• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.947-971
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• 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "Washing-Day" (1797) has sparked a variety of feminist critical endeavors over the past two decades. While many feminist literary critics try to salvage the poem as a successful tongue-in-cheek riposte directed at the male dominant literary world, more rigorous Marxist feminists accuse Barbauld of being limited by her own middle-class woman's view on women's domestic labor. Legitimate as they may be, these readings fail to elucidate Barbauld's place in a larger literary and intellectual discourse during the eighteenth century. In this paper I read "Washing-Day" as a woman's georgic, a genre or mode concerned with agricultural labor, the public value of which was highly recognized in eighteenth-century England. Alluding to canonical texts by writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, Barbauld's "loaded lines" in mock-heroic form create a space in which the women's domestic labor of washing interrupts men's daily routines and disrupts their poetic assumptions. While she makes women's work visible, Barbauld also addresses its quintessential nature. Women's work is affective labor; women have to labor physically and mentally to produce the desired domestic comfort. By allowing the image of the soap "bubble" to echo with many "bubbles" in other writers' texts, from the soap bubbles the narrator used to play with as a child to the hot-air balloon "bubble" of the Montgolfier brothers, Barbauld pleasantly equates work and day-dreaming, men's toil and children's play, and finally public, scientific, and recognized labor and private, domestic, and imaginative activities.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.723-752
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• 2012

Although his mythic poetry deals with the fall and resurrection of Albion as the origin of humankind, William Blake (1757-1827) simultaneously links it to the professionalization and unification of disciplinary knowledge itself. He particularly takes a great interest in the cross-referential relation of poetry to science. He argues for the communication of poetry and science on equal footing with each other without the former's prioritization over the latter, or vice versa. In his works Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797-1807) and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820), on which I focus in this essay, Blake's primary problematic is to display strong conflicts among different systems of knowledge. I approach this issue in light of the ideological clash of Newtonian thought, Romantic thought, and postmodern thought. In his poetry, Blake thematizes the very clashes of these different thought patterns. From the standpoint of Romantic thought, first of all, Blake problematizes Newtonian Enlightenment. He criticizes abstract universalization both in poetry and science, which Urizen, one of four Zoas, propagates. Protesting against Urizen's Newtonism, Los values "living form." Thus, Blake demonstrates, through this figure, that poetic imagination and scientific organicism are discursively communicative. Blake, however, also questions the network of Romantic science and Romantic poetry so as to suggest what current critics would call postmodern thought. Blakean postmodernism pursues the self-similarity of organic structure in science and poetry. Precisely, Blake sees polypus as a proliferation of organic body; he arranges four Zoas' self-repetitive stories in a non-linear way. Blake aspires for the conflicting coexistence of different thought patterns.

• Sijohaknonchong
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• v.25
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• pp.129-144
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• 2006

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the rhetorical features of the Chosun Sijo through researching them. A poem has been made by imagination and rhetorics which are based on the poet's experience. The qualifies of the Poem have been determined by how the poet described the object oddly. So it is essential for the poet to struggle to make embellishments and artistic skills when he or she makes a poem. But the Chosun clerisy ostracized the poet who was trying to do these things mentioned above, which was a kind of special poetic point of view the Chosun clerisy had. They recognized embellishments and artistic skills as a resort to petty trick as a result of their sticking to the external form of the objects. The reason they thought them like this was that the Chosun clerisy thought the embellishments and artistic skills could show the self-pride and self-righteousness. Also, there were concerns on the distortion of the object nature by the artificial concoction. Because they can interrupted and distorted the stream of feeling and the original meaning, the artistic skills mush not be recognized as the artistic skills of itself. As a result, they valued the poem made from restraining the rhetoric and artistic skills. They valued the poem which had common words related people's daily life, but was able to feel the simple Lyricism. The poem based on these features has remains as a work which makes people enjoy the nature, and face their life without any resorts, and which has the natural leeway.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.94-107
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• 2008

