Hasil untuk "History of Great Britain"

Liudmila Reshetnikova

Introduction. The article is about Professor A.I. Kubyshkin, who had devoted more than 25 years of his career to the Volgograd State University (VolSU). He taught at the Department of History, headed the Center for American Studies “Americana,” and from 1995 to 2008 headed the Department of Area Studies and International Relations at VolSU. Professor A.I. Kubyshkin is one of the founders of the series 4 “History. Area Studies. International Relations” of the Science Journal of Volgograd State University, and he is a member of the Editorial Board. Professor A.I. Kubyshkin is the author of 160 publications, 7 monographs, and 15 collective ones, and he has published in Russia, the USA, Great Britain, Canada, and France. Materials. The main materials for the article are memoir articles by Professor A.I. Kubyshkin and his colleagues about the development of American studies and research of the North American states in Russia and, in particular, at Volgograd State University, and publications by A.I. Kubyshkin about the U.S. higher education system and universities. Analysis. The article briefly describes the main stages of the teaching and research career of Alexander Ivanovich. Since 1978 and up to the present, Professor Kubyshkin has conducted his main educational and scholar activities at three Russian universities: Ivanovo State University, Volgograd State University, and St. Petersburg State University. At VolSU from 1982 to 2008, A.I. Kubyshkin headed the department and contributed to the development of the study of North American states. From 2008 to 2025, Alexander Ivanovich, working at St. Petersburg State University, has defined the field of his research interests, in addition to the history of Russian-American relations, as university studies and the particular study of universities in the USA and Canada as resource models of international educational space and modern innovations, which resulted in the monograph “Town and Gown. American University in the Structure of Civil Society.”

Rachel Gough

Jean-Charles Perquin

This article explores the cultural and emotional role of photography in the Victorian era, especially in the way it intersected with mourning and memory. In the wake of the invention of photography by Niépce and Daguerre, the Victorians saw photography not just as a technological advance, but a way to preserve the past and defy death. Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed a deep emotional attachment to daguerreotypes, valuing their ability to capture the ‘shadow’ of loved ones forever, more than any painting. The practice of post-mortem photography was a uniquely Victorian tradition of photographing the dead to keep their memory alive. These images blurred the line between life and death, often depicting the deceased in lifelike poses. Although considered macabre by some, they served as powerful memorials and reflected a deeper, paradoxical desire to capture the essence of life through the stillness of death. Parallels with Gothic literature can be found—especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’—to emphasize how photography, like these stories, probes the boundaries between life and death. He argues that Victorian photography was less about documenting reality and more about resurrecting it, whether symbolically or emotionally. Over time, as photography evolved, so did its artistic conventions— especially with the acceptance of blur as a sign of movement and life, contrasting with the ghostly stillness of the dead. Ultimately, photography became both a form of art and a medium of remembrance, a way of capturing ‘life itself’ through light, shadow, and the absence of motion.

Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf traces a fascinating genealogy of women writers from Aphra Behn to George Eliot, including Frances Burney and Jane Austen among others, to emphasize the power of influence in relation to their engagement with both fiction and economics. At the crossroads between economic and symbolic transmissions, this paper seeks to highlight the evolving representations of women’s complex relationships to inheritance by focusing on a few emblematic novels, whose plots crystallize major economic and social changes—namely Burney’s Cecilia (1782), Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), and Gaskell’s North and South (1854‒55).

E. I. Baguzina

The importance of teaching a foreign language alogside with its culture, history and modern life has been universally acknowledged. The article focuses on integrating music and songs of Great Britain into the English language training program for MGIMO undergraduate students as a means of developing their foreign language communicative competence. Music and songs appear to be powerful incentives for enhancing students’ motivation to learn by positively impacting their emotions and creating a favorable learning environment. There are several examples of pieces of music, songs and tasks to follow that would arouse students’ interest and improve their language skills as well as their critical thinking, creativity and broaden their horizons. Another major issue dealt with in the article is the process of selecting songs for a particular age group of students with a focus on British Studies integrated into the English language training program. By highlighting the cultural component in the English language classroom, educators emphasize the signifcance of the communicative function of a foreign language that is particularly important for students specializing in international relations. Students will be able to access all supplementary learning materials, i.e. audio tracks, music video clips, creative task on MGIMO portal via their PCs and mobile devices.

SHUBIN Vladimir Gennadievich

The article is based on the information of the author, who as officer of the 10th Main Directorate of the Soviet General Staff spent two days in Egypt during the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states. It briefly analyzes the history of Moscow’s relations with Cairo after the 1952 revolution, particularly in the military field, and notes that the Soviet military leadership overestimated the combat capability of the Armed Forces of the United Arab Republic, as the Arab Republic of Egypt was then called. Although by June 1967 the situation in the Middle East was rather tense, the war was not expected by Moscow on the day Israel attacked Egypt, and its quick success, especially the defeat of the Egyptian Air Force, was a shock to Cairo and Moscow. The article describes the situation in Cairo on June 9 and 10, the Egyptians’ reaction to the resignation of President Gamal Abdel Nasser; speaks of the negative attitude of the “Arab street” to the Russians, which arose in those days, primarily because of the false information of the Egyptian authorities, who argued that unlike the USSR, the United States and Great Britain took part in the war by bombing objects in Egypt.

