2 The twin demons of aristocratic society in Sir Gowther Alcuin Blamires Sir Gowther is a 700-line narrative probably originating (in its Middle English form) about 1400 in the North Midlands. It is extant in two mildly divergent manuscript texts, which will here be referred to as the ‘Advocates’ and ‘Royal’ versions.1 Sir Gowther is conspicuous for that surface crankiness and drastic speed which are often found in medieval English verse romances and which readily provoke a modern reader’s suspicion that no very challenging contact with medieval society is being
sustainability: some definitions With the publication of MaddAddam in 2013, the story that Margaret Atwood began with Oryx and Crake in 2003 and continued with The Year of the Flood in 2009 stands complete and can be read as a single narrative. Over the course of the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood relies on notions of collapse, resilience, stability and sustainability as she establishes setting, navigates turns of plot and weighs the actions of characters, among which we must number the multinational corporations – OrganInc, HelthWyzer, AnooYoo and others – where several of her
7 The Siege of Jerusalem and recuperative readings Elisa Narin van Court Dismissed for years from serious critical attention, the fourteenthcentury alliterative narrative The Siege of Jerusalem1 has recently begun to generate the kind of interest associated with more canonical Middle English works. Scholarly studies have emerged to fill the lacunae of response and readings, and a new edition is forthcoming.2 In this essay I will argue that this new attention to Jerusalem is well deserved and long overdue, inhibited more by scholarly distaste for the poem
BOEHMER Makeup 3/22/05 2:55 PM Page 127 John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Job 7 Transfiguring: colonial body into postcolonial narrative to get me out of the belly of my patriarchal mother . . . [distance] my eye from her enough so as to see her in a different way, not fragmented into her metaphoric parts. Crossing through the symbol while I am writing. An exercise in deconditioning that allows me to acknowledge my own legitimacy. The means whereby every woman tries to exist; to be illegitimate no more. (Nicole Brossard, These Our Mothers)1 The
societies. As histories of violence and restraint are usually written from national and nationalist perspectives, this volume brings global approaches to the study of violence to probe historical assumptions about the limits of violence and its decline during the early modern period. It thereby also questions narratives of the inexorable rise of the nation state alongside historical periodization of the ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’. The study of violence offers a way to connect otherwise potentially disparate historical themes, since it relates to so many other aspects of
, and we know not how many more places in our Eastern empire. 1 During this life of global mobility, Earle also lived in New South Wales, Australia, and, most pertinently for this chapter, in Aotearoa New Zealand, writing the travel book A Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand, in 1827 (1832). 2 Although Earle’s works were originally produced primarily for a metropolitan audience in London, they have since made him one of the most important European visual artists of Aotearoa New Zealand working immediately prior to formal colonisation, as well
provides a case study of how the reality was not so simple. The IODE collaborated with the SOSBW in this impressive cross-Canada tour. In its organization, itinerary and subjects, the tour provides a vivid snapshot of the IODE’s ideal Canada. The itinerary formed a narrative of superior British-based culture, economy and politics in a modern resource-rich, technologically advanced, democratic Canadian
9 The unsustainable aesthetics of sustainability: the sense of an ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods Adeline Johns-Putra Jeanette Winterson’s 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, is a critique of progress, both in the general sense of movement, journeying, or going forward, and in the specialised sense of human development, particularly the privileging of economic and scientific improvement that is often called the myth or narrative of progress. In the spirit of so many of Winterson’s novels, The Stone Gods places its several protagonists on journeys, most
calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. More specifically, I want to closely examine how artistic silence and narrative breakdown in texts by Northern Irish writers and visual artists often result from an unwillingness to respond to atrocity due to the need to remain ‘expertly civil tongued’,4 from a perception that art lacks efficacy in (what is perceived to be) a cyclical, pre-ordained conflict, and from a sense of being at a disabling temporal, cultural or spatial distance 9780719075636_4_017.qxd 288 16/2/09 9:30 AM Page 288 After words from
CEO firmly representative of the one per cent. As the most privileged, he is nevertheless depicted as also being spectacularly broken and scarred by childhood trauma. Starting from and revolving around James’ articulation of a hurt, damaged man as an irresistible object of heterosexual desire, this chapter inquires after the intermeshing of privilege, vulnerability and desirability in the narrative fantasy of Fifty Shades. Written as fan fiction online and launched as e-books in 2011–12, James’ trilogy gained viral popularity and was published through Vintage as