Between the Acts

Critics have widely explored John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Graham Swift’s Waterland, and A. S. Byatt’s Possession. These novels are generally treated as outstanding historiographic metafictions since they self-consciously adopt the notion of history and simultaneously problematize historical understanding. For Hayden White, the historian is inevitably impositional and every narrativized history is relative. Following White, Linda Hutcheon defines postmodern historical fiction as the type of fiction that self-reflexively and paradoxically makes use of the notion of history and simultaneously denies its truthfulness. The present article attempts to analyze, compare, and contrast John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Graham Swift’s Waterland and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance in light of the theories of White and Hutcheon to show that in spite of problematization of the possibility of recovering the past as it actually was, these novels treat the concept of histor...

The paper aims to emphasize and display the importance of the pedagogical, explorative and theoretical work of Stanislavsky in the fields of the pedagogy and ethics of the art of acting and how these influenced the development of features and the establishment of the basic principles of Grotowsky's director/pedagogical work in his various artistic and researching periods. As well as essential historic-biographic correlation, the points of contact and the links in their work are established with particular emphasis on the crucial link manifested in the researched importance and in the development of the so-called method of physical actions which Grotowsky assumed from Stanislavsky but further developed in his own direction. By contrasting the basic principles of their work in the field of the method of physical actions, the crucial theoretical and practical differences between the two authors emerge. These differences are primarily evident in the apprehension of the basic preferences of...

Not just another dictionary in the well-known Rowman & Littlefield “Historical Dictionaries” series – South American Cinema is a special kind of book for anyone delving into the broad field of national and regional cinema encompassed by the term South American. Author Peter H. Rist is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal and his PhD thesis dealt with the early films of John Ford. Rist is better known within film circles as the author of several papers on experimental Japanese cinema, so his solo venture into South American cinema is quite unexpected. It is even more surprising that he has produced a 701 page book of this stature on his own – definitely a huge task.What is quite different about this book is evident right from the title – South American – not Latin American, Hispano-American, or any other expected paradigm based on the language or the hyper-cultural context. Rist, as he notes in the preface, tried to envision a book bordered by the notion of the whole continen...

Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, is divided into seven chapters which function as separate essays that can be read without having specific knowledge about the horror genre. If read systematically, the book presents an anthological review which establishes the continuity of the genre from 1764 to the early twenty-first century. Even though it privileges theory over textual analysis, the book can be used to elucidate numerous cultural productions and developments that have influenced the simultaneous evolution and devolution of horror by offering a precise insight into the continual interaction of social and literary spheres. Horror: A Literary History is valuable precisely because it questions the devalorizing stances towards the horror genre by acknowledging the importance of various writers who have contributed to the evolution of American and British literature but have often been marginalized because of their tendencies to transgress into the horror genre.

The article begins with a brief discussion of what the author judges to be an overproduction of publications in literary studies. He offers an explanation of this development and contends that the causes are endemic to the humanities. Two causes of this overproduction are particularly pertinent for his reading of Melville: firstly, the constant change of interpretative paradigms and, secondly, the striving of the humanities to reflect upon the contemporary moment. The departure point of the reading is the spatial turn and the author's contention that this geographical knowledge has failed to address the sea. Elaborating on this contention, the author foregrounds the need for a maritime criticism and proceeds to read Moby Dick by excavating the manner in which Melville represents and thinks of the sea. On the basis of this evidence, the author argues that in Moby Dick, Melville offers a meontological thinking of the sea. Consequentially, the author argues that this meontology has a bear...

This essay examines the long-standing and far-reaching influence of Oscar Wilde’s public persona – both historical and mythical – on author Beverley Nichols. Nichols, famous during his lifetime for both his non-fiction and reportage, has sustained his fame primarily through his Allways and Merry Hall gardening trilogies. These feature a semi-autobiographical version of the author who is self-styled as a spiritual successor who pays homage to, and extends the legacy of, Oscar Wilde and his endless bon mots, serving up irony, humor, and social commentary in an engaging, urbane manner while further shaping the Wildean identity that prevailed as an iconic gay style throughout much of the last century and that endures, in some forms, even today. Keywords: queer theory, Oscar Wilde, Beverley Nichols, Pet Shop Boys, queer identityOscar Wilde’s final words as his three harrowing trials and, indeed, his remarkably verbal life drew near their close – “And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?” – serve ...