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• “No country, this, for old men”: A View of the Aging Artist through Intertexts in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

  Angelika Reichmann

  Views:

  281

  J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) features two emblematic modernist representations of the aging artist, William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which have not been given enough critical attention. Focusing on the Romantic notions underlying David Lurie’s worldview, current critical discourse, with the notable exception of Mike Marais, suggests that Lurie’s career follows the patterns of the Bildungsroman. Taking its cue from Marais, the present intertextual reading discusses Lurie’s “anti-Bildungsroman” in the light of the novel’s non-Romantic intertexts. It argues that they highlight, on the one hand, Lurie’s chiastic thought-processes, which are likely to bracket any progress or development. On the other hand, they reveal his (self)-ageism and the entrenched ageism of the literary tradition he relies on. Those, in turn, also give a pessimistic prognosis of his discovering a protective discourse or worldview which would allow him—and post-apartheid South Africa—to “age gracefully.” Likewise, they manifest yet another aspect of the novel’s unreliable narration, which—unlike Lurie’s sexism and racism—is rooted in so universal fears that, instead of alienating readers from his perspective, it makes his bleak  vision of post-apartheid South Africa even more compelling. (AR)

• The Lucky Leaf Casino: A Retroscape in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox

  Huseyin Altindis

  Views:

  75

  Representations of the American South and the southern sense of space have been changing rapidly due to transnational effects of colonialism, globalization, and the rise of technologies. Due to such factors, unprecedented numbers of people now travel to more distant and less visited places. One consequence of such changes is that place and spatiality represent multicultural and global perceptions and experiences rather than being uniquely and distinctively local. Market economies exploit the space and create retroscapes to serve the economic aims of various industries. Within this context, drawing on the aesthetics of space, memory, and nostalgia, the paper focuses on the Lucky Leaf Casino in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox to discuss how the text challenges and problematizes plantation nostalgia and labor exploitation through which power structures continue to restrict, disrupt, and exploit space, people, and history. (HA)

• The Fabulous Adventures of Alice with Fashion, Science, and Pinocchio

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  406

  The three scholarly monographs published between 2017 and 2020 by Laura White, Laura Tosi and Peter Hunt, and Kiera Vaclavik, are recent contributions to Lewis Carroll scholarship. They belong to what Michael Heyman calls “the sense school” of nonsense literary criticism in so far as they attribute a specific agenda, a systematic structure, a decipherable message, and a homogenised reading to the Alice tales (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass). Each re-explores a well-known children’s classic from fresh new perspectives by relying on interdisciplinary methodologies, mingling the literary historical approach with insights of critical fashion studies, evolutionary biology, and comparative cross-cultural analysis (translation studies), respectively. Like adaptations, these critical theoretical interpretations of the Alice books are in a constant dialogue with one another within a Genettian transtextual network of multimodal narratives.

• What Makes the Genre of Lyric Compelling?

  Katalin Pálinkás

  Views:

  61

  Book review:

  Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. x + 391 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-74426-4. Hb. $41.

• Chimeric Visions: Posthuman Somaesthetics and Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Humanimal Body Art Performances

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  389

  Body art performances experiment in provocative, transgressive ways with the human body that becomes, simultaneously, an instrument, a medium, an agent, and an end product of artistic creation. They invite calculated corporeal reactions from audiences in a multitude of affectively, perceptually, and politically engaging ways. A brief overview is given of the evolution of body art from its roots in avant-garde performance arts to current trends of carnal art to shed light on the changing cultural-historical interpretation of human embodiment. It reveals how body art’s growing dissatisfaction with anthropocentrism entails an inevitable move toward humanimal poetics and politics. The shift of focal point from humanoid embodiment to interspecies relationalities and posthuman enworldedness marks a major paradigm shift of body art. Mapping the aesthetic manifestations, ethical stakes, and corporeal experience of this shift—that extends the notion of subjectivity beyond the human species—is the main aim of the essay. (AK)

• Advancing the Discourse on Travel Writing

  Balázs Venkovits

  Views:

  69

  Book review:

  Kuehn, Julia, and Paul Smethurst, eds. New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 325 pages. ISBN 978 1 137 45757 8. Hb. $90.

• Seaside Resort Blues: The English Seaside in the 1930s

  Virginia Richter

  Views:

  195

  In the interwar period, seaside holidays had become accessible to more people in the United Kingdom than ever before. It was not least the unapologetic hedonism of the working classes that gave places like Blackpool and Scarborough their vibrant energy. However, a notable number of English travelogues in the 1930s depict seaside resorts as overcrowded, vulgar, debilitating, and in fact un-English. During the years in which the UK faced the rising threat of fascism, the seaside became a site where ideas of Englishness, popular culture, and masculinity came under scrutiny. In my paper, I explore these ambivalent constructions of the English seaside resort, from J. B. Priestley’s English Journey to the collection Beside the Seaside, in which women authors, including Yvonne Cloud and Kate O’Brian, celebrate the seaside as a catalyst of female agency. (VR)

• The Birth of Imperial Race Medicine

  Eszter Ureczky

  Views:

  104

  Book review:

  Seth, Suman. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 2018. 324 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-41830-0. Pbk. £29.99.

