Volume 59, Issue 3

The English drive to competitively negotiate imperial ambitions in South America is embodied by the “Guiana native” as a nexus of Early Modern English publications. Once colonial rule had been established, however, this trope became superfluous, a gradual marginalization which this paper traces into the 18th century. In an imagological analysis, the “Guiana native” emerges as a figure that balances native subservience with innate sovereignity, gendered Otherness and emerging racial constructions. Older tropes such as Cannibalism are re-defined as de/perception (Ralegh, Kemys, Harcourt). In royalist Civil War publications the trope is tempered to that of the “noble savage,” to be sexualized (Warren) and staged (Behn) in the Restoration. Conversely, Puritans maintain a conservative approach towards this figure well into the Restoration, and read the native body as part of the mystical body of the English faithful (Harcourt, Day) or even as a stand-in for the English (Gage). The paradoxes of Defoe’s Friday emerge as resulting from his eclectic blend of dated versions of this trope. In the late 18th century only rudiments of the original trope remain in Stedman

The relation between Sir Walter Scott and Scotland is that of the hen and the egg: we can never be sure what came first and who authored whom. Such paradoxes are typical also of the ways in which Scott’s authorship and anonymity are entangled with one another. After a general reflection on how authorship may feature as anonymity and vice versa, this article turns to some of Scott’s autobiographical documents which consider physical illness and anonymity not as handicaps but as empowering to his writing. Scott’s novel Redgauntlet is autobiographical precisely in that it echoes these correlations of illness, incognito and authorship. Especially through his indebtedness to Scottish legends and (anonymous) oral performance, the case of Walter Scott encourages us to imagine alternative models of authorship which simultaneously undermine and supplement Roland Barthes’ manifesto of “The Death of the Author.”

This paper brings together linguistics and Cultural Studies by focusing on a key area of contemporary visual culture: TV programmes and films are prime examples of multi-coded texts that not only necessitate joint analyses but, in some cases, seem to actively demand them. Our case study is a British sitcom, Coupling (BBC, 2000-2004), where topics negotiated range from (gendered) social relations to constructions of British identity. The episodes are structured in such ways that they presuppose both linguistic and cultural competence for viewers to meaningfully engage with them. Moreover, TV sitcoms employ strategies that mark privileged moments in which such competence is demanded (the most obvious being the laugh track). The essay analyses such moments of competence, and, in the process, attempts to draw out the critical potential that resides in joining cultural and linguistic perspectives

Between 2006 and 2010, British urban space seemed to have become a battlefield for gang rivalry among young black Britons. These incidents of urban violence have received a lively response in the popular press. The paper will address the representation of the black male teenager in British online newspapers and will examine the way in which he is constructed as an iconic figure of ‘otherness’ against which middle class values can be measured. In conveying the image of the young black urban male as positioned outside mainstream society, the contemporary media, particularly the tabloid press, employs three strategies in particular: dehumanization, his fashioning as an inhabitant of a ‘dangerous wilderness,’ and the link between the gang member and the terrorist. The second part of the essay aims at exploring exemplary British ‘grime’ videos as a key form of black youth’s self-expression and a corrective voice, but also as a medium which deliberately nourishes the anxieties of the public and thus contributes to the media’s construction of ‘otherness