English - current issue

Editorial

Hiscock, A., Wilcox, H. — 2008-01-01

A Prophet Looking Backwards: H.G. Wells's Curriculum for the Future

James, S. J. — 2008-01-01

H. G. Wells was a literary writer very closely involved in education. From his early career as a teacher and his first writings onward, his work always attempts to instruct. This article considers Wells's involvement with the teaching of history. Novels such as Joan and Peter discuss the ideas which led to Wells's writing The Outline of History, which Wells hoped would found a World State and end war between nations.

Poems: from Warrant Error

Sheppard, R. — 2008-01-01

'I Need a Master': Sylvia Plath Reads D. H. Lawrence

Bayley, S. — 2008-01-01

Although scholarship exploring the intertextual relations of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes continues to grow, little attention has thus far been paid to D. H. Lawrence's impact on the development of Plath's poetry. This paper aims to remedy that situation by exploring the circumstances of Plath's readings of and fascination with D. H. Lawrence's poetry and prose, with particular attention to imagery, symbolism, thematic and lexical choice. I expound the relationship between Plath and Lawrence evidenced in Plath's annotations to Lawrence's texts held in her personal library, which reflect both writers' preoccupation with ‘the ghastly’, as Plath terms it. I argue that Plath's readings of Lawrence shape her 27 October 1961 poem, ‘Ariel’, in which the ‘end’ of one self signals the rebirth of another. Yet, Lawrence's literary influence is rendered problematic through Plath's cognizance of his stylistic inadequacy, thus complicating his status as her ideal literary ‘master’.

Poem

Halsey, A. — 2008-01-01

'Moral Pornography' and 'Total Imagination': The Pornographic in J. G. Ballard's Crash

Francis, S. — 2008-01-01

This article discusses pornographic elements in Crash, J. G. Ballard's controversial 1973 novel about ‘the perverse eroticism of the car-crash’, situating the novel in relation to the debate in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s about the availability of pornography. The text is seen as displaying many characteristics of pornographic representation, and its problematic depictions of sexualised violence are discussed. However, I argue that the text also parodies pornographic representations and critiques the sexual politics of contemporary culture, particularly the pornographic or voyeuristic sensibility created by the prevalence of technological representations and scientific thought-modes. The novel, I therefore suggest, can be read in terms of Angela Carter's controversial concept of a ‘moral pornography’. I conclude by considering, with reference to Susan Sontag's essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, how Ballard's ambiguous novel may also be seen as speaking to the possibilities of the pornographic imagination as a means of accessing extreme modes of consciousness.

Poems

Hampson, R. — 2008-01-01

Bardic Aspirations: Philip Roth's Epic of America

Morley, C. — 2008-01-01

This article focuses upon the Jewish experience of post-war optimism and ‘innocence’ in Philip Roth's American Pastoral trilogy. The epic sequence retrospectively depicts three lives, each in various ways enchanted and disappointed by the dream of a self-reliant American identity. Mediated from an indefinite moment in the present by Roth's alter-ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, the trilogy self-consciously addresses the role of the writer in the construction of a mythical national identity. The three novels of the sequence are presented as historical narratives. They uncover the processes whereby the memories of post-war America became, for better or worse, interlaced with the foundational myths of the United States. Their presiding themes are of disenchantment, and the slow collapse of myriad fictions of nation and race. Oscillating between expressions of escape from an entangled web of memories and explorations of the prerogatives of nostalgia, these works ultimately concern the epic process of unmaking the American ‘race’. Each subverts the phoney rhetoric of nation-building polemicists and myth-makers, yet acknowledges these myths as a formative component of their individual, national and literary identities. Like Joyce, Roth is presented as both fascinated with and repelled by the concept of the epicist as the founder of his people.

The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House

Davies, R. — 2008-01-01

Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere

Sandru, C. — 2008-01-01