Minor Characters Research Articles

Гендерные перспективы представления пространства в романе Вирджинии Вулф «Миссис Дэллоуэй»

Gender aspects of Virginia Woolf’s writings have become an immensely expanded field of interdisciplinary research in the West. In Russia, however, they remain quite little known. The article focuses on the gender-spatial division of space in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Drawing from a number of Marxist philosophical and literary conceptions of modernist space and, mostly, from the literary narrative methodology, the authors present a model of interrelations between the narrative social and personal spaces from the perspectives of the two protagonists and of the collective character, that is, various minor characters sharing post-Edwardian societal norms. Literary narrative approach makes it possible to characterize the modernist traits of Virginia Woolf’s novel which she shared with the contemporary writers and her individual, specifically Woolfian literary inventions. One of them consists in a specific use of free indirect discourse imitating the perceptions of the two gender-opposite realities, namely, the “material” reality of the actual story world and the mental reality of the subjective experiences from the protagonists’ pasts. The other is Woolf’s innovative contribution to feminist writing. It may be described as a representation of the female “modernist body” via the female protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness saturated with meaningful gaps. The obtained results include specifying Woolf’s gender principle of structuring her narrative space and the alternations of the female protagonist’s two bodies, which are her gender body “for others” and her mental “modernist” body freed from social limitations.

Blind Medusa: The Portrayal of Liza Pursewarden in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet

In Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the major female characters, Justine and Clea, each have their own eponymous books. However, minor female characters in the novels have notably received more limited scholarly attention. This article will consider one of these marginal female characters, Liza Pursewarden, who appears in both the novels Mountolive and Clea. I will argue that the portrayal of Liza, by David Mountolive, her brother Ludwig Pursewarden and the character L. G. Darley, moulds her into a Gothicised fetish object onto which they project their fear of castration and lack.

Герцог Олбани в сопоставлении двух версий «Короля Лира» У. Шекспира

The aim of the study is to conduct a detailed comparison of the quarto and folio of “King Lear” by W. Shakespeare and to highlight the differences between two editions associated with the image of the Duke of Albany, a minor character who personifies order in the chaotic universe of “Lear” and acts as a kind of normative moral reference point. The scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that a detailed comparison of the quarto and folio texts in connection with the image of the Duke of Albany has not been carried out. As a result, it is proved that, although Albany occupies a more significant place in the quarto version, where his role is increased by 30 lines, the folio version not only cuts the role, but offers different understanding of Albany’s place in the structure of the tragedy, which also explains the fundamental difference in the ending of the play in different editions.

Characters in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

In this article, the main purpose has been the characterization of characters in the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. To carry out the task, the research has been conducted through the lenses of the deconstuction approach. Through the completion of the task, the characters have been divided into three groups namely major characters, the minor characters, and other characters. At the end of the investigation, it has been discovered there are two major characters in the novel. As for minor characters there are two characters as well. When it comes to other characters, although in this article their number has shortened to two characters, it should be mentioned that there are more characters who should belong to this last group of characters. This short number of characters belonging to other characters has been due to the constraint of the article size.

Hopes Woven in Smoke: Reimagining Virgil’s Aeneid in Irene Vallejo’s El silbido del arquero

This article investigates Irene Vallejo’s 2015 novel El silbido del arquero, a narrative in the Virgilian tradition mostly inspired by Book IV of the Aeneid. We show how Vallejo reinterprets Dido and Aeneas’s tragic love story by foregrounding minor characters, developing the setting, integrating popular subgenres and exploring communicative anxieties and gender issues. It is argued that patterns of dissatisfaction, self-delusion and disillusionment with human affairs ultimately collide with a message of hope voiced by the fictionalised Virgil.

Fire in the Mainframe

The 1969 Sir George Williams computer centre occupation has always felt like a secret, or underground, history, with whose protection Black Montreal has been entrusted. It is underground because it is often buried by mainstream Quebec history. When the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), Quebec nationalism, and the October Crisis of 1970 are discussed, little or no reference is made to the occupation. That omission is telling, because people of my generation have grown up hearing about those events as centrepieces of “recent” Canadian history, and because, at the very least, the occupation shares the timeline. The occupation, in fact, preceded the October Crisis, and there is anecdotal evidence of a kind of cultural overlap. As a Black writer in Quebec, I am attracted to minor characters and suppressed histories, and this informs part of my interest in the occupation.

