<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> American mystery writer Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) achieved wide readership both within the United States and abroad, and, significantly, within the US both among white Americans and Native Americans. This article discusses Hillerman’s detective fiction firstly within the tradition of the genre and then focuses on particular themes and literary means the writer employs in order to disseminate knowledge about the Southwestern nations (tribes) among his readers using the framework of mystery (crime) fiction. Hillerman’s two literary detectives Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police, are analyzed and contrasted with female characters. Finally, the article analyzes the ways in which Hillerman makes the detectives’ intimate knowledge of the traditions, beliefs and rituals of the southwestern tribes and of the rough beauty of the landscape central to the novels’ plots, and how he presents cultural information. </abstract>

Ethnicity and Social Critique in Tony Hilleman’s Crime Fiction

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Food and murder have had a paradoxical relationship ever since the first prehistoric hunter-gatherers put the first morsels of meat into their mouths. On one hand, eating means life: food is absolutely necessary to sustain life. On the other hand, eating means killing. Whether it is the obvious killing of an animal for meat, or the less obvious termination of a plant’s life, one must destroy life in order to eat. It is assumed that this inherent tension between eating/living and eating/dying often informs and shapes crime narratives, not only in the recently invented genre of culinary mystery, produced most famously by Diane Mott Davidson and Joanne Fluke, but also, even if to a lesser extent, in classic detective novels of the 20th century. This article focuses on how the contradictory nature of eating is manifested in the work of Agatha Christie. By combining a traditional structuralist approach to crime fiction as a formula, as advocated by John G. Cawelti, with the methods of the emerging field of food studies, the paper aims to observe a classic, i.e., the classic detective story, from a new perspective</abstract>

The Flavour of Murder: Food and Crime in the Novels of Agatha Christie

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This paper provides a close reading of a representative selection of suburban poems by the American writer John Updike (1932–2009). It also draws upon the existing scholarship by suburban studies historians (including Kenneth Jackson, Dolores Hayden, John Archer, and James Howard Kunstler), who have argued for the cultural importance of American suburbia in fostering identity, and develops the argument by literary critics including Jo Gill, Peter Monacell, and Robert von Hallberg, who have championed the existence of a viable suburban tradition in postwar American poetry. By scrutinizing poems from Updike’s early poetry, represented by “Shillington”, up to his closing lyric opus, “Endpoint”, the paper argues that Updike’s unrecognized importance is that of a major postwar poet whose lyric work chronicles, in memorable, diverse, and important ways, the construction of individual identity within suburbia, in a dominant setting for most Americans from the 1950s up to the present.</abstract>

Suburban Identity in the Poetry of John Updike

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> 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>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Wole Soyinka and Samuel Beckett apparently occupy distinct places in the literary space, in all ramifications. Specifically, while the former’s dramaturgy is definable within the context of the traditional convention of playwriting, otherwise known as well-made plays, the latter is inherently non-conformist in this regard. Hence, the effort in this paper was to locate a nexus in their writings, using two of their plays, <italic>Death and the King’s Horseman</italic> and <italic>Endgame</italic>, respectively. Theatre of the Absurd, as an offshoot of existentialism, provided the ground for the critical intersection of philosophical and ideological geometry of the two plays. The critical paradigm essentially relied on the interconnectivity of absurdist writings and existentialist thoughts, as the holistic context which fundamentally defines modernism, to assess what is conceived as modernist theatricality in the two plays. Building on the modernists’ interrogation of man’s existence and essence in the world in which existential meaning is presumably lost, the paper concluded that the two texts are largely intoned with modernist thoughts, regardless of their formal or structural distinction. It arrived at this by placing particular emphasis on the playwrights’ attempts, in these works, at demanding a more spontaneous response to the question of the essence of the individual and his/her place in the universe in which meaning in existence, in the modernist sense, is believed to have been lost.
</abstract>

Existential Dualism and Absurdity: Modernist Theatricality in Wole Soyinka’s <italic>Death and the King’s Horseman</italic> and Samuel Beckett’s <italic>Endgame</italic>

