British Literature

A Saga of Cosmopolitan Friendship in Time of the Breaking of Nations: A Study of Ali Smith’s Autumn

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Mousumi Chowdhury
Department of English, Raja Rammohun Roy Mahavidyalaya, Nangulpara, Hooghly, West Bengal, India

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 3, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n3.23
[Article History: Received: 13 June 2023. Revised: 27 August 2023. Accepted: 1 September 2023. Published: 4 September 2023]
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Abstract

Brexit, Britain’s exit from the supranational polity of the European Union has unsettled the vision of European unity. Rather than nourishing an “and/ both” cosmopolitan view even in the limited context of continental relationship, Britain inculcates an “either/ or” jingoistic nationalism fed on Euroscepticism. English literature has a long tradition of invoking political issues and Brexit has inaugurated a new sub-genre, ‘BrexLit’. The paper seeks to attempt a detailed study of Scottish writer Ali Smith’s novel Autumn (2016), designated by The New York Times as “the first great Brexit novel”. The first of the seasonal quartet, this novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and bagged the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Embedded in the Brexit Britain, the novel raises questions of citizenship, particularly in relation to immigration, and mirrors the loss of cultural conviviality. The paper discusses anti-immigrant toxicity, the upsurge of nostalgic appetite for national heritage, and the territorial social ontology of the contemporary English national outlook. The paper studies, in the context of the narrative, how the media resorts to post-truth politics and right-wing nationalistic propaganda in media resulting in the death of democracy and the end of dialogue. The paper explores how the novel advocates an inclusive, realistic cosmopolitanism through Elisabeth-Daniel friendship.

Keywords: BrexLit, nationalism, Anti-immigrant toxicity, post-truth politics, Euroscepticism
Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Citation: Chowdhury, Mousumi. 2023. A Saga of Cosmopolitan Friendship in Time of the Breaking of Nations: A Study of Ali Smith’s Brexit Novel Autumn. Rupkatha Journal 15:3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n3.23

Survival between Being and Doing: An Existential Reading of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

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Anney Alice Sharene
Assistant Professor, College of Arts and Science, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University. Email: a.sharene@psau.edu.sa

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September-October 2022, Pages 1–8. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.23

First published: October 27, 2022 | Area: British Literature| License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 3, 2022)
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Survival between Being and Doing: An Existential Reading of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

Abstract

The study aims at exploring the existential approach that Doris Lessing has adopted in portraying the character of Harriet Lovat in The Fifth Child. The work presents a conflict between society and the individual that the protagonist, Harriet Lovatt has to undergo and overcome in the process of personal choice. She is given the freedom to choose between what she wants and what society wants her to do. In doing so, she demonstrates full responsibility for such choices. In this novel, the choices and the decisions that the protagonist makes follow from an existential way of thinking. Thus, the approach of the author in portraying the character of the protagonist is examined from an existential standpoint. Lessing skillfully weaved the prevailing cultural and social circumstances of Harriet’s community with the question of being and survival in her quest for a meaningful existence. She refuses to be controlled by the traditional codes of sexual liberation before marriage and to have a traditional family after it. Having become a mother of an abnormal child, Harriet also goes on to make decisions that reinforce her existential status. This study presents Harriet as capable of revealing personal awareness and choice by rejecting the prevailing norms in her community as a young woman before marriage and as a wife and a mother afterward.

Keywords: Existentialism, free, choices, decisions, rejection, responsibility, self-assertion.

