Village Boys Research Articles

Exposition of Body Aesthetics: Reading Koirala’s Sumnima and Parijat’s Shirisko Phool

Sumnima and Shirisko Phool deal with the subject matter of body aesthetics. Koirala’s Sumnima exposes vivacious Sumnima body with ‘strong sense of heroism’ that she straightens in front of dry body, idealistic notion of Somdatta and Parijat’s Shirisko Phool reveals the causes and consequences of Suyogbir’s kissing that kills Bari. Suyogbir fails to preserve his military ethics and social prestige while he is mad in Bari’s bodily beauty and behaviors. Somdatta’s spiritual salvation of Khas-Aryan stocks in the name of achieving divinity by the power of penance makes victim to a Kirat girl, Sumnima, for a long and she ultimately marries with a village boy from Kirat community and gives birth to a daughter. Comparative study compares two or more than two people, places, things, arts, culture/religion and literature and this is a comparative study on Koirala and Parijat characters’ body aesthetics in Sumnima and Blue Mimosa. This comparative study’s objective is to bring prolong history of body aesthetics of Suryadatta, Somdatta, Bhilla, Puloma and Sumnima in Sumnima and Suyogbir, Shivaraj, Mujura, Sanu and Sakambari in Shirisko Phool for which I take theoretical support from Susan Bassnett, Charles Bernheimer, Jonathan Culler, David Ferry, Guillen Clandio, Jost Francis, Remak H.H.etc.’s ideas. Koirala and Parijat characters expose body aesthetics, experience ups and down of social practices and continue and/or break throw them from multiple aspects. The narratives in Sumnima and Blue Mimosa also focus on divine power for spiritual living, too but this study highlights an exposition of body aesthetics.

“Through the Pen to Begin with”: Anticolonial Resistance in Tanika Gupta’s Adaptation of Great Expectations

Abstract Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in and around Calcutta in the years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy to metropolitan businessman to nineteenth-century India but also to a particularly fragile moment in the history of the British Empire: a subcontinent grappling with the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, facing the early years of the British Raj. Gupta interrogates narrow understandings of “Victorian” as located within the British Isles, explicating the contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement of imperialist ideologies and politics. Examining the play’s engagement with imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments that hint at the destabilisation of, if not revolt against, British rule. Gupta juxtaposes canonised narratives of undisturbed imperial hegemony with a tale of incessant colonial resistance. In doing so, she challenges those historiographical as well as fictional (neo-)Victorian texts that silence the sustained efforts and influence of anticolonial movements and that frame the history of Empire in terms of continuity rather than rupture.

Exploring Psyche of the Gurkha Soldier in Koirala’s Soldier, Rai’s The Murderer and Bista’s The Andhikhola

Lahure, ‘Gurkha soldier’ has a unique image and personage in the World; people around the world characterise and praise the braveness and honesty of Gurkha soldiers. But no one describes and contemplates about the psyche and personality of the lahure outside the barracks and battlefields, and treat accordingly them. This research paper explored psyche, motives and mentality of lahures (“Gurkha soldiers”) in Koirala’s Soldier, Rai’s The Murderer and Bista’s The Anthi Khola. This paper exposed the pre-service, in-service and post-service conditions, thoughts and experiences of lahures, and unveils the psychological motives, intentions and personality of lahure in the stories selected. This research has exploited interpretative qualitative approach and utilised psychoanalysis theory to interpret the data from the stories; this theory exposed the mindset and mentality of a person like a lahure. Three stories of different writers are purposively selected to truly exhibit the psyche, persona and mind of lahures in the pre-service, in-service and post-service. The findings are that Koirala manifests the nature and mind sets of a lahure who is on leave and returns to the cantonment; the self of the soldier is ‘other’ to show people, and he also displays his own provocative character. Rai discloses the temperament and perception of ex-lahure in his village; circumstantial evidences and his subconscious forces him to slander and calumniate the accidental act. Likewise, Bista demonstrates the motivation, rationale and intention of lahure and village boys who wish to join army forces; their paramount intention is to pay off debts and earn for bread and butter as well as social status in the village. Rai also exemplifies how the beloveds are psychologically devastated by the lost lahure in wars. They divulged the psychic conditions, individuals’ unique thoughts and experiences of Gurkha soldiers to the particular problems outside the cantonments and battlefields. This research significantly unveils thoughts, provocation, psyche and motives of lahures to the (academic) publics who have heard and described the braveness and honesty of the Gurkha soldiers in the battle fields.

