{"title":"Book Review: Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, edited by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison","authors":"P. Petkov","doi":"10.54664/qxot6221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/qxot6221","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127246217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eastward Ho! Aspects of Eastern European Writing Translated into Irish","authors":"A. Titley","doi":"10.54664/tolg2142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/tolg2142","url":null,"abstract":"The article focuses on translations into Irish of literary texts by writers from several central and eastern European countries. The author adopts a historical approach by first drawing attention to the Irish language as a means of literary expression and a vehicle for the translation of classical texts in the Middle Ages. Irish came under sustained attack because of English rule from the seventeenth century onwards and was only spoken by the poor and the marginalized in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century the language experienced a revival. The latter process was intensified following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. In 1926, a project for literacy and provision of reading material in the Irish language was implemented, and a government publishing company known as An Gúm started producing books for the new Irish-reading public. Since the start of the project, the general tendency has been for books by western European writers to be translated into Irish. However, a significant number of texts by eastern and central European authors, ranging from classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov to novels and short stories by contemporary Russian and Slovenian authors, have also been published over the years.","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121732577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Two Irishmen and the 1863 Polish Uprising","authors":"K. Gmerek","doi":"10.54664/fwok9817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/fwok9817","url":null,"abstract":"In January 1863, an uprising started in all parts of the former Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania that had been annexed by Russia. The uprising was of particular interest to Irish nationalists, who made a number of parallels with the Irish situation and used Polish examples in their political discourse. Two Irish politicians visited Poland at that time: William Smith O’Brien, a former leader of Young Ireland, and the young Tory M.P. for King’s County, John Pope-Hennessy. This article discusses their visits and compares and contrasts their personalities and political views. It examines relevant aspects of the historical context by using both Polish archival sources and coverage by Irish nationalist periodicals.","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128258079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Walking on the Wall”: Postmemory and Hiberno-English in Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People","authors":"Helen Penet","doi":"10.54664/jhzy8928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/jhzy8928","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how Hugo Hamilton’s childhood memoir The Speckled People works through the postmemory of the narrator’s paternal grandfather’s enlistment in the Royal Navy. The narrator’s father has concealed the photograph of the “sailor in the wardrobe” from his children, and in parallel has built a linguistic wall around his family, denying them access to the English language. In his memoir, Hamilton manages to “walk on the wall” by poetically merging the two languages, and writing in Hiberno-English, which circumvents his father’s binary view of the Irish and English languages.","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129359987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Varia: Cultural Nationalism and Postcolonial Imperatives in Irene Salami-Agunloye’s Emotan: A Benin Heroine and Emmy Idegu’s Ata Igala the Great","authors":"Michael Olanrewaju Agboola","doi":"10.54664/lyur5937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/lyur5937","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the efforts of postcolonial creative writers, particularly dramatists, who attempt to rethink the seeming erosion of African culture in the face of western cultural expansion. The present research adopts the methods of descriptive and content analysis, as it dwells on books, journal articles, and internet materials to examine its subject. Of immediate interest are two Nigerian plays, Ata Igala the Great by Emmy Idegu and Emotan: A Benin Heroine by Irene Salami-Agunloye, which are read as paradigmatic texts for interpreting problematic postcolonial relationships. The article contributes to discussions related to colonialism and the hidden agenda of neo-colonialism, which are often interpreted in terms of western economic interests underlying cultural expansion. The article demonstrates how African postcolonial writers have striven to reverse this trend by promoting Africa’s cultural aesthetics as they represent indigenous ways of life and their problematic interaction with western cultural patterns. The discussed works focus on cultural canons related to African life, such as consultation with oracles, ancestor worship, and festivals; and they demonstrate the aesthetic specifics of African dance, music, songs, and their semiotic significance. The article concludes that even though the two plays “speak back” to power, their strength lies in the articulation of certain aesthetic patterns that contribute to African self-location. Thus, the plays not only attempt to assert African culture, but they also strive to rethink the meanings of western cultural imperialism.","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127240230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The West from a Byzantine Perspective During the Early