Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish
<p>The main focus of <em>Postgraduate English</em> is to provide a space for postgraduates and early-career researchers to publish their work and receive feedback from established academics. We seek to give early-stage researchers a supportive and transparent environment in which to gain experience in working with publications.</p>Durham UniversityenPostgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English1756-9761<p><span><span>Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:</span></span></p><ol><li>Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <a title="Link opens in a new browser window" target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence</a> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Authors may deposit the Submitted version; Accepted version (Author Accepted Manuscript); or Published version (Version of Record) in an institutional repository of the author's choice.</li></ol>The Post-humus: Decomposition and Circulation in The Overstory by Richard Powers
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/295
<p>Since antiquity, humans have endeavoured to unveil the question of life by seeking answers in bodies and matter within their domain. Humanity’s understanding of the natural world has traditionally been dominated by anthropocentric and zoocentric accounts of what constitutes life and the living. Accordingly, vegetal life has been relegated to the periphery of nature’s feats, subservient to the instrumental benefit of human progress. In this paper, the question of life is reviewed in terms of a rerooted ontology that departs from an anthropocentric understanding of life to consider the vibrancy and vitality of an entanglement of coevolving organisms. Through a reading of <em>The Overstory</em> by Richard Powers, the intersection of human and nonhuman life is rethought in light of the roles and realities of plants in stories. In the novel, language appears as a tool that extends beyond the human, encapsulating the infinite modes of communication within a system of entangled life, particularly as expressed in the circulation of matter, decomposition, and replenishment. Effectively, the representation of plant life in contemporary literature provokes a refreshed understanding of the lived experience of plants, challenging anthropocentric assumptions about what constitutes valuable life. To guide this research into the hidden realm of planthood, reference is made to works by Peter Wohlleben, Michael Marder, Matthew Hall, Jeffrey Nealon, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Suzanne Simard, Merlin Sheldrake, Jane Bennett, and Tim Ingold. Their emergent botanical studies and theories of entangled matter contribute to the rerooted ontological outlook on the nature of the humus and what lies beyond it. As the novel attracts a readerly rumination over vegetal stories and the correspondence between organisms, it seeds itself in the reader’s mind bolstering action so that what was given up may blossom into something just as miraculous.</p>
ArticlesAnthropocentrismDecompositionEntangled LifePlanthoodThe OverstoryEnglish Studiescultural studiescontemporary literatureEnglish LiteratureRebekah Zammit
Copyright (c) 2023 Rebekah Zammit
2023-07-112023-07-11‘Such rambling habits’: Walking in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/294
<p>In recent years mobility in the Victorian novel has become an interest to more scholars. Walking is an important aspect of mobility, especially in connection to gender. The most famous walker is the flaneur, but men were not the only ones walking the Victorian streets. The focus of this article is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Margaret Hale from her novel <em>North and South</em> (1854) and her walking habits. Walking is not only a form of mobility, but it is also connected to certain social issues such as class and gender and it is related to exercise, courtship, shopping and many other topics too. For Margaret walking is a way to explore her new home in Milton and to get to know its people. Her walking habits also show that walking is often connected to thinking and emotions.</p><p>North and South also demonstrates that walking is linked to certain dangers. The word ‘streetwalking’ already highlights the association of the prostitute with walking. This paper analyses these dangers but also highlights that walking was a way to express agency for Margaret. While Margaret risked her reputation while out walking, the positive outcomes of her walking outnumber its risks.</p>
ArticlesVictorian LiteraturegenderWomen walkersWalkingCityElizabeth GaskellEnglish Studiescultural studiesVictorian literatureEnglish LiteratureJacqueline F. Kolditz
Copyright (c) 2023 Jacqueline F. Kolditz
2023-07-112023-07-11Embracing Hybrid Identity and Celebrating Cultural Differences: Love and Hope across Time and Space in The Hundred Secret Senses
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/293
<p>Published in 1995, <em>The Hundred Secret Senses</em> is considered as Amy Tan’s most popular novel. While critics from home and abroad hold divergent opinions towards the novel, they tacitly find it crucial to deal with the problem of multiple cultural identities shown through the novel and that of whether Amy Tan is reinforcing or deconstructing the antagonistic relationship between Chinese culture and American culture. Upon these subjects, this paper holds that, Tan, as a Chinese American writer, has to find a way to deal with her difficult writing situation in America, where racism and cultural hegemony prevails. Indeed, Tan cannot be totally cleared of the suspicion that she is catering to the taste and preference of American readers, since she displays sharp cultural conflicts between Chinese and American culture and portrays a seemingly wacky and ignorant Chinese immigrant, Kwan. However, considering that quite a few characters in the novel possessed complex cultural identities or backgrounds, it can be said that, at least to some extent, the novel moves readers’ concern from the identity problems of the characters to the interactions and connections between them as individuals. Meanwhile, with the help of the Third Space theory and the Philosophy of the Mind, this paper believes that racial or cultural conflicts are not the central concern of Tan, instead, the belief in love and hope is the ultimate themes that she wants to emphasize. In this sense, the coexistence of different races and cultures is naturally reasonable, possible, and acceptable.</p>