Analysis of Directive Speech in the Novel The Village Boy by Damien Dimatra


 
 
 This study describes the types of directive speech in the novel The Village Boy. A directive speech act is an utterance expressed through the attitude of the speaker so that the speech partner receives the implied message and acts according to what the speaker intended. Descriptive methods were used in this study. The listening and note-taking method was used to collect data, which were analyzed using the matching method and the determining element sorting technique (DEST). Based on the results, in the novel The Village Boy, seven types of directive speech acts were found, namely: 1. directive speech acts ordered marked by markers (try, subtle illocutionary signal power, subtle illocutionary signal power with interrogative sentences and strong cues); 2. pleading (please, beg, hopefully, and the illocutionary power of subtle cues and subtle illocutionary cues); 3. demanding (should and the illocutionary power of soft cues and strong illocutionary cues); 4. suggest (should ask, better, the illocutionary power of subtle cues and strong illocutionary cues); 5. ask (ordinary questions and rhetorical questions); 6. forbid (don’t, the illocutionary power of soft cues and strong illocutionary cues); and 7. allow (please, let, bless, say, goodbye, illocutionary power of soft cues and strong illocutionary cues).
 Keywords: speech act, directive, novel
 
 

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger: Precursor Narrative of Upcoming Unicorns in India under Globalization

India in the turn of the millennium has encountered with liberalization, globalization and privatization subsequently resulting in paradigm shift encompassing all activities along with trade and commerce. This transnational and transcultural phenomenon has brought to India advanced technologies with economic opportunities to provide talented and hardworking minds to grow by new exposure and unbiased platforms whicheventually proved boon to the victims of restricted stratified society. To the parallel of legacy of family business, ran the entrepreneurship aspirations by many newcomers in the field to claim the share in emerging economy which had witnessed drastic change with the arrival of greater ideas and dreams. Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker awardee novel The White Tiger, published in 2008 has encapsulated the nuances of globalized contemporary society and foreseen the trend of entrepreneurships and surge of startups to change the scenario to great extent in near future. The protagonist of the narrative, Balram Halwai, a village boy from Bihar emerges as a successful entrepreneur in the cosmopolitan and global backdrop of Bengaluru; the silicon valley of India. The IT/BT revolution in India post-Y2K has strengthened its socioeconomic status in global forum. Recently India has displaced the UK and occupied third positionnext to the USA and China in terms of the number of unicorns created in 2021. This paper attempts to analyse the dynamics of globalizationas a paradigm shift as portrayed in The White Tiger.

Lesya Ukrainka's drama "Lisova Pisnya" in literature lessons

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the choice of methods and ways of analyzing Lesya Ukrainka's drama-extravaganza "Forest Song" in the context of a competency-based approach to teaching and educating young people by means of the art of words. The statistic looks at the genre-style and the novels of the drama-extravaganza "Lisova Pisnya", the individual style of writing, the artistic officials, the character of creation of characters, the particularity of the problematic of the composition of the work. Typically, I mean those that in the new protist two light – light of reality with living people and light of nature with biological sources, which is the result of the development of science fiction. The main conflict is the struggle against stupidity, youthfulness for a high world, vitality and beauty, for harmony, happiness in life. The compositional structure of the work is enhanced by the role of the prologue-singing as a kind of prelude to future conflicts, the opposition of will and captivity, movement and stagnation; conflict between man and nature: the meeting of the forest child Mavka and the village boy Lukash, the birth and flowering of love, the development of the conflict between poetry and prose, dream and everyday life, the vicissitudes of love, which are the plot of the drama. Its feature is emphasized by two culminating peaks, which in the third act reach the deepest struggle of passions. The article offers methodical recommendations for the analysis of the drama extravaganza "Forest Song" in accordance with the requirements of the competence approach to the literary education of students: take advantage of the mixed path of analysis of a literary work.

Village boy moves to London

The British Student Doctor Journal is a high quality, open access, biannual, peer-reviewed, general medical journal, which publishes articles written primarily by medical students. In addition to publishing original research and systematic reviews, we also provide a platform to medical students to express original thought and reflections on clinical practice, student life and medical education.All of our content is fully open access, available without subscription and with no authorship charges. All articles published in The British Student Doctor Journal go through a rigorous peer-review process, led by our student editorial team. The governance of the journal is overseen by our faculty advisory board, and we are published by Cardiff University Press and funded by Cardiff University School of Medicine.For more information, please visit our homepage at www.bsdj.org.uk.

