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Shaping Destinies: Women and the Hungarian Refugee Movement to Canada (1956–1958)
Views:362By 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)
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Beyond the “Raked Gardens”: Female Identity in American Suburban Poetry
Views:308The article analyzes an overlooked aspect of American suburban poetry—the writing of American women poets who deal with the problem of how to represent female identity. Drawing on the existing criticism of women’s poetry, a comprehensive survey of the suburban poems by American women poets, from the 1940s to the 2000s, is provided. The article documents the various approaches that these poets adopt in order to explore identity while resisting the gender stereotypization in American suburbia. These approaches include either embracing the suburban ideal of domestic conformity or attempting to present women suburbanites who reject the socially prescribed roles forced upon them and develop new identities of their own. (JF)
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A Novel Inquiry into a Strategic Aspect of Irish Women’s Theatre across a Century
Views:268Book review:
Hill, Shonagh. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 257 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-48533-3. Hb. ₤75.
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Introduction
Views:197Introduction to the Special Section: Negotiating Aging and Ageism in English-Speaking Fiction and Theatre
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Miles Franklin’s Growing Voice: Revisiting My Brilliant Career
Views:299Rather than any of her more mature writing, Miles Franklin’s debut romance, My Brilliant Career, has been cemented into the canon of Australian literary nationalism. The novel received ambivalent immediate responses upon its publication in 1901 for its unflattering representation of the author’s kin and society. Subsequent criticism soon accepted Franklin’s oeuvre as part of the dominant male discourse of late nineteenth-century Australia, but after the 1970s her writing came under new scrutiny from a feminist aspect. Recently, she has been placed in a long tradition of female writing and discussed for gendered ventures. Nonetheless, however dedicated a feminist Franklin later became, she did not yet search for women’s greater self-realization in her debut but for her own identity and place in the world as an adolescent. This article argues that although Franklin’s classic has become an icon of both nationalist and feminist literature, the dichotomy of these readings can best be appeased through the adolescent ramps of its protagonist. It is an adolescent novel, in which a growing voice argues with her superiors, peers, and self, thereby exploring her authorial, gendered, and national identity. (GTE)
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Aging and Death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Views:542With focus on the tropes of aging and death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox (1960) and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), the essay investigates the negotiation of the protagonists’ identity through specters of age and the means of encountering death, and it analyzes the representation of the dramas’ senior citizens with special regard to the ways in which these characters challenge mainstream cultural constructions of aging. On their deathbed, both Albee’s and Williams’s protagonists are reconnecting with their pasts in idiosyncratic ways: they build up a conscious “age autobiography” (Margaret Morgenroth Gulette) in an inventory of events and feelings assessing a complete(d) life and achieve an “agewise” (Gulette) identity that comes full circle in the very moment of grace. The characters who escort these two elderly women on their last journey reconceptualize the sense of intimacy between people. The dialogic potential of their empathy, care, and unconditional support during the end-game of the protagonists accommodates difference in various contexts by blurring the boundary between the old and the young as well as the one between men and women, because death has neither age nor gender. Thus, these intergenerational exchanges help elder characters’ agewise enterprises into the unknown gain a cathartic sense of freedom. (RMC)
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Geographies of Women
Views:136Book 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.
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Experimental Dramaturgy, Intellectual and Art-related Subjects in Irish Theatre
Views:152Book 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
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The 1990s and the Remaking of the Neoconservative Foreign Policy Paradigm
Views:377This essay explains how neoconservative foreign policy doctrine evolved from strenuously seeking to defeat the communist enemy during the Cold War to thoroughly seeking to preserve America’s newfound “unipolar moment” by constructing new enemies to defeat. It analyzes the generational transition within the neoconservative movement from the 1970s to the 1990s and its empire-building project in the post-Cold War era. Based on neoconservative publications and contributions to magazines such as Commentary, The National Interest, and Weekly Standard as well as the publications, reports, and statements of neoconservative think tanks (The Coalition for a Democratic Majority, The Committee on the Present Danger, American Enterprise Institute, The Project for New American Century, among others), the essay argues that the themes associated with the neoconservatives after 9/11—such as militarism, preemptive war, regime change, democratization, and unilateralism—had been rooted in the neoconservative discourse since the 1970s. It also shows that the post-9/11 neoconservative foreign policy approach was the product of neoconservative narratives during the Cold War era and after the fall of communism. (RA)
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“Holding so Much of the Mind of Ireland” and Writing Modernist Drama: Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
Views:322Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
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They Dare Disturb the Universe
Views:160Book 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.
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Narrating Motherhood: The Power of Storytelling
Views:335Book 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.
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The Architecture of the Self
Views:120Book review:
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xiii + 246 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-53681-5. Hb. $90.
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Sexual Violence Tells Stories
Views:242Book review:
Taylor, Dianna. Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. 128 pages. ISBN 9781138581432. Pbk. N.p.
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Women in Contemporary Irish Theatre: Widening the Space
Views:140Book review:
Haughton, Miriam, and Mária Kurdi, eds. Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2015. 251 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-75-3. Pbk. €20.
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Through the Eyes of the Delusional Ones
Views:331Book review:
Hanson, Victor Davis. The Case for Trump. New York: Hachette Book Group Inc., 2019. 355 pages. ISBN 978-5416-7353-3. Ebook. $16.81.
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Transgressions and Reterritorializations as Markers of Minor Literature in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, or Lonesome no More!
