The American and British Studies Annual (ABSA, ISSN 2788-2233) is an open-access scholarly peer-reviewed journal focused on American and British cultural studies. Our aim is to create a platform for scholarly exchange not only within the Czech Republic but internationally. We seek original articles that explore wide range of issues concerning American and British literature, visual arts, music and other cultural phenomena as well as cultural history. The editors encourage submissions from scholars working in various disciplines with interests in American and British cultures, as well as articles with interdisciplinary perspectives on those cultures. We also devote a portion of the journal to outstanding undergraduate student contributions.
Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, University of Pardubice
The Stage of Contamination: Performing Environmental Racism through Water in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s cullud wattah
The paper examines Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s award-winning play cullud wattah (2021) as a powerful dramatization of environmental injustice centering on the Flint Water Crisis as both a historical event and a symbol of systemic racism in the United States. Through the lens of environmental justice scholarship and the concept of “slow violence,” this analysis explores how race, class, and gender intersect to shape unequal access to clean water. The play foregrounds the lived experiences of a working-class African American family grappling with the physical, psychological, and spiritual consequences of toxic water contamination. The Cooper women represent generational responses to oppression, ranging from resignation and complicity to spiritual resilience and political activism. The staging transforms contaminated water into a powerful symbol of both trauma and resistance, while the absence of theatrical closure emphasizes the unresolved nature of the crisis. Integrating legal, political, and cultural critiques, cullud wattah emerges as a compelling call to action advocating for truth-telling, reparations, and structural change.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrea Holešová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Advancing Environmental Justice By Expanding The Literary Canon
Review of Petr Kopecký and Jan Beneš, eds. Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literature (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2025)
Copyright (c) 2025 Paul Von Blum https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Untrue Island Re-visited: Three Encounters with Orford Ness
The present paper deals with three texts inspired by the topography and secretive military history of the East Anglian offshore shingle spit Orford Ness. Each may be considered a specific example of a hybrid genre. The first part presents Robert Macfarlane’s Ness (2019) as an explicitly eco-centric and experimental poetic response to this unique territory. The poem’s five “more-than-human forms” are related to the notions of haecceities, the smooth space, Aeon, and the concept of rhizomes in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. The latter part of this article focuses on Polly Crosby’s fictional island Dohhalund from her second novel, The Unravelling (2022). Though this novel is referred to as a historical mystery, it clearly does not represent the traditional whodunit genre. First, the treatment of Orford Ness in Crosby’s text will be confronted with another hybrid of a book, W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995), a novel acknowledged by Crosby as a major influence. The final section shifts focus to Crosby’s island setting as a site of transformation, offering a surprisingly non-anthropocentric perspective comparable to that of Macfarlane’s Ness.
Copyright (c) 2025 Magdalena Potočňáková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Phenomenon of Adultification in R. Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
This article examines the representation of adultification in Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), focusing on how the narrative positions children within adult roles and responsibilities. Central to the analysis are the concepts of boundary dissolution and parentification, alongside the recurring tropes of the child redeemer and the lost child, and pervasive experiences of trauma and ennui. Through these frameworks, Riggs’s characters are shown inhabiting liminal identities that blur conventional distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of “growing sideways,” the article explores how the peculiar children resist linear models of development and instead inhabit non-normative trajectories of growth shaped by delay, repetition, and queer temporality. By examining these narrative and psychological dimensions, the discussion highlights how Riggs portrays childhood as a space of burden, responsibility, and vulnerability. Ultimately, the article argues that Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children challenges conventional frameworks of childhood, offering a complex vision of growth and identity that unsettles developmental norms.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nikola Kmošková Bajerová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Geography of the Narrative Self in Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
