• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.543-555
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• 2010

In his early poems, Wallace Stevens shows us different gestures, compared with his later poems, when he acquires reality by faculty of imagination. The former is made of ontological violence while the latter is revealed by bareness of less sensuality. However, they are the identical gestures, though from different angles, to accomplish things as they are rather than the ideas of things. In "Sunday Morning," ontological violence occurs in such epistemological couples as thought and thing, mind and world, and imagination and reality. Especially, in order to recuperate his poetic reality, Stevens undermines the traditional hierarchy between heavenly divinity and earthly divinity. In the poem, Christianity faces a critical challenge and then it is disempowered by the earthly divinity. Additionally, by disadvantaging religion, he wants to raise his poetic issue of the faculty of imagination to acquire reality. Stevens' concept of imagination is less subjective and more transcendental than Kantian one. After the ontological violence, Christian divinity and mythic gods leave ontological boundary for earthly divinity in an ambiguous way. In other words, between "Sunday" and "sunny day," the ontological conflicts haunt us throughout the poem as if the violence would happen between imagination and reality. For Stevens, both Christian divinity and mythic gods are mere obstacles to real divinity; both play a mere role of imagination before reality is revealed. Whatever reality is, imagination is always ready to draw an ontological line of reality in an ambiguous way, regardless of how long it lasts. In general, most ontological violence requires such physical remnants of conflicts as borderline, deaths, and pains which still prevail in the poem. Those ontological remnants remain to be found on earth. The sky is an abstract borderline between heaven and earth because in a sense, it belongs to both earthly landscape and heavenly sphere. Without any ontological borderline or threshold, there is no recognition of the divinity because the vitality of divinity is inflamed in continuous transgression of the other. After the final ontological conflict between heaven and earth, there remains only ambiguous borderline near the earth beside the friendlier sky.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.301-328
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• 2010

Many recent British novels engage with the construction and deconstruction of history and identity; and in dealing with these historical, or historicised novels it seems to be an untouchable ground that truth is beyond grasp. Even when approached, its authenticity should be examined under the post-modern "incredulity toward metanarrative" discourses. Julian Barnes's 1998 novel England, England may be one of these. Yet, unlike others it achieves a complicated and controversial status as a new kind of historiographic metafiction by providing selfconscious reflections on the invention of innocence and the questionable notion of historical authenticity against the background of current postmodern historical, cultural, and literary explorations. The book, set in a near-future, namely post-post-modern England, starts with a story of a young girl, Martha Cochrane, whose first memory goes back to her early infantile years. Yet, the narrator comments that it is a lie, "her first artfully, innocently arranged lie," since memory, or history, is a product of identity, and vice versa. Her memory of the jigsaw puzzle is both a reminiscent and a significant component of who she is now, both a simulacrum and the original of herself. The correlation between her individual memory and identity parallels that of a region, England, in formation of its history and nationality. "England, England" is the replicated miniature of the former glorious Kingdom as well as a becoming der Ding an sich (the thing itself). In search of the English history and identity, the author satirizes the modern mind's perception of the unreliability and arbitrariness of memory and history, and further explores the alternative to the postmodern discourses by suggesting the probability of inventing innocence glimpsed in children's face "believing while disbelieving." In doing so, the author reconstructs not only the history of Englishness on the ground where nothing seems to be solid, but more importantly also the postmodern theme of relativity in relation to memory, history and identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.667-690
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• 2010