Crusades","authors":"D. Dimitrov","doi":"10.54664/isxj5239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/isxj5239","url":null,"abstract":"The article explores changing attitudes to western Europeans in the Byzantine Empire from the eleventh century until the Fourth Crusade and for some time after it. Special attention is paid to the development of old stereotypes and the emergence of new ones. More active contacts between the two halves of Christendom from the eleventh century onwards did not result in an expected rapprochement, but rather led to hatred and resentment. The article focuses on a number of texts by Byzantine authors, such as Michael Psellos, Anna Komnena, John Kinnamos, Eustathios of Thessaloniki, and Niketas Choniates. In my view, the changes in Byzantine perceptions of the west could be represented in terms of the following metaphorically named stages: Calm, Menace, and Bitterness and Despair.","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122609033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Let us, therefore, stimulate one another”: John Fothergill’s Letters and the Notion of Value and Professionalism","authors":"Marcel Hartwig","doi":"10.54664/zcxr1359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/zcxr1359","url":null,"abstract":"Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the London Quaker John Fothergill, M.D., established himself as an essential node in a transatlantic epistolary network. Via letter writing, Fothergill closed book deals, forwarded anatomical drawings, and exchanged botanical seeds and investment schemes that eventually culminated in the financial politics of the first North American hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He also provided books for the Hospital’s first Medical Library and made suggestions for people to be employed and teaching tools to be used in the first anatomical lectures in Philadelphia. Fothergill’s network sheds much needed light on transatlantic trade and the circulation and commercialization of medical print media in North America’s first regulated medical institutions. The many letters that he wrote provide insights into practices of knowledge production in these institutions. In this article, Fothergill’s epistolary web is represented as a semi-institutionalized network showing colonial medical practice to have been linked to semi-institutionalized spaces that were themselves connected to custodians of knowledge but also functioned as social networks. I argue that such networks were user-based and community-driven, and that they relied on a semi-authoritarian dispersion of knowledge.","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122644043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Ivan Naydenov: za pravo i napredak. Memoari, pisma by Nikolay Aretov","authors":"Keta Mircheva","doi":"10.54664/esbb7341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/esbb7341","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114707180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Varia: Beauty and/(n)or Truth: A (Hermeneutic) Rhetoric of the Aesthetic","authors":"E. Douka-Kabitoglou","doi":"10.54664/wusw7936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/wusw7936","url":null,"abstract":"“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –,” a line of poetry by the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson can be used as a signpost for this article, which attempts a hermeneutic regress from the postmodern to the archaic, in search of a rhetoric for the aesthetic. In this textual tour, some of the master narratives of our culture examining various versions of the story of beauty and truth are visited, and more specifically (always in backward motion), the work of the postmodern theorists Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, the German philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the English Romantic poet John Keats, the Greek philosophers Plato and Parmenides, and, last but not least, the Greek poet Sappho. Paul de Man, the “sad” patriarch of postmodernism, who engaged deeply with the cardinal problem of the truth of poetry and its relation to reality, contests that all language is figurative and rhetorical, and hence unable to represent the real. De Man demystifies aesthetics exploding a whole tradition of aesthetic theory based on the ontology of language, that is, the relation between “word” and “thing.” Along the same lines, the deconstructive critique of Jacques Derrida supports that linguistic figurality contaminates not only literature but philosophy as well, playing mimetic games of seduction that limit reality to a textual frame. On the far side of deconstruction, the hermeneutic theory of Hans- Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger give figurality an overwhelming power by establishing a rhetoric of ontology and presence. Heidegger’s radical reformulation of truth as aletheia and its conjunction with beauty, not only reflects the romantic identification of “beauty is truth,” as best expressed by the poet John Keats, but also points back to Plato who “aporetically” devoted a lifetime to a search for the beautiful and the true, coming up with multiple and contradictory views. As we move into archaic times, the whispering voice of Parmenides unexpectedly recommends the rhetoric of persuasion as the way to truth, while Sappho, celebrating presence and union, employs an erotic rhetoric that names not only human, but natural and divine encounters of beauty and truth.","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131059540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Citizenship, Gender, and Democracy Building, edited by Euromed Feminist Initiative","authors":"P. Petkov","doi":"10.54664/qezj8932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54664/qezj8932","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":124585,"journal":{"name":"VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"54 87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124706453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}