Katharine Cleland's Irregular Unions provides the first sustained literary history of clandestine marriage in early modern England and reveals its controversial nature in the wake of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which standardized the marriage ritual for the first time. Cleland examines many examples of clandestine marriage across genres. Discussing such classic works as The Faerie Queene, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, she argues that early modern authors used clandestine marriage to explore the intersection between the self and the marriage ritual in post-Reformation England. The ways in which authors grappled with the political and social complexities of clandestine marriage, Cleland finds, suggest that these narratives were far more than interesting plot devices or scandalous stories ripped from the headlines. Instead, after the Reformation, fictions of clandestine marriage allowed early modern authors to explore topics of identity formation in new and different ways.
This dissertation traces the role of figural language and aesthetic form in representations of English political sovereignty between 1589 and 1674. The ideological power of the monarch emerges in part from his or her association with various figures of authority, including the father, the human mind, and God; I show that early modern poets—including George Puttenham, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton—disrupt the connection between the monarch and his or her metaphoric vehicles, highlighting contradiction rather than presupposing the union of the sensible body and the intelligible figure in the ruler. At the same time, they often register nostalgia for an idealized political past that ironically resembles monarchical order. Not only is this temporal predicament crucial for understanding the patterns of revolution and restoration that characterize the seventeenth century, but I argue that the same dynamic is at work in contemporary critical accounts of the period: recent interest in embodiment and aesthetics risks repeating T. S. Eliot's nostalgia for early modern England as a cultural space where thought and sense could intersect, forgetting the problematic political implications of such fusion. In moving from the Elizabethan era to the Restoration, I do not seek to provide a narrative of progressive political demystification; rather, I chart an ambivalence about monarchy that emerges from the legal and figural grounding of sovereignty itself. It is for this reason that the fantasies of order and control once associated with the king return among even the most ostensibly radical republicans and in later moments of the critical tradition, including our own.
Katharine Cleland's Irregular Unions provides the first sustained literary history of clandestine marriage in early modern England and reveals its controversial nature in the wake of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which standardized the marriage ritual for the first time. Cleland examines many examples of clandestine marriage across genres. Discussing such classic works as The Faerie Queene , Othello , and The Merchant of Venice , she argues that early modern authors used clandestine marriage to explore the intersection between the self and the marriage ritual in post-Reformation England. The ways in which authors grappled with the political and social complexities of clandestine marriage, Cleland finds, suggest that these narratives were far more than interesting plot devices or scandalous stories ripped from the headlines. Instead, after the Reformation, fictions of clandestine marriage allowed early modern authors to explore topics of identity formation in new and different ways.
The Partition of India was the process of dividing the sub-continent along sectarian lines, which took place in 1947 as India gained its independence from British Empire. The northern part predominantly Muslim, became nation of Pakistan and the southern predominantly Hindu became the Republic of India, the partition however devastated both India and Pakistan as the process claimed many lives in riots, rapes, murders and looting. The two countries began their independence with ruined economies and lands without an established, experienced system of government, not only this, but also about 15 million people were displaced from their homes. The Partition of India was an important event not only in the history of the Indian subcontinent but in world history. Its chief reason was the communal thinking of both Hindus and Muslins; but the circumstances under which it occurred made it one of the saddest events of the history of India. No doubt, the Hindus and the Muslims were living together since long but they failed to inculcate the feelings of harmony and unity among themselves. The fanatic leaders of both communities played a prominent role in stoking the fire of communalism. The partition was exceptionally brutal and large in scale and unleashed misery and loss of lives and property as millions of refugees fled either Pakistan or India.
The Partition of India was the process of dividing the sub-continent along sectarian lines, which took place in 1947 as India gained its independence from British Empire. The northern part predominantly Muslim, became nation of Pakistan and the southern predominantly Hindu became the Republic of India, the partition however devastated both India and Pakistan as the process claimed many lives in riots, rapes, murders and looting. The two countries began their independence with ruined economies and lands without an established, experienced system of government, not only this, but also about 15 million people were displaced from their homes. The Partition of India was an important event not only in the history of the Indian subcontinent but in world history. Its chief reason was the communal thinking of both Hindus and Muslins; but the circumstances under which it occurred made it one of the saddest events of the history of India. No doubt, the Hindus and the Muslims were living together since long but they failed to inculcate the feelings of harmony and unity among themselves. The fanatic leaders of both communities played a prominent role in stoking the fire of communalism. The partition was exceptionally brutal and large in scale and unleashed misery and loss of lives and property as millions of refugees fled either Pakistan or India.
