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Social Upheaval in pre-1789 France: Connecting the French Wars of Religion, the Flour War, and the French Revolution
Full text linkThis essay explores the French Wars of Religion and the Flour War, comparing them with the French Revolution, in its study of social upheaval in France before 1789. Research surrounding this has been conducted for many years, and different scholars have offered different interpretations. In this essay, the case study method is used, with these three popular protests. Through studying these cases, the essay hopes to draw broader lessons about how these popular protests are interconnected and how they challenged the social order. This essay argues that both the French Wars of Religion and the Flour War caused social upheaval and have similarities with the French Revolution in terms of the political and social impact
To English and Back Again: Preserving the Complexities of Fantastic Creatures on the Journey Between Languages
Full text linkAs Anglocentric fantasy scholarship continues to globalise, the challenges and complexities of translation, specifically into English, reveal that an overreliance on tradition in translation has anglicized global fantasy. Fantastic creatures are a cornerstone of the fantasy genre and are also prominently featured in fantasy-adjacent texts such as mythology and folklore. As a result, translators of these texts are frequently faced with names and terminology surrounding fantastic creatures, which—whether entirely new or culturally specific—poses a unique challenge for translation. This article will identify some of the strategies that have been utilised to meet this challenge, with the goal of building a vocabulary with which to study this process further. The strategies identified are Substitution, Descriptor, Naturalisation, and Tradition. The implications and effects of these strategies are analyzed through the spectrum of foreignization and domestication in translation practices. This article discusses the potential pitfalls of Anglocentrism and Anglonormativity, primarily associated with domesticating approaches in translation into English. A case study examines how the word “giant” has been used to gloss or translate the jotunns of Norse mythology. The descriptions and behaviour of the jotunns in Norse mythology are often contradictory, and as a group they are incredibly complex and open to interpretation. This work will examine both the origins and limitations of the term “giant,” and how a dedication to tradition affirms its continued use. In conclusion, while domesticating translators hesitate to demand too much of readers by presenting complex and foreign terms, translators’ attempts to help readers can rob a creature or concept of its complexity—and perhaps the very things that make it so fantastic
The Debate Surrounding Black Linguistics: An Assessment of the Origins and Growth of African American Vernacular English
Full text linkThis paper provides an assessment of the origins and growth of African American Vernacular English. It presents background on AAVE by discussing its users and its cultural role in the Black community and explores the two main theories in the debate surrounding the subsequent development of the vernacular, with focus on specific linguistic evidence relating to the variable copula absence
Of Heroes and Heartbreak: Digital Fantasy and Metaphors of Affect in Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
Full text linkThis article uses a psychoanalytic framework informed by Fantasy theory to investigate how the Japanese Role-Playing Fantasy video game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch offers a depiction of, and engagement with, emotional issues via its deployment of literalised metaphors of affect. In doing so, it considers the overlaps between Fantasy and video games, coining the term ‘Digital Fantasy’ to describe video games which evoke Fantasy worlds and use the imagery of Fantasy as a means of communicating emotion. The close reading provided uses the work of Fantasy theorists such as Rosemary Jackson and Kathryn Hume, combined with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, to explore how Digital Fantasies use varying degrees of Fantasy and mimesis to offer interactive representations of affective processes such as mourning and melancholia. The analysis demonstrates the continued influence of psychoanalytic imagery as a means of understanding emotion, whilst posing that its deployment within Digital Fantasy situates the form as one of exploring and understanding the emotional challenges of everyday life
The Darkened Cinema of Elvira Notari: In and Out of the Archives
Full text linkIn recent years, a process of historical revision (by way of re-evaluating archival materials) has uncovered the stories of silent cinema’s women pioneers, whose legacies and contributions had previously gone uncredited. Amongst these figures is Elvira Notari, Italy’s first woman director and production company founder. Her taking on of different roles led to a rich production catalogue of which only a few traces remain. In examining the features and contexts of Notari’s cinema, and the causes for its subsequent neglect, this paper argues for her central importance in Italian cinema as a director and considers how her omission from the archives can be addressed
