In 2000 the final volume of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials was published in London. Although it was only after New Line Cinema announced the film adaptation that it attracted world wide attention, it is undeniable that Pullman’s work made an immense contribution not only to children’s literature, but to British literature in general. The fact that Pullman was the first children’s author to receive The Whitbread Award, as well as the sales of more than 15 million, speak in favour of the significance his work. However, because of his public outbursts against the boycotters of his works, Pullman came under strident criticism. Unconventional usage of traditional religious and Church-related concepts as literary devices brought into question his integrity as an author and designated him as a fervent atheist. The central aim of this paper is to show how Pullman uses various religious concepts, which are mainly related to Christian tradition and doctrines. The resonant imagery of His Dark Materials carries numerous canonical references, primarily from the Bible, but also from Milton’s Paradise Lost and the works of William Blake. Pullman employs different strategies throughout the volumes to introduce these, somewhat dogmatic, precepts; they are either rewritten in a way that casts new light upon the matters they relate to or are presented unaltered per se, but in a completely new context that enables a different, allegorical reading of the canonical item. This paper opens with a short explication of the religious canon, followed by examples of its subversion in His Dark Materials. Special emphasis is placed on the transfer and modification of the traditional Christian religious concepts into fantasy fiction context and a relatively critical replica of the Catholic Church in His Dark Materials....

Probing the dramatic monologue mould of Robert Browning (1812-1899) has maintained a long tradition of portraying this poet as an experimenter and pursuer of the Victorian representation de-norming process. Browning’s narrative verse employs ambiguation through syntactic rendition of his dramatic personae who voice their minds beyond the restraints of dialogic turn-taking and divulge their impulses through verbal dominance. Browning’s bicentenary seems a most auspicious moment to creatively explore the tenacity of his discordant narrative vein in literary translation. Browning’s fixation on engendering a poetic form that would fully sustain the self-projecting techniques of his protagonists resulted in the employment of narrative verse whose dialogic nature is undermined and embedded in his creations’ monologues. The poet utilizes innuendoes which originate not only from the pool of poetic references but also from the syntactic realizations disclosing a disparity between the speakers’ intentions and their verbal acts. Their interlocutors are being gradually drawn into a puzzling locutionary display. ...

Kuja iz Ureda za vize rekla je: „Svaki emigrant ima pravo na tri kofera. Takva je norma. To su posebni propisi ministarstva.“Nije imalo smisla proturječiti. Ali ipak sam morao: „Samo tri kofera?! Što bih trebao sa stvarima?“„Na primjer?“„Na primjer, sa svojom zbirkom trkaćih auta?“„Prodajte je“, odsutno odgovori službenica. Zatim doda, lagano se namrštivši: „Ako nečim niste zadovoljni, podnesite žalbu.“„Zadovoljan sam.“Nakon zatvora bio sam svime zadovoljan.„Pa onda se i ponašajte tako.“Za tjedan dana već sam pakirao stvari. Ispostavilo se da mi je bio dovoljan jedan jedini kofer. Gotovo sam zaplakao od muke. Pa imao sam trideset i šest godina. Od toga sam osamnaest godina radio. Zaradio bih pa kupio nešto. Mislio sam da imam nekakvu imovinu. A na kraju – jedan kofer. I to prilično skromnih dimenzija. Ispada da sam siromah? Kako je do toga došlo?Knjige? Imao sam uglavnom zabranjene knjige. One nisu prolazile kroz carinu. Morao sam ih podijeliti poznanicima zajedno s takozvanim arhivom. ...

In his essay on Australian poetry of the early twentieth century, Nicholas Birns claims that the poetry of the given period was not at the time fully appreciated in the rest of the world, and that metropolitan centres placed low esteem on Australian poetic production (173). There was the lack, as he puts it, of “an efficient market”, caused by various factors, including the remoteness and isolation of the country, its distance from the hotspots of political crisis, and its “perceived rejection of modernism” (Ibid). It was the Anglo-American experimental modernism that the young Australian poets rejected, composing verse that “tended to rhyme and obey metrical contentions” (Ibid, 174) or at least have a certain melodic quality. In its stylistic aspect, this poetry was rather traditional, and the themes used were also quite different from those explored by American or English modernist poets: exploration by sea and land, and the European explorations of Australia in particular, was a very popular theme, along with the descriptions of nature and typically Australian landscape (as was the case, for instance, with the Jindyworobak school of poetry). Australian literature of the first half of the twentieth century, as noted by Tom Englis Moore, a well-known poet and professor of Australian literature, was marked by “[t]he ideals of peace, freedom and social justice combined with a marked realism” (Waten 26). The anti-realist strain in Australian literature was rather weak at the time when poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound wrote their best works across the globe. The only group of poets truly infatuated with modernism gathered around Max Harris (1921–1995) and called themselves the Angry Penguins. The group that was stimulated by the literary magazine Angry Penguins, was founded in Adelaide in 1940 by Harris and is today probably best-known not for their attempts to introduce modernism into Australian poetry, but for the infamous literary hoax perpetrated by two poets of a more traditionalist orientation, James McAuley (1917–1976) and Harold Stewart (1916–1995). Their main purpose was to debunk modernist poetry as meaningless babble, but what they actually succeeded in doing, as this paper aims to show, was advancing Australian literature beyond modernism into the kind of poetry that stylistically and thematically could be described as postmodern, and thus debunking not only the Angry Penguins’ writing, but their own traditionalist verse as well. ...