Literature 10.2

Kipps (1905) by Herbert George Wells establishes an ambiguous relationship with the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman: by parodying it and by caricaturing its archetypical characters, Wells’s work lays bare the values and cultural background on which the nineteenth-century production of the genre was based. In particular, given the focal role of the social compromise between bourgeoisie and aristocracy in this production, Wells’s novel has the effect of showing the weakening of the upper class as well as illustrating a transition phase of the middle class which had not yet been legitimised to constitute a new social model.
To this end, this study will follow two trajectories: on the one hand, it will illustrate Kipps’s deviation from the classic Bildungsroman on the structural and semantic levels, in which the values and ideals underlying the reference genre are reversed. On the other hand, it will examine the role of the emotion of shame in the three main phases of Kipps’s Bildung and the different traits that it assumes in the gradual emergence of a social reflection and a class consciousness in the protagonist’s experience. Being strictly related to the protagonist’s social ascent, shame involves both the social and the moral levels. As a social emotion, in this novel it implies social ranks and a real or internalised audience, while as a moral emotion it is crucial to the definition of the protagonist’s identity and to the acquisition of self-awareness through the comparison with the others. In terms of the reversal of the socialisation process expected by the traditional Bildungsroman, this analysis illustrates how the protagonist’s overcoming shame coincides with his distancing from the norm, from the class conventions that the novel emphasises and calls into question.

Comparing some characteristics of Archaic Greek colonisation and modern colonialism, the paper reads the Odyssean motif of the isle of women, the woman/island pair, and the related erotic imagery as the results of an interaction between historical events and literary imagination. Indeed, besides being commonly found in ancient mythologies, isles of women are generally considered as the mythic precursors of the vision that sees settlement of a new land as the conquest of a woman. Since the binarism and strong sense of a superior centre common to the colonisation of the New World and colonialism do not seem appropriate to Archaic Greece, the peculiarities of the ancient and modern erotic imageries related to the arrival of a seafarer in a new land and the woman/island pair can be understood by considering the differences between modern Western colonialism and the Archaic Greek decentred attitude to place, religion, and ethnicity.

The main focus of the paper is to tentatively document traces of hypertextuality between the Buddhacarita and the Mahābhārata, under the assumption that Aśvaghoṣa probably knew this latter work, albeit non-definitive version of it. The selected methodological approach is a comparison between Bc and MBh in-compound-rūpakas. Indeed, since it is plausible that he benefited from an erudite court audience, Aśvaghoṣa is here assumed to take for granted that even indirect hints at MBh passages would be promptly understood. Therefore, he sometimes re-uses Mahābhārata expressions, and merely changes the word-order or replaces a single constituent in the matching figurative phrases or compounds, and sometimes plays with the MBh rūpakas in a more complex way.
On the basis of the survey and analysis of all the Bc’s rūpakas and their supposed inspirational MBh source, the present inquiry tries to show how the singled-out cross-references are not only aimed at building a generic sophisticated literary pattern for his mahākāvya and his learned audience, but they are also intentionally targeted at evoking Epic heroic imagery as clues for the kingly commitment the author attributes to Buddha.

The present research aims to analyse the perceptive and representative modalities of landscape in the narrative production of Simona Vinci. Through the framing of a particular anthropology of the eye, connected to a corporal rendition of places, the writer creates a deep mindscape, rich in fairy refractions and an oneiric amplitude. But, above all, in her narrative production, it is fear the orbit to which Vinci’s landscapes can be ascribed: therefore, the expression fearscape can be introduced in order to understand the force of a writing which is characterized by an urgent need.

Some scholars, including Grutman (2009²) and Popovič (1975), believe that self-translation of literary works should be defined essentially as translation, whereas others recognize that works translated by their authors have their own specificities and cannot be described as the mere output of translating. The Indian writer Qurratulain Hyder is among the famous authors who wrote their literary works in two different languages, in this case Urdu and English. The novel Āg kā dariyā, allegedly her masterpiece, written in 1959, was transcreated in English in 1998. A comparison of the two versions shows notable differences and sheds light on the peculiarities of creative writing in English and in Urdu in the Indian Subcontinent. Āg kā dariyā, however, is not the only example of rewriting by Qurratulain Hyder. Among her other works, the short story Ḥasab nasab, rewritten in English as Honour, shows some similarities with Āg kā dariyā. Our conclusion is that self-translation may be considered as a rewriting, and possibly a new original. The article is followed by the translation into Italian of both the Urdu and English versions.

