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

Coffee was a foreign product in Britain, only introduced during the Post-Medieval period. The introduction was not smooth as it was viewed as a drink from the Moors or the Turks. Two groups emerged – one favouring coffee and one deriding it – and the conflicts were depicted in books, pamphlets, and leaflets of that era. Coffee faced opposition from other beverage sellers as it became a threat to their existing businesses. During its initial days, there was even a call for a baptism of the drink to wash out its “Satanic influence”. Coffee, seen as a medicine in its earlier days in Britain, became an essential part of everyday life in the late 17th century. Coffee houses became a place for public gatherings where social, political, and business discussions took place. This paper will explore the discussions and debates revolving around coffee in 17th-Century English Literature.
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Arguments and Counterarguments for and against Coffee in 17th-Century English Literature

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This paper aims to explore the migration of narrative elements from four medieval Welsh tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi into four recent Englishlanguage novels which are part of Welsh publisher Seren’s series New Stories from the Mabinogion. Russel Celyn Jones’s <italic>The Ninth Wave</italic>, Owen Sheers’s <italic>White Ravens</italic>, Lloyd Jones’s <italic>See How They Run</italic>, and Gwyneth Lewis’s <italic>The Meat Tree</italic> bear an explicit textual relationship to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a textual whole of unknown authorship. This affords an opportunity to examine the workings of what constitutes a textual tradition, both diachronically and synchronically. The article relies on Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s structuralist theory of narrative, on Welsh philologist Sioned Davies’s analyses of the medieval tales, and on Slovak literary scholar Anton Popovič’s view of tradition in terms of prototexts and metatexts. The methodology chosen consists of identifying textual variables and invariables in order to capture possible ways of examining relationships between related texts of different periods and languages within a corpus of linguistically encoded messages of a geographically defined community.
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New stories from the Mabinogion and Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi: Texts, Narratives and Tradition1

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This paper addresses the issue of the loss of the real in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro as a contemporary author whose thought line is still in progress. His approach to this issue is anti-capitalist as he questions the so-called scientific advancement led by cash-oriented capitalists and industrialists. His writing seeks to strip the veil of the murderous nature of this kind of science. He blames it for killing the real and creating a world of simulations. He animadverts upon dystopian spaces where he holds postmodern scientific knowledge responsible for the digression of the natural course of life and lays bare the secrets behind the replacement of the real with the simulated by drawing attention to such debatable topics as human cloning, cosmetic surgeries and artificial intelligence. In terms of methodology of analysis, this paper is primarily based on a close examination of the author’s literary texts: two novels <italic>(Never Let Me Go</italic> and <italic>Klara and the Sun)</italic> and three short stories from Nocturnes (“Malvern Hills”, “Nocturne” and “Crooner”). Postmodernist concepts have been of great relevance to the analysis of these texts, for his fiction could not be approached in isolation from the realities of the postmodern era where it’s produced. Equally, bearing in mind the author’s socio-ethnic and historical background, the society where he lives and the politico-cultural transformations of the world aTher the Second World War plays an important role in the analysis of his texts.
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The Loss of the Real in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <italic>Never Let Me Go</italic>, <italic>Klara and the Sun</italic> and <italic>Nocturnes</italic>

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Critical engagement with and intersections of Japanese and African literatures are burgeoning. In pre-colonial African society, a lawful action was that action that took into consideration the common good expressed in the spirit of Ubuntu. Interestingly, Japanese literature and African literature share this universal character in common. Ubuntu intersects with the Japanese philosophy of Nagomi which emphasises harmony and balance thereby creating a nexus of transcultural hybridity. This paper examines Ubuntu and Nagomi as transcultural motifs in stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Nagai Kafu, and Uno Koji in <italic>Akutagawa and Others: Three Japanese Short Stories</italic> to highlight ideological and law-oriented similarities. Carl Jung’s Persona-Archetype is privileged in this study because it accounts for the recurring images of Ubuntu and Nagomi in the public life of the characters. These cultural images help them to mitigate defiant conducts which violate the fundamental human rights and life purpose of other characters. In Nagai Kafu’s <italic>“Behind the Prison”</italic>, the motif of physical and psychological imprisonment is eye-catching as the narrator writes His Excellency expressing his frustration at the awful state of things in his Japanese society. Uno Koji’s <italic>“Closet LLB”</italic> interrogates the imperatives of choice and identity while Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s <italic>“General Kim”</italic> is a story based on the history of Japan and its neighbour, Korea. In the stories, the protagonists and other characters act heroically in ways that evince the tenets of Ubuntu and Nagomi. Their heroic actions allay the fears of their vulnerable compatriots and protect their fundamental human rights.
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Stimulating the Law through Ubuntu and Nagomi in Three Japanese Short Stories

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This paper explores the use of the passive in present-day British English, focusing on its register-specific lexico-grammatical patterns. The interaction of the grammatical structure, lexis, phraseology and register is examined on the basis of two sub-corpora of the <italic>British National Corpus 2014</italic> – academic prose and informal conversation. The results have corroborated the findings of previous studies in that the pattern <italic>‘BE / GET V-ed’</italic> is populated by verbal participial forms which create a cline with departicipial adjectives. The communicative needs of registers have been shown to have a decisive impact on the frequency of passive patterns and the specific lexical choices associated with the patterns. In both registers, the <italic>‘BE / GET V-ed’</italic> patterns appear to constitute the core of larger fixed phraseological units, e.g., <italic>can’t be bothered to/with,</italic> or <italic>it should be noted that</italic>.
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The Passive across Two Registers of Present-Day British English: A Corpus-Based Lexico-Grammatical Perspective

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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 12 (2023): Issue 1 (July 2023)

Arguments and Counterarguments for and against Coffee in 17^th-Century English Literature

New stories from the Mabinogion and Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi: Texts, Narratives and Tradition¹

The Loss of the Real in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun and Nocturnes

Stimulating the Law through Ubuntu and Nagomi in Three Japanese Short Stories

The Passive across Two Registers of Present-Day British English: A Corpus-Based Lexico-Grammatical Perspective

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