Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 250; 3 illus. $80.00 cloth. Melissa Mowry's Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History follows the traces of a non-elite communal practice of hermeneutics and a collectivist politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary history. The book has five chapters, the first of which functions as an introduction, as well as a short but provocative coda. Throughout, Mowry looks to the Levellers as the positive articulation of a collective hermeneutics that she claims has been buried by the standard narrative of the rise of liberal individualism, and she argues that the political and literary history of the period she examines should be reconceived as a consistent attempt to eradicate this collectivism in favor of a conservative individualism. This is in stark contrast to the conventional narrative of early eighteenth-century political and literary history which argues that an individualist ideology produced a new liberal and anti-absolutist politics. For Mowry, by contrast, the theater of the Restoration and early novels by Defoe worked tirelessly to disavow the possibility of collectivist thought and politics. This refraction of the traditional narrative throws up some surprising and enlightening results. The Tory Aphra Behn and the dissenting Whig Daniel Defoe, for instance, are, in Mowry's account, engaged in the same political project of anti-collectivism rather than existing on opposite sides of a partisan political spectrum. This new lens thus reorients our vision of this period and stands as a profound challenge to conventional ways of understanding the relation of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature to political ideology. Collective Understanding models a new form of literary criticism that Mowry terms collective hermeneutics. Mowry's reading of the Leveller tradition in the second chapter of the book demonstrates this practice by paying attention to the ways in which texts "articulate relationships rather than statements/principles/ideas, or even identities" (13). This method allows Mowry to recover the contribution of Leveller women to the political praxis of the group, and to demonstrate the way Leveller texts worked by producing affective relationships. These relationships, Mowry argues, are the very basis of political association for the Levellers, a communal political thought that forthrightly challenges the sovereign exceptionalism being developed contemporaneously by theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Mowry argues that instead of a popular sovereignty that would grant "the commonalty the sovereign power of exceptionalism," the Levellers claimed "a more fluid and socially grounded account of authority, stabilized through the affective bonds of collectivity" (57). Mowry deftly recovers this theory of association by her method of reading Leveller writings, a process in which instead of focusing on ideas or individual authorship, she follows traces of collective and social production of texts, from authorship, to printing, to distribution. The claim that Mowry makes through her practice is a significant one: that the kind of liberal, individualist criticism we are accustomed to practice makes it impossible for us to see the very collectivity characteristic of the Leveller movement, and that only a changed critical practice can recover a communitarian and sociable politics. The final three chapters of Collective Understanding focus not so much on tracing the positive development of a collectivist politics, as on finding the remnants of this collectivism in literary and ideological works that are determined [End Page 484] to erase it. Chapter 3 argues that attending to the work of William Davenant and Aphra Behn can demonstrate that "the royalist push to regain cultural authority over the late seventeenth century" enlisted literature to "secure the value and cultural centrality of exceptionalism and singularity" (129). Mowry thus reads the Restoration period as an ideological battle between an alliance of sovereignty and singularity against collectivism. The most interesting account of this battle comes in Mowry's readings of Behn's rewriting of the history of Bacon's rebellion in The Widdow Ranter. The play, for Mowry, is an "indictment of collectivity" (123) in which the "aggregated authority of the first-hand accounts" on which Behn's (and others') knowledge of the...

Paul Clairmont and his connections to American surgery.

To examine the life and influences of Paul Clairmont (1875-1942). Review and analysis of published and archival information. The Clairmont family was associated with famous individuals in English literary history. Paul Clairmont himself was born, educated, and trained as a surgeon under Anton von Eiselsberg in Vienna. As a junior faculty member in 1908, he was the first general surgeon to publish a report for German readers on the remarkable progress of American surgery. Later, as Professor of Surgery in Zürich, he was a mentor to Alton Ochsner, who became a leader in the further development of surgery in the USA. Paul Clairmont's interesting life was an important link between the classical science and practice of surgery in Europe and its continuation in America.