This article aims to explore the new poetical strategy devised by the famous poet Aśvaghoṣa (2^nd CE), a Brahmin converted to Buddhism, in order to promote the Buddhist doctrine: his works represent that cultural syncretism, which was supported by the policy of the Kuṣāṇa dynasty, spanning over three centuries in the northern India. Such a cultural environment stimulated new communicative strategies, especially on occasion of doctrinal debates, which must be held between the promoters of the Brahmanical counter-reformation movement, developed since the last centuries BCE – as assumable from the Brahmanical epics, especially the Mahābhārata –, and the challenging innovative Buddhist currents, such as the (Mūla)Sarvāstivāda school, attested in the Mathurā region, with which also Aśvaghoṣa must be affiliated. Against such a cultural background, the learned Aśvaghoṣa elaborated a sophisticated poetics, consisting not only of mere ornamentation, according to the earlier kāvya models, represented by the Brahmanical Rāmāyaṇa, but also of deeply complex inter-textual connections, made of flowing analogical suggestions, even inconsistent, producing a sort of ‘multistable’ perception of reality. Thus, an innovative kāvya poetry was shaped, fascinating and disorienting the educated audience at the same time. In fact, the manifold layers of reality, resulting from multi-meaning poetic expressions, suggest the main Buddhist principle which is exactly counterposed to the Brahmanical ontology: the phenomenal existence is devoid of a unique ‘essence’ itself (ātman), and is therefore ultimately unsubstantial.
This peculiar poetical strategy is here probed by means of the reconstruction of the textual network of the occurrences of the term phena, meaning ‘foam, froth’, and their literary contexts. Aśvaghoṣa adopts this Sanskrit term, drawing it and the correlated imagery from the Brahmanical textual repertoire (Vedic corpus, and epics) and Buddhist scriptures (Pāli canon), so that multifaceted meanings referring to different codified literary languages are implied by the single term phena. However, an ultimate value emerges from Aśvaghoṣa’s works: it paradoxically fulfils and consummates the previous inconsistent meanings, since in the Buddhist perspective the evanescence of the foam prefigures the supreme awareness of unsubstantiality.

The paper aims to explore the interplay between class conflict and urban milieu that structures In the Cage’s narrative. Starting from the author’s prefaces and some of the most influential sociological essays of the time, this study delves into the spatial counterpoints – streets, houses, parks, neighbourhoods – used by James to represent the social turmoil that upsets Late Victorian London, thus giving shape to the emerging classes’ difficulty in creeping into its hermetic class system. In the nouvelle, such a predicament is effectively thematized by the experiences of an anonymous telegraphist, whose burning desire for social improvement translates into the attempt to physically penetrate and “colonize” the most aristocratic areas of London. As the paper demonstrates, her efforts are met with utter disappointment: she always feels like an intruder in Mayfair’s posh streets, and she ends up seeing nothing but the hall of Park Chambers apartments. Constantly pushed to the city margins, she can only gain access to Maida Vale – the suburban limbo where her friend Mrs. Jordan lives – and Chalk Farm, which by virtue of its position «near town, and at the same time quite secluded» (Walford 1878) functions as a perfect spatial correlative to her liminal social status.

The present paper will represent the first extended study of the verse Life of St. Paul the First Hermit included in the Abbotsford Legenda Aurea. The Abbotsford Legenda Aurea is an as yet unpublished manuscript containing the only surviving copy of the translation of the Legenda Aurea by the fifteenth-century East Anglian Austin friar, Osbern Bokenham. The Life of Saint Paul the First Hermit is of particular interest since it is one of only three extant verse lives of male saints by Bokenham, who, prior to the discovery of the Abbotsford MS, was considered primarily as an author of lives of female saints. Rather than basing his text of Paul’s life on that in Voragine’s Legenda, Bokenham translates directly from Voragine’s source, the significantly longer vita by Jerome. The descriptions of Paul’s cave, of the monsters who Anthony meets in the desert and of the warm relationship which develops between Anthony and Paul had all been significantly cut back in Voragine’s text and Bokenham’s choice of source is indicative of the crucial thematic importance of these episodes to his retelling, which has a Preface in Chaucerian rime royal and is replete with stylistic and verbal echoes of his more secular vernacular forebears. In emphasising the familial ties binding the monastic brotherhood through his depiction of Paul, Anthony and Anthony’s disciples, Bokenham affiliates his own hagiographic output to an ancient transhistorical community (Sanok 2007) which legitimizes his poetic voice without severing it outright from the secular vernacular traditions in which his style is rooted.

Olivier (1826) is Henri de Latouche’s contribution to the fictions of sexual impotence in the French Restoration. In this context, impotence frequently functions as a symptom of the crisis of the aristocracy in the modern world. This paper compares Latouche’s novel with similar texts authored by Claire de Duras and Stendhal, particularly focusing on the notion of masculinity, on the social and cultural aspects of romantic eros and on the role of the French Revolution in the plot.