English Literature

| This article explores the relationships between fashion , glamour, celebrity, and Canadian literature, focusing specifically on Toronto, Canada. I argue for the value of "reading glamour" into Toronto's literature by examining how glamour provides a socio-cultural insight into character and plot development and, moreover, elevates the character of the city itself. No doubt certain authors conjure up a glamorous cachet with their coterie of bohemian intellectual and literary salons but the writing itself rarely approaches the same level of glamorous celebration. However, reading glamour-that is, following Brown, tracing the language and grammar of glamour as a literary form linked to modern mass culture-extends the potential for literary and cultural expression of the text. As Gun-dle and Castelli argue, glamour is typically associated with the urban and cosmopolitan, and this paper explores how Toron-to has historically engaged with its own sense of burgeoning celebrity, fashion, and glamour. By focusing on the work of Phyllis Brett Young' s The Torontonians (1960), I examine how glamour as a corollary to fashion challenges preconceptions of "Toronto the Good, " not only within the local urban imaginary but also on national and global levels. Résumé | Cet article explore les relations entre mode, glamour , célébrité et littérature canadienne en se concentrant plus

There is a moment in reading Alice Munro's "My Mother's Dream" when one comes to suspect that the story is being narrated by a dead baby. This inkling describes a mode of participating in the story, becoming part of its affective world by joining the range of characters who, at various points within the narrative, worry that the baby, our unnamed narrator, is dead. And while this will not turn out to be the case in any simple sense-the narrator survives to tell the tale-the reader is initially suspicious for quite good reasons: the narrator will indeed have survived an insistent, if in some senses passive, or unconscious, attempt at infanticide. Read carefully, "My Mother's Dream" suggests that the baby (who is herself a defiant and murderous adversary) survives her mother's attempt on her life several times over, even if much of this (maternal) violence is disavowed; only the tiniest sprinkle of the sedative pill was involved; the pulling up of the blanket over the baby's head was a gesture of care, of course! Survival, or going-on-being in relation, for both mother and infant, would seem to be bound up with such

Emma Donoghue's 2010 novel, Room, is read as an allegory of parenting and as a brilliant account of the profoundly relational and ethical structure of subjecthood. This chapter draws on the work of Jessica Benjamin, D.W. Winnicott and Lisa Guenther.

What does it mean to read a poem about anti-Blackness as ecopoetics? How do we account for the ecological in such a work? How does this kind of reading unsettle the notion that ecological literatures are tethered to the environment? These are the questions I tackle in this paper as I undertake a reading of Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries as ecopoetry—a poem that explores the entanglements between the human and nonhuman worlds. I argue that through this poem, Brand pushes against such simple definitions of ecocritical works as focused on the impact of human activities on the environment. Her work suggests that woven into the fabric of the narratives that govern such activities are evidence of the destruction of marginalized bodies. As such, I approach Ossuaries from the angle of the key elements identified by scholars like Lawrence Buell, Laura-Gray Street, and Ann Fisher-Wirth as evident in ecological literatures. I examine how Brand deploys these features in her poem, using them to nudge ...

Amidst the Renaissance celebration of amicitia, English women writers grapple with two ways that discourse falls short: its masculinity excludes female friendship, and its idealism passes over the imperfect realities of human relationship. Women writers must conceptualize for themselves both who a female friend would be, and how she could make friendship real—but equally important as who? and how? is where?. For Isabella Whitney (A Sweet Nosegay, 1573) and Mary Wroth (Urania, 1621), lack of friendship and hope for its discovery can be most clearly felt in the garden. My analysis links studies of early modern friendship, genre, and women writers. Whitney and Wroth draw on the ethos of pastoral to shape encounters between their avatars and the voice of an other, leveraging the garden space (with its associations of privacy and self-reflection) to imagine a female friendship that transcends the boundaries of both the garden and amicitia itself.

Scholars are increasingly able to demonstrate that Old Norse literature drew upon a rich and ancient tradition of ritualistic madness, along with its attendant violence, from Indo-European and possibly Middle-Eastern sources. The writers of Old Norse literature then crystallised this inheritance into the highly distinctive character of the berserker (Speidel 2002). This article argues that the driving and shaping dynamic of this uniquely socialised Norse madness is not informed fundamentally by its pragmatic (or instrumental) value, but an aesthetic (or intrinsic) appeal. However, over time, the aesthetics of this madness undergoes a metamorphosis at both macro and micro levels, recasting it as the grotesque and taboo in certain aspects while subsuming other aspects into characters who adapt this madness to new social mores and orientations.

This article examines the relationship between the Bonifatii et Lulli Epistolae (BLE) and the Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldo, adopting a literary perspective in order to consider how the differing agendas of the BLE and the Vita Bonifatii complicate modern scholarship’s understanding of that relationship. In the attempt to deepen such knowledge, this paper concerns itself primarily with the life’s hagiographic use of the BLE, rather than, as has been more usual, the philological and historical dynamics of its preservation. The ultimate aim is to lay out a more rigorous and systematic framework for considering these parallels which takes into account the often radically different functions of epistolary records and hagiography.

