CONTENTS VOLUME 5 (2012)

 

 

 

Seen from the vantage point of the Victorian sensibility, John Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne transgress the norms of respectability, being too personal, too passionate and too direct.  Moreover, they define Keats as a sensuous, therefore effeminate poet who allows himself to be flooded by emotions and passion. After the publication of the letters in 1878, the perception of Keats as “feminine” became standard during the Victorian era. This paper proposes to look at chosen letters and poems which Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in order to see how the problematic discourse of infatuation can account for the charges of effeminacy brought against the poet. Strikingly, although Keats expresses love and devotion in his letters and love poetry, at the same time he articulates much more ambivalent attitudes to femininity in general. Therefore, it can be suggested that the problematic relations between male and female characters in Keats’s verse (where the woman is frequently figured as either the threatening femme fatale or the indifferent muse) can be better understood in the context of his conflicted views on gender matters. Finally, my interpretation facilitates the understanding of the “camelion Poet” concept, one of the chief ideas concerning Keats’s poetic theory. 

 

John Keats, Fanny Brawne, women, letters, infatuation, fear

 

Department of British Literature

Institute of English Studies

Warsaw University

ul. Hoża 69

00-681 Warszawa

Poland

E-mail: m.holdys@uw.edu.pl

 

 

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English poets of ethnic origin have traditionally responded to their social condition with greater immediacy than the politicians of their time. This article focuses on the process of exclusion and inclusion of English poets with an ethnic background into the canon of English literature. It demonstrates the ways poets search and fight for their ethnic and/or English identity. Special attention is paid to Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, James Berry, John Agard, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Levi Tafari, Grace Nichols, and Jean Binta Breeze, whose works are examined in order to explore the notion of "otherness." The concepts discussed also include social prejudice, conflicting identities, social hierarchy, multicultural diversity of Englishness, and mainstream attitudes and images in contrast with ethnic imagery. The poetry of these poets is analysed in relation to the Empire Windrush generation of Caribbean-British poets, the post-war immigration policy of the UK, and in the context of diasporic literature.

 

ethnic poetry, Empire Windrush, British literature, British-Caribbean, postcolonial, multicultural, Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, James Berry, John Agard, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Levi Tafari, Grace Nichols, Jean Binta Breeze

 

Pavlína Flajšarová   

Department of English and American Studies

Palacký University

Křížkovského 10

771 80 Olomouc 

Czech Republic

E-mail: pavlina.flajsarova@upol.cz

 

 

 

Taking Leo Bersani’s proposal for a “ruseful naïveté” in reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, this study considers how a theoretical “naïve reader” would read and re-read Ulysses. Such a reader would journey through a first stage of identifying the core story of the novel, which requires resolving narrative complications, and also a second stage of constructing the life stories of the main characters, which requires integrating the huge amount of information not needed to tell the core story. Ulysses is a good example of a novel that demands to be re-read, and as such this study turns to the early novel theorists György Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin to consider how the reading experience of Ulysses compares with the theory of the novel. Within this structure, and from today’s perspective, Ulysses can be seen to be relatively coherent in that the naïve reader can eventually gain mastery over the preponderance of the text. However, Ulysses certainly changed our concept of reading and re-reading a novel.

 

James Joyce, Ulysses, naïve reader, Leo Bersani, re-reading, narrative strategy

 

Richard Stock  

Department of English Studies

Faculty of Education

University of South Bohemia

Jeronýmova 10

371 15 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: stockr@gmail.com

 

 

 

This article argues that Graham Swift’s recent novel Wish You Were Here, which depicts the erosion of rural life in contemporary England, may be treated as a post-rural novel; it both overtly alludes to the tradition of rural fiction and the pastoral convention in literature as well as suggests that the lifestyle that sustained this type of literature is currently disintegrating. Although focused on the limited experience of a particular family, the novel forges connections between a series of recent personal disasters and national and international events whose impact may be felt even in rural Devon. The narrative is overshadowed by the protagonist’s traumatic memories, and above all by his current mission to bury his brother, a soldier killed in Iraq. The burial that ends the story is a bitterly ironic return to the family farm, which, however, will never again serve the function for which it was once built.

 

Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here, rural fiction, pastoral tradition, retrospection

 

Bożena Kucała  

Institute of English Philology

ul. prof. S.Łojasiewicza 4 (Kampus UJ)

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: bkucala@o2.pl

 

 

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Peter Ackroyd’s most ambitious literary-historical project is to compose a biography of London, to reconstruct the city through the texts it has created, allowed to be created, incited or inspired. His fictional London, though always diverse and heterogeneous, has several idiosyncratic features such as intertextuality, metafiction, irrationality, supra-temporality and a focus on the unofficial or marginal aspects of its history. This article tries to explore the various roles of the city within the narrative and meaning structure of Chatterton (1987), arguably the author’s most metafictional novel to date. The article is especially interested in how the city is used to develop the novel’s arguments concerning the theme of the authenticity, originality, and ethical limits of artistic creation.

 

London, the city, metafiction, intertextuality, forgery, imitation, imagination

 

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague
Celetná 13
110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

E-mail: petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz

 

 

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The present article focuses on the work of contemporary British journalist and public intellectual, Peter Hitchens (b. 1951). Hitchens represents one of the most vocal voices of modern British conservatism, his works included into syllabi of British Studies at several universities. The paper starts with a discussion of his specific “anti-conversion” in the context of his generation from a Trotskyite to a Tory, then concentrates on the major issues of his critique: the slow decline of traditional British values since the 1960s, failure of British politics, problematic developments in relation to law and order, cultural revolution and, finally, his views on new atheism, so aptly represented by his recently deceased brother Christopher (1949-2011). The article concludes with a short discussion of the significance of the use of his ideas in teaching courses on British society since the 1960s.

