Literary Revolution Research Articles

선군혁명문학의 발명과 실재, 위기의 딜레마

고난의 행군이라는 위기의 매트릭스는 선군과 선군혁명문학의 탄생지였다. 선군혁명문학의 첫 모습은 주체문학과 구분되지 않았다. 주체문학의 발전된 단계 내지 새 형의 문학으로 규정되던 선군혁명문학은 김정일 리더십을 구현하는 데 초점을 두었다. 선군혁명문학의 전성기는 『선군혁명문학예술과 김정일』(2005) 출간시점이었다. 약하게 존속되다가 김정일이 사망한 이후 쇠퇴의 수순을 밟았다. 새로운 패러다임 전환을 이끌었던 ‘선군’은 생활의 모든 분야를 지배했지만 새로움은 자동화되었다. 선군혁명문학은 새로운 형식과 미학을 촉진하려 했으나, 주체문학론 같이 창작의 기율로 발전하지 못하였다. 선군혁명문학은 북한 문학사에서 김정일의 영도 업적과 그 결과물로 정리되었기 때문이다.

The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War by James McGrath Morris

Reviewed by: The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War by James McGrath Morris Steven Florczyk The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War. By James McGrath Morris. Da Capo Press, 2017. 314 pp. Hardcover $27.00. In his postscript to The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War, James McGrath Morris notes that "we might never have heard of Ernest Hemingway had it not been for an Italian soldier who was killed taking the brunt of the exploding mortar on the July night in 1918. But it seems little or no effort has been made to identify the soldier …" (253). To correct this oversight, Morris publishes here a list of eighteen potential candidates along with a note to contact him if "interested in trying to identify the actual soldier's name" (254). Future readers of this book no longer need to do so, however. As Morris informs in a 18 January 2019 Washington Post article, upon reading The Ambulance Drivers, Italian historian Marino Perissinotto reached out to Morris, and together they concluded that the name previously lost to history must be that of Fedele Temperini, whose regiment was stationed in the same vicinity as Hemingway and whose death was recorded on the same date as Hemingway's wounding. If correct, the discovery of Temperini is remarkable, even if, as Morris goes on to point out in the article, "strict Italian privacy laws prevent us from learning more about him." Morris's interest in recovering figures from anonymity, especially those obscured due to the overshadowing presence of Hemingway, suggests a parallel of sorts for understanding his account of the friendship between John Dos Passos and Hemingway in The Ambulance Drivers. Morris reminds readers of Dos Passos's importance by quoting George Packer's 2005 comment in The New Yorker: "It's hard now to remember that, several generations ago, the trio of great novelists born around the turn of the century—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—was a quartet, with the fourth chair occupied by Dos Passos" (249-50). The granters of the The John Dos Passos Award might agree, for they created the prize "to honor one of the greatest—and most often ignored—American writers of the twentieth century." Likewise, Morris's book [End Page 141] helps readers remember that Dos Passos not only once occupied that fourth chair but even at times garnered more attention for his writing than the trio that sat beside him. That said, Morris does not explicitly set out to champion Dos Passos. As the subtitle suggests, The Ambulance Drivers is the biography of a literary friendship, focusing on these writers' careers that developed as a response to The Great War, which inspired them to plot, as Morris puts it, "a literary revolution" (3). Their common experiences as volunteer ambulance drivers in the war significantly informed their plans, even if each writer varied in his view of the catastrophe and how to deal with it in writing. Whereas, according to Morris, "Hemingway had no interest in pondering its causes, worrying about its conduct, or even being bothered by the banality of military life," Dos Passos "wanted to write about war to end it. In Hemingway's mind, war was inevitable and a man was measured by it, as he had been. Literature could capture the experience, not change it" (76). Thus, a portrait emerges of Dos Passos turning to fiction as a medium for social activism and satire while Hemingway appears more consumed with personal concerns. Morris quotes from each writer's work to showcase their distinct versions of Modernism as well: Dos Passos experimented with combining words ("rainseething," "whiskeyglasses," etc.) and splicing fiction with newsreel accounts; Hemingway relied on repetition and minimalism. Morris even shows instances when Hemingway apparently recast ideas originated by Dos Passos. "As in the moment in Dos Passos's Three Soldiers when Chrisfield murders his sergeant," Morris explains (172), Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms includes a scene when Frederic Henry and Bonello execute a sergeant who deserts. Besides chronicling the successes, Morris also presents Dos Passos's struggles as a playwright...

