{"title":"The human component in social media and fake news: the performance of UK opinion leaders on Twitter during the Brexit campaign","authors":"Maximilian Höller","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2021.1918842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2021.1918842","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ever since David Cameron announced the UK’s EU referendum in February 2016, discussions about Fake News during the Brexit campaign have been thriving and sparking debates on the role of social media in the run-up to Brexit. So far, research on this topic has mainly focused on the automatic spread of false information, through bots, for example. Building on the assumption that political leaders accounted for Fake News as well, my analysis adds a human component: I screened more than 1400 tweets posted by David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage during the Brexit campaign. Using fact-checking platforms, I verified each leader’s top three arguments for Remain or Leave. As the results show, some political leaders turned out to be part of the Fake News epidemic surrounding Brexit: Johnson and Farage shared multiple arguments that were clearly misleading, while Corbyn and Cameron mostly stuck to the facts (although some of their points were speculative). Furthermore, my analysis provides insights into the prevalent arguments used by the respective leaders and their performance on Twitter in general.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2021.1918842","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42257263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interfering in Brexit: responsibility, representation, and the ‘meaningful vote’ that wasn’t","authors":"C. Duggan","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2021.1918837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2021.1918837","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration into the phenomenon of Brexit, and how to approach it from the perspective of the critical humanities. Following calls by Edward Said and Lawrence Grossberg to cross the border between political science and cultural studies, this paper takes Karen Barad’s agential realist approach to rethinking responsibility as response-ability and diffractively reads it alongside the performances and practices of Brexit, as well as the political theory of Hanna Pitkin and Lisa Disch. This new approach is developed through a close analysis of the debates held in the House of Commons surrounding the deferred ‘meaningful vote’ on the Brexit withdrawal agreement. The paper is organised into three parts, corresponding to a representative’s responsibility on the: (1) local, (2) national, and (3) party level. As the deferred ‘meaningful vote’ did not happen, it will not be remembered as a landmark in the Brexit saga. This paper argues that precisely because of its unrealised nature, the deferred vote offers a potential space of resistance, contestation and transformation. The goal is to demonstrate that a greater understanding of the causes and consequences of Brexit can be achieved through the tools of the critical humanities, but that these tools can in turn be sharpened and reinvigorated as a result of said analysis.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2021.1918837","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41531019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neo-Victorianism’s inhospitable hospitality: a case study of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White","authors":"Marie-luise Kohlke","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1876608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876608","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Long Nineteenth Century has proven exceedingly hospitable to creative artists’ historical re-imaginings. Yet the tendency of neo-Victorian works to focus on the nineteenth century’s darker traumatic aspects troubles conceptualisations of ideal hospitality’s crucial link with ethics. This article explores what I term neo-Victorianism’s curious ‘inhospitable hospitality,’ using Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) as a case study to expose troubling gender biases and hierarchies of ‘otherness’ at the heart of hospitality. Hospitality, I contend, is predicated on inhospitality, accounting for neo-Victorian violations of ‘otherness’ and inviting us to question our own liberal subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876608","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47547590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neo-Victorian negotiations of hospitality: an introduction","authors":"Rosario Arias","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1875978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1875978","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue Neo-Victorian Negotiations of Hostility, Empathy, and Hospitality provides a contextual overview of the concept of hospitality, focusing on Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, as well as on other critics such as Tracy McNulty, Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, who have greatly contributed to the development of the notion. Hospitality involves crossing borders; it hovers over the fluid relationship between host and guest, ‘self’ and ‘other,’ home and the unhomely, which also reflects current anxieties and preoccupations. In addition, the introduction discusses neo-Victorianism as a movement which bears similarities with hospitality’s tension between welcoming and distancing. The authors of the collected essays open up new ways of understanding neo-Victorianism through the critical lens of hospitality, and in so doing, they lay bare and challenge cultural discourses about ‘othering’ in the Victorian period and today.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1875978","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44774636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The politics of museal hospitality: Sonia Boyce’s neo-Victorian takeover in Six Acts","authors":"Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Ana Cristina Mendes","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1876595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876595","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Museums and their painstakingly curated constructions of history are increasingly being scrutinised for their heteronormative, androcentric and decisively white biases, often through museum interventions. Based on an understanding of museal hospitality as the constantly-shifting laws that regulate access to Britain’s prestigious exhibition spaces (and the intersections of these spaces with issues of race and gender), this article posits that Sonia Boyce’s Six Acts (2018) can be understood as a neo-Victorian intervention that critiques and forces us to acknowledge the conditions of Britain’s museal hospitality. In conceptualising the museum space as a host, based on Immanuel Kant’s and, particularly, Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality, this article argues that Six Acts addresses and modulates the relationship between host and guest, and interrelatedly, re-conceptualises the Victorian art gallery as a neo-Victorian museum (as an institutional space that self-consciously and reflexively engages with the gendered and racialised subtexts of Victorian visual arts). Boyce’s artwork performs epistemic labour, helping us to continually unlearn both the Victorian ideological biases that still suffuse contemporary discourses on heritage and art, on artistic merit as a law of hospitality, and a distorted imagination of a historically white Victorian Britain.