Historical Allusions Research Articles

Assessing English Translation of Historical Intertextuality in Maḥfūẓ's Cairo Trilogy

By skillfully integrating a wide range of scholarly and intercultural references into his novels, the Egyptian novelist Najīb Maḥfūẓ has differentiated himself as an author of exceptional prowess. To convey his intended meanings, he has made extensive use of historical allusions, including (past figures and events). In the present study, we attempt to assess the translation of these types of intertextuality utilized in Maḥfūẓ's Cairo trilogy via adopting the criteria of "accuracy, clarity and naturalness" proposed by Larson in 1984. This study follows a qualitative descriptive approach to analysis. We aim to discover the tactics utilized in translating historical intertextuality into English and to identify the challenges faced by the subject translators and the reasons behind them. The current study hypothesizes that irrespective of what method the translators use to translate historical intertextuality, the translator's historical and cultural background would seriously influence the output of the translation process. The study concludes that intertextuality is a crucial device for all language users since no speech ever starts in a vacuum, and it is via intertextuality that our old legacy is continually refreshed and viewed from different points of view. It further concludes that intertextual expressions that are more culturally specific are the most challenging and he translator's familiarity with the previous texts of SL plays a significant role in the process of deciphering the meaning of intertextual texts.

Copiously Quote Classics: Improving Chinese Poetry Generation with historical allusion knowledge

Integrating allusions into poems is an advanced form of human poetry writing, which could clearly express the author’s thoughts and arouse the resonance of readers. However, existing poetry generation works mainly focus on improving the coherence and fluency of poetry, while generating poems with allusion knowledge is rarely considered. To solve this issue, we propose an Allusion-aware Chinese Poetry Generation (ACPG) framework in this study. Concretely, we first release an Allusion-Enriched Poetry (AEP) dataset by linking poems with historical allusions, which might enable a new research direction for poetry generation. Based on this dataset, we design a three-stage learning mechanism to encourage the training stage under a low-resource setting, which can effectively exploit the knowledge of large-scale poetry and allusion data to generate informative allusive poems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ACPG among a series of proposed baselines. Moreover, the proposed ACPG framework can also be applied to lyrics generation or other controlled text generation tasks, which can incorporate allusion knowledge into the generated results and enhance the meaning and quality of the texts.

THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE AND HERITAGE ON ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

Institute of Najaf Technical,Al-Furat Al-Awsat Technical University, Al-Najaf 31001, IraqCultural and historical settings play a significant role in shaping architectural design. This article delves into the relationship between cultural heritage, architecture, and cultural narratives, looking at how physical environments reflect and shape social practices, historical traditions, and cultural practices. The study emphasizes how architects integrate indigenous materials, cultural symbols, and historical allusions into their designs by comparing and contrasting diverse architectural styles and movements across different areas and eras. A hybrid architectural language incorporating multiple cultural aspects is also addressed in the article, delving into the impact of globalization in this regard. Modern design approaches emphasize cultural sustainability and heritage protection, as seen in case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, demonstrating the interconnected nature of culture, history, and architecture. To promote a more sophisticated and context-sensitive method of design that pays tribute to and breathes new life into cultural heritage, the results stress the significance of cultural literacy in architectural training and practice.

The Scene of the “Holiday” in the Draft and Printed Text of Dostoevsky’s “Demons”

The article analyzes the material of the draft manuscript of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Demons”, specifically, the pages containing the scene of Karmazinov reading his work “Merci”. The draft manuscript of the novel “Demons” is a syntactically coherent text containing a large number of author’s edits between the lines and in the margins. The analysis of the manuscript made it possible to identify inaccuracies in its reading by publishers that negatively affect the interpretation of the text. In addition, this analysis helped to correct these errors and accompany them with the necessary textual commentary, affecting, in particular, such problems as the establishment of the text, the identification and analysis of new discrepancies (variants) between the sources of the text, as well as text omissions in print. The textual part of the work is continued by the historical-literary and real commentary proposed in the article based on the newly discovered information about the features of the creation of the artistic concept of “Demons,” explaining the significance of literary and historical motifs that are associated with ancient culture and history for the novel plot. In the process of analyzing handwritten and printed sources, literary and historical allusions were established, which the specified episode of the novel “Demons” contains. In addition, the article examined the historical subtext and symbolism of ancient motifs that were reflected in the scene of literary reading in “Demons,” as well as the content of some historical sources (works by ancient authors on the history of Ancient Rome; lectures by T. N. Granovsky, who became the prototype of the hero of the novel, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky). New information revealed during the study of the draft manuscript of “Demons” indicates, on the one hand, that the ancient “trace” played an important role in the development of the idea of this novel, on the other hand, the complexity of the novel’s narrative structure.

