Band 141, Heft 3

The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) is one of the first dramatizations of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in English, written in three parts. Starting with the episode of Cardenio and Luscinda in the first part, Thomas D’Urfey takes liberties with the characters and twists the plot, mixing chapters and embellishing it with songs by composer Henry Purcell and music by other contemporary artists. However, this dramatist presents us with a noble and quite sensible Don Quixote, as opposed to a histrionic Sancho, thus inverting the essence of the original characters in Cervantes’s novel.This article will analyze – from the perspective of studies on theatrical adaptation, such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Jane Barnette’s ADAPTURGY: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (2018) – Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) as an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Quixote . The author will explore the different episodes that D’Urfey chose to rewrite in the three parts of his play, analyzing the differences and similitudes between the original stories in the novel and their adapted version in the play, in order to prove that, on the one hand, Cervantes’s novel was already widely known by English audiences when D’Urfey’s plays were premiered, on the other, that he adapted the existing material to suit the preferences of English seventeenth-century audiences and, finally, that he created a parody in which Don Quixote is actually a nobler character than that of the preceding seventeenth-century adaptations. 1

Hawthorne’s often-neglected tale, “The Seven Vagabonds” (1833), portrays one of the most significant instances of a vagabond’s way of life eventually materialized in literary pursuit. This paper examines the short story in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnival’, explicating how each vagabond arriving at the wagon offers some tantalizing glimpses of what a Bakhtinian carnival looks like. These carnivalesque features include the immediate familiarity between the characters, the suspension of moral and social rules, embodiment, and unfinalizabilty. Acting as the prelude to Stamford, the vagabonds’ merry gathering is ultimately canceled out. It is finally argued that the failure of the vagabonds’ utopia marks the narrator’s momentum of transformation, leading him to internalize the carnival spirit of vagabonds within his own imaginative mind and to change the role of carnival from an actual event to a literary pursuit, embodied in the creative and subjective art of storytelling. This transformation of carnivalization tallies well with Hawthorne’s modified political vision of utopianism in the aftermath of the Brook Farm experiment and Bakhtin’s configuration of carnival after its decline as a public event in the Renaissance.

Irish history and literature are plagued with silenced discourses and untold stories. The discourse of dominance, which maintained the Anglo-Irish élite in their ruling position for centuries, was built on the silencing of the repression exerted on the Catholic population. Fin-de-siècle Irish literature encapsulates, and portrays, such silencing, which the Anglo-Irish exerted through their dominance and abuse of the judiciary, the religious and the political statements. Postcolonial reinterpretations of these writings have helped unveil the perceptions of Irish society at the time, and how different Irish writers attempted to criticise this corruption. Bram Stoker’s Gothic story “The Judge’s House” (1891) explores how the past, albeit silenced, always returns to haunt the present, exposing Anglo-Irish anxieties over the return of the repressed native Catholic population, simultaneously denouncing the one-sided abuse conducted by an élite . This paper explores how narrative technique is used to convey the idea of the perennial return of the unsolved, guilty past. Silence over historical past continuously actualises the unresolved conflicts of the Anglo-Irish, generating the ghosts that haunt them.

This paper aims to offer a critical discussion of the representation of the cosmopolitan stranger (Marotta 2010) in Muriel Spark’s last novel, The Finishing School (2004). A category taken from the social sciences, mostly from the work of G. Simmel and Z. Bauman, the stranger as a literary figure has been associated with binary modes of relationship, whose versatile presence is usually responsible for destabilising socio-cultural spaces through his/her permeability and ambivalence. This notion will provide a valuable background for a better understanding of the game of doubles played in Spark’s novel through which the author challenges binary logic in character development and trespasses symbolic boundaries involving the encounter of otherness and a re-evaluation of the self. Our study re-examines Spark’s avant-gardism and foresight in her perception of a figure who reflects contemporary, multiple, playful and hybrid identities, one who may occupy this interstitial and ambivalent space which problematises social and cultural boundaries as unstable and permeable rather than reinforcing them. It adds a new perspective on Spark’s final novel which, as most of her later ones, may be said to be permeated by a sense of hybridity as a synonym for completeness, and a yearning for transition by implying the acceptance of new forms of interpretation and in-between spaces where fictional representation is negotiated and the intersection of opposites may enhance the inherent duality of existence. 1

