The Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket is interpreted as an extended metaphor for the origin and destiny of the English people. The right panel has already been identified by Ari Bouman and Simonne d'Ardenne as representing Hengest mourning his brother Horsa. The left panel literally depicts Romulus and Remus founding Rome, but it is argued that it figuratively represents Hengest and Horsa founding the English nation. The rear panel depicts the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus, a metaphor for the Saxon conquest of Britain. The lid is interpreted as literally depicting the death of Achilles inside the walls of Troy, and as figuratively representing the death of Horsa at AE gelesthrep. The front panel represents the progress of the English from paganism to Christianity. It is proposed that the Casket was created to hold the dowry for the marriage of a Northumbrian princess to a Merovingian king or prince.1
Katharine Burdekin's classic dystopia Swastika Night (1937) depicts a twenty-eighth-century world in which Nazi Germany reigns supreme. Most of the scholarship deals with the novel's extreme gender politics - above all, the enslavement and defacement of women - that foreshadow later dystopias like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985). The paper addresses the other significant feature of Burdekin's Nazi empire: the complete destruction of all non-German history in the wake of the Nazi triumph. Germans alone possess chronopoetic agency, they alone can make history, but that history appears to be coming to an end, which raises the question how those impacted by the destruction of their memory and history can rediscover their lost agency. Drawing on contributions by Christopher Clark, Hannah Arendt and Hans Blumenberg, among others, the essay analyzes how Burdekin spins out the various - and frequently contradictory - shades of Nazi chronopolitics. Ultimately, overcoming the suppression of women and reversing the annihilation of historical agency and consciousness fundamentally depend on each other.1
The Bildungsroman genre has always been an ideal platform for underrepresented groups such as Black people, women, people from former European colonies, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other marginalized and/or minority groups to share their coming-of-age experiences and grievances. In this paper, I will explore how postcolonial writer Ng & utilde;g & itilde; wa Thiong'o utilizes this genre. My argument in this paper is twofold: First, I propose that a logical parallelism exists between Ng & utilde;g & itilde; wa Thiong'o's writing aesthetics - characterized by class consciousness - and the development of his protagonists; second, aligning with his pro-African, pro-Asian, and pro-Global South ideological and political views, Ng & utilde;g & itilde; places his young African protagonists in Africa and Asia for education and growth on the assumption that education at home or in the Global South would support Africa and Africans far better than education at mission schools or in the West. This shift in perspective towards education in the West/ern institutions signifies a departure from the postcolonial Bildungsroman narratives, inviting the upcoming generation of Kenyan and African writers to craft their Bildungs-heroes, free from Western educational systems and influences in their pursuit of African modernity.
This article examines BBC's Dracula (2020) as a cultural text that reflects and interrogates the shifting dynamics of national identity in post-Brexit Britain. By revisiting Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) through a contemporary lens, the mini-series engages with foundational myths of Englishness - namely Victorianism and Empire - to explore how identity is constructed in a multicultural, post-imperial context. The article argues that the 2020 adaptation of Stoker's novel reconfigures the figure of the vampire as a European outsider who threatens British identity not through racial difference, but through cultural and linguistic assimilation.The analysis identifies three distinct identity positions embodied by the series' characters: the majoritarian English-as-British subject, the minoritarian becoming-British subject, and the foreign European other. Through these varied articulations of identity, the series stages a negotiation between nostalgic imperial ideals and contemporary multicultural realities. While the show appears to embrace progressive representation through gender and ethnic diversity, it ultimately falls short. Despite its inclusive casting, the narrative roles assigned to these characters reveal a persistent anxiety surrounding cultural dilution and national belonging. The vampire's mastery of English and appropriation of British cultural markers appear to become a metaphor for the perceived threat of European encroachment in the post-Brexit imaginary. In this way, Dracula (2020) not only reanimates the gothic figure of the vampire but also the spectres of empire, reverse colonisation, and an endangered national identity that continue to haunt Britain's cultural and political landscape.1
