Between the Acts

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 ...

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...

This paper examines how short-short stories published on social media platforms such asFacebook and Twitter experiment with brevity. It examines the use of devices such as planned spaces between words, colors, and enjambments, a genre called twitter fiction, to deliver the literary after-taste of ‘byte-sized’ fiction. What are the ramifications, requirements, and results of this form of brevity? Since the works are written and published on/for the digital media, what other aids supplement the reading process, if any? What forms of innovation does this conciseness allow? Two platforms of reading and writing short-short stories (of 140 characters or less) will be used to examine these questions: Terribly Tiny Tales on Facebook and Very Short Story (@veryshortstory)on Twitter. Keywords: digital humanities, twitter fiction, brevity, short story, technology, social mediaThe six-word story by Ernest Hemingway, written in the 1920s, can be seen as an exemplary precursor to the recent burgeoni...

Kuća je imala tri sobe, dva dnevna boravka, kupaonicu, blagovaonicu, kuhinju, sobu za sluškinju, podrum, terasu i dvorište.Što je za Eduarda značilo dvorište?Značilo je zemlju kojom je jurio orući štapom, iskopanu krhotinu stakla iz kojeg je izišao crv prepolovljen napola, ali koji se još micao, uvijek moguće postojanje kakva blaga, lokve blatnjave vode u vrijeme kiša, papirnati brodić, jednog mrava u njemu, liniju mrava koju je pratio da vidi kamo idu. Išli su u mravinjak. Manga sapatinho, manga manga-coracao-de-boi. Šećerna jabuka, goiaba, gabiroba. Kokošinjac. Bijela kokoš bila je njegova, bilo je jasno iz imena: „Eduarda!”Stisnula bi se i dopustila mu da je uzme u ruke. Katkad bi snijela jaje. Kada bi odlazio u školu, Eduardo bi je ostavljao ispod lavora. Jednom zgodom otac mu je rekao da to nije u redu: zar bi volio da netko to radi tebi? I kokoši pate. Jedne nedjelje za vrijeme ručka zatekao je Eduardu na stolu, s nogama u zraku, pečenu. Pojeo ju je kroz suze. Da, pate, no svi ih...

This December it will be ninety years since Agatha Christie disappeared for eleven days and despite the fact that there are many biographical books about her life and work, nobody knows for sure what provoked her to vanish, sending shockwaves in British society in 1926. Whatever the cause may be, this disappearance has remained a mystery and inspired French authors Anne Martinetti and Guillaume Lebeau, along with the illustrator Alexandre Franc, to create a graphic novel: Agatha: The Real Life of Agatha Christie. Marinetti has also written a cookbook inspired by Agatha Christie, entitled Creams and Punishments, while together with Lebeau, she has co-authored the encyclopedia Agatha Christie from A to Z.Agatha: The Real Life of Agatha Christie was originally released in 2014 as a French-language Kindle edition and was first published in English in May, 2016 by the UK press SelfMadeHero, which specializes in graphic novels and manga adaptations of classic literature, like those of Shakes...

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...