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“Is this your buying China?”: Luxury consumerism and superficiality in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife
Following increased maritime trade and a reliance on foreign goods, the commercial revolution that swept through England in the late sixteenth century resulted in an intensified desire for new and hitherto inaccessible luxury commodities. One such commodity, china porcelain, resulted in a “china fever” that continued well into the eighteenth century, introducing new notions of social refinement and, more importantly, social and economic superficiality. In the infamous “china scene” of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Lady Fidget operates within the discourse of “woman as consumer” in order to forward her sexual agency, participating in the surface play that luxury commodities as ultimately empty signifiers afford. England’s commercial revolution not only saw…
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“Such dread as only children can feel”: Childhood trauma in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
“For me,” Jane begins, following the incident in the red room, “the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and mind alike strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel” (Brontë 20). Saturated as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is with unnerving or unsettling sensations, what is fascinating is how these sensations and images work in conjunction to articulate trauma—particularly trauma as it is experienced by a child. There is a striking poignancy to Jane’s specification that the dread she feels in this moment is “dread as children only can feel” (emphasis mine). A closer reading of red room incident reveals that the text corresponds to two…
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Transgressive social mobility in Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”
“Once upon a time, deep in the heart of the country,” begins Charles Perrault, “there lived a pretty little girl whose mother adored her, and her grandmother adored her even more. This good woman made her a red hood like the ones that fine ladies wear when they go riding. The hood suited the child so much that soon everybody was calling her Little Red Riding Hood” (33). Since its inception in Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” (1697) and its rapid proliferation by the likes of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm with their adaptation “Rotkäppchen” (1812/15) or James N Barker’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (1827), the iconographic legacy of the eponymous…
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“A salvatory of green mummy”: John Webster and Corpse Medicine
Jacobean dramatist John Webster approached the taboo and the questionable with inexhaustible determination, plunging the contemporary reader into those dark, uncomfortable spaces we prefer to skirt around, never lingering for too long for fear of what we might uncover. For Webster, a preoccupation with the gruesome side of mortality manifests particularly strongly in his references to the practice of mummy, or corpse medicine (tinctures made from dead human flesh and bones), in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Contrary to such a perceivably unthinkable medical practice being attributed to British “medieval” history, corpse medicine continued to be practiced well into the early modern period, where it reached its height of popularity…
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Aconite and mandrake: Crypto-pharmacological botanicals in Shakespeare
Don’t try these remedies at home, kids, no matter how reputable Shakespeare’s local apothecary might seem.
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Festival Dionysia: A Review
A cacophony settled by stillness, despair tempered by hope, Festival Dionysia lays bare the humanity of its characters and its audience. In a whirlwind of motion and storylines, six plays come together to celebrate the truly brilliant platform that is the UBC Players Club.
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“The Loveliest Lies of All”: Adapting Folk and Fairy Tale Functions in “Over the Garden Wall”
“If dreams can’t come true, then why not pretend?” asks the narrator of Patrick McHale’s animated series Over the Garden Wall, offering a partially hopeful, partially haunting message to guide the viewer through the whimsical, eerie, and complex process and history of adapting folk and fairy tales.
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Betwixt and between psychoanalysis and liminal theory: A liminal approach to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
Within the liminal phase, Coraline finds herself in what Turner coins as “a ‘moment in and out of time’” (The Ritual Process 96), in which spatio-temporal boundaries and the constraints of state no longer apply when there are no boundaries or states to be had in the first place.
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Translation as Literary Reconciliation: Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali’s Sounds of a Cowhide Drum / Imisindo Yesigubhu Sesikhumba Senkomo
The 1995 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) intended to “provide a forum for both victims and perpetrators [of apartheid] to share their stories and bear witness to historical harms and injustices in an open, public forum” (Gaertner 446). The terms and expectations for the TRC’s notion of reconciliation, however, do not account for the lasting effects of the legacy of apartheid on contemporary South Africans. More specifically, the TRC does not account for socio-political and cultural reconciliation beyond the proposed reconciliation of the individual victim and perpetrator. It instead provides a temporary but ultimately insufficient method of healing dependent on the closure of a past that cannot and…
