This article presents a diachronic analysis of the word archegay, a weapons term that has its origins in early fourteenth-century French but first appears in written form in English around the end of the fifteenth century. I begin by considering the origins of the word, provide a new citation that antedates the earliest in the Oxford English Dictionary, and then examine evidence in French and Latin texts that show that the word’s referent was well known in England in the fourteenth century, even though no Middle English lexical item has yet been discovered. I discuss the implications that this has for our understanding of the currency of the term in the multilingual context of the later Middle Ages in England, then proceed to argue that later examples from the sixteenth century onwards (which appear to suggest that the word became accepted and even naturalised in English) are misleading, and that the word and its denotatum had by then become exotic and obscure. Finally, I demonstrate that the form harsegay, recorded in the nineteenth century, is a doublet borrowed from later French sources, and that it was frequently used by English writers with little comprehension of its meaning. 1. THE ORIGINS OF ARCHEGAY AS A LOANWORD IN ENGLISH Contact linguistics has demonstrated many of the difficulties to be found in the area of lexical borrowing. One issue that continues to be debated is the question of whether the nonce usage of a foreign word constitutes borrowing or merely code-switching. By extension, the question of when, or even whether, certain loanwords become naturalised in a language can be notoriously difficult to answer. At one extreme, a cluster of examples in a limited body of works must be considered inadequate proof that a loan has won general acceptance, even within a restricted or specialised group. At the other extreme, a larger number of attestations over several centuries need not necessarily indicate widespread adoption of a word, or even comprehension of its meaning in its adoptive language, as I shall argue in this paper. Furthermore, written evidence can be misleading, especially in a multilingual culture such as that of England in the Middle Ages, when (Middle) English, (Anglo-)French and (Anglo-)Latin comprised, in DOI 10.1515/ang-2012-0042 1 I am very grateful to Thom Richardson of the Royal Armouries, Leeds, for sharing information from his unpublished studies; also to John Kahn and Prof. Rajend Mesthrie for reading and commenting on early drafts of this paper. 2 See, for example, Sarah G. Thomason, Language Contact: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003) 131–36. varying degrees, the common linguistic stock of most literate persons. In such a culture, it is conceivable that a word – or even a set of cognate words for the same concept – might have spoken currency in one or more languages without necessarily being written down in all of them. Likewise, a word originating in one of these languages might be used in eithe
{"title":"Lexical Borrowing and Code-Switching: The Case of archegay/hasegaye/harsegay in the Middle Ages and Later","authors":"David Scott-Macnab","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0042","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents a diachronic analysis of the word archegay, a weapons term that has its origins in early fourteenth-century French but first appears in written form in English around the end of the fifteenth century. I begin by considering the origins of the word, provide a new citation that antedates the earliest in the Oxford English Dictionary, and then examine evidence in French and Latin texts that show that the word’s referent was well known in England in the fourteenth century, even though no Middle English lexical item has yet been discovered. I discuss the implications that this has for our understanding of the currency of the term in the multilingual context of the later Middle Ages in England, then proceed to argue that later examples from the sixteenth century onwards (which appear to suggest that the word became accepted and even naturalised in English) are misleading, and that the word and its denotatum had by then become exotic and obscure. Finally, I demonstrate that the form harsegay, recorded in the nineteenth century, is a doublet borrowed from later French sources, and that it was frequently used by English writers with little comprehension of its meaning. 1. THE ORIGINS OF ARCHEGAY AS A LOANWORD IN ENGLISH Contact linguistics has demonstrated many of the difficulties to be found in the area of lexical borrowing. One issue that continues to be debated is the question of whether the nonce usage of a foreign word constitutes borrowing or merely code-switching. By extension, the question of when, or even whether, certain loanwords become naturalised in a language can be notoriously difficult to answer. At one extreme, a cluster of examples in a limited body of works must be considered inadequate proof that a loan has won general acceptance, even within a restricted or specialised group. At the other extreme, a larger number of attestations over several centuries need not necessarily indicate widespread adoption of a word, or even comprehension of its meaning in its adoptive language, as I shall argue in this paper. Furthermore, written evidence can be misleading, especially in a multilingual culture such as that of England in the Middle Ages, when (Middle) English, (Anglo-)French and (Anglo-)Latin comprised, in DOI 10.1515/ang-2012-0042 1 I am very grateful to Thom Richardson of the Royal Armouries, Leeds, for sharing information from his unpublished studies; also to John Kahn and Prof. Rajend Mesthrie for reading and commenting on early drafts of this paper. 2 See, for example, Sarah G. Thomason, Language Contact: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003) 131–36. varying degrees, the common linguistic stock of most literate persons. In such a culture, it is conceivable that a word – or even a set of cognate words for the same concept – might have spoken currency in one or more languages without necessarily being written down in all of them. Likewise, a word originating in one of these languages might be used in eithe","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"94 1","pages":"264 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73207790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