Antonio Fraguas, de Insuela á Real Academia Galega

Como chega un rapaz da aldea a ser membro dunha institución académica? A senda que conduciu a Antonio Fraguas desde o seu lugar nativo no concello pontevedrés de Cotobade á cadeira que Castelao deixara vacante na Real Academia Galega é un modelo de tesón, de humildade e de fidelidade á terra e á cultura que vai impregnando o espírito dun home desde o berce.

Mahmut Makal'ın Bizim Köy Adlı Eserinde Halk Bilimi ve Halk Kültürü Unsurları

Abstract War is a major disaster that leads to the destruction of the societies from all aspects. And the Turkish War of Independence caused the Turkish Republic which was on the foundation phase to start from the very beginning. Most of the scholars who were educated thanks to the reforms implemented in the downfall period of the Ottoman Empire, had died in the Independence War. For the development of the newborn country one of the main factors to be improved was education together with economy. In order to succeed this development, it was necessary to educate the people whose 80 percent lived in rural areas, and this education should have directed people to production in all aspects. But in spite of all the laws and regulations implemented, desired level of success could not have been reached. One of the reasons of this failure was to try to understand and expalin the rural life from the viewpoint of city life. At this downturn Makal, indited his masterpiece “Bizim Koy” which shows the facts that it was needed to see the city life from the viewpoint of rural life and describes the village reality as it was. The factors that lead “Bizim Koy’’ to attract attention to the highest levels of the State, were Makal’s growth in the village and to observe the peasent and the village reality well while teaching in villages. In this study, Mahmut Makal’s usage of folklore and folk culture elements in his masterpiece named “Bizim Koy” have been observed. These elements are classified as main and subtitles and include samples with page numbers. Makal has been seen as the victim who lived exactly from birth what he told as much as the narrator in “Bizim Koy”. Makal’s Bizim Koy is an important masterpiece which transfers the village truth without fret and also represents a trend which will be called ‘’village literature ‘’ after years. As a result of this study, thanks to the fact that Makal was a village boy and he reflected his observations with all their reality, in “Bizim Koy” someone can see quite a lot elements of that period such as language, clothing, beliefs, games and entertainment.

“A vicious circle”: Repatriation of Bissau-Guinean Quranic Schoolboys From Senegal

ABSTRACTThis article treats repatriation of Bissau-Guinean Quranic schoolboys from Senegal where they beg for their teachers who are named marabouts. Data is based on fieldwork that occurred between 2009 and 2017 and focuses on the marabouts, parents, villagers, NGO staff and boys who have been repatriated to Guinea-Bissau. Repatriation benefits some actors while others are hurt. The authorities strive to fulfill commitments to combat child trafficking vis-à-vis the international community, however without prosecuting the marabouts who are influential community leaders. The NGOs keep their business going and “capture” boys for repatriation, which some marabouts and parents use as free transport for boys to Guinea-Bissau in line with seasonal labor demands. Many of the repatriated boys return to Senegal to escape stigma, rejection, and mistrust attached with repatriation at the family and community levels. While back, some boys keep on with Quranic studies, others run some business or take village boys with them to beg. Through repatriation, boys circulate between the countries, yet most Bissau-Guinean Quranic schoolboys in Senegal never enter the circle. The marabouts, empowered with symbolic capital, adjust to the dynamism of repatriation as a social space, aiming to keep the position as the masters of the game.

