British Fiction Research Articles

Morphological and syntactic identification of clauses of universal concession in British National Corpus

The article investigates morphological and syntactic organization of English sentences of universal concession in modern English fiction dramatic, prose and verse texts of the British National Corpus. In the context of the studied sentences identification with the semantics of concessive action, the main attention is focused on generalization of morphological and syntactic characteristics of universal sentences of concession with the verification of their statistical data implementation in the modern English corpus. It has been found out that in the fiction texts of the British National Corpus English sentences of universal concession are actualized in four syntactic types of sentences: in simple, compound, complex, and cohesive types, where the concessive action clause is introduced by various types of conjunctions such as though, even though, although; in any case, in spite of; yet … (al)though etc. with / without punctuation for the cohesive type. Morphological features of means of syntactic connection are defined in three types of clauses of concession with hypotactic, paratactic, cohesive conjunction coherence in the morphological configuration as: “simple means of connection – conjunctions or adverbs”, “complex or composite means of connection – prepositional phrases”, “correlative means of connection – correlative conjunctions or disjuncts”. Seven basic morphological and syntactic subtypes of English sentences of universal concession have been identified with the syntactic description of models of concessive clauses as: finite / non-finite -ed (-ing) participial / non-finite to infinitive / nominative / prepositional / adjective / adverb clause of concession. In order to identify the structural semantic grid of the studied sentences, taking into account the corpus analysis in terms of the semantic marking tagging with the collocation [+1 Right] to the right of the conjunction of the universal concession, the quantitative indicators of nine structural and semantic types of concessive clauses are determined and calculated in the adjustment of the concessive conjunction with any verb, noun, adjectival, adverbial, conjunctive, prepositional, pronominal categorical phrase, as well as the agreement with any article and punctuation.

Colonial Struggle-Revolt of Adivasis against Corporate Policies and It’s Invisibility in Modern Global Fictions of Indian English Literature

The treatment to the adivasi community in Postcolonial Indian English fiction lacks in many grounds. Tribal historical revolts, encroachments of British rule into tribal territories, grabbing lands of the tribals, exploitation of tribal women, cruel landlords, deforestation and degradation of tribal environmental values do not find realistic representation in Indian English fictions. In Gita Mehta's The River Sutra, tribal are shown as the worshipper of Narmada River and performing some ritual on the bank of River Narmada, but tribal religious concerns are not so much the limited and full of superstitions. They consider land, forest and water as godly gift to them. In fact these natural objects are itself Godlike for them but when British power and landlords took the illegal entry in their territories, they protested against them and became the epitome of valor and martyrdom in the history. This research article tries to examine the bias attitude of mainstreams literature writing regarding the adivasi heritage and glorious tradition of revolt and sacrifice.

Unwomanly Woman: How Some Nineteenth-Century British Fictions Imagined Begum Samru of Sardhana

In the late eighteenth century India, Begum Samru rose from a dancing girl to become a renowned military adventuress and the ruler of a small semi-independent principality. One of the few female rulers in the country at that period, she is romanticized nowadays in popular histories and biographies. This article examines how three nineteenth-century colonial authors imagined her in their fiction. It shows that these provide counternarratives to contemporary romanticizations of the Begum. By comparing colonial depictions of her with contemporary ones, the article highlights how all such imaginings are informed by the authors’ confirmation biases. It finally argues for the need to look beyond the personal life of Begum Samru to fully appreciate the other aspects of her sterling career.

