This article aims to analyse various representations of violence in Audrey Magee’s novel The Colony (2022). Violence is defined here as any form of oppression, discrimination, or coercion that inflicts harm, whether physical or psychological, on individuals or groups. The framework of postcolonial theory provides a comprehensive epistemic foundation for this analysis; additionally, for clarity, a distinction is drawn between “postcolonial” and “neocolonial”, with the former referring to the examination of the legacy of colonial subjugation, and the latter denoting patterns of behaviour shaped by enduring colonial attitudes. The neocolonial perspective is most evident in the actions of two foreign visitors – one an English painter, the other a French linguist – engaged in an acrimonious battle over “their” island. The analysis will also examine the contentious issue of whether the novel suggests that Ireland’s colonial past can explain the country’s later difficulties. The Colony implies that English colonialism is responsible for the brutal violence of the Troubles and the decline of the Irish language, while the third form of violence, relating to discrimination against women, is more complex; Magee is inclined to blame the marginalisation of women on the inherent oppressiveness of Irish Catholicism rather than on the abuses of English imperialism.
In 1849, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt undertook a trip to France and Belgium, with the specific goal of visiting art collections in Paris, Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent. Despite not being as exotic as the expeditions of Richard Burton or David Livingstone, this trip was particularly meaningful, not only because of the context (the early years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, soon after the 1848 Revolutions) but also because it was related by Rossetti himself, who wrote a series of poems during the journey and sent them in letters to his brother William Michael and some other members of the Brotherhood. These poems, collectively gathered under the title ‘A Trip to Paris and Belgium’, focus on different aspects of the trip: some of them describe the journey itself, by boat, train, or coach, from London to Antwerp and back; some of them describe places and events, for instance their arrival and connection in Paris; some others let transpire historical and political commentary under a sheen of ekphrasis. Overall, there is in the collection a more formal contrast between travel poems properly speaking, that is to say the texts describing the journey, and what I would call ‘static poems’, that is to say the texts written in the places visited. This paper will focus on the potential political role of these poems, established through this contrast: the elaboration of a Pre-Raphaelite realm of memory through Rossetti’s and Hunt’s contact with modernity. This contact is transcribed through a hybridisation of words and images which builds on the Pre-Raphaelite program and crystallises the two artists’ experience to transmit it to Pre-Raphaelite brothers waiting for them in Britain.
Symbolic performance and rhetoric of service are part and parcel of the meaning and function of gifts in any given culture. Exploring the specificity of Muslim Orient’s gift terms such as pīshkash and khil‘at, which entered the English language in the wake of trade and diplomatic interactions with the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals in the seventeenth century, this article looks into the protocols and rituals accompanying each term, as a basis for understanding their community-building value. My case studies on the contextual uses of gift terms in travel narratives from the period include Thomas Herbert’s A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, Begvnne Anno 1626 (1634), and the first English translation by John Phillips of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s Six Voyages (1677). In each case, I argue, practiced uses of terminology illustrate the visitors’ cultural and linguistic attempts, but also their failures, at understanding the host system and infiltrating it.
Abstract Climate change has a diverse range of impacts on wild bees, including their phenology or timing of life history events. Climate‐driven phenological shifts can not only impact individuals at species level but also threaten the vital pollination service that wild bees provide to both wild plants and cultivated crops. Despite their involvement in pollination, for most bee species, especially in Great Britain, little is known about phenological shifts. This study makes use of 40 years of presence‐only data for 88 species of wild bees to analyse shifts in emergence dates, both over time and in relation to temperature. The analyses reveal widespread advances in emergence dates of British wild bees, at an average rate of 0.40 ± 0.02 days per year since 1980 across all species in the study data set. Temperature is a key driver of this shift, with an average advance of 6.5 ± 0.2 days per 1°C warming. For change in emergence dates both over time and in relation to temperature, there was significant species‐specific variation, with 14 species showing significant advances over time and 67 showing significant advances in relation to temperature. Traits did not appear to explain variation in individual species' responses, with overwintering stage, lecty, emergence period and voltinism considered as possible explanatory traits. Pairwise comparisons showed no differences in sensitivity of emergence dates to increasing temperature between trait groups (groups of species which share all four traits) that differed by only one trait. These results highlight not only a direct impact of temperature on the phenology of wild bees themselves but also the species‐specific shifts highlight a possible impact on the temporal structure of bee communities and the pollination networks for which the wild bees are so crucial.