This paper examines how Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018) engages in ongoing debates concerning embodied consciousness and personal identity yet to be resolved by current theories linking mind and body. The analysis integrates a neuroscientific approach (Greenfield), narrative self theory (Dennett, Schechtman), pre-narrative self-consciousness (Zahavi), embodied narrative (Brandon), transpersonal psychology (Grof), and Eastern philosophical concepts (Blackmore, Watts) with close textual analysis to study how Turton's protagonist navigates self-definition across multiple bodily experiences. His behaviour and actions are influenced by emotions, skills and reasoning that he perceives as temporarily acquired from the body and mind of his current 'host’. Although initially it may appear paradoxical, Turton's narrative constructs a complex geography of personal identity, suggesting that consciousness persists independently of specific embodiment, while remaining fundamentally shaped by bodily experience. This paper examines the capacity of speculative fiction to engage with philosophical problems of the mind-body relationship and to advocate for alternative approaches to selfhood and embodied consciousness.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elzbieta Perkowska-Gawlik https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Academia Betwixt: Liminality and Transgression in David Lodge’s Changing Places
David Lodge’s Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975) captures academia’s inherent liminality through its exchange academics on two campuses. This paper examines how Lodge frames academic exchange as a ritualized border-crossing, drawing on Arnold Van Gennep’s rites of passage and Victor Turner’s interstructural situations to analyze characters suspended between places and their liminal experiences, Philip Swallow’s transformative sojourn in America and Morris Zapp’s humbling exile in England. The novel’s geo-poetic contrasts – Euphoria’s sun-drenched ambition versus Rummidge’s industrial simplicity – portrays campuses as two distinct geographies where the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization unfold. Lodge’s formal experimentation – epistolary chapters, film scripts, and metafictional play – creates an alternative “narrative liminality” where readers inhabit a “third space” between fiction and reality. The analysis highlights key scenes which extend this liminality beyond the text. Ultimately, Changing Places transforms the campus novel into a comic but insightful study of transgression in which geographic, institutional, and textual border-crossings reveal the unstable fault lines beneath academic life. NOTE: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 41st AAAS Annual Conference “Space Oddities: Urbanity, American Identity, and Cultural Exchange,” held at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, November 21-23, 2014
Copyright (c) 2025 I. Murat Öner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
“Time Never Worked That Way:” Toni Morrison’s Disruption of Historical Chronology in Beloved
This article reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) as a form, intervention and expansion of Black temporality. Rather than retelling history in linear time, Morrison uses a recursive, ghosted narrative that deconstructs the divide between past and present. Drawing on Tao Leigh Goffe's concept of “maroon time,” the novel is here read as a refusal of Enlightenment chrononormativity as well as racial capitalism's demand for closure, progress, and resolution. With Morrison's free indirect discourse, fractured pace, and spectrality, Beloved inscribes time as trauma, survival, and resistance. The novel re-writes the Black womb as a site not of reproduction but of temporal disjunction, its form possessing a fugitive beat that shatters Western historiography. Morrison extends the grammar of Black narration by architecting a temporality which is incomplete, relational, and speculative, rendering the novel an ethical and political site of refusal.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yazdan Mahmoudi , Sayyed Navid Etedali Rezapoorian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Oceanic Tale: Trauma, Technology and Cultural Resistance in Richard Powers’s Playground
The article appears to be one of the first academic treatments of Richard Powers’s Playground (2024) to delve into the intertwining narratives of humanity and nature within the Anthropocene epoch. Powers examines the ethical, emotional, and existential dilemmas posed by climate change and technological advancement through his characters and their engagement with an aquatic ecosystem. We explore how the author addresses the issues of environmental (ocean) pollution, AI, childhood trauma, (de)humanisation, and cultural resistance to reflect the complexities of the human condition represented in Anthropocene fiction. Within the interdisciplinary realm, we bring together various perspectives from the (environmental) humanities and ecocultural studies, emphasizing the crucial significance of discussing current crises through culture. An ecocritical reading of Playground reveals how Powers critiques anthropocentrism and illustrates the consequences of ecological neglect, ultimately advocating for a more harmonious coexistence with the natural world. Powers’s captivating story of personal tragedies, environmental issues, anxieties of the Anthropocene, cultural myths, and the critique of overreliance on technology prompts readers to reflect on their roles within the global ecosystem, the importance of environmental stewardship, and the urgency of addressing climate change, while fostering a sustainable future.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrii Bezrukov , Oksana Bohovyk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Rewriting the Mothers in Joyce’s Dubliners for the 21st Century: Oona Frawley’s “The Boarding House” and Elske Rahill’s “A Mother”
