English Novels Research Articles

‘[A] very improbable and imaginative fiction’: Fictionalising the French invasion of Fishguard

In the years leading up to the centenary of the last invasion of the British mainland, several historical novels in Welsh and English chronicled the events of the French landing near Fishguard in 1797. These fictional explorations throw Welsh national identity into relief at a time when Britain consolidated its domestic and overseas territories against its main rival, France. While ostensibly set in the historical past, the novels under observation share significant traits with the popular genre of the invasion novel that came to the fore in the second half of the nineteenth century as the British Empire neared its largest extent. Published during a time of cultural and political revivals in late-Victorian Wales, these historical invasion novels offer a different, literary way to examine past discourses around Welsh nationhood and national territory as well as coloniality and sovereignty.

Slavery as a Cultural Legacy: Abdulrazzak Gurnah’s Paradise as a Case Study

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1948 in Zanzibar, Tanzania (then the Sultanate of Zanzibar). He moved to the UK as a refugee in the 1960s after the Zanzibar Revolution. The vulnerability of slavery has been discussed by many writers. This paper is going to investigate slavery in Gurnah’s novel Paradise1994, particularly in the lives of the protagonist, Yusuf. This paper aims to follow the journey of Yusuf, a young man who is forced into servitude after his father pawns him. Through Yusuf’s experiences, Gurnah delves into how slavery has become a cultural legacy, shaping identities, relationships, and aspects of society. The paper will identify how the characters’ experiences are shaped by their ancestors’ history of slavery. It will also explore how the novel depicts the social, economic, and psychological impacts of slavery on the characters and their communities especially the loss of agency which can lead to feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness. The paper also shows Social Marginalization as a stigma associated with slavery. Individuals are treated differently based on their ancestry. Yusuf’s experiences illustrate how racial and social hierarchies can be perpetuated through cultural legacies.

Virginie Iché and Sandrine Sorlin: The Rhetoric of Literary Communication: From Classical English Novels to Contemporary Digital Fiction

Virginie Iché and Sandrine Sorlin: <i>The Rhetoric of Literary Communication: From Classical English Novels to Contemporary Digital Fiction</i>

Ecological Imperialism and Indigenous Resistance: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Analysis of Selected Indian English Novels

This paper examines the representation of environmental degradation and critique of postcolonial development paradigms in two contemporary Indian English novels: Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007). Employing a postcolonial ecocritical framework, the study analyzes how these works articulate the environmental consequences of development in India, challenge Western models of progress, and highlight indigenous environmental perspectives. The research reveals that both novels effectively portray multi-faceted environmental issues, from biodiversity loss in the Sundarbans to long-term impacts of industrial pollution in urban areas. They offer pointed critiques of anthropocentric development models while presenting indigenous knowledge as a valuable alternative for sustainable human-nature relationships. The study contributes to postcolonial ecocriticism by demonstrating how Indian English literature engages with and critiques the environmental costs of postcolonial development. It underscores the potential of literature to provide nuanced, culturally-specific insights into complex environmental issues, challenging dominant narratives and proposing alternative visions of progress.

THE UNIQUE TRANSLATION STRATEGY OF NOVEL TITLES

Titles of literary works such as novels plays an important role in attracting possible readers. Novel titles should also reflect the contents of the books. When a book is translated to other languages, the title should be translated accordingly. Novel titles are not always translated literally in the target language, they may vary from one country to another. For example, in “Harry Potter and the philosopher stone” in the UK, the phrase ‘philosopher stone’ is translated into ‘sorcerer’s stone’ in the US and ‘batu bertuah’ (miracle stone) in Indonesia. In French it is even translated into ‘Harry Potter a l’ecole des sorciers’ (Harry Potter in the school of witches). This study aims to investigate the translation strategies of English novel titles to Indonesian. By searching the internet and from private book collection, the writer collect 50 English novels which have been translated and published in Indonesian. Based on the writer’s personal preference, all the novels belong to thriller/suspense genre. The data collected were 50 English titles and their translations in Indonesian. Before arriving at this number of data, a preliminary selection has been done by eliminating the target text titles that were using literal translation strategy. This is deliberately done to discover the unique translation strategy of novel titles and to find out the reason for the specific translation strategy. Three main theories are used to analyse the novel titles, they are functions of title translation as suggested by Nord (2005) and Viezzi model translation (2013) and Vinay &amp; Dalbernet (1995) translation strategies. In translating the titles, equivalence is pursued, but if it is not possible, there are other ways to accomplish it. The results show strategies such as adaptation, modulation, equivalence, and transposition are used to translate novel titles to Indonesian. Meanwhile based on Viezzi model, the target titles are categorised into explicit, indicative of the genre, suggestive, and seductive. This study would raise the translators’ awareness to choose more communicative and creative titles for literary translation tasks, including novels and other literary works.

