1,721,014 research outputs found
Remediating life writing: a look into Gigante’s, Campion’s, and Roe’s biographies of John Keats
No full textIn a letter written in the 1870s, George Eliot defined biographers as “a disease of English literature”. Scholars should certainly be less biased than Eliot, but biography as a literary genre is undeniably rooted in British culture. English literature is in fact “filled with a long and proud tradition of life writing, all the way from the exemplary and moralistic to the critical and iconoclastic” (Bostridge 2004: xi), as the massive Oxford Dictionary of National Biography proves with its over 50,000 biographies written by about 10,000 contributors.
After the well-known works of Walter Jackson Bate (1963), Robert Gittings (1968) and Andrew Motion (1997), three new biographies of John Keats have been issued over the last four years. Before Denise Gigante’s insights into the life of Keats as the brother of the less-known George (The Keats’s Brothers: the Life of John and George, 2011) and Nicholas Roe’s John Keats: A New Life (2012), in 2009 Jane Campion hit the box office with the motion picture Bright Star, a romantic, romanticised and poetic biography of the last three years of Keats’s life and his troubled love for Fanny Brawne.
By looking into these three works in relation to existing knowledge on Keats’s life, this paper tries to ascertain to which extent the constraints imposed by different media (and hence by different targets) may change the way biographical facts are presented, provide new knowledge and contribute to the creation of a popular myth. As a matter of fact, as Bolter and Grusin remarked over a decade ago, no medium or single media event can do “its cultural work” in isolation from other media or other social and economic forces, while at the same time every medium constantly refashion itself in order to “answer the challenges” posed by the other media (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 15).
On the one hand, Campion’s film is worth investigating as an instance of remediation for making biographical facts fit the screen and the public of moviegoers, and it seems interesting to consider both the script and the non-verbal content of her movie in relation to the content available through other media. Because of the hybrid status of the film, it is crucial to reflect on whether Campion ought to be regarded not only as a film director, but also as an author or a biographer. On top of that, as far as the creation of a popular myth goes, it seems equally pertinent to take into consideration the relationship existing between remediation and “repurposing” as a “practice of adapting a ‘property’ for a number of different media venues” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 273) in order to investigate the ways in which Campion’s Bright Star may have affected (or was influenced by) other cultural products and markets.
On the other hand, biography as a genre raises similar questions, as it is a “bastard” product of the “unholy alliance” of “fiction and fact” (Holmes 1995: 15). Just like Campion’s film may be considered a hybrid, so should biography as a genre: as Bostridge (2004) notes, there seems to have been much debate going on about whether biography should be considered a branch of historiography or literature. Besides, if, to borrow Bolter and Grusin’s words once more, refashioning within a specific medium is to be considered as a case of remediation, Gigante’s and Roe’s works should be taken into consideration as part of the intertextual network they establish with the existing biographies of Keats. The subheading of Roe’s work seems particularly interesting from this point of view. Furthermore, it is also worth trying to figure out whether the decision of the publishing industry to issue two new biographies within a span of just one year was somehow encouraged by the success (and the revenues) of Campion’s motion picture.