The Rhetoric Structure of Research Article Abstracts in English Studies Journals

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper aims to explore the migration of narrative elements from four medieval Welsh tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi into four recent Englishlanguage novels which are part of Welsh publisher Seren’s series New Stories from the Mabinogion. Russel Celyn Jones’s <italic>The Ninth Wave</italic>, Owen Sheers’s <italic>White Ravens</italic>, Lloyd Jones’s <italic>See How They Run</italic>, and Gwyneth Lewis’s <italic>The Meat Tree</italic> bear an explicit textual relationship to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a textual whole of unknown authorship. This affords an opportunity to examine the workings of what constitutes a textual tradition, both diachronically and synchronically. The article relies on Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s structuralist theory of narrative, on Welsh philologist Sioned Davies’s analyses of the medieval tales, and on Slovak literary scholar Anton Popovič’s view of tradition in terms of prototexts and metatexts. The methodology chosen consists of identifying textual variables and invariables in order to capture possible ways of examining relationships between related texts of different periods and languages within a corpus of linguistically encoded messages of a geographically defined community.
</abstract>

New stories from the Mabinogion and Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi: Texts, Narratives and Tradition1

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Critical engagement with and intersections of Japanese and African literatures are burgeoning. In pre-colonial African society, a lawful action was that action that took into consideration the common good expressed in the spirit of Ubuntu. Interestingly, Japanese literature and African literature share this universal character in common. Ubuntu intersects with the Japanese philosophy of Nagomi which emphasises harmony and balance thereby creating a nexus of transcultural hybridity. This paper examines Ubuntu and Nagomi as transcultural motifs in stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Nagai Kafu, and Uno Koji in <italic>Akutagawa and Others: Three Japanese Short Stories</italic> to highlight ideological and law-oriented similarities. Carl Jung’s Persona-Archetype is privileged in this study because it accounts for the recurring images of Ubuntu and Nagomi in the public life of the characters. These cultural images help them to mitigate defiant conducts which violate the fundamental human rights and life purpose of other characters. In Nagai Kafu’s <italic>“Behind the Prison”</italic>, the motif of physical and psychological imprisonment is eye-catching as the narrator writes His Excellency expressing his frustration at the awful state of things in his Japanese society. Uno Koji’s <italic>“Closet LLB”</italic> interrogates the imperatives of choice and identity while Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s <italic>“General Kim”</italic> is a story based on the history of Japan and its neighbour, Korea. In the stories, the protagonists and other characters act heroically in ways that evince the tenets of Ubuntu and Nagomi. Their heroic actions allay the fears of their vulnerable compatriots and protect their fundamental human rights.
</abstract>

Stimulating the Law through Ubuntu and Nagomi in Three Japanese Short Stories

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper addresses the issue of the loss of the real in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro as a contemporary author whose thought line is still in progress. His approach to this issue is anti-capitalist as he questions the so-called scientific advancement led by cash-oriented capitalists and industrialists. His writing seeks to strip the veil of the murderous nature of this kind of science. He blames it for killing the real and creating a world of simulations. He animadverts upon dystopian spaces where he holds postmodern scientific knowledge responsible for the digression of the natural course of life and lays bare the secrets behind the replacement of the real with the simulated by drawing attention to such debatable topics as human cloning, cosmetic surgeries and artificial intelligence. In terms of methodology of analysis, this paper is primarily based on a close examination of the author’s literary texts: two novels <italic>(Never Let Me Go</italic> and <italic>Klara and the Sun)</italic> and three short stories from Nocturnes (“Malvern Hills”, “Nocturne” and “Crooner”). Postmodernist concepts have been of great relevance to the analysis of these texts, for his fiction could not be approached in isolation from the realities of the postmodern era where it’s produced. Equally, bearing in mind the author’s socio-ethnic and historical background, the society where he lives and the politico-cultural transformations of the world aTher the Second World War plays an important role in the analysis of his texts.
</abstract>

The Loss of the Real in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <italic>Never Let Me Go</italic>, <italic>Klara and the Sun</italic> and <italic>Nocturnes</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Coffee was a foreign product in Britain, only introduced during the Post-Medieval period. The introduction was not smooth as it was viewed as a drink from the Moors or the Turks. Two groups emerged – one favouring coffee and one deriding it – and the conflicts were depicted in books, pamphlets, and leaflets of that era. Coffee faced opposition from other beverage sellers as it became a threat to their existing businesses. During its initial days, there was even a call for a baptism of the drink to wash out its “Satanic influence”. Coffee, seen as a medicine in its earlier days in Britain, became an essential part of everyday life in the late 17th century. Coffee houses became a place for public gatherings where social, political, and business discussions took place. This paper will explore the discussions and debates revolving around coffee in 17th-Century English Literature.
</abstract>