• Editor's Notes

  Zsolt Győri

  Views:

  55

       

• Through A Xenophobic Lens: Degeneration Theory in W. Christy Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo

  Susan Savage Lee

  Tamas Z. Csabafi

  Views:

  160

  At the turn of the twentieth century, social theories developed in both the U.S. and Europe suggested that those at the top, or those most well endowed with good genetics, would stay that way, while those with poor genetics had little hope of changing their circumstances.  Degeneration theory, as this concept was called when it took root in the United States from the late 1890s, before it had evolved to formally become eugenics in the 1910s, and beyond. While eugenics offices opened in Berlin in 1905, in England in 1907-08, and in the United States in 1910, there were many forms of it, including degeneration theory. What bound all the theories together was the notion of biology and heredity.

              Westerns like Martyrs of the Alamo became a vehicle to explore these concerns because they inundated everyday Americans with illustrations of national identity. Films like these often mixed fantasy with ideology. This is clearly evident in W. Christy Cabanne’s anti-Mexican sentiment in Martyrs of the Alamo. Examining Cabanne’s film through the lens of degeneracy theory provides a greater understanding of American social concerns in the 1910s. These concerns, characterized by xenophobic depictions of immigrants, particularly Mexicans, culminated in the linking of immigrant bodies and disease with heredity and genetics, namely through theories of degeneration . Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo suggests, through the reproduction of the conflict surrounding the Alamo Mission, that the alternative to “race suicide” is a fantasy of American heroism, collectivism, and cultural exclusion. (SS and TZCS)

• Shaping Destinies: Women and the Hungarian Refugee Movement to Canada (1956–1958)

  Sheena Trimble

  Views:

  136

  By December 1958, Canada had admitted almost 38,000 Hungarian refugees, forced to flee their country after Soviet forces crushed the October 1956 uprising. A rich historiography has examined this migration from a range of perspectives, but an analysis of women’s actions and attitudes represents an uncharted approach. Archival research reveals that Canadian women expressed opinions and took on a variety of roles related to the refugee movement. Examining those opinions and roles not only offers a novel perspective on Canada’s response to the refugee crisis, but it also provides insights into the evolving roles of women in Canadian society. The weight of intersectionality often muted the voices of women of Hungarian origin, both Canadians and refugees. Yet, refugee women were accorded a symbolic power that played its own role in the movement, and they found ways to exercise their agency to achieve their desired admission and settlement outcomes. (ST)

• Chronotopes of the City: Spatial Injustice and Narrative Form in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

  Babett Rubóczki

  Views:

  360

  Combining Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and Sarah Dillon’s notion of the palimpsest, the essay highlights the dialogic relationship between narrative time and space in Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came with Them (2007). Set in East Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s—the heyday of urban renewal projects and the rapid spread of freeways—the novel registers the geographical displacement and constrained socio-economic mobility of Mexican Americans whose homes are demolished by the freeway building bulldozers. The spatial form of intersectionality characterizing the architectural structure of the freeways also describes the narrative form of the novel. The non-linear narrative is structured upon multiple intersecting plotlines, each of which portrays the social struggles of a young Chicana woman inhabiting the city. Focusing on the interplay of environmental theme and narrative form, the paper explores the narrative representation of East Los Angeles as a spatially and temporally multilayered landscape that palimpsestously overlays and interconnects the personal memory of the characters and the collective history of Mexican Americans’ socio-political oppression in North America. (BR)

• Pocahontas Incarcerated: An Activist’s Account of Early Twentieth-Century Native America

  Judit Szathmári

  Views:

  66

  Book review:

  Ackley, Kristina, and Cristina Stanciu, eds. Laura Cornelius Kellogg: Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works. New York: Syracuse UP, 2015. xxviii + 301 pages. ISBN 978-0-8156-3390-7. Hb. Npr.

   

• Celestial Democracies

  Sándor Kiss

  Views:

  80

  Book review:

  Tamás, Nyirkos. The Tyranny of the Majority. New York: Routledge, 2018. vi + 154 pages. ISBN 978-1-351-21142-0. E-book. $56.20

• Killing the Canard: Saint Stephen’s Crown, Nixon, Budapest, and the Hungarian Lobby

  Máté Gergely Balogh

  Views:

  114

  With the question of the return of the Holy Crown in the focus, the essay describes how certain leaders of the Hungarian-American community attempted to influence American foreign policy towards Hungary during the détente period. Whereas certain members of the Nixon and Ford administrations, as well as the State Department, had already considered returning the Crown to the People’s Republic of Hungary, many of the émigré groups were strongly opposed to this action, and voiced their protest whenever speculations surfaced in the press. With the help of certain American and Hungarian-American politicians in Congress as well as in the Republican Party, the decision to return the Crown could be presented as potentially too risky politically and postponed during the Nixon and the Ford administrations. But with the election of President Carter, the Hungarian-American groups seem to have lost their leverage, and as soon as the political decision was made they could no longer prevent the return. (MGB)

• Strategies of Silencing

  Zsolt K. Virágos

  Views:

  41

  Book review:

  Maxwell, William J. F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. xiv + 363. ISBN 9780691130200. Hb. $29.95.

