“The Tale of Slawkenbergius”, also known as the “Episode of the Nose”, is one of the most recognised and quoted passages from Tristram Shandy (Sterne 1759-1767). This short story from the fourth volume of Sterne’s novel has received a great deal of attention in the specialised bibliography. However, the studies so far published analyse the story as an isolated episode and concentrate mainly on the use of irony, double entendre and puns as a means of alluding to sexual issues (Gallagher 2018; Walsh 2009). The aim of this paper is to study “The Tale of Slawkenbergius” no longer as a humorous representation of the grotesque, but as a metaliterary manifestation of Sterne’s poetics, thus relating the tale to the structure of the novel. The way in which Sterne uses the device of the “strange loop” in this passage to express his subscription to Hogarth’s aesthetics and to Hogarth’s ideas about the “lines of beauty and grace” will be determined. It will also relate the apology for the beauty of a colossal-nosed, disproportionate hero that is established in this episode to the defence of “deformed” art forms, removed from neoclassical aesthetics, that Tristram establishes throughout his narrative.
Despite the publication of three books directly addressing the intersection between text and visual artworks — Fishing for Amber (1999), Shamrock Tea (2001), Still Life (2019) — Ciaran Carson’s work has not been given significant attention in terms of his contribution to the subject of ekphrastic poetry in Irish literature. Several texts, on the other hand, have been devoted to discussing his work in relation to the spatial, place-bound quality of his poetry and prose. This article seeks to bridge this gap by reframing the ekphrastic mode as the intimate but illusory coming into contact between author, reader, and work. Using the dual role of the ‘study’ as both a practice drawing and a private room, this paper argues Ciaran Carson’s final collection, Still Life, represents a new interpretation of how intimate connections in domestic spaces can be portrayed in Northern Irish literature.
Uniforms carry cultural meaning shaped by their interaction with military realities. They can communicate tradition but also anticipate change. Prior to the Great War, British Army uniforms had developed from the familiar red tunic to khaki, but the manner of their representation in the mass culture confirmed a continuity and correctness of the British way of war that ran against the emerging industrialization of warfare. Wearing familiar uniforms linked to the past and concurrently fighting what seemed like anachronistic ‘small wars’ in empire as reported in the press, what awaited the volunteers of 1914–15 could not have been anticipated by those consumers of the commercial culture. This article uses a variety of sources, from the illustrated adult and juvenile press, paintings, and toys, to reveal the link between uniforms and the representation of warfare in the fifty years prior to the Great War. In that representation we see not just the glorification of war that cultural historians attach to gendered, imperialist, or nationalist meanings. This article argues that the role of uniforms in the representation of warfare was a means by which to make it knowable and worthwhile for the consumer public. But by representing past and contemporary uniforms quite accurately, the writers and artists imposed a sense of military continuity at a time when war was changing.
This article offers an examination of Benjamin Black’s Quirke series through an ecocritical lens. Set against the backdrop of 1950s Dublin, the texts feature a pathologist who investigates the murder of the victims that end at the morgue of the Holy Family Hospital. I contend that by exhaustively mapping the city through its crimes, the author hints at the far-reaching web of criminal actions executed and sanctioned by different agents of authority and violence. Similarly, I also claim that the author consistently draws on the notions of coexistence and interdependence to construct the personality of the protagonist, as the narrator insists on this growing indignation and cynicism towards the connected artefacts of dominance that inhabit the city. Consequently, the novels suggest that relationality and interdependence should involve untangling that net of power and control so as to negotiate social responsibility and create a climate of greater justice and solidarity.
