<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The article introduces and discusses a computer-assisted study that seeks to shed light on the frequency and use of the central modal verbs (<italic>can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would</italic>) in research article (further: RA) abstracts in applied linguistics published in the Inner and Outer Circles of English, respectively. The study is informed by the construal of the Circles of English that are comprised of the Inner Circle, where English is spoken as the mother tongue (for example, the United Kingdom), the Outer Circle, where it is used as a second language in the former British colonies (for instance, Hong Kong, Malaysia, etc.), and the Expanding Circle (e.g., Japan), where English is spoken and taught as a foreign language (Kachru 48). In the construal of the Circles of English, the Outer Circle is regarded as a heterogeneous sociolinguistic space with fluid boundaries (Higgins 615) that affects the frequency and use of the central modal verbs in a variety of textual genres (Lee and Collins 501). Against this background, the study aims at identifying and analysing the frequency of the central modal verbs in a corpus of RA abstracts in applied linguistics published by international peer reviewed journals associated with the Outer Circle (one journal published in Hong Kong and one in Malaysia, respectively) and the Inner Circle of English (one journal published in the United Kingdom). The results of the quantitative analysis of the corpus indicate that the most frequent modal verbs in the entire corpus are <italic>can</italic> and <italic>may</italic>, which function as hedging devices in the journals that are associated with the Outer and Inner Circles of English, respectively. These findings are discussed in the article through the prism of the construal of the Circles of English.
</abstract>

Modal Verbs in Research Article Abstracts in Applied Linguistics: Juxtaposing Discursive Practices of the Inner and Outer Circles of English

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This article is part of <italic>A Comparative Study of Byrd Songs: Volume 17</italic> of the <italic>British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization</italic> (BRRAM) series. <italic>Volume 17</italic> offers evidence to re-assign the authorship of the 29 texts in William Byrd’s linguistic group. <italic>Volumes 1-2</italic> of the series present a new computational-linguistic attribution method that reassigns all of the tested 303 texts from the British Renaissance to a Workshop of only six ghostwriters: Byrd, William Percy, Josuah Sylvester, Gabriel Harvey, Richard Verstegan and Gabriel Harvey. This article is a fragment from <italic>Volume 17</italic> that presents new evidence, beyond the quantitative linguistics, for one of the Byrd re-assignments, “Michael Cavendish’s” <italic>Airs</italic> (1598), together with a modernizing translation of a representative sample of poetry from the linguistically-tested text. <italic>Airs</italic> is a rarely commented on work that tends to appear in studies of the self-plagiarisms within it, or between it and other texts. Only a single private copy of <italic>Airs</italic> has survived; this closeting is likely to have been the result of its dedication addressing Lady Arbella, who repeatedly unsuccessfully plotted with the Cavendishes and Percys to gain the British throne, first after Elizabeth I’s reign, and then after James I’s. The dedication appears to have been a propagandistic marker of support during Arbella’s attempt in 1609 to marry Seymour to challenge James I’s claim, which ended with Arbella’s imprisonment and premature death. The <italic>Airs</italic> book is likely to have been published to encourage this effort and was probably closeted and had its title-page backdated to 1598 when the attempt failed. Additionally, a comparative study is included in the Appendix between a poem in <italic>Airs</italic> and a translation of a song it echoes from Giovanni Croce.
</abstract>

“Michael Cavendish’s” <italic>14 Airs in Tablature to the Lute</italic> (1598)

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This article analyzes the documentation available in an attempt to settle the controversy over the “true” date and place of birth of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavo Vassa, the African. Several original documents are analyzed, and the data is compared to the information provided by the author himself in his <italic>The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself</italic>, first published in London, in 1789. According to these documents (a baptismal record and a muster book), he was not born in Africa, in Igboland (in today’s Nigeria) as he argued in his autobiography, but in South Carolina, as he declared before those who recorded the information in the official documents. The issue of authenticity is more relevant for historical research than for literary criticism; in the case of the latter, the accuracy of the data does not significantly impact upon the literary value of his work. In conclusion, the dispute is pertinent only in the liminal space where the two contexts (historical research and literary analysis) overlap, and it currently operates with information whose relevance and usefulness depend on the framework against which it is judged.
</abstract>