on. And its author makes some excellent choices. He lifts Richard Price from the crime writing section, for instance, reading Lush Life as the smart, sophisticated novel that it is (the actual crime case at the core of the novel, O’Donnell argues, just serves as “the germinating seed for entanglement of desires, lies, motives, stories, and disavowals that brings together dozens of characters into an ad hoc community” [55]). The author reads Edward P. Jones’s quietly marvelous The Known World as a deceptively simple example of realist historical fiction and then exposes its metafictional, metahistorical subtext. Jones’ novel, O’Donnell shows, “suggests the degree to which the past lives on in the present, and is only separable as ‘epoch’ by virtue of the questionable fiction of historical progress” (146). And The American Novel Now gives Chang-rae Lee his due and his language “that is at once alien and native, possessed by none, and by all” (202). But again, the chapter raises questions rather than answering them. O’Donnell only discusses Lee’s most predictably ‘ethnic’ debut novel Native Speaker, leaving the author’s later works (such as the magisterial Aloft) as unexamined as Lee’s larger and complex project to move what some call multicultural American literature to a new, 21st century level. It is a characteristic pattern. O’Donnell makes discoveries. But he doesn’t have the time to make them come alive. There’s something to be said for the rushed approach (in order to save the novel, an endangered species, we may have to count the last of these big, quiet animals as quickly as possible). However, since the complex beauty of the individual work of art needs more than a few rushed paragraphs, it would be fascinating to see what O’Donnell, a passionate reader, would do with more time on his hands.
上。它的作者做了一些很好的选择。例如，他把理查德·普莱斯从犯罪写作部分中拉了出来，把《郁郁葱葱的生活》当作一本聪明、复杂的小说来读(奥唐纳认为，小说核心的实际犯罪案件只是“欲望、谎言、动机、故事和否认交织在一起的萌芽种子，把几十个人物聚集在一起，形成一个特别的社区”[55])。作者把爱德华·p·琼斯(Edward P. Jones)的《已知世界》(The Known World)作为现实主义历史小说的一个看似简单的例子来阅读，然后揭示了它的元虚构、元历史潜言。奥唐纳认为，琼斯的小说“表明了过去在多大程度上存在于现在，只有通过对历史进步的可疑虚构才能将其作为‘时代’加以区分”(146)。《现在的美国小说》给了李昌来应有的评价，他的语言“既异域又本土，无人拥有，又为众人所有”(202)。但是，这一章再次提出了问题，而不是回答问题。奥唐纳只讨论了李最具“种族”色彩的处女作《母语者》(Native Speaker)，对他的后期作品(如权威的《Aloft》)则只字不提，而李更宏大、更复杂的计划是把一些人所说的多文化美国文学提升到21世纪的新水平。这是一种典型的图案。奥唐纳有新发现。但他没有时间让他们活起来。这种匆忙的做法是有道理的(为了拯救小说这种濒临灭绝的物种，我们可能不得不尽快清点这些大型、安静的动物的最后数量)。然而，由于单个艺术作品的复杂之美需要的不仅仅是几个匆忙的段落，所以看到奥唐纳这位热情的读者在更多的时间里会做些什么，这将是一件令人着迷的事情。
{"title":"Robert Boschman. In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt","authors":"C. Gerhardt","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0017","url":null,"abstract":"on. And its author makes some excellent choices. He lifts Richard Price from the crime writing section, for instance, reading Lush Life as the smart, sophisticated novel that it is (the actual crime case at the core of the novel, O’Donnell argues, just serves as “the germinating seed for entanglement of desires, lies, motives, stories, and disavowals that brings together dozens of characters into an ad hoc community” [55]). The author reads Edward P. Jones’s quietly marvelous The Known World as a deceptively simple example of realist historical fiction and then exposes its metafictional, metahistorical subtext. Jones’ novel, O’Donnell shows, “suggests the degree to which the past lives on in the present, and is only separable as ‘epoch’ by virtue of the questionable fiction of historical progress” (146). And The American Novel Now gives Chang-rae Lee his due and his language “that is at once alien and native, possessed by none, and by all” (202). But again, the chapter raises questions rather than answering them. O’Donnell only discusses Lee’s most predictably ‘ethnic’ debut novel Native Speaker, leaving the author’s later works (such as the magisterial Aloft) as unexamined as Lee’s larger and complex project to move what some call multicultural American literature to a new, 21st century level. It is a characteristic pattern. O’Donnell makes discoveries. But he doesn’t have the time to make them come alive. There’s something to be said for the rushed approach (in order to save the novel, an endangered species, we may have to count the last of these big, quiet animals as quickly as possible). However, since the complex beauty of the individual work of art needs more than a few rushed paragraphs, it would be fascinating to see what O’Donnell, a passionate reader, would do with more time on his hands.","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"130 1","pages":"144 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89461988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One of the most important consequences of the leftist turn in German literary criticism in the late 1960s was the discovery of a