ArticlesAmy TanEdward SojaHybrid IdentityThe Hundred Secret SensesThird Spaceliminal entitiesthe Philosophy of the MindEnglish Studiescultural studiespostcolonial literatureEnglish LiteratureYuxuan Li
Copyright (c) 2023 Yuxuan Li
2023-07-112023-07-11A Language of Loneliness: Spatial Confinement and the Revolt of Textual Selves in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/291
<p><em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em>, Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, positions itself as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s <em>Jane Eyre</em> that attempts to address a gap in the nineteenth-century narrative. Rhys superimposes the twentieth-century imperatives of postcolonial, gender, and feminist theories onto the historically revered — yet politically contested — space of Brontë’s novel. The re-visioning in <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em> thus inscribes feminist and postcolonial concerns into the Victorian narrative and offers the text a renewed narrative conscience informed by the characters’ personal, cultural, and spatial experiences. From the contemporary vantage point of enforced isolation, <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em>’s intricate engagement with the notion of space and mobility (or lack thereof) is accentuated. This paper identifies spatial confinement and consequent isolation as recurring and determinant factors in instituting the identity and selfhood of women. Drawing upon the theoretical framework crafted by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their seminal text <em>The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination</em>, the present study identifies Antoinette as the product of the material and metaphorical confinement to which she is subjected. It constitutes confinement, as articulated in <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em>, as the convergence of a triadic conception of the term and argues that Rhys’s depiction of Antoinette is centred on the character’s material entrapment and cultural isolation, which, in turn, are emblematic of the woman writer’s loneliness within a decidedly ‘masculine’ literary enterprise. This triadic formulation is articulated in this paper, first, by examining Antoinette’s physical engagement with space as a woman, before exploring the fundamental intersectionality of the experience as a result of her Creole identity. Finally, these feminist and postcolonial perspectives converge within the textual space, which becomes the ground where women enact their defiant revolts.</p>
Articlesspatial literary studiesgender studiesJean Rhysneo-Victorian literature20th-century literatureEnglish StudiesEnglish literaturepostcolonial literatureT. C. Nivedita
Copyright (c) 2022 T. C. Nivedita
2022-04-082022-04-08Kill Like Medea, but with Love this Time: Marina Carr’s Take on Filicide in By the Bog of Cats
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/290
<p>This paper discusses Marina Carr’s <em>By the Bog of Cats</em>, an Irish theatrical play that is a loose adaptation of Euripides’ <em>Medea</em>. Originally staged at the Abbey Theatre on the 7<sup>th</sup> of October 1998, <em>By the Bog of Cats </em>is Marina Carr’s most renowned and oft-performed theatrical play today. Carr borrows and reworks the deadly myth of Medea, namely the story of a mother who kills her children as a form of revenge against her husband. Carr transposes the myth to the rural Midlands of Ireland, bringing a tragedy originally performed in 431 BC to a contemporary Irish setting. Placed into this new context, what stands out in Carr’s adaptation in relation to the ancient precursor is Carr’s profound take on filicide. Leaving aside notions of retribution and jealousy typically assigned to <em>Medea</em>, filicide, in Carr’s hands, transforms into a radically liberating force.</p>
Articles20th-century Irish theatreIrish StudiesClassical receptionGreek tragedyMarina CarrEnglish StudiesEnglish literaturedramaDimitris Kentrotis-Zinelis
Copyright (c) 2022 Dimitris Kentrotis-Zinelis
2022-04-082022-04-08Exile and Colonialism in The Tempest: Prospero’s Powers and Identities Revisited
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/289
<p>Among the wide and diverse readings of <em>The Tempest</em>, Shakespeare’s last complete full play, much attention has been drawn to its colonialist implications and aspects. Prospero, the deposed Milanese Duke, is a European subject who has been exiled to an alien island and then become the ruler of the people and creatures there. The play’s representation of Prospero’s relations and interactions with the earlier inhabitants of the island, Ariel and Caliban, and most importantly its contemporary context of the onset of Europe’s colonial activities, reveal the significance of the underlying colonial discourse. When it comes to Prospero’s multifaceted relations with Ariel, Caliban, and the island, however, a reading focussed on his identity as an exile provides more insight into the play’s representations of the intersected issues and undertakings of exile and colonialism. Given the significant overlap of Prospero’s state of exile with his identity as a colonizer, it is worthwhile to see his encountering and interactions with the island’s earlier inhabitants through the prism of exile, with consideration of the ideological significance of exile in Shakespeare’s time.</p>
ArticlesexilecolonialismThe TempestShakespeare studiespolitical powerEnglish StudiesEnglish literaturedramaYi-chin Huang
Copyright (c) 2022 Yi-chin Huang
2022-04-082022-04-08Testing boundaries: Millom and the Ironworks in Norman Nicholson’s The Pot Geranium (1954)
