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This paper examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ecophilosophy in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by focusing on his various representations of the natural environment and the human relationship to it. It suggests that the story reflects his belief that nature is divinely arranged and that humanity should protect rather than manipulate its systems. From his perspective, the disruption of natural systems would not only cause the extinction of many animal species but also endanger human life and existence on earth. The paper further suggests that Hawthorne promotes a view of nature as a living organism whose entities possess souls and spirits. Their capacity to have feelings and emotions makes them entitled to moral respect and consideration. In its study of the author’s environmental values and ethics, the essay claims that Hawthorne advocates the idea that human beings do not occupy a privileged position in the universe and that they are not superior or more important than nonhumans. In contrast to the Biblical vision of humankind, he portrays humans as weak and flawed creatures that cannot attain divine perfection. For these reasons, the paper asserts that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” exhibits Hawthorne’s deep ecological awareness and underlines his stature as a pioneer of American literary environmentalism.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Ecophilosophy in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

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This paper seeks to carry out an analysis of the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue in the character of Mariana in both Alfred Lord Tennyson’s homonymous poem and its subsequent pictorial representation in a painting by John Everett Millais. The character of Mariana is taken from Shakespeare’s comedy, <italic>Measure for Measure</italic>, which was published in the First Folio in 1623. By contrast, in 1832, Lord Tennyson introduces the character in his homonymous poem, “Mariana”, as a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection to society. Through interfigurality, Tennyson opts to present her as a “tragic” heroine and she is depicted from a pessimistic perspective. The process of interfigurality entails a conversion stage of reverse ekphrasis through which Shakespeare’s source text is turned into another text, Tennyson’s poem. This interaction between both texts is later turned into two visual expressions. In doing so, both texts are later transferred into John Everett Millais’s painting. Millais’s intertextual dialogue with Tennyson’s poem and Shakespeare’s play involves a process of reverse ekphrasis. Taking this approach, this paper will analyse the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue between the poem “Mariana” and its visual representation in Millais’s artistic manifestations.
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“Her tears fell with the dews at even”: The Ekphrastic and Intertextual Dialogue between Victorian Poetry and Pre-Raphaelite Painting

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Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are not as well-recognised as his novel or his dramatic works. This paper circles around two of his tales, <italic>The Happy Prince</italic> and <italic>The Nightingale and the Rose</italic>. Through a postmodernist outlook, this study postulates the vigorous diatribe of Wilde against the consumer culture which was dominant within Victorian society. Wilde asserts that the Victorian mind-set claims that happiness is attainable through accumulating signs of affluence and he ironically mocks this notion of happiness which is entitled to commodified objects. To him, happiness is defined through a strict sense of Christian morality and Christ-like love and kindness. His aesthetic views are entangled with morality and he fails to celebrate art for art’s sake. Moreover, this study asserts that Wilde is aware of the dominant language games, and his application of the technical language game for the Prince, the Nightingale, and the Swallow is in debt to his monolithic morality or his opportunistic character. At last, Wilde refuses to celebrate beauty if morality is absent and in this way, his aesthetic concerns become rather contradictory.
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The Commodified Happiness: The Only Established Source of Meaning in Oscar Wilde’s <italic>The Happy Prince</italic> and <italic>The Nightingale and the Rose</italic>

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Modernist literature was obsessed with a metaphysical problem regarding the word. A series of formal and material experiments started to address the word’s self-referentiality and aesthetic autonomy, against the backdrop of a new sociocultural milieu in the early twentieth century. To discover how this materialisation of language explored the interplay of literary and artistic modernisms, this paper will critically scrutinise Mina Loy’s and James Joyce’s radical reforms of writing and try to answer the following questions: how did Loy’s multifarious artisthood and poem-writing exchange, interact with, and reinforce each other? As both were closely associated with avant-garde art movements between Europe and America, how did Joyce influence Loy’s refashioning of “torrential languages” (<italic>LoLB</italic> 88) as a creative model of linguistic experimentation? How did their visual aesthetics and experimental poetics help to declare the independence of language and the shape of aesthetic modernism in a new historical epoch?
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The Materialisation of “torrential languages” within the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy, James Joyce, and Aesthetic Modernism

