著者

日下 隆平 Ryuhei Kusaka 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.17, pp.3-28, 2002-12-20

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At the fin de siecle, the Celtic Revival was complex and multifaced movement, comprising a variety of approaches to the representation of Irish identity. In this paper, the influence of Matthew Arnold on the Celtic Revival will be mainly explored. He created a stereotyped image of the Celt as a “shy, sensitive and imaginative” race. The Irish people have greatly changed their image from what they used to be in the eighteenth century. The image of Irishman in England can be traced back to the age of Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift. Yahoo represents the savage people whom Jonathan Swift described in Gulliver's Travels (1726). The description of the Irishman as Yahoo was found in the cartoons and writings of the eighteenth century. Eiren, on the other hand, was a gloomy and beautiful woman, with long and dark hair. She was often drawn in the cartoons of the magazines at 1890s. The inclination for nostalgic representations of the Celt could be found in the figure of Eiren. In the first section, the discovery of the Celtic motif will be discussed in connection with the rise of Irish nationalism in the middle of the eighteenth century. The traditional Irish symbols such as the Celtic Cross, harp, and Irish wolfhound, will be referred in the poems and paintings. In the second section, I will deal with the image of the Irishman as Yahoo, in Gulliver's Travels and the cartoons of Punch. In the last section, the Celtic Revival and the transformation of the Irish image at the end of century will be discussed. The figure of Erin suggested Irish femininity itself. This figure of Erin cannot be separable from Arnold's opinion. As a critic points out, the Celt is a construct based on oppositions such as wild and tame, savage and civilized, or idealist and utilitarian. In this paper, an ambivalence in English attitude towards the Celt will be also explored.

著者

三宅 亨 Toru Miyake

雑誌

英米評論 = English Review (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.3, pp.1-31, 1991-01-25

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Languages characteristically have regional varieties. The English language, being a world language, has several major national varieties. Thus the English spoken in Canada has its own distinct features as well as similarities to the varieties of English used in the United Kingdom and the United States. In this paper I try to clarify Canadian preference in pronunciation, based on a survey conducted with 74 Canadians. The results show that Canadian speech sometimes follows a dominant American pattern, sometimes the British usage, sometimes a mixed pattern, and sometimes its own. Canadians tend to pronounce such words as ate, tomato, leisure, and missile in the same way as most Americans do. Some of these words reflect features of 17th and 18th century English speech which have been retained in most of North America, including Canada, but changed over time in standard English. On the other hand, Canadians prefer British pronunciation in such words as ration, lever, soot and route. This can be partly ascribed to the fact that many Canadians have identified themselves more with Britons than with Americans since the American Revolution. However, the cultural and linguistic influence of the United States upon Canada has always been so strong that it is not surprising that Canadian speech shows a mixed pattern in such words as student, progress, schedule, etc. At the same time, Canadians have their unique pronunciation in such words as out, write, father, calm, vase, guarantee, almond, etc., most of which have been carried over from the days of the early 19th century immigrants from various parts of the British Isles, where phonological changes have long since taken place. It is interesting to observe how Canadian speech will change in the years to come under the constant strong influence of the giant to the south.