An Interstitial Space: Cross-Cultural Negotiation and Concession in Early Fiction Translations in New Youth

This article focuses on the early translations published in New Youth, a leading periodical of the New Culture movement in China. While extant research mostly focuses on this journal's iconoclastic and radical arguments that prepared the way for the May Fourth movement in 1919, this article examines the period before Chen Duxiu, founder of New Youth, raised the banner of literary revolution. By interrogating the concealed history of the relay translations of fiction published in New Youth, especially Chen Gu's translations of Turgenev's novellas, this article unfolds the various approaches Chinese translators took in presenting Western culture, which sometimes involved unexpected processes of localization due to Japanese mediation. Specifically, I argue that the early translations in New Youth formed an interstitial space of hybridity where writers negotiated among different visions of transcultural syntheses.

The Image of Russian Literature in Czech Literary Monographs of the 1920s

The article deals with the first Czech monographs on Russian Soviet literature, including in the context of classical Russian literature, published in the 1920s. With exceptional political and cultural pluralism in this golden era of Czech history, Russian writers were often perceived by Czech critics and researchers through the prism of the political views of the latter, as a result of which very different, if not opposite, interpretations of their works appeared. This is clearly seen in publications in periodicals of different orientations, which has been shown in our previous studies. The aim of this article was to find out how the views of the authors influence the vision of Russian literature and how the approaches to its study differ in this regard. The ideological orientation of the authors affected not only the interpretation of the work of Russian writers and the literary process as a whole, but also the structure of their works. František Kubka in the book Poets of Revolutionary Russia (1924) gave a philosophical vision of revolutionary poetry as a representative of the Slavophile nationalist wing considering poets of different ideological views. Jiří Weil in the book Russian Revolutionary Literature (1924) gave the Czech reader a panorama of Russian revolutionary literature as a bearer of socialist ideas, viewing Russian contemporary writers in terms of how well they managed to become genuinely in praise of the revolution. Augustin Alois Vrzal, being a Catholic priest, in the book A Brief History of New Russian Literature (1926) showed the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century, mainly from a religious position.

National Language Movement- An Indispensable Perspective of Literary Revolution

The development and formation of Mandarin has spawned the emergence of modern Chinese literature. Mandarin and literature are intertwined and inseparable in the process of modern reform. The unity of national language movement requires the affirmation of the important social status of vernacular, and the initiative of “54” vernacular literature resolves the original language elegance of national language movement, making the value pattern of national language movement free from its bondage. From the perspective of Mandarin, we can better recognize some phenomena in the occurrence and development of modern literature. In the process of carding national language movement, we can be more truly aware of the significance of the literary revolution contained in the value concept of Mr. Hu Shi’s vernacular literature.

Maoist Aesthetics in Western Left-wing Thought

In their article “Maoist Aesthetics in Western Left-wing Thought,” Jun Zeng and Siying Duan discuss a terrain of knowledge called “Maoist aesthetics,” which is the creative misreading of Mao’s “On Contradiction,” the theory and practice of “Cultural Revolution” and other revolutionary literature and arts of Mao’s time by Western Left intellectuals. Scholars and academic communities inspired by Maoism include Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Pierre Althusser, the Chinese period of Tel Quel, Fredric Jameson, Arif Dirlik, and Contemporary Radical Left intellectuals such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Comparative study of the mutual influence of (Western) Maoist Aesthetics and (Chinese) Mao’s thinking on literature, as well as the research of (Western) Maoism’s return to China, can contribute to the rediscovery of the multi-dimensional voices and complexity of the theoretical thinking around Mao Zedong, and thus reveal unique but neglected voices.