Realism and Pessimism in the novels of Thomas Hardy

The objective of this article is to highlight realistic and pessimistic approaches in the novels of Thomas Hardy. His pessimism is of a different kind, which is based on logical and realistic earthly facts. His writing career spans over two centuries in the history of English literature, and viewers find that pessimism in his novels is, of course, a kind of realism. In fact, ‘life and death’ and ‘gain and loss’ always execute mankind and take all human beings into the realm of suffering. He has devoted his thoughts, ideas, and philosophy to many problems such as religion, ethics, life, society, love, and marriage in his novels.

A Literary Stylistics Study on Verbal Humor in Pride and Prejudice

Literary stylistics is defined by its object and purpose of study, a school of literature that aims to elucidate the thematic significance and aesthetic value of literary issues. Literary stylistics, as a branch of stylistics, is a combination of linguistics and literary criticism. Literary criticism focuses on interpretation, while linguistics attaches importance to form. Literary stylistics pays attention to both interpretation and form, which is conducive to better language study. Jane Austen, comparable to Shakespeare, is one of the greatest novelists in the history of English literature. As a master of language, she wrote many books, Pride and Prejudice is one of her masterpieces. It has also been adapted into several TV series and films. Among them, English Rose Keira Knightley played Elizabeth is very impressive. For a long time, many critics and writers have studied this work, but there is relatively little research on its style, so this paper studies this film in terms of vocabulary, rhetoric, and syntax. In addition, this paper attempts to interpret the humorous expressions in Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of literary stylistics, to analyze the women’s awakening consciousness implied by the humorous words, and to shed light on contemporary female values.

New Hungarian Narratives in the History of English Literature

Review. Az angol irodalom története. Vol. I. A középkor. [‘History of English Literature. Vol. I. The Middle Ages.’] Edited by Tamás Karáth and Katalin Halácsy. Editors in chief: Tamás Bényei and Géza Kállay. Budapest: Kijárat, 2020. Pp. 411. ISBN 978-615-5160-77-6., Az angol irodalom története. Vol. II. A kora újkor. [‘History of English Literature. Vol. II. The Early Modern Period.’] Edited by Attila Atilla Kiss and György Endre Szőnyi. Editors in chief: Tamás Bényei and Géza Kállay. Budapest: Kijárat, 2020. Pp. 501. ISBN 978-615-5160-78-3.

The History of English Literature: A New Approach

Review. Az angol irodalom története. Vol. I. A középkor. [‘History of English Literature. Vol. I. The Middle Ages.’] Edited by Tamás Karáth and Katalin Halácsy. Editors in chief: Tamás Bényei and Géza Kállay. Budapest: Kijárat, 2020. Pp. 412. ISBN: 978-615-5160-77-6.

After Euripides: Esotericism in Medea’s English Literary Tradition

The Euripidean Medea remains a mystery to human understanding The esotericism of her story has allowed for dramatically different representations. In tracing her English literary history, from classical to contemporary dramatists, this paper follows Medea’s characters throughout the centuries. Drawing on Euripides, it provides a wide perspective on a long tradition, pointing out the distinctive intellectual and moral features of each historical period. In particular, it aims to show how this esoteric figure actually suits the writers’ ideology, who recurrently use Medea as a symbol to serve their different political and moral purposes, proving the malleability and esotericism of myth.