This article explores how Chinese writing in English interacts with the theoretical model of "minor transnationalism" (Lionnet and Shih 2005: 8). Taking Xiaolu Guo and her novella, UFO In Her Eyes (2009), as representative examples, my analysis illustrates how Guo's experimental style, which is characterized by artistic imagery and symbolic representations, together with her positionality as a Chinese Anglophone writer, suggests a non-assimilative, transfigurative and tripartite model navigating the triangular relations among 'the local', 'the national' and 'the global'. This is represented by Guo's emphasis on marginality in relation to the sociopolitical power imposed by 'the major' in her translingual approaches. In the novella, Guo outlines the minority's agency in both engaging with and distancing itself from the centripetal force of Sino-U. S. transpacific competition. Guo's narrative style and approach shed light on the position of translingual minority writers within nation-centered and global-neoliberal frameworks in the contemporary literary world, suggesting that 'minor transnationalism' proposes a critical prism for reconceptualizing the binary-based, major-praxis paradigm of world literature.1
Knowing when Middle English began and what to call the period that began when Old English finished are problems that have beset historians of English for centuries. One of the attendant problems was that the name 'Middle English' was not used before 1830, when it was introduced under German influence, so there was a gap in nomenclature for the English that came after 'Anglo-Saxon' and before 'English'. To some extent, this gap was filled by the term 'Semi-Saxon', first used by George Hickes in the early eighteenth century. This article looks at what was meant by 'Semi-Saxon' and how Middle English was presented in print, and suggests that there is a connection between the description and what is described: Semi-Saxon is printed using a palette of Anglo-Saxon sorts that is reduced in number from those deemed necessary to print Old English. This usage is traced from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, when, after a brief resurgence in the use of 'Semi-Saxon', the term 'Middle English' finally became established. The consequences of this development are briefly considered.
The reading "pizelines bearn" in line 300 of The Battle of Maldon has been the subject of much speculation. This is no doubt partly a consequence of the fact that the poem is known only from a transcript made c. 1724, the original manuscript having been largely destroyed in the fire of the Cotton Library in 1731. Two major questions are apparent. The first involves the accuracy of the reading itself. The second is that of the identity of pizelin(e) within the context of the poem itself. Since that part of the manuscript in which the poem appeared is now lost, we must assess the transcript within a set of comparative morphological and etymological parameters. The present article favours the emendation of the pizelines of the transcript to pizelines (for OE Wighelm) and rejects the retention of the reading pizelines deriving from a feminine *Wigelin(e) and denoting the name of the mother of the Pistan purstanes suna of lines 297-298. Instead, Pistan purstanes suna is interpreted as the anglicized form of the name of a Scandinavian who had taken the Old English name Wighelm on being baptised when entering Ealdormann Byrhtnoth's entourage.
This article examines how Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and Catherine Lacey's The Answers (2017) - two contemporary American novels of the 2010s - reflect and interrogate the transformation of media culture in the context of hyper-industrial capitalism and its sociocultural impact on one's identity and affect. Charting the commodification of artistic media and the ascendancy of techno-capitalist products, the study argues that these medial changes disrupt conventional modes of mediation and identification, culminating in the failure of affect. At the same time, the novels also gesture towards the symptomatic obsession with or fixation on affective experience as a compensatory response to this disruption, which further reflects the paradoxical entanglements of one's identity, personal desire, and mediation in contemporary life.1
Drawing on the work by Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, this article reads VanderMeer's Southern Reach series from a posthumanist, neomaterialist perspective as a form of postdisciplinary, posthuman inquiry. As I will argue, the series questions mainstream scientific knowledge, the positivism of science and the belief on the unbridgeable separation of the human from everything else. This interrogation is tightly linked in the series to the dismantling of the subject/object, meaning/matter and human/nonhuman dualisms, which is achieved through an emphasis on the performativity and creativity of matter. The series also problematizes time as a linear phenomenon, putting forward a view of time as contingent, emergent and in constant flux. This reading of the series offers a vision of postdisciplinary scholarship in which literary texts have the capacity to interpret, critique and enact scientific paradigms, ultimately fostering an ethics of responsibility for our posthuman times.1
