Tag: Language

Mary Barton and the Politics of Translation in Maoist China

Other

Mary Barton occupies a special place in the history of English author Elizabeth Gaskell’s Chinese reception. It was the only Gaskell work to be translated into Chinese in Maoist China, and one of the most valued pieces of British literature at that time because of its direct engagement with sociopolitical themes of class conflict and labor struggles. The Chinese translation of Mary Barton was printed three times by different publishing houses during the Mao years and was included in the

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Language of Feminism in Arabic and British Fin-de-Siècle Writing

Other

Writing a comparative PhD thesis on the New Woman in Britain and the Arab world at the fin de siècle entailed establishing similarities and differences in language usage in the early feminist movements in both cultural contexts. Considering that the New Woman is a well-established field of study in Western scholarship, the main focus of my research project was to demonstrate that, contrary to the assumptions made in existing literature – that the New Woman appeared in Arabic from the

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Words at War: Fiction and Critique Forged in Times and Spaces of Violence

Victorians Beyond the Academy

War occupies an uneasy place in literature and in the study of literature. Raymond Williams’s well-known observation about Jane Austen captures something of this dynamic: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her time. Where […] are the Napoleonic wars: the real current of history?” (113). In posing this question, Williams makes war both central to, and beside the point of, the novel form. Today, the relationship between war and

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Will Abberley, ‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

Other

In 1885 William Morris wrote that poetry had become near-impossible in the modern age, since ‘language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it’ (IIB 483). Abberley explores the intellectual influences that shaped Morris’s belief in such linguistic degradation, and how his late fiction

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