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Rose Botaish APHRA BEHN Mathes, Carmen Faye. "Lucretius Taken Lightly: Women's Educations and the Radical Materialist Joke." Representations, vol. 159, 2022, pp. 34–57. This article is an examination of eighteenth-century jokes about Lucretius and their connection to the inadequacies of women's education. Mathes analyzes the radical materialist joke and its potential to invoke "notions of subjectivity beyond agential autonomy" in the work of Aphra Behn, Anne Ingram, and Mary Robinson (34). Jokes generally, Mathes points out, fail to revolutionize because they fail to "move beyond the social spheres already likely to appreciate them" and promote continual comedy rather than consideration of "real-world implications" that would incite actionable change (36). In particular, Mathes highlights the reliance on "patrilineal inheritance" in jokes about Lucretius as pointing to the failures of women's education without successfully inciting useful social change (35). Ultimately, Mathes concludes that jokes' democratic potential is undermined by the boundaries set by its necessary appeal to a certain ingroup audience. MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE Zimmern, Arnaud. "Silkworms and Panaceas: Margaret Cavendish, Infinite Nature, and the Progress of Utopia." ELH: English Literary History, vol. 89, no. 1, 2022, pp. 89–113. Zimmern examines Margaret Cavendish's departure from her typical form in the utopian fiction The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, a work of fiction wherein she abandons prior convictions that "nature abhors philosophical reduction and will not be made to cure all" in favor of satirizing her contemporaries in the Royal Society (89). Zimmern argues [End Page 189] that she entertains more imaginative "conjectures what a panacea might look like if, rather than a work of artifice, it was an unrefined wonder of Nature; rather than mimic the alchemist's chrysopoeia, it mimicked the caterpillar's chrysalis" (90). Zimmern disagrees with Lara Dodds, Laura Knoppers, Marina Leslie, and John Morillo's scholarship which supposes that Cavendish used the Empress and The Blazing World's panacea to reimagine the role of women and the value of fertility (or, in Cavendish's case, lack thereof) in the Restoration. Zimmerm instead interprets her butterfly language as evidence of her "her remarkable ability to abide on the threshold between warranted skepticism of art and persistent hope in Nature" (108). WILLIAM CONGREVE Urban, David V. "Ironic Allusions to Hebrews 13:4 and Romans 11:16 in William Congreve's The Way of the World, Act III, Scene XVIII." Notes and Queries, vol. 68 [266], no. 4, Dec. 2021, pp. 419–21. Urban points to Congreve's biblical allusion to Hebrews 13:4 and Romans 11:16 in The Way of the World, which scholarship has not previously considered. Contextualizing this allusion with Congereve's insistence that "language 'which is seemingly allusive to the Bible' ought 'be understood only in the context of the play' in which it appears," Urban examines the allusion as signifying the role of the characters Fainall and Mrs Marwood (419). Urban shows the couple's use of scripture in their conversation within the play as Conreve's emphasis on the characters' "impiety and their extreme cynicism towards the institution of marriage" to indicate the sadness of their cuckoldry (420). In this sense, Urban contends that rather than Congreve being blasphemous, his biblical allusions serve to present his characters in a certain light. See DRAMA & PERFORMANCE, RELIGION & THEOLOGY COMPARATIVE STUDIES Hulse, Mark C. "Dryden and Shakespeare in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger: Contrasting Emblems of Nature, Empire, and Communion." Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary, vol. 119, no. 2, Nov. 2021, pp. 276–98. Hulse investigates Barry Unsworth's 1992 historical fiction novel Sacred Hunger and its depictions of eighteenth-century slavery through engagements with Roman, Renaissance, and Restoration texts. This intertextual approach, Hulse claims, expands the novel's reach to be "prescient and timely for modern debates about economic and ecological tensions" (277). Hulse focuses on the references to Shakespeare's The Tempest and its Restoration adaptation by John Dryden, The Enchanted Island. Specifically, Hulse delves into the multiple iterations of the Caliban role in Enchanted Island, which he sees as upending more typical ideas of "the non-European savage" to show that...

A Corpus-based Study of William Blake’s The Tyger-Translation Style

The Tyger by William Blake symbolized a devout Christian belief and admiration towards the God among western people at that time. It is of great importance in the English literature history. Thus whether the Chinese translation versions are in concordance with the original meaning or not is worth study. Based on the corpus, this paper will compare and analyse the three Chinese translation versions in terms of lexicon selection and sentence features, so as to explore the differences in styles.