whole new canon of texts written by authors forced to leave the German-speaking countries after the Nazi takeover in 1933. To be sure, renowned authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann or Franz Werfel had always received attention, but many writers – or artists, or scientists – who had not previously been acknowledged at home remained largely unknown and unread. The openings of the canon which occurred in the post-Sixties also benefitted authors in exile – albeit more for political than literary reasons. This distinction, of course, had become as obsolete as the traditional canon itself. Some thirty years after the discovery of exile literature, with the Sixties at a historical distance, the self-interest of German and Austrian critics in acknowledging exile writers had become apparent. By repatriating these authors, the children of the perpetrator generation tended to rehabilitate their own reputation as much as address the wrongs that had been committed vis-à-vis the exiles. Thus their reluctance to acknowledge these writers’ full biographies. Instead of focusing on their lifetime achievement and looking at them as the literary personalities they had become in the course of four, or five, or six, decades, they reduced them to the exilic condition. In short, they focused on the losses, not only to the exiles themselves but also to Germany and Austria, and neglected the gains made in the New World. In order to change this one-sided approach, the catastrophe defined by Germanistik was to be complemented by the new beginning analysed and commented on by American Studies. A number of investigations of Austrian and German exile writers began to be undertaken in American Studies in the 1990s, including Franzi Ascher-Nash, Mimi Grossberg, Anna Krommer, Felix Pollak, Johannes Urzidil and Wieland Herzfelde. The most recent – and a very successful example – is Ingrid Gehrke’s study of Carl Djerassi, the father of the “pill” and a chemist-turned-writer who wrote, looking back at his career: “If I hadn’t been born a Jew, I wouldn’t have left Vienna and would doubtless have ended up as an Austrian physician ...” – rather than becoming a world-famous scientist. Eugen Banauch’s study of four Jewish exile writers in Canada, however, is the first to solidly bring together the many theories and approaches connected with American cultural studies on the one hand and exile literature on the other. The
{"title":"Eugen Banauch. Fluid Exile: Jewish Exile Writers in Canada 1940–2006","authors":"Walter Grünzweig","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0012","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most important consequences of the leftist turn in German literary criticism in the late 1960s was the discovery of a whole new canon of texts written by authors forced to leave the German-speaking countries after the Nazi takeover in 1933. To be sure, renowned authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann or Franz Werfel had always received attention, but many writers – or artists, or scientists – who had not previously been acknowledged at home remained largely unknown and unread. The openings of the canon which occurred in the post-Sixties also benefitted authors in exile – albeit more for political than literary reasons. This distinction, of course, had become as obsolete as the traditional canon itself. Some thirty years after the discovery of exile literature, with the Sixties at a historical distance, the self-interest of German and Austrian critics in acknowledging exile writers had become apparent. By repatriating these authors, the children of the perpetrator generation tended to rehabilitate their own reputation as much as address the wrongs that had been committed vis-à-vis the exiles. Thus their reluctance to acknowledge these writers’ full biographies. Instead of focusing on their lifetime achievement and looking at them as the literary personalities they had become in the course of four, or five, or six, decades, they reduced them to the exilic condition. In short, they focused on the losses, not only to the exiles themselves but also to Germany and Austria, and neglected the gains made in the New World. In order to change this one-sided approach, the catastrophe defined by Germanistik was to be complemented by the new beginning analysed and commented on by American Studies. A number of investigations of Austrian and German exile writers began to be undertaken in American Studies in the 1990s, including Franzi Ascher-Nash, Mimi Grossberg, Anna Krommer, Felix Pollak, Johannes Urzidil and Wieland Herzfelde. The most recent – and a very successful example – is Ingrid Gehrke’s study of Carl Djerassi, the father of the “pill” and a chemist-turned-writer who wrote, looking back at his career: “If I hadn’t been born a Jew, I wouldn’t have left Vienna and would doubtless have ended up as an Austrian physician ...” – rather than becoming a world-famous scientist. Eugen Banauch’s study of four Jewish exile writers in Canada, however, is the first to solidly bring together the many theories and approaches connected with American cultural studies on the one hand and exile literature on the other. The","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"35 1","pages":"126 - 128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79515703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