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Raw Materials. Half Creatures and Complete Nature in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Homunculus in Goethe’s Faust II

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Siv Frøydis Berg

Associate professor, Ph.D., National Library of Norway. Email: siv.berg@nb.no

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September-October 2022, Pages 1–8. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.09

First published: October 7, 2022 | Area: Latin America | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under the General Area)
Abstract Full-Text PDF Cite
Raw Materials. Half Creatures and Complete Nature in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Homunculus in Goethe’s Faust II

Abstract

Why did Mary Shelley’s famous Creature meet its ends in the eternal ice of the Arctic Sea? What made it possible for Goethe’s Homunculus to finally break free in the Classic Walpurgis Night? Both remote places fulfill the destinies of two of the most famous laboratory-made artificial human beings in Western literature, the Creature of Frankenstein, and the “little man”, Homunculus. They are born as half-creatures: Shelley’s Monster as pure body, Homunculus as pure spirit, locked up in a phial. Their lives on earth circle around one purpose: to create themselves as complete human beings, by achieving what they miss: a soul for Shelley’s Creature, a body for Goethe’s Homunculus. This article aims to present a systematic purification and comparison of the creations, lives, and ends of the Monster and Homunculus. My thesis is that each of them literally embodies two opposite and contemporary views of nature, identified in their own time as respectively materialistic and vitalistic positions. By comparing these life spans it is possible to shed light on Shelley’s and Goethe’s literary investment in the debate.

Keywords: Frankenstein, Homunculus, Goethe, Mary Shelley, materialistic and vitalistic, worldview.

Feature image  credit: Andy Mabbett, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Revisiting the “Inhabited Space” of English Country House in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger

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Srijani Chowdhury1 & Lata Dubey2

1Research Scholar, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University. ORCID id: 0000-0002-8970-8341. Email id: srijani10@bhu.ac.in, srijani24@gmail.com.

2Professor, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University. ORCID id: 0000-0002-3581-881X. Email id: ldvnsi@gmail.com, latadubey@yahoo.com.

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.46

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Abstract

The English Country House happens to be one of the most iconic topoi in English literary studies. Since narratologists have long privileged time over space, narrative space remained a relatively unexplored territory until the twentieth century, which intensified the interest in the house as the thematic fulcrum of literary works. British novelist Sarah Waters’s first venture into the realm of the sub-genre of English Country House fiction, The Little Stranger (2009) is a befitting discourse that appropriates the poetics of manorial space. Hundreds Hall, the Warwickshire seat of the Ayreses, encapsulates many roles as the epicentre of the story and as a powerful symbol of the gradual decay of English aristocracy in the post-World War II Britain. The article will try to incorporate Gaston Bachelard’s spatial criticism elaborated in his The Poetics of Space (1958) and the concept of heterotopia by Foucault for the interpretation/ (s) of the narrative. The study seeks to locate Bachelard’s bourgeoisie points of view, which the author subverts by portraying the rise of the proletariat. The focus of the article is to highlight the ingenuity of Waters’s creative process, which resorts to the genre of English Country House fiction to capture the condition of British aristocrats in a time of crises.

Keywords: English Country House fiction, bourgeoisie points of view, rise of the proletariat

Gender Subversion in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn

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Soheila Farhani Nejad

English Department, Islamic Azad University, Branch of Abadan, Iran.

Email: soheila.farhani@gmail.com. ORCID:  0000-0001-8168-0703

 Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.42

Gender Subversion in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn

Abstract

This study examines the various representations of female identity in Murdoch’s The Unicorn. The analysis of the novel revolves around the character of Hannah who is the center of everyone’s obsessive gaze. She is described both as an angel and a monster, a victim and a victimizer. Her victimization is aggravated by her passive submission to the will of her victimizers. This simultaneous presence of contradictory features in one character problematizes the notion of perceiving female identity in terms of binaries. As a typical Gothic heroine, Hannah is trapped within cultural assumptions about women. She passively and yet subversively plays the roles projected on her by the contradictory desires of other characters. It will be argued that the obsessive pursuit of perfection in a female figure as well as the disruption of the boundaries of victim and victimizer in this novel serve to problematize the cultural tendency to understand individuals in terms of stereotypes. Therefore, this study aims to illustrate how Murdoch has used an enigmatic female character to challenge the readers’ disposition to perceive characters in terms of gender stereotypes.