Badness and Struggle in Underclass: Character Image Analysis on Detective Sun in the Novel Camel Xiangzi

Camel Xiangzi is an immortal literature that wins universal praise. In this article, the author maintains his focus on the minor character --Detective Sun, tries to analyze his characteristics and figure out the reason and significance that he is shaped in the novel. Although this article analyzes the reasons that lead to the wickedness and hard life of people at the bottom of society from a different perspective, it also works in reflecting the living condition of the lower classes in the Old China. The author analyzes Detective Sun’s characteristics from mainly 3 aspects in this article. The first is to study the humanistic part as well as bestial part of this character in depth. The second is to dissect and speculate the reasons that cause his specific words and behaviors. The third is to make analysis on other related persons of his son generation, trying to figure out the common reasons that result in his character. We can draw a conclusion: Detective Sun is a spy who comes from the lowest class. He is extremely poor and makes a living via following and working for exploiting class, via helping them to persecute other ordinary people that come from the same class of him. He is not only a victim of the dark society, but part of the darkness.

Report of the Cestode Phyllobothrium chiloscyllii, Subhapradha, 1955 from Carcharhinus macloti

Present investigation deals with report of cestode Phyllobothrium chiloscyllii, Subhapradha, 1955 from Carcharhinus macloti at Alibag, Borali, Dighi, Shrivardhan, Murud,Raigad, West Coast of Maharashtra, India during the February, 2007 to January, 2009. The present tapeworm comes closer to Phyllobothrium chiloscyllii Subhapradha, 1955 with the characters such as length of worm, shape of bothridia, presence of long neck, arrangement of vagina and genital pore, but the same differs due to scolex (oval, China Rose shaped Vs. globular); Number of testes (30-40 Vs. 55-80); Ovary (transversely placed Vs. ‘U’ shaped) and Vitellaria (granular Vs. follicular). These are the minor characters hence it is redescribed here as Phyllobothrium chiloscylli Subhapradha, 1955.

ОБРАЗ КОТА КАК ДРУГОГО В РУССКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ: ОТ КЛАССИКИ XIX В. К «ОТТЕПЕЛИ» ХХ В.

The article is devoted to the culturological comprehension of the cat as a character and image of the XIX-XX century Russian poetry. It is noted that the most famous and firmly established in the Russian mentality cats enter the reading and, accordingly, the cultural experience of Russians in their childhood when they are introduced to classical Russian literature (A.S. Pushkin, the learned cat from the introduction to the poem Ruslan and Lyudmila» and the Russian liter-ary fairy tale (K. Chukovsky). The author specifies that even in the 19th century these animals were an inseparable part of the Russian literary landscape, but they did not play an important role there, being semi-animate characters of sorts for their masters (A. Fet). It is found out that some writers of the turn of XIX-XX centuries assigned supernatural abilities to them, recognizing the mysteriousness of these creatures and our inability to understand them (I. Bunin). In this historical period, Russian poets in general did not separate the cat from the animal world, which was opposed to the human world (Sasha Chyorny). The attitude towards cats changed fundamentally during the «thaw»: the poets of the Sixties saw in their behavior a degree of inner freedom and independence which they themselves were unable to achieve on the social and cultural level, but which they desired so much. (B. Akhmadulina, A. Voznesensky). The atti-tude toward animals, cats in particular, became for many a criterion of the human personal qualities and it was a sign of certain softening of mores in Soviet society (I. Brodsky). The article suggests and studies the development of the cat's image / character from a minor character being a part of the lyrical hero's environment, through positioning the cat as part of the animal world, to humanizing its image in XX century poetry and assigning to it the qualities of human beings, interlocutors and associates, on the one hand, and interpreting the cat as a creature involved in the mysteries of the Universe, on the other hand.