Cultural Capital and the Tale of Two Lu Xuns

Historically, Lu Xun’s canonical status in China had been used for purposes other than strictly or specifically “literary,” although the aesthetic merits of his works remain indisputable even from the broader perspective of World Literature today. Nonetheless, such uses, which this study refers to as “cultural capital,” have brought about certain inconsistencies and contradictions in the evaluation of his works. In order to survey the complex and shifting history of reception to Lu Xun’s works, this paper attempts to explain the contextual determinations of his canonicity from the rise of vernacular literature in 1917 in China and his use of sophisticated techniques of the short story from the modern aesthetics learned when he studied abroad. Both developments earned Lu Xun a fairly wide readership among the Chinese, and the respect of Chinese intellectuals and the literati from the very beginning of his career; later, his essays on revolutionary literature and proletarian literature appear to have contributed to his full recognition even by the Communist Party since the 1930s. The positive reception of these different sectors resulted in a “cultural capital” that would be at the core of the changes in the history of the reception to his works in China. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization and John Guillory’s elaboration in terms of literary evaluation and in order to show how Lu Xun’s works were used as cultural capital, this paper discusses the changes in representation of Lu Xun’s works in Middle School and High School Chinese textbooks, as well as the related historical movements and social activities after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The discussion also tries to show how he was later aligned with the political struggle and propaganda demands to convince the masses to follow the government’s policy and practice. In this regard, the study attempts to describe how his works were chosen in accordance with the mechanisms by which political preferences and cultural values are historically inculcated and normalized in literature in China. All these developments resulted in the production of “Lu Xun” whose hybrid identity was anchored on the differing and contradictory uses as cultural capital.

Interconnectivity between Feminist Literature and Prison Literature or Feminist Prison Literature: al-Sharnaqa Novel as a Sample

Interconnectivity between Feminist Literature and Prison Literature or Feminist Prison Literature: al-Sharnaqa Novel as a Sample Dr. Līnāal-Sheikh-Ḥishmeh Abstract This study confirms the existence of intersection and interconnectivity between Feminist Literature and Prison Literature. Both genres intersect and interconnect in their approaches and aesthetic tools. Since the Feminist Literature is a breaking through revolutionary literature that seeks to achieve liberation and breaking away from the traditional chains on the level of form and content, it intersects with the Prison Literature at these points. Since the Prison Literature is an act of struggle, rebellion and revolution against the regimes of suppression and the political authority and its prisons, the Feminist Literature is nothing but rebellion, resistance and revolution against the masculine norms including breaking of political, social and religious taboos. Thus, the quest for freedom, revelation, unbosoming, revolution against persecution and destruction of all the forms of authority constitute central points of intersection and interconnectivity, which reach their burning point when the writer herself is the prisoner who lives the experience of imprisonment and she reveals her experience through writing a narrative text, in which she does not forget her feminist discourse. Thus, her revolutionary cry doubles against the trilogy of the social, religious and political injustice. The study suggests calling this type of literature written by such women writers as "Feminist Prison Literature" and seeks to clarify this interconnectivity and prove that the prison literature that the woman writes does not differ in its themes and features of its revolutionary content, its artistic devices and techniques from men's prison literature for two reasons: first, for the resemblance of prisons and their real conditions, and second, for the resemblance of the nature of the human experience between men and women in prison. To achieve these objectives, the study chose the novel of al-Sharnaqa/ the Cocoon by the Syrian woman writer, ḤasībaʿAbd al-Raḥmān, as a sample. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v6n2a8

Of Race, Gender, and the Novel; or, Where in the World Is Toni Morrison?

