Tim Robinson’s acclaimed two-volume account of the Aran Islands, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1995), originated both in the author’s personal fascination with the islands and his professional, cartographic project when he was encouraged to produce a detailed map of the area. The digressive narratives in the companion volumes are structured around Robinson’s walks along the coast (Pilgrimage) and through the interior of Aran (Labyrinth). His generically hybrid books combine topography, folklore, human and natural history, culture and nature. Although sceptical about the tradition of romanticising the Aran Islands and a self-professed non-believer, Robinson nevertheless tends to transcend down-to-earth, factual reporting towards reflections on the spiritual and the universal. This approach paves the way for the use of metaphorical language. The article examines the intersection between the scholarly and the creative, the objective and the personal in Stones of Aran, and especially the tension between the writer’s simultaneous proclivity for and resistance to figurative language.
This article investigates the surviving borrowers’ catalogues (c.1850–70) of the Allendale lead-miners’ libraries, situating these within the wider history of workplace libraries in the North-East of England. It considers popular reading habits in this community and the patterns of borrowing among individuals, suggesting that these give us insight into the way in which working-class readers used libraries, especially those founded through management initiatives, and their reading preferences in the mid-Victorian period.
In the second half of the Victorian period, and even more so at the turn of the century, fears for what was considered the health of the nation started to grip Britain. The second Boer War (1899-1902) shook the already eroding self-confidence of an Empire that was preoccupied with what was described as the fitness of the race. Scientists joined the heated debate, some arguing that the British stock was deteriorating. The other, the alien element, in this discourse, was not necessarily a foreign man or woman; the outsider was coming from within the nation. This paper explores this altering discourse as well as the development of a counter-discourse that was carried by sociologists keen to reintegrate those who were stigmatised into the nation, eager to highlight environmental factors and social injustices and reluctant to oust some citizens from the community. It seeks to question and shed historical light on the construct that is Britishness in the context of raging debates on identity and nation in post-Brexit Britain.
This article assesses the creation of an enemy image of France and the French in the United States in two separate historical contexts. Although France and the United States have usually enjoyed rather positive relations throughout history after the signing of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1778, the French were widely depicted as America’s enemy during the late 1790s Quasi-War, and more recently after France refused to support U.S. military intervention in Iraq in 2003-2004. In the first instance, an undeclared naval war opposed the two countries as the French government allowed for seizure of American ships in the wake of the 1795 Jay Treaty the US had signed with Great Britain, a conflict which escalated when U.S. navy later began to fight the French in the Caribbean. In 2003-2004, an acute diplomatic crisis induced a confrontation between the two nations when France suggested it would use its veto power to block passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a U.S.- led military operation against Iraq. The aim of this study is to provide an understanding of the process through which the image of France was transformed, in both historical contexts, from that of ally and friend into that of a threatening other. Particular attention is paid to the creation and use of cultural stereotypes in statements by American officials, as well as in the media campaigns that characterized both diplomatic crises. Although the enemy image of France underwent significant changes between 1797 and 2003, our research shows that a number of cultural stereotypes that were created during the Quasi-War were revived during the 2003 diplomatic crisis. Chief amongst those is the association of France with terror and tyranny. This article also examines the deep political divisions that pitted Federalists against Republicans in the 1790s, and Neo-Conservative “hawks” against anti-war “doves” in 2003. These disputes shed light on the creation of enemy images of France in the United States. In both cases, the French antagonist was as mirror and a scapegoat that provides as much information on American identity and U.S. political debates as it does about American views on France and the French.
History (General) and history of Europe, English language
Seamus Heaney has introduced the theory of redress of poetry as a personal means to elaborate his poetic abilities and to respond to the conflicts in his native land, Northern Ireland. This theory bears some resemblances to the postcolonial and postmodernist theory of adaptation put forth by Linda Hutcheon. This paper aims at representing the similarities of Heaney’s redress and Hutcheon’s adaptation by exploring the functioning of these ideas in Heaney’s translation of Dante’s story of Ugolino. The main subjects addressed in this study are the definition of these two terms in the mentality of Heaney and Hutcheon; the institutional mechanisms involved in Heaney’s adaptation of Dante’s narrative; adaptation as a tripartite process of indigenisation; the significance of “Ugolino” in comparison with Heaney’s earlier adaptations; the relation of this poem to the historical moment in which it is translated and the weaknesses and the strength of this technique.
The history of diplomatic struggle of Italy for the recognition of Italian control over the Dodecanese Islands is examined. It is emphasized that the archipelago, captured by Italy during the Libyan war of 1911-1912, had strategic importance as a natural centre to establish spheres of influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is noted that Italy had not originally sought the inclusion of the archipelago in its own land, but quickly showed interest to establish its power over the Dodecanese Islands and refused to implement the international agreements providing the evacuation of the Italian occupying forces from the archipelago. The article proves that the difficult diplomatic struggle in which, along with Italy, Greece and Ottoman Empire, the great European powers - France, Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary - took part, did not led to the return of the disputed Islands to the Ottoman Empire or to their transfer to Greece, demanding these Islands on the basis of ethnic principle. The author argues that the persistence, under various pretexts, the Italian occupation of the Islands was as a result of significant diplomatic victory of Italy and subsequently allowed them to be Italian possession.
Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
Introduction: Medicine and its technology are the most important issues in the history of Islamic countries. However, their present condition in Islamic countries is not favorable. The aim of the present research was to assess the development of medical technology in Islamic countries through studying their medical patents in United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Methods: The current research was a descriptive and applied study. The study population included all medical patents of Islamic countries registered until 2014 in the USPTO. The data were collected through combining the fields of countries’ names and the search classification, and by using the USPTO software. The required information from each patent was extracted using the USPTO 2. PATREF 5 was used for citation information and GPS Visualizer software was applied for the visualization of the geographic information map.
Results: The analysis of the data showed that among the 57 Islamic countries; only 26 countries, including Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, and Kuwait, had been active in medical inventions. The findings showed that subjects such as pharmaceuticals, organic compounds, molecular biology and microbiology, and medical and laboratory, dental, and optical, thermal, and electrical surgery equipment had the highest rank. The results also revealed that regarding medical patents, Islamic countries had the most communications with countries such as America, France, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
Conclusion: The results of this study, in addition to providing Islamic countries’ authorities with knowledge on medical technology, and can be useful in macro and micro policies of Islamic countries in this field.
Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics
In the XX century the research work in the Russian and later Soviet archives and libraries entailed great difficulties for foreign researchers. Under these circumstances the efforts of Westerns scholars aimed at creating archives and book collections of "Rossica" in their own countries were of key importance. The purpose of the paper is to review main collections of documentary materials and printed editions on pre-revolutionary history ofSiberiain foreign countries in order to make an objective evaluation of historical sources available to Western researchers. The author shows that such collections of materials connected with the early period of Siberian history have been deposited in the archives and libraries funds inCanada,Great Britain,Germany, and other countries. The largest collections of "Rossica" and "Sibirica" are located in the USA - in the Library of Congress; Harvard and Yale Universities; the University of Hawaii and the UC Berkeley; the University of Alaska Fairbanks; Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University; the National Archives in Washington, DC etc. For the most part these documentary collections appeared owing to the efforts of researchers who came fromRussia– F. A. Golder, M. Z. Vinokouroff, B. A. Bakhmeteff, G. A. Lensen, A. Ya. Gutman-Gan, V. Lado-Motsarskiy, A. S. Lukashkin and others. Western researchers compensated certain limitations of available sources on Siberian history by using the published materials, translating historical documents into English and German. With all the variety of sources on Siberian history kept in the archives and book collections outside Russia, Western historians still have the tasks of further expansion of source base, more active cooperation with the research centres, archives and libraries in Russia.
History of Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics, Psychology
The 2015 General Election outcome in Scotland was historic, for several reasons: the SNP won a General Election in Scotland for the first time, it won almost all Scottish seats, and Labour did not win for the first time in half a century. The aim of this paper is to put this undeniably historic outcome into context and into perspective, through an analysis of General Election results in Scotland since 1997 and a comparison between those results and Scottish Parliament election results. It will be argued that besides the obvious ones, the 2015 election outcome was exceptional for another, less obvious reason, namely that it was the result of a convergence in voting behaviour in Scotland for General Elections and for Holyrood elections.
“Speak I must; I had been trodden on severely and must turn”. It is with these unspoken but no less eloquent words that Jane starts attacking her baffled aunt, who is not used to being addressed in this way by one who is usually obedient and silent. The scene, which follows the incarceration in the red room and Brocklehurst’s visit, can be read as a "Vindication of the rights of Jane” and also as both a metamorphosis and a reversal: Jane is out of herself and rebels against the enemy who gradually turns into a powerless child, ready to cry, unable to recognize this new Jane whom she vainly tries to propitiate. If Jane comes out victorious from this verbal confrontation, her triumph has a bitter after-taste and her previous exaltation is followed by a kind of depression, which is often the case with her. I propose to study this emblematic scene firstly by following three axes: a double metamorphosis where Jane defeats Mrs Reed who loses her composure, in a spectacular reversal of roles, and then by analysing Jane’s ensuing inner monologue, where the narrator’s I takes over from the character’s in this splitting of the narrative voice that is common to both novelistic and fictitious autobiographical forms.
This essay argues that the illustrations provided for the serial publication of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—mainly by Sidney Paget—constitute a significant supplement that both illustrates common ideological prejudices of the nineteenth century and undermines any complete containment of evil and crime by the investigator. This ambivalence between social conformism and a disquieting urge in Paget’s drawings appears for instance in the similitude between images of Holmes and images of Moriarty, his arch enemy, or through the stylized settings which suggest a lasting threat in the outside, non-domestic world. The specific style of the illustrations, often unrealistic and bent on euphemizing violence, also contributes to this ambivalent celebration of crime fighting that only partly hides some distrust as to its success. Eventually, by relating the topic at hand to the global debate on photographic and mechanical reproduction in the nineteenth century, it appears that the various disguises Holmes uses in the plots are rendered graphically by Paget as entirely new images of the characters, which again ambivalently points both to his mastery over crime fighting modern artefacts and to some uncertainty (generating cultural anxiety) over the question of stable identities.