Abstract When the disintegration of Western colonies in Africa and Asia ended the formal colonialism, the structures of dependency remained intact and were mushroomed to other countries in the region. One such dependency is academic dependency in which universities in much of Asia and Africa follow the curricula introduced in the colonial era. Although scholars put a great deal of efforts in challenging this academic imperialism, this dependency has been promoted by departments such as Department of English. Whereas "World Literature in English" or "Literary Studies" is gaining momentum around the world, the English literature programmes in Iranian universities are celebrating the Anglo-American canonical literature. By drawing on Syed Hussein Alatas' concepts of "academic dependency," this paper examines how the English literature programmes in Iran are promoting academic imperialism, which prompts the urgency of decolonisation of English literature. It also reveals how this decolonisation can be taken to its ultimate conclusion.
This paper examines the role and the position of the English Literature component in the current Malaysian English curriculum.A brief historical overview of the role and the position of English literature in the Malaysian curriculum will be provided. English literature has been through volatile changes throughout the years and is often seen to play a secondary role to help increase English proficiency of students.In the preliminary National Education Blueprint (2013 – 2025), once again English literature is juxtaposed as a tool to help increase English proficiency.Given the many revamps the curriculum in Malaysia has undergone, this paper argues that there is a general state of ambivalence towards the role and position of English Literature in the curriculum.This paper proposes that English Literature as a subject should be reconceptualised given its potential to help educate and prepare young Malaysians for the impact of globalization and the vibrant changes and challenges in the Malaysian political and social context.Literature should no longer be considered merely as a tool to increase English proficiency; it should serve as a bridge to educate young Malaysians about their rich literary traditions, heritage and culture.
The present study attempts to understand young Pakistani women's identities in relation to their aspirations for higher degrees in English literature. The research reported here is part of a larger ongoing study aimed at exploring linkages between young women's literacy practices in various languages and their concepts of self and identity. The feminist techniques of unstructured in-depth interviews backed up with a self-participatory approach and participant observation were used to capture the richness and fluidity of women's public and private identities. The analysis and findings suggest that despite resistance shown by women to Western culture and ideologies, they do take on new subjectivities and positionalities as they tend to imbibe the norms and values associated with English. The wider exposure to English at an institution of higher education opens up windows to the world, to Western ideologies and world-view, coupled with access to the Internet, cable channels, literary texts, books and magazines. Often in expressing personal aspirations that are contrary to their more traditional roles there is also a certain resistance to this cultural invasion; the women seem to project distinct hybrid identities that are dichotomous and conflictual.
This dissertation examines motion as a literary trope in several late medieval English texts. The types of movement examined here fall into three categories: physical motion recurring in narrative, mobility of textual form that produces the phenomenon of motion in the reader or listener, and the variety of movements external to the narrative but related to the text. Each chapter is organized around an individual author or genre, and Chapter One explores two of Geoffrey Chaucer's early dream vision poems: The House of Fame and The Parliament of the Fowls . Attention to Chaucer's engagement with motion as a concept of natural philosophy and as a desirable state of being reveals connections between his writing and the physics of William of Ockham, and suggests the centrality of fragmentary and complex movement to Chaucer's own poetics. Chapter Two turns to William Langland's Piers Plowman , analyzing its mobile, convoluted, and jarring form, the compulsive nature of its narrative motion, and the poem's involvement in extra-narrative movements--including those that were subversive and revolutionary. Chapter Three examines movement as it appears in several fourteenth-century metrical romances, primarily surrounding the tropes of the quest and the forest. Finally, Chapter Four analyzes movement in Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Morte Darthur with a focus on simple narrations of travel, the aesthetics of the motion of battle and journeying, the way this text looks back to earlier romances in relation to this subject, and how it uses motion outside of the primary narrative frame to expand the vision of a randomized, always-moving Arthurian world. The organizing contention running through these chapters is that each text studied here employs motion as a central preoccupation, that the complexity and importance given to the trope in these works relates to the philosophical and scientific context of fourteenth-century England, and that these representations and embodiments of motion tend to have similar features: complexity, fragmentation, randomization, and a form that produces the phenomena of acceleration and jarring transitions. Finally, movement is presented as an impulse: a primary state of existence independent of any defined direction or destination.