Treating the popular and academic discourse surrounding Toni Morrison's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 as a case in point, this essay critiques the ways in which race and gender—“black” and “female”—have been used as loaded signifiers to limit, qualify, segregate, and even diminish the achievements of black women writers and their contributions to American letters. Sources from the New York Times to Henry Louis Gates Jr. labeled Morrison's win a “great day” for black women writers, for black Americans, and for African American literature; but few if any commentaries noted the significance for the novel, for American letters, and for literary and critical studies, even as black women writers like Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, and Gayl Jones—together with a rising body of black feminist scholars and critics—had been engaged in transforming the genre of the novel, the nature of literary studies, and the makeup of the academy at least since the early 1970s. This essay argues that while as a Nobel Laureate, as a distinguished university professor, as an exemplary literary and cultural critic, and as a legendary editor at Random House who guided the careers of authors like Angela Davis, Bambara, and Jones, Morrison herself might well be classified as the best thing to happen to the genre in the past fifty years, Novel, too, completely missed the black feminist literary revolution Morrison anchored in the 1970s and 1980s and has yet to afford her an appropriate place of honor and attention within the pages of the journal.

Christine Savinel, Gertrude Stein : Autobiographies intempestives

Gertrude Stein: Autobiographies intempestives offers exemplary scholarship on Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical oeuvre. Chistine Savinel scrutinises the multiple facets of a cubist-like self-portrait painted by the prominent American author, an iconic figure at the heart of a vibrant artistic environment at the beginning of the twentieth century in Paris. Stein’s “autobiographical enterprise” (15) amounts to a literary revolution, similar to her friend Picasso’s geometrical representation of ...

Eclectic Revolution: Illusory Femininity and Two-Fold Mimicry in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives

In the present paper we discuss Gertrude Stein’s in-between position in the literary canon by alluding to her eclectic literary revolution. On the one hand, she is excluded from the patriarchal canon due to her disruptive style. On the other, she postulates a milder kind of revolution, in line with Luce Irigaray’s tenets, which implies a conscious reproduction of a constructed “femininity” in women (as opposed to the non-strategic and unconscious imitation of traditional gender roles) that finally unmasks the illusive character of a distinctive feminine identity. In her opinion, everything is a construct of the pervasive patriarchal model, where women reproduce an individuality taylored for them rather than their essential identity that is also ultimately questioned.

Reconsidering World Wars Won (and Two): Recent Books About Burma and Southeast Asia in the Context of Great Wars

Reconsidering World Wars Won (and Two):Recent Books About Burma and Southeast Asia in the Context of Great Wars Jane M Ferguson Heather Streets-Salter. 2017. World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-13519-2; Philip Woods. 2017. Reporting the Retreat: War Correspondents in Burma, 1942. London: Hurst & Company. ISBN 978-1-84904-717-3; [End Page 413] To reconsider World War in Southeast Asia in general is to question the relationship between military history and political transformation, inevitably transcending nationalist approaches to the subject. Two new books offer valuable new insight on the subject: how a world history approach can be valuable to consider Southeast Asia's role as a region in the context of the First World War; and the challenging, contradictory expectations placed on twenty six international war correspondents during the 1942 allied retreat from Burma. Streets-Salter's book, drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources weaves Southeast Asia's role into the picture of the First World War, often characterised, and therefore studied as primarily a European war. Indeed, as a region, Southeast Asia is described as "not a major player." But this does not mean that it was not affected by the war, nor that its contributions were negligible. In addition to thinking about Southeast Asia's importance because of its location and geopolitics, the stories of sedition, conspiracy, and arms smuggling during this period challenge archetypical notions of metropole/colony relationships, the latter of which, as the author rightly points out, have tended to dominate the historiography of empire (Streets-Salter, 5). In addition to the Introduction and the Conclusion, World War One in Southeast Asia contains six chapters, or case histories of transnational conspiracies for sedition in the region during the Great War. These include: 1, The Singapore Mutiny of 1915; 2, The Defeat of the Singapore Mutiny; 3, Germans, Indians, and the War in the Dutch East Indies; 4, The S.S. Maverick and the Unraveling of a Global Conspiracy; 5, Siam and the Anti-Allied Conspiracies; and 6, China, Germany, and the Viet Nam Restoration Association. From these cases across the region, readers learn about how transnational German networks sought to arm and to stoke uprisings through both funds and propaganda; as we learn as well, neutral (or provisionally neutral) states in Southeast Asia served as important transit points and shelters for anti-colonial nationalists to connect with European conspirators. [End Page 414] The truly transnational span of the conspiracies is illustrated in the many case studies, but to give readers a taste of this, especially in the context of Burma Studies, the story of the S.S. Maverick is particularly compelling. The ship, evading inspection, departed California with a lood of ammunition as well as five Sikhs of the Ghadar Party, with a cargo of revolutionary literature to boot. Their networks, from the US also extended to cities in Southeast Asia, and they saught to take advantage of the neutrality of the Dutch East Indies. The plan was to meet with the schooner Annie Larsen to transfer more arms, though the rendezvous eventually failed. The mobilization of resources was due to German-Indian collaboration against the British (Streets-Salter, 116) and ultimately the conspiracy's failure to succeed offers an example of increasing security regimes, including those on the high seas. In sum: Streets-Salter's work is a fantastically readable history of transnational networks of military strategy and colonial sedition during the First World War. Whereas the Second World War is often looked at as ushering in Southeast Asian states' independence, Streets-Salter's book provides solid evidence that we should not only rewind our timeline, but also broaden our scope. It was the upheavals of war which induced colonial states to reconsider their vulnerabilities in Soutehast Asia, because these same contexts allowed Southeast Asian nationalists to seek potential allies far beyond their shores. Fast-forwarding to the Second World War, the topic of Woods' book, Reporting the Retreat is the situation of 26 war correspondents who covered the 1,000 mile retreat of the British and Chinese armies from...