• Geographies of Women

  Zsuzsanna Nagy-Szalóki

  Views:

  73

  Book review:

  Beebe, Kathryne, and Angela Davis, eds. Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn. London: Routledge, 2015. x + 158 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-83049-3. Hb. £110.

• The Great Men of the Great War: Heroic Martial Masculinity in the Wartime Works of Harvey Dunn

  Kaia L. Magnusen

  Views:

  193

  American artist Harvey Dunn was one of the eight soldier artists recruited by the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F) during World War I (1914-1918). His wartime works can be situated within the moralizing, Wilsonian rhetoric surrounding America’s entry into the war and linked with a conception of masculinity that was inextricably connected with war service. These images of heroic, martial, American masculinity align with the pronouncements President Woodrow Wilson made to justify America’s participation in the war. They reflect the gendered language and imagery American propaganda posters used to glorify enlisted soldiers as masculine heroes. Rather than portraying German soldiers as savages, Dunn altered this discourse by portraying cowardly German soldiers in moments of vulnerability. Dunn’s wartime images emphasize American ideas of martial masculinity in order to convey patriotic and propagandistic notions concerning the righteousness of the Allied cause, the superiority of American manhood, and the might of the American military. (KLM)

• Death onto Life—A Guide to Edward Albee

  Boróka Prohászka-Rád

  Views:

  70

  Book review:

  Roudané, Matthew. Edward Albee: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. 200 pages. ISBN 978-0-521-72695-5. Pbk. £14.99.

• Editor’s Notes

  Zsolt Győri

  Views:

  137

  Editor’s Notes

• Modernism between History and Academia

  Erika Mihálycsa

  Views:

  77

  Books reviewed:

  Bahun, Sanja. Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning. Oxford: OUP, 2014. 236 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-997795-6. Hb. $45.00.

  Goldstone, Andrew. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Oxford: OUP, 2013. 204 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-986112-5. Hb. $73.00.

   

• Performing on the Razor’s Edge: On the Aesthetics of the Theatre of Martin McDonagh

  Péter P. Müller

  Views:

  92

  Since the emergence of naturalism in the theatre in the last decades of the nineteenth century the reality of an action on the stage has been put into a new context. The previous tradition of performance characterized by artificial, schematic solutions in gestures and speaking was replaced by direct presentation. Performance pretended that real events were taking place in an artificial, stylized context; that is, within the framework of the theatre. The first part of the essay discusses the connection between theatre and violence, starting from a historical and philosophical context and arriving at an aesthetic perspective which regards violence as a challenge for the theatrical representation. The second part studies stage violence in the plays of Martin McDonagh with the primary example of The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The third part summarizes the Hungarian reception of The Lieutenant of Inishmore and compares two productions which handle the staging of natural and brutal scenes quite differently. As the whole play has a metatheatrical feature, confronting theatre with the general problem of theatrical representation, it is relevant to see how this challenge is handled by the productions reviewed. (PPM)

• Reading in the Dark, Sleeping with the Lights On: Uses and Abuses of Horror in Children’s Literature

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  210

  Book review:

  McCort, Jessica R., ed. Reading in the Dark. Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. pp. 256. ISBN 978-1496806444. Hb. $56.99.

• Language and the Continental Congress: Language Policy Issues in the Founding Documents of the United States from 1774 to 1789

  Sándor Czeglédi

  Views:

  95

  Although neither the first nor the second constitution of the United States contains any references to the role of languages in the process of nation-building, a few language-related issues emerged from time to time during the early congressional debates and deliberations. These sporadic instances mostly framed the English language as a “pragmatic instrument” rather than a “national ideological symbol.” Consequently, no serious attempts were made either to officially adopt it as the majority language or to enhance its societal role and capacity in identity formation by legislative fiat. The apocryphal accounts of disestablishing English and installing, for example, French, German, or Latin as the de jure official language after the American Revolution probably belong to the realm of language policy myths. Drawing on key legislative documents during the critical years of the founding of the United States and employing language policy classification schemes based on the works of Anderson, Wiley, and Ruiz, the essay proposes a comprehensive overview of how, when, and in what contexts language-related references appeared. (SCz)

• Introduction

  Balázs Venkovits

  Views:

  129

  Introduction to the Special Thematic Block:

  Undesirables in the Last Best West? - Central and Eastern European Immigration to Canada