<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The following paper deals with the interpretation of one of the major “Cromwellian” poems of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), “The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector”, 1655. The poem is first set in the context of Marvell’s poetry and his public career in the period between 1637 and 1660. The article then identifies and analyses three main themes of “The First Anniversary”: the notion of a new aeon starting with Cromwell’s rule and the apocalyptical imagery related to his Protectorate, the concept of his power and authority between liberty and tyranny, and the relation between the harmony established by Cromwell and classical Pythagorean harmonious lore. The author argues that the imagery Marvell uses to describe the nature of the regime (especially the concept of Cromwell’s “no-kingship”) shows a deeply paradoxical structure, which uncovers the frailty and insecurity of Cromwell’s dictatorship as well as the circular logic of its justification. In that sense, the poem can be read as a vivid manifestation of the dilemmas and tensions of this period.</abstract>

Apocalyptic Kingship, Harmony and Political Expediency: the Challenges and Paradoxes of Andrew Marvell’s “First Anniversary”

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The pervasive psychological realism of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) challenges scholarly assumptions based on her biography or her indoctrination to Victorian medical discourses, as it explores dysfunctional body/mind interrelations, particularly those evidencing patriarchal pressures and prejudices against women. Under the guise of her heroine Lucy, the author becomes both the physician and the patient suffering from a female malady of unnamed origin. This article intends to prove that, instead of narratively unravelling her creature’s past trauma with healing purposes, the author conceals its nature to protect her intimacy and she focuses on the periphery of her crisis aftermath to demonstrate its severity by means of the psychosomatic disorders that persistently haunt her life: depression, anorexia nervosa and suicidal behavior. Brontë’s literary guerrilla of secrecy aims, simultaneously, to veil and unveil the core of Lucy’s clinical case with an unequivocal diagnosis: a harmful, mysterious event from her childhood/adolescence, whose reverberations repeatedly erupt during her adulthood and endanger her survival. Unreliable but “lucid”, this heroine becomes the daguerreotype of her creator to portray life as a sad, exhausting journey, where professional self-realisation - not love or marriage - turns into the ultimate recovery therapy from past ordeals, never successfully confirmed in the case of Lucy, who epitomises a paradigm of femininity in Victorian England: the impoverished, solitary, middle-class woman</abstract>

Unravelling the Body/Mind Reverberations of Secrets Woven into Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article deals with the work of two of the most prominent horror fiction writers in American history, namely Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. The focus of this study is put on the comparative approach while tracing the influence of Poe’s several chosen narratives in King’s novel called The Shining (1977). The chosen approach has uncovered that King’s novel embodies numerous characteristics, tendencies, and other signs of inspiration by Poe’s narratives. The Shining encompasses Poe’s tales such as “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and “The Black Cat” which are shown to be pivotal aspects of King’s novel. The analysis has shown that the aforementioned King’s novel exhibits Shakespearean elements intertwined with Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, the Overlook Hotel to be a composite consisting of various Poesque references, and that The Shining’s protagonist is a reflection of autobiographical references to specific aspects of the lives of Poe and King themselves.</abstract>

From One Master of Horror to Another: Tracing Poe’s Influence in Stephen King’s The Shining

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Michael Moorcock is often described as “one of the most prolific and varied writers working in Britain” (Malcolm 146). His success as a writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy literature is well established, but he is also the author of two novels about London, Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000). Hardly known, Mother London by Michael Moorcock, offers itself to a variety of approaches that have been widely discussed in the context of studies on English literature during the Thatcher years, post-modernism, and psycho-geography. The novel resonates with the author’s own childhood in war-time London without being autobiographical. It tells the story of three Londoners who were traumatised during the Blitz. The following article focuses on the mysteries of subterranean London that represents the hidden and unconscious identities of its inhabitants in the post-war period.</abstract>

“This fabulous flotsam”: Michael Moorcock’s Urban Anthropology in “London under London”

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Bearing in mind Edwidge Danticat’s ideas about writing being a dangerous affair, this paper reflects on authorial matters regarding Farida Karodia’s A Shattering of Silence (1993). Like other novels set in times of conflict, A Shattering of Silence can be seen to deploy what the researcher chooses to call a “poetics of disruption”. This is a poetics heavily at the service of politics, intended to disrupt and destabilise the blunt binaries lying at the heart of any armed conflict. In this sense, the main character in the story, Faith, embodies a poetics of disruption in so much as she problematises the binary dimension of the political situation in the Mozambique of the period, being a white woman who sympathises with the anti-colonial struggle. This article claims that, reproducing the dynamics of the poetics of disruption in a process which can be said to replicate that of her character, Farida Karodia herself makes the most of her strategic location in a liminal terrain across nations. Her position as an exilic author can be defined as dihiliz, that is, as a threshold vantage point which enables her to be both inside and outside the situation she reflects about. Karodia’s liminality is here more pointed than is usually the case with the exilic writer, since she chooses to write about Mozambique, in many senses close to her country of origin yet not her birth-place.</abstract>