Within the multifaceted portrayals of the people in James Joyce’s seminal short story collection Dubliners (1914), a complex and not particularly positive portrayal of motherhood emerges, as the mothers attempt to support their children in ways that may appear rather problematic. For example, in “The Boarding House,” Mrs Mooney manoeuvres the well-off Mr Doran into an affair and, consequently, a wedding with her daughter, knowing he will be careful not to harm his reputation. Similarly, in “A Mother,” Mrs Kearney attempts to use the Irish Revival to improve her family’s social standing by arranging for her daughter Kathleen to be hired as an accompanist for four concerts, and then later insists on Kathleen being paid all the promised money regardless of the changing circumstances. In 2014, the collection Dubliners 100: Fifteen New Stories Inspired by the Original was published, with each story set in the early twenty-first century and adapted by a different contemporary Irish writer. This article thus aims to show how two women writers, Oona Frawley and Elske Rahill, rewrite and update Joyce’s portrayal of Irish motherhood in their versions of “The Boarding House” and “A Mother.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Petr Anténe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
“Persistence of Difference”: the National-Cultural Identity of the Cornish as a People on the Periphery of Britain
Cornish identity has been shaped by both Celtic and English influences. The county’s proximity to other Celtic peoples and its position on the periphery of Britain has fostered a “persistence of difference,” which, in turn, helped create a clear national-cultural identity, unique among other English counties. Cornish identity is also tied to forces of nature, industry, and tourism and, since the 19th century, the region and its people have experienced many changes, threats, and challenges. It has been during these times of upheaval and change that the Cornish have sought outlets to express and preserve their culture and infuse them with a distinct Cornish identity. The present paper discusses such cultural markers as language variety, politics, sport, and religion in this context and suggests that the Cornish, as a minority population group, have a national-cultural identity distinct from that of the majority English population, and that the position of the Cornish, as an ethnic group, is similar to that of minority groups in other countries (e.g. Basques, Catalans, or Rusyns).
Copyright (c) 2025 Eva Eddy, Jonathan Eddy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Hyperreality and the Mass Production of Destiny: Baudrillardian Simulacra in Never Let Me Go
Existing scholarship on Never Let Me Go has primarily engaged with its ethical, philosophical, and socio-political implications, particularly regarding cloning, human rights, and the commodification of life. While critics such as Rachel Carroll and Amit Marcus have examined the novel’s deconstruction of normative discourses on humanity, and Shameem Black has explored its engagement with multiculturalism and globalization, insufficient attention has been given to its postmodern ontological dimensions. This article addresses this critical gap by applying Jean Baudrillard’s theories of hyperreality, simulation, and simulacra to Ishiguro’s dystopian narrative. It argues that Never Let Me Go functions as a meditation on the dissolution of reality, wherein clones exist as third- and fourth-order simulacra — entities that mask the absence of a profound reality. Through an analysis of Hailsham’s institutional mechanisms, the novel’s representations of nostalgia, and the commodification of identity, this study illuminates the ways in which Ishiguro’s work critiques the hyperreal structures that define late capitalist societies. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how Never Let Me Go challenges conventional distinctions between the authentic and the artificial, exposing the mechanisms through which contemporary societies manufacture consent and obscure the erosion of human agency.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ali Selki https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Translating and Interpreting George Orwell in Ukraine: A Study of Literary and Critical Engagement
This article explores the different ways George Orwell’s works have entered Ukrainian culture, with a particular focus on the translations that have introduced his sharp political commentary to Ukrainian readers. Apart from translations, we will examine other channels of interpretation, such as various adaptations and critical analyses, which have further expanded Orwell’s reach and influence in Ukraine. By analyzing these various forms of transmission, we would like to shed light on how Orwell’s themes have resonated in a Ukrainian context, and how his works continue to inspire reflection and discourse in a nation with its own complex history of sociopolitical struggle. This study represents the first attempt to gather and analyze the various interpretations of Orwell’s legacy within Ukraine.
