Volume 64, Issue 4

This article assesses Mary Pix’s tragedy Ibrahim (1696) at the transition from traditional heroic drama to pathetic she-tragedy. Considering the coexistence of different ‘heroic modes’ towards the turn of the century, Pix’s tragedy can be placed between Dryden’s heroic drama The Indian Queen (1665; revived 1696) and Manley’s she-tragedy The Royal Mischief (1696). Ibrahim made use of traditional, popular theatre practices such as an oriental set and the incorporation of rape as stage spectacle; yet with the increased presence of women on the Restoration stage, Pix attributed a double function to the raped Morena as a reward for the male hero and as a heroine in her own right, thus mitigating the focus of earlier heroic plays on male heroship.

Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, critics have tended to treat Walter Scott’s fiction disparagingly – the tacit assumption often being that it lacks formal sophistication or semantic ‘depth.’ Reading Scott against the grain of this reception, I argue here that Ivanhoe (1819/1820) commands an allusive density which complicates such verdicts. Offering a detailed analysis of both the novel’s hermit figure and the cultural geography in which it appears, this essay retraces Scott’s references to eighteenth-century literary, aesthetic, architectural, and horticultural discourses. Acutely aware of drawing from a codified set of readily consumable images, Scott both quotes and subverts the eighteenth-century hermit tradition. Employing an elaborately intertextual strategy to defamiliarize readerly notions of identity and signification, Scott’s writing emerges as somewhat more complex than the history of his critical reception would seem to suggest.

In his work as a playwright, Lee Hall not only explores dramatically the troubled relationship between culture and the working class in Britain. He also seeks to challenge the stereotyped images of the working class in the media as being feckless, inarticulate and incapable of engaging in any cultural production on their own terms. In this paper I examine the ways in which this encounter between the working class and ‘high art’ is depicted in the film Billy Elliot (2000) and the play The Pitmen Painters (2008), both written by Lee Hall. In these portrayals of a working-class boy’s struggle to become a ballet dancer and of the collective efforts of a group of coal miners to express themselves as fine artists, I discuss how far Hall has succeeded in subverting received working-class stereotypes and what are the broader political and aesthetic implications of his cultural depictions of these coal-mining communities.

Among the stories included in Little Children (1937), “Around the World with General Grant” proves to be particularly revealing of Saroyan’s double consciousness. By juxtaposing the master narrative of President Ulysses S. Grant’s global tour and the petit récit of the family’s exile, the narrator composes a liminal narrative that pits the assimilationist thrust of the national pedagogy (epitomized by the travelog’s imperial vision) against the child’s performative ability to fracture the homogeneous time of the host nation through his allusions to his father’s exodus. The result is a serious erosion of the metaphor of two worlds of American exceptionalism. In addition to Bhabha’s concept of cultural liminality, this article also explores the role of cultural memory and communicative memory in the travel binaries that constantly merge and collide with each other throughout the story.

The article discusses the popularity of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden (1952) in Slovenia, demonstrated by its presence in virtually every area of public life and the sheer number of Slovene editions. The study also shows that in past decades, when Slovenia was in the grip of communist rule, even this book by Steinbeck, which is characterized by its non-fidelity to the rules imposed by social realism, in contrast to those that largely conformed to the communist regime’s ideology, could not escape an ideological burden.

The article sets out to investigate configurations of literary visuality in Derek Walcott’s long poem Tiepolo’s Hound , illustrating how an engagement with verbal-visual relations might add to our understanding of Walcott’s postcolonial aesthetics. It is argued that the evocation of Eurocentric visual practices constitutes an act of intermedial and transcultural translation, which both acknowledges the influence of imposed models and subjects them to creative processes of exchange.