Cognitive translation analysis of fiction simile

This paper introduces a method of cognitive translation analysis of English-Ukrainian translation of fiction simile. Our analysis of Ukrainian and foreign research on fiction simile translation has revealed that such papers are mostly based on traditional structural-semantic translation analysis. Cognitive translation analysis of fiction simile, which allows identifying cognitive models that underpin simile functioning in speech and affect its translation, has been done in very few papers and therefore it requires developing. This paper aims at establishing correlations between linguacultural specificity or, conversely, similarity of cognitive models of English fiction similes and a choice of a translation strategy to render English similes into Ukrainian. The research sample consists of 1200 English similes, collected from D. Tartt’s novels, The Goldfinch and The Secret History, and M. Atwood’s novel, The Blind Assassin, and their Ukrainian translations, performed, respectively, by V. Shovkun, B. Stasiuk and O. Oksenych. Achieving this goal involves fulfilling the following tasks: 1) identifying and comparing cognitive models of English similes and their Ukrainian translations; 2) revealing translation procedures used to render fiction similes – retention, replacement, reduction, omission or addition; 3) establishing correlations between translation procedures and translation strategies – the foreignization strategy and the domestication strategy. A fiction simile is addressed as an explicit conceptual metaphor structured by a propositional model (A is like B), where A is the target concept / domain representing the entity that is compared, B is source the concept / domain representing the entity to which the target is compared (its language / speech instantiation is called a vehicle). Simile can also explicate the characteristic, which is the basis for comparison (A (target) is like B (source / conductor) by characteristic B). Conducting the translation analysis, we take into account the type of fiction simile. We distinguish between conventional simile, grounding on universal knowledge, and original simile, reflecting individual knowledge and creative imagination of an author. Among conventional similes, we differentiate between allusive similes that are mostly based on subcultural knowledge, and idiomatic similes that can be based on both universal and culturally specific knowledge embodied in idioms. Our cognitive translation analysis led to the following conclusions. Retention of similes realizes different translation strategies depending on the type of the simile and the presence / absence of its linguacultural specificity. Retention of conventional and original similes correlates with neutral translation strategy, as neither the former nor the latter has linguacultural specificity that would indicate the inconsistency of their cognitive models and thus constrain the translator's choice, causing a translation problem. Retention of allusive similes can also correlate with neutral strategy if the allusion is part of universal knowledge although more often retention of allusive simile realizes foreignization strategy as such similes are based on subculturally specific knowledge and thus rest on cognitive models that are unestablished in the minds of most representatives of both cultures. If a translator adds a commentary, foreignization is neutralized by domestication. Replacement, reduction, omission or addition of similes correlate with domestication, which can be compulsory if English and Ukrainian similes are based on different cultural cognitive models, or optional if they are based on similar cognitive models. Moreover, domestication can be complete if the simile cognitive model is replaced or partial if the concepts of the model are specified or explained, but the model remains unchanged. These results call for further research, specifically, conducting a quantitative analysis to establish quantitative correlations between the procedures and strategies of English-Ukrainian translation of fiction similes.

The evolution of the English small talk: a cognitive-pragmatic analysis

Since Malinowski defined small talk as a communicative mode – the establishment of human bonds or communion, abundant studies have supplied numerous data about its cultural contexts, social and phatic function, participants and topics of small talk, conversational routines and etiquette mores etc. Nevertheless, some aspects of small talk, both its historical and contemporary procedures, still lack clarification. Lately, the development of a new linguistic approach of cognitive pragmatics has worked out a new methodology that makes it possible to take inquiry into cognitive-intentional and social-cultural aspects of the communicative behavior of small talk. In this paper, we have worked out an integrative framework for cognitive-pragmatic analysis of small talk underpinned by the ideas of historical pragmatics. We implemented this framework in the analysis of small talk on the material of English fiction of the 17th -21st centuries elicited from the BNC database. We aimed to find out evolutionary trends of small talk in English and to describe the underlying change of English ethos, in particular, politeness principles. Our findings have revealed historically stable and variable characteristic features of small talk: the former mainly concern people’s communion as a universal value, the latter reflect procedural communication patterns and requirements of a particular community. We argue that small talk is a meta-communicative (accompanying informative communication) form of behavior that satisfies human needs for social cohesiveness; its cultural conceptualization depends upon the leading social-cultural values and changes throughout history. We hope, this study may shed light on the understanding of small talk as communicative behavior found not only in fiction but also in other contexts.

Subdued Voices: Women Characters and their Author in Inside the Haveli

Rama Mehta is an eminent novelist who contributed significantly to Indian English fiction by bringing female issues to the fore through her exemplary novel, Inside the Haveli. The novel shows a predominant concern with the subjugating condition of women characters shackled in the Indian patriarchal structure and brings, particularly, into light the repressed state of female characters and the elements that determine their submission. Simultaneously, based on the incident, the novel reveals silence and submission on the part of the novelist as well. Nevertheless, the work seems stifled when dealing with women's issues; its movements are confusing, contradicting and oscillating. The characters and their author appear tense under pressure showing a disinclination to adopt a bold stance. This cramped and oscillating situation speaks of their helplessness and repressed situation.