著者

吉田 一穂 Kazuho Yoshida 桃山学院大学兼任講師

出版者

桃山学院大学総合研究所

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.18, pp.41-65, 2003-12

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In 1857, Charles Dickens (1812-70) revisited the Marshalsea prison to look back upon the past and make a necessary atmosphere in Little Dorrit (1857). The Marshalsea prison was the place which Dickens could not forget in his lifetime. Dickens returned to his father's experience of debt again while he was drawing the portrait of the Father of the Marshalsea, William Dorrit, as 'a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman.' John Dickens, Charles's father, was a cheerful person but he had no sense of economy. He was imprisoned in the Marshalsea prison, and Charles had to work at Warren's Blacking warehouse, which gave him an agony and despair. Dickens seems to change the relationship between his father and him into the relationship between William Dorrit and Amy in Little Dorrit. William Dorrit who is called 'the Father of the Marshalsea prison, is proud of the title although he is a prisoner for debt. Amy as a 'Little mother' of his father and the chief support of the family, shows consideration for her father ; she is a protector of her father and his respectability. Indelibly marked by the more than twenty years to which the Circumlocution Office has condemned William Dorrit behind those walls, it is forever impossible for him, even when he is released, to lose those psychological scars. In Book 2, Chapter 19, 'The Storming of the Castle in the Air', William returns to the identity in the Marshalsea prison. William Dorrit who lived for many years, there is a victim of social system. Arthur who becomes a prisoner of the Marshalsea prison in Book 2, Chapter 27, is also a victim of social system. Arthur who has invested in the business of Merdle, goes bankrupt after he killed himself. Arthur is a victim of Calvinism which drives people to the condition of confinement, and is a prisoner of the wicked religion of Mrs. Clennam. Dickens showed how Arthur could be released from the cultural ideology of Calvinism which made him an indecisive man and how he could get freedom. In Book 2, Chapter 29, Amy visits Arthur who went bankrupt and became the prison of the Marshalsea prison. Amy gives him motherly love. What has to be noticed is that Amy says to Mrs. Clennam, 'Be guided only by the healer afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities', before the house of Mrs. Clennam collapses. The words of Amy show the forgiveness of sin as a theme of Little Dorrit. Moreover, the representation of nature emphasizes the relief by Jesus Christ just before the house of Mrs. Clennam collapses : "From a radiant centre over the whole length and breadth of the tranquil firmament, great shoots of light streamed among the early stars, like signs of the blessed later covenant of peace and hope that changed the crown of thorns into glory." Amy delivers Arthur from the ideology of Calvinism which Mrs. Clennam brought him. In Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked the Christianity of Mrs. Clennam which deprived Arthur of his liberty and imprisoned his mind. Mrs. Clennam adopts Arthur, the love child of Mrs. Clennam and his love, to raise him in righteousness and retribution, but her Christianity which justifies her scheme of retribution does not bring her and Arthur happiness. Dickens demonstrated that people could be released from vengeful feelings by a practice of forgiveness of sin as Jesus Christ had done, through showing how Arthur could be released from the influence of the vengeful thoughts of Mrs. Clennam with the help of Amy.