Having mapped these points, I shall finally consider Gigante’s and Roe’s written works and Campion’s motion picture contrastively, in order to pinpoint their approach in analysing and narrating Keats’s life. The aims is to understand whether and why they have decided to embrace or discharge what Gillies names the “cradle-to-grave approach” (Gillies 2009: 58) and, with specific reference to Bright Star, to explore how a film may deal with biographical facts that would be confined to the space of endnotes in a written volume
Renaissance tracks. Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, and Garden Aesthetics
No full textThis paper explores the fin de siècle reception of the Italian Renaissance by focusing on Vernon Lee's and Edith Wharton's interest in Italian gardens. In the paper I argue that such interest should be read in connection with the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and those nineteenth-century authors who looked into fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy not only as historians or art critics, but rather as classic cultural historians. They were intellectuals for whom the Italian Renaissance did not simply design a transition in the development of the human intellect, but represented a menaingful category to be studied in its political, artistic and historical development
Queer Heroines : On the Construction of Gender in Vernon Lee’s Renaissance Essays
No full textScholars have often identified the connections between Vernon Lee’s works and her complex sexuality. The protagonists of her supernatural tales have been the object of extensive study in that they eschew neat gender categorisation and repeatedly sublimate sexual drive into subjugation and murder. Lee’s writings as an aesthetic critic, by comparison, have mostly been explored in connection with Water Pater’s work. In this article I argue that in Euphorion and Renaissance Fancies and Studies Lee’s allusions to Pater’s thought shape not only her construction of gendered authorship, but also the textual representation of gender and sexuality. Characters like Héloïse and Nicolette endorse transgression and prove able to master stereotypical masculine functions, showing how gender roles are independent of sex. In addition, Lee’s interest in Franciscanism and the Renaissance iconography of the Madonna provide a historical legitimisation of non-normativised forms of sexual desire, which should be viewed from a queer perspective
Miss Havisham's Banquet and Its Joycean Afterlife
No full textFood is a leitmotiv in Dickens, and in Great Expectations it appears to be the objective correlative of the moral stance of the characters. This is especially evident in the representation of Miss Havisham’s decaying banquet: in letting food putrefy, Miss Havisham reduces her own body as mere flesh to feast upon, and it is only by nourishing herself on other bodies that she can satiate her appetites.
After exploring how Dickens relates the verbal and visual representation of food to the psychological and emotional depiction of his characters, this paper will focus on Miss Havisham and her banquet before concentrating on “the Joycean afterlife” of Dickens in “The Dead”
A Tentative Quest for Gender Identity: Elements of Queer Discourse in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Between the Acts
No full textModernism was marked by a deep concern with sexuality and gender
identities. Ellis’s and Carpenter’s works were pioneering in their attempt
to disentangle the hard knot of heteronormativity, while Walter Pater and
Oscar Wilde were regarded by some as a threat to society because they had
taken over “the traditional idiosyncrasies of the feminine rôle” (Lewis 1989:
244). This article will argue that the sexual politics embedded in the works
of Virginia Woolf anticipate the discourse of sexual identity formulated
by queer theory. Depicted as the object of both heterosexual and bisexual
desire, the protagonist of Jacob’s Room (1922) explores the multifaceted
nature of gender identity while Between the Acts (1941) deals with issues of
gender and sexual desire within a well-defined cultural milieu
Reweaving the tapestry of intertextuality. Keats’s dialogue with Shakespeare and the Italian translations of When I Have Fears
No full textThis essay takes a contrastive approach to the expediency of an intertextual approach to Keats’s poetry and his thinking about the nature of poetry. Keats, it is argued, becomes ‘indissolubly united’ to his predecessors, and such intertextual relations are explored in relation to Harold Bloom’s ideas of poetic influence, Keats’s creative responses to Shakespeare, and further developed through an exploration of intertextuality and translation. The essay concludes with a detailed account of Italian translations of Keats’s poetry
Bridging the gap between "The Two Cultures" : il medico che si fa autore e personaggio nella narrativa di A.J. Cronin (1896-1981)
