<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Emily Keene’s My Life Story (1911) is a unique travel account as it is written by an Englishwoman, which puts the travelogue in the ambit of female travel narratives. She married a Moorish notable, Sidi Al-Hadj Abd al-Salam, the Shareef of Wazzan, spending, hence, more than four decades amongst the Moors in pre-protectorate Morocco or the “Land of the Furthest West”. For more than four decades, Keene managed to live on the cusp of two starkly different cultures, civilizations, religions and societies. Keene was fascinated by the atavistic Moroccan customs and the metaphysical world of the Moors. The man she married epitomized these purely aspired elements. Keene was mesmerized and enchanted by the Moors, their culture and traditions, but at the same time she adhered to her own culture, moving, hence, between two acutely different identities. As an Englishwoman in the Moorish sanctum, Keene was virtually seen by most of the Moors as a Christian from “Bilad al-Nassara” or an “Abode of Disbelief”.</abstract>

A Woman Traveller in the Moorish Sanctum: A Look at Emily Keene, Shareefa of Wazzan’s My Life Story

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> In the 1930s W.H. Auden taught at several public schools in Britain while simultaneously embarking on his poetic career. Later in life, he lectured at various educational institutions and returned to Oxford, his alma mater, in the 1950s as Oxford Professor of Poetry. His experience of teaching allowed Auden to reflect upon the pitfalls of Britain’s interwar educational system and its social function. Therefore, this article diverts attention from the prevailing scholarly focus on Auden’s poetry to his critical prose in order to examine the poet’s concerns about the content, purpose and role of education in society, his views on the structure of the educational system and disquiet about the tension between the utilitarian and humanistic dimensions of the educational process. At a more general level, the paper points out the relation that Auden maintained existed between education, democracy, art and the “crystallizing” power of poetry.</abstract>

The Poet at the Teacher’s Desk: W.H. Auden on Education, Democracy and Humanity

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Humanity has long been haunted by the notions of Armageddon and the coming of a Golden Age. While the English Romantic poets like Shelley saw hopes of a new millennium in poems like “Queen Mab” and “The Revolt of Islam”, others like Blake developed their own unique “cosmology” in their longer poems that were nevertheless coloured with their vision of redemption and damnation. Even Hollywood movies, like The Book of Eli (2010), rehearse this theme of salvation in the face of imminent annihilation time and again. Keeping with such trends, this paper would like to trace this line of apocalyptic vision and subsequent hopes of renewal with reference to William Golding’s debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and his Pincher Martin (1956). While in the former, a group of young school boys indulge in violence, firstly for survival, and then for its own sake, in the latter, a lonely, shipwrecked survivor of a torpedoed destroyer clings to his own hard, rock-like ego that subsequently is a hurdle for his salvation and redemption, as he is motivated by a lust for life that makes him exist in a different moral and physical dimension. In Lord of the Flies, the entire action takes place with nuclear warfare presumably as its backdrop, while Pincher Martin has long been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and the resultant fear of annihilation from nuclear fallout (this applies to Golding’s debut novel as well). Thus, this paper would argue how Golding weaves his own vision of social, spiritual, and metaphysical dissolution, and hopes for redemption, if any, through these two novels. </abstract>

William Golding’s Apocalyptic Vision in Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Literature and learning play an important role in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead (2004). By focusing on the author’s many references to books, literature and learning, the present paper attempts to study their individual contextual occurrences and explores how they saturate the discursive substratum of the novel’s major themes. The paper claims that a special role attributed to books and learning, and particularly to the Greek New Testament, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and The Essence of Christianity, sheds significant light on the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the meaning of life, one of the novel’s central concerns. </abstract>

Literature and Learning in Marilynne Robinson’s Novel Gilead

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The aim of this article is to analyse the role of memory in generating, transmitting and coming to terms with trauma, and the importance of exploring history, and talking about and sharing traumatic events in the process of healing in Joan Fedler’s The Dreamcloth (2005). In the novel, Maya’s memories of her unrequited lesbian relationship with her beloved Rochel, oppression by the traditional structures of her family and Jewish community, her forced marriage with Yankel, and her being raped by him are responsible for her trauma on a personal level, whereas her forced relocation to South Africa in order to flee from the Holocaust is responsible for her trauma on a communal level. Mia, the protagonist and the grand-daughter of Maya, suffers from the transgenerational trauma of her grandmother, is haunted by her ghost, and also symbolically represents the traumatized Jewish community. She cannot relate to her own Jewish South African identity and thus tries to avoid being reminded of her historical background. Mia recovers from her trauma by exploring her history, solving the riddles of the past and sharing the traumatic memories of the past. </abstract>

