<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article focuses on Walter Scott’s Waverley and its classification as the founding text of the historical novel by Georg Lukacs. The author attempts to show that Lukacs takes Scott too much at his word and posits Waverley in the tradition of the English historical novel as it developed from Defoe and Fielding, while neglecting the close ties that Waverley has with marginalized genres such as romance. The author also argues that rather than being an expression of class consciousness, Waverley is an attempt to justify a certain change in political attitude, from radicalism to conservatism</abstract>

Historical Fiction as a Mixture of History and Romance: Towards the Genre Definition of the Historical Novel

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article examines the supposed lack of “humanity” in Woolf’s short stories and novels by identifying its source in the sphere of “solid objects” and in the way these “objects” destabilize the coherence of what the western philosophical tradition typically refers to as “subject” (in the Cartesian sense). Referring to Moore’s direct realism as well as James’s and Mach’s radical empiricism, the discussion focuses on specific states of heightened perceptive intensity in which the perceiving subject stumbles on the verge of collapse and “mixes” itself with what it perceives. By considering these limit cases, this paper tries to demonstrate the way in which Woolf’s fiction might in fact be understood as illustrative of the process of de-humanizing de-centralization and dispersion of the already fluid consciousness and its blending with the impersonal material objects, resulting in a complete loss of one idea of “the human” (an idea based on the intellectual autonomy and sovereignty of a unified subject) and pointing towards a post-human and post-modern condition in which human becomes defined by the ever-widening circle of its own outside</abstract>

“A Very Remarkable Piece of Iron”: Towards a Theory of Material Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s “Solid Objects”

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Food and murder have had a paradoxical relationship ever since the first prehistoric hunter-gatherers put the first morsels of meat into their mouths. On one hand, eating means life: food is absolutely necessary to sustain life. On the other hand, eating means killing. Whether it is the obvious killing of an animal for meat, or the less obvious termination of a plant’s life, one must destroy life in order to eat. It is assumed that this inherent tension between eating/living and eating/dying often informs and shapes crime narratives, not only in the recently invented genre of culinary mystery, produced most famously by Diane Mott Davidson and Joanne Fluke, but also, even if to a lesser extent, in classic detective novels of the 20th century. This article focuses on how the contradictory nature of eating is manifested in the work of Agatha Christie. By combining a traditional structuralist approach to crime fiction as a formula, as advocated by John G. Cawelti, with the methods of the emerging field of food studies, the paper aims to observe a classic, i.e., the classic detective story, from a new perspective</abstract>

The Flavour of Murder: Food and Crime in the Novels of Agatha Christie

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Are humour and laughter gender-specific? The simple answer, like most everything that is ideological, is “yes”. Many feminists in recent years have grappled with the question of humour and how it is often the site of much contestation when it comes to women using it as a tool of transgression. This paper probes the seemingly timeless antipathy between humour and representations of femininity through recourse to performance and theories of the body. This article holds the term “woman” up to scrutiny while simultaneously examining the persistence of both critical and philosophical recalcitrance and the way humour continues to function in both gendered and violent ways. How does gender “do” or “undo” humour? Laughter is no simple matter for women, due to the legacy of profoundly polarized and hyper-sexualized historical ambivalence between femininity and laughter. Acknowledging the problematic nature of the category “woman”, and after clearing some terminological distinctions (comedy, humour, irony, satire, and parody), this article investigates humour’s complicated and volatile relationship to gender and the way the laughing body of women on stage presents a fascinating double helix of sexual aggression and power</abstract>

Gender, Humour and Transgression in Canadian Women’s Theatre

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article aims to give a cognitive linguistic account of the dual nature of the concept of relative adjectives, and the specific character of their semantic processes. After a brief discussion of the adjectival character of the relative subclass, it will be argued that denominal relative adjectives belong to the class of predicate words (i.e., words denoting property and hence forming a predicate concept), while retaining, on the other hand, the substantive nature of the basic noun’s concept. Further, two subclasses of relative adjectives are contrasted in view of their cognitive processes: substancepredicate, denoting a certain substance of which an object is made, and argumentpredicate, denoting an object the relation to which becomes a property of another object. The substance-predicate group of relative adjectives will be analyzed as having the properties of qualitative adjectives, as they clarify their meanings in discourse due to the operation of profiling the landmark properties on the base of the trajector of the described object. On the other hand, the conceptual entity of argument-predicate relative adjectives can be described by means of the theory of conceptual integration. Argument-predicate adjectives in discourse form a new conceptual blend that is the result of mapping the mental spaces of the predicate concept and the concept of the described noun. The relation between the two objects that appears in the blend forms the context meaning of the adjective</abstract>

The Concept of the Relative Adjective

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> In order to enhance mobility, competitiveness, and opportunities for work, the European Union lists the ability to communicate in a foreign language and to understand another culture as an important objective in their language education policy. Knowledge of a foreign language is also an important objective for many American universities, which require students to study a foreign language as a prerequisite to graduate. Students with documented disabilities affecting the learning of a foreign language or students with poor foreign language learning skills, therefore, pose a significant challenge, since a foreign language requirement may prevent such students from graduating unless universities are willing to make special arrangements such as having students graduate without fulfilling the requirement or letting them take substitution classes. The question of what to do with such students is at the heart of this article. It describes how one mid-sized private university with a two-year language proficiency requirement has approached the problem to ensure that policies are implemented fairly. Rather than pulling students out of the foreign language classroom, the university succeeded in keeping students engaged with foreign language study through advising and mentoring across departments</abstract>

A Cross-Departmental Approach to Supporting Students with a Disability Affecting Foreign Language Acquisition

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 12 (2023): Issue 1 (July 2023)

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

Volume 10 (2021): Issue 1 (July 2021)

Volume 9 (2020): Issue 1 (July 2020)

Volume 8 (2019): Issue 1 (July 2019)

Volume 7 (2018): Issue 1 (July 2018)

Volume 6 (2017): Issue 1 (July 2017)

Volume 5 (2016): Issue 1 (July 2016)

Volume 4 (2015): Issue 1 (July 2015)

Volume 3 (2014): Issue 1 (September 2014)

Volume 2 (2013): Issue 1 (December 2013)

Volume 1 (2012): Issue 1 (December 2012)

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. 