British Library MS Harley 2250 (last quarter of the 15th century, from Cheshire) contains a life of John the Baptist that has long been considered a witness of the South English Legendary (SEL) version of the Baptist’s vita. In fact, however, the text combines material from a number of sources to create a unique saint’s life that relates the full range of events in scriptural accounts of John’s nativity and beheading. This hybrid life gives evidence of a desire in the late Middle Ages to supplement the narrative possibilities offered by the SEL. The text is edited here for the first time in its history, with commentary drawing on most of the known analogues. It has also been collated with those passages in all witnesses of the SEL life of the Baptist that overlap with the Harley life.
{"title":"A Hybrid Life of John the Baptist: The Middle English Text of MS Harley 2250","authors":"R. Newhauser, W. E. Bolton","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0053","url":null,"abstract":"British Library MS Harley 2250 (last quarter of the 15th century, from Cheshire) contains a life of John the Baptist that has long been considered a witness of the South English Legendary (SEL) version of the Baptist’s vita. In fact, however, the text combines material from a number of sources to create a unique saint’s life that relates the full range of events in scriptural accounts of John’s nativity and beheading. This hybrid life gives evidence of a desire in the late Middle Ages to supplement the narrative possibilities offered by the SEL. The text is edited here for the first time in its history, with commentary drawing on most of the known analogues. It has also been collated with those passages in all witnesses of the SEL life of the Baptist that overlap with the Harley life.","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"10 1","pages":"218 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77217468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The series Studies in Medieval Romance, which started in 2003 with Carol Heffernan’s The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance, publishes monographs, conference volumes and thematically focussed collections of essays. To date it comprises some fifteen volumes. The three books under consideration have been published in close succession and provide a good overview of the current state of research in the field. I will begin with the earliest of the three volumes and proceed in chronological order. Melissa Furrow’s monograph is the product of an engagement with the topic that lasted more than a decade, during which time she published preliminary versions of her research as articles and papers. Yet it would be wrong to think that the current volume was merely a (re-)collection of those individual essays. It is a well-structured, in-depth study of how the first readers of medieval romances responded to these texts. The opening chapter (1–42), though starting with a reasoned discussion of the problems of terminology and a short presentation of the most important studies in the field, does not tackle the thorny question of ‘What is a romance?’ (which is dealt with in chapter 2), but gives the reader a guided tour of the various medieval responses to romances. Furrow, in the tradition of New Historicism, takes the tiles used to pave the chapterhouse of the Benedictine Abbey of Chertsey as the starting point for her exploration of how medieval audiences reacted to romances. The chapterhouse tiles pose something of a puzzle to scholars since they depict scenes and protagonists from Tristram and Isolde – material that seems hardly fit for a monastic environment. In order to try and find an answer to this puzzle, Furrow changes track (or rather medium) and analyses a wide variety of comments made by medieval authors, poets, chroniclers, theologians etc. on the use or misuse and the qualities of romances. The evidence quoted suggests a division into two camps – one that sees romances as frivolous distractions leading readers into sin, the other defending them as texts providing models of exemplary behaviour or, at least, some much-needed relaxation of the mind. Both, however, ostensibly agree on the utilitarian framework as relevant for the evaluation of romances – thus the function of the ‘relaxation of the mind’ is no virtue per se but derives its value from the fact that it helps to refresh the reader’s mind in order to continue all the better with his ‘serious work’ afterwards. Yet Furrow also identifies a more hidden dimension, “a hint that frivolities and lies, ornament and fiction, have their own attraction that cannot be fully acknowledged or explained” (42). The second chapter (43–94), as announced, tries to tackle the term ‘romance’ itself. It is in its medieval use vague and highly generalized, which is reflected in the modern critics’ inability to agree on a universally accepted definition or even description of the genre. Furrow, in response to J