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/288
<p>Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson’s 1954 collection <em>The Pot Geranium</em> is deeply lonely, yet also seemingly prophetic. The poet looks to the heavy industry in the area, characterised mainly by the Ironworks in his hometown of Millom. His gaze is held inwards toward the area of the Cumbrian coastline he has known and loved his entire life. The poet is confined by boundaries and exists in a location that is on the boundary between counties, a National Park, and the sea. Most importantly, the poet explores the boundary between Millom town and the Ironworks site. The local society is reliant upon the Ironworks industry economically and, to an extent, socially; and Nicholson recognises the ever-present influence of the site in his childhood and later years. The poet holds disdain and fear for the industry, but also a quiet respect for the role it plays in the wider society he is part of. The boundary between the Ironworks and the town of Millom is blurred geographically, socially, and financially, and Nicholson’s poems exhibit the creeping influence of the industry between the buildings and down the streets of the main town, less than a mile away. He explores innocence, danger, past and present, in the collection, underpinned by the confinement and boundaries he exhibits in the titular poem.</p>
ArticlesCumbrialandscapepoetryNorman NicholsonplaceEnglish StudiesEnglish literaturepoetryLaura Day
Copyright (c) 2022 Laura Day
2022-04-082022-04-08Moral Contagion as a Threat to Cultural Hegemony in the Novels of Charlotte Dacre
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/287
Among what remains of the former popularity of Charlotte Dacre’s novels today, pride of place is given to the nineteenth-century critical reception of her works. Diagnosed by censors from <em>The Literary Journal </em>as being ‘afflicted with the dismal malady of maggots in the brain’, it was feared that her ‘licentious’ writings, focusing on female sexuality, violence, and novel-reading, would contaminate the minds of her own female readers. Interestingly, that very fear of moral contagion is at the core of Dacre’s plots: her monstrous heroines, depicted by a generally sympathising narrative voice, are presented as a threat to society, and to the moral purity paramount in nineteenth-century English culture. Presiding over these improper heroines is Victoria, the protagonist of Dacre’s Gothic best-seller <em>Zofloya, or the Moor </em>(1806), whose sexual attraction to the eponymous moor, and the murderous actions committed under his influence, remained for centuries a staple in Dacre’s popularity as a ‘writer of trash’. This paper will present the dynamics of alteration and contagion in Charlotte Dacre’s novels, ranging from the pollution of the stable household, to the cultural threat to imperial hegemony posed by sexual attraction to the racial Other, as well as by novel-reading, itself ironically presented as an agent of moral contamination.
Articles19th Century literaturemoral contagionracefemale desireCharlotte DacreEnglish StudiesEnglish literatureCharlotte Chassefiѐre
Copyright (c) 2022 Charlotte Chassefiѐre
2022-04-082022-04-08Immanent Spirituality and Legitimacy of Poetry in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Squarings’
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/282
<p>In 1991, with the publication of his collection <em>Seeing Things</em>, Seamus Heaney confirmed that the focus and diction of his poetic practice have shifted. In my essay, I revisit the second part of this volume, the sequence titled ‘Squarings’, in order to examine what has inspired this profound transformation and what is being expressed as a result of this shift in Heaney’s aesthetic tectonics. Contrary to numerous critics who argued that the poet either left the earthly grounding of his earlier poetry or that he lost his faith, I am convinced that drafting the sequence, Heaney did not commit any act of detectable abandonment but much rather creatively reclaimed what had been his already.</p><p>Dealing with his complex and non-credal spirituality which has found a fascinating expression in the ‘shifting brilliancies’ of words and images in ‘Squarings’, I articulate my conviction that the transcendental element introduced (yet in many respects re-inhabited) in the sequence cannot be fully understood and reflectively incorporated unless the poem is read as a reflection of the threefold morphology of the self. In this structural interpretation of the individual human existence, the physical body is temporarily united and infused with spirit (forming the individual soul). The dynamic and unique juncture which is thus created is represented by the individual consciousness. It is this consciousness, re-emerging in the awareness of its potential and intuitively in touch with its immanent spirituality, which finds its expression and aesthetic terrain in ‘Squarings’. Further, it is this re-animated and synthesizing model of human consciousness which liberates the poet’s expression and signals the opening up of a new creative space which Heaney could finally enter without ‘guilt and anxiety characteristic of [his] previous works’.<a title=\"\\"\\"\" href=\"/postgraduate.english/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/editor/viewMetadata/\\"#_ftn1\\"\">[1]</a></p><div><br clear=\"\\"all\\"\" /><hr align=\"\\"left\\"\" size=\"\\"1\\"\" width=\"\\"33%\\"\" /><div><p><a title=\"\\"\\"\" href=\"/postgraduate.english/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/editor/viewMetadata/\\"#_ftnref1\\"\">[1]</a> Panzera, Daniela, ‘Heaney’s Journey into the Self: Towards a Dantean Light’, <em>Nordic Irish Studies</em>, 15.2 (2016), 12.</p></div></div>
Articlesconsciousnessdouzainmemorypoetic sequencespiritualityEnglish StudiesEnglish literatureIrish literatureLucie Kotesovska
Copyright (c) 2021 Lucie Kotesovska
2021-09-242021-09-24‘I manage my mere voice on postcards best.’: Review of The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer (London: Faber & Faber, 2021).