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This paper examines the use of laughter as redemption in Samuel Beckett’s <italic>Waiting for Godot</italic> and <italic>Endgame</italic>. By acknowledging the somatic life of characters, Beckett’s humour problematises un-embodied philosophies of life. Challenging Hugh Kenner’s claim that Beckett’s humour is not redemptive because of the dryness and repetitions involved, it is argued that the foregrounding of fragility and vulnerability is a way of expressing deeply humane laughter in <italic>Waiting for Godot</italic> and <italic>Endgame</italic>. While highlighting that the dialectic of lack and excess is one source of Beckettian laughter, the main thrust of the argument emphasises the possibility of transcendence in a comic situation. The play of lack and excess, rather than suspending transcendental redemption, presents the human condition in its existential mundane realities. Accordingly, visceral and repetitive laughter are discussed in the two plays to bring to the fore the ironic and redemptive aspect of the comic, especially in the scenes where some sort of existential humour is implied.
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Laughing with Beckett in <italic>Waiting for Godot</italic> and <italic>Endgame</italic>

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This paper examines the institutionalisation of psychiatric treatment in Ken Kesey’s <italic>One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</italic>. Taking up the work of Michel Foucault, the paper examines how those suffering from mental illness were classified as disruptive and unfit for society, subsequently labelled mad and institutionalised in facilities more akin to semi-judicial structures than medical facilities. McMurphy, having manipulated a transfer for himself from a state work farm to what he perceives will be the less rigorous confines of a mental institution, epitomises the disruptive presence of the madmen, bringing a world of disorder and chaos to the staff and patients of the mental ward. Self-proclaimed as the head “bull goose looney”, McMurphy reflects the counter-culture movements of the 1960s in the United States in his rejection of the rules and regulations imposed upon him by what amounts to a totalitarian system of control. A wild indomitable force of nature, McMurphy becomes a totem for Chief and the other patients, an embodiment of the human spirit the patients have forfeited inside the institutional system.
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The “bull goose looney” as a Totem Guide for Chief’s Writing Himself to Freedom

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Wole Soyinka and Samuel Beckett apparently occupy distinct places in the literary space, in all ramifications. Specifically, while the former’s dramaturgy is definable within the context of the traditional convention of playwriting, otherwise known as well-made plays, the latter is inherently non-conformist in this regard. Hence, the effort in this paper was to locate a nexus in their writings, using two of their plays, <italic>Death and the King’s Horseman</italic> and <italic>Endgame</italic>, respectively. Theatre of the Absurd, as an offshoot of existentialism, provided the ground for the critical intersection of philosophical and ideological geometry of the two plays. The critical paradigm essentially relied on the interconnectivity of absurdist writings and existentialist thoughts, as the holistic context which fundamentally defines modernism, to assess what is conceived as modernist theatricality in the two plays. Building on the modernists’ interrogation of man’s existence and essence in the world in which existential meaning is presumably lost, the paper concluded that the two texts are largely intoned with modernist thoughts, regardless of their formal or structural distinction. It arrived at this by placing particular emphasis on the playwrights’ attempts, in these works, at demanding a more spontaneous response to the question of the essence of the individual and his/her place in the universe in which meaning in existence, in the modernist sense, is believed to have been lost.
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Existential Dualism and Absurdity: Modernist Theatricality in Wole Soyinka’s <italic>Death and the King’s Horseman</italic> and Samuel Beckett’s <italic>Endgame</italic>