Postcolonialism, Liberal Internationalism, 9/11 and Pakistani English Fiction

In this article, I argue that Momo, Chengaze, and Daanish’s quest of political liberty and identity in Red Birds, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Trespassing respectively manifests that liberal-internationalism is a colonial agenda. Focussing on the development of liberal internationalism because of the transformation of the colonial to a neo-colonial strategy of the powerful countries, I argue that Pakistani fiction demonstrates these policies influencing and affecting the everyday life of ordinary Muslims living in refugee camps, diaspora, or in Pakistan. The focal point would be the examination of the procedures and constituents of liberal-internationalism to distinguish colonial subterfuges and ruses of upholding control in the erstwhile and contemporaneous colonies exemplified in these novels in the context of post 9/11. For the purpose of this analysis, I have taken Chris Brown and Kristen Ainley’s notion of liberal internationalism as a modern means of colonization, Gilbert Rist’s ideas of liberal internationalism as a medium of disguised colonization, and E. H. Carr’s view of internationalism as a utopian fantasy for fundamentally being a colonial economic agenda to keep afloat the conflict between ‘haves’ and ‘have not’ by way of creating an economic dependency of the third world nations’ upon the rich nations. Following this, I will interpret Brown, Ainley, and Rist’s philosophy of the production of liberal internationalism as a secreted ploy of modern colonization building on Carr’s notion of international liberalism as a paradox of political and economic freedom and a disagreement against it for political and economic liberty, an essential element in M. Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, and Uzma Aslam Khan’s protagonist’s achievement of individual sovereignty through a fundamental reconceptualization of their identity to the decolonization of their personhood.

From Unparalleled “Greatness” to Predictable Insularity. A Composite Sketch of “Warped Britishness” as Drawn in Selected Works of Contemporary English Fiction

Brexit, as seen from the present perspective, is seemingly a success story. Taking into account a myriad of voices expressed in the public domain over the past few years, it is legitimate to make a cautious claim that some of the expectations people shared before/during the referendum have been inflated and deflated in the post-plebiscite reality. In 2016, across the majority that voted for the divorce, a growing consensus on the soundness and solidity of pro-Leave arguments about Britain being in crisis was seen. The proponents of change had endorsed the policy of restoring a sense of national dignity. That mode of reasoning, though still present within current “British” mindsets, has been confronted with the “unplanned” turbulence of national (re) adjustment. The whole process of bidding farewell to the European Union has led to sentiments of uncertainty/anxiety/regret, rather than to the anticipated sense of satisfaction/relief. Therefore, it seems both vital and interesting to juxtapose the passion about restoring people’s trust in Britishness/Englishness, and its “exceptionality” with more sobering projections of a new post-Brexit world. In order to discuss the consequences of this self-inflicted condition, I will here elaborate on selected English literary texts. They feature authors who draw conclusions running parallel to Anderson’s assumptions that in times of crisis a general predilection for self-deluding (re)constructions of collective identity can be observed, which are variously expressed in a merely referential, subversive or satirical manner.

OVERCOMING THE BOUNDARIES OF EVERYDAYNESS IN NIALL GRIFFITHS`S NOVEL «STUMP»

The paper presents the research of poetics of the fourth novel «Stump» (2004) written by contemporary Welsh Anglophone author Niall Griffiths. The early works of Niall Griffiths have long been associated with the off-center tendency in contemporary British fiction, with novels written by Scottish authors such as Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, John King. This study attempts to demonstrate that Welsh writer doesn’t merely articulate the problems of the fringe groups of the society as well as shocking and taboo topics. Also to overcome the common postcolonial approach to Griffiths`s works which focuses on the concepts of «colonial othering», «forms of disability» etc. in the novels, the author of the article proposes the existential philosophy as methodological basis for this research. The study concentrates over the central problem of the human Being-in-the-world, the human life in the world of everydayness in Griffiths`s novel «Stump». Understanding «the everyday life», «everydayness» as common, routine life, full of daily automatic human actions (according to B. Waldenfels) the author aims to consider the boundaries of everyday life and the experience of overcoming the borders of everydayness in the novel discussed.The analysis demonstrates that narrative structure of the novel combines several modes and forms of narration. Interior monologue with steam of consciousness fragments is the form of representing the first plot line focusing on the one day of nameless recovering alcoholic who has lost his left arm to gangrene. «Style indirect libre» in first person plural form is used to finish each of the chapter devoted to one-armed hero and expresses his contradictory point of view on the «12 steps addiction recovery» program. The non-diegetic impersonal narrator (according to V. Shmid classification) introduces the second plot line devoted to the two gangsters who have set out from Liverpool on a mission to find and punish the one-armed man for a past misdeed. Their continual dialog sometimes is interrupted by the omnipresent narrator voice who conveys in form of indirect speech one of the gangster`s thoughts and his perceptive and ideological «point of view». A Griffiths`s fictional space can be divided on close/open, secular/sacral, everyday/non-everyday types. In the novel Wales natural world is opposed to any closed and narrow spaces. One-armed protagonist fills himself free and happy in the open space, where he communicates with birds, animals and meets a pantheistic God. Oppositely, two gangsters are afraid of open space in the middle of dangerous nature of Wales, when they leave native Liverpool. Having the works of K. Jaspers and M. Merleau-Ponty as the basis for our research, we conclude that the body for one-armed hero is an existential and temporal border, which transforms each moment of his life into an endless «boundary situation» (germ. Grenzsituation, according to K. Jaspers). A journey to unknown Wales gives a start to personal transformations for one of the gangsters – Alastair. Crossing the geographical border becomes a time of «boundarysituation» in Alastair`s existence. Consequently, the motives of the real Being, existential self-identity, meeting with the transcendent are concerned with the experience of overcoming the everydayness, crossing its boundaries.

Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction by Kevin Seidel

<i>Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction</i> by Kevin Seidel

Black, Scott. Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction.

Black, Scott. <i>Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction</i>.

Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. John Baker, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram.

<i>Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>, ed. John Baker, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram.

A Comparative Study of Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam and Namita Gokhale’s Shakuntala: The Play of Memory

Shakuntala is one of the most acclaimed women characters of Indian Literature. For the first time Shakuntala’s character originated in The Mahabharata. Since then she has been represented in various texts in various languages of India. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the representation of Shakuntala by the authors from ancient times to the present. For this purpose ancient work Abhijnana Shakuntalam by Kalidasa and the modern work Shakuntala: The Play of Memory by Namita Gokhale are studied.&#x0D; In Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam Shakuntala is the real daughter of Sage Vishvamitra and nymph Menka. However, she is adopted and brought up by Sage Kanva and his wife Gautmi. She is a rustic girl, brought up in a hermitage. With the progress of the play, she is married to King Dushyanta who forgets her because of a curse. Later, she was adopted by sage Kashyapa and his wife Aditi. She gives birth to a brave child Bharat and finally reunites with her husband.&#x0D; Shakuntala: The Play of Memory by Namita Gokhale was Published in 2005 and it is a challenging work of Indian English fiction. Like the remakes of films there may be re-invention and re-interpretation of old myths embodied in literary works. In her masterpiece Shakuntala, Namita Gokhale has portrayed the story of a woman named after the heroine of Kalidasa’s classic drama Abhijnana Shakuntalam. In contrast to her legendary namesake, she is bold, spirited and imaginative. Right from her childhood she is conscious of the discrimination towards female. In her marriage with a mahasamant, Srijan, she feels suffocated by social customs. Hungry for experience she deserts home to travel with a Greek horse merchant, Nearchus. Together they travel far and wide and surrender to unbridled pleasures. Shakuntala assumes the identity of Yaduri: the ‘fallen woman.’ But she forsakes this life as well to meet her salvation in her death at Kashi.

“New patriotism” in post-war Sri Lanka and the revival of the Walauva as a site of power in contemporary Sri Lankan English fiction

An emerging body of fiction by contemporary English novelists in Sri Lanka during the immediate post-civil war decade (2010–2020) indicates a renewed interest in the feudal grand house (the walauva) as a site of power. Often described in romantic terms and presented from positions of entitlement, in its renewed form, the walauva is constructed as a benevolent patriarchal system in which class superiors and servants share cordial and meaningful relationships. With primary reference to Nayomi Munaweera’s “What Lies Between Us”, Madhubhashini Ratnayake’s “There is Something I Have to Tell You” and Charulatha Thewarathanthri’s “Stories”, I place this emergent romanticized impression of the feudal grand house within the centralist power agenda of majoritarian populism prevalent in post-civil war Sri Lanka: a mass consciousness engineered by Sinhalese nationalist political fronts postwar, which historian Nira Wickramasinghe terms Sri Lanka’s ‘new patriotism’. While appreciating the contemporary writer’s imagination as being shaped by demands of ‘new patriotism’ the article identifies a deviation of her reading from the representations of the walauva as a site of power by Sri Lanka’s English literary canon from the 1950s to the mid-1990s.