From its initial publication, Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill has been regarded as children’s literature and Kipling’s imperialism—how he teaches and justifies British Empire’s imperial ideology—has been the main issue for critics in children’s literature studies. With the same issue in mind, I aim to complicate Kipling’s imperialism in Puck by revealing the ‘overlaid tints and textures’ embedded in the intergenerational dialogue between the adult heroes and the children. Specifically, this essay argues that Kipling does not simply represent the adult voice within the imperial discourse, but rather renders ambiguity in uniting the anxieties of the Empire’s previous generation and the hopes for the Empire’s future generation. In the story, although Kipling’s narrative return to the construction of the old England and evocation of its war heroes seem designed for the Empire’s imperialism, the conversations between the adult heroes and Dan and Una raise the unsettling issue of the past heroes’ being wounded ghosts brought about by the British Empire’s imperialism. To construct the questioning narrative, Kipling employs the children as engaging collaborators, but he also restrains them, through the device of the magical amnesia, from being fully grown agents. Rendering the ambiguous agency of both the adults and the children, Kipling most importantly challenges the questionable agency of the British Empire.
Based on a range of anthologies and collections mostly published since 2013, this paper analyses different faces of the North in poetry, from a heavily industrial place filled with the violence of history to a land of opportunity for a brighter future. In doing so, it tries to elucidate what the North means in poetry and what poetry does to representations of the North. A paper on poetry in a journal devoted to British social studies, even though tackling the theme of the issue, namely the North-South Divide today, might come as a surprise to most readers. Hopefully, the present article will prove that verse is not adverse to a reflection on the state of Britain and that the divide between the two fields of study can be bridged and help further research.
The article analyzes the information potential of the documents of Fedorov’s personal fund in the context of studying the international activity of the scientist, his scientific and personal links in the world astronomical community. The personal fund of Ye. P. Fedorov, an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, an outstanding Soviet astronomer, director of the Main Astronomical Observatory of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, is deposited at the Institute of Archival Studies of Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and consists of 333 files. The publication examines the specifi c composition of the documents characterizing the activity of the scientist as a chairman of the Commission 19 “Variability of Latitudes” and a member of the International Astronomical Union; his participation in the organization of the X General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Moscow, participation in international symposia, colloquiums. For many years, Ye. P. Fedorov had been working on improving the work of the International Latitude Service, actively participated in all discussions and considerations on its reorganization into the International Polar Motion Service. Analysis of the correspondence of Ye. P. Fedorov allowed to determine the range of his personal communication and the geography of correspondents and addressees. Correspondence with Japanese colleagues characterizes close scientific and friendly communication between scientists. In addition to Japan, Ye. P. Fedorov’s geography of correspondence covers the United States of America, Great Britain, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina, Greece, Australia and New Zealand. The subjects of correspondence mainly concern the scientifi c issues of conducting latitudinal observations, the exchange of scientific publications and the review of scientific papers. An analysis of the documents of Ye. P. Fedorov’s personal fund testifies to their high information potential, both for studies of the scientist’s biography, and for research of the history of science and technology in general.
In 1879, theatre critic Augustin Filon stated on account of the French company’s second visit to London that year, ‘les voyages de la Comédie-Française sont regardés en Angleterre comme des dates’. Upon receiving the troupe, renowned actor Henry Irving praised the success of French actors, such as Got, Mounet-Sully, Coquelin aîné and cadet, and Sarah Bernhardt on the Gaiety Theatre stage in London. Their performance in their native tongue proved to be an aesthetic magnificence that had clearly captivated an essentially English-speaking audience: ‘the pictures they produced went straight to the heart and needed no language for those of us who could not master French’, Irving declared. Indeed, performances in the original linguistic version were sure to garner critical acclaim. British actor and theatre director Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree would also chime in to eulogize the prosodic qualities of the language of Molière, contrasting it with the British tradition as follows: ‘what a perennial delight is in hearing the French language spoken! . . . How blunt and heavy an old instrument, in comparison, English seems!’ For their powerful oratory and elocution on stage, the French, he concluded, were ‘a naturally expressive race’. This study aims to analyse the impact of the Comédie-Française in Victorian England by focusing on the company’s visits to London in 1871, 1879 and 1893. Although their repertoire (which included works by Molière, Racine, Corneille, Alfred de Musset, Alexandre Dumas fils, and Émile Augier) was completely performed in French, the company was commended by audiences as much as it was lauded by British professional peers, for whom it represented the ultimate expression of high art. Through an examination of the reviews and impressions published by an array of professionals, including leading theatre critics at the time, dramatists, actors and aficionados, the research analyses the sociological, political, and aesthetic implications associated with the firm presence of the French language and French canonical plays in late Victorian London. The responses of theatre professionals inevitably raise the matter of high art by implicitly questioning which of the two theatrical traditions best reflect and recreate, through their language, such cultural standards: How is a language stylized to answer simultaneously to dramatic conventions and to expectations related to national sentiment? To what extent could French phonetics and prosody be regarded as a sociocultural referent accessible only to an elite audience? Did the Lord Chamberlain subject the plays in French to the same censorship procedures and vigilance as those in English? By posing these and other related matters, the work argues that the debate on the superiority of French or English as theatrical languages is inevitably bound to the ever-fluctuating issue of Britishness. Theatre being a fundamental pillar of national identity (while also an indispensable conduit for questioning political order and structures), the traditional rivalry between French and British culture could not have found a better setting in which to compete for aesthetic and rhetorical excellence than the London stage.
Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson) was a professional Irish traveller
and travel-writer, who spent over a year on the peninsula. The travelogue
Italy (1821) she was commissioned to write on the basis of the reputation
she had acquired as a novelist (e.g. The Wild Irish Girl, 1806) and
a socio-political writer (France, 1817), left a mark on Italy and on the
understanding of Italy in Great Britain. Her writings, in fact, helped
disseminate the ideal of a unified Italy and influence British and Irish
public opinion in favour of Italy’s aspirations to cast off foreign or domestic
autocratic rule. Moreover, she used her travelogue to serve the
cause of Ireland disguising a patriotic message about her home country
under her many sallies about nationalism and the right to self-determination
concerning Italy. The political impact of her book, unusual
for a travel account written by a woman, was enhanced by Morgan’s
radical ideology, the gender bias of her observations and her original
methods. The present article purposes to examine Morgan’s double,
feminine and masculine, approach of mixing solid documentation with
apparently frivolous notes originating in the feminine domain of society
news, commentary on the domestic scene and emotional reporting on
social and historical events. Distrusting male-authored official history,
Morgan gave a central place in her work to the informal sources from
which she gathered her insights about Italy. Analysing how she came to
obtain the contemporary input for elaborating her ideas will be the aim
of this chapter which will dwell on the more worldly aspects of Morgan’s
sojourn in the peninsula focussing on the company she kept, the
activities she partook of, the events of a domestic nature she witnessed.
Far from the common representation of money in Victorian literature, with its many references to the expanding world of finance, credit and speculation, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) depicts money mainly as gold coins, at the crossroads between realism and symbolism, the profane and the sacred. In this novella, gold is not merely the main dramatic thread that connects the parallel stories of Silas, Eppie and the Cass family, it also echoes mythical and Biblical narratives, such as the Book of Job, thereby lending itself to multiple interpretations: gold is, in turn, synonymous with a transgressive passion, an impure light or tainted matter which, as such, enables Silas’s successive transmutation, transformation and transfiguration, thereby partaking of the hero’s complex alchemical initiation and spiritual quest. At the end, the recovery of the stolen gold coins both leads to the emergence of the truth and works as a sign of divine reward for Silas’s spiritual progress. Such weaving of the multi-layered theme of gold into the narrative definitely gives birth to an effective poetics which may address several planes of consciousness.