Olaudah Equiano’s Biography: Fact or/and Fiction

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In eighteenth-century Britain the term <italic>taste</italic> was a new vehicle for discerning subtle qualities of an individual mind’s experience of practically anything in the polite world and the world of letters. The term entailed the response of the mind to beauty, and it became popular in each and every genre of writing. The notion of taste acquired a distinctive dimension which effectively disentangles it from the notion of aesthetics emerging early in the nineteenth century as a new area of philosophical enquiry. The eighteenth-century discourses on and ongoing debates over taste and beauty focused on the dominant classicist prototypes of universality, awareness of proportion, harmony and the sense of form and symmetry, principles which were specifically articulated by such <italic>Men of Taste</italic> as the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume and Joshua Reynolds, who had a monopoly on taste. However, the eighteenth century laid the groundwork for an alternative notion of taste, which included women in the realm of theorizing in the taste mode. This article aims to look into the category of exotic taste, and more precisely into the fashionable literary coterie of eighteenth-century England, often presided by women writers such as the Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Delany, Catherine Macaulay, and Hannah More, with the purpose of connecting this type of literary promotion, which was effective in shaping contemporary literary taste, to the theories of taste that anticipated aesthetic judgment in the nineteenth century. Besides, the new social milieu accommodating literary meetings shaped a new discourse which, though ridiculed, facilitated and revitalized conversation in what Hume called “the conversable world” and Samuel Johnson defined as the “clubbable” age. Accordingly, the article will explore the extent to which the discourse employed in such conversations transformed women’s literary taste into an accepted critical category and contributed to the formation of literary reputations.
</abstract>

New Chapters in the Evolution of Taste: How Eighteenth-Century English <italic>Salonnières</italic> Shaped the Culture of Sociability

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Whereas so-called dictator fiction in Latin America is already established as a significant literary subgenre, it is only recently that an increasing number of studies have started to deal with its counterpart set in Africa. In fact, both inside and outside the postcolonial African continent, dictator novels have been written in several languages, including English, French, Arabic, and Kikuyu. One of the most outstanding achievements among recent studies of this kind of fiction is Magali Armillas-Tiseyra’s <italic>The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South</italic> (2019), which examines dictator novels in two different regions – Africa and Latin America – by using the keyword “Global South” to connect them with each other. After taking a genealogical overview of some dictator novels by both African and non-African authors, the present essay will critically investigate Armillas-Tiseyra’s argument in order to reconsider fictional African dictators depicted in contemporary novels, especially those written in English, from a global and transborder perspective. The aim of this essay is to clarify both the challenges and prospects of the current studies of this literary subgenre in/about Africa.
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Inheriting the “Unfinished Business”: An Introductory Study of the Dictator Novel Set in Africa

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This article explores the aetiology and the psychogenesis of Macbeth’s tyrannical ambitions and the growth of his psychic degradation. Macbeth deigns to be an incorrigible regicide, but his ambition is ultimately overpowered by his conscience. This aporetic conflict is ultimately fatal to his morality and sense of Self. Character analysis informed by psychoanalytic criticism will investigate the protagonist’s tormented psyche in its struggle between the ego-syntonic (Persona) and the ego-dystonic (Shadow) leading to neurosis that culminates in psychosis as Macbeth’s identity fractures throughout the play. The ontological issue of the Witches is explored in an attempt to explain the role the metamorphic environment plays in Macbeth’s psychic atrophy. For this reason, the Witches present us with the conundrum of their being both phenomenal and noumenal. Macbeth’s difficulty to distinguish between the real and the phantasmagoric results in a psychotic breakdown. Accordingly, he becomes a mad tyrant seeking to protect his unlawful reign.
</abstract>

The Aetiology and the Pyschogenesis of Tyrannical Behaviour in <italic>Macbeth</italic>