The situation in Yemen in the 1960s went far beyond an ordinary public upheaval and internal crisis. The turmoil caused by the political regime change affected the interests of numerous foreign stakeholders, in particular, of Great Britain. The response of the British government to a new threat to its strategic interests in the region took form of a mercenary operation. An unofficial use of mercenaries for clandestine operations was not an extraordinary measure in the modern world history. However, the British operation in Yemen stands out in that regard as it was for the first time since the end of the World War II that such mission was carried out by mercenaries alone. It is therefore not surprising that this operation has played a crucial role in the development of corporate mercenarism in general.The first section examines the causes and triggers of Great Britain’s intervention in the North Yemen Civil War in both global and regional contexts. The second section covers the initial stage of the mercenary operation: its priorities and objectives, funding mechanisms, the main forms and the role of mercenaries’ assistance to the Royalist forces. The author also emphasizes the role of regional actors, involved in the conflict on both sides: that of the Republican government (Egypt) and that of the former royal regime (Saudi Arabia, Israel). Finally, the third section examines the mercenary activities in the final stages of the North Yemen Civil War, particularly difficulties they faced as the British and the Saudi governments began to lose interest in supporting the Royalists. In conclusion the author assesses the influence of this operation on the development of corporate mercenarism.
Arthur Symons’s description of J. K. Huysmans’s À rebours as ‘the breviary of decadence’ is widely cited by critics. It has had a significant influence on our understanding of Huysmans and upon histories of the Decadent movement more generally. This article examines the complex and changing textual history of this phrase as it is found in Symons’s journalistic writings. Across various periodicals, I trace the literary and social concerns that underlie Symons’s response to Huysmans during the 1890s. In the process, I uncover a set of conflicting motives and forms that can be traced to the contradictions and complexities of Decadence as a movement and concept. Symons’s comparison of À rebours to the Catholic breviary is exemplary here: although he first formulated this during 1892, he did not arrive at the familiar form in which it has been so influential until 1908, at which point he had disavowed Decadence for Symbolism. Drawing on recent work by Vincent Sherry I argue that this textual crux has broader consequences for our understanding of the untimely nature of Decadence, especially as it was encountered by English-speaking British readers. I show how Symons’s response to Huysmans epitomises the elusive and difficult nature of Decadence within the form of his writings, as much as his critical pronouncements.
Since its publication in 1933, Muiris O’Sullivan’s Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing) has been limited and distorted by critics who view the memoir through a lens shaped by prior assessments of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s earlier Blasket autobiography, An tOileánach (The Islandman). Muiris Mac Conghail voices the standard perspective when he states, “It was the publication of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach, in 1929, which both acted as an incentive and provided an exemplar to Muiris” (150). O’Crohan’s autobiography certainly inspired O’Sullivan; however, Muiris’s more literary sensibility set him on his own inscriptive journey during which he creates a new type of narrative, one which creatively interweaves oral traditions with the contours of the novel. As we investigate what Pádraig Ó Fiannachta terms the author’s nua scéalaíocht, or “new storytelling” techniques, we can more fully appreciate O’Sullivan’s subtle dexterities as both traditional storyteller and novelistic craftsman.
Famed director Robert Flaherty’s first direct sound film, Oidhche Sheanchais, was recently discovered at Harvard University. This article discusses the impact that the discovery will have on our understanding of this short film, especially as concerns film studies and folklore. It notes several misunderstandings reported in the literature over the years that have now been set right with the finding of the film. The article points to resources held in archives in Ireland and the United States that can additionally address questions related to this film. While a noteworthy contribution to the filmography of Robert Flaherty, the short ‘talkie’ must be approached with caution by folklorists due to the coaching of actors and cinematographic editing.