This essay attempts to read Percy Bysshe Shelley s The Mask of Anarchy by attending to a political agenda that Shelley seeks to propose and embody in the poem. This poem was written as a response to an exceptional political event, the Peterloo Massacre, and thus it is evident that Shelley intended to engage in contemporary politics by writing this poem. As many critics have pointed out, however, the way in which this poem addresses social, plitical issues is ambivalent and even confusing, since it contains many elements that contradict each other, and sometimes its political visions are based on incoherent conceptions. For this reason, this poem has been considered to be a failure as an occasional poem which should provide the reader with a clear direction for political actions. Faced with this critical problem, this essay proposes that the ambivalence this poem reveals-e.g., the confrontation between moderate artistic fantasy and radical tenets-is not a retreat from political activism, as some critics suggested, but a result of its creation and embodiment of a public sphere which invites various social classes and their positions. The mode in which Shelley conceives this unified public sphere in the course of writing The Mask of Anarchy can be interpreted in terms of the following three features. First, this poem underscores the significance of thoughts in constituting a communal space between people, thus asking the reader to participate in this process of thinking on given issues. Second, this poem suggests that people should enlighten each other by engaging in communicative reciprocations. Lastly, the public sphere formulated by the previous two features should incorporate various socio-political agents beyond class boundaries (even oppressors themselves) into its own working field. After explaining how these three features are manifested in the poem, this essay argues that the unified public sphere thus formed in the poem is the very agenda that Shelley aims to propose for the contemporaneous politics and culture. As a conclusion, this essay highlights how Shelley s project of creating a unified public sphere finally failed in contemporary history through observing two contrasting receptions of Shelley s works.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.691-717
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• 2010

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of love framed by an overarching pattern of death, set in the war-torn and doomed Troy, from which the lovers cannot separate their fate. Compared with Boccaccio's poem, the attention paid to death in Chaucer's version underlies his complex treatment of love. Above all, the language of death in Chaucer's poem provides the thread from which the entangled web of love is woven. Death together with desire pervades the language and rhetoric of the poem, prominent not only in the courtly love tropes, but also in the characters' asides and speeches. The prominence of these two concepts, desire and death, seem to be central to the various issues that the poem contains explicitly and implicitly. That is, two concepts are the basis for the breadth and depth of Chaucer's examination of love in light of the social and political realities of late fourteenth century England. The language of death in Chaucer's poem reflects the powerful influence on his imagination. With the devastation wrought by the plague and the changing fortunes of England in the war with France, Chaucer's world was once saturated in death, and one that could amply parallel the turn from prosperity to downfall. In particular, Chaucer's poem is suffused with the language of contagion and death in connection with desire. Troilus's lovesickness mimics the progress of a viral infection. Once breached, his body performs its newly compromised identity through fever, loss of appetite, and physical disintegration. On the other hand, Chaucer depicts Boccaccio's conventional portrait of Criseyde into a elaborate paramour of a pathogen. She is characterized as the contaminant that infects male hero. In addition, Criseyde is cast as sole earthly cure of illness that Troilus suffers from. In spite of Criseyde's role as nurturer and healer, Troilus longs for his own death and feels death clutching his heart. Finally, Troilus's love toward Criseyde is doomed to death.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.973-998
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• 2010

This paper aims at assessing the significance of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the agreed inaugurator of English Romanticism, in terms of such key concepts as poetic "experiments," "conversation," and the authorial function. The 1798 volume marks an interesting incidence in which an author with no tangible substantiality can wield his authorial function over his works. The volume is signed without the named proper noun-its author is neither William Wordsworth nor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The figure of the author in this case is realized by the poems he writes; he produces, and is produced by, his works-a fact that constitutes part of the poetic experiments manifested in the Advertisement. Working under this reciprocal production, the Author of the 1798 volume and his poems are collectively aiming at establishing a new class of poetry and an interpretive community. The notion of "conversation" is a key element in the thematic, stylistic ties among individual poems. Poems of the 1798 volume effect multi-layered, "blended" voices. Readers are expected to draw out the topological interweaving among poems through the practices of dialogic reading. In this light, the sequential necessity of "The Rime" and "Tintern Abbey" should be emphasized. They are stitched together in a logic of textual placement and the transition from one to the other is never arbitrary. Most of all, they are working under the same authorial function, complementing each other, and addressing the same poetic project in different textual locations. As an inaugural work of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads of 1798 in fact makes so many things happen and yet again anticipates something yet to come with elusiveness. The value of this poetic experiments should be judged not only by what is claimed in it, but what it sets out to do and "how far" it will be performed, as implied in the Advertisement. The efficacy of the volume, more than anything else, is dependent upon the performative power of words.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1067-1090
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• 2010