Keywords: Gothic, Gender stereotypes, Binaries, Victimization.

Tragedy and Ecophobia: A Study of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea

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Thakurdas Jana

State Aided College Teacher-I, Department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan, E-mail: thakurdas0901@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n7

 Abstract

Terry Eagleton’s humorous question of “how a tragedy differs from a congress of global warming” echoes the tragic and traumatic life of human beings facing increasing violence of nature. In a tragedy, the protagonist does not have biophilia as conceptualized by Edward O. Wilson to explain the innate tendency of human beings to find connections with nature and other forms of life, rather experience with themselves of an ecophobia, ‘antipathy towards nature’ as defined by Simon C. Estok. In a tragedy, “the unfathomable agencies of Nature”, to Eagleton, create ecophobia among the characters of tragedies written in most of the periods of literature. It is experienced in a Renaissance tragedy Macbeth by the Bard of Avon with the appearance of ‘nature’s mischief’ as well as in a modern tragedy Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge with the destructive sea devouring Maurya’s five sons, husband, and husband’s father creating an antipathy towards nature as shown in Macbeth’s fear of the ‘unruly’ and ‘rough’ night and the ambiguous movement of the Brinamwood, and Maurya’s desperate request to resist Bartley to travel by sea to the Galway fair. Their ecophobia has created an unhinged personality among them. With all these perspectives this paper aims to re-establish a connection between ecophobia and tragedy and examine how ecophobia has been internalized among the characters of the aforementioned play.

 Keywords: ecophobia, biophilia, tragedy, Macbeth, Shakespeare, Riders to the Sea, J.M.Synge

Poetics of Space and Its Association with Human Soul in Brian Dillon’s In the Dark Room

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Hassan Abootalebi1 & Alireza Kargar2

1PhD student of English Language and Literature, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. Email: abootalebi2010@gmail.com

2M.A in English Language and Literature, Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Iran. Email: alirezakargar1984@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.26

Abstract

The present paper intends to analyze and put under scrutiny Brian Dillon’s memoir In the Dark Room (2005) in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s theories of house as an intimate space explicated and expounded on in his magnum opus The Poetics of Space (1964). Since Bachelard’s ideas are often associated with phenomenology which accentuates the significance of the manner in which phenomena appear to us and are given meaning, the house and objects in it as a place of intimacy are of paramount importance to him. The spaces along with objects are not merely possessions which can be lived in or owned by individuals, but rather they express and suggest human emotions and human soul. They also have the power to transport us back into a distant past and evoke deeply buried memories and feelings. The house, says Bachelard, protects both daydreaming and the dreamer and allows one to dream in peace. Moreover, it provides a restful place in which imagination and thought are both stimulated. The title-mentioned work can be investigated in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s theories to provide proof for the above claim. The narrator of In the Dark Room is surrounded with objects and places which are capable of taking him back to the past arousing his interest and making him conjure up bygone days. Not only does the house function as a metaphor for evoking memories, but also the street and the place in which Dillon’s mother was hospitalized are accentuated. Hence, in the subsequent sections of the current paper, first phenomenology will be defined and elaborated on, then Brian Dillon’s selected work will be scrutinized based on Gaston Bachelard’s house-related theories and notions in order to demonstrate the association of the house and its objects with human soul and imagination.