This article discusses the sole issue of the Pagan Review (1892) single-handedly authored by William Sharp under various pen names. Sharp was a poet, literary critic and novelist who began publishing under the pen name of Fiona MacLeod in 1894. Penned down in an astonishingly brief time when Sharp was experiencing a deep personal change, The Pagan Review also manifests late-nineteenth-century religious and literary change as can be seen in its search for a new subjectivity. Sharp’s pagans claim gender equality, and express both cultural cosmopolitanism and a peculiar form of syncretism.
The number of wars in which English-speaking countries, primarily the United States and Great Britain, have been involved in the past one hundred years might leave the impression that peace movements are ineffectual. Virtually every war in recent US and UK history has had its corresponding anti-war protests, and there is no record of a peace movement actively stopping an impending military action at inception, although evidence exists that peace movements have affected martial policy after the initial stages of a military action. Instead, peace movements seem to elicit ill will and accusations of self-preservation and treason. This article argues that peace movements are thus censored through a sense of patriotism constructed by those in positions of influence, including government entities and the press. Primary focus is on the United States and Europe in advance of both the Great War and the global War on Terror because those two serve as bookends for the twentieth century, and they both provide examples of global conflicts.
The limited critical attention given J.F. Powers (1917-99) has concentrated on his engagement with Catholicism. Powers also applies Irish American motifs to his fiction. This article analyzes the depiction that Powers and his wife Betty Wahl (1924-88), who left postwar America to live on and off in Ireland, made of the Irish in both their homeland and in America. Powers only once directly addressed his own experience as a sporadic Irish resident, in the final story, “Tinkers,” anthologized in his third and last collection in 1975. Wahl’s writing career proved limited. Her only novel, Rafferty and Co. (1969), semi-fictionalizes the Powers family’s decision to move to Ireland, for a series of extended stays in the 1950s and early 1960s. This article examines these writers’ dramatization of postwar Ireland as expatriate Americans. Powers’ story and Wahl’s novel depict the stresses of living in suburbs south of Dublin while struggling to sustain a countercultural yet conservative idealism. That combination drove the family away from the Midwest, in both fiction and fact, to settle in an economically destitute and patriotically insecure Ireland.
The Fenian movement was born in 1858 as an alliance between the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a revolutionary secret society, and the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American organisation intended to supply this society with funds and trained officers. This was not the first time that Irish nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to cooperate, but it was the first time that there was a steady arrangement in place. The Fenian partnership was extremely successful on the surface, but it was undermined by fundamental differences in customs, political attitudes and ultimate goals between Irish and American Fenians. The clearest evidence of these differences was afforded by the Fenian Brotherhood’s successive attempts to invade Canada between 1866 and 1871. As military episodes the Canadian raids were negligible; as Irish revolutionary attempts they seem absurd. However, they were a perfectly coherent manifestation of the Irish-American “hyphenated identity”. The present article traces the parallel evolution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood up to 1866, and reconstructs the cultural and political reasons for the revival of the Canadian scheme, the ensuing split in the Fenian Brotherhood, and the final collapse of the Fenian alliance.
BACKGROUND
A review article intends to discover a cause, frequency, treatment and complications ofhaematuria in patients with haemophilia.
METHODS
A review of PubMed (1969–2007) for key words haemophilia, haematuria and renaldisease.
RESULTS
Four studies were published: two in Great Britain (1971 and 1982), one in USA (2003)and one in Slovenia (2007).
CONCLUSIONS
The authors of first two studies concluded that history of haematuria in haemophilia isprobably benign and does not lead to progressive renal failure. The general belief thatrenal disease is a rare complication of haemophilia is challenged by the Kulkarni’s report.He found in 2.9 % of patients with haemophilia either acute or chronic renal disease butthe design of this study lacks many important clinical details. Slovenian study showed thateven repetitive episodes of haematuria do not lead to renal damage. Therefore complexrenal function tests only for haematuria are not required