Modern English Literature Research Articles

National peculiarities of a traumatic experience in H. Mantel’s novel “A Change of Climate”

This article examines the problem of depicting traumatic experiences in modern British literature based on H. Mantel’s novel “A Change of Climate” (1994). In the course of the trauma literature development and its research (trauma studies), new opportunities and ways of depicting a traumatic event in fiction appear, for example, the attention of writers shifts from a large-scale description of historical trauma to the private lives of certain people and individual traumas. Mantel’s work presents several traumatic events at once, but only one is actual – the loss of a child by the Eldred family during their missionary trip to South African. In addition to the “standard” devices of trauma literature (unreliable narrator, lacunae, etc.), H. Mantel also introduces a national component into the novel, which determines the specifics of the main characters’ traumatic experience. So, such concepts as family, religion, virtue, good manners and missionary work become important for the characters born and raised by English society, through the prism of these concepts they perceive reality and try to overcome their trauma. However, this trauma is not only a personal experience, but also a cultural one in a certain sense, since leaving Africa after the child’s death at the hands of aborigines shows the failure of their mission. Thus, in his novel, H. Mantel demonstrates how deeply English national character traits are rooted in people’s lives, and how they become an obstacle in overcoming a traumatic event.

Sherman, Anita Gilman. Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature: The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt

Sherman, Anita Gilman. Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature: The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt

English as a Foreign Language Students’ Usage of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer in the Classroom and Homework Assignments

Understanding the interaction between artificial intelligence and humans was one of the study's objectives. Another was to examine the advantages and disadvantages of ChatGPT for English language learners. The primary aims of this study were to examine how English language learners utilize ChatGPT, why they use it, and how it impacts their academic progress. The phenomenon in question has been the subject of extensive research. The questionnaire used in this study was created with Google Forms and delivered electronically. More than 115 English as a foreign language students gave answers; the majority of them were students studying English at the bachelor and master levels. The questionnaire data represent how and how frequently students utilize ChatGPT, and the results show that a considerable proportion of them use the software. The data also show us the most common reasons why English language students use ChatGPT, and it appears that grammar is the first reason, while tasks requiring critical thinking are the second. Another very distinct reason is the use of ChatGPT for summarizing the books they are required to read during their English studies, which usually occurs at the bachelor's level where they learn Old and Modern English Literature. The results also revealed that students believe ChatGPT has had a beneficial impact on their academic advancement. After all, it is vital to note that artificial intelligence and its application are a developing phenomenon, particularly in the educational process; thus, the support of ChatGPT is assisting students in realizing their school projects, although not completely. This phenomenon should be viewed as both useful and detrimental. Artificial intelligence should not be used to limit student growth and critical thinking since it risks diminishing the value of human intelligence. Something artificial cannot be substituted with something natural, such as intelligence. As a result, our synthesizing mind is capable of far more than artificial intelligence.

Vita Haroldi and Hamlet—a flight of the imagination

This discursive article was inspired by a reading of Vita Haroldi and in seeing similarities to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the introduction, I examine the possible links between the medieval survival story Vita Haroldi and Hamlet. Part One explicates three potential approaches to a study of early modern English literature: the traitorous letter trope, the historiography of the death of medieval English kings, and the interest of leading lights in Elizabethan England in Anglo-Saxon law and the church. Part two implements these approaches in a brief reading and interpretation of Hamlet. Both the play Hamlet and the character of Prince Hamlet are situated in a transition from the medieval to the early modern; from a faith-based world to a rational one, from a focus on revenge to one on justice.

