Editorial. All the World’s a Page: Towards a Definition of ‘Writer’ in an Age of Opportunity

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The purpose of this article is to re-examine popular culture in early-modern England by focusing on the oral/illiterate-written/literate and popular culture-high culture dyads. I aim to question why these interrelated socio-cultural categories have not been properly reconciled by the writers of the time. Moreover, my purpose is to focus on antiquarianism as a valid method whereby the delineation between the above-mentioned dichotomies turns into a subtle relationship in which both terms become complementary. I shall focus on two important antiquarian texts - Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (1725) and John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777) - by considering issues of religion and national identity, in an attempt to show that popular culture made known its counter-hegemonic virtues which, though permanently negotiated, were never rejected by the polite. Ultimately, the unstable relationship between the high and the low will be seen as suggestive of the porous boundaries between the two, indicating, at the same time, popular culture’s participatory role in rethinking cultural identity in Enlightenment England.</abstract>

The Counter-Hegemonic Virtues of Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> For the past 150 years, American art and art criticism have undergone important cultural and ideological transformations that are explanatory both of their historical evolution and of the possibility of being divided into several stages. In my interpretation, art criticism cuts across the historical evolution of art in the United States, according to the following cultural and ideological paradigms: two predominant cultural ideologies of art between 1865-1900 and 1960-1980, respectively; two other aesthetic and formalist ideological shifts in the periods between 1900- 1940 and 1940-1960, respectively, and one last pluralist approach to the arts after 1980. Even if this conceptualisation of art criticism in America might seem risky and oversimplifying, there are conspicuous and undeniable arguments supporting it. In a previous study published by American, British and Canadian Studies, I provided conceptual justifications both for the criteria dividing the cultural and the ideological within the overall assessment of American art by art critics and for the analysis and interpretation of the first two important temporal periods in the field of art criticism, 1865-1900 and 1908-1940. The present study continues by analyzing the cultural and ideological stances of American art criticism after 1940 and argues for certain paradigmatic shifts from one period to another.</abstract>

American Art Criticism between the Cultural and the Ideological (II)

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The now-longstanding academic revival of allegory, as well as its import as a perennial buzzword of contemporary art criticism, owes much to a group of essays published in the journal October in the early 1980s. Authors Craig Owens and Benjamin Buchloh, in turn, drew a bloodline to the ideas of allegory that occupied Walter Benjamin throughout his literary career. However, whereas Benjamin saw allegory as the expression of a radical, indeed messianic, view of political possibility, the October writers found in allegory a counter-paradigm against Modernism that would resist the latter's totalizing tendencies by pursing its own deconstructive fate of “lack of transcendence.” In the following essay, I trace the source of this discrepancy to the crucial theological underpinnings of Benjamin's concept of allegory, without which the allegorical forms - appropriation and montage - produce not miraculous flashes of unmediated recognition but the permanent impossibility of communication.</abstract>

Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The following experimental text is drawn from my most recent research project War Machines: Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the Twenty-First Century. The project is an adaptation of the allegorical poetics developed by the French poet Charles Baudelaire in his scathing attacks on the sweeping transformation of Paris being conducted by Napoleon III’s right-hand man, Baron Haussmann. This small excerpt from my new book is a demonstration of my critical and poetical re-framing of Benjamin’s work that orients itself more towards the overlooked elements of Benjamin’s Marxism, as well as his “weak messianic” perspective, in order to re-assert a more radical orientation of his poetics and critical method with the utopian perspectives found in the work of that other great Marxist outlier of the twentieth century, Ernst Bloch, especially as outlined in his book, The Principle of Hope. Thus, unlike the postmodern appropriation of Baudelaire and Benjamin, I want to propose the possibility of bridging the gap between allegorical poetics, Marxism, and utopianism once again as a rigorous, critical option in the twenty-first century.</abstract>