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876595","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46657371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Swallow up me”: hosts, guests and queer hospitality in Sarah Waters’ Affinity, Fingersmith, and Fingersmith fan fiction","authors":"A. Kelly","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1876606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876606","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Throughout Sarah Waters’ neo-Victorian novels, the roles of hosting and visitation are rewritten by the queer desires of her lesbian characters. From Margaret Prior’s queer turn as the “Lady Visitor” of Millbank prison in Affinity, to the erotic convergence of hosts and guests in Fingersmith, the orthodox roles of Victorian hospitality – so essential to the construction of the boundaries that maintain public and private space – are repeatedly recoded in Waters’ writing. In Fingersmith fan fiction, this connection between spatial boundaries and queer affect is realised through the imagined reclamation of a home space that will house a more egalitarian and peaceful version of Maud and Sue’s relationship. This paper offers close readings of home/private/residential space in two of Waters’ novels, as well as in four fan-written stories inspired by Fingersmith. I argue that where the novel eroticizes the point of host/guest convergence between Maud and Sue, Fingersmith fan fiction imagines the queer shelter and domesticity that might grow from it, once those roles have been renegotiated and transcended.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876606","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41729467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Doomed to a kind of double consciousness”: treacherous hospitality and the inversion of tradition in A.S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia”","authors":"Roberta Gefter Wondrich","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1876605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876605","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A.S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia” marks a significant moment in the consideration of (narrative) hospitality in neo-Victorian fiction. It expands on the concerns of neo-Victorianism by foregrounding the theme of hospitality in discourses that are central to the Victorian novel and to contemporary re-interpretations of Victorian culture. Among these are the trope of the visit to the family house in the English novel, in which guests are often then assimilated into the family, and the perils and threats to personal identity that come with the crossing of the threshold of hospitality. A third is the relationship with the ‘other’ in the un/conditional hospitality that is experienced by the protagonist. All of these sub-themes are contained in an epistemological dimension defined by science and religion, problematically interrelated at the time. This article thus considers the conceptual standpoint and the narrative strategies with which Byatt engages with the literary tradition of hospitality, from Homeric parallels through the nineteenth-century novel’s interest in self-identity, to the implications of the limits of knowledge and recognition of otherness. It also assesses the novella’s neo-Victorianism as a literary reimagining of the nineteenth-century world and examines its receptiveness to a post-structuralist questioning of traditional notions of hospitality.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876605","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47181453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetic hospitality: dramatic monologue as a neo-Victorian, post-modern genre","authors":"E. Ravizza","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1876610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876610","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The ever-increasing contemporary interest in the Victorian Age is testified to by a growing number of works engaging with the re-reading, re-writing, and revising of the long nineteenth century. This interest parallels a tendency to identify the Victorian literary tradition solely with the novel. By contrast, this essay focuses on Victorian and neo-Victorian poetry, arguing that issues of otherness/identity, and empathy/hostility are at the heart of Victorian poetic predicaments. Victorian models and themes are exploited by contemporary poets in order to deal with anxieties about local/global experiences, collective/individual identities, and host/guest interactions. Drawing on Rachel Hollander’s definition of narrative hospitality, this essay proposes a definition of ‘poetic hospitality’ that takes the specific features of the poetic text into account, and focuseson poetry as a heteroglossic discourse. The dramatic monologue, is analysed as a privileged site for exploring neo-Victorian hospitality. This kind of poetic composition is generally written in a form that suggests a speech made by an individual character. In dramatic monologues, what appears to be a single voice is usually a composite one, signifying more than one identity amongst the speakers. The analyses of poems by A.S. Byatt, C.A. Duffy and Margaret show how dramatic monologues in neo-Victorian poetry may mobilise historical memory in order to allow new narratives to emerge.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876610","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44142802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ghost, host, hostage: a poet(h)ics of vulnerability in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder","authors":"Rūta Šlapkauskaitė","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1876611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876611","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper considers how Emma Donoghue’s novel The Wonder addresses the historical phenomenon of “fasting girls”. Premised on the idea of the body as a condition for exposure, my reading of the narrative is organised around the affective ties that bring into relief the ethical salience of vulnerability highlighted in the figure of the female faster. Insofar as vulnerability is both a social and ontological condition it also offers a structural foil to the narrative’s engagement with the discourse of hospitality formalised through the use of the Victorian tropes of detective work, medical science, sensationalist journalism, and Christian dogma. Borrowing ideas from Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Erinn C. Gilson, among others, I argue that through its visceral construction of hospitality The Wonder calls our attention to the nineteenth century’s anxiety about female autonomy, the encroachment of empirical knowledge, the traps of imperial power, and the precariousness of life. Seen through the lens of the eschaton of hospitality, the novel examines the ambivalence of the soteriological promise tied to the Christian guilt ethic and the imperative of redemption, suggesting instead a secular ethics of care rooted in empathy, compassion, and unconditional love as the ultimate agents of resurrection.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1876611","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44423591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spanish Civil War commemorations in Northern Ireland, The Republic of Ireland and Spain: political, spatial and generational relations between Irish anti-fascists and Spanish historical memory activists","authors":"Daniel Meharg","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2020.1844414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1844414","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article attempts to analyse the distinctive nature of the commemorations of the Spanish Civil War that have been taking place in the North and the Republic of Ireland, and the partnerships of the memorial groups with Spanish correspondents. Using press archives and interviews, I argue that the commemorations are part of a delayed process of recovery of Ireland’s historical memory of people who were often exiled or forgotten, as well as a contribution to cross-community reconciliation in Northern Ireland. This process of rediscovery takes place through the creation of lieux de mémoire in the form of plaques, stone monuments of various forms, artworks, murals and repeated commemorations across Ireland and Spain. Although this process has its roots in Irish republican groups, trade union and community activists, it has expanded sufficiently to attract attention in Spain and to put down roots in the Madrid area and in Catalonia, most notably through regular visits by the Friends of the International Brigades Ireland group. The commemorations seem to remain more informal than in the United Kingdom, perhaps reflecting their recent development in the wake of the all-consuming Troubles that previously left less space for such activities.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13825577.2020.1844414","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48802843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}