Following the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the women’s suffrage campaign was forged around the slogan “on the same terms as men”. The suffrage, though restricted at the time to men, was gradually extended to include some workers (1867), farm workers who were heads of households (1885) and finally all men, with the advent of universal male suffrage in 1918. In 1884, those wives who now had control over their own bodies, joined single women in demanding representation and the right to vote at local and national level. Citing their irrefutable status as citizens in their own right, British women opposed and denounced the clear injustice of biological arguments used to justify political inequality. In calling for social and political reform based on the equality of the sexes, such women asserted both their status as political subjects and their place in history. In so doing, they called on the state to provide financial assistance to poorer pregnant women and to take action in the struggle against wage inequality and the doctrine of “separate spheres”. Women’s history in the 1970s, and gender history in the 1980s, precipitated the emergence of new approaches in the vast majority of academic fields. Gender inequalities – linked to themes such as masculinities, consent or sexual violence – are thus constitutive of history.
The British government’s reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic has meant wide-ranging restrictions imposed on people living in the UK with minimal parliamentary oversight. Thus, human rights and civil liberties were affected, as far as both individual freedoms and constitutional guarantees are concerned. However, given the urgency created by the health crisis and the controversial nature of human rights speech in the UK, using it to criticize the government’s measures was bound to be a politically charged choice. Through an analysis of parliamentary discourse in the main Covid-related debates both in the British Parliament and in the devolved legislatures, this article argues that human rights were not used as an expression of common values in a time of national crisis, but as a divisive rhetorical tool. Focusing thus on political discourse rather than on the effective effects of Covid restrictions on human rights allows us to identify ideological fault lines. Indeed, the analysis shows a highly differentiated definition of human rights between political parties on the one hand and between the different nations on the other.
The invention and popularization of photography in the nineteenth century revolutionized portraiture. From the beginnings, many writers posed in front of the camera to have their portraits captured by the successive developments of the daguerreotype, the carte-de-visite and other cheaper as well as more practical and portable photographic processes that brought portraiture outside the professional studio. A simultaneous growing interest in literary celebrities and the places related to them and their works led photographers to produce pictures of writers in their habitat, including pictures that were disseminated among the public through collectibles or publications. The representation of interiors in most photographic portraits of Victorian and Edwardian writers appears as a key element contributing to constructing the writer as a sociocultural type and a public figure. What can be perceived, at first, as a mere backdrop to the representation of a human being can actually reveal much about the fashioning of an author’s literary identity through images. Portraits of Charles Dickens or George Bernard Shaw, for instance, testify to the importance of staging and accessories when seeking to construct authors’ images and to depict their universe as a materialization of their character and psychological interiority.
Queer readings of Samuel Beckett’s antipathy to reproduction have focused on his refusal of futurity. This essay expands on previous studies of anti-futurity in Beckett’s work by exploring his fascination with atavism, regression, and decadence. Beckett’s anti-vitalist modernism departs from James Joyce’s preoccupation with the fruitful potentialities of the degenerate body; from his early story “Echo’s Bones” to his final full-length novel How It Is, he links atavism to the queer refusal of generative life. By extension, Beckett’s “queer atavism” presents a striking alternative to recent neovitalist affirmations of the inhuman in queer theory and modernist studies.
If voting for the Conservative party had become somewhat of a rarity in Scotland since the Thatcher era, the May 2016 Scottish Parliament election ushered in a new era, as it saw the resurgence of the Scottish Conservatives after they obtained a total of 31 seats. A comparative perspective on Labour and Conservative Party attitudes to devolution and post-devolution Scottish politics will shed light on the electoral demise of the former and the rising fortunes of the latter. This article seeks to examine the main unionist parties’ differences in terms of structural and ideological adaptation to devolution within the broad centre-left consensus that characterizes the current Scottish political landscape.
The article examines and analyses the image of Great Britain which at the beginning of the last century was formed by Russian journalists on the pages of the pro-government periodical “The Chronicle of the War against Japan”. Within this work the British Empire appears to be one of Russia's main competitors in the struggle for the leading positions in the international arena. This research analyses more than 60 issues of this periodical. In conclusion, in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century periodicals had a special role in informational impact on people's minds.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
This article aims to present the main aspects of the British Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. It traces the history of the movement from the first national conference held at the University of Oxford (Ruskin College) in 1970 to the last national conference held in Birmingham in 1978. It focuses on the beginnings of the movement, on its influence in the adoption and improvement of gender equality legislation in Britain and it underlines the profound changes brought about in the perception and understanding of gender roles in British society. This article stresses the importance of feminist publications in the dissemination of feminist ideas beyond feminist circles. It also insists on the crucial role of the practice of consciousness-raising in the development of feminist theories, notably in the distinction between sex and gender and in the realisation that “the personal is political”.