Trouble

Trouble Katherine Atkinson (bio) It is the beginning of the rainy season when you arrive with your mother and sister. The air is hot and thick. Rose shrubs bud pink and yellow against the turquoise of your grandmother's small, wooden house. There is the sweet-stink smell of fallen fruit in the air. Your grandmother looks smaller than she did when you last saw her. Her head is wrapped in a foulard, and she wears a thin, cotton dress. Her feet are bare, her soles spread and pale against the rest of her skin. She remarks how pretty your sister has grown, and looks at you from the side of her eye. She turns to say something to your mother in a Creole that you don't understand. Your mother answers her, but there is no energy in her voice. Her face is still swollen and purple as an aubergine. Gesturing for you and your sister to follow, your mother walks into the house behind your grandmother. ________ As your mother's bruises fade, so does her voice. She takes up her rosary and mouths fervent prayers. She begins to tie up her hair and wears a house dress like your grandmother's. You and your sister feed the yard fowl, sweep the verandah and hang the washing. It is your job to watch for rain and bring in the clothes. The house is quiet except for your grandmother's voice and the nightly news. A constant mutter vibrates from your grandmother's chest, directed at the cubes of dasheen she spears with a fork in the pot, at the slippery knob of blue soap in the wash basin, at the back of your head as you walk away. Sometimes the mutter issues as a shout so sudden and urgent, it seems to surprise her as much as it does you. Often it is a quarrel against the many sins of your father. Sometimes, it is a small domestic wisdom: "Wash the stain with blue soap, then leave it in the sun to bleach." Mostly she just talks at the crotons in the tins on the verandah, or the rose bushes by the steps. Sometimes, if your sister isn't pining for Seon Louisy, you and her walk away from the house to the river, looking for somewhere cool and quiet to go. It is by the river that you first see him, on the far cliff bank. He is wearing a pair of old dress pants cut at the knees and tied with cord, and he has one arm wrapped around the peeling trunk of the gommier tree, the other searching the air above the water as he balances. His feet are curled round the smooth roots, ready to launch. He looks at you just before he leaps, and makes a splash so big it wets your dress. Your sister quarrels in the timbre of an old woman, cursing him before he has even broken the surface. You say [End Page 80] nothing. There are more boys to follow his dare, and it is never quiet after that, those days by the river, but you don't mind. Your sister tells you not to talk to them. "Don't take on these coarse, neg boys, is only one thing they want," she warns. The only time you hear your mother's voice these days is when your sister speaks. You feel sorry for her because you know she hopes Seon will come to see her. Some days she stays behind, and when you come back, she is sitting on the verandah, waiting. ________ After a few days of meaningful looks, the boy from the river tries to speak to you. He asks, "Why you never go in?" You blush and say you can't swim. And even though he laughs at you, you feel like you've been dipped in the water. Each day the boy comes and performs a feat more impressive than the last, and all the village boys try to follow. You sit and watch and don't speak, but secretly you know each back flip is for you. One day, your grandmother mumbles that...

The White Tiger : A Critique

This work is a comprehensive study which brings out the narrative techniques used by Arvind Adiga who has a fascination for his past as a boy belonging to Chennai and feels a bond with the life of middle class people. His view of looking at history in an alternative way reflects in this work. He looks at violence as a channel for freedom and this view is realized in the form of the protagonist, Balram Halwai murdering his master Mr. Ashok. The novel is also a way of looking at India in its flux of economic changes as against China, the country of communism. Apart from sharing the view of the author, the work brings out the aspects of light and dark, casteism, rural and urban life, difference between Indian and American culture, Indian politics and corruption. It is also peppered with humour here and there. Every detail has been incorporated in narrating the transformation of a poor village boy into a successful entrepreneur.

Revivification of Educational System: A Life Long Struggle of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi

Education is such a crucial element of a society that plays a vital role in building characters, behavior and ideology of a nation. The failure to develop this element rightly and according to indispensable requirements of time may result in the decline or ultimately the collapse of a society. Accordingly, every great scholar and intellectual in human history for instance Plato, Confucius, John Locke, Rousseau, [i] as well Muslim scholars i.e. Al-Ghazali, Farabi and Ibne Khaldun etc. has given special attention to this building block of society. Bediuzzaman Said Nursi also expended all his efforts for the reforming of education system during his whole life. Having considered educational backwardness the main cause of Ottoman Muslim’s decline, Nursi got the opinion of making necessary reforms in this area. His biography indicates that due to his remarkable foresight he understood the problem of education system of his time at a very early age, while kept on moving from one madrassah to the other restlessly.[ii] The reason of his unrest in early five years, that he could not stay longer in any madrassah, was his discontent with education system. Moreover his three months stay in Sheikh Jalali’s madrassah in Dogubayazit[iii] in the city of Agri in Turkey, his study through self-selection of particular texts from course books, and his reply to his amazed teacher, “The treasures (of learning) you control are in a strongbox. You have its key. What I need is a clue to its contents. I will choose whatever I find appropriate”[iv] all illustrates his dissatisfaction with the education system of his day. Serif Mardin expresses his amazement on “remarkably modern perception of such a peasant” i.e village boy.[v] He states: “We get a clue as to the reasons for his inability to settle in any medrese…. He was finding the entire long-drawn curriculum too cumbersome.” Vahide also connects this statement of Nursi with his intention “to point out the need for reform in medrese education and to prevent time being wasted through the inclusion of so many commentaries, annotations and expositions.”([vi]) [i] William Cooney, Charles Cross, and Barry Trunk, From Plato to Piaget: The Greatest Educational Theorists from across the Centuries and around the World (University Press of America, 1993). [ii] For details see Sukran Vahide, Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 6-10. [iii] When he commenced his studies with serious effort and got diploma in just 3 months at the h of Sheikh Jelali, here the method he adopted for learning was not thorough study of whole works; rather he selected certain texts and took a general study of all. And when his teacher asked him the reason of doing so, he replied in this way. [iv] Serif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 68. [v] Ibid., 68-9. [vi] Vahide, Islam in Modern Turkey, 10.