 

Peter Hitchens, British society since the 1960s, conservatism, contemporary British politics, new atheism

 

Tomáš Jajtner

Department of English Studies

University of South Bohemia

Branišovská 31a

370 05 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: tjajtner@ff.jcu.cz

 

 

 

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At the end of the 1960s sociologist Robert Bellah formulated his concept of American civil religion, a concept which has since then provoked considerable reaction among scholars and intellectuals. It identified specific religious features in American public life and traditions, rejected by some, enthusiastically accepted by others. Bellah claims that since the seventeenth century the idea of the promised land, of a new age and a new nation with a mission in the world closely connected with Biblical symbolism has been emphasized by, among others, the Puritans. Since that time this first American Republic was gradually abandoned during the twentieth century, America having according to Bellah betrayed its original ideals. In this paper, features of Bellah are The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (1975, 1992) are paralleled with similar tendencies in Czech culture in connection with the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The first Czechoslovak President Tomáš G. Masaryk as well as other intellectuals of the time propagated the idea of a new religion, one for a new era. Certain parallels can be drawn between an American civil religion and the Czech idea of the new religion, despite the fact that unlike the American puritans, the Czech interwar situation was formed by the spirit of Enlightenment, romanticism, and anti-clericalism. Both versions of civil religion embrace the principle that the stability of a democratic, republican nation state and its politics requires more than just external norms and rules. The idea of a non-ecclesiastical, secularly understood religiosity in democratic society can therefore be seen as their shared vision.

                                                                                             

American civil religion, Robert Bellah, American culture, Czech philosophy, new religion, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

 

Tomáš Bubík

Dept. of Religious Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 97

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: tomas.bubik@upce.cz

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La Malinche, Cortés’ interpreter and both real and symbolic mother of the mestizo race, is a paradigmatic figure in Mexican and Chicano/a cultures, in which she comes to represent an embodiment of national and linguistic betrayal. By employing postcolonial and gender studies perspectives, this article analyzes La Malinche’s liminal position within discourses of silence and speaking. It further shows how La Malinche’s hybrid identity undermines hierarchical binary oppositions implied by the process of colonization. On the other hand the article also argues that her victimization is already present in the language she speaks and is spoken about.

 

hybrid identity, Chicano/a culture, conquest of Mexico, La Malinche, liminality, mestizo race.

 

Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová

Department of Gender Studies

School of Humanities

Charles University

José Martího 31

162 52 Prague 6

Czech Republic

E-mail: terezka@gebbeth.cz

 

 

 

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James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) is the first of five novels known as The Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper began writing in an effort to meet mounting financial obligations created after poor business decisions made by his brothers, unresolved legal claims against the estate of his father Judge William Cooper and the radical devaluation in land values brought on by the War of 1812. All of this left Cooper wholly financially dependent upon his pen to support himself, his wife and their four young children. Storytelling was an integral link in the spreading of news, the triumphs, and terrors of living on the frontier. Cooper casts his tale against the backdrop of the French and Indian Wars during which Native Peoples experienced repeated land dispossessions as the French and English fought their war. The story of Chingachgook/John Mohegan is one of resistance to intruders, a narrative which involves bloody conflict in the region where the town Templeton was established.

 

Native Americans, Indians, French and Indian War, Land Dispossession, Oratory, Canassatego, Little Turtle, Logan, Pontiac, Red Jacket, James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy, The Pioneers.

 

Barbora Rumbinas 

Institute of English Philology

ul. prof. S.Łojasiewicza 4 (Kampus UJ)

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: barbara.rumbinas@uj.edu.pl

 

 

 

This essay probes the ecocentric dimension of the works of two quintessential California writers, Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck. While the representation of the Californian landscape in their writing has received much attention from critics, the non-anthropocentric vision often expressed in their works remained unnoticed for a long time. The primary objective of this essay is to examine the ways in which the authors use ecocentric personification to express their unconventional and sometimes even subversive views on the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world. The essay discusses different metaphors whose purpose is to affirm the unity and equality of all life forms. The representation of the earth as woman and woman as the earth is explored in particular depth, together with the (eco)philosophical implications of this strategy. It is also argued that ecocentric personification as a literary trope is used more competently by these two authors than by many other writers with Romantic leanings. It is the authors’ erudition in biology and ecology that enables them to imaginatively express ideas that are deeply grounded in holistic science. Jeffers and Steinbeck can thus be legitimately described as literary precursors of the influential Gaia theory that was postulated by James Lovelock as late as the 1970s.

 

Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, ecology, environmentalism, ecocentrism, ecofeminism, ecocentric personification.  

 

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: petr.kopecky@osu.cz

 

 

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This article provides a brief analysis of Sherman Alexie’s novel Indian Killer (1996). This work is unique in the way it reflects Native Americans. They are not portrayed as merely the victims of horrific crimes that remain unanswered. On the contrary, the decades of hardships that Indians suffered have resulted in a “red rage” – a bloodthirsty response by Native Americans to racism, violence and oppression. To highlight Alexie’s Indian Killer as a groundbreaking piece of literary work, this article also presents a brief history of Native American literature.

 

Native American literature, Native Americans, red rage, racism, violence, assimilation, Indian Killer, Sherman Alexie, identity

 

Michaela Jirsová 

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: michaela.jirsova@student.upce.cz

 

 

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