Research on the Development of Chinese Contemporary Literature Trend under the Language and Culture Angle of View

In this paper, we conduct research on the development of Chinese contemporary literature trend under the language and culture angle of view. Modern Chinese literature unification, actually is to point to in traditional forming process, the new literature has always emphasized performance to distinguish it from the old literary value connotation of thoughts, emotional content. Generalization of the content for later generations have don't have much room for doubt, literary revolution advocates some extent is also the founder of Chinese modern literature unified have made clear, they are not only from the modern Chinese literature to argue that the traditional sense. For dealing with this basic issue, we propose the countermeasures for the further and in-depth implementation that will then optimize the current research result on the Chinese contemporary literature

港大“中國經學”課程之退場———一個東亞視域的考察

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 本文立足於先行研究成果，進而從一個相對廣域的東亞視野來考察1934年以還，始於胡適，歷經陳受頤、容肇祖，完成於許地山的港大中文系改革事業之緣起原委、發展經過、造成之結果及其可能意涵。全文主要討論兩大議題，一是將港大中文系之改革，視爲中國新文化思潮、文學革命之一環，重新分析胡適主持計劃改革港大中文系這一事業的性質爲何？二是將港大中文系改革之兩大結果，亦即區分中國文史學系爲“哲學”、“史學”、“文學”、“普通文學”四部，以及將“經學”自港大中文教育退場一事，置於東亞之近代新式大學課程如何編派舊學的發展脈絡中，以思考其間所展現出的共同樣態。本文以爲港大中文教育之改革，其實並非只是一個大學内部單純的“課程”架構問題，我們應該將之納入民國初年以來胡適所從事的“文學革命”之一環來加以認識。又“經學”自港大中文完全退場，不僅是在英國人意想之外，也在中國内地“中文教學變動潮流”之外，筆者因此判斷胡適、許地山的港大中文學院改革發想源頭，恐在“域外”。而據本文考察我們得以合理推測：港大中國文史學系“中國經學”課程的退場，確實存在著隱而不宣的“日本因素”。
 This article bases on the East Asian horizon to explore the origin, process, result and meaning of the reformation in Department of Chinese in the University of Hong Kong (HKU), which was begun by Hu Shih from 1934, developed by Chen Shou-yi, Yung Zhao-zu, and finished by Xu Di-shan. Firstly, I see the reformation in Department of Chinese in HKU as a part of “new culture trend” and the revolution in literature in China and reanalyze the properties of Hu Shih’s plan for the reformation in Department of Chinese in HKU. Secondly, I put the result of the the reformation in Department of Chinese in HKU, that to separate Department of Chinese Literature And History as four parts: philosophy, history, literature and common literature, and to let Chinese Classics course exited from the Chinese education in HKU, into the context of the development of new course in modern East Asian universities. Therefore, I think that the reformation in Department of Chinese in HKU was not a matter about courses in universities but a part of the revolution in literature in China which related with Hu Shih. And the exit of Chinese Classics Course in HKU was not only unexpected for British but also out of the change of Chinese education in China. Through this study, I think that the origin of this reformation was in foreign. And there was invisible factors about Japan related with the exit of Chinese Classics Course in HKU.