KEYWORDS: Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Brian Dillon, In the Dark Room, phenomenology

Carnivalesque and its All-Pervasive Influence in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine

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Hassan Abootalebi & Alireza Kargar

PhD student of  English Language and Literature, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. Email: abootalebi2010@gmail.com

M.A in English Language and Literature, Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Iran. Email: alirezakargar1984@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.08

 Abstract

The current paper is an attempt to scrutinize and shed some light on Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine (1979) with the application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of carnival and carnivalesque explicated in his celebrated book Rabelais and His World (1984) which presupposes a world in which the flouting of, and challenging authority along with disrespect for, and disregard of, what is deemed sacred and valued are vital and instrumental, where individuals are liberated from any restrictions imposed on them outside carnival, and are permitted to pursue what pleases them without the least fear of being castigated, oppressed or interrupted by authorities. The selected work, as argued in the subsequent sections of the present article, presents a world where authority and social constructs as well as  conventions are all undermined and mocked. What is thought of as truth is, therefore, mocked, and the characters are no longer restricted by imposed rules and regulations. It, however, celebrates the subversion and calling into question of gender roles and demonstrates how restrictive and oppressive these roles can be, and what it is like when one is not circumscribed by societal constructions and expectations, and is given the opportunity to enjoy themselves in an unlimited way. In the first act, everyone stands in an already pre-defined position, as expected by the authorities, where no transgression is tenable, and no one seems inclined to go beyond them. The second act, however, is set in London in 1979 and women are no longer restrained by rules, and the characters as a result grow. In what follows, the words carnival and carnivalesque will be first fully defined and elaborated on, and then applied to Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine to illustrate the above-mentioned claim.

Keywords: Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival, carnivalesque, Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine

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Realms of the Dead and the Living: George II’s Allegorical Presence, Politics of Nonsense and Ignorance in Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce

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Samia AL-Shayban

Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts, King Saud University. ORCID ID:  0000-0003-3229-0834. Email: samia700@hotmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.05

Abstract

Ideologically, Fielding’s Author’s Farce is read as an attack on Sir Robert Walpole and his corrupt government.  Dramatically, it is perceived as a play with two separate plots, a factor that denies it any literary merits. This paper attempt to read Fielding’s play as a disguised multifaceted attack against King George II of England who is accused of deliberately corrupting London’ s literary scene to secure the Hanoverian hegemony. Fielding achieves his design through complex dramatization of the Realms of the dead and living. At the center of both realism stand George II who is metaphorically presented by the poor poet Luckless who resides in the land of the living and Nonsense the underworld goddess. The comparison between George Augustus who later became Prince of Wales and crowned as George II is based on detailed biographical and ideological similarities. The biographical and ideological affinities lead to the conclusion that King George II is the originator and protector of literary corruption. To strengthen the attack against the king, the court of Goddess Nonsense which appeared in Luckless’ play that depicts the land of the dead is connected to George II’s court through the prominent presence of opera and ignorance. Thus, Fielding’s literary dramatization is used as a medium to expose the role of the King in devaluing the English literary scene and turns it into a circus that makes the public ignorant with no literary taste and resigns authors to poverty. The scene is the result a deliberate tactics designed to disempower authors and public as a way to spread the Hanoverian hegemony and silence criticism of the corrupt political system.

 Keywords: Patriarchy, Margin, Center, George II, Power, Hobbes, Machiavelli.

A Medieval Woman Dares to Stand Up: Marie de France’s Criticism of the King and the Court

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Albrecht Classen

University of Arizona, USA. ORCID: 0000-0002-3878-319X. Email:  aclassen@arizona.edu

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.01

 Abstract:

While medievalists have long recognized Marie de France’s extraordinary literary abilities, we have not yet fully identified the extent to which she stood up as a social critic who attacked many social ills within her society, not holding back in her sharp attacks both against the figure of the king and against the powerful nobles of her time. Only if we combine her lais and her fables in our analysis, can we gain a full understanding of the far-reaching discourse about the danger of abuse of power at the hand of the mighty and rich in the high Middle Ages. Although we tend to identify that past era as deeply remote from us, as repressive, simple-minded, and submissive, Marie’s strong criticism of the abuses by the high-ranking contemporaries sheds important light on a world that was not really that far away from us in many different ways, with many intellectuals already extensively aware about social injustice and the danger of tyranny.

Keywords: Marie de France, court criticism, criticism of the king, lais, fables