Copyright (c) 2025 David Livingstone, Iryna Malyshivska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
“I Was Something You Pick Up and Take a Swig of”: Ecofeminist Toxic Discourse in Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen
Echoing ecofeminism’s long-standing concerns with the interconnection between the oppression of women and the degradation of the environment as a consequence of patriarchal and capitalist systems, this paper suggests that Jennifer Clement’s acclaimed novel Prayers for the Stolen (2014) should be read as representative of an ecofeminist toxic discourse, which enables the oppressed, where weak women characters find agency in telling their story and drawing attention to the multi-layered toxicity they have had to face. Such a reading not only highlights the novel’s preoccupation with and warning against pollution, toxicity, and overall environmental degradation – thus far explored by few scholars of Clement’s work – but also illuminates the inescapable connections Clement repeatedly draws between how nature and women are physically and mentally abused and poisoned by the same toxic patriarchal and capitalist forces.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anežka Morysová, Jan Beneš https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
From “Water Liars” to Yonder Stands Your Orphan: Pastimes, Sports, and Games Inside/Outside the Frame of Barry Hannah’s Eagle Lake Stories
For most of his career, Mississippi author Barry Hannah was deemed the postmodern heir to William Faulkner and is best known for the short fiction in his landmark collection Airships (1978), which begins with the muchanthologized story “Water Liars.” Like many of the meta-fictionalist masters of the 1970s (Barth, Coover, etc.), Hannah stepped inside/outside the frame of his fictions, often in his case by using highly elevated language, and syntax to depict a rogue’s gallery of down-and-out characters, as well as the construction of numerous autobiographical personas, which wink and wave to his initiated readers. Thus, Hannah’s fiction is not only funny, it is playful, as if to invite the reader into some fictional game. As Hannah’s career developed, this sense of gamesmanship only seemed to increase as the characters and settings of many fictions began to reappear or return for cameo appearances. The characters first introduced in “Water Liars” reappear intermittently throughout Hannah’s thirty-year career and populate the community we come to know as Eagle Lake, the setting for Hannah’s final novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001). While other critics have examined Hannah’s passions for tennis and golf as having thematic significance, this article will focus on the pastime of fishing as well as many other intertextual games played inside/outside the frame of Hannah’s Eagle Lake Stories, to reckon with how they inform his swan song, Yonder Stands Your Orphan. Ultimately, the paper will consider to what extent writing itself is a literary game on a meta level, a dynamic in which writers and tellers of tall tales strive against not only their peers but also their forbears.
Copyright (c) 2025 Brad Vice https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
[review of Milena Kaličanin and Soňa Šnircová, eds. Representations of the Local in the Postmillennial Novel: New Voices from the Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022)]
Copyright (c) 2024 Šárka Bubíková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
White Emotion and White Scopophilia: The Myth of Docile and Brute Blacks
This article investigates the resilience of the docility and brutality myths attributed to African Americans as demonstrated by three fairly recent film renditions. The focus is on the historical origins and the continued relevance of these tropes through white scopophilia and cognitive dissonance. The myths are analyzed in terms of their role in justifying racial hierarchies and reinforcing white supremacy within historical and contemporary contexts. Through a critical examination of historical texts by Lerone Bennett Jr. and portrayals in films such as Django Unchained and Twelve Years a Slave, the study demonstrates how these stereotypes are alternately emphasized or diminished to maintain white dominance. It argues that white America constructs African American identities with a strategic oscillation between docility and brutality to sustain control and alleviate white guilt. This manipulation is facilitated by psychological mechanisms that allow white individuals to hold contradictory beliefs about race without recognizing their inconsistencies. By detailing the dynamic usage of these myths, the article highlights how they are not static, but are strategically deployed to reaffirm white moral and authoritative supremacy as needed. The conclusion calls for a critical reassessment of racial representations in media and historical narratives to disrupt these enduring racial myths.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sayyed Navid Etedali Rezapoorian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
From Having Sympathy to Showing Empathy for the Demented: A Narratological Study of the Perspectives of Characters with Dementia in Away from Her, Still Alice, and The Father