Sequel and aftermath: tragic structure and dramatic continuity in Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and Cleopatra"

In this paper I shall discuss some possible relations between two of Shakespeare’s tragic dramas, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra (1). These plays were probably written and perhaps staged at a distance of seven years from each other (Julius Caesar almost certainly written by, and staged in, 1599, and Antony and Cleopatra perhaps written by the end of 1606); but they deal with periods of ancient Roman history effectively continuous with one another. I shall consider, first, the notion of ‘sequel’, as it might be relevant to possible interconnections between Shakespearean dramatic units, and the related but distinct notion of ‘aftermath’. Here I shall refer to a text by the contemporary English novelist and essayist Rachel Cusk, Aftermath (2012). Secondly, I shall consider applications of these notions within the fields of Shakespearean comedies, English Histories, and tragedies. In my third and final section I shall argue, both that, in relation to Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra may be considered a sequel, and that the lines along which, in the later play, the roles of Anthony and of Cleopatra are presented and developed can fruitfully be understood in terms of ‘aftermath’.

A Comparative Analysis of Ivanhoe and the Translation

Walter Scott (1771-1832), a great English novelist in the 19th century. His historical novel Ivanhoe tells the story of England’s struggle for the throne and romantic adventure in the end of the 12th century. This paper will take the co-translated version of Ivanhoe by Zhang Yi and Mr. Liu Zunqi as the research object, and analyze the translation methods embodied in the translation version. It will focus on how the translator deals with the original text. This paper will first introduce the main situation of the original work and the author of Ivanhoe. Secondly, from the perspective of vocabulary, narrative and rhetoric, through a large number of typical examples in the original text and translation, this paper will compare the version of Zhang Yi and Liu Zunqi with the original text, analyzing the specific processing methods and techniques of the translation. This kind of research is conducive to further deepen the readers’ understanding of the application of specific strategies and methods in the process of translation of Liu and Zhang’s translation, to further promote the public’s understanding and research of Ivanhoe.

The Trajectory of Chineseness in English Novels Written by Chinese Singaporeans in 1990s

As a critical period of transition and transformation, the ten years in the 1990s had witnessed both the improvement of Sino-Singapore relationship and the rise of Singapore economy. However, the satisfaction of material propelled Chinese Singaporeans to pursue spiritual sustenance by discovering their ethnic and cultural root, which can be reckoned as “Chineseness”. With regard to the mixed nature of Chinese Singaporean reared in Western mode, this thesis intends to analyze the “Chineseness” of Chinese Singaporeans as a whole through a few English novels written by Chinese Singaporeans in the 1990s. The “Chineseness” which used to face desperationwas gaining momentum by virtue of the pride cause by the rise of China and the increasing communication between the two countries. In the meanwhile, the open-mindedness of new generation also help accustomed their Chinese Singaporeans’ Chineseness to the country they lived and thrived. Besides, this thesis would discuss the value of English novels created by Chinese Singaporeans as a tool for historical and cultural research on overseas Chinese.

Human Versus Machine Intelligence: Assessing Natural Language Generation Models Through Complex Systems Theory.