He Is a Dog, But I Am a Bigger Dog Than He Is<br>I toj pes, ama i jas ušte popes</br>

The subject of this article is one specific ritual that has been practised in Macedonia during Orthodox New Year (Vasilica), when the village boys have violently beaten and expelled the village dogs. The goal of the investigation is to stress the social and the religious codes of the ritual related to the affirmation of the male principle, as well as the ambivalent relation of the humans towards the dog in general, that speaks in favour of the symbolic duality dog-wolf, which leads towards emphasised elements of the wolf cult in the New Year ritual cycle. In a certain sense the article is following the recent investigation of these phenomena done by Mirjam Mencej and others.

Hard lines of the fifth Kazan state medical institution principal, associate professor of the department of ophthalmology Suleyman Bek-Mukhametovich Enaleev (devoted to the 120th birth anniversary)

The article is devoted to the 120th birth anniversary of the fifth principal of the Kazan State Medical Institute, associate professor of the ophthalmology department Suleyman Bek-Mukhametovich Enaleev, whose life journey was short and thorny. His curiosity, thirst for knowledge and self-sacrificing work had raised him from a simple village boy to the principal of the Kazan State Medical Institute and the People’s Commissar of Healthcare of Tatarstan. The article describes the successful start of his career as manager, but false accusations tragically cut short his life. For a long time his name was noteless because documents showing his activities during this period were seized from the Institute archives. Only official orders were preserved, which shed light on active work he performed in this post: not only taking the great interest in his employees’ lives, covering the cost of their treatment and other needs, but also supported the scientific, medical and educational work of his colleagues. In addition, associate professor S.B. Enaleev actively participated in launching new schools and hospitals in Tatarstan, creating new departments at the Institute (departments of pathophysiology, surgery of the pediatric faculty and the faculty of public health, 4th department of internal medicine), recruiting their personnel, organizing repair of university buildings and dormitories, etc. However, despite the progress made by S.B. Enaleev while he was in charge of the Institute, in 1938 the NKVD arrested him on a false denunciation. Unable to withstand the torture and beatings, S.B. Enaleev died. Many years later, a special commission of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of Tatarstan rehabilitated his good name.

Book Review: Van dorpsjongen tot wereldburger (from Village Boy to World Citizen). 4 Vols.

Book Review: Van dorpsjongen tot wereldburger (from Village Boy to World Citizen). 4 Vols.

From Grassroots to Success: A Case Study of a Successful Goan Woman Entrepreneur

Goa - The Pearl of the East on the world map, flaunts its serene and beautiful beaches and ancient Portuguese architecture that attracts an influx of tourists and boosts the economy. Besides this, Goa, the twenty fifth state of federal India, is famous for its own authentic and unique cuisine and sea-food. More specifically, we find an increasing number of tourists looking out for authentic Goan cuisine. One of the success stories worth mentioning is of an entrepreneuring widow from Betalbatim, South Goa who stood against the tide, stuck to her grass roots, and proved her abilities in providing authentic Goan dishes. Martin's Corner was established in 1989 by the Late Mr. Martin Pereira as a corner shop where local village boys would come to play carom or to grab a soft drink. Mrs.Carafina, the wife of Late Mr. Martin Pereira along with her dedicated sons, started serving popular Goan dishes, which instantly became famous among the Goans for her exquisite cooking. In no time, her delicacies became popular not only in Goa, but outside Goa too. Today, it has grown to become one of Goa's most talked about and most frequented multi-cuisine restaurants for authentic Goan and fresh sea food. It has been patronized by many Bollywood film stars, top cricketers, politicians, corporates, foreign tourists, and not to forget, Goans from all walks of life. Also noteworthy is their ability to serve both vegetarian and non-vegetarian clientele. Every scrumptious meal in the evening at Martin's Corner is accompanied with live entertainment. The ambience portraying Goan culture, casual, and easy atmosphere leaves you with a feeling of contentment. What is the secret behind the success of Mrs. Pereira's (who has not learned the ropes of management from a B-school) entrepreneurial venture? How did she manage to market her small corner shop to become a popular food stop for many rich and famous personalities as well as middle class people? The present case study explores the journey of Martin's Corner from a small corner shop to one of the most popular and loved restaurants in Goa.