Unveiling the past: the multidimensional theatrical space in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus

Abstract With acute historical awareness, African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks uses abundant signs in the form of words, movements, sights, and sounds in her plays to create an imagined world, helping readers and audiences to revisit forgotten and neglected history and contemplate on how to read Africana history. In Venus, she wields rapid transformation of space, inserts a play-within-the-play, and presents historical extracts to reconstruct history. This article uses theatrical space as a critical tool to investigate how Parks uses the configuration of theatrical space within and theatrical space without to express historical allusions, reconstruct historical events, and bridge the gaps hidden between remembered and forgotten history in Venus.

Mining Plato’s Cave: Silver Mining, Slavery, and Philosophical Education

Abstract The Allegory of the Cave (Pl. Resp. 514a1–520e2) is often analyzed in terms of metaphysical, epistemological, political, and psychic hierarchies that are clarified and reinforced by philosophical education. But the Allegory also contains an important historical allusion to the silver mining that took place in classical Attica. Examining the Cave in light of the enslaved miners around Lavrio leads us to reconsider the philosophical ‘liberation’ (λύσιν … τῶν δεσμῶν, 515c4) at the Allegory’s heart in the context of Athenian slavery and Plato’s thoughts on the practice. Elsewhere in his work Plato generally uses servile metaphors in two ways: to depict ‘bad’ internal psychic subjection and ‘good’ submission to logos as manifested in various entities. This historical dimension of the Allegory works to undermine the ostensible naturalness of the slave/citizen distinction and suggest that philosophical education has the potential to ‘free’ the former and ‘subjugate’ the latter. The implication that these juridical categories are, to an extent, arbitrary and mutable reveals important differences between Plato’s views and those of his classical peers, and it adds to the dialogue’s protreptic dimension for its readers then and now.

Fashion on Currency: Analysis of the 1977 – 1986 Millinery Fashion in Post-independence Ghana

This article showed interest in millinery displayed pictorially on the currencies as well as the significance of those fashion representations in Ghana’s fashion culture. The article specifically analysed the millinery fashion that featured on currency notes of 1977 and 1986 and the Yaa Asantewaa’s imagery on the currency note of 1984. Three Ghanaian currencies purposively sampled for the study were the Five Cedis note issued on July 4, 1977; the Fifty Cedis note issued on 15th July 1986; and the Twenty Cedis note issued on 15th May 1984. These currency notes were released within nine years interval, that is, between 1977 and 1986. Content analysis of visual images, and social semiotics methods of visual data analysis constituted the method of analysis for the study focusing on the dominant feminine figures on the currency accessorised with millineries. The study put forward those feminine images represented on the Five Cedis, Fifty Cedis, and Twenty Cedis currency notes issued on July 4, 1977, 15th July 1986, and 15th May 1984 respectively that displayed the repertoire of straw-woven and the Akan militaristic millinery fashion in post-independence Ghana. The millinery practices depicted on the currencies embodied historical allusions to Ghanaian women irrespective of economic background and ingrained in the memory of the citizenry the fashioned feminine identities constructed through millinery fashion in relation to the popular culture of twentieth-century Ghana. The selected indigenous millinery-inspired visuals also celebrated female vitality and brought to the fore the visibility of women in the public sphere and represented the epitome of independent women of twentieth-century Ghana who contributed to national development. It also made a strong socio-political fashion statement about the indigenous classic millinery fashion consciousness of Ghanaians and the millinery structural design in use in the post-independence era.

ПАРК СТАДИОНА «КРАСНОДАР» (2017-2023): СОВРЕМЕННАЯ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ КЛАССИЧЕСКИХ САДОВЫХ СТИЛЕЙ

The paper provides, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of the artistic features of the Krasnodar Stadium park and historical allusions associated with the compositions of this park. The park, opened to the public in 2017, has become a novelty in the international landscape culture and a landmark of Krasnodar. The main elements of the ensemble analyzed: concept, layout, roads and routes, volumes and space, green architecture and forms of the plants, water system, boundaries and zones, materials and textures, shapes and rhythms, play of light and conditions of nature. The works of art placed in the park are considered in detail: first, the compositions “Geolocation” and «Artificial Environment» of the Recycle group (2019) and, second, subsequent installations, the presence of which could be a matter of discussion. The historical garden styles that influenced the idea of the park are Italian, French, and English types and water gardens of the Middle East, as well as postmodern “landforms» by Charles Jenks. The large Japanese Garden (2023) is a new development of the park. The shift to the stylization makes it possible to summarize the image of the main park, in which the techniques of modern landscape art and the motives of historical heritage are summarized.

