Volume 127, Issue 3

Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus is one of the most opaque seventeenth-century prose texts. This essay attempts to understand it by suggesting that its central aesthetic strategy is that of literary sprezzatura : a rhetorical equivalent to the technique of self-presentation fundamental to early modern courtliness. It can be shown that the figure of paralepsis is a major structuring device in The Garden of Cyrus . Like sprezzatura , this corresponds to a broadly neoplatonic mind-set, which dissimulates, but ultimately gestures towards, an invisible order based on a transcendence which cannot otherwise be articulated or performed. Thus, Browne's writing appears to be related to certain habits of mind typical of Renaissance culture, which still retain their imaginative attraction as well as their efficacy well into the seventeenth century. From this point of view, it can also be appreciated in which respects new, ‘scientific’ mentalities are indebted to, and inseparably linked with, older, metaphysical modes of thought and feeling.

Stage adaptations of the physical transformations as evoked in Ovid's Metamorphoses have been deemed impossible or at least deficient in literary criticism, in particular with regard to Shakespeare's plays. My paper critically engages with this assessment and explores the ways in which metamorphoses can be staged in the theatre. Focusing on moments of transformation in Titus Andronicus, The Winter's Tale and A Midsummer Night's Dream , it examines actual theatrical realisations of different epochs as well as staging options of the scenes and argues that critics examining Shakespeare's metamorphoses have tended to neglect the mobility and polyfunctionality of theatrical semiosis in favour of an implicitly verisimilar notion of theatrical representation. Rather than exclusively aspiring to a verisimilar staging of bodily metamorphosis, the scenes self-reflexively comment on the double vision of theatre audiences, who witness both the intradiegetic moments of shape shifting and the incessant metamorphoses of theatrical signs, including the bodies of actors, which constitute and distinguish theatre as an art form.

The following essay explores the depiction of the Eastern European migrant in the British contact zone in Rose Tremain's novel The Road Home (Chatto & Windus, 2007) and in Marina Lewycka's novel Two Caravans (2006). It will analyse in which way London and other British places are constructed as spaces where Eastern and Western European cultures interact and clash and how the figure of the newcomer is employed to critically examine the state of contemporary British society. It will further look at how this meeting between East and West is also mediated through narrative strategies which illustrate the difficulties of successful intercultural communication and emphasise the Eastern European migrant's sense of belonging. Furthermore, the essay will investigate the liminal position of the migrant from the East between neighbour and stranger, as well as the affirmation and subversion of powerful national stereotypes in Tremain's and Lewycka's texts.

Since its heyday in the 1950s and 60s, myth criticism has been accused of taking a reductive approach to literature because it tended to neglect cultural and historical differences between ancient Greek myths and their current renderings and, more damagingly perhaps, to marginalise the specific properties of literary works that redeploy ancient myths. While this article does not have a New Historicist agenda, it seeks to show how prevalent ancient Homeric myth still is in contemporary poetry, despite the desacralised and often more humble post-Modernist world of current letters. The article analyzes how poets such as Lorna Goodison have gone against the grain of ancient myths (as many feminist writers have done), and in what ways Homer's Odyssey has been given unexpected extensions that provide the battleground not for epic extravaganzas but for familial issues treated in a post-Confessional mode. The study focuses primarily on poems by Peter Redgrove, Ted Hughes, Michael Longley, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, John Montague and Paul Durcan. After having given an outline of the various ways in which recent poets employ myth, the survey focuses on a particular case in point in the field of Irish poetry to show that myth criticism can also be attentive to the specificities of the texts its seeks to examine in an archetypal light.