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/280
<p>In <em>The Letters of Thom Gunn</em>, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer (London: Faber, 2021), we encounter the poet’s private voice for the first time. Gunn is a pre-eminent poet, and probably the most important gay poet of the later twentieth century. This review examines how Gunn’s reputation has been shaped by homophobic attitudes, and how he has been marginalised. These letters reveal the evolution of Gunn’s work, and illuminate the particular struggles he faced as a gay writer: from a police investigation into him and his partner, his early attempts to persuade his editor to publish his openly queer poems, as well the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful elegies of <em>The Man with Night Sweats </em>(1992). Gunn often described himself as an ‘impersonal’ poet, and this book undoubtedly offers a more profound insight into his life and work than has been seen before. Reflecting on the fact that Gunn spent much of his early career hiding his identity as a gay man, the review emphasises the importance of this encounter with his private voice.</p>
ReviewsLettersThom GunnGayPoetryEnglish StudiesEnglish literatureFelix Hawlin
Copyright (c) 2021 Felix Hawlin
2021-09-242021-09-24‘the Self which underlies [...] separate individuality’: pain and the transcendence of selfhood in the work of Aldous Huxley
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/281
<p>This article explores the presence of pain in Aldous Huxley’s works and its significance in relation to his religious and spiritual ideas. Drawing on Joanna Bourke’s conception of pain as an evaluative event rather than an objective stimulus, I will focus on how different stimuli are evaluated as pain-events, and how this process of evaluation can affect one’s sense of self. Through analysing his fiction with reference to Huxley’s study of religious thought, <em>The Perennial Philosophy </em>(1945), this essay will consider the theological contexts around pain-events. Through these contexts, a connection between pain and Huxley’s ideas of transcending selfhood will be drawn. A key term for the essay will be Huxley’s idea of the ‘Self’, a vague state of spiritual unity and bliss where one’s own selfhood is annihilated to make room for the presence of the divine. Starting with <em>Brave New World </em>(1932), this study will bring to light key religious contexts such as mortification, exploring the presence of self-flagellation in the text and its effectiveness in denying and transcending the body and self in the face of the World State. Moving onto Huxley and Christopher Isherwood’s critically neglected screen-treatment, <em>Jacob’s Hands</em> (1998), the essay will shift focus to the pain of a heart-attack, analysing the text in relation to Huxley’s ideas of organ deterioration being connected to a self-absorbed and spiritually unfulfilled existence. Finally, <em>Time Must Have a Stop </em>(1944) will be discussed in relation to previously discussed ideas, this time focusing on Huxley’s conception of purging pain in the afterlife, and the struggle towards the spiritual state of the Self. In Huxley’s view, the Self can eventually be achieved through perennial philosophy.</p>
ArticlesAldous Huxleypainselfhoodperennial philosophymortificationEnglish StudiesEnglish literatureRyan O'Shea
Copyright (c) 2021 Ryan OShea
2021-09-242021-09-24A Fragmented Poetic Consciousness in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/283
<p>With its multiple voices and perspectives, shifting pronouns, personal and historical memories, <em>The Waste Land</em> presents the fragmented consciousness of the alienated human mind after the horrors of the First World War. In an attempt to express life, the poem is a portrayal of an internal world that presents neither a coherent nor unified subjectivity; instead, it illustrates a consciousness that takes on distinctive forms, but still remains in continuous flux.<em> The Waste Land</em> throws the most relevant light on Eliot’s own theory of subjectivity and the perception of reality: that the world only becomes real through the multiple, distinctive and seemingly disjointed perspectives of the individual consciousness. By creating a poetic consciousness, Eliot, like other modernist writers, strives to capture the essence of life: the continuous flux of fragments that point to a common unconscious desire for death. This paper explores the poet’s vision of a post-war human consciousness: its fragmented nature, burden of existence, and search for salvation.</p>
ArticlesT. S. Eliothuman consciousnessrealityunconscioussalvationEnglish StudiesEnglish literatureGwenda Koo
Copyright (c) 2021 Gwenda Koo
2021-09-242021-09-24‘We named her, and so she will be till the end of the chapter’: authenticity and the feminine voice in postmodernist neo-Victorianism
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/284
<p>This article explores the ways in which postmodernist neo-Victorian novels present women who subvert societal norms, arguing that their treatment is symptomatic of a wider conflict in neo-historicism between authorial appeal and historical ‘authenticity’. In John Fowles’ <em>The French Lieutenant’s Woman </em>(1969), Angela Carter’s <em>Nights at the Circus </em>(1984), and Sarah Waters’ <em>Tipping the Velvet</em> (1998), the feminine neo-Victorian voice disrupts a master discourse of history which privileges masculine, heteronormative narratives. The inherent exchange between past and present in neo-Victorianism necessarily responds to contemporary issues pertinent to a modern readership by establishing thematic and formal connections between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.</p><p><em> </em></p><p>All three novels place a consideration of authenticity and artifice at the centre of their narratives, with <em>Nights at the Circus </em>and <em>Tipping the Velvet</em> particularly emphasising the performativity of both authorship and the narrative self-invention of women, challenging notions of ‘authenticity’ and considering self-referentially how this manifests within the neo-Victorian project. <em>The French Lieutenant’s Woman</em> similarly critiques normative narrative structures by both rejecting and fulfilling literary expectations of Victorian fiction, complexly articulating a postmodern tendency towards pastiche whilst retaining a sense of replicative historicity.</p><p> </p><p>The act of ‘talking back’ to the nineteenth century can be seen to disrupt dominant historical and social narratives by permitting non-hegemonic perspectives and exposing the impossibility of neo-Victorianism as pure replication. The interweaving of contemporary feminist discourse in these texts serves to critique enduring attitudes towards women and challenge the idea that the onset of modernity necessarily instigated sexual progressiveness. Thus, the voices of subversive female characters may be heard and history itself presented as a product of manipulable invention.</p>
Articlesneo-VictorianpostmodernfemininityauthenticitynarrativeEnglish StudiesEnglish literatureRosalind Crocker
Copyright (c) 2021 Rosalind Crocker
2021-09-242021-09-24Review of Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/261
Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer. The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. £190.00 (hardback), £35.99 (eBook) 553 pgs. ISBN 978-1-138-57986-6.