The introduction of Transformer architectures - with the self-attention mechanism - in automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a breakthrough in solving general task-oriented problems, such as the simple production of long text excerpts that resemble ones written by humans. While the performance of GPT-X architectures is there for all to see, many efforts are underway to penetrate the secrets of these black-boxes in terms of intelligent information processing whose output statistical distributions resemble that of natural language. In this work, through the complexity science framework, a comparative study of the stochastic processes underlying the texts produced by the English version of GPT-2 with respect to texts produced by human beings, notably novels in English and programming codes, is offered. The investigation, of a methodological nature, consists first of all of an analysis phase in which the Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis and the Recurrence Quantification Analysis - together with Zipf's law and approximate entropy - are adopted to characterize long-term correlations, regularities and recurrences in human and machine-produced texts. Results show several peculiarities and trends in terms of long-range correlations and recurrences in the last case. The synthesis phase, on the other hand, uses the complexity measures to build synthetic text descriptors - hence a suitable text embedding - which serve to constitute the features for feeding a machine learning system designed to operate feature selection through an evolutionary technique. Using multivariate analysis, it is then shown the grouping tendency of the three analyzed text types, allowing to place GTP-2 texts in between natural language texts and computer codes. Similarly, the classification task demonstrates that, given the high accuracy obtained in the automatic discrimination of text classes, the proposed set of complexity measures is highly informative. These interesting results allow us to add another piece to the theoretical understanding of the surprising results obtained by NLG systems based on deep learning and let us to improve the design of new informetrics or text mining systems for text classification, fake news detection, or even plagiarism detection.

COMPLICATED SENTENCE AS AN INDICATOR OF A VIRTUAL SPEAKER’S INTELLECTUAL LEVEL

The paper looks at the problem of correlation of cognitive processes taking place in the person’s cognition with the syntactic organization of their speech. The speech of any individuum mirrors their thinking, and this is one of the ways they come to know their environment, acquire cognitive experience for building up their own picture of the world. In the process and due to communication, a human is shaped as an individual with a certain intellectual level of mind. The presented work is focused on syntactic peculiarities of the English-language verbal message, produced depending on the intellectual level of the virtual speaker. The topicality of the conducted scientific research consists in lingual and gnoseological need to penetrate into the cognitive-communicative essence of the processes of generating messages, and is motivated by the lack of serious scientific research of this problem. The objective of this paper consists in singling out a scientifically valid criterion for determining the intellectual level of a virtual speaker in the aspect of syntactic construction of sentences inherent to him. The starting point of this research was an assumption that there are certain typologically different structural sentence models, preferred by representatives of a certain psychological group of individuals. In our previous studies, it was established that in dialogue communication, simple sentences prevail among other structural types, while complex sentences take the third place in terms of use frequency with almost all speakers, regardless of their education level, social status, and cognitive abilities. According to our observations, a striking contrast can be seen in the native speakers’ use of complicated sentences, the grammatical status of which is not fully specified in grammar. The carried-out research specifies the concept of “complicated sentence”, and by means of comparative analysis of speech samples provided by the protagonists’ of three English novels captured at different stages of their lives, this type of sentence is determined as an indicator of the speakers’ cognitive peculiarities at the level of syntax. It is suggested that, in contrast to the surface representation, deep structures of human speech organization correlate with deep structures of human thought activity. Hence, a high intelligence level of an individuum is reflected not only at the level of adequacy of information perception, but also in the form of message representation and generation, namely, mainly in the constructions with a hidden deep structure of predication.

Postcolonial Identity and Cultural Hybridity in Indian English Novels: A Study of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy

Postcolonial Identity and Cultural Hybridity in Indian English Novels: A Study of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy

Apocalyptic Scenes In Emma Donoghue’s The Pull Of The Stars

Ahmet Yusuf Akyüz is an English language literature educator and a researcher in the literary field, specializing in English novels, and historical and postmodern fiction, he has some works on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s The Pull Of The Stars, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and other works.