{"title":"Melissa Furrow. Expectations of Romance. The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England; The Exploitations of Medieval Romance. Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts","authors":"Thomas Honegger","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0050","url":null,"abstract":"The series Studies in Medieval Romance, which started in 2003 with Carol Heffernan’s The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance, publishes monographs, conference volumes and thematically focussed collections of essays. To date it comprises some fifteen volumes. The three books under consideration have been published in close succession and provide a good overview of the current state of research in the field. I will begin with the earliest of the three volumes and proceed in chronological order. Melissa Furrow’s monograph is the product of an engagement with the topic that lasted more than a decade, during which time she published preliminary versions of her research as articles and papers. Yet it would be wrong to think that the current volume was merely a (re-)collection of those individual essays. It is a well-structured, in-depth study of how the first readers of medieval romances responded to these texts. The opening chapter (1–42), though starting with a reasoned discussion of the problems of terminology and a short presentation of the most important studies in the field, does not tackle the thorny question of ‘What is a romance?’ (which is dealt with in chapter 2), but gives the reader a guided tour of the various medieval responses to romances. Furrow, in the tradition of New Historicism, takes the tiles used to pave the chapterhouse of the Benedictine Abbey of Chertsey as the starting point for her exploration of how medieval audiences reacted to romances. The chapterhouse tiles pose something of a puzzle to scholars since they depict scenes and protagonists from Tristram and Isolde – material that seems hardly fit for a monastic environment. In order to try and find an answer to this puzzle, Furrow changes track (or rather medium) and analyses a wide variety of comments made by medieval authors, poets, chroniclers, theologians etc. on the use or misuse and the qualities of romances. The evidence quoted suggests a division into two camps – one that sees romances as frivolous distractions leading readers into sin, the other defending them as texts providing models of exemplary behaviour or, at least, some much-needed relaxation of the mind. Both, however, ostensibly agree on the utilitarian framework as relevant for the evaluation of romances – thus the function of the ‘relaxation of the mind’ is no virtue per se but derives its value from the fact that it helps to refresh the reader’s mind in order to continue all the better with his ‘serious work’ afterwards. Yet Furrow also identifies a more hidden dimension, “a hint that frivolities and lies, ornament and fiction, have their own attraction that cannot be fully acknowledged or explained” (42). The second chapter (43–94), as announced, tries to tackle the term ‘romance’ itself. It is in its medieval use vague and highly generalized, which is reflected in the modern critics’ inability to agree on a universally accepted definition or even description of the genre. Furrow, in response to J","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"170 1 Pt 1 1","pages":"298 - 306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77471790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the first decade of the 21st century, atheism has seen a renaissance as a result of a series of bestselling publications by authors such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which advance atheism as a social and political force. These publications have been subsumed under the term “New Atheism”. In the course of its wide public reception, New Atheism has also had repercussions on contemporary English literature. Especially, Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday has been reviewed as New Atheism cast into fiction. This article re-examines this claim. After discussing McEwan’s relationship with New Atheism and contextualizing Saturday as a New Atheist novel, a close reading of two passages will be offered. The analysis of these passages will demonstrate that Saturday, in spite of McEwan’s affiliation with New Atheism, construes a much more complex, even conflicting worldview and is as much a New Atheist novel as it is the decon-
{"title":"Ian McEwan’S Saturday as a New Atheist Novel? A Claim Revisited","authors":"J. Wally","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0003","url":null,"abstract":"In the first decade of the 21st century, atheism has seen a renaissance as a result of a series of bestselling publications by authors such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which advance atheism as a social and political force. These publications have been subsumed under the term “New Atheism”. In the course of its wide public reception, New Atheism has also had repercussions on contemporary English literature. Especially, Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday has been reviewed as New Atheism cast into fiction. This article re-examines this claim. After discussing McEwan’s relationship with New Atheism and contextualizing Saturday as a New Atheist novel, a close reading of two passages will be offered. The analysis of these passages will demonstrate that Saturday, in spite of McEwan’s affiliation with New Atheism, construes a much more complex, even conflicting worldview and is as much a New Atheist novel as it is the decon-","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"29 1","pages":"119 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78133654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ones of ‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ texts. These ‘clerical romances’ foreground questions of good governance and kingship and can be seen as the ‘literary counterparts’ to the central tenets found in the Magna Carta – and are as such additional examples of the collaboration between the nobles and clerical writers. Medieval contexts do not invalidate independent modern readings, but as this nicely produced volume shows, “there are aspects of medieval texts that will remain stubbornly inaccessible in any other context other than a medieval one” (Introduction, 7).