ReviewsVictorianEnglish LanguageEnglish Studiescomparative literaturecultural studiesEnglish literatureHannah Bury
Copyright (c) 2021 Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English
2021-02-222021-02-22‘This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay...’: The Autobiographical Impulse in the Dream Poetry of William Dunbar
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/264
<p>This article considers the dream-framed first person allegories of the Scottish poet William Dunbar (<em>c.</em> 1460-1513?) as an example of ‘autobiography before autobiography’ in pre-modern Scotland. Dunbar’s poetry offers a vivid representation of the society and spectacle of the court of James IV (1473-1513; r. 1488-1513), though little biographical information about the poet himself. His poetry is celebrated for its great tonal and generic variety; but this very versatility poses problems for the recovery of ‘[t]he “real” Dunbar’. In this article, I show how in poems such as <em>The Goldyn Targe</em>,<em> The Thrissil and the Rois</em>, and ‘This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay’, Dunbar affirms his role as a <em>makar</em> or ‘maker’ at court, but positions himself as the exponent of a lively, literary, court culture, rather than a psychologically complex, individuated self. In this, I suggest, Dunbar’s poetry demonstrates an alternative approach to autobiography: the development of a corporate rather than an individual sense of identity, and a pathway for thinking about quasi-autobiographical self-representation outside of the Burckhardtian paradigm of the Renaissance development of the individual. Dunbar professes to represent, while in practice he reinvents, love, praise, and ribaldry at the Scottish court. This is autobiography, I propose, not of an individual, but of a time, place, and patron, and is as literary as it is historical.</p>
ArticlesWilliam DunbarpoetryEarly ModernMiddle ScotsautobiographyPR1-9680PR500-614English Studiescomparative literaturecultural studiesEnglish literatureLaurie Atkinson
Copyright (c) 2021 Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English
2021-12-012021-12-01111A Marriage of Consumption in George Meredith’s The Egoist
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/250
<p>This article acknowledges the cannibal rhetoric used by George Meredith in his 1879 novel <em>The Egoist</em>. Much academic attention has been paid to the author’s employment of physical and social aesthetics; this article expands on the notion of the significance of aesthetic pleasure in suggesting that the accompanying incessant cannibal rhetoric aestheticizes the potential marriage partner to the point of corporeal assimilation.</p><p>The article suggests that the cannibal imagery identifies the commodification of eligible bodies within the Victorian marriage market, specifically emphasising the vulnerability of women in their role as prey for predatory bachelors. Sir Willoughby Patterne epitomises the socially conscious, economically and aesthetically-motivated groom, whose competitive nature extends to procuring only the most beautiful bride. His civility and anachronistic romanticisms provide however, only a thin veil for his innate atavism, his appetite for marriage manifesting in metaphors of feeding and consumption. </p>
ArticlesMeredithEgoistMarriageVictorianConsumptionMetaphorJessica Lewis
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Those Backward Hordes: Representing the Indian Peasant as a ‘Rebel’ in Early Indian Fiction in English
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/251
<p>One of the earliest Indian works of book-length fiction in prose to have unequivocally earned the title of a ‘novel’ in posterity, Reverend Lal Behari Dey's <em>Bengal Peasant Life</em> (1878; titled <em>Govinda Samanta</em>, or <em>The History of a Bengali Ráiyat</em> in its first edition, published in 1874) exists in the annals of literary history and criticism mostly as a part of lists enumerating the ‘early novels’. It has been ranked novel amongst what Meenakshi Mukherjee terms the nineteenth century Bengali literature of ‘protest’, alongside texts such as Dinabandhu Mitra's <em>Neel Darpan</em>, Mir Musarraf Hussain's <em>Jamidar Darpan</em> and Dakshina Charan Chattopadhyay's <em>Chakar Darpan</em>. This essay seeks to consider Reverend Lal Behari Dey's quest to write an ‘authentic history’ of the Bengali peasant in the light of the fact that the humble Bengali peasant and his native rural Bengal would steadily become a staple of discussion in the nineteenth century, featuring prominently in economic and historical narratives, in the pages of newspapers, periodicals and novels, almost always in terms of his ‘backwardness’ or his status as a foil to the urbanized <em>bhadralok</em>. The first section of the essay addresses the claim to authenticity in terms of the predominance of visual descriptions in the narrative technique, in keeping with the novel’s realist mode of representation. Following that, the essay argues that the claim to authenticity, furthermore, lies in a narrative construction of rural Bengal as a changeless idyll, untouched by the experience of colonial modernity. The essay then considers the material constitution of the backwardness of the Bengali peasant, in the context of transformations in rural land ownership and rent structures following the Permanent Settlement. The fourth and final section of the essay addresses the question of a rebellious peasantry, and the narrative foreclosure of the possibility of an agrarian unrest that might lead to lasting social change. </p>
ArticlesNineteenth CenturyIndian Writing in EnglishPeasant RebellionReverend Lal Behari DeySwati Moitra
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‘Just a pen, paper, and a little thought’: E. M. Forster and literary labour
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/249