The Absurd as a Representation: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Inexplicable (The Problematic Case of Godot)

AbstractThis article attempts to re-signify the already extensively discussed conception of the absurd attributed to the aesthetic phenomenon presented by the so-called theatre of the absurd by critically reconsidering its paradigmatic work Waiting for Godot in relation to philosophical hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur). The fact that Beckett’s artistic method invalidates the transparency of the mirror-like relation between reality and art is known, and yet the potential theoretical consequences of such a literary revolution do not seem to have been exhausted - particularly in respect to the category of the absurd. Hence, the presented inquiry aims to view the phenomenon quite against its common conceptualizations derived from existentialist philosophy in order to indicate a possible route of exploring it from a hermeneutic perspective and thereby challenging, to some extent, Simon Critchley’s (2004: 165) famous assertion that Beckett’s oeuvre seems “uniquely resistant to philosophical interpretation”.

Lu Xun, the Critical Buddhist: A Monstrous Ekayāna

Abstract When Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) sows in “Gudu zhe” 孤獨者 (The Misanthrope) the analogy of a seed in a conversation about the nature of children, he alludes to the epistemic seedbed other than evolutionary thinking: Buddhism. This study probes into this moment of double conjuration as religion encounters science and soteriology confronts natural law. It unravels the significance of the Buddhist reference by tracing the seed to its Yogācāra provenance and implanting it in a twentieth-century debate between the Yogācārins and the advocates of the Tathāgatagarbha doctrine across East Asia. The author situates Lu Xun in a shared intellectual horizon with the contemporary lay Buddhist scholar, Ouyang Jingwu 歐陽竟無 (1871–1943), whose critique of Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論 (Treatise on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna, or the Awakening of Faith) in 1922 furnishes a Buddhist exemplum of the “obsession with China.” In spirit both Ouyang and Lu Xun anticipate the Critical Buddhism movement of late 1980s Japan, in which hongaku 本覚， or original enlightenment thought, is censured for latent ideological complicity with Japanese ethnocentrism. Lu Xun, the author suggests, turns out to be the most critical of all Critical Buddhists. This is evidenced by his “Sihuo” 死火 (Dead Fire), which features a ghastly twist in its retelling of the burning house parable from the Miaofa lianhua jing 妙法蓮華經 (Saddharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra; Sūtra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Dharma, or the Lotus Sūtra). Having undergone a Buddhist vita contemplativa in the preceding years of the literary revolution, Lu Xun came to personify a profound “consciousness of darkness” (youan yishi 幽暗意識) in dwelling on the karma of modernity.

The “Natural Rhythm” Of Chinese Poetry: Physical and Linguistic Perspectives Since 1919

Abstract During the literary revolution, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) advocated the concept of natural rhythm, emphasizing the liberation of sound and the segmentation of meaning. Since 1919, his writings have attracted a great number of writers to reconceptualize the meaning and function of poetry and language. This study reviews critical discussions of the relationships among sound, meaning, and poetry by a number of Chinese scholars, from Tang Yue 唐鉞 (1891–1987) and Hu Pu'an 胡樸安 (1878–1947), to Chen Shih-hsiang 陳世驤 (1912–71), among others. Their discussions of rhythm and the relation it has to emotion and motion have yet to attract enough critical attention in the English-speaking world. This article explains how these scholars built on or challenged Hu Shi's findings to provide new ways of assessing the production of sound and meaning in Chinese language and literature.