According to Caroline Wise, who wrote her Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies entry, in Florence Farr: ‘[t]he mystical, the philosophical and the political wove a seamless whole in an active, questing and pioneering life’. Nevertheless, Farr has long been studied almost exclusively as George Bernard Shaw’s or William Butler Yeats’s so-called ‘Muse’. Admittedly, Shaw and Yeats wrote leading parts for her, but it was she who commissioned and staged some of their very first plays. Furthermore, Shaw strongly disapproved of Farr’s occult studies as a leading member of the Golden Dawn. Yeats, for his part, also was a member of the Golden Dawn, and he collaborated with Farr for over twenty years. Together, they explored the ‘music of speech’, that they considered as the lost art of ‘cantilating’ poetry. They made no secret of the pagan and mystic roots of their art. To Yeats, Florence Farr was less an actress and a composer than a priestess and a bard. Farr’s method was inspired by her Golden Dawn rituals, when she already combined poetry and contrapuntal music, according to the theory of harmonic convergence. Nevertheless, the central relevance to Farr’s and Yeats’s artistic endeavours of her occult work and study has constantly been played down. So I chose to put Florence Farr back onto centre stage and explore her influential role in the pagan revival of the late Victorian and Edwardian era from her own perspective, i.e. that of a New Woman and an artist. My aim is to demonstrate how Farr’s feminism, artistic creativity and spiritual quest constantly enriched one another and left a deep impression on those who met her.
Britain in the late 1990s and most of the 2000s was presented as a remarkable economic success story underpinned by a flexible job market which, it was claimed, encouraged the creation of jobs and wealth. There was however a dark side to this image, with an emerging picture of a workforce at the bottom of the pile, made up mainly of international migrants, which was shamefully exploited, to the extent that fears began to be expressed that there was a significant amount of human trafficking and even forms of contemporary slavery underlying the general prosperity. The tragic death of some twenty Chinese “illegals” who were cockle-picking in Morecambe Bay in 2004 alerted public opinion to the issue and a number of reports and surveys focused on the issue. Films and novels also played a role in bringing this situation to life and thus generating further public interest. This article analyses these representations of exploitation and assesses their impact.
This essay builds on recent critical discussion of Dickens’s novels in terms of the ‘uniformitarian’ and ‘catastrophist’ paradigms of time and change, then current in contemporary geological discourse. While previous scholarship has mainly focused on these ideas as they are represented in Dickens’s later novels, this essay examines an earlier text, Martin Chuzzlewit, the only Dickens novel to reference Lyell’s Elements of Geology by name and, (through its American subplot), the only novel to explore fundamentally contrasting paradigms of origins, history, and nationhood. The providential plot of Martin Chuzzlewit, its deus ex machina conclusion, and continent-spanning coincidences would seem to describe a ‘catastrophist’ narrative structure, one characterized by interventions that interrupt the status quo and suddenly alter history. But Dickens also shows how catastrophic events are often contained within a more expansive uniformitarian time frame. He depicts human beings as small and vulnerable against ancient earthscapes of ocean, plain, forest, and wilderness, and exposes as myopic the narcissism of the vaunting, needy ego, with its self-centered construction of the world. Dickens makes these ideas part of a nationalist argument in deconstructing the American historical narrative. Americans found the closest analogue for their democratic experiment in the favourite example of the catastrophists—the Biblical deluge. Like the flood, the American Revolution had supposedly washed away the sins and traces of the past, permitting a momentous new start. But Dickens proposed a counter-narrative of the ‘New’ World evoking its still-visible primeval landscape and its disappearing ‘savage’ races. Against the American view of democracy as a recent, decisive intervention in human history permanently altering its trajectory, Dickens urged the unknowability of origins, the fragility of the human race and the certainty of change.
The Falklands conflict was particularly remote and direct individual experience correspondingly rare. At the same time public interest in the conflict was intense. The events of the South Atlantic raise a number of important questions about the extent to which a distant confict can be ‘represented’. Even at a very basic level of representation, it is clear that the facts cannot speak for themselves: without context bare facts can be misleading. In art and photography, it becomes obvious that representations are shaped according to pre-existing patterns. And like all previous conflicts, the Falklands War saw the projection of heroic narratives, recalling representations of previous conflicts.