Prose and poetry of J.R.R.Tolkien in modern English literature

Prose and poetry of J.R.R.Tolkien in modern English literature

Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature by Katharine Cleland (review)

Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature by Katharine Cleland (review)

Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Dialect Diversity in Modern English Literature: A Study of "Shuggie Bain" and "There There"

This research explores dialect diversity in contemporary English literature through a comparative analysis of two seminal works, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and There There by Tommy Orange. The purpose of this study is to unravel the nuanced ways in which authors employ dialects to convey unique cultural and socio-economic contexts, contributing to the broader discourse on linguistic diversity in literature. Using a qualitative research approach, the researcher closely examines the stylistic choices made by the authors, mapping out the dialectical variations present in the narratives and their significance. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, recurring patterns and variations in both novels are identified, shedding light on the role of dialect in character development, setting, and narrative voice. The findings reveal that dialect diversity serves as a powerful tool in characterizing the struggles, identities, and histories of multifarious communities. Additionally, it highlights how these authors challenge conventional literary norms, enriching the reader's experience with authentic voices and perspectives. This study underscores the pivotal role of dialect diversity in contemporary English literature, emphasizing its potential to bridge gaps and foster empathy among readers while amplifying underrepresented voices in the literary canon.

Daniel, Drew. Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Daniel, Drew. Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Проблема памяти в романе «Лунный тигр» Пенелопы Лайвли

The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarity of the structure in the novel “Moon Tiger” by the British writer Penelope Lively. The paper analyses the narrative features of the image of the protagonist. The heroine’s memories and reflection are a way of reconstructing memory, as well as a continuous process of self-recognition and realising her own individuality. The heroine possesses a strong and unique character, but at the same time, the author embodies the traits of a hero who absorbed the traumatic experience of the wars of the XX century in her image. The research makes a theoretical contribution to the study of modern English literature and the peculiarities of representation of the problem of memory. The scientific originality of the paper lies in examining narrative strategies in Penelope Lively’s novelistic works that are necessary for building a narrative in which a person’s thinking process is constructed in close relationship with memories. The paper analyses an atypical figure of a diegetic narrator characterised by internal focalisation. As a result of studying the narrative structure of the novel, it has been proved that the violation of the principles of the epic in the novel and the tendency to deconstruct the events of the past, but at the same time the rejection of the objectivity of the narrative and the desire for individualisation in the subjective text of the protagonist allow the novel to be attributed to postmodern literature, where the whole world is reflected in the history of one person.

ANALYSIS OF THE CAUSES OF PHILIP LARKIN’S WOUNDS IN THE MIRROR OF FREUD’S PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

Philip Larkin is one of the prominent post-modern poets who tackled with various themes in his poems. He approached his ideas directly or indirectly. This study aims to analyze selected poems of Philip Larkin as one of the most vital figures of English poetry. The analysis of the poems is achieved on the basis of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory which is regarded as a great criterion used in modern English literature. Psychoanalysis is a well-known method that helps critics and readers to interpret and dive deep beneath the meanings of the lines of the poems to get familiar with the unconscious mind of poets. Sigmund Freud in his work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) believes that poetry is the dream of poets and writers. So, the one who reads the literary work has to use psychoanalysis as a focal method and technique for finding and figuring out the hidden meanings and intentions of the writer within the work. Psychoanalysis, to a great extent, aids critics and readers to understand the conflict between Id, Ego and Superego as well the inner psyche of the writer in order to comprehend the reasons behind the writer’s actions and behaviors.

Carol Mejia LaPerle, ed. Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2022. Pp 221.

