The AnaChronisT

Radical Continuities

Csaba József Spalovszky — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Alexander Regier, Exorbitant Enlightenment. Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Repetition and Innovation

Antonio Sanna — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Dracula 2020

A Fascinating Case Study of Jewish-Irish Literary Connections

Mária Kurdi — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Dan O’Brien, Fine Meshwork. Philip Roth, Edna O’Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2020)

A Tale of More than Two Cities

Dietmar Larcher — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Tamás Juhász (ed.), Art in Urban Space (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary and Éditions L'Harmattan, 2021).

A Window Into the World of Alice Dunbar Nelson

Jafar Baba — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Tara T. Green, Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022)

Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth

Erzsébet Stróbl — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The historical romance of Kenilworth (1821) by Sir Walter Scott redefined for his own generation the cultic image of Queen Elizabeth I of the previous centuries. The Scottish author moulded the famous Virgin Queen of English history into a British icon by referencing the common English-language literary heritage shared by all subjects living on the British Isles. Scott based his plot upon the contemporary antiquarian accounts of the 1575 Kenilworth visit of Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Leicester. While he handled historical chronology in a rather loose manner, in his descriptions of detail he followed the sixteenth-century sources about the events that were collected and published by John Nichols between 1788 and 1821. Utilising the romantic interest in such antiquarian reports, Scott filled up the gaps of grand history about the private life of the Queen by quoting exact details from these contemporary documents. Scott’s writing in the new genre of the historical novel was persuasive through its material authenticity which justified the fictious elements that explored the feminine aspects of the Queen’s personality. Scott also utilised the Romantic interest of his age in the picturesque countryside through which he depicted Queen Elizabeth’s character both as a public monarch and a private woman. Furthermore, by the choice of a peaceful reception rather than a military victory, Scott could promote a new and modern understanding of monarchy. For him royal festivity bridged the differences between national groups that lived on a common land inherited by all layers of society. Thus, Kenilworth established a new interpretation of the cultic figure of Queen Elizabeth that rested on the glories of the English past but catered for the needs of a newly formed United Kingdom of the nineteenth century.

The Brier-Patch in the Kailyard

Tom Hubbard — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At the turn of the nineteenth century, conservatively sentimental fictions, often religious and/or provincial in context, were answered by other works based on a realist and/or modernist aesthetic. In two novels by Canon Patrick Sheehan, Geoffrey Austin, Student (1895) and its sequel, The Triumph of Failure (1899), the central character moves from religious scepticism through secular philosophies to a rediscovery of faith. Whatever the failings of its human adherents, religious faith—and its institutions—are seen as benign. Novels which challenge this include Gerard O’Donovan’s Father Ralph (1913), the autobiographical work of a former priest who exposes what he considers the conformist mediocrity of actually-existing Catholicism, and Brinsley MacNamara’s The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), a controversial study of small-town narrow-mindedness and religiosity. Such works are comparable to the better-known critiques of James Joyce and George Moore. Sheehan’s “A Spoiled Priest” (1905) finds a Scottish Presbyterian counterpart in S. R. Crockett’s “The Stickit Minister” (1893). In both these short stories, the aspiring clergyman’s failure is a personal one, and the respective religious cultures remain unquestioned. Crockett and Ian Maclaren, the author of the short-story collection, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), belong to the so-called “Kailyard” (cabbage-patch) school of Scottish writers who presented an idealised picture of small-town life. An unrelentingly dark riposte to the Kailyard, however, is supplied by George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901); this novel is a Scottish equivalent of The Valley of the Squinting Windows. In the US, certain Southern white writers maintained that the wrong side won the Civil War, and that slavery was not inhumane. Such attempts to legitimise racism were exposed by African-American writers, notably Charles Chesnutt in works such as “The Goophered Grapevine” (1887). However, the stories of Joel Chandler Harris—a white Southerner—are not as cosy as they might at first appear: in his Uncle Remus books (1880, 1883), Brer Rabbit can be seen as the black trickster who can outwit his oppressor Brer Fox (= the slave-owner/overseer), as in the tale of Brer Rabbit, the Tar-Baby and the Brier-patch. As we would expect, there are vast differences in the historical and ideological contexts of these Irish, Scottish, and American works, but the patterns of force and counterforce are remarkably similar.