The present study discusses the challenge of choosing an appropriate narrative structure for representing the unreliable perspective of characters with dementia in cinematic adaptations. The argument is that the chosen frameworks and techniques should create sympathy and empathy in readers/audience, and the ideal empathetic adaptation should choose narratological frameworks with the lowest level of coherence, narrative distancing and external focalization. As prototypical examples, the study focuses on the cinematic adaptations of three literary texts which treat dementia as their main thematic concern: Away from Her (2007), Still Alice (2014), and The Father (2021). The study employs critical categories and conceptualizations proposed by Per Krogh Hansen regarding unreliable perspectives, as well as the critical views of Gulce Torun, the latter of whom domesticates Endel Tulving’s mnemonic functions of episodic memory in her narratological discussions regarding the rapport between unreliable perspectives and memory. The analysis identifies features of intranarrational, internarrational, and extratextual unreliability as well as corresponding features of semantic, episodic, archival, and constructivist memory in the adaptations.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hossein Mohseni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article examines the portrayal of siblings and sibling relationships in folktales. It focuses on tales from collections with either British or American cultural backgrounds that include siblings as main or secondary characters. The methodology in this research is strongly inspired by the study of sibling relationships in young children’s literature conducted by Laurie Kramer, Sonia Noorman, and Renee Brockman in 1999. Folktales are analysed in terms of the birth order of main characters, their gender, and themes that characterise the relationships and behaviour of siblings. The structuralist framework of Vladimir Propp is employed to classify character functions, such as heroes, helpers, and villains, within the narratives. Furthermore, this article challenges, to some extent, certain traditional views regarding folktale characters, ultimately highlighting the importance of scholarly research into sibling dynamics in literature.
Copyright (c) 2024 Kateřina Pecková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
“Nature’s Work:” Carolus Clusius and His Ties to the Sidney Circle
Philip Sidney’s European sojourn (1572-1577) was undoubtedly a formative experience, one that shaped his political and literary development. Unsurprisingly, it has received much commentary. Nevertheless, one rather neglected sphere of influence on Sidney’s education that deserves fuller attention is the coterie of high-standing and learned figures based in Central Europe, many of whom Sidney either corresponded with or met in person. This essay will consider the role of Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), a distinguished French botanist employed at the imperial court in Vienna. The influence of Clusius in Sidney’s intellectual circle and Sidney’s correspondence network will be surveyed, as well as whether Sidney’s exposure to the work of Clusius and other botanists, physicians and emblematists would have inspired Sidney’s ideas.
Copyright (c) 2024 Martina Kastnerová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
From Eastern Prophets to Syrian Yankees: Tracing the First Generations of Arab American Writers
The article discusses the first generations of Arab American writers with the aim to identify the narrative strategies they employed. The focus is primarily on the representatives of the Mahjar movement (Khalil Gibran, Ameen Rihani) along with observations of the roles that they adopted through their writing pursuits (the role of the prophet/man of letters). Furthermore, the text examines selected literary works of Salom Rizk, Vance Bourjaily, and William Peter Blatty as the representatives of the second generation of Arab American authors who desired to be identified as Americans. The article argues that in the first two generations of Arab American writers, the authors’ storytelling techniques are generally rooted either in self-orientalizing narrative strategies as represented by the character of an “Eastern prophet” or by an assimilating strategy epitomized by the character of a “Syrian Yankee.”
Copyright (c) 2024 Zuzana Dostálová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Czech-ing Shakespeare: Tracing Shakespeare’s Influence (not only) in Czech Advertisements
Shakespeare’s plays are indisputably among the most translated, staged, and adapted works for both theatre and screen. The texts undergo updating, recontextualization, and transcultural adaptation to engage audiences across different age groups, thereby facilitating their reception. This article explores Shakespeare’s position in modern popular culture. Initially, Shakespeare’s status in popular culture is discussed, drawing on the concepts of Graham Holderness (1988), Douglas Lanier (2002, 2006), and Marjorie Garber (2008). The article then examines selected popular Shakespearean representations, such as Richard Burt’s concept of “Schlockspeare” (2002), which focuses on the use of catchphrases, references, along with both textual and visual allusions to Shakespeare in advertising (e.g. mortgage loans from Commercial Bank, a Shakespeare-inspired yogurt, etc.). The objective is to demonstrate that popular culture serves to disseminate Shakespeare’s work without diminishing its inherent value, echoing Graham Holderness’s assertion that Shakespeare is, here, now, always, what is currently being made of him.”