著者

中村 祥子 Shoko Nakamura 桃山学院大学文学部

出版者

桃山学院大学総合研究所

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.19, pp.133-163, 2005-02

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The short story, "The Doom of the Griffiths" was written by Elizabeth Gaskell in 1857, more than one year after her former fictional creation, "The Poor Clare". The story presents a conflict between two types of landlords ; a landlord who may prosper and one who may not. This is the author's first treatment of an issue that becomes a major theme in her later works. "The Doom of the Griffiths" is a tale about the fall of the Griffiths family, people of the landlord class. At the beginning of the story is an explanation of why the Griffiths were doomed to fall. When Owen Glendower, a Welsh hero in the Middle Ages, rebelled against Henry IV, an ancestor of the Griffiths named Rhys ap Gryfydd betrayed Owen, who believed in him. It means that Rhys ap Gryfydd was shrewd, and that he tried to side with those most likely to be victorious. In great anger, Owen, who was said to be able to use magic, cursed the traitor and his descendants. As a result, members of the Griffiths family were doomed by Owen to fail and disappear after nine generations. Owen prophesied that at that time a son should slay his father, the ninth Griffiths. After this brief explanation the main plot begins. Two generations are described ; the ninth named Robert Griffiths and his son, Owen Griffiths. They are father and son, but are quite different in manners. Robert is the second son and inherits the estate of the Griffiths as a result of his elder brother's death. He is gifted and able to create his own future. On the other hand, Owen is the only son who is an heir to the estate from the moment of his birth. He has no choice but to succeed his father. Therefore, he is passive and does not try to take a step forward, even though he becomes under the necessity of earning a living. Their attitudes toward marriage also differ. The father gets married to a rich attorney's daughter after he inherited his family's estate. And after his first wife, who is Owen's mother, died, he marrys again a beautiful young widow with a little boy named Robert, who, coincidentally, has his stepfather's name. The son, on the other hand, secretly gets married to the beautiful daughter of a man who works as a half farmer and half fisherman. The girl's name is Nest. They have a baby named Owen. Because the young couple cannot make a living, the wife and their baby live with her father in his cottage. Owen frequently and surreptitiously comes to the house from his father's manor house. The wife's father, who is a tenant of the Griffiths estate, endures this irregular situation, believing that his daughter will be Lady Griffiths in the future. Robert's new wife schemes to drive Owen out of the mansion and make her child Robert inherit the family's estate. As a result of her scheming, her husband becomes estranged from his son and begins to favor his stepson. One day she tries to irreparably break the relationship between Robert and his biological son to make sure of her biological son's inheritance, and she exposes Owen's secret marriage to her husband, lying and insinuating that Nest is a prostitute. The angry father goes to his son's secret home to require him to separate from his wife, and snatches the little Owen from Owen's arms to throw the baby back at Nest. As a result, the baby falls to the floor and dies. At last, Owen decides to leave his father's mansion for ever to live with his wife in a big city, earning his bread. It is, however, too late. After some troubles, the father moves into action. He and his son are placed in a situation in which they struggle on the edge of a precipice. A push of the son to escape from the father's grip causes the father to fall off the cliff, to hit his head against the edge of a boat, and to die. Though it seems that this is a fulfillment of the prophecy, the author denies the supernatural element, emphasizing that the father's death is accidental. As a squire, Robert, a person who is shrewd and selfish like his ancestor Rhys ap Gryfydd, prospers, but he is also very cruel, while Owen, a passive liberal, is disqualified as a landlord. Through the story, the author is critical of the father. The last of the story deals with Owen, his wife, and her father, who should leave the country before the dead body of the squire is found. They venture out on a stormy sea to disappear into the night. The author partly suggests that the three are shipwrecked and die. She, however, leaves room for another interpretation. The three might safely arrive in Liverpool, where Owen could "gain a livelihood by his own exertions." The author accepts Owen's way of living when he leaves the status of a landlord. That is the reason that Owen is the younger of the two central characters. It is important that the name of the second son Roger in Wives and Daughters, who is Robert's successor, has the initial "R", and that of the elder son Osborne in the same novel, who is Owen's successor, has also the initial "O". It means that "The Doom of the Griffiths" developed into Wives and Daughters.

著者

伊藤 貞基 Sadamoto Ito 桃山学院大学文学部

出版者

桃山学院大学総合研究所

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.20, pp.3-55, 2006-03-20

著者

西村 徹 Toru Nishimura

雑誌

英米評論 = English Review (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.4, pp.51-78, 1991-07-25

著者

西村 徹 Toru Nishimura

雑誌

英米評論 = English Review (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.創刊号, pp.75-89, 1990-03-01

著者

西村 徹 Toru Nishimura

雑誌

英米評論 = English Review (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.2, pp.45-77, 1990-07-17

著者

西村 徹 Toru Nishimura

雑誌

英米評論 = English Review (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.3, pp.77-106, 1991-01-25

著者

岡田 章子 Akiko OKADA 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.9, pp.139-159, 1994-12-20