Views:302Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are transgressive techniques in literature that characterize subversive literature. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest that questions about marginal literature or other forms of peripheral literatures must all be covered within the designation and definition of minor literature, not only if they are written in the language of the mainstream. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, or Lonesome no More (1976) is a set of deterritorializations and reterritorializations made possible through creative assemblage, a technique that allows a continuous flow of meaning, that is, meaning is not fixed, as language moves from one territory to another, constructing new assemblages and acquiring new meanings. Meaning changes each time a new assemblage is composed. Through the re-construction of family, love, and human relationships, the novel defies the alienating practices of the American society as presented in Vonnegut’s novel. (MM and WHRM)
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Dramaturgical Roles of Present and Past Teenage Characters in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Drama
Views:304The Good Friday Agreement (1998) has set in motion significant changes in Northern Ireland, generating new conditions which, however, also brought numerous problems to the surface on various levels of society. Sociologists have called attention to how intensely the persistent afterlife of sectarian hostilities affect especially teenagers who are often unable to see their goals clearly. Several contemporary Northern Irish playwrights have relied on young characters to pinpoint timely and pressing social and cultural issues as well as to throw light on the precarity of the post-Troubles environment. This essay discusses three plays from different decades of the post-Agreement period: Gary Mitchell’s Trust (1999), Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves (2007), and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012). Their respective dramaturgies showcase the long-lasting influence of the historical burden of the Northern Irish conflict on young peoples’ subjectivities as well as demonstrate how middle-aged characters are still haunted by memories of the psychic wounds they suffered during the most formative years of their lives. Through their underage protagonists, each playwright suggests that members of this generation might not be able to further strengthen the peace they have formally inherited. (MK)
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What Makes the Genre of Lyric Compelling?
Views:124Book review:
Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. x + 391 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-74426-4. Hb. $41.
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Alternative Readings of J. M. Synge’s Drama Predicated on Archival Material
Views:167Book 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.
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Reframing the New Mestiza: Identity Politics and Social Commitment in Chicana Art
Views:341This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to some of the most iconic pieces of Chicana Art using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Parallels between the textual and visual representations of identity politics and social commitment in Chicana feminist art and Anzaldúa’s work, respectively, will be established through the concepts of “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza” as interpretation keys. The article begins by addressing representations of geographical borders as a unifying theme; then, it establishes a correlation between the concepts “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza,” and the reformulation of female identity represented in Chicana visual art. Finally, it will explore the purpose of the social commitment of the author/artists and how it is represented in their literary/artistic productions. The visual art of the selected Chicana visual artists, including Ester Hernández, Yolanda M. López, Alma López, Santa Barraza, and Judith Baca, accurately portray the experience of Chicana women theorized in Borderlands/La Frontera. (PAL)
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Reproduction and the Female Body in Anne Sexton’s Poetry
Views:677The essay focuses on two representative examples of Anne Sexton’s poems about reproduction, “In Celebration of My Uterus” and “The Abortion.” Contrary to most previous analyses which have foregrounded Sexton’s concern with personal identity, the paper claims that Sexton positions personal experience in the wider framework of cultural and social discourses. “In Celebration of My Uterus” explores the experience of the vitality of the speaker’s reproductive organ in the context of kinship with women in other geopolitical locations, also addressing how childbearing is implicated in processes of national economic production. “The Abortion” situates the termination of a pregnancy in the context of the Pennsylvanian landscape, raising questions regarding the embeddedness of the natural landscape in processes of human economic production, as well as the financial implications of the termination of a pregnancy. While questions of self-identity, personal boundaries, and physical experiences are undoubtedly central to “The Abortion” and “In Celebration of My Uterus,” they also attest to Sexton’s concern with the experience of the individual in their wider social context. (BK)
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From Heroic Soldiers to Geometric Forms and Suffering Wrecks: The Transformation of the Male Body in the Art of World War I
Views:165Mechanized and trench warfare, which dominated World War I representations and made millions of soldiers suffer, challenged the rigid gender ideals and hierarchies in the Europe of the time. As the destruction of the traditional manly ideal ran parallel with the destruction of male bodies in the war, the hegemony of traditional representational modes of soldiers was also gradually replaced by more innovative strategies both in poetry and painting. The essay analyzes such works of art with a focus on the crisis of masculinity, manifested quite tangibly in new strategies and representations of visual art. Similarly to soldiers’ written reminiscences, works of visual art depict a sense of emasculation, powerlessness, physical and mental breakdown, testifying that the masculine ideal, which was in large part defined by the chivalric heroic tradition, became anachronistic and unattainable. The figure of the physically or mentally disabled, disempowered soldier as a new phenomenon gained a central position during and after World War I, questioning the validity of the old patriarchal order. Previously marginalized masculinities, for example, the masculinity of homosexual men, and traits previously associated exclusively with femininity such as sensitivity, found their way to open up the borders and shape the Modernist discourse of European masculinity, changing it once and for all. (EEB)
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Seaside Resort Blues: The English Seaside in the 1930s
Views:317In 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)
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Experiments with Realism in Irish Language Short Stories by Daithí Ó Muirí
Views:236Relying on Joseph McMinn’s statement that the connection between realist and non-realist fiction is not a hierarchical relationship, this essay maintains that realism in Irish language fiction is, and has always been, an energizing force for experimentation. This is nowhere more evident than in the work of writer Daithí Ó Muirí (1954-), a native English speaker now residing in an Irish speaking area in Ireland. Much of Ó Muirí’s work is experimental due to his use of allegory and fantasy, yet many of the stories remain rooted in the realities of the world, particularly in his representations of masculinities and in works concerning the impact of war, violence, and displacement on men’s lives. The essay examines Ó Muirí’s first three collections, Seacht Lá na Díleann (1998), Cogaí (2002), and Uaigheanna agus Scéalta Eile (2002), in which he explores subjects that are classically realistic: war, death, religion, and relationships between men and women. The essay explores how Ó Muirí’s work often combines realism and magic realism, and shows that Ó Muirí’s fiction provides a fresh if somewhat bleak narrative of 21st century realism in Irish language prose fiction.