‘Marriage had bastilled me for life’: Propertied Women as Property in the Legal Fictions of Richardson, Wollstonecraft and Collins

AbstractWhen a woman married during the eighteenth century, according to Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), her autonomous identity was removed, and she was immediately classed as one with her husband. This consolidation into the husband's own identity means that she is automatically classed as his property, as to incorporate and consolidate implies a taking over of ownership of the item being transferred – and thus, of course, a complete lack of self‐governance over mind, body and actions on behalf of the woman. This leads to the perception that the woman has been transformed from a human into a mere thing, while still retaining human function. It is this mid‐existence of the eighteenth and nineteenth century woman and her entrapment somewhere between human and thing that raises a key question. Is it possible for such a legal phenomenon to own property (thus, another thing) itself without repercussions – essentially, if the propertied woman was herself property? This ‘work in progress’ paper examines the extent to which this may be true, and if so, how it affected her identity as an independent human being in a patriarchal legal system over a specific time period by studying several themes of what are arguably legal fictions. The gendered inheritance of Samuel Richardson's work and the obstacles this incurs due to the female's lack of legal recognition in the eighteenth century are referred to, and explorations are made into the questions about inheritance, identity and what constitutes as property raised by the French Revolution of the 1790s, and the representations of this in Gothic and revolutionary literature, specifically Wollstonecraft's Maria (). Moreover, I consider the effects of the Gothic upon the development of sensation fiction, positing the latter as a direct descendant rather than subscribing to the notion of them being related but rigidly disparate, with sensation fiction suddenly emerging in the mid‐nineteenth century (Hughes ; Thomas ; Herbert ). Within these two genres, the entity of the married woman is well‐established but, I argue, warrants further examination of its representations of the legal entity of woman in her occupation of the domestic sphere as a wife and the social sphere as a single, propertied, legally existing woman in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860‐61).

A Comparative Study of Modernism in the Poems of Forough Farrokhzad and Adunis

Clash of the West with East countries (Iran, Lebanon and Syria) was a factor in changing the structure of Eastern societies, resulting in the emergence of political and social developments like constitutional movements. There are undeniable similarities between Arabic and Persian poetry because of the long historical ties, similar political and social contexts, close cultural backgrounds and the influence of European culture on their literatures. After the literary revolution occurred under the influence of European culture and literature, attention to modernism is a common approach used by Persian and Arabic poets. In both Arabic and Persian literature, Modern poet expresses his surrounding issues according to the needs of the community. Attention to the culture of the West is a common point closing Forough Farrokhzad and Adunis as two contemporary poets. Due to the different cultural and intellectual situations as well as the degree of their familiarity with the West, they have differences and similarities in the methods and the effects of modernization in the West. Using a descriptive-analytical approach, this article will show that Forough and Adunis have used modern manifestations such as secularism, feminism, nihilism, freedom, deconstruction, city and nationalism in their poems due to their relations with the West under the influence of cultural-political developments in their own societies.

Book as a Cure of the Condemned: From the History of Penitentiary System of Western Siberia (second half of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century)

Historical experience of education by the means of books, known as culture of reading, started being weakened in “the age of Internet”. Novelty of the article is in the described process of impact of the book on criminals in the territory of Western Siberia considered through the cultural, historical and psychological aspects. With the use of previously unknown archival materials there are revealed the cure methods of the condemned by using the book, and the relationship to the prison literature of the political prisoners. The personality of prisoners differed by a set of moral qualities, but almost all of them were ready to the perception of people around and themselves through the literature. Illiteracy was the main obstacle in education of the condemned, but the administration of prisons opened prison schools and organized reading literature aloud. The first prison libraries appeared in the 1860-ies and were replenished generally at the expense of philanthropists. F.M. Dostoyevsky’s novels “Crime and Punishment” and “Notes from the Dead House”, fairy tales and poems by A.S. Pushkin were the most popular books: they filled life with romanticism and were a compensation factor. Political prisoners denied any educational methods, preferring to read revolutionary literature. It is impossible to track extent of impact of book on the process of correction of criminals, but it is possible to claim that libraries started forming the atmosphere of book which is the most important condition of education in prisons, and is a necessary prerequisite for correction of a convicted person.