This article examines liturgical language and motifs potentially interwoven with the Old English prose account of ‘St Andrew amongst the Cannibals’, located in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198. The article traces in detail the possible parallels between the liturgy of the Mass and the language of the account, and then considers explanations for liturgical elements in the saintly legend and what this may contribute to our aesthetic understanding of that account.

This article examines potential textual sources for the animal fylgja in fornaldarsögur and íslendingasögur. It compares fylgja-scenes in such sagas with possible analogues in scripture, bestiaries and the so-called Pseudo-Daniel in order to discern what influence these foreign texts might have exerted upon the nature of animal fylgja as we encounter them in the sagas. The article will also examine the notion that especially amongst the fornaldarsögur, foreign influences constitute a primarily ornamental rather than substantive aspect of these texts.

This article examines the inversion of incarnational dynamics and the apotheosis of the Human in Dante’s Inferno. Human in Dante’s Inferno. Specifically, it analyses and critiques the ways in which that inversion has been facilitated and nuanced by a number of key Humanist scholars after the Romantic period,
centring particularly upon the influences of Erich Auerbach and Edward Said. The paper argues that the later Humanist vision of the Inferno is, in many ways, in sharp contrast from Dante’s text as conceived within his own cultural milieu, though both Dante and the critics are ultimately concerned with the problem of transcendence and this problem fundamentally frames both visions.

This article traces the development of the opus geminatum (a twinned pair of texts, one in verse, one in prose, treating the same subject) as this grows out of late antique literary practices surrounding the conversio (paraphrase) and as it is adopted by Anglo-Saxon authors, becoming one of their most distinctive literary forms.

This article examines three aspects of Augustine of Canterbury’s Libellus responsionum. Through recent scholarship it provides a summary of the Libellus’s textual context. It also clarifies the very contentious issue of just how familiar theLibellus was to missionaries, not only those preaching in England but also on the Continent, and specifically Augustine of Canterbury and Boniface. Finally, in light of the pastoral and textual circumstances, it explores the largely neglected question of just how the Libellus may (or may not) have illuminated the various literary features and strata of Augustinian and Bonifatian biography.

This article traces the development of the opus geminatum (a twinned pair of texts, one in verse, one in prose, treating the same subject) as this grows out of late antique literary practices surrounding the conversio (paraphrase) and as it is adopted by Anglo-Saxon authors, becoming one of their most distinctive literary forms. Keywords Opus geminatum Á Anglo-Saxon Á Latin Á Bede Á Rhetoric Á Genre A number of recent analyses of Anglo-Saxon literature have tied in productively with broader developments in Language Studies. 1 For instance, Ruff (2005) and Stanley (2006, pp. 451-472) have lately published articles which align well with certain discussions in Stylistics; Harbus' recent work situated itself well into new developments in Cognitive Linguistics (2007); and Kim's investigations of Beowulf parallel in a striking and helpful manner much current work in Genre Studies (2005). On the other hand, these analyses of Anglo-Saxon texts simultaneously avail themselves of well-established comparative methodologies which have long undergirded research in Anglo-Saxon studies. 2 It seems appropriate, therefore, to consider at greater length a genre of Anglo-Saxon literature of which most Anglo-Saxonists are presently aware, but which to

This paper takes up the Zapatista “Mother Seeds in Resistance” seed-preservation project as a case study for exploring the interconnections between contemporary biotechnology, biocultural diversity, and cultural institutions such as the archive. Drawing on environmental theories that employ the bioscientific concepts of entropy and self-organization to think about issues of biopiracy (Shiva), and on cultural theories that employ the same vocabulary to think about the archive as a mechanism of imperialist control (Richards, Stoler), I theorize the “Mother Seeds in Resistance” seed bank as an autonomous, self-organizing archive that embraces entropy in its biological, knowledge-sharing, and sociopolitical dimensions. I argue that, in addition to constructing an antihegemonic model of archival practice, this seed bank initiative teaches us that the growing influence of biotechnology on the production and circulation of knowledge means that contemporary decolonization movements must learn to speak about living systems, archival materials, and information control all in the same breath. This emergent biocultural paradigm has important consequences not only for archive theorists but also for ecocritics interested in the cultural ramifications of environmental efforts to preserve indigenous agricultural resources, as well as postcolonial scholars interested in identifying situated material practices that are contributing to the global struggle for the decolonization of knowledge. - See more at: http://socialtextjournal.org/article/the-zapatista-mother-seeds-in-resistance-project-the-indigenous-community-seed-bank-as-a-living-self-organizing-archive/#sthash.0Iq11dLU.dpuf