ALLUSIVE FEATURES OF PRECEDENT-HISTORICAL PHENOMENA IN SLAVIC FANTASY

The article is devoted to the study of historical allusions actualized in precedent historical phenomena, in particular in precedent chronotopes, precedent situations and precedent names, as well as their text-creating functions in fantasy texts of the Slavic sector of the beginning of the 21st century. The relevance of the research lies in the fact that in modern linguistics there is a lack of research devoted to historical allusions in artistic texts, in particular, in texts belonging to fantasy discourse. The purpose of the article is to analyze universal precedent and national precedent chrononyms, chronotoponyms and chronoanthroponyms, to characterize their functions. It was determined that the main functions of historical allusions in fantasy texts are evaluative and characteristic, occasional, aesthetic, the function of figurative characterization, and the function of creating irony. The term «oneirofactonym» is proposed to denote a one-time event that occurred in a dream and affected people’s activities, as well as the term «chronoanthroponym» as an example of transonymization – metamorphosis, during which the onym moves from one category to another. The prospects of the research consist in the expansion of the actual material for analysis due to the involvement of German-language and English-language fantasy texts.

Ferdinand Hiller’s Twelve Trips to Meet Old Friends in Heaven: A Little-Known Essay in Cultural Commentary from 1881

The present article is the first published translation ever of a remarkably insightful essay, in the form of a tale, that the important mid-nineteenth-century pianist-composer-conductor Ferdinand Hiller wrote in 1881. In it he invokes thirty-eight famous individuals he knew during his lifetime: mostly musicians, but also some writers, visual artists, one great Shakespearean actor, and one legitimist (that is: monarchist, highly conservative) lawyer and politician. He knew some of the group—such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and the violinist Ferdinand David—quite well. We have annotated the essay extensively in order to bring out its richness, much of which is carried out through literary or historical allusions and careful word choice or, indeed, wordplay. Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885) was one of the leading figures in what was often called the Leipzig School of musical composition, a loose group of largely German and Austrian musicians who looked to Mendelssohn and Schumann as their models for how to continue and extend the great achievements of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

When Science Interrupts History: New Soviet Man and Posthuman Science in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog

This article explores the cultural and conceptual place of humanity in Heart of a Dog, and brings it into line with the novel’s allegorical view of history. Sharik’s transformation allegorically depicts the changes in Russian society after the Bolshevik occupation of the country. Criticizing the rapid collapse of the old Russian tradition and the establishment of a new system, Bulgakov represents the absurd history of the Soviet Union in the novel. Along with the novel’s historical allusions to the New Soviet Man project, the eugenic experiment that sought to enhance human faculties via supposedly scientific ways, issues of humanity and subjectivity are discussed in the scientific advances posed in Heart of a Dog’s metamorphosis story. The novel’s account of how human-enhancing technology served its ideological function after the revolutionary change in Russian history is the author’s response to one of the most provocative and complex issues when the communist regime sought to appropriate the scientific method for political purposes. Bulgakov presents a strong political satire using post-humanistic imagination while contemplating the place of human and humanity at the time when science intervened in human life.

Fictional mapping: the nature of cartography in film production

This practitioner piece considers cartographies that permeate and enable the practice of film production. Using his feature film PUNCH (2022) as a case study, Welby Ings discusses ways in which mud maps, overhead maps and relational maps were used as communicative devices in establishing a shared template for understanding the positioning of fictional spaces. Mud maps (see Danesh’s ‘7 pro tips for managing crew parking when filming on location’, 2019), are conventionally used in film production to describe geographies and inform cast and crew about locations. Overhead maps (see Isham’s ‘Creating overhead maps for film directors’, 2017), were employed in association with shot lists, as ‘graphic prompts’ when directing complex scenes. Relational or ‘mental maps’ (see Bays’, ‘Between the scenes: Choosing locations’, 2015) were used in conjunction with site drawings, to establish spatial blueprints for discussing the internal logic of the film’s world with the director of photography, production designers, location scouts, sound recordists, costumers and postproduction collaborators. As the film’s director and cartographer, the author created these maps with a unique visual language that included distinctive considerations of marginalia, typography, line weight, texture, historical allusion and colour, to communicate the emotional tone of the film’s world.