<p>In his New Year’s Eve journal entry in 1904, E. M. Forster lamented: ‘I’m not good enough to do with regular work’. Several decades later, he said with an air of nonchalance in a BBC radio broadcast that, ‘professionally, I am a writer’. This article examines Forster’s uneasy relationship with literary labour, and analyses its manifestation in three of his fictional authors: aspiring writer Rickie Elliot and his aunt Emily Failing in <em>The Longest Journey</em> (1907), and the critically neglected novelist, Miss Lavish, in <em>A Room with a View</em> (1908). I contextualise Forster’s long trajectory of authorial worry with the Victorian labour theories of Carlyle and Ruskin dismissed by Forster’s own generation, and the startling growth of the Edwardian literary market which compounded cultural anxieties surrounding the figure of the ‘potboiler’. By appraising Forster’s fictional juxtaposition of research and inspiration, proactivity and inactivity, and algorithm and artistry in the writing process, I argue that his ironic presentation of the productive potboiler and the inactive, artistic writer is nuanced, complex, and at times self-deprecating, opening up a way of rethinking his ‘professional’ trajectory and his representations of labour. </p>
ArticlesLiterary labourpotboilerartistrybestsellerEdwardianprofessionalauthorshipwritingBryony Armstrong
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“Time was running shorter, tightening around our house, crushing me.”: Space and Time in the Female Gothic of Shirley Jackson
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/252
<p>Shirley Jackson has enjoyed some commercial acclaim of late – Netflix’s re-imagining of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> (2018) and Stacie Passon’s adaptation of <em>We Have Always Lived in the Castle</em> (2018) found cause to retell Jackson’s two most widely known novels over half a century after their initial publication. Jackson’s timelessness is undoubtedly thanks to her strong feminist themes, female characters and memorable gothic prose. She walks the line between female mental illness and the possibility of malign, supernatural forces in their domestic worlds. In her three ‘house novels’ – <em>The Sundial</em> (1958), <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> (1959), and <em>We Have Always Lived in the Castle</em> (1962) – Jackson centralises the domestic sphere to raise questions about women’s power and patriarchal tradition in the atomic age. This paper explores how Jackson uses both the ‘space’ of the house as an oppressive <em>and</em> liberating reality for the fifties housewife and ‘time’ to consider progress and haunted legacies for her women. It argues that ultimately, many of the supernatural elements in Jackson are manifestations of her women’s tormented psychologies as they come to terms with their place in a changing world. Who do these women want to be? Is it regressive to enjoy the small pleasures of domesticity, or is this very enjoyment a source of strength? Ultimately, this is a personal realisation for Jackson. By the time she reaches <em>Castle</em> her resolve is clear, confident, and final: like her characters, she is happy to be both the powerful witch and the unassuming housewife. </p>
ArticlesMid-centuryGothicHorrorFeminismShirley JacksonSouthern GothicSupernaturalHarriet Barton
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Between penal reform and The Newgate Calendar: why are we made to feel for Fagin?
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/248
<p>Charles Dickens is commonly – and justifiably – regarded as a writer of reformist fiction. One of the many social issues he took interest in was that of imprisonment, in particular solitary confinement, which he famously and vociferously condemned. His preoccupation with the subject of incarceration is already clearly discernible in <em>Oliver Twist</em>, in which the novelist offers an emotionally fraught depiction of the chief villain, Fagin, awaiting his execution in a Newgate cell. I argue that although the scene contains elements anticipating Dickens’s later penal critique, it can equally persuasively be interpreted in light of the moralistic rhetoric of <em>The Newgate Calendar</em>, and remains elusively situated between the two interpretations, simultaneously inviting and resisting both of them. Thus, this essay proposes to see ‘The Jew’s last Night alive’ as an instantiation of what David Paroissien identifies as the insoluble ambiguity of Dickens’s attitude towards crime and criminals, at once disparaging and sympathetic. </p>
ArticlesCharles Dickensincarcerationreformmoralistic literatureThe Newgate Calendarcrime fictionAgnieszka Serdynska
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Special Feature
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/247
Contributions from previous and current authors for the 40th anniversary issue.
ArticlesMultiple Authors
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An Urban Romance: London and the Marriage Plot in Virginia Woolf's 'Night and Day'
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/235
<p><em><span>Night and Day</span></em><span>is something of an uneasy presence among Virginia Woolf’s works. Considered by some to be a disappointingly conservative courtship narrative – an Edwardian take on Jane Austen – the novel nevertheless anticipates Woolf’s so-called ‘mature’ modernist texts on account of the crucial role it assigns to London. Jean Moorcroft Wilson argues that from <em>Jacob’s Room</em>onwards, it is the city – in lieu of the contrived novelistic plot – that provides Woolf’s novels with shape and unity. The same is true of <em>Night and Day</em>, where the key developments of the romance plot occur within the urban space; indeed, the budding relationship between Katherine Hilbery and Ralph Denham is facilitated by the city. This, additionally, creates a link between spaces/places and emotions, which Andrew Tucker sees as essentially modernist. Yet while the way London figures into the narrative may push <em>Night and Day</em>towards literary experimentation, the conclusion it brings about appears to be staunchly Victorian: a marriage ceremony in Westminster Cathedral. Is it possible to resolve this tension? The key question, it seems, is what sort of a relationship Katherine and Ralph have forged by the end of the novel: is it a partnership that will give Katharine the freedom she longs for, or a rehearsal of old, hierarchical models in which the woman is reduced to a prized possession? The novel, once more, pulls in two contradictory directions, substantiating both interpretations, and the unresolved ending makes them both equally plausible. By reading <em>Night and Day</em>as perched precariously between Victorianism and Modernism, the following discussion seeks to expose the novel’s inherent ambivalence – perhaps the most Woolfian quality of all.</span></p>