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Speculative fiction, containing speculative elements based on supposition and imagination, changes the dynamics of what is real or possible as we perceive them in our current world and then surmises the likely consequences. Litterateurs have employed speculative fiction as a means of suggesting the latent possibilities and promises for our immediate reality which are not yet enacted or materialised. Accordingly, female writers of feminist speculative fiction, particularly from the 1970s onwards, have used this genre as an effective tool both to expose and to interrogate the oppressive status quo and the normative ethos of the conventional power relation between the sexes prevailing at present. In keeping with this, Naomi Alderman, in her Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017 winning novel The Power, strategically flips the current power structure between the sexes on its head by investing the women, primarily adolescent girls, with the unforeseen yet inherent power of electrocuting men which ultimately results in a Cataclysm initiating a new world order ruled and dominated by empowered women some time in the future. This paper aims at exploring how Alderman, a staunch feminist, purposefully demonstrates in <italic>The Power</italic> that her novel’s fictional dystopia, though macabre and gruesome, is, in essence, a fairly accurate representation as well as a critique of the hierarchical gender relationship as it is prevalent in our present reality.
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Naomi Alderman’s <italic>The Power</italic>: A Speculative Feminist Dystopian Fiction Mirroring the Here and Now

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The present paper sets out to investigate whether the conservative or upper RP accent of selected elderly speakers, namely three of the Mitford sisters, all members of the English aristocracy, manifests change or diachronic stability and uniformity over time. The typical conservative RP features looked for were: the LOT-CLOTH split, absence of the CURE-FORCE merger, SQUARE vowel realised as diphthong /εə/, SMOOTHING, KIT vowel in unstressed ending syllables and TRAP vowel realised as /æ/ instead of /a/. The procedure of the study consisted in the identification of the presence or absence of these specific features in the speech of three selected speakers in recordings made over, at least, a 15-year time span. The individuals studied were: Lady Mosley (née Diana Freeman-Mitford), Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford and Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (née Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford). The results of these comparisons suggest that elderly upper RP speakers are not highly influenced by changes in pronunciation taking place around them and mostly maintain the preferred pronunciation of their youth. In some cases, however, a general uncertainty amongst speakers of the accent, here detected in the presence of the CURE-FORCE merger, does affect the speech of individuals over the course of time.
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The Mitford Voice: A Diachronic Inquiry into the “Upper-Crust” Accent of the Mitford Sisters

Book Review: Ladislav Vít The Landscapes of W.H. Auden’s Interwar Poetry: Roots and Routes (New York and London: Routledge, 2022). 143 pp

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Prague Journal of English Studies

 The Prague Journal of English Studies is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal that invites international contributions, but also aims to be a forum for Czech scholars working in the fields of literary studies, cultural studies and linguistics concerning the English-speaking world. We are seeking submissions of articles on English, American and other English written literatures ranging from Chaucer to the present, that reflect the wide spectrum of current critical and theoretical approaches, including interdisciplinary ones. Cultural studies articles relevant to English language and English written literature are also welcome. The linguistics section of the journal is also receptive to a variety of perspectives in linguistic theory and linguistic description of English, with special attention given to corpus linguistics, stylistics, text and discourse analysis.Priority is given to synchronically designed empirical research. The views expressed in the research articles and reviews are the authorsʾ views exclusively and need not be shared by the editorial panel.  The journal was founded in September 2011, the first issue released in June 2012. The printed version is published by Charles University, Prague (Karolinum Publishing House). The journal is enlisted in ERIH PLUS database.  The journal does not have article processing charges (APCs) nor article submission charges.  Rejection Rate   30-40 %   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. 

Prague Journal of English Studies

Volume 11 (2022): Issue 1 (July 2022)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Ecophilosophy in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

“Her tears fell with the dews at even”: The Ekphrastic and Intertextual Dialogue between Victorian Poetry and Pre-Raphaelite Painting

The Commodified Happiness: The Only Established Source of Meaning in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose

The Materialisation of “torrential languages” within the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy, James Joyce, and Aesthetic Modernism

Laughing with Beckett in Waiting for Godot and Endgame

The “bull goose looney” as a Totem Guide for Chief’s Writing Himself to Freedom

Existential Dualism and Absurdity: Modernist Theatricality in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Naomi Alderman’s The Power: A Speculative Feminist Dystopian Fiction Mirroring the Here and Now

The Mitford Voice: A Diachronic Inquiry into the “Upper-Crust” Accent of the Mitford Sisters

Book Review: Ladislav Vít The Landscapes of W.H. Auden’s Interwar Poetry: Roots and Routes (New York and London: Routledge, 2022). 143 pp

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