This study examines the diversity of garden culture in the Joseon Dynasty focusing on genre painting. Genre painting gives us insight into the various ways of enjoying the garden. The intimate activities portrayed in the painting show us about the vivid scenes of Korean garden at that time. Among the various meanings of gardens, sensual pleasure is focused on here. The garden has always been a place of pleasure for seeing, smelling, touching, meeting people and erotic flirting. Here, the oriental aesthetic idea of Pungryu is adopted to reformulate pleasure based on the traditional way of thought. Most Korean gardens in the Joseon Dynasty were understood as the place for Pungryu. Sensuality in the Korean garden associated with a high level of spiritual pleasure. In order to look closely into garden activities, genre paintings were selected and analyzed. Several characteristics were elicited. First, the garden was understood as the medium of communication through reconciling man with nature. Mediating man with nature often calls for uplifting the sense of community within groups of people. Second, the garden was featured as the place of cultural creation. Many scholars utilized the garden as a place for poetic imagination. Therefore, the garden was the locus of intellectual discourse. Third, personal retreat was one of important functions in the Korean garden. the humble attitude toward landscape such as solitude and mediation might be understood as one way of enjoying the nature. Fourth, taste, power and social relations were embedded in garden culture. Therefore, the garden was regarded as a space of distinction. Garden making was understood as one of the high class leisure activity. It was quite natural that the garden was used as a place of showing up their taste and culture. Finally, we need to reinvigorate the rich meanings of garden in contemporary practices. In-depth analysis of garden culture through the lens of genre painting gives us quite useful information in Korean garden culture.

• Sijohaknonchong
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• v.30
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• pp.263-300
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• 2009

Adoration for nature constitutes one of the primary subjects that literature has tackled since the origin of human history. Nature expressed through a poet's subjective imagination is the internalized and reorganized nature. This study examines the view on nature enacted in Ch'o-Jung's three-verse poems (sijo) in light of the traditional views on nature implicated in the ancient three-verse poems (koshijo), which is in line with the long-established Oriental view on nature. To dignitaris(sadaebu) in the Chosun Dynasty, nature appeared as the idealistic subject for moral culture ($shims{\breve{o}}ngsuyang$), which also becomes the literary space where the purity and justice of the world view of Neo-Confucianism(Sungrihak) is contained in the form of the three-verse poem, the lyrical poetic space where the "I" is united with nature by way of "enjoying of wind and moon"($umpungnongw{\breve{o}}i$) and "living in quiet retiremen"($yuyuchaj{\breve{o}}k$), and the object for the poetical perception of the surrounding world. Ch'o-Jung' s three-verse odes are found in Reed pipe ($Ch'oj{\breve{o}}k$), Sixty Five Pieces of Three-Verse Odes (Samhaengshi-$yukshipopy{\breve{o}}n$), Autumn Fragrance ($Hyangginam{\check{u}}n-ga{\check{u}}l$), and The Words of Zelko va Tree ($N{\check{u}}tinamu{\check{u}}i-mal$). This study analyzes 212 pieces of Ch'o-Jung' s three-verse poems chosen from theses books. In Ch'o-Jung's poems, the traditional view on nature expressed in the ancient three-verse poems is rendered in such a way that metaphysical understanding of nature is indirectly transmitted through the objective correlatives found nature. Nature is no longer the object of straightforward utterance, but transformed, displaced, and removed: that way, nature gets objectified to form a complicated and multi-layered structure. In conclusion, the view on nature manifested in Ch'o-Jung's three-verse poems is based on traditional metaphysics. Second, nature is the object of lyrical nostalgia and adoration. Third, nature is imbued with the fundamental affection for parents. Fourth, nature is associated with organic life. Fifth, the nature in Ch'o-Jung's poems reveals the beauty of stillness endorsed in Lao-tse's and Chung-tze's philosophy. And last, nature is the agent for self-realization and meditation.