ArticlesLondonromance plotVictorianismModernismambiguityAgnieszka Serdynska
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Similar Vision, Essential Difference: Mass Violence in Tolkien and Le Guin
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/234
<p><span>J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin put forward similar visions of the good society. Tolkien’s Hobbits in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>The Lord of the Rings</em><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and Le Guin’s Athsheans in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>The Word for World Is Forest<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></em>each<span class="apple-converted-space"><em> </em></span>model a community that is peaceful, nature-loving, and non-expansionist. Yet Tolkien’s belief in the need for just war contrasts with Le Guin’s pacifism. In 'The Scouring of the Shire', a final chapter of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, Tolkien argues that to flourish, the Shire must be willing to employ violence in self-defense and to accord a lesser moral status to outsiders. Peaceful without being pacifist, the Shire reaches a stable equilibrium, safe from any invaders. To the Le Guin of the Vietnam era, in contrast, only true pacifism is stable for Athshean society. The Athshean demotion of their invaders to lesser moral status, undertaken in self-defense, nonetheless brings about a downward spiral that suggests future indiscriminate war. </span></p>
ArticlesTolkienJ.R.R.Le GuinUrsula K.‘Scouring of the Shire’Word for World Is Forestjust warJamie Campbell Martin
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'Break the Narrative': Metafictional Anthropocene Aesthetics in Jeanette Winterson's 'The Powerbook' and Ben Lerner's '10:04'
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/233
<p><span>Given the difficulties of representing the Anthropocene through narrative, recent experimental texts use metafictional techniques to imaginatively engage with the impact of environmental decline. In contrast to apocalyptic narratives of ecological breakdown, the metafictional Anthropocene aesthetics of Jeanette Winterson's </span><em><span>The Powerbook </span></em><span>(2000) and Ben Lerner's </span><em><span>10:04</span></em><span>(2014) activate the metaleptic potential of literature to provide alternative perspectives. The textual subversiveness of their aesthetics present worldly engagements with environmental crises and reflect upon the production of literature in the Anthropocene. Winterson deploys narrative techniques associated with postmodernism such as such as historiographic metafiction and textual play. However, these devices have an ecocritical edge which demonstrates how storytelling can examine the Anthropocene beyond factual discourses through a uniquely imaginative capacity. Similarly, Lerner’s formal experimentations with autofiction and temporality generate a self- conscious Anthropocene aesthetic. This style leads to textual paradoxes that generate poetic self- consciousness of relational dynamics to articulate hope for change and constructive interventions to contemporary crises. These novels challenge boundaries – between fiction and reality, prose and poetic address – through metafictional experimentation beyond self-conscious artifice on a surface level. These innovative texts can be put into dialogue with ecocritical theory to recognise that environmental crises are complex and multifaceted, but fragile contingencies that humans can still change. Both texts emphasise the relationality of experience and represent humanity’s impact on the environment while illustrating that the future can still be changed. </span></p>
ArticlesAnthropocene aestheticsmetafictionJeanette WintersonBen Lernercontemporary literatureAlex J. Calder
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Narrative Burial and the Pleasure Principle: A Freudian Reading of Trauma in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/232
<p>This article provides a trauma reading of narrative suppression in Toni Morrison’s <em>Beloved. </em>I argue that Sethe’s infanticidal guilt, which lays at the heart of the text yet is never directly spoken about, acts as the novel’s structuring metaphor. Drawing on the trauma rhetoric of Roger Luckhurst and Cathy Caruth as well as various Freudian literary criticism, I propose that Sethe’s repression and elusive narrativization of Beloved’s murder pertains to the process of memory augmentation in Freud’s the ‘Pleasure Principle’. When Sethe’s recall, and by extension Morrison’s textual structure, imitates the way in which the human psyche represses the pain of trauma with a pleasant re-fashioning of events, the adult Beloved’s return signifies unconscious manifestation. I read Beloved as an imaged wish-fulfilment when Sethe accepts her reincarnation as saving the severe mother-daughter bond she longs after. However, as a transmutable manifestation of trauma; moving from a representation and projection of Sethe’s augmented memory to the originally unexposed and disconcerting memory, Beloved’s enigmatic characterization anticipates the harm incurred by undealt trauma. In close reading Sethe’s refusal to look back; the competing narratives of the infanticide; and then the tempestuous breakdown in the Sethe-Beloved relationship, this article concludes with exploring the inadequacy of The Pleasure Principle in dealing with long-term trauma. Morrison’s text ends with Beloved becoming a signification of infanticidal resentment. The novel’s didacticism which in turn elucidates the necessity of confronting that which causes discomfort in memory, becomes clear through Morrison’s conclusive narrative experimentation. In employing the monologue form to indicate the continued prevalence of the pain-inducing adult Beloved in her narrative control and confrontation, Morrison’s text communicates the ineffectual function of the ‘Pleasure Principle’ as a means of traumatic relief.</p>
ArticlesTraumaThe Pleasure PrinciplePsychoanalysisNarrative RepressionInfanticideTia Byer
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Review: Christine Mangan, 'Tangerine' (New York: Ecco, 2018). ISBN 9781408709993.