Review of Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. By Heather James

Heather James, by examining a number of Tudor- and Stuart-era authors through the twin lenses of Ovidian reception and early modern concerns about autocratic pressure on literary expression, offers an intriguing perspective on the period’s restless ferment of poetry and political philosophy. Through a series of close readings of selected works by Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, James focuses on Ovid as both these authors’ inspiration and, more daringly, the springboard for their own potentially perilous verses about speech and silence in a wider world inescapably overshadowed by the authority of the Crown. The towering status of Ovid in early modern English literature is of course well-established in scholarship; what James does is argue for a better appreciation of Ovid’s importance for the political ramifications of poetic work. After a somewhat desultory introduction, James considers Spenser in her first chapter, “Flower Power: Political Discontents in Spenser’s Flowerbeds.” She begins to build her theme of Ovidian influence not by choosing an overtly political work, but by taking “the counterintuitive position that Spenser is in fact deeply political when he invites his readers to wallow and get lost in lush flowerbeds of poetry” (20). James posits that when Spenser indulges in long, descriptive floral catalogues that seem to have no relation to external politics, he is in fact offering an escape from such politics with a “poetic aromatherapy” (21) of blooms “all flagrantly irrelevant to moral use or political encomium” (27). The heart of the chapter is a close reading of Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie: in it, the butterfly Clarion flutters through a lush garden, but is killed by the spider Aragnoll, who embodies “the darker passions of the court and Crown, namely Envy” (40)—for in Spenser, Aragnoll is the son of Arachne. In a “seismic change” (43), however, Spenser’s Arachne deviates from her Ovidian predecessor by spontaneously becoming a spider due to her envy of Athena’s art. Spenser’s confection of a poem becomes in James’s reading a metaphor for reading for pleasure and “an ideal of imaginative and expressive freedoms” that is ultimately “a gorgeous but doomed fantasy” (50).

:Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature

:<i>Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature</i>

Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature. Ed. by Jan-Peer Hartmann and Andrew James Johnston

As I write this review, the treatment and perception of material remain very much in the public eye, as news reports and social media alike are dominated by accounts of the lying in state of the late Queen Elizabeth II, with people queuing for hours, days, at a time to view her mortal remains in Westminster Hall in London. The materiality of the pageantry and its historical origins have been much debated. The Queue to view the casket (capitalized into a phenomenon) is itself being cited by some commentators as one of the greatest ever pieces of public theatre and can be productively read in relation to the examples of ‘archaeo-theatrics’ cited by Jonathan Gil Harris’s chapter in Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature (2021). These events are exceptional in so many ways, but the capacity of the physical to embody the intangible, or more broadly, how humans relate to the physical world around us, has long been studied by archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists amongst others. Scholars of literature may have arrived more recently at this destination, but as John Hines, the author of the final essay in Material Remains, highlights, ‘a welcome development in literary studies of the last decade or so has been the emergence of a serious and extensive engagement not only with the history but also with the archaeological materiality of the past in relation to literature’ (p. 240). The material turn in literature began in earnest in the 1990s, but from 2001, when it was used by Bill Brown in a piece of the same name in Critical Inquiry, Thing Theory has emerged as a dominant framework of literary enquiry.1

Author – Text – Reader: Hermeneutic, Interpretations and Reception Theory: Based on the Material of James Joyce “Ulysses”

This article presents the concept of interpretation, hermeneutics, and the reception of the literary text in the consciousness of the reader, which is at the center of the problematic field of literary science. Awareness of the locality of traditional interpretation methodologies leads to the search for other ways of interpreting artistic work. At the present stage of development of literary science, paying attention to the communicative function of literary text, such an interpretive methodology is relevant, which would allow to fully explore the work from the standpoint of an aesthetic dialogue between the author, the text, and the reader. James Joyce's Ulysses represents one of the most complicated works that was written in modern English and world literature and that contributed implicit and explicit interpretation and meaning to the original text.

