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• Alternative Readings of J. M. Synge’s Drama Predicated on Archival Material

  Mária Kurdi

  Views:

  68

  Book review:

  Collins, Christopher. Theatre and Residual Culture: J. M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 301 pages. Hb. ISBN 978-1-349-94871-0. €106.99.

• Her Dark Materials: What Makes the Fantastic Dark

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  70

  Book review:

  Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. New York UP, 2020. 240 pages. ISBN 9781479806072. Pbk. $16.95.

• Dracula Addressing Old and New

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  81

  Book review:

  Crişan, Marius-Mircea, ed. Dracula: An International Perspective. Palgrave Gothic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xi + 280 pages. ISBN 978-3-319-63365-7. Hb. $101.51.

• Crime Fiction Reloaded

  Renáta Zsámba

  Views:

  63

  Book review:

  Edwards, Martin. The Golden Age of Murder. London: Harper Collins, 2015. 528 pages. ISBN 0008105960. Hb. £16.59.

• The "Burden” Or What It Means to Be Black in America Today

  Yesmina Khedhir

  Views:

  83

  Book review:

  Riley, Rochelle, ed. The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2018. 178 pages. ISBN 978-0-8143-4514-6. Hb. Npr.

• Contemporary and Beyond?

  Éva Szabó

  Views:

  51

  Book review:

  Acheson, James, ed. The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000. Edinburgh UP, 2017. 214 pages. ISBN 978 1 4744 0375 7. epub. £80.00.

• Friendly Encounters with Literary Animals

  Borbála László

  Views:

  274

  Book review:

  McHugh, Susan, et al., eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 636 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-39772-2. E-book. €117.69.

• Unlearning Gender

  Boglárka Kiss

  Views:

  132

  Book review:

  Repo, Jemima. The Biopolitics of Gender. Oxford: OUP, 2016. 218 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-025691-3. Hbk. Npr.

• Interpretations of Reagan’s Legacy

  Máté Gergely Balogh

  Views:

  37

  Book review:

  Chidester, Jeffrey L., and Paul Kengor, eds. Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. 294 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-42620-7. Hb. $45.

• The Figure in the Carpet

  Pierre Lurbe

  Views:

  50

  Book review:

  Győri, Zsolt, and Gabriella Moise, eds. Travelling around Cultures: Collected Essays on Literature and Art. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. xii + 279 pages. ISBN 978-1-4438-0996-2. Hb. £52.99.

• World Enough and Time

  W. A. Senior

  Views:

  85

  Book review:

  Morse, Donald E. It’s Time: A Mosaic Reflecting What Living in Time is Like. Debrecen: Debrecen UP, 2022. 326 pages. ISBN 978-963-615-004-4. Open Access E-book and Pbk. HUF 4,000.

• Death onto Life—A Guide to Edward Albee

  Boróka Prohászka-Rád

  Views:

  61

  Book review:

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

• Never Letting Go: Ways of (Mis)remembering and Forgetting in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels

  Anna Petneházi

  Views:

  60

  Book review:

  Drąg, Wojciech. Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. 211 pages. ISBN 1-4438-6057-3. Hb. £47.99.

   

• Wonder vs. Sublime in Romantic and Postmodern Literature

  Iyad Mukahal

  Views:

  81

  Book review:

  Economides, Louise. The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. vii + 214 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-47750-7. E-book. $84.99.

• They Dare Disturb the Universe

  Rasha Awale

  Views:

  82

  Book review:

  Kauffman, L. A.  Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. London: Verso, 2017. 236 pages. ISBN 978-1-78478-409-6. Pbk. $12.

• Predatory Neo-Victorian Novels

  Krisztina Jilling

  Views:

  81

  Book review:

  Ho, Tammy Lai-Ming. Neo-Victorian Cannibalism: A Theory of Contemporary Adaptations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 150 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-02558-8. Hb. €58.84.

• Strategies of Silencing

  Zsolt K. Virágos

  Views:

  31

  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.

• Narrating Motherhood: The Power of Storytelling

  Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka

  Views:

  230

  Book review:

  Martin, BettyAnn, and Michelann Parr, eds. Writing Mothers: Narrative Acts of Care, Redemption, and Transformation. Bradford, ON: Demeter P, 2020. 258 pages. ISBN 978-1-77258-223-9. Pbk. $34.95.

• What Makes the Genre of Lyric Compelling?