Political Extremism and Its Implications: An Inquiry into Violence, Struggle, and Self-Sacrifice

This research paper draws upon English novelist George Orwell’s observations on human proclivities toward struggle and self-sacrifice, as seen in his criticism of “Mein Kampf”, and uses them to explore the complex nature of political extremism. By analyzing the evolution of the political narrative since the 1970s, from economic to cultural issues, it investigates the foundations of extreme nationalism within contemporary liberal democracies. In order to show the features and motives of this phenomenon, the study observes several European far-right groups through the lens of extreme nationalism, uncovering similar themes of anti-globalization, immigration, and European Union views. It delves further into the examination of human beings by taking a closer look at the way culture shaped our development as a species and the fundamental urge for identification and belonging, providing insights into the psychological underpinnings of extreme beliefs and behavior. It also looks at the foundations of group violence, discussing it as a morally motivated behavior meant to maintain and preserve social ties and the concept of struggle as behavioral mechanisms exploited by extreme nationalists. To thoroughly assess the validity of Orwell’s ideas, the research combines the theoretical framework with a case study of the contemporary tendencies towards extremism in the U.S. political system. The analysis leads to the conclusion that George Orwell’s findings that the attractiveness of political extremism has its roots in basic features of human nature are still applicable in modern democratic societies.

Threads of Tradition Social Expectations and Marriage in Emma by Jane Austen and Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

This study explores the theme of marriage and social expectations in two beloved novels: In case of two British novelists Jane Austen's Emma and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The paper is focused on revealing a multi-faceted character of the figure of gender roles, social values and traditions linking the lives of Emma Woodhouse and Tess Durbeyfield by means of a comparative analysis. These tensions between female characters' individual goals and social constraints are exposed by the study and the opinions of Elizabeth V. Spelman, Ann Bo-Hubert, Hazel Carby, Elaine Showalter, Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert are referred to. Austen dismantled the precedent social norms of the Regency period through the vital tool of satire and wit after this novel is through and through analysed out. The made decision to make the word association “Brain” instead of “love” is a pretty good way to show the society who sees marriage as only a calculated action, not the passionate connection. The multilayered substructures of a theme are formed due to the "crazy woman in the attic" metaphor constructed by Gilbert and Gubar which implies the true self of a woman in society is suppressed due to restricted roles. Unlike Stone's 'Greek Myths,' Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles focusing on a gloomy story that work to demonstrate the harmful consequences of ignoring Victorian society rules. The article analyses the marriage and gender role issues that Hardy has shown in a vivid manner as Eagleton says. The main conflict of the play is about what man want and what society demands, that is: what is true happiness and what is right in social term. Social class differences get intensively scrutinized, as the plot shows how the social systems influence the lives of the characters and build their destinies which deepens the theme analysis further. The study shows that these classic novels have been excellent guides and examples that have helped readers figure out what they would like to do with their lives. Moreover, the readers have been able to see people confront the challenges they encounter from institutions or interpersonal dynamics as well as expectations to balance their culture and social obligations.

Éilís na Gaeilge

Many readers of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s short stories and novels in English may not have read her creative work in the Irish language. In this short essay I aim to make more readers aware of her contribution to literature in Irish and of where her work is situated within the overall range of modern literature in Irish. ‘Éilís na Gaeilge’ is a somewhat different writer than her English language doppelganger. Her Irish language novels, for example, are predominantly works of popular fiction such as murder mysteries. Much of her work in Irish is aimed at – or at least accessible to – a young adult readership and deals directly and indirectly with social issues that affect their lives. She is an exceptional writer who had already developed a national and international reputation writing in English before devoting much of her writing life to work in Irish. This essay aims to cast some light on the range and quality of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s creative work in Irish and to encourage those who can to engage with that work as well as with her more widely known stories in English.

Trans-forming Narratology

ABSTRACT: From the vantagepoint of a feminist/queer/cisgender narratologist, “Trans-forming Narratology” asks which aspects of narrative practice might be particularly salient to developing a fruitful trans narratology while also calling our attention to elements of narrative that conventional (cis)narratology has undervalued or ignored. Keeping in mind matters that might be particularly relevant to trans narratives, this speculative essay explores aspects of voice, embodiment, character space, plotting, and closure in a set of recent American and British novels. It considers ways in which trans narratives can exploit the gender freedom of the first-person English pronoun or, conversely, signal temporally dual identities through heterodiegetic naming practices. It addresses tensions between a character’s proclaimed gender and their assigned sex and the differing implications of texts with narratees who are also textual actors and those whose narratees serve as external confidantes. Through brief forays into multiple aspects of narrative form, this essay argues for a narratology that can show the rich and varied capacities of trans writings past and present, with the hope that attention to trans narratives will both deepen our understanding of trans literature and advance the larger project of a comprehensive, situated narratology.