Research on the Qi-Lu imagery and Confucianism in Edward Yang's Films

Edward Yang is known as a prominent representative of of Taiwan's New Wave Cinema movement, and as the next generation of migrant, born in Shanghai and originally from Meixian, Guangdong Province, however, shows a strong representation of Qi-Lu Culture in his films, and reflects a deep sense of national culture. His film intervenes on two levels: the survival of Shandong people who migrated to Taiwan and the historical allusions to Qi-lu culture, focusing on the mainland imagery of Shandong and the extended Confucian culture of Qi-lu.

A discourse appraisal of conspiracy perceptions about COVID-19 and its vaccine in Nigeria’s social media space

As COVID-19 ravaged the world, its management was undercut by conspiracy perceptions that construct different versions of reality about the pandemic. This has hugely attracted scholarly attention in several fields but discourse analysis. This study was thus motivated to investigate the discursive constructions of conspiracies, the interpretive repertoires, expressed feelings, and enacted social actions. Data were sourced from posts and comments on Coronavirus and the vaccines on Twitter, Facebook, and Nairaland social media platforms, and subjected to discourse analysis. Three conspiracy perceptions were identified: COVID-19 as fraud, COVID-19 vaccine (COVAX) as a depopulation plan, and COVAX as associated with the 5G network. These were constructed in COVAX conspiracy discourse through these interpretive repertoires: reference, evaluative devices, time clauses, and intensifiers under lexicogrammar; and inclusive/exclusive distinctions, argumentation, historical allusion, rhetorical question, and narratorial trope under rhetorical strategies. These enacted the social actions of disputing, alleging, justifying, denouncing, and prognosticating, which worked up the negative emotions of dissatisfaction, apprehension, anger, insecurity, and disinclination expressed in terse textual voices that suppress the official COVAX narrative and endorse the alternative views.

Historical Allusions in Dante’s Inferno: The Teaching of History and Literature

Historical Allusions in Dante’s Inferno: The Teaching of History and Literature

Robert Browning

Robert Browning Suzanne Bailey (bio) Philip Kelly, Edward Hagan, and Linda M. Lewis's new volume 28 of The Brownings' Correspondence has been several years in the making and offers one of the more intriguing glimpses into the Brownings' lives. We hear more of Robert Browning's voice in the surviving letters from this period and can follow some of the epistolary conversations on the illness and death from cancer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sister Henrietta. This year is also significant in marking the publication of volumes 5 and 6 of The Poems of Browning, edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan and focused entirely on Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868–1869). Among themes in books and articles this year, there is an interest in exploring historical events or encounters that may have been woven into Browning's poems and that may shed some light on his creative process. Claire Simmons examines Victorian records of the lunar rainbow and Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850); Joseph Phelan connects Browning's friendship with Lady William Russell to the mysterious portrait in "A Likeness" (1864). Browning's influence on other artists is evident in a striking number of publications, including Patricia Rigg's book on the Victorian poet Mary Robinson, an essay on Richard Henry Wilde, and critical work on more contemporary poets such as Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Paul Muldoon. The Victorianist and poet Jason Camlot writes a monologue in the style of Browning in a recent poetry collection, while Jane Manning uncovers allusions to Browning's life in a Gary Carpenter composition for mezzo-soprano. In addition to historical allusions and poetic intertexts, essays this year touch on Browning and nineteenth-century literary currents and on themes of labor and money. [End Page 356] ________ The Brownings' Correspondence, volume 28, May 1860–February 1861 (Winfield, Kan.: Wedgestone, 2022) Volume 28 of the Correspondence contains a more extensive collection of letters from Browning than in past volumes, such that one can follow how he deals with challenges such as his ongoing stewardship of Walter Savage Landor and his affairs, as well as the progress of his sister-in-law's illness and Browning's managing of the impact on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had suffered health setbacks. The letters are written in the context of the aftermath of the Treaty of Turin in March 1860, by which the Duchy of Savoy and the County of Nice were ceded to France. Barrett Browning is pained by the loss of Savoy and records Browning's comment on Napoleon III: "It was a great action; but he has taken eighteen pence for it, which is a pity" (p. 3). During the period covered in the volume, the Brownings leave Rome in May for several months in Siena, returning to Florence in October 1860 and to Rome in November. Letters include Browning's correspondence with Walter Savage Landor, who sends Browning his thoughts on Shakespeare, in addition to other literary commentary. Barrett Browning also shares the interesting news that Browning "has been writing a good deal this winter," "working at a long poem which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I have seen, & may declare most worthy of him" (p. 10). Barrett Browning's remarks suggest a renewal in Browning's writing of poetry, and she also suggests something of her poetic relationship with him in the remarks that follow: "For me if I have attained anything of force & freedom by living near . . . the oak, < . . . > the better for me—But I hope you don't think I mimic < him, or > lose my individuality" (p. 10). She repeats the news with slightly more detail to William Allingham, suggesting that Browning's activity has extended through the winter of 1859–1860: "Robert is writing, not political poems, but a poem in books, a line of which I have not seen—and also certain exquisite lyrics . . . Neither he nor I have been idle this winter, nor mean to be idle this summer—" (p. 16). William Allingham replies with interest that "the news of Mr. Browning's growing Poem is of the best one...