  Katalin Pálinkás

  Views:

  53

  Book review:

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

• After the “Post,” in the Present: New Perspectives on Nationhood

  Judit Szathmári

  Views:

  289

  Review essay:

  Charles, Mark, and Soong-Chan Rah. Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2019. Print.

  Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge Advances in American History 8. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2018. Print.

• Editor’s Notes

  Marianna Gula

  Views:

  118

  Editor’s Notes

• J. M. Synge’s Images of Society and Social Critique

  Michal Lachman

  Views:

  74

  J. M. Synge’s artistic contribution to the revival of the Irish theatre remains an undeniable fact. However, his consistently developed and dramatized views on the condition of Irish society, on the social and economic problems facing the newly formed state, are issues which seem to have been sidelined by critical emphasis placed on artistic and theatrical issues of his writing. This essay traces the line of Synge’s social thinking and imagery to show its continued effort to critically review the conservative, patriarchal system of values that Irish society had developed in the first decades of the twentieth century. The main part of the article concentrates on presenting the figures of dramatic protagonists who oppose the conservative social order and who simultaneously develop their independent ethical and social consciousness. The article argues that by presenting strong, Nietzschean, individuals who are vehemently rejected by their communities Synge formulates his own critical views of the Victorian and patriarchal normativity of the Irish state. (ML)

• Black Flânerie, Non-White Soundscapes, and the Fantastic in Teju Cole’s Open City

  Dorottya Mózes

  Views:

  294

  This essay develops an alternative notion of Black flânerie, one that foregrounds the flâneur’s auditory experiences and practices in the city, explaining how sound patterns work as indexes of historical traumas such as slavery, colonialism, and indigenous dispossession. More specifically, it investigates how sound and space are connected and what these connections may reveal about acoustical and historical conditions of urban sites. Analyses advance readings of spaces as shadowed by sonic traces, echoes, afterlives, and memories, which point to the sedimentation of sound in geographic as well as psychic structures and ruptures and hence show how different soundscapes suggest different forms of relationality: alienation, rupture, intersection, connection, and transformation. Finally, it demonstrates how sound imagery—including music, dialects, noise, voices, and silence—functions to signal fantastic spaces and places, fantastic or speculative linkages in particular, and produces a version of the non-White fantastic. (DKM)

• Hungarian Narrato-Rhetorheme in an American Novel: Harry Houdini in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

  Zoltán Abádi-Nagy

  Views:

  143

  The escape artist of Doctorow’s Ragtime is in close relationship with each transposed and fictitious character through an aspectual transmission system of character-motivation. The variegated and diverging perceptual and cognitive processes of the numerous characters may reveal a centrifugal system of storyworlds, but the multiform manifestations of being shackled and the desire to escape do meet in the anchoring image of the shackled Harry Houdini and his escape bravura. So Doctorow’s Houdini will be studied here as an aspectual coordinate of the novel.

  On the other hand, the mentality emanating from the escape artist’s narrative function of aspectual coordination and the other characters’ positional predicaments and motivational concerns that reflect the same mentality, jointly perform the rhetorical role of suasion. Thus, Ragtime’s Houdini can be subjected to a narrato-rhetorical investigation. I propose that he is a hermeneutically coded cultural narrato-rhetorheme in the novel and the source of further narrato-rhetorhemes of storyworlds that come under his semantic sway. (I introduced the notion of the “cultural narrato-rhetorheme” in a former HJEAS issue [2014/1]). The book’s transposed Houdini is both an overt cultural narrato-rhetorheme (he is present in the narratorial discourse: the narrator actually meets him) and a covert one (embedded in the storyworld). The notions of “repeating,” “factoid,” “contextual,” “assimilative,” and “enthymematic” narrato-rhetorheme will also be introduced as descriptive of Houdini’s manifold narrato-rhetorical roles.

  Ragtime’s epistemological tandem (the narrator[s] and Houdini) makes it unequivocal that the modality of the narratorial domain is epistemic. This also sets the escape artist into the novel’s focus; as does the book’s lead (deontic) modality, through the African American ragtime pianist’s defiance of racist cultural prohibition. (ZAN)

• Experimental Dramaturgy, Intellectual and Art-related Subjects in Irish Theatre

  Mária Kurdi

  Views:

  57

  Book review:

  Woodward, Guy, ed. Across the Boundaries: Talking about Thomas Kilroy. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2014. 112 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-51-7. Pbk. €25.00