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/231
ReviewsRoula-Maria Dib
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Reading 'The Excursion' with Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The Recluse’ as a ‘Conceptual Persona’
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/230
<p class="Standard"><em><span lang="EN-US">The Excursion</span></em><span lang="EN-US">, by William Wordsworth, has gone down in literary history as Wordsworth’s early Victorian poem, and is often contrasted with <em>The Prelude</em>, which is considered the poet’s true Romantic masterpiece. This article gives a new reading of <em>The Excursion </em>as a genuine Romantic philosophical poem by highlighting Wordsworth’s use of ‘conceptual personae’—a very specific type of character used by philosophers and poets according to Deleuze and Guattari in <em>What Is Philosophy?</em>. While replacing <em>The Excursion </em>within the frame of the project of ‘The Recluse’, the aim of this article is to answer the question ‘who is the Recluse?’, so as to better understand the nature of the characters the reader is presented with in <em>The Excursion</em>. It is argued, in the wake of Simon Jarvis’ seminal work <em>Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song</em>, that Wordsworth tries to solve in <em>The Excursion </em>the traditional dichotomy between poetry and philosophy by resorting to the use of characters who all stem from the figure of the ‘Recluse’, who is Wordsworth’s own version of the Romantic philosophical poet. Relying on recent studies such as <em>The Excursion and Wordsworth’s Iconography</em>, by Brandon Yen, this paper revisits readings of the poem that focus primarily on the dramatic quality and on the dialogic nature of the poem. Through its close analysis of key passages of the poem, the article rather sheds light on the fusion of philosophical concepts and poetic images in the characters’ discourses, so as to underline the blurring of the limits between philosophy and poetry in Wordsworth’s poetry.</span></p><p class="Standard"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
ArticlesWordsworthDeleuzeGuattariThe ExcursionRomanticismPauline Hortolland
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‘Now Flying over the Hell-mouth’: The Gap Between St Guðlac and Nordic Volcano Imagery
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/229
<span>This investigation into the effects of landscape and place on apocalyptic literature constrasts the portrayal of demonic flights over a hell-mouth (in the 8thC Latin<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Vita Sancti Guðlaci</em><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and 10thC Old English<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Life of St Guðlac</em>) with Norse volcanic imagery (in the possibly-early-as 10thC<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Völuspá</em><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and later<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Hallmundarkviða</em>). Proposing that Guðlac’s vision borrows Hell’s traditional location in the north but instantiates it north of East Anglia, the article discusses how the Guðlac narrative combines patristic hell-mouth imagery with an Anglo-Saxon social imaginary. In the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Dialogues</em><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>of Gregory of the Great, immensely popular in Anglo-Saxon England, a volcano is described, functionally, as the mouth of hell. Guðlac’s vision of hell is difficult to relate to its more proximate visionary influences (<em>Vita Fursei</em>,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Visio St Pauli</em>,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Vita Antonii</em>), being much less concerned with pedagogical descriptions of hellish torments due the sinner in favour of an atmospherically elaborate apocalypticism. In contrast, Icelandic literature demonstrates a different conceptual organisation of hellishness and volcanic dynamism. The apocalyptic<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Völuspá</em>, and the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Hallmundarkviða</em><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>episode from <em>Bergbúa þáttr</em>, offer an alternative to the moralisation of their lived environment. For Icelanders, environmental hazards like eruption can be associated with the actions and conflicts of supernatural agents on a spiritual plane, but the physical events themselves have an impersonal, if highly destructive, quality. Fascinatingly, the 13thC Norwegian text<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Konungs skuggsjá</em><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>addresses the validity of various perspectives on volcanic activity and its meaning, suggesting an encyclopaedic plurality of views. Later evidence from the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Lanercost Chronicle</em><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>would offer a complete conceptual mapping of hell and hellishness onto Iceland specifically: the Bishop of Orkney, on a visit to Iceland, reports that the souls of the damned can be heard in the fires of eruptions there.</span>
ArticlesGuthlacAnglo-SaxonIcelandapocalyptic literaturehell-mouthMichael Baker
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The Author(s) of the Book of Jeremiah
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/228
<span>Who wrote the Book of Jeremiah, one of the major prophetic books in the Bible? As it stands now, the book purports to record the words that the Israelite prophet Jeremiah spoke in between 650–586 <span>BCE </span>(Jer 1. 1, “The words of Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah, one of the priests living in Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin”). Parts of this book resemble a biography, and yet details of the life of the prophet are scant and incomplete (neither a birth nor a death notice is provided), with double accounts of events of his life (such as, Jer 7. 1–14 and 26; 7. 15–25; 44. 15–30; 37 and 38). Most of the book comprises anonymous oracles addressed to the people of Judah, the chapters mix poetry and prose, and the portrayal of the man Jeremiah that emerges from its pages is contradictory and elusive. Although some biblical scholars still do not question the historicity of Jeremiah and of the content of the book that bears his name, a more critical approach to the study of the biblical text was undertaken starting from the twentieth century. This approach challenges the assumption of one single hand behind the composition of this book, and even questions the historicity of his author and his status of “prophet”, considering him a literary creation of the later editors of the book, who were active for centuries after the “times of Jeremiah”. Thus, is it possible to reconstruct the “historical” Jeremiah, the alleged “author” of the book? If not, how should we consider “authorship” relating to this book? If there was no Jeremiah, how are we supposed to intend a book that begins with the sentence “the words of Jeremiah”?</span>
ArticlesBiblical ProphecyHebrew BibleRedaction CriticismThe Prophet JeremiahAuthors and AuthorshipFrancesco Arena
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Seventh Annual Norse in the North Conference (2018)
https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/219
ReviewsKatie Harling-LeeAlexander J. Wilson
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