This article examines Mourid Barghouti’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) in his memoir I Saw Ramallah published originally in Arabic in 1997 and translated into English in 2000. The memoir documents his temporary return to Palestine after 30 years of exile and his criticism of the delusional life of Palestinians post Oslo accords which, as he argues, undermined the rights of Palestinians for autonomy, sovereignty and self-determination. Barghouti associates post-Oslo Palestinians with the fictional figure of Hamlet who is unpacking his heart with words rather than taking action against Claudius. According to Barghouti, Hamlet’s merry jests and laughter have striking similarities with many post-Oslo Palestinians who romanticize their injuries, turning their defeat into victory and their tragedy into comedy. Furthermore, Barghouti associates his feeling of displacement and internal exile with that of Hamlet who is displaced in his homeland, Denmark. Both Hamlet and Barghouti retreat behind the wall of silence and turn their exile and displacement into a subjective space of creativity and critical consciousness. We argue that Barghouti writes the Palestinian present through the classic, and we illustrate that Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah has rendered the personal and national larger and global, permitting the specific and multifarious Palestinian oppression to be understood on grander scales. Thus, I Saw Ramallah suggests broad ethical messages, gerneralizing the Palestinian struggle to the level of significant moral questions of oppression, injustice and valor.

This essay discusses how and to what effect Weird and New Weird fiction use description in unique and genre-defining ways. Using H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and China Miéville’s The City & The City as examples, it shows how the Weird relegates a comparatively large part of the text to description and attempts to elicit dread as an aesthetic effect. The essay argues that the Weird breaks with the traditional use of description by employing formally realist tendencies which it defies functionally, and by combining over-description with the failure to describe, whereas the New Weird is more concise in its use of description, ties it more closely to the narrative, and is less reliant on descriptive failures. Both the Weird and the New Weird demand more active reader participation in their creation of aesthetic illusion, which they encourage through the frames they create around their descriptions, thus preparing readers for the potential of aesthetic distance in the reception process and diminishing its effect. The analysis emphasizes the potential of description to be more than a subordinate to the narrative mode and to be a central component in the formation of a text’s implied worldview.

Transformations in the perception of horror by modern readers have provoked an increased tolerance for cruelty and death. This increase challenges authors to use special means of emotional arousal in order to appeal to contemporary audiences. One of Stephen King’s most recent books, The Institute (2019), is replete with such special means. The novel deals with unspeakable terror and centres on a group of psychic kids kidnapped and placed in brutal conditions to serve the dark purposes of powerful men. This article explores King’s ways of expressing horror by affecting universal human experiences, emotions, and feelings. It applies an interdisciplinary perspective based on psychological and hermeneutic approaches to argue that in the non-otherworldly and non-monster horror The Institute , King involves a combination of vocabulary inventions, syntactic transformations, letter emphases, and refined literary devices to create a terrifying atmosphere. These means are explicated in the article to argue that the violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms is, in many ways, more shocking and frightening than traditional bloody images. They help King remodel a dark realm of gripping horror, where fear arises primarily out of a sense of the distorted world order, and enable the writer to critique social institutions for their approval of horrendous harm.

The ‘ecological imperative’ (Hans Jonas) manifests in different ways according to the linguistic, generic, medial, and semiotic conditions in which it is communicated. This is also true of creative forms of cultural practice such as literature and the aesthetic. The ecological imperative in literature is conveyed not primarily through its discursive content but through the narrative, formal, and aesthetic procedures themselves that literary texts employ, that is, through the translation of the autopoietic complexities of the aesthetic into the co-creative responsiveness of its recipients. The paper starts with some comments on the underestimated relationship between literature and survival; looks at some of the ways in which the intrinsic eco-ethical dimension of literature has been described in ecocriticism, distinguishing three major directions of material, political, and cultural ecology in the field; and addresses the ecological imperative in transdisciplinary contexts that are significant for environmental studies in general, sustainability and the Anthropocene. The paper ends with a list of features of literature as a medium of the ecological imperative from a cultural-ecological perspective.