Maciej Kierzkowski

<p>This paper deals with the issue of brass bands’ contests in Poland and is analysed using both the diachronic and systematic approaches. The sources for this inquiry are the international literature relating to the working class contest phenomena and the outcome of my ethnomusicological field research conducted in 2001–2005 in the Mazovia region (Central Poland). I briefly examine the history of contests of brass bands in Poland since the interwar period. The systematic part deals with different aspects of contesting, which include motivations of musicians, organisers’ assumptions, performed repertoire, as well as evaluation criteria. I explore the structure of brass band contest and its roles in bands’ development. The national, multileveled format of musical contest, is described in relation to the fireman band movement, which was being animated by the Main Board of Voluntary Fire Brigades – a non-musical organisation, and corresponds with the well-researched phenomenon of brass band movement in Great Britain.</p>

Mathilde Bertrand

The community arts movement appeared in the United-Kindgom in the wake of the counter-culture of the 1960s. Inspired by artists from different disciplines, community arts practices aimed at giving access to artistic creativity to deprived social groups. These multifarious practices formed a movement committed to a redefinition of the social role of art and to the advent of a genuine “cultural democracy” (Shelton Trust, Culture and Democracy : The Manifesto, 1k986). In the formulations that the movement developed in the 1970s and 1980s, this demand was inseparable from a radical political discourse of empowerment and challenge to traditional conceptions of culture. At a time when Cultural Studies were developing a critique of ideological hierarchies opposing high and low culture, the community art movement invested popular culture as a possible site of resistance against ideological domination. To study the community arts movement through the prism of the concept of commitment is an invitation to question the involvement of actors and the modes of implication of local populations in projects. At another level, the challenges raised by community arts practices went well beyond the artistic field and contributed to a political theory of culture: how did community arts combine the concepts of cultural expression and empowerment? Whereas the movement defined itself in terms of an ethics of collective action in the 1970s, what happened to this initial radicalism in the ideological context of the 1980s, characterised by the rise of individualistic and conservative values?

Eric Shaw

This article discusses why the Labour party was highly unlikely to win the British general election of 2015. It does so by probing four major predicaments: lack of confidence in Ed Miliband as a potential Prime Minister, in Labour’s ability to run the economy, in its capacity to manage the explosive issue of immigration and in its will to tackle (alleged) pervasive welfare abuse. The article agrees that, in the key issues of the economy, immigration and social welfare Labour was quite out of tune with public perceptions and attitudes but then suggests these many of these were, in turn, at variance with empirically verifiable facts. The article then contends that political parties do have the capacity to modify public perceptions and attitudes but only be devising plausible alternative narratives. This the Labour party signally failed to do, disabling its capacity to resolve any of its four predicaments.

Ilse Bussing López

Even though during the nineteenth century Great Britain boasted the largest empire in history, its ex-colony, the United States, and other European powers competed fiercely against it. It is at this time that the world fairs, displaying the latest industrial and scientific advances advertised and celebrated a country’s leadership. The Great Exhibition of 1851 gave Britain the perfect opportunity to showcase its world supremacy, but it is the Crystal Palace, the iconic building that housed the event, which has survived in the people’s imagination. This article focuses on this legendary building as a space rich for interpretation. In particular, I will explore the function of the exhibition and its building as spatial spectacle, capable of doing two things: first, of engaging with its visitors in such a way as to create sensations of awe and wonder; and second, of masking cultural and social anxieties under a veneer of spatial and discursive “transparency.” As an interdisciplinary study, this article works under the premise that architectural spaces, like literature, can be read and interpreted. According to this stance, then, the Crystal Palace will be approached as a textual building or a built text that prompts interpretation.

Jean-Charles Perquin

The Victorian dramatic monologue is not only a first person poetic speech with a silent audience suggested in the very poem; it is also a complex poetic chiaroscuro in which the speech itself is translucent, but always on the verge of obscurity, since what is at stake in the poem is the question of understanding. The speaker has to be understood by the reader, whereas the addressee must be partly kept in the dark. In other words, the reader reconstructs the speech in the back of the voiceless listener’s mind, thus adding to the natural difficulty of poetic language. If poetry rests on the maximal use of the possibilities of language, the genre of the dramatic monologue adds to that condition the indirection of speech, i.e. the fact that the addressee has to miss the message the reader has to understand in order to build an intricate mesh of misunderstandings. Such obscure transparency, or transparent obscurity, is the condition for a poetic genre that cannot rely only on form.

Mária Kurdi

Nowadays the joint themes of living at the borderland of cultures and responding to the pressures which emerge during the necessary re-formation of identity are treated in an increasing number of literary works. The subject of the present paper is Anne Devlin’s After Easter, a drama which uses the trope of the journey to fuse the constraints of exilic existence with narratives of gender, race and generational tension. My analysis explores how Greta, questor of a new diasporic identity, manages to reinterpret conflicting images and discourses as she confronts them on revisiting her original home country, Troubles-ridden Northern Ireland. By the end of the journey she is able to invent her own story, intertwining concerns of origin and continuity, love of the mother(land) as well as of the Other, and through that she re-constructs her identity as a self-assured migrant.

Rosana Herrero Martín

Rosana Herrero Martín

Thomas Conway is Literary Manager of the Druid Theatre Company (Galway), independent director and lecturer of Contemporary Theatre in the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was born in Sydney but his family moved to Ireland when he was 5 years old. He attended University College Cork and studied English including theatre, and history. He has been working in the professional theatre since graduating, primarily as a director of new and classic work, but also as dramaturg and literary manager.

Annie Escuret

Christopher Reed

This piece presents, in their totality, two little-known texts by Roger Fry: one an exercise in emotional self-analysis and the other a rumination on mosquitos. These essays are analyzed to consider Fry’s application of formalist aesthetics to the problems of life.

Annie Escuret