“A Poetics of Disruption”: Farida Karodia’s A Shattering of Silence and the Exiled Writer’s Dihiliz Position

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article deals with novels by Lawrence Norfolk which are read with a focus on their visual quality and the way they depict history. It is argued that Norfolk’s historical novels are unique in their portrayal of “landscapes of history”, large canvases in which individual characters play marginal, or a rather insignificant role. This approach distinguishes Norfolk from much of contemporary historical fiction, albeit at times this strategy might not be wholly satisfactory from a critical perspective. However, the article claims that Norfolk’s novels are intellectually inspiring since, similar to landscape, they invite a certain gaze, yet deny us the possibility of naming, of conceptualising. They provide readers with impressive vistas on history, which is seen as something too large to understand and penetrate. In this the novels are anti-humanistic. Individual characters (and their actions) are insignificant, or significant only to such an extent that they subscribe to some mythical framework, as Norfolk shows in, arguably, his best novel, In the Shape of a Boar (2000).</abstract>

Landscapes of History in the Novels of Lawrence Norfolk

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In 2012, Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot joined the likes of Richard Ellmann, Gordon Bowker and Michael Hastings and in their graphic memoir Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (2012) offered a new re-telling of James Joyce’s life, focusing, in particular, on the difficult relationship between the great Irish writer, and his daughter Lucia. However, the story of a complicated emotional bond between Joyce and Lucia was only a framework for an autobiographical coming-of age narrative about Mary M. Talbot herself and her violent relationship with James S. Atherton, a celebrated Joycean scholar and her very own “cold mad feary father”. Following Martha C. Nussbaum’s conception about cognitive and narrative structure of emotions postulated in Love’s Knowledge (1990) and Upheavals of Thoughts (2001), this article wishes to argue in favour of an organic connection between the volume’s thematic concerns and its generic affiliation. In other words, it discusses how a specific class of emotions pertaining to Lucia’s gradual mental disintegration can be adequately told only in a specific literary form, i.e. in a transdiegetised “commix”, an (auto)biographical account which occupies a threshold space between a comic and a novel, fiction and non-fiction, biography and autobiography, words and pictures.</abstract>

Upheavals of Emotions, Madness of Form: Mary M. Talbot’s and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes and a Transdiegetised (Auto)Biographical Commix

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This paper dwells on some aspects of language, grammar in particular, through the prism of the functional-cognitive approach. It covers such issues as language and mind, the embodiment of language, the peculiarities of language acquisition, and the metaphoric nature of the human mind. The functional-cognitive approach is regarded as part of a holistic anthropocentric paradigm where language is conceived of as a natural biological phenomenon connected with the adaptive functions of a human being as a holistic living organism. A new paradigm gives rise to new epistemologies and generates new forms of scientific collaboration. Thus, neurosciences, quantum physics, and biology become involved in processing language data, influencing the direction and goals of linguistic research. As suggested by the author of this paper, changes in language can be viewed with regard to quantum effects observed in the macroworld, or an autopoietic reconstruction of the language system. Dwelling on the ideas of cognitive typology, the paper also makes an attempt to elucidate some reasons for the appearance of new structural features in language which influence the reconstruction of its grammatical interface in the first place. Such processes are viewed as the reflection of global shifts in the linguistic world image of language bearers under the influence of the outer world/extralinguistic factors, and as connected with encoding by language of the changes in socio-discursive parameters of the intercourse. Finally, some perspectives of grammar analysis are outlined</abstract>

Holistic Linguistics: Anthropocentric Foundations and the Functional-Cognitive Paradigm

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This paper reports on the findings of a study that aimed to identify the linguistic items which act as hedges in the speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan, as well as to examine the pragmatic functions of these devices. Twenty-five political speeches of King Abdullah II, randomly selected from the official website of King Abdullah (see Appendix), were analyzed adopting Salager-Meyer’s (1994) taxonomy. The study revealed that the most frequently used hedging device in King Abdullah’s speech is modal auxiliaries, and the most frequently used hedging device subcategory is the modal auxiliary “can”. The findings suggest that these hedging devices fulfil several pragmatic functions. These findings contribute to understanding that speaking a second language (Arabic, in the case of King Abdullah II) neither affects the types of hedging devices nor the functions these devices perform. Moreover, contrary to scientific discourse (e.g., medicine), the research concludes that political discourse as a non-scientific genre resorts to hedging devices to express indirectness, politeness, lack of commitment and probability.</abstract>

Hedging in Political Discourse: Evidence from the Speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan

Martin Adam. Presentation Sentences (Syntax, Semantics and FSP)

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. 