Copyright (c) 2024 Ivona Mišterová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Secular Shakespeare: Robert Green Ingersoll in the Context of American Bardolatry
As American Literature began to depart from European models in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shakespeare came to be venerated with increasing enthusiasm, and was often regarded in quasi-religious terms, even as other British writers fell out of favor. This “Bardolatry” culminated in the late nineteenth century with the critical and appreciative writings of Robert Green Ingersoll, who was both the most prolific writer on Shakespeare and the most celebrated atheist and secularist of his age. Ingersoll’s appropriation of Shakespeare, as both a sceptic whose political and religious opinions reflected his own and an object of religious veneration to resemble and challenge the figure of Christ, exercised a strong influence on later writers, both popular and academic. This influence shaped the way in which Shakespeare is now widely regarded in America as the one indispensable secular writer and the center of a world canon.
Copyright (c) 2024 Colin Cavendish-Jones https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Things Can Only Get Dickensian: An Analysis of Media Coverage of Britain’s Cost of Living Crisis
The period following the 2008 financial crisis saw the UK enter a period of austerity, exacerbated by the wide-ranging welfare spending cuts of consecutive Conservative governments. Nevertheless, when it appeared that the situation could not become more dire for struggling Britons, the country found itself in the grips of a cost of living crisis precipitated by several concurrent developments such as inflation, an energy crisis, and the fallout from Brexit. Using qualitative thematic analysis, this article examines coverage of the crisis by the British press by exploring how individual newspapers on both the political right and left have chosen to report on the indicators, causes, and victims. The aim is to establish whether the standard political leanings of the papers apply here, or whether the situation is so exceptional in its urgency that the usual stereotypes (strivers/scroungers, deserving/undeserving poor) have been abandoned for a more unified discourse.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alice Tihelková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Liquid Metaphor in Becoming Animal by David Abram: A Transmodern Perspective Entangled with Phenomenological Insights
Becoming Animal (2010) by David Abram represents a significant contribution to eco-phenomenological literature. The work describes how, by focusing on the aspect of becoming animal, i.e., tuning our senses to the pulse of the Earth, we can become fully human. The main point of the present paper is to explore the figurative language so abundantly used by the author to determine how it can play a part in opening our senses and helping us to engage with extra-linguistic reality. One recurring theme in the work is interbeing and the fluidity among all participants, a premise which influenced the selection of transmodern concepts as one of my analytical approaches. My examination of figuration is supported by conceptual metaphor theory enriched by the embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his descriptions of how the body plays a crucial role in the creation of metaphorical expressions. The exploration of imagery reveals that metaphor exhibits not only transmodern movement across signs and extra-linguistic reality but is liquid in itself, featuring the potential for free, spirited reversibility, as well as oscillation between metaphorical analogy and literal meaning.
Copyright (c) 2024 Agata Walek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Henry Bibb’s (Dis)claiming Family: Malinda as a Case Study of Black Women’s Symbolic Annihilation in Antebellum Literature
Existing scholarship on the autobiography Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb prioritizes Bibb’s masculinity and the impact of slavery on Black families, often overlooking the complex experiences of enslaved Black women such as Bibb’s first wife Malinda within such a narrative. Amy Lewis’s article “Who’ll Speak for Malinda?” distinguishes itself by offering an alternative narrative focusing on Malinda’s experience. My paper builds on Lewis’s work by arguing that despite condemning slavery, Bibb’s narrative inadvertently perpetuates Malinda’s symbolic annihilation. Through a close reading of Bibb, my study attempts to reveal how enslaved women’s experiences are often omitted, trivialized, and condemned in American antebellum literature. By devoting particular attention to the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved women, this paper responds to Amy Lewis’s call for alternate narratives and offers a critical shift in reading and interpreting depiction and omission of Black women in ex-enslaved narratives throughout nineteenth-century antebellum America. This approach has the potential to uncover the complex realities of Black women to offer valuable insights into their lives and experiences, thus challenging dominant interpretations of slave narratives.
