<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold></bold> This paper provides a close reading of Paul Farley’s 160-line poem, “Thorns.” The poem is read in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s celebrated Romantic ballad “The Thorn.” Special attention is given to Farley’s treatment of memory and metaphor: It is shown how the first, exploratory part of the poem elaborates upon the interdependent nature of memory and metaphor, while the second part uses a more regulated form of imagery in its evocation of a generational memory linked to a particular place and time (the working-class Liverpool of the 1960s and 1970s). The tension between the two parts of the poem is reflected in the taut relationship between the poet and a confrontational alter ego. Wordsworth’s importance for Farley is shown to inhere not only in the Lake Poet’s use of personal memory, but also the close connection between his poetry and place, as well as a strongly self-reflective strain that results in an interminable process of self-determination. Farley’s independence as a poet also comes across, though, and is for instance in evidence in his desire to avoid the “booby trap” of too simple appropriation of the methods and motifs of his Romantic predecessor.</abstract>

“Never Some Easy Flashback”

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold></bold> Comparing two essays written by Du Bois at a great interval of time, “The Tenth Talented” (1903) and “The Hundredth Talented” or the “Guiding Hundredth” (1948), the author of this article intends to deal with Du Bois’s endeavor to cohere culturally and politically an answerable and duty-bound black leadership, and to acknowledge the different accents laid by the author of The Souls of Black Folk on culture and on politics. An accomplished essayist and journalist, a foremost militant for the cause of black emancipation, Du Bois strove to persuade both white and the black audience about the role of high culture, an idea which perfectly matched the towering ideals of Victorian culture, but ran counter to the rapid urbanization of America, and later on, to the times of the Great Depression. The utopian solving chosen by Du Bois in “The Hundredth Talented” mirrors the conflict between the political convictions of a great mind and American reality, as well as the winding course of intellectual ideas which brought black emancipation into life, only in the midst of the last century.</abstract>

“The Tenth Talented” v. “The Hundredth Talented”: W. E .B. Du Bois’s Two Versions on the Leadership of the African American Community in the 20th Century

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold></bold> This paper addresses the issue of identity in relation to war through a close reading of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. It investigates the connections between war and the construction of identity, focusing on aspects such as violence and death. In his novel Ondaatje uncovers private histories alongside the framing events of World War Two. Kip’s perception of war and his way of living through it suggest that the engagement on the world’s battlefield is riddled with inner conflicts separating people or bringing them together. In The English Patient what is at issue is the quest for a redefinition of the self: Hanna, Kirpal Singh and Almásy attempt to liberate the self through an investigation of the past. Thus, the novel problematizes the convolutions of human interaction zooming in on ideas of movement and metamorphosis as thematized in the war plot, functioning as the fundamental mechanisms that shape identity.</abstract>

Identity and War in Michael Ondaatje’s

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold></bold> My paper discusses the construction of character in some American experimental narratives within the optical paradigm of the vanishing point. In a first part the investment of the pictorial notion of the vanishing point in Faulkner’s Light in August will be discussed as an instance of the occasional confrontation in Modernist fiction of the limits of literary representation, even if the pictorial category is adapted (and so limited) to the specific issue of biracial identity. In a second part, William Gass’s short story “Mrs. Mean” and Paul Auster’s The Locked Room will be examined as instances of a sustained critical recasting of the very concept of character. The trope of the vanishing point is consciously deployed in both texts to reinvent fictional character within the challenging scope of borderlines between presence and absence, the life-like (mimetic) and the purely verbal.</abstract>

Character as a Vanishing Point in American Experimental Fiction

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold></bold> In today’s global world, the urban/ rural opposition is increasingly becoming a more relevant marker of the acculturation of foreigners whose adoption of national values is reflected by the spaces they inhabit. As they bring with them traditions related to the healing and balancing forces of the earth, immigrants prompt a reconsideration of the urban/ rural dichotomy in the metropolitan spaces they come to inhabit. Rural landscape in American culture has a long tradition of acting as a source of an alternative symbolic imaginary, responsible for boosting people’s feelings of patriotic commitment that are crucial to national integration. Diasporic American fiction has increasingly combined this tradition with symbolic magic and natural elements brought over from the “other” cultural backgrounds their authors come from. This paper aims to study the socio-political negotiations in a few instances of cultural translation within the urban/ rural dialectic in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novels The Mistress of Spices and Queen of Dreams. I will suggest that Divakaruni’s female protagonists work their initial experience of dislocation into a discourse of nature and the earth free from boundaries, based on a rejection of urban alienation and the discovery of the reconciliatory potential of America’s nature.</abstract>

Urban and Rural Narratives of Female Relocation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Novels Queen of Dreams and The Mistress of Spices

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold></bold> The study of The Cantos, one of the most complex and difficult works belonging to literary modernism makes possible, precisely due to this observation, the exploration of a series of characteristics and dimensions of Pound’s work that have either remained in a programmatic stage or should be revisited more closely in order for their meanings to be discerned. ‘Analyticity’ and ‘scientism’ can be considered relevant characteristics of Pound’s work, with both aesthetic and methodologic meanings. The present study aims at investigating these two dimensions of Pound’s poetry as they appear in the second and the fourth decades of the 20th century. In conclusion the question is whether Pound’s analyticity and scientism could still be considered valuable from an aesthetic or methodologic point of view.</abstract>

Aesthetic and Methodologic Resources of Ezra Pound’s Poetry

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold></bold> In Romania, Shakespeare played an important role in the construction of Romania’s cultural identity and in the reshaping of political awareness during the communist dictatorship. In recent years, the Bard’s work has been translated into a contemporary, accessible Romanian language, with theatrical or musical adaptations targeted at a public whose tastes are shaped by popular culture. The authors discuss, from this perspective, two recent adaptations: The Taming of the Shrew (2005), acclimatized to contemporary Romanian realities (names, locations and folk music), and Romeo and Juliet (2009) that relocates the tragedy in the musical genre. The choice of two musical genres popular with the most widely spread segments of the public - the conservative, but less educated middle-aged group of non-theatre-goers and the youth - indicates an attempt, still new for the Romanian cultural market, to accommodate Shakespeare to the interests of two different communities of consumers, so far absent from this country’s high culture circuit.</abstract>

Romanian Bard: A Case Study of Shakespeare’s Adaptations in Contemporary Romania

What’s My Name?: Memory, Identity, and Allegory in the Age of the American Empire

Arson/Art: A Manifesto

On Poetry and Becoming: A Conversation with Paul Hamill

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 41 (2023): Issue 1 (December 2023)

Volume 40 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 39 (2022): Issue 1 (December 2022)

Volume 38 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 37 (2021): Issue 1 (December 2021)

Volume 36 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 35 (2020): Issue 1 (December 2020)

Volume 34 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 33 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019)

Volume 32 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 31 (2018): Issue 1 (December 2018)

Volume 30 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 29 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017)

Volume 28 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 27 (2016): Issue 1 (December 2016)

Volume 26 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 25 (2015): Issue 1 (December 2015)

Volume 24 (2015): Issue 1 (June 2015)

Volume 23 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014)

Volume 22 (2014): Issue 1 (August 2014)

Volume 21 (2014): Issue 1 (January 2014)

Volume 20 (2013): Issue 1 (June 2013)

Volume 19 (2012): Issue 2012 (December 2012)

American, British and Canadian Studies

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  Founded in 1999 as the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, American, British and Canadian Studies is currently published biannually by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, under the aegis of the Research Centre for Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at LBUS and the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. It is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone Studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.  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. 