No full textNella Rede Lecture The Two Cultures (Università di Cambridge, 1959), il fisico e romanziere C.P. Snow individua nella frattura tra quelle che definisce cultura umanistica e scientifica una "sheer loss" a danno dell’intera società occidentale. Snow imputa alla rigidità del sistema universitario britannico non solo la difficoltà a formare una moderna e consapevole élite dirigente, ma anche la mancata assimilazione delle recenti scoperte scientifiche all’interno dell’arte del Novecento. Eppure, il romanzo di lingua inglese tenta un risanamento di questa frattura cercando di riconciliare progresso scientifico e mainstream culture. L’approvazione del National Health Service Act in Gran Bretagna (1946) e la crescente pressione dei costi sanitari attirano l’attenzione pubblica sulla medicina in quanto branca della scienza di più immediata fruibilità quotidiana, e si fanno spazio nella prosa di medici romanzieri come Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896-1981). Se The Citadel (1937) sembra avere un’eco nell’istituzione del NHS, in Doctor Finlay of Tannochbrae (1978) Cronin traccia la figura di un professionista per cui l’appartenenza alla comunità è tanto irrinunciabile quanto la competenza scientifica. Questo intervento si propone di indagare la figura del medico che si trasforma in autore e personaggio, riattualizzando il genere della medical fiction. Ci si concentrerà su quella rappresentazione del medico che prende le distanze dallo stereotipo prometeico dello scienziato in seguito all’emergere di riflessioni di ordine etico di cui la scienza deve tenere conto e che tentano, sulla pagina, una riconciliazione di cultura umanistica e scientifica.In his Rede Lecture on The Two Cultures (University of Cambridge, 1959), C.P. Snow denounced the "sheer loss" caused by the polarization of sciences and humanities in twentieth-century western society. For Snow, the academic system is responsible for both the difficulty to train a modern and adequately skilled ruling class and the lack of a place where both cultures may meet and cross-fertilize each other. Already in the nineteenth century, however, English fiction seems to have attempted to bridge this gap and reconcile scientific progress and mainstream culture. In the 1930s, the debate concerning the efficiency and the costs of the healthcare system, and the project of the National Health Service (NHS) in Great Britain drew the attention of the public to medicine as a branch of science having a tangible impact on everyday life. Such aspects are investigated in the fiction of a number of physician writers. This essay focuses on Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896-1981) and his bestselling novel The Citadel (1937), which contributed to the coeval debate on the foundation of the NHS, while Cronin’s last work, Doctor Finlay of Tannochbrae (1978), portrays a "postmodern" healthcare provider who recognizes the importance of both scientific knowledge and public aid. The essay explores the works of Cronin as one of those physicians who, by becoming literary authors, popularized medical fiction as a genre. Its focus lies on the portrayal of doctors who, by acknowledging the importance of professional ethics, depart from the Faustian cliché of the scientist and provide a place where "soft" and "hard" sciences meet
Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013
No full textBetween Sign and Symbol : Huston's Intersemiotic Translation of "The Dead"
No full textWhen directing the film version of James Joyce’s “The Dead” in 1987, John Huston faced the challenge of reproducing on the screen Joyce’s atmosphere of claustrophobia and spiritual barrenness as well as his hints to the reader. In this paper, Huston’s film is analysed by adopting the point of view expounded by C. S. Peirce in his theory of intersemiotic translation, an act that he defined as the process of reproducing “a sign into another system of signs”. After an introductory analysis of the use of symbols in “The Dead”, the paper focuses on Huston’s filmic adaptation of Joyce’s symbolism. To this end the text is staged through the use of “fading lights”, the choice of dark and oppressive colours, props, music and the quality of photography and framing. The aim of this contrastive analysis is to ascertain whether and to which extent Huston managed to reproduced the symbolic meanings embedded in Joyce’s text despite slight changes due to his resorting to a different semiotic system
The Food Metaphor : the Intertextual "Afterlife" of a Literary Text, from Dickens to Joyce
No full textFood is a leitmotiv in Dickens’s novels, and in Great Expectations it appears to be the objective correlative of the social rank and the moral stance of the characters. This is especially evident in the verbal and visual representation of Miss Havisham’s decaying banquet: by letting food putrefy, Miss Havisham reduces her own body as mere flesh to feast upon, and it is only by nourishing herself on other bodies that she can satiate her appetites. After exploring how Dickens relates the verbal and visual representation of food to the depiction of his characters’ emotionality, this essay focuses on Miss Havisham’s banquet and its literary ‘afterlife’ in James Joyce’s “The Dead”
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