Ecocriticism in Modern English Literature

Ecocriticism these days is indeed a relatively new revisionist and reformist trend that has dominated the ecological point of view in recent English literature worldwide. The ecological perspective constructed under Eco-criticism delineates the nature-human alliance in both detrimental and constructive ways. The present research paper tries to inspect some post-1900 modern English literature from an Ecocritical perspective. The literature reviewed in the present study incorporates the analysis of some well-known authorship whichever is eminently written to gain insights from the ecological frame of reference. Analyzing some notable works culminates in the conclusion that the trend of Ecocriticism progresses from ‘nature- a mystic substance ‘and ‘nature’s interconnectedness to action ‘importance of maintaining nature, ‘eco-consciousness and eco-literacy about environmental issues, and finally calls to action.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreCharles Cathcart is an honorary associate in English with the Open University. He has published—often as an independent scholar—since 1999. He is intrigued by the processes through which multiple writing contributions may cohere within a single early modern text. His recent subjects have included the publication history of John Marston’s writings in the years after he ceased drafting plays, the stationer Leonard Becket and his publications, and the canon of Thomas Heywood.Jeffrey S. Doty is an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas and the author of Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His essays on Shakespeare and ethics can be found in Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and his work on Shakespeare, social class, and popular politics in Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Literature Compass. His essays coauthored with Musa Gurnis on the early modern London “theater scene” and its interactive public have appeared in the journal Shakespeare and in Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public (Palgrave, 2021). He is currently preparing a critical edition of Coriolanus for Cambridge University Press.Margo Kolenda-Mason is a visiting assistant professor of English-Literary Studies at Hendrix College. Her first book project, Fruitless Labor in Early Modern English Literature, explores rhetorics and representations of subverted, thwarted, and frustrated labor in poetry and drama. She is also contributing a chapter on “Work, Play, and Solitude” in A Cultural History of Solitude in the Early Modern Age, forthcoming from Bloomsbury’s Cultural History series.Scott Maisano is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous venues, including The Tempest: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare), Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford University Press), Configurations, Extrapolation, Shakespeare Studies, and Shakespeare Quarterly. His current book project—“Labouring with Shakespeare—is both a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s lost comedy, Love’s Labour’s Won, and a critical engagement with academe, race, and speculation in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 51, Number 1Spring 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726061 © 2023 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

Janel Mueller, 1938–2022

Previous articleNext article FreeObituaryJanel Mueller, 1938–2022Joshua ScodelJoshua ScodelHelen A. Regenstein Professor of English, University of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCourtesy of Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointI am deeply honored to pay tribute to Janel Mueller, who died on October 21, 2022. From 1988 to 1998 Janel edited Modern Philology with a characteristic blend of broad vision and incisive attention to detail. As a journal editor, award-winning teacher, and inspiring mentor of younger scholars, Janel energetically advanced literary scholarship by nurturing and improving the work of others. I gratefully remember many drafts of my own work in progress laden with her acute blue-penciled suggestions.The fitting coeditor of the 2002 Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, Janel was a magnificent scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. She combined immense erudition, particularly in the history of Christian thought; passionate dedication to expanding our literary canon by revealing the expressive power of underestimated early modern women authors and religious writings; and bold yet historically contextualized accounts of what made individual authors and texts new in style, argument, and vision. With rigorous stylistics grounded in linguistics, Janel’s Native Tongue and the Word (1984) traced with revisionary vigor how Protestant scripturalism and the imitation of biblical parallelism shaped early modern English prose, which had previously been analyzed in relation to classical models or modern science.Throughout her career Janel focused with piercing intensity on two major male authors, Donne and Milton. Attentive to Donne’s sources but above all to his ever-surprising imagination, Janel published as her first book an edition of Donne’s prebend sermons (1971) and as her last an Oxford selection of his oeuvre (2018). Janel was at the forefront of scholarship exploring early modern constructions of gender, and her numerous publications on Donne include her learned, brilliant, and influential 1992 article articulating Donne’s lesbian utopianism in “Sapho to Philaenis.” Her many articles on Milton included important 1980s and 1990s analyses of his reinvention of the political sonnet and of his first prose tract’s radical reformulation of English apocalypticism and vanguard articulation, well before other scholars had recognized it, of a “nascent English republicanism.”In numerous editions and articles, Janel examined how early modern English women authors found their literary voices by engaging with scripture and with traditions previously defined by men. Her 1994 article elucidating the way that Aemilia Lanyer’s 1611 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum reimagined Christ’s crucifixion in gendered terms was characteristically revelatory. Having coedited Elizabeth I’s writings and translations (2000–2009), in 2011 Janel published her magisterial edition of the writings of Elizabeth’s stepmother Katherine Parr, the first Englishwoman to publish a work of her own under her own name. Janel’s luminous introductions and copious notes revealed precisely how and why Parr produced a distinctive feminine vision of reformed spiritual devotion. Her praise of Parr’s “richly expressive legacy” might fittingly be applied to Janel’s own scholarship, the enduring expression of an unforgettable mind. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723649 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.