The Enigma Code of “The Secret Sharer”

George Kutash — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While most commentary on Joseph Conrad’s novella, “The Secret Sharer,” focus on the loneliness of the Narrator-Captain and on his perception of the fugitive Leggatt as his "double," this article shifts the attention away from these issues, and onto some other noteworthy aspects of the story. Conrad’s piece of fiction is connected to a historical event which took place on board HMS Cutty Sark in 1880. There, Captain James Wallace committed suicide under the weight of responsibility he felt for a crime that had taken place on his clipper, and for his decision to allow the murder-accused to quietly slip away, thus perverting the course of justice. As an analysis of hints given in the story as to the protagonists’ age and personal circumstances reveals, Conrad’s Narrator-Captain is, in fact, James Wallace’s fictional reincarnation, for whom Conrad rewrites history and provides him with a triumphant denouement. Conrad, thus, gives a different finale to the real-life saga and rescues young Captain James Wallace form an ignominious suicidal end. Conrad is motivated in this both by personal sympathy, and by social-class solidarity felt for Captain James Wallace. Further, the article contains a discussion of the structure of the narrative, which shows that the first half of the text is crafted in the form of a "tale of assembly," and an examination of the naming convention, which reveals that Conrad’s practice of naming or leaving a person un-named in the story marks position in social hierarchy, and is a deliberate device.

Constructing Black Subjectivity

Mónika Dénes — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Trauma and recovery are the two ends of the process that Toni Morrison’s novels are centred around. Characters carry either transgenerational traumas or they experience them in early childhood. Once they are traumatised, they are much more likely to receive several layers of wounds in the future. This essay explores the different types and sources of trauma, as well as ways of recovery, in five of Toni Morrison’s novels: The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Home, A Mercy and God Help the Child. It concludes that all the main characters suffer from being neglected and refused as children; some of them were said to be ugly and/or used as bodies (objects) by their parents. Social acceptance and forgiveness are identified as the main sources of the healing process as storytelling starts with the creation of a listener (often in another communicational level: the trauma victim narrates the story to the reader of the novel), thereby establishing a relationship between the trauma victim and the community.

Defenceless Bodies in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Dóra Sápy — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The article discusses the relation of the hand and humanness, a relation which permeates the novels of South African author John Maxwell Coetzee. It focuses on the hand’s protecting function in one of Coetzee’s earlier novels, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The article argues that the free use of the hands has often been overlooked in definitions of what it means to be human, but to deprive someone of the hands, or of the capacity to use them is one of the most important means of dehumanisation. First, the paper examines how we understand being human in general through Nick Haslam’s theory on the two different senses of humanness and the two respective types of dehumanisation. While non-physical (cognitive, psychological, and social) characteristics have been analysed extensively in discussions of the features that make us human, the role of the body has often been neglected. However, Coetzee’s works show that the specificities of the human body, and especially the human hand as an "instrument" to protect, create, communicate, and connect with the world and others through touch is a key feature of humanity. The restriction of the hands leaves the body defenceless, thus in a vulnerable state not dissimilar to that of animal bodies. The article concludes that in Coetzee’s novel, the disablement of the hands results in animalistic dehumanisation.

Natural Areas and Places in Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf Reflecting on the Status of Arabs in the US

Rashideh Ghazi Badran — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this paper is to examine the human connection with nature, place, and the physical environment in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) in order to demonstrate the ways the Arab American author employs these themes to reflect the diasporic experience of her protagonist, providing (in)direct commentary on the wavering location of Arab Americans in repellent contexts, on the one hand, and offering readers a possible solution, on the other. This paper, then, explores the portrayal of nature, place, and environment in Kahf’s novel as an active agent that accompanies the protagonist throughout the events of the plot to finally highlight the way she finds to reconcile with the world, blend differences, and find inner balance.

The Abject Body of History

Noura Elaoun — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Across the disciplines and ages, the human body has been approached as complex, political, and mysterious. Caught in an intricate socio-cultural fabric, it acquires and projects multiple patterns of symbolism, seized by literature to convey deep realities and perplexing themes. The body has become to be recognised as an eloquent metaphor for postcolonial writers, effectively staging the resistance to colonial practices and discourse. It is from the insides of such a body that the strange voice of a worm emerges and recounts its memories in Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “Tape Measure,” from Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (2007). Drawing on the insights of trauma studies, this paper focuses on the body as a metaphor to show how its use addresses the problematics of memory reconstruction and its limitations in the South African context. The unnatural voice of the worm articulates South African history as an abject “body” marked by “filthy” crimes, proposing the legacy of racism as an “excremental” practice that stains South African reality. The analogy finds its purchase in Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of the “abject” as “lack of cleanliness” and “monstrous”; history, thus, emerges as dark and deformed, and memories are hard to “expel.”