On the Tragedy of Cao Yu’s Yuanye

In the realm of aesthetics, tragedy is known as “the highest stage and crown”, and its artistry is difficult to describe in simple words, as it mostly touches our senses and reveals the supreme value of beauty. Cao Yu wrote his play Yuanye against the backdrop of rural feudal society. The thesis will be based on Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and will talk about its tragic nature from three aspects. Firstly, Cao Yu has created many vivid and tragic minor characters; secondly, the realism and tragedy of the plot details build up multiple dramatic conflicts, amplifying the tragedy and giving the audience strong sensory stimulation to achieve resonance; finally, its profound theme of revenge is a manifestation of the inferiority of the Chinese peasants under the feudal society the - absurd tradition of “ The son must pay his father’s debts”, which amplifies the tragic effect of the whole play.

Гоголь и Школа юнкеров (Из комментария к письмам Гоголя А.С. Данилевскому)

The article provides new information on Gogol’s biography in his early years in St. Petersburg (1829–1831). In particular, it gives new facts and hypotheses concerning Gogol’s social circle, interests and plans during this period. The author of the article carries out a detailed analysis of Gogol’s letters to his closest friend A.S. Danilevsky. Alexander Danilevsky arrived in the capital together with Gogol and entered the School of Cavalry Junkers and Ensigns of the Guard in the spring of 1829. Some names and circumstances mentioned in Gogol’s letters to Danilevsky have so far remained unclear to commentators. The article reveals the meaning of these realities due to the involvement of previously unpublished archival materials, as well as some newspaper reports and little-known memoirs of contemporaries. As follows from the letters, Gogol knew well the everyday life, manners and interests of the School’s students and teachers. This knowledge can be seen in his later literary work, for example in the numerous images of middle-ranking officers, from Lieutenant Pirogov in “Nevsky Prospect” to nameless minor characters: lieutenants in “Dead Souls,” “The Inspector General,” “Litigation,” “Ivan Fedorovich Shponkа,” etc.

«Пугающе жуткая книга о детях…»: особенности поэтики романа Д. Тартт «Маленький друг»

The article is devoted to comprehensive research on the novel The Little Friend by D. Tartt. It investigates the narrative features and genre characteristics of the literary work. The immanent method was used in research to study the narrative model: the symbolic meaning of the title, the specifics of the settings and plot structure, means of characterization, the theme of racial inequality, intertextuality, and photographic ekphrasis in the novel. The contextual method allowed us to identify the features of the ‘southern noir’ in the novel, as well as to consider the traditional and innovative manifestations of the characteristics of young adult literature. The theme of growing up in the novel is associated with traditional motives of loss, experiencing death, illness, mental pain, disappointment, and self-attainment. The Little Friend is third-person narration, this is the only work by D. Tartt where it is used, opposite to the retrospective confessional narration of the novels The Secret History and The Goldfinch. The story is told by the omniscient author who enters the mind of his character. It gives the writer the possibility to focus not only on the inner world of the main characters but also to present the historical and cultural background, as well as to create expressive psychological portraits of the minor characters and their families. The tone of the novel is quite conversational; the narrator is very exact in describing the characters and places. The paper concludes that the novel simultaneously contains the features of young adult fiction – the theme of growing up through overcoming trials (loneliness, loss, fighting the evil / awareness of the illusory nature of ideas about it), and the characteristics of the literature of the American South, the contexts of which play a crucial role for D. Tartt as a writer and a person.

Major Role from Minor: Charactrization of Dr. Peabody in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner’s main concern turns from an isolated hero to people. Dr. Peabody as a minor character begins to receive our attention when his obese body dragged up the steep hill to the Bundren house via a rope. Dr. Peabody first attends to Addie and later to Cash. In the process of his relation to the Bundrens, Peabody finally becomes one of the memorable minor characters. Dr. Peabody suggests the dialectic based on the relationship between word and deed, death and life, that is, a formal method of argument, in which new positions are reached by testing opposing views against one another. Peabody points to an answer to Addie s sense of death in his own ideas of life. In his final homey image, Dr. Peabody suggests us a solution: in the union of abstraction and concretion, fact and metaphor is interchangeable.

Minor and Marginal(ized)?