In the last decades of his life Seamus Heaney enjoyed phenomenal worldwide success, outselling, or so it was widely held, all other poets writing in English combined, a fact attesting to the existence of an international component in his work. A close study of the entire body of his poetry, as well as a study of the concurrent poetic interests he himself professed and which other critics have identified, reveals a subtle and gradual shift toward what may be referred to as the “international style”. The reader encounters such a style, prominently manifest, in the work of some of Heaney’s poetic influences, especially Eastern European poets like Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. This article argues, however, that Heaney’s stylistic shift was too slight to account for the enormity of his international success and asserts instead that his far-ranging appeal is a matter of tone: Heaney’s attitude toward his material, but more so, deep characteristics of his personality – what Ted Hughes refers to as “the ultimate suffering and decision” in him –occupy space below the surface of his work and imbue it with a quality to which readers around the world are drawn.
Charles Dickens is a writer who has always featured in the literature textbooks for the English language secondary schools in Bulgaria. In this paper I look at the way he has been presented in them in the different periods of Bulgarian history since 1945. The investigation is motivated by the belief that his status of a world-renowned literary figure depends on the dissemination of his works in non-Anglophone countries not only through the traditional mechanisms of reception but also by his inclusion in the curriculum. My examination is placed in the context of the changing institutional protocols of the Bulgarian school and the pressures they exert on the teaching of literature. In the communist past Dickens’s texts were treated exclusively as examples of social history. During and after the transition period his value has been questioned by educational ideologies that privilege language proficiency over literary competence, as well as by the efforts to redress the gender balance in the canon of British literature. Finally, I propose a change of emphasis. A greater attention to Dickens’s relation to popular culture will allow students from non-Anglophone countries to tap into the richness and variety of his art.
This essay examines twentieth and twenty-first century responses by Irish poets to the Holocaust. It argues that, despite the illiberal tendencies of the Irish state towards Jewish immigration during and after the 1939-1945 war, recent commemorative activities in Ireland have included the Holocaust and are part of a wider commemorative ‘opening up’ in Ireland towards twentieth-century historical events. Important contemporary Irish poets have written Holocaust poems of notable merit including: Seamus Heaney, Harry Clifton, Derek Mahon, Pearse Hutchinson, Paul Durcan, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Kinsella and Tom Paulin, all of whom are discussed here. These poets are noted as second-generation Holocaust poets, more at home in the lyric form and less troubled by communicative dilemmas than their precursors such as Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett whose resemblance is briefly discussed. The essay concludes by arguing that Giorgio Agamben’s arguments about testimony after Auschwitz are strikingly pertinent to some of the poems under discussion. It also suggests that the historical essays of Hubert Butler may have acted as an unseen influence on some of these writers.
The First World War that caused the collapse of four Empires: the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, is being remembered today as a pitiless conflict that caused the death of 8.700.000 soldiers and civilians and the rendering destitute of at least quite as many. Those who study the WWI tend to focus their attention upon the large battles that took place during the 1914-18 period but few realise the enormous struggle for influence over Ethiopia - the then only independent country, other than Liberia, on the African Continent - that took place between the Entente and the Central Powers and the intensity of diplomatic efforts made to draw Ethiopia into one camp or the other. The appointment of Ahmed Mazhar Bey, a previous director of the Translation Department at the Bâb-ı Ali (Sublime Porte) as Consul General of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Ethiopian city of Harar and the subsequent transfer of the Consulate General to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa in 1914, led to important developments in the history of Ethiopia. Mazhar Bey who would demonstrate soon his skills of visionary in his position, was quick to realise the strategic advantages that would accrue from the alignment of Ethiopia to the ranks of the Central Empires. The Turkish Consul General's efforts towards this end were met favourably by Lidj Iyassou, the young de facto Emperor of Ethiopia, who, besides his sympathy for Islam, had developed a personal friendship with Mazhar Bey. The possible entry of Ethiopia to the war on the side of the Central Powers caused the Ambassadors of the Entente Powers (Great Britain, France and Italy) in Addis Ababa to take action and on September 10th 1916, the British, French and Italian Ministers made a joint "demarche" vis-avis the Ethiopian Government. The fruits of the Entente Powers' undertaking were soon to be harvested. The Archbishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Abouna Matheos would, on the 27th September 1916, declare Prince Lidj Iyassou both deposed and excommunicated. Thus, the Addis Ababa "Coup d'Etat" of 27th September 1916, was going to change the course of the history of modern Ethiopia.
In 1851, a Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park, London, to host the first Great Exhibition. Fourteen years later, another Crystal Palace was built in Porto, Portugal, to host a similar world exhibition. In this paper the author tries to assess, based upon the research project which took place in Portuguese journals during the period between 1851 and 1865, the degree of similarities between the two crystal palaces, from an architectural conception as well as at the level of their ideological meaning.