Arguments and Counterarguments for and against Coffee in 17th-Century English Literature

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper explores the use of the passive in present-day British English, focusing on its register-specific lexico-grammatical patterns. The interaction of the grammatical structure, lexis, phraseology and register is examined on the basis of two sub-corpora of the <italic>British National Corpus 2014</italic> – academic prose and informal conversation. The results have corroborated the findings of previous studies in that the pattern <italic>‘BE / GET V-ed’</italic> is populated by verbal participial forms which create a cline with departicipial adjectives. The communicative needs of registers have been shown to have a decisive impact on the frequency of passive patterns and the specific lexical choices associated with the patterns. In both registers, the <italic>‘BE / GET V-ed’</italic> patterns appear to constitute the core of larger fixed phraseological units, e.g., <italic>can’t be bothered to/with,</italic> or <italic>it should be noted that</italic>.
</abstract>

The Passive across Two Registers of Present-Day British English: A Corpus-Based Lexico-Grammatical Perspective

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are not as well-recognised as his novel or his dramatic works. This paper circles around two of his tales, <italic>The Happy Prince</italic> and <italic>The Nightingale and the Rose</italic>. Through a postmodernist outlook, this study postulates the vigorous diatribe of Wilde against the consumer culture which was dominant within Victorian society. Wilde asserts that the Victorian mind-set claims that happiness is attainable through accumulating signs of affluence and he ironically mocks this notion of happiness which is entitled to commodified objects. To him, happiness is defined through a strict sense of Christian morality and Christ-like love and kindness. His aesthetic views are entangled with morality and he fails to celebrate art for art’s sake. Moreover, this study asserts that Wilde is aware of the dominant language games, and his application of the technical language game for the Prince, the Nightingale, and the Swallow is in debt to his monolithic morality or his opportunistic character. At last, Wilde refuses to celebrate beauty if morality is absent and in this way, his aesthetic concerns become rather contradictory.
</abstract>

The Commodified Happiness: The Only Established Source of Meaning in Oscar Wilde’s <italic>The Happy Prince</italic> and <italic>The Nightingale and the Rose</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Hedges and boosters are important metadiscoursal devices contributing to the construal of persuasion in academic discourse as they enable academic writers to distinguish facts from opinions, evaluate the views of others and convey a different degree of commitment to their assertions (cf. Hyland 1998a, Hyland 2004, 2005). This study explores cross-cultural variation in the use of lexical hedges and boosters in the academic discourse of non-native writers. The study is carried out on a specialized corpus of linguistics research articles published in the international journal Applied Linguistics and the national Czech English-medium journal Discourse and Interaction. The main purpose of the cross-cultural investigation is to analyze variation in the rate, distribution and choice of hedges and boosters across the rhetorical structure of research articles in order to shed light on ways in which Anglophone and Czech writers express different degrees of commitment in their assertions when striving to persuade their target readership to accept their views and claims. </abstract>

Cross-Cultural Variation in the Use of Hedges and Boosters in Academic Discourse

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> In order to enhance mobility, competitiveness, and opportunities for work, the European Union lists the ability to communicate in a foreign language and to understand another culture as an important objective in their language education policy. Knowledge of a foreign language is also an important objective for many American universities, which require students to study a foreign language as a prerequisite to graduate. Students with documented disabilities affecting the learning of a foreign language or students with poor foreign language learning skills, therefore, pose a significant challenge, since a foreign language requirement may prevent such students from graduating unless universities are willing to make special arrangements such as having students graduate without fulfilling the requirement or letting them take substitution classes. The question of what to do with such students is at the heart of this article. It describes how one mid-sized private university with a two-year language proficiency requirement has approached the problem to ensure that policies are implemented fairly. Rather than pulling students out of the foreign language classroom, the university succeeded in keeping students engaged with foreign language study through advising and mentoring across departments</abstract>

A Cross-Departmental Approach to Supporting Students with a Disability Affecting Foreign Language Acquisition

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> 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

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> 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

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Prague Journal of English Studies

The Journal of Charles University, Faculty of Education

 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...

 The Prague Journal of English Studies is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal that invites international contributions, but also aims...

Prague Journal of English Studies

The Journal of Charles University, Faculty of Education

Wszystkie tomy i zeszyty w tym czasopiśmie