{"title":"Ardis Butterfield. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War","authors":"A. Johnston","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0049","url":null,"abstract":"ones of ‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ texts. These ‘clerical romances’ foreground questions of good governance and kingship and can be seen as the ‘literary counterparts’ to the central tenets found in the Magna Carta – and are as such additional examples of the collaboration between the nobles and clerical writers. Medieval contexts do not invalidate independent modern readings, but as this nicely produced volume shows, “there are aspects of medieval texts that will remain stubbornly inaccessible in any other context other than a medieval one” (Introduction, 7).","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"59 1","pages":"306 - 308"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90479741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Helge Nowak. Literature in Britain and Ireland: A History","authors":"Peter Lenz","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"46 1","pages":"132 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82576342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although the novel continues to be challenged by new forms of narrative communication, and although critics have questioned the borderline between the novel as fiction and various forms of non-fictional discourse, there is little doubt that the novel is still one of the most important literary genres that we have. One of the reasons why is suggested by its extraordinary flexibility and elasticity: over and over again, the novel proves to be capable of changing and developing as a genre while at the same time retaining important generic characteristics introduced, developed and refined over the four hundred years that have passed since the publication of Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605, 1615). In his Preface to The Novel: An Introduction, Christoph Bode notes that “this volume is intended as a general introduction to the critical analysis of novels” (vii). In actual fact it is more than that, since Bode not only gives a competent introduction to the study of the novel but also makes a range of helpful and critically stimulating observations on narrative theory and analysis. One notable asset of the book is that although these observations are relevant to various kinds of narrative, including short fiction, they are also illuminating with regards to the task of reading and studying novels. Thus there is a strong sense in which The Novel: An Introduction serves the dual purpose of introducing the reader to the rich tradition of the European novel on the one hand and giving the reader the critical concepts and tools required to study novels on the other. Chapter 1 begins by focusing on openings in the novel. This is a good choice, because the problem of beginnings looms large both in theories of the novel and in narrative theory, and because it is closely linked to challenges of writing as well as reading. Usefully reminding us that narratives (including novels) necessarily “only pretend to begin with the beginning” (p. 1), Bode points out that the challenge of how to begin is possessed of pragmatic aspects as well as ontological and epistemological ones – a beginning is contingent and yet “in narrative, everything depends on it” (p. 2). One critical advantage of beginning by discussing beginnings is that Bode can highlight problems of the novel that are also significant narrative issues. Thus he gives illustrative examples from the beginnings of novels such as Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) while at the same time referring to a classic study of the novel such as E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) and to an influential work of modern narrative theory such as Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse
{"title":"Christoph Bode. The Novel: An Introduction","authors":"J. Lothe","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0058","url":null,"abstract":"Although the novel continues to be challenged by new forms of narrative communication, and although critics have questioned the borderline between the novel as fiction and various forms of non-fictional discourse, there is little doubt that the novel is still one of the most important literary genres that we have. One of the reasons why is suggested by its extraordinary flexibility and elasticity: over and over again, the novel proves to be capable of changing and developing as a genre while at the same time retaining important generic characteristics introduced, developed and refined over the four hundred years that have passed since the publication of Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605, 1615). In his Preface to The Novel: An Introduction, Christoph Bode notes that “this volume is intended as a general introduction to the critical analysis of novels” (vii). In actual fact it is more than that, since Bode not only gives a competent introduction to the study of the novel but also makes a range of helpful and critically stimulating observations on narrative theory and analysis. One notable asset of the book is that although these observations are relevant to various kinds of narrative, including short fiction, they are also illuminating with regards to the task of reading and studying novels. Thus there is a strong sense in which The Novel: An Introduction serves the dual purpose of introducing the reader to the rich tradition of the European novel on the one hand and giving the reader the critical concepts and tools required to study novels on the other. Chapter 1 begins by focusing on openings in the novel. This is a good choice, because the problem of beginnings looms large both in theories of the novel and in narrative theory, and because it is closely linked to challenges of writing as well as reading. Usefully reminding us that narratives (including novels) necessarily “only pretend to begin with the beginning” (p. 1), Bode points out that the challenge of how to begin is possessed of pragmatic aspects as well as ontological and epistemological ones – a beginning is contingent and yet “in narrative, everything depends on it” (p. 2). One critical advantage of beginning by discussing beginnings is that Bode can highlight problems of the novel that are also significant narrative issues. Thus he gives illustrative examples from the beginnings of novels such as Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) while at the same time referring to a classic study of the novel such as E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) and to an influential work of modern narrative theory such as Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"28 1","pages":"319 - 321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84917767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
tions” (chapter title) of these four authors have to do with their – partially newly found, in all cases newly defined – Jewish identity. Probably the most impressive fiction discussed in this book and a true find, the still largely unpublished hundreds of short stories by Carl Weiselberger, deals precisely with the European Jewish past. These writers “are hardly ever engaged in representations of Jewish Canadian realities but very much in those of Jewish worlds lost” (181). Of course one can, as Banauch does, interpret this as writing from a transcultural angle, but the sophisticated interpretations provided in this book are best when taking the Jewish angle. When they attempt to accentuate transcultural dimensions, they often remain on the level of content and do not approach a more complex literary analysis. This, of course, is not surprising – I know very few examples where transculturality has actually been demonstrated as a method on the level of the literary discourse – the language – itself. Not even the most obvious question, that of language shift, has been adequately addressed. Charmingly, Banauch also provides a list of “to do’s” for research in “German Canadian Exile Studies”, mainly a series of names to be considered, including Ernest Bornemann, the multi-talented author of Das Patriarchat, sex and jazz researcher and novelist, who lived in Canada from 1940 until 1950. Beyond its status as a list with helpful suggestions for future researchers, this section also proves the significance of the area Eugen Banauch has chosen for himself. This is a very significant book opening up new ways of thinking about authors we need to either get to know or re-evaluate. It is a true experience.
{"title":"Betsy van Schlun. Science and the Imagination: Mesmerism, Media and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature","authors":"D. Vanderbeke","doi":"10.1515/ang-2012-0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0013","url":null,"abstract":"tions” (chapter title) of these four authors have to do with their – partially newly found, in all cases newly defined – Jewish identity. Probably the most impressive fiction discussed in this book and a true find, the still largely unpublished hundreds of short stories by Carl Weiselberger, deals precisely with the European Jewish past. These writers “are hardly ever engaged in representations of Jewish Canadian realities but very much in those of Jewish worlds lost” (181). Of course one can, as Banauch does, interpret this as writing from a transcultural angle, but the sophisticated interpretations provided in this book are best when taking the Jewish angle. When they attempt to accentuate transcultural dimensions, they often remain on the level of content and do not approach a more complex literary analysis. This, of course, is not surprising – I know very few examples where transculturality has actually been demonstrated as a method on the level of the literary discourse – the language – itself. Not even the most obvious question, that of language shift, has been adequately addressed. Charmingly, Banauch also provides a list of “to do’s” for research in “German Canadian Exile Studies”, mainly a series of names to be considered, including Ernest Bornemann, the multi-talented author of Das Patriarchat, sex and jazz researcher and novelist, who lived in Canada from 1940 until 1950. Beyond its status as a list with helpful suggestions for future researchers, this section also proves the significance of the area Eugen Banauch has chosen for himself. This is a very significant book opening up new ways of thinking about authors we need to either get to know or re-evaluate. It is a true experience.","PeriodicalId":43572,"journal":{"name":"ANGLIA-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ENGLISCHE PHILOLOGIE","volume":"72 1","pages":"128 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76489933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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