Iconographies of ‘Childness’ and the Contemporary British Novel: Book Covers, Discourses, and Cultural Models

Abstract A sizeable segment of the contemporary British fiction market for adult readers consists of novels that focus on children and childhood. In accordance with interdisciplinary Childhood Studies, such texts can be understood as contributions to the social construction of children and childhood, or ‘childness’. Such constructions appear to be in particular demand in this phase of late modernity, when childhood is conceptualized as an antidote to the many uncertainties contemporary post-industrial societies are faced with. While on the level of societies, public constructions of childhood are best understood in terms of a Foucauldian notion of discourse, discourses are not what individual readers and book-buyers actually have in their minds when choosing a title. Rather, this article argues that the cover illustrations of these novels both activate and reinforce cultural models of ‘childness’ that readers have stored as schemata shared with their cultural community. On the basis of this alignment of discourse theory with a concept from cognitive anthropology, the article demonstrates that book covers play a role in maintaining particular conceptions of ‘childness’, and in feeding them back into the minds of the readers. Furthermore, the relevance of the book as a material artefact is once again acknowledged.1

Концептуально-метафорическая репрезентация в метадискурсе англоязычного художественного нарратива: диахронический аспект

The paper deals with a very important aspect of communication – the fictional communication between the author of emotive prose and the reader. The research is based on the widely accepted thesis of a communicative nature of narrative. The author of the paper uses a popular nowadays term metadiscourse. The paper studies the diachronic aspect of conceptual-metaphoric representation in English fiction. The research shows that the conceptual metaphor is presented differently in the explicit and in the implicit dialogue of the author with the reader. The conceptual metaphors JOURNEY, BUILDING and GASTRONOMIC METAPHOR are characteristic of the explicit dialogue, whereas CONTAUNER mainly appears in the implicit dialogue.

Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

Scrutiny of Self in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

An Outstanding novelist of human predicament, Arun Joshi is ranked with the great masters of contemporary Indian fiction in English. He believes that reality lies within the consciousness of isolated individuals. As he is the great writer of psychological perception, he envisions the inner crisis of the modern man in his five novels. In particular, his second novel The Strange Case of Billy Biswas is the apple of his eye. It portrays the story of the protagonist who is dragged by the mysterious world of the tribal society. The protagonist, Billy’s strange quest leads him to leave his position as the sole inheritor of a wealthy family and lead to live a natural life. There is no comfort in his American life as well as in his marital life too. Further, the story visualises Billy’s quest for individualism and self-identity at the cost of leaving materialistic world. This paper focuses on the clashes between the civilised world and the primitive one as well as it looks at the root of the protagonist Billy’s quest for the self.

Portrait descriptions in poetry and prose of England of the XVI-XIX centuries: from Shakespeare to Byron (the influence of trends of the past on the present)

The description of the portrait of a literary character plays an important role in creating the overall image of the character. The urgency of the study is due to the anthropocentric direction of linguistic studies since reflection and interpretation of the existing world and descriptions of portraits play an important role in this. In this sense, it is necessary to analyze the use of linguistic units in the description of portraits of characters from English fiction and poetry in the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries and to know the influence of past trends in the present. During the study several general scientific methods were used: analogy, generalization, observation, comparison, experiment, analysis, and the historical method. The study analyzed portrait descriptions in English poetry and prose from the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and found that writers used a variety of symbols to capture the author's intentions in characters. Often, the authors used somatic vocabulary to represent the appearance of the characters, the less used lexical units of the general characteristics of the portrayal of the characters and the least to represent the appearance of the characters used the kinetic vocabulary.

Передача зашифрованных сообщений – вкраплений в художественном тексте с английского языка на русский

This article examines cases where translators are confronted with messagesm whose meaning is obscured by a simple cipher. Russian translators had to overcome certain difficulties while translating certain passages in the works of British (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie) and American (Edgar Allan Poe, Dan Brown) fiction writers. Substitution code (―The Gold-Bug‖, ―The Adventure of the Dancing Men‖), anagrams (―The da Vinci Code‖), as well as different kinds of text steganography (―The Gloria Scott‖, ―The Four Suspects‖) can be used to encrypt the information. Each case is illustrated with two examples. The translator has to depict not only the very process of deciphering a message, but also render its cryptic nature with the means of a target language (Russian). We show, that in half of the cases it is a mere translation of the deciphered text. It is a simpler way, because there is no need to create an analogue thereof. The grand purpose, however, remains unachieved. In two instances there were multiple translations of the same text (6 of ―The Gold-Bug‖ by E.A Poe and 9 of ―The Four Suspects‖ by A. Christie). This phenomenon can be explained not only by the popularity of the stories, but by the relatively small circulation of certain editions. We have undertaken a comparative analysis of these translations and have revealed discrepancies, concerning more and less significant translation units and, in some cases minor errors.