showing 5 related works from this author
The city on the Moldau as a liminal space: Prague in Anthony Trollope's "Nina Balatka"
2022
The article discusses Anthony Trollope's representation of the city of Prague in his 1867 novel Nina Balatka, which first appeared anonymously in the Blackwood's Magazine. The novel tells the story of the eponymous protagonist, a Christian woman, who falls in love with a Jewish man. Trollope's choice of Prague as the backdrop for the story of two lovers separated by the great gulf between Christians and Jews seems particularly fitting, because the spatial division of the city by the river Moldau which separates the Christian and the Jewish parts of town reinforces the sense that the two protagonists come from different worlds. Trollope's characters exist in the realistically represented cit…
"The wrathful sunset glared...": The Krakatoa Sunsets in Victorian Science and Art
2020
The eruption of Krakatoa on August 27, 1883 was an event both tragic and spectacular. Thousands of lives were lost; sea waves and atmospheric disturbances were detected around the globe. Billions of tons of volcanic ash were thrown into the atmosphere producing multi-coloured sunsets caused by the scattering of light by aerosol particles. The paper discusses the ways in which these so-called Krakatoa sunsets, which were experienced by most of the world, were reflected in Victorian scientific and artistic discourse. The accounts included in the section “Descriptions of the Unusual Twilight Glows in Various Parts of the World, in 1883–84” of the Royal Society report The Eruption of Krakatoa a…
"Florentine Nights", or domesticating "Romola": The forgotten Polish translation of George Eliot's novel
2019
The paper discusses an anonymous Polish translation of George Eliot’s 1863 novel Romola, published in the late nineteen-twenties by the Edward Wende publishing house. The Polish version, which appeared with the title Noce florenckie (Florentine Nights) and a photo of Lilian Gish on the cover, may be seen as an early case of a movie tie-in. The discussion focuses on the domesticating strategies used by the Polish translator, who paid attention only to the elements that move the personal story of Romola, Tito and Tessa forward, and removed most of the elements that deal with the history and culture of Renaissance Florence. As a result, the translation becomes a highly simplified paraphrase th…
“Though I was alone with the unseen, I comprehended it not”: The Relationship Between the Dead and the Living in Margaret Oliphant’s „A Beleaguered C…
2017
Margaret Oliphant 1828–1897 is best remembered today as one of the important practitioners the domestic fiction, with her “Chronicles of Carlingford” series considered to be her most enduring achievement. Oliphant’s other interesting group of works are ghost stories and other spiritual tales known as the “Stories of the Seen and Unseen”. A Beleaguered City, a novella first published in 1879, is generally considered to be Oliphant’s most successful supernatural tale. Set in Semur, France, and told by five different narrators, the story focuses on the inhabitants of Semur, who are evicted from their town by the spirits of the dead. This paper aims to demonstrate that Oliphant uses the supern…
“An Unpleasant Book about Unpleasant Boys at an Unpleasant School”: Kipling’s Reshaping of the Victorian School Story in “Stalky & Co.”
2022
“Slaves of the Lamp, Part One”—the first tale of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co.—was published in 1897, forty years after the publication of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a book that created a pattern followed by other practitioners of the school-story genre. The aim of the following paper is to discuss the ways in which Kipling challenged the established conventions of the Victorian school story. In contrast to his predecessors, Kipling did not set his tales in an old, established public school; he questioned the importance of sports and games in developing manly character; and refused to idolize the school traditions. His protagonists rebel against authority and do not follow…