Healing Trauma and Reasserting Identity through Remembrance in Joanne Fedler’s The Dreamcloth

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Described as one of the leading voices of her generation, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has become one of the many African authors who through their narratives have succeeded in challenging the literary canon both in Europe and North America while redefining African literature from the diaspora. Her specific use of the English language as well as transcultural writing strategies allow Adichie to skilfully represent what it means to live as a “translated being”. In her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and her latest novel, Americanah (2013), which were greatly influenced by her own experiences as what she has referred to as “an inhabitant of the periphery”, Adichie depicts the way in which different Nigerian characters live in-between Nigeria and America. In this regard, her characters’ transatlantic journeys imply a constant movement between several languages and cultural backgrounds which result in cultural and linguistic translation. </abstract>

New Transatlantic African Writing: Translation, Transculturation and Diasporic Images in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck and Americanah

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Hanif Kureishi’s 2014 novel, The Last Word, involves most of the author’s idiosyncratic themes, such as ethnicity, racism, sexual identity, examination of interpersonal relationships and the crucial role of the creative imagination in human life. Its focal concern, however, is to explore the process of writing a literary biography of a living person and the character and dynamics of the relationship between the biographer and his subject - a writer. As such, the novel can be taken as being representative of biographic metafiction, a subcategory of historiographic metafiction, which, following the postmodernist questioning of our ability to know and textually represent historical truth, presents biographic writing critically or even mockingly, rendering its enthusiastic practitioners’ efforts with ironic scepticism. The aim of this article is to present The Last Word as a particular example of biographic metafiction that has all the crucial features of this genre, yet which differs from its predecessors through the complexity and thoroughness of its portrayal of the biographer-biographee relationship. </abstract>

Dodging the Literary Undertaker – Biographic Metafiction in Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) and its research methods have been considered one of the prominent tools of discourse analysis and information processing. It is widely known that, combining the approaches adopted both by formalists and functionalists, the theory of FSP draws on the findings presented by the scholars of the Prague Circle. The father of FSP himself - Jan Firbas - drew on the findings of his predecessor, Vilem Mathesius, who formulated the basic principles of what was to be labelled FSP only later. Apart from the principal FSP representatives and more recent followers (as a rule associated with Prague or Brno universities), this homage paper overviews somewhat less familiar - yet significant - pioneers in the field of theories of information structure, viz. Henri Weil, Samuel Brassai, Georg von der Gabelentz and Anton Marty. It will discuss some of their writings and achievements that were forming (and inspiring) the theory of FSP.</abstract>

The Dramatic Arc of the Theory of FSP: A Tentative Diachronic Excursion

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Occasional notes in secondary literature suggest that there is a growing tendency to use non-finite clauses in written English. It is partly attributed to the fact that during the process of historical development the English finite verb has lost much of its dynamism and the nominal elements of predication, namely infinitives, participles and gerunds have gradually become semantically more important. This paper deals with the occurrences of non-finite clauses in the tagged Brown/Frown and LOB/F-LOB corpora, which are matching corpora of American English and British English respectively. The article looks at 1) the use of noun phrases followed by -ing participles, -ed participles and to-infinitives, 2) the use of -ing/-ed clauses with/without overt subordinators and 3) the occurrences of to-infinitive clauses. When the structural patterns 1), 2) and 3) were taken as wholes there was always an increase in the frequency of occurrence of non-finite clauses demonstrated by hundreds of examples in the Frown and F-LOB corpora. This may be considered significant since there is only a 30-year difference between the Brown/Frown and LOB/F-LOB corpora. The findings thus completely support the premise that when the perspective of the research is diachronic, in written English non-finite clauses are becoming increasingly prominent. </abstract>

A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study of a Change in the Use of Non-Finite Clauses in Written English

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

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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. 