From Grassroots to Success: A Case Study of a Successful Goan Woman Entrepreneur

Goa - The Pearl of the East on the world map, flaunts its serene and beautiful beaches and ancient Portuguese architecture that attracts an influx of tourists and boosts the economy. Besides this, Goa, the twenty fifth state of federal India, is famous for its own authentic and unique cuisine and sea-food. More specifically, we find an increasing number of tourists looking out for authentic Goan cuisine. One of the success stories worth mentioning is of an entrepreneuring widow from Betalbatim, South Goa who stood against the tide, stuck to her grass roots, and proved her abilities in providing authentic Goan dishes. Martin's Corner was established in 1989 by the Late Mr. Martin Pereira as a corner shop where local village boys would come to play carom or to grab a soft drink. Mrs.Carafina, the wife of Late Mr. Martin Pereira along with her dedicated sons, started serving popular Goan dishes, which instantly became famous among the Goans for her exquisite cooking. In no time, her delicacies became popular not only in Goa, but outside Goa too. Today, it has grown to become one of Goa's most talked about and most frequented multi-cuisine restaurants for authentic Goan and fresh sea food. It has been patronized by many Bollywood film stars, top cricketers, politicians, corporates, foreign tourists, and not to forget, Goans from all walks of life. Also noteworthy is their ability to serve both vegetarian and non-vegetarian clientele. Every scrumptious meal in the evening at Martin's Corner is accompanied with live entertainment. The ambience portraying Goan culture, casual, and easy atmosphere leaves you with a feeling of contentment. What is the secret behind the success of Mrs. Pereira's (who has not learned the ropes of management from a B-school) entrepreneurial venture? How did she manage to market her small corner shop to become a popular food stop for many rich and famous personalities as well as middle class people? The present case study explores the journey of Martin's Corner from a small corner shop to one of the most popular and loved restaurants in Goa.

Long Lankin (review)

Reviewed by: Long Lankin Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough. Any storyteller knows that folklore is as rich with terrifying villains and creepy bad guys as it is with clever heroes and happy endings. Long Lankin, the titular baddie of a centuries-old British folk ballad, is one such monster, but while his tale is tellably rife with murder, witchcraft, and revenge, the story has been previously untapped as a source for novelistic adaptations. That changes here, as Barraclough pits this nightmarish creature against two resourceful but vulnerable little girls to create a stunningly atmospheric and genuinely horrifying story. It's 1959, and sisters Cora and Mimi have been shipped off to an old family estate in the English countryside to stay under the care of a distant relative. About as welcoming as the gloomy, dilapidated rooms of Guerdon Hall itself, Aunt Ida is ready to return the girls to London almost as soon as they appear on her doorstep, but with the sisters' mother institutionalized and their father incommunicado, the old woman is stuck with the girls for the time being. After making the acquaintance of a village boy, Cora begins to suspect that her aunt's anxious demeanor has to do with an ancient legend regarding the Hall's history, and an encounter with a ghostly woman and the grisly spirits of dozens of murdered children convinces Cora that she needs to get herself and Mimi out of the small town before the sisters meet a similar end. Escape quickly becomes a non-option, however, and Cora is forced to investigate the past of her extended family and find a way to defeat a centuries-old evil. Barraclough begins her adaption of the ballad with a splendidly developed setting; Guerdon Hall is entirely believable as a place where folklore would come to life. The stuffy, shadowy halls of the crumbling estate are vividly portrayed in cinematic prose, and the house soon becomes nearly suffocating with its menace. The surrounding town carries an air of desperation about it, as the residents attempt to forge their way into the twentieth century even as they are haunted by the unpleasant details of their village's past. The oppressive summer heat plays a part as well, creating a feeling of strained stillness, an eerie peace that is abruptly shattered with the arrival of Cora and her sister. The narration alternates between Cora, the village boy Roger, and Aunt Ida, a device that serves to echo the omnipresent gloom of the setting with Ida's fraught voice while conveying a sense of vulnerability and innocence through the children's perspective. Their everyday doings of dares and mischief seem to exist in a safe cocoon, escaping the sinister force that otherwise surrounds the kids, and the tension amps up considerably as the creepier elements come out to play. [End Page 3] Before Long Lankin even make his appearance, Cora must contend with the aforementioned murdered young ones, a ghost with a cautionary tale, a few demented townspeople, and adults who remain mysteriously mum on the town's history of missing children. The presence of Long Lankin is at first only made evident by mysterious scratching sounds, a rotten smell near an old graveyard, and whispered rumors, but Barraclough fulfills on the book's promise of true horror, giving readers a spectacular scene in which the unfathomably evil villain appears sitting upon a throne of bones and brandishing sharp teeth and an appetite for young flesh. That image will sear itself into readers' memories, and it's not the only vivid horror the book offers. Like all the best scary stories, this will haunt readers well after the tale has been told, leaving teens who have long thought themselves too old for the bogeyman double-checking the locks on their doors. (See p. 7 for publication information.) Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Specters of the Victorian in the Neo-Forties Novel: Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger (2009) and Its Intertexts