The epistolary novel, as developed and refined by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), is concerned with distinctly private experience and the morality of individuals-Richardson's heroine writers. In contrast to nineteenth-century novels, which explore their subjects through the overview of a narrator with a singular moral outlook, the epistolary narrative allows Richardson to examine the various different ways in which individuals/heroines interpret, mold, and respond to their experiences in writing. In this paper, I argue that the authorial voice of Richardson does not control the narrative but rather is present in the prefaces, character sketches, notes and occasional interjections between letters. Although there is little doubt as to whether Richardson intended to make a particular moral point or attempted to control the effect of his novels on his readers, the heroines and their letters dominate the novels so that they put the authorial suggestions in a different light, reducing the author's to one voice among several. Thus, Pamela's letters are exemplary for the vigor and intelligence with which they appear to be written, rather than for the imposed morality of their ghost writer-Richardson. Although Clarissa is of a different social class from Pamela, both heroines are united in their oppression as victims of a patriarchal society. In Clarissa's letters, the heroine's situation and experience are seen through her own writing in dialogue with that of her confidante Anna Howe, and in contrast to the writing of her oppressors. Clarissa, then, becomes a struggle between different discourses in which their genesis and effect, and the societies and individuals from which they come are implicitly suggested in Richardson's text. While Richardson may or may not be guilty of taking the writing of women and using it for his own ends, his epistolary novels represent a deliberate and bold attempt to shape the novel in a way conducive to his heroines and to women writers.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.501-517
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• 2010

This paper examines the British imperialism found in Edith Nesbit's fantasy stories by looking at the function of magic and of the hierarchical relationships seen in the books. Although Edith Nesbit is relatively unknown in Korea, she is widely recognized as having had a great influence on the 20th century British literary world, and is also well-known for her political position as a socialist. Nesbit's fantasy books are commonly differentiated from other Victorian children's books written before her in that she created realistic and liberal children characters and rejected the adult didactic tone. While Nesbit's books have been recognized as revolutionary and being distinguished from other Victorian children's books, I suggest that the ideas found in her fantasy novels largely include the dominant Victorian message of British imperialism. This imperial ideology is delivered by the logic of magic and the multilateral hierarchies. The two magic creatures (The Psammead and the Phoenix) and the two magic items from an Oriental background (the Carpet and the Amulet) all have a magic power to grant people's wishes, wholeheartedly exercising their power and knowledge for the sake of the British characters. While the magic agents serve to fulfill the children's wishes, the children aim to please their parents and to benefit their family, showing layered hierarchies among the characters. Also, there is a hierarchical distinction between the magic items and the magic creatures in that the magic items have no voice to express themselves but only serve and obey the British children. The foreign characters that the children encounter in their adventures also cooperate with the British characters to help them to fulfill their goals. In short, magic frees the children from the adult-centered world but ultimately their free adventures serve their parents and other adults, and represent the ideals and hierarchical concepts of British imperialism. Thus, Nesbit's position as a modern writer seems to be ambiguous, switching between modern characterization and style, and the old Victorian imperial messages that also exist in her fantasy novels.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.813-838
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• 2011

Toni Morrison's ninth novel A Mercy delves into the colonial American history of the seventeenth century when Europeans began to migrate to the New World and when the first slaves were brought to Virginia. Morrison presents a diverse group of people such as white Europeans, an American Indian, a free black man, indentured servants, and slaves from Africa in order to explore the subjects of ownership, freedom and racism. She emphasizes the fact that most of the Europeans who came to America in the early seventeenth century were the people who were thrown out from the society such as felons, prostitutes, servants and children. By portraying how these castaways tried to settle in a new environment surrounded by unknown dangers and challenges, Morrison demystifies and reconstructs the myth of the birth of America as a nation state. In continuation of Morrison's writings about love and the betrayal of love, her novel A Mercy explores the subjects of trauma, memory and subjectivity by choosing the topic of motherly love and its betrayal which she dealt with poignantly in Beloved. The female protagonist, Florens, is given away by her mother in partial payment of debt incurred by the owner of Florens's mother. The traumatic memory of Florens's separation from her mother shapes Florence's character. She has to revisit the site of the original traumatic experiences of being given up by her mother in order to reconstruct her fragmented memory and past. The recurring dream of the traumatic incident that takes hold of Florens can be explained by the trauma theory of Freud, Cathy Caruth, Suzette Henke, and Judith Herman. The paper explores the self journey of Florens in which she faces the traumatic past and comprehends its meaning which enables her to construct her subjectivity by understanding the true meaning of being free and of owning oneself. In particular, it demonstrates how the process of writing a confession, a story about one's history, enables one to reclaim the traumatic experience and to locate it in the narrative memory.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.839-870
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• 2011