Copyright (c) 2024 Asmaa Alshehri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
A Personal Apocalypse: Ecological Poetics in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Greenleaf”
Mrs. May, the main character in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Greenleaf,” undergoes a personal apocalypse. Her destiny is foreshadowed throughout the short story in her struggle with accepting ecological thinking. This paper analyses “Greenleaf” through an ecocritical perspective and focuses on O’Connor’s unique employment of the trope of apocalypticism as well as nature metaphors. While previous research in O’Connor studies has delved into the theme of ecology, the concern of this paper is to discuss the author’s ecological poetics, which thus far remain under-researched. Building my analysis on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor, I will argue that Mrs. May’s personal apocalypse is metaphorical and expresses the theme of anthropocentrism as a cataclysmic force. My goal is to demonstrate how O’Connor’s ecological poetics become evident through apocalyptic tropology and nature metaphors.
Copyright (c) 2023 Simona Bajáková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Gender Issues in Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller
Through an exploration of the comfort women system, this article analyzes how the female gender has been oppressed in history. It follows the story of Akiko, the main character of Comfort Woman (1998) by Asian American author Nora Okja Keller. Keller is one of the first authors to write about comfort women, gaining publicity for this issue. This article provides an examination of terms such as sex, gender, and gender issues. Certain concepts influencing American and Asian cultures and their stance towards gender are also analyzed, after which focus is placed on the portrayal of gender roles as illustrated in the novel. The article briefly mentions the history of the relationship between the United States and Korea. The characteristics of the comfort women system are described as well as the causes leading to its establishment such as patriarchy, Confucian traditions, and the exploitability of lower-class society. Additionally, the article highlights how the comfort women issue helped define feminist theory in the US and identifies the transnational nature of the issues involved.
Copyright (c) 2023 Barbora Frizelová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Frustration, Boredom, and Fantasy: Augusta Webster’s “Circe”
The present article examines how Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue “Circe” (1870), represents the problem of women’s boredom, frustration, and fantasy through the reinterpretation of the mythological Greek enchantress Circe. The analysis offers a close reading of the text supported by philosophical, historical, and cultural notions of boredom. Webster’s poem functions as an intriguing commentary on how loneliness and hatred towards domesticity are accompanied by growing sexual frustration and even misandry. My reading proposes a fresh look at Webster’s work, incorporating a number of critical, mostly feminist, analyses of the poem. Indeed, Webster’s “Circe” acts as a provocative glimpse into the psycho-scape of a bored woman who gradually reveals her incessant desires for change and a perfect lover.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dorota Osinska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Cats Can Be Dangerous to Your Relationships: Cats in the Fiction of Jim Grimsley
In the context of culture’s fascination with cats, the present article analyzes the use of felines in two pieces of fiction by the southern writer Jim Grimsley: the short story “The Cathouse Lovers” (1976) and his novel Comfort & Joy (1993 in German, 1999 in English). The two texts differ greatly in terms of the genre, period, as well as the role of cats in the story, yet both of them include the motif of cats that have a negative effect on the romantic and sexual relationships of their human protagonists.
Copyright (c) 2023 Roman Trušník https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Two (Postmodern) Czech Shakespearean Adaptations: Claudius and Gertrude and Emodrink of Elsinore
In her book on adaptation theory, Linda Hutcheon1 argues that “[n]either the product nor the process of adaptation exists in a vacuum: they all have a context - a time and a place, a society, and a culture.” Texts travel from their locus originis to other destinations, times, and contexts, crossing geographical, language, and genre borders, and creating their own palimpsestic identity. As Hutcheon2 states, “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative - a work that is second without being secondary.” The objective of the article is to examine two Czech adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Claudius and Gertrude (2007) by Jiří Stránský and Jakub Špalek, which was inspired by Saxo Grammaticus and John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and Emodrink of Elsinore (2009) by Josef Prokeš. The two plays differ significantly. Stránský and Špalek retell the story that precedes the well-known events at Elsinore and remade the remake. Prokeš, on the other hand, transfers the action to an obscure nightclub, turning Hamlet into a bartender accompanied by a faithful dog (albeit embodied by a human) and incorporating some Czech allusions. The paper focuses on the intertextual aspects of the Czech plays and their vertical rather than horizontal existence.
Copyright (c) 2023 Ivona Mišterová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0