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This article presents an archetypal reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s <italic>Jasmine</italic> that foregrounds the narrator’s agency in her sequential transformations in the narrative. The critic starts from a broader conception of the term agency that encapsulates those instinctive types of actions in which the protagonist, and people in everyday life, find themselves implicated. In other words, the term agency should not be limited to fully conscious and deliberate acts, hence the concept “instinctive agency.” Other scholars have seen that the denomination factor in <italic>Jasmine</italic>, i.e. the fact that every characterological transformation the narrator experiences coincides with a name given to her by a male partner, is a clear sign of her diminishing subjectivity and lack of agency. This study refutes this claim by foregrounding the agentive role of her personal history, and by presenting a thorough psychological and archetypal analysis of the male partners with whom she relates. This article also refutes Mukherjee’s claim that complete abnegation of the old self is required for transformation to occur. By highlighting the ways in which the protagonist’s old Indian self comes to the surface time and again throughout her journey, the article evidences that the author’s views regarding self-transformation are psychologically unrealistic. The article concludes with the perspective that it is inaccurate to regard Jasmine as a sheer receptacle of male power and postcolonial influence, and that a deeper psychological reading substantiates her agency and subjectivity in the postmodern world in which her narrative of self-transformation unfolds.
</abstract>

An Archetypal Reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s <italic>Jasmine:</italic> Instinctive Agency and the Individuation Process

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In her coming-of-age memoir, <italic>A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York before the Great War</italic> (1979), Marie Jastrow, a Jewish-American immigrant woman, cleverly captures the daily life of her family in Yorkville, New York City, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Jastrow recalls the difficulties she and her parents had to face during their first years in the United States, between 1907 and 1918, and the ways in which they managed to adapt to the social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances of the new environment. Therefore, this essay sets out to explore how Jastrow’s family members succeeded in negotiating the challenges of a gendered immigrant experience.
</abstract>

Memories of Immigrant Life: Marie Jastrow’s <italic>A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York before the Great War</italic> (1979)

Review: <italic>Sir Gawain and the Green Knyght * Sir Gawain și Cavalerul cel Verde</italic>, translation into Romanian by Mircea M. Tomuș, Cluj Napoca: Editura Școala Ardeleană, 2021, 350 pages, ISBN 978-606-797-644-1, paperback, 50 RON

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Volume 23 (2023): Issue 2 (December 2023)

Volume 23 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 22 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 22 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 21 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 21 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 20 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 20 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 19 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 19 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

East-West Cultural Passage

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  East-West Cultural Passage appears biannually and publishes work by scholars interested in the cross-cultural dialogue in areas such as literature, history, film, popular culture, institutions, politics and related subjects. The journal is devoted to the study of cross-cultural understanding with a clear humanistic emphasis. Articles with an interdisciplinary character are particularly welcome. The journal also publishes notes and comments, review essays and book reviews.  The East-West Cultural Psassage Journal focuses on theoretical and empirical research in the humanities disciplines. The journal welcomes the submission of articles from the following fields:   Anthropology  Cultural studies  Education  Language  Linguistics  Literature  Novels and short stories  Poetry  Teaching   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

East-West Cultural Passage

Volume 22 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Modal Verbs in Research Article Abstracts in Applied Linguistics: Juxtaposing Discursive Practices of the Inner and Outer Circles of English

“Michael Cavendish’s” 14 Airs in Tablature to the Lute (1598)

Olaudah Equiano’s Biography: Fact or/and Fiction

New Chapters in the Evolution of Taste: How Eighteenth-Century English Salonnières Shaped the Culture of Sociability

Inheriting the “Unfinished Business”: An Introductory Study of the Dictator Novel Set in Africa

The Aetiology and the Pyschogenesis of Tyrannical Behaviour in Macbeth

An Archetypal Reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine: Instinctive Agency and the Individuation Process

Memories of Immigrant Life: Marie Jastrow’s A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York before the Great War (1979)

Review: Sir Gawain and the Green Knyght * Sir Gawain și Cavalerul cel Verde, translation into Romanian by Mircea M. Tomuș, Cluj Napoca: Editura Școala Ardeleană, 2021, 350 pages, ISBN 978-606-797-644-1, paperback, 50 RON

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