The Little Stranger is a ghost story with a twist. This is something we have come to expect from a Sarah Waters novel, given the author's mastery of the narrative tease. The UK's leading contemporary female historical fiction writer rose to prominence with her lesbian romp Tipping the Velvet (1998) and her subsequent neo-Victorian novels Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2003). With The Night Watch (2006) Waters turned to the neo-forties, at the same time moving away from a focus on lesbian characters. The Little Stranger continues her interest in the forties, with a difference. The interpretative conceit for which her fiction is so conspicuous here does not rely on any sudden revelations arising from shifts in perspective or temporality but, rather, on the complexity of the historical framework adopted, for Waters embeds neo-Victorian Gothic within her forties context. In exploring the post-war transformation of social relations, Waters combines the twentieth-century theme of the demise of a country house and family with the Victorian trope of the Gothic mansion engulfed by the past. The project of the nostalgic/traumatic return is played out in a multifaceted mirror game with our contemporary period's rememorizations of the dual legacies of the “golden age” of the Victorians and the “broken age” of the immediate post-war period. Waters's novel plays with our recognition of the interpretative instabilities raised by her synthesis of the two genres. The ancestral home acts as both an emblem of the literature of our dual Victorian and war-torn past and a site of intertextual experimentation. In The Little Stranger, the second of her novels set in the 1940s, Sarah Waters reconfigures, to chilling effect, key preoccupations of her previous historical fiction: neo-Victorian Gothic (Affinity), the claustrophobia and insurgent spirit(s) summoned by the disciplinary regimes of institutions (the prison, the family), class relations (Tipping the Velvet); psychopathological sexualities (Fingersmith); and the upheavals caused by war (The Night Watch). The novel opens with the narrator's memory of the Empire Day commemorations he attended in 1919 at the local country estate Hundreds Hall, “an absolute mansion” in the ten-year-old village boy's stunned eyes (The Little Stranger1). First implemented on 24 May 1902 (the birthday of the recently deceased Victoria), Empire Day served to induct British youngsters into an unquestioning allegiance to traditional models of authority and to the principles of patriotism and imperialism. In Waters's ironic use of the occasion, the day intended to celebrate the post–World War I restoration of Victorian values and social hegemonies (the latter encoded in the open house with all its entrances barred by ropes, a prohibition soon breached by the narrator) in actual fact marks the “last grand year” of the estate, with both the stately home and its owners about to start their “steady decline” into extinction (4). By the close of the text some thirty years later, after another world war, the wrecked house stands abandoned by all but the narrator, its few surviving family members having fallen victim to a series of calamities: casualties of war, though of a different kind. The subtleties of this “other” war – spectral, sexual, (para)psychological, class inflected – and Waters's complex negotiation of intertext (the integration of a wide range of literary sources), subtext (the layered nature of the text's narrative hauntings), and context (the play with a dual historical framework, the Victorians and the 1940s) are the subject of this essay. Our appreciation of the fabric woven from a patchwork of literary references to both periods inevitably influences our interpretation: as I argue, we will read The Little Stranger differently, depending on whether we focus on the forties or Victorian paradigms or are mindful of both.