This study compares and contrasts Jane Austen's novels of sensibility with those of Rousseau and Goethe. In Julie, or The New Heloise and The Sorrows of Young Werther, the passionate but doomed love of the heroine and her lover is juxtaposed with her passionless marriage to the virtuous husband. In Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Austen revises Rousseau and Goethe's novels of sensibility to accommodate them to the puritanical English literary conventions. She parodies the basic plot of Menage a trois found in their novels of sensibility and transforms her novels into British Bildungsroman, focusing on the heroines' maturation. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne stands up against the mercenary and snobbish high society. However, Austen represses Marianne's sensibility since the indulgence in sensibility can bring about sexual fall, as is evidenced by the cases of the two Elizas. Marianne's dangerous fever following Willoughby's betrayal emphasizes that female sexual desire should be punished for her continued existence in the high society. The taming of her sensibility and body through the fever is posited as a prerequisite for the happy marriage. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth favors the deprived Wickham over the wealthy Darcy. As Wickham turns out to be a debauched lover, Darcy snatches sexual charms from him and is transfigured into one of the most virtuous and attractive husbands in Menage a trois of the novels of sensibility. Acknowledging sexuality as a vital element of a courtship, Austen embeds sexual desire in dances and glances. However, Elizabeth has to repress sensibility and desire and the complete gratification of desire is continuously deferred to some indefinite period in the future. Marriage is a synecdoche for the union of the bourgeois and the aristocracy in Austen's Bildungsroman and Marianne and Elizabeth are bestowed with happy marriage in return for repressing their sensibility and desire. Since their 'normality' and 'maturation' have been achieved at the expense of subversive sexual power of deviant sensibility, they look too impotent to gratify their desire when they finally secure comfortable but mediocre upper class life.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.939-958
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• 2011

Ezra Pound has an idea of poetry as a field of energy in which words interact with each other with kinetic energy. The energy field which Pound creates in his poem is analogous to the theory of electromagnetism developed by Michael Faraday and James Maxwell, who look upon the space around magnets, electric charges and currents not as empty but as filled with energy and activity. Pound argues that "words are charged with force like electricity," demonstrating that words charged with their own images or energies of positive or negative valence interact one another. This idea is similar to Faraday's concept of "line of force" which he used to represent the disposition of electric and magnetic forces in space. Pound's concept of "image" as an "intellectual and emotional complex in an instant" is remarkably consonant with the confluence of electric and magnetic fields that are coupled to each other as they travel through space in the form of electromagnetic waves. The instant profusion of conception and perception, much like that of electric and magnetic fields, enables Pound to move beyond the sequential and linear hierarchy in time and space. Particularly, Maxwell's stunning discovery that the electromagnetic waves propagate in space at 'the speed of light' has allowed Pound a relativistic sense of escape from the limitations of Newtonian absolute time and space. Pound's poetry transcends any geographical space and sequential time by rendering and juxtaposing images simultaneously. Pound was fully aware of light and electricity fundamental to what he called his world "the electric world." Pound's experiments in Imagism and Vorticism can be considered an attempt to rediscover a place for poetry in the modern world of science and technology. Almost all the appliances that we think of today as modern were laid down in the closing decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, in response to the availability of electromagnetic energy. This paper explores how Pound responded to the age of modern technology and science, examining his conception of "image" through his many analogies and similes drawn from electromagnetism. Pound's imagist poetics and poetry come to embody, not only the characteristics of the electric age in the early twentieth century, but the principles of electromagnetism the electric age is based upon.