English
http://hdl.handle.net/10034/6719
2024-03-28T13:08:39ZStylistics, point of view and modality
http://hdl.handle.net/10034/628424
Stylistics, point of view and modality
Neary, Clara
Revised version of chapter for 2nd edition.
2023-05-29T00:00:00Z‘Dizzy with the to-ing and fro-ing’: Diasporic prose of the ‘new South Africa’
http://hdl.handle.net/10034/628313
‘Dizzy with the to-ing and fro-ing’: Diasporic prose of the ‘new South Africa’
Blair, Peter
Engaging with concepts of exilic and transnational writing established by Edward Said, Stephen Clingman, and others, this chapter offers a comparative survey and analysis of a wide range of fiction and nonfiction representing South Africa’s internal and external diasporas, mostly published between 1994, year of its first-ever democratic election, and 2021. A brief overview of the country’s formative immigrations and the internal displacement and external exile created by segregation and apartheid is followed by four sections. The first discusses texts by or about post-liberation returnees, including ex-activists and white expatriates, as well as perspectives from South Africa’s Jewish community and its exiles. The second examines narratives by or about new continental immigrants from the rest of Africa, including refugees, and novels chronicling the intercontinental roots, oceanic routes, and immigrant experiences of South African Indians. The third and fourth sections provide contrasting case studies of revisionist émigrés: J.M. Coetzee, who scrutinizes the migrant’s ‘substitutive’ desire to start afresh; and Zoë Wicomb, whose ‘translocal’ refines the ‘combinatory’ transnational. The chapter argues that identities in the ‘new South Africa’ and its external diasporas are diasporic in diverse and complex ways that challenge and reconfigure the paradigms of ‘contrapuntal’ exile and celebratory cosmopolitanism/Afropolitanism.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in [The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature] on [06/05/2024], available online: http://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-the-New-African-Diasporic-Literature/Losambe-Ojaide/p/book/9781032500461
'Men Shall Not Make Us Foes': Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks
http://hdl.handle.net/10034/628229
'Men Shall Not Make Us Foes': Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks
Wynne, Deborah
Sharon Marcus in Between Women (2007) highlighted the variety of friendship models employed by Victorian women, focusing on the female friend’s role in the development of women’s emotional lives and sexualities. Drawing on Marcus’s key insights, this chapter will chart the role of the female friend in the development of Charlotte Brontë’s professional identity and her creation of characters such as Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, who speak powerfully of feminist concerns. The chapter will argue that female friends played a crucial part in helping Charlotte Brontë develop an understanding of women’s rights and she went on to find ways to represent feminist ideas in her novels. During her childhood and teenage years Brontë wrote prolifically ‘as a man’, always employing male narrators. Indeed, her juvenilia is characterised by an overtly ‘masculine’ style forged through her collaboration with her brother Branwell and her immersion in the male-dominated discourse of the Tory periodical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. She gradually gained a feminist voice following her inclusion in a network of close female friends at Roe Head School, particularly valuing the influence of the radical feminist Mary Taylor, who went on to teach in Europe and then emigrated to New Zealand to set up a shop and become a writer. The letters exchanged between Brontë and her female friends offer valuable insights into the importance of the female network in the mid-nineteenth century, when the professions and higher education were closed to women. Later friends, such as the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, gave Brontë further opportunities to discuss women’s social roles and explore alternative identities to the prescribed ones of wife and mother. Examining Brontë’s letters, as well as her major novels, this chapter shows how her feminist ideas were shaped through the channels of a Victorian female friendship network.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in [The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism] on [01/12/2023], available online: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Literature-and-Feminism/Carroll-Tolan/p/book/9780367410261
2023-12-01T00:00:00Z“This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend”: Romantic Satanism and Loving Opposition in Good Omens
http://hdl.handle.net/10034/628228
“This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend”: Romantic Satanism and Loving Opposition in Good Omens
Tankard, Alex
In the last years of the Cold War, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a buddy-comedy about two disillusioned field agents putting humanity before their respective sides to avert nuclear Armageddon. Gaiman’s 2019 television adaptation of Good Omens updated its setting to the present day – a questionable decision in the light of how successfully Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010), Stranger Things (2016-), and The Americans (2013-2018) demonstrated the stylistic and dramatic potential of blending a variety of genres in Cold-War settings. More importantly, while the adaptation kept brief scenes of secret agents meeting in St James Park, they were unrooted from their Cold War context, discarding the novel’s effective (and affective) shorthand for friendship between enemies in the shadow of mutually-assured destruction.
In his DVD commentary, Gaiman explained that he “wound up having to write this [screenplay] as a love story. And part of the joy of writing a love story is the breakup” (“Hard Times” 51:58-52:12). For the necessary emotional tension, the adaptation found an imaginative framework in the novel’s literary ancestry: Romantic Satanism. With their partnership as gentleman-spies stripped away, the adaptation exposed, at the core of Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship, the paradoxical opposition and fluidity of angels and devils found in British Romantic-Satanic literature, like William Blake’s illustrated Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).
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2023-08-08T00:00:00Z