1914-1917 Lithuanian politics suggested the Lithuania orientation question and decided to choose - The West - during Vilnius Lithuanians' conference on 18-22 September 1917. The Northern orientation of Lithuanians wasn't so actual in conforming with the West orientation, but it didn't mean that orientation to Scandinavia wasn't fixated in Lithuanians' political mentality. The facts in archive documents, old press, memoirs of M. Yčas, J. Tumas Vaižgantas, V. Bartuška, and the Lithuanian historians such as R. Lopata, A. Eidintas, A. Gaigalaitė. These materials obviously explore that the tradition of Lithuanians' diplomacy in Scandinavia existed before 1918. We can define this tradition as the possibility of Lithuanian diplomacy to orientate in the political conjuncture of the First World War and their humanity, political and propaganda activity to become Lithuania independent, to orient to Scandinavian countries. When we talk about Lithuanian diplomacy in 1915-1917, we talk about Lithuanian diplomacy which is based on moral motivation, because the juridical motivation couldn't be released, although it was possible.
The choice to orient to Scandinavia depended on subjective and objective factors of the orientation of the Lithuanians. The first one - the political neutrality of the Scandinavian countries. It helped the Lithuanians to make a solution for economical and political existence. The second one - the blockade of Germany. They forbid sending information and letters abroad and back, closing the Lithuanian newspapers. The best way to break through that blockade was to find a way to send it through neutral countries: Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, USA. The forbidding of the Russian government to send money to the territories occupied by German military force was the third objective factor which forced the Lithuanians to choose the Scandinavian orientation. The best way to send money from Russia to occupied Lithuania was found through Stockholm. The fourth one - the British blockade of Germany. The material help of USA Lithuanians, which had been coming from the USA to Europe, couldn't get to Lithuania because it was a German territory and they wanted to protect their fund. The fifth one - the activity of German insurgence in Scandinavia—Stockholm (F. Reichenau, H. Lucius) and Copenhagen (U. Brokdorf-Rantzau), which aimed to propagate the separate movement of nations of the Russian empire. The sixth one - the policy of Polish diplomats. It was underlined in the first conference of Lithuanians in Stockholm in October 1915, where it was said about the importance of blocking the Polish propaganda of a new-type union. The seventh one - subjective factor - political activity of Lithuanians, related to the reconstitution of Lithuanian self-dependence, which became an international factor.
The aims of Lithuanian diplomacy in Scandinavia had formed two concepts of Scandinavia. Humanitarian aims formed Scandinavia - bridge, and political-propaganda aims - Scandinavia - political centre of Lithuanian policy. Scandinavia became the financial and informational bridge to Lithuania when Lithuanian society started to send money and letters throughout Stockholm (Swedish-Lithuanian help committee) in Vilnius and from Vilnius to Lithuanians in foreign countries. In Stockholm, Lithuanians' conferences took place and concentrated propaganda of Lithuania: some articles about the Lithuanians in occupied territory were written in Swedish newspapers, and lectures were arranged about Lithuanian history and parties to proclaim the will of Lithuania to be independent. That formed Stockholm as the political centre of the Lithuanian people.
The orientation of Lithuanians to the Scandinavian countries at the end of 1917 became measures of Lithuanian diplomacy, which tried to internationalise the Lithuania question and grant juridical ground to Lithuanian diplomacy, which represented the Lithuanian nation. Scandinavia in 1917 meant to Lithuania the possibility to choose between the West-East and North-South geopolitical axis, and the orientation of Lithuania to Scandinavia could be interpreted in two ways: to Germany as orientation to Germany, and to Great Britain - as orientation to Scandinavia and the states of the Entente.
19th-century high life is characterized by a marked attempt at avoiding behavioural mistakes or social blunders, in accordance with courtly ideals of the past. Thus exchanges are over-codified, as is borne out by the use of the conventional phrase « Not at home ». In The Egoist, the expression does not imply that Willoughby is absent, but it simply stands as a correct, polite refusal to see a relation, Lieutenant Patterne. However, the gap between the two strata of meaning cannot be perceived by Patterne, who is unfamiliar with the complexities of etiquette. By constantly shifting view-points in the fictional situations he has created, Meredith shows that the apparent correctness of a statement reveals a type of incorrectness by writing the casuistry which makes it possible to revisit a dead metaphor and study it in the light of truth, truthfulness and deception. With the help of pragmatics and analyses of contemporary philosophers of language like John Austin and Herbert Paul Grice, I examine the concepts of correctness and incorrectness, as well as those of illusion, truth, reality — and disillusionment.