Pema Tseden's Balloon: Reincarnation of a Semi-transparent Envelope

Buddhism provides the vocabulary for film auteur Pema Tseden to express a psychological dimension in his Amdo‐Tibetan stories. Drawing on the Tibetan Buddhist concept of bardo, the transitional space between sleep and waking, or death and rebirth, his works encapsulate surrealist flow of consciousness of the characters as they are torn between religious principles, modern imperatives, and conscience. Specifically, Balloon exposes an Amdo woman's choice between having an abortion in compliance with China's 1990s birth control policy or enabling the prophesized rebirth of a family forebear. The film extends Pema Tseden's earlier experiment in Jinpa, which enacts an intrapsychic dialogue in a dream, by using a religiously inflected visualization of the state of mind in the threshold between death and the next life. Balloon's passionate reenactment of a luminous afterlife landscape and its reflexive and even questioning attitudes toward the concept of reincarnation create an intriguing tension. Its central imagery, the inflated condom balloon, is a “semi‐transparent envelope,” to borrow British novelist Virginia Woolf's phrase, which suggests the inscrutability of the characters’ internal experiences. The balloon is also a “semi‐transparent filter” of the director's ambiguous affects, encapsulating cultural intimacy and cultural contemplation within a non‐dual framework.

The Relationship between Metaphors of Addiction and Character Development in 19th Century British Novels

The 19th century marked an unprecedented period of prosperity in British literature, giving rise to numerous distinguished authors and works. During this era, the metaphor of addiction, as a unique narrative technique, established a close connection with character development. This metaphor not only deepened the portrayal of characters but also enriched the thematic content of the works, allowing readers to understand more profoundly the inner worlds and complex personalities of the characters. The use of addiction metaphors in 19th century British novels was not accidental; it reflected the societal attention to drug issues and the profound exploration of human nature. Through the symbolic element of addiction, authors could reveal the inner conflicts, struggles, and pursuits of their characters, thereby creating more dimensional and vivid character portrayals. Moreover, the development of character personalities also influenced the representation of addiction metaphors in novels. Different character personalities led to varied attitudes and responses to addiction, further enriching the connotation and expression of the addiction metaphor. Therefore, the relationship between addiction metaphors and character development is intertwined and mutually reinforcing.

Reminiscence of the existentialism philosophy in Hindi literature

This article is focused on the peculiarities of the perception of existential philosophy in modern Indian literature of the late 20th–21st centuries. The research is based on the stories of Hindi writers – Kunwar Narain (1927–2017) and Nirmal Varma (1929–2005). Their works is the brightest example of existential literature. The research is also based on two English novels by Indian-born writers Anita Desai (born 1937) “Where Shall We Go This Summer?” and Upamanyu Chatterjee (born 1959) “English August”. Despite the renewed interest in existentialism in modern literature, known as neuro-existentialism , the study of which takes place with the participation of the latest achievements of neuroscience, there are still few analyses in Russian Indology that are aimed at studying the influence of this philosophical trend on Hindi works and postcolonial literature. The aesthetics of existentialism is quite pronounced, moreover, they, creating a new theme of literary works, remain within the framework of traditional poetics, referring to Indian images, plots, religious foundations of Hinduism, as well as to their own self-awareness. However, the philosophical implications of works in Hindi and English are different. Writers interpret the foundations of existentialism in different ways, and the characters choose different ways to solve their internal contradictions.In the light of the stated topic, the problem of why the psychological life of the characters of these writers is depicted differently is considered. If the heroes of K. Narain and N. Varma, accepting the absurdity of existence, do not see the infinity of suffering and death of meaning, building their lives around the belief in rebirth, then the hero of the works in English fatally accepts the frailty of existence, believing in his helplessness before fate.

Jerzy Pietrkiewicz’s two English novels: "Loot and Loyalty" and "Green Flows the Bile"

English version. Original issue: “Archiwum Emigracji” 2018/2019, no. 1–2 (26–27)https://apcz.umk.pl/AE/article/view/AE.2018-2019.001