Children of Empire: How Discourses of Empire Permeated British Victorian Childhood Before and After the 1870 Education Act
Full text linkWhile the British Empire is acknowledged to have functioned from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was during the nineteenth century that its greatest expansion in terms of size, population, and wealth occurred. Dominating the nineteenth century, the Victorian Era (1837-1901) is considered by scholars such as Amy Lloyd and Peter Marshall to be the period in British history in which the monarchy became increasingly identified with empire. Queen Victoria was granted the title of Empress of India in 1876; this, as well as occasions such as Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees 1887 and 1897, continued to rouse imperialism towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the context of this essay, discourses of empire can be understood as texts, discussions, and ideals concerning imperialism; Pramod Nayar suggests in Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire that discourses are not only a reflection of events, but serve to define reality for viewers, giving insight into lived experiences. Accordingly, this article will examine the way in which discourses of empire permeated Victorian experiences of childhood before and after the 1870 Education Act
“This Land Doesn’t Die […] It Lives on Like This. Like a Fairy-Tale”: Topography, Identity and Recovery through the Fantastic in Elias Venezis’s Aeolian Earth
Full text linkElias Venezis’s 1943 historical novel Aeolian Earth (Αιολική Γη) represents Kimintenia, an area in Ayvalik, Asia Minor, as it was before the forcible expulsion of its Greek populations in the early twentieth century through literary devices that stretch reality. While not a fantasy work as such, Aeolian Earth features numerous stories by and about characters that span the speculative spectrum, including folktales, a creation myth, and retold fairy-tales. As Alison Cadbury observes, many of these stories fall under “magic realist animist cosmology” (28). They are also associated with exile, foreshadowing the Greek populations’ forcible relocation and allowing for the fantastic to be retrospectively interpreted as an attempt to recover the lost homeland (27). Throughout the narrative, Greece is both lovingly mythologised by locals and exoticized as a mythical land by non-Greek characters: these two fantasy discourses within the novel act as a counterpoint to one another, exploring how fantasy is used by Anglocentric and non-Anglocentric perspectives when applied to a country and culture that lies outside the Anglosphere. Using concepts from J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories, this paper studies manifestations of the fantastic in Aeolian Earth, considering the national identities and geopolitical conditions that created them. When analysing the novel’s metatextual fantastic tales as fairy stories, trends begin to emerge regarding the extent to which these Greek tales function as Recovery, Escape, or Consolation—and for whom. While Tolkien’s essay helps illuminate the ways in which the fantastic allows Greek characters in the novel to recover the lost homeland or cope with the harsh realities associated with life in the titular Aeolian Earth, Escape is not depicted as desirable for those who will eventually be exiled from their native home. Rather, Escape in fairy stories is mostly associated with non-Greek characters who consume, appropriate, or produce speculative metatexts about Greece, often ignoring the country’s geopolitical nuances
A Failed Upheaval? Evaluating the Success of the Scottish Parliament’s ‘New Politics’ Aspirations
Full text linkOpposition to the adversarial politics of the Westerminster Parliament was closely interwoven with the campaign for Scottish devolution. Upon its foundation, the initial proponents of Scottish devolution intended for the new Scottish Parliament to embrace a more consensual ‘new politics’. Evaluating the success of these aspirations through the framework of the Consultative Steering Group’s principles of power-sharing, accountability, access and participation, and equal opportunities, this essay argues that the Scottish Parliament has not delivered the ‘new politics’ expected upon its foundation
Reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov as Fantastic Literature
Full text linkMikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is a much-studied classic of Russian literature, often discussed in relation to its political, philosophical, and religious themes. However, very little critical attention has been paid to another major strand of the novel: its use of the fantastic and its place within the fantastic canon. This essay demonstrates how The Master and Margarita performs the functions of a fantasy novel as described by Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Jackson asserts that fantasy is a means of expressing “the unsaid and unseen of a culture.” However, the assumed culture for much of her theory is a “secularised culture produced by capitalism,” i.e. a western and Anglocentric conception of culture. I demonstrate how her theory both functions and requires adaptation within the Soviet-Communist context of Russia in the 1930s. In doing so, I situate Bulgakov within the genre of fantasy and suggest ways in which fantastic theory can shift its focus away from the Anglocentric