 
 
 Alexander Woloch, in a pioneering 2003 study on literary characters and characterization, observed that narrative meaning emerges in the dynamic attention to and neglect of the characters, major and minor, who inhabit the same story but occupy different positions therein. This essay draws on Woloch’s theory and methods to analyze the Standard Babylonian (SB) Epic of Gilgamesh, taking the women of the narrative as its case study. Aruru, Ninsun, Shamhat, Aya, Ishtar, the scorpion-man’s woman, Shiduri, and Uta-napishti’s wife are here examined not as flat or stock characters but rather as individual personalities who often transcend both their constrained narrative spaces and the gendered (mis)characterizations applied to them in the scholarship of recent decades. In paying the women of the SB Epic of Gilgamesh the attention they deserve, this study sheds new light not only on the composition’s minor characters but also on its narrative structure and meaning.
 
 

Adam Grener. Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel.

Adam Grener. <i>Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel</i>.

The poetry of minor characters and everyday life in the "Sĕrat Cĕnthini"

The 722 cantos and 247,766 lines of poetry in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini , composed in Surakarta by Ki Ng. Ronggasutrasna, R.Ng. Yasadipura II, and Ki Ng. Sastradipura under the direction of the Crown Prince of Surakarta (later Pakubuwana V, r.1820-1823) in 1815 during the British occupation of Java (1811-1816), are arguably the greatest expression of literary art ever written in Javanese. The earliest version of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini comes from Cirebon at the beginning of the seventeenth century. When the poem reached Surakarta in the late eighteenth - early nineteenth century, court poets rewrote it, greatly expanding the number of episodes and characters, as well as the kinds of information and literary styleto be found in the text. My interest in the excerpt I have translated from Canto364 focuses on two aspects of this process of literary revision: characterizationand the representation of everyday life.

Lipski, Jakub. Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction.

Lipski, Jakub. <i>Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction</i>.

George Eliot’s Wetland Form

Margaret A. Miller, “George Eliot’s Wetland Form” (pp. 291–320) This essay relies on the 1747 Lincolnshire bog-woman and her porosity of bodily boundaries as a useful heuristic to historicize the ontological unity between gender unconformity and the environment. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), which shares its setting with the Lincolnshire bog-woman, is a novel of wetlands and women, of gender and drainage, and of femininity and floods. This essay reads the novel’s bog-women, including protagonist Maggie Tulliver and an oft-forgotten minor character, the widowed Mrs. Sutton, alongside nineteenth-century agricultural records of Lincolnshire, including manuals on the locally specific land-improvement technique—warping—used to drain the county’s various wetlands. In doing so, the essay argues that The Mill on the Floss reveals land improvement, particularly the postenclosure acts of drainage and warping, as a negative form for female Bildung. In negotiating how to write female development within a patriarchal society, Eliot exposes the violent limitations that ideas of arbitrarily redefining and reclaiming environments as arable and usable “land” during an era of enclosure and nascent global capitalism impose upon female futurity. Ultimately, Maggie’s alignment with wetland ecologies renders her an anachronistic figure of a preindustrial, predrainage past. In a present climate crisis moment of increased urgency to restore wetlands worldwide for their carbon storage capacities, what does it mean to read Maggie’s story not in spite of her death and foreshortened life, but instead as that of an incipient bog-woman who refuses to be drained?

Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli.

<i>Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature</i>, ed. Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli.

On the Afterlives of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca: Spinoffs and Transfictions

Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is one of these novels that are regularly submitted to rewriting and expansion. If the process “preserves the traditional canon’s centrality” (as Jeremy Rosen says about minor character elaborations), it also participates in the critical reassessment of the source text as it throws a new light on it. This article discusses very diverse transfictions based on Du Maurier’s novel and examines the workings of the various narrative strategies adopted to reactivate the well-known novel. This will enable us to underline the elements, traits or characteristics of Rebecca that are picked upon – and which ensure Du Maurier’s novel an afterlife – and how these various revisions and/or expansions engage with the source text. While Antonia Fraser’s “Rebecca’s Story” (1976) is a coquel enabling a first-person account by Rebecca of her marriage, Rose Tremain’s “The Housekeeper” (2014) changes diegetic level as it portrays the young Du Maurier and gives an account of the inspiration behind Rebecca by the character misrepresented as Mrs. Danvers. Other texts under study are Susan Hill’s Mrs. de Winter (1993) and Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale (2001), which offer narrative and temporal expansions, and finally Lisa Gabriele’s The Winters (2018), a transposition of the plot and its characters to contemporary America.