Shadows Between the Signs

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This paper investigates the multi-layered violence of religious representation in the late medieval York biblical plays, with a focus on the Supper at Emmaus. I read Emmaus (Y40), a play which commemorates the Crucifixion and openly encourages strong anti-Judaism, alongside scenes in an early predecessor pageant, The Crucifixion (Y35), within their contemporary devotional and mnemonic practices, i.e. the confessional Book of Margery Kempe and Thomas Bradwardine’s tract on ars memorativa. Emmaus in particular demonstrates how a fundamentally violent ars memorativa, the legacy of ancient rhetoric to the Middle Ages, also underpins the instruction of the laity in the basics of Christian faith, here with the aid of highly musical prosody and repetition, and thereby hones a biased, intolerant and violence-inured Christian collective memory. To study the York play’s position relative to late medieval mnemonic practices, I frame my analysis within memory studies, enriched with the more specific insights offered by social-psychological, neurobiological and cognitivist studies of memory.</abstract>

Ars Memorativa, Ars Oblivionis in Middle English Religious Plays

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article focuses on particular meanings of the term “work,” as related first to the process of adapting Shakespeare and secondly to the ideological and philosophical resonances of this term as employed in the socialist propaganda in East Germany and which Heiner Müller introduces into Shakespeare’s text and gives an ironical twist to. In the first part it points to a few aspects of East German doctrinaire readings of Shakespeare, which were further contested and deconstructed in Müller’s translation cum adaptation. The final part zooms in on the reconfiguring of the established meanings attached to the concept of work in Müller’s rewriting of Macbeth and on the relation between these meanings and the philosophy of history he proposes in his adaptation.</abstract>

Re-Working Shakespeare: Heiner Müller’s Macbeth

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article investigates the intersections of historical memory and political behavior during England’s “Exclusion Crisis” of 1679-1681. In doing so, I bring together theorists of social and historical memory in interpreting the Exclusion Crisis polemic. Between 1679 and 1681, opposition Whigs and Loyalist Tories rehashed sixteenth-century Elizabethan history because it provided potent analogues to the contemporary crisis over the succession. Through an analysis of parliamentary debates and historical writing, I argue that England’s sixteenth-century history was an integral part of the contemporary political debate. The context of Elizabeth’s Treason Act and the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots provided historical parallels that opposition writers used to justify the exclusion of the Duke of York as well as make claims for parliamentary sovereignty in determining the succession. The Elizabethan era provided a wellspring of historical examples that could be culled to refute arguments for monarchial divineright absolutism. Rather than foreground the role of political theory in structuring attitudes and assumptions about the monarchy and parliament, this article sets out to show that sixteenth-century historical polemic set the terms of contemporary debate and, thus, influenced political outcomes.</abstract>

“A Pattern for Princes to Live by”: Popery and Elizabethan History During England’s Exclusion Crisis, 1679-1681

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> By sharing the experiences of women and the black community of her time, represented as a journey towards womanhood on stage, Afro- American playwright Ntozake Shange deconstructs the patriarchal structure of language, by pushing the boundaries of genres as she assembles prose, poetry and stage performance in a “choreopoem” capable of empowering and liberating the trajectories of the represented black women. The present study explores the semiotic and linguistic deconstructions of the patriarchal ideology in for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, aiming at a discussion of the author’s experimentalism with language outside instituted discursive paradigms regarding women. Considering that the concept of the liberation of the individual is strongly historicized in the play, the characters of the seven ladies are focalized as being tightly related to the feminist movement in North America in the seventies. Furthermore, the implications of ideological impositions and limited roles for women in society are analyzed.</abstract>

Experimental Language Deconstructing Patriarchal Discourse in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This paper participates in the discussion about the configuration of what is commonly being referred to as ‘the posthuman condition’ by addressing the technological transformation of the human body and the cultural and political inflections of this transformation through the exploration of Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box.” The paper interrogates the implication of the fusion of flesh and technology and the re-conceptualization of the body as information, thus enabling insights into how these changes affect subjectivity, individuality, and the stereotyped understanding of gender hierarchies.</abstract>

The Posthuman Body in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”

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. 