Cultural Diversity and the Alternate History in Kim Newman’s Novel ‎Anno Dracula

The paper offers a new insight into the global perception of vampirism as cultural diversity tradition lens in the British writer Kim Newman’s novel Anno Dracula, published in 1992. The historical allusions throughout the novel presents the discourse of intercultural concepts that does not only speak to the Western Dracula tradition and the 19th Century English historical setting but also to our own 21st Century with its multicultural emerging societal relations. In a politically charged destruction of a fictional setting, the writer shows a kind of prevailing evil that defies the existence of mankind. The paper presents different points of view to interpret the role of both historical and fictional characters drawn by the novelist to create an image of horror. The paper also traces the cultural encounters with the Dracula tradition and how far this has contributed to build a political rebellion in a police state that might exist anywhere in the world.

Translating Biblical and Historical Allusions: The Case of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

The literary concept of intertextuality provides a new insight for translation studies. According to intertextual theory, texts are not isolated, they interact with each other in a way that a text is under the influence of preceding ones and it affects later writings (Allen 1). In translation, intertextual theory enables translators to take into consideration intertextual relations of a text to other texts which also means a translator should be aware of the literary and cultural tradition of the target culture. Allusions as one of the features of intertextuality hide a broader meaning and carry cultural implications in relation to other texts. To transfer them to the target culture effectively entails translators having cultural knowledge and experience of the target language. In the light of intertextual theory, this study focuses on the translation of biblical and historical allusions found in Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, which is a Renaissance play involving numerous allusions to mythology, the Bible, and history. In this study, biblical and historical allusions seen in Doctor Faustus and their Turkish renderings translated by T. Yılmaz Öğüt as Dr. Faustus (2018) have been analyzed in the light of Rita Leppihalme’s translation strategies concerning allusions. After detecting the allusions related to the Bible and history, they have been listed and compared to their Turkish allusions. Then, alluded references and their Turkish translations have been evaluated and the strategies adopted by the translator have been discussed according to the strategies proposed by Leppihalme in detail.

Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Moral Self, Volume One; Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Lonely Subject, Volume Two

Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Moral Self, Volume One; Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Lonely Subject, Volume Two

Linguistic creativity in the implementation of the patriotic rhetoric in Chinese media discourse

The subject of the study is the tools of linguistic and discursive creativity that implement the patriotic rhetoric in Chinese official state media. The purpose of the study is to identify the key creative linguistic tools and features of their use in the implementation of the patriotic rhetoric in Chinese media discourse. To achieve this goal, the following research methods are used: classification, lexical and syntactic analysis, cognitive-semantic method, descriptive method. The article describes the associative features of the concept PATRIOTISM in the Chinese linguistic worldview. Particular attention is paid to creative linguistic mechanisms in expressing and accentuating patriotic meanings. In the process of linguistic analysis, an explication of the combined use of folk wisdom, proverbs, sayings of thinkers of ancient China and historical allusions is carried out. As a result, it has been proved that a multifaceted creative language strategy is used for implementing the rhetoric of patriotism. The main conclusions of the study are that parallel constructions enhance the semantic and emotional information in the implementation of the patriotic rhetoric in Chinese media discourse; the military metaphor is often used when external threats appear; in reflecting the ideas of solidarity and the image of the great overcoming, the existing two-character words are creatively reorganized to form new four-character words to express nuances of word meaning and emotion. The scientific novelty lies in a comprehensive analysis of the ways of creative linguistic use for the implementation of the patriotic rhetoric in the authentic linguistic material of Chinese media discourse. The results can be used in the process of intercultural communication and the development of special courses about Chinese media, and can also promote communication and cooperation between politicians, journalists and linguists.