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Contemporary women novelists are interesting to me as my fellow travellers in the present-day society. Anita Brookner is particularly familiar and attractive because her novels deal with women who work in the universities and libraries. They seem to be my colleagues. Besides, the streets, the parks, and the shops which I saw in my recent visit to London are vividly described in her novels. These things stimulate me to imagine what England is and what British women are. Brookner's attractive appearance in her photograph also draws me into her world. Brookner's biography is not very well known. She withholds talking about herself and has stopped giving interviews because of the misunderstanding and defamation she had suffered. But in her novels, especially the first three, her life and character are living. Brookner's novels are permeated with profound loneliness. The first book, A Start in Life, is the most autobiographical. It opens with the striking sentence: "Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." Then she looks back at her unhappy life from childhood through her professional career. Meanwhile, the loneliness Ruth Weiss suffers is minutely expressed: how she hates to go home, how she sits alone at a coffee bar on the station platform, and how she stays up in the library until nine o'clock. This loneliness makes her devote herself excessively to her lover when she falls in love. She borrows a flat so that she can invite her lover to dinner at home. She prepares an elaborate dinner for him, which turns out to be meaningless, because he arrives hours late for a trivial reason. She marries her father's exmistress's nephew for convenience, but after six months he is killed in a traffic accident. This brief, loveless marriage gives her momentary security, which, Brookner says, all women need. In the end, she gets a position in a college and looks after her old father. The next novel, Providence, has autobiographical overlays and also reveals a lonely heroine. Kitty Maule is a visiting lecturer in a university. She falls in love with Maurice, her colleague. She, like Ruth, devotes herself entirely to him. Though she is an excellent teacher, her job is significant not for its own sake but for Maurice's sake. Staff meetings are great occasions to her, as she can see him there. She knows that "a man gets tired of a woman if she sacrifices everything for him," but she cannot get rid of her obsession because of loneliness. The description of the minutes waiting for her lover's message in a hotel is almost tragic. She has waited so keenly that when he appears, she is absent-minded. This love ends unfruitfully; after the lecture which she has to give to be promoted to a formal staff position, she finds that Maurice is going to marry one of her students, not very bright. Though she succeeds in getting the promotion, she is thrown into deeper solitude. The third novel, Look at Me, shows a slightly different approach. This time Francis Hinton tells her story in the first person. She works at a reference library in a medical research institute. Her daily life is lonely, especially on holidays. To herself, she names the melancholy feeling on holidays as the "Public Holiday Syndrome." To alleviate the feeling, she writes; she has already published two stories in an American journal. Francis is, in a way, a contrast to Ruth and Kitty; she has a lover named James for whom she does not have to wait. She knows when she can see him next time; she spends relaxing time with him. She does not write on these happy days. But the tragedy comes from her girlfriend whom she trusts. Her love is interfered with by the friend, and James falls in love with Maria, a flippant girl. Francis, in her unhappiness, starts to write again; the story ends with "I pick up my pen. I start writing." This is highly autobiographical, as Brookner says in an interview that she writes to remedy her neurosis. To Brookner, women cannot be happy with professional success; rather it is an outlet for frustrated feelings. She skillfully represents the solitude and the intimate thought processes of intellectual women. Generally they are old-fashioned and hardly seem to be the twentieth century's women. Brookner wants to say that women's loneliness, especially that of single women, cannot be changed, however the society changes. She does not write of men's solitude. Probably she writes only through her feelings.

著者

出原 博明 Hiroaki Dehara 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.8, pp.3-35, 1993-12-20

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Hemingway tried to pursue something truly universal in The Old Man And The Sea. Apparently the title is more equivocal, comprehensive, less particularized, than such titles as Santiago and the Sea or Santiago and the Marlin would be. This may be one of the reasons why there have been quite a few interpretations of Santiago as something other than the fisherman he is. For instance, according to Brenner, Santiago as King Oedupus commits incest with la mar as his mother, using the fish as his genital organ, and is punished. On the other hand, Price's interpretation is that Santiago is Hemingway himself as a writer, the fish being his work, and the sharks are critics. In another interpretation, Hogge sees the realization of medieval chivalry in Santiago. The story has also often been taken as an allegory. Hemingway, however, denies his intention of symbolism, saying that the old man (in the work) is the old man, and the fish is the fish. Santiago has been decorated by many critics with such splendid tags as 'superhuman', 'medieval knight', 'King Oedipus', and 'Jesus Chirist'. The purpose of this paper is to take the tags off him for a while and to try to read Santiago as a fisherman pure and simple. To do this, I picked out three refrains in the novella as cues. (As is well known, Hemingway learned the technique of 'refrain' or 'repetition' from Gertrude Stein in his writer's apprenticeship in Paris.) The refrains I have selected are as follows: 'he [Santiago] went too far out', 'I [Santiago] wish I had the boy here', and 'You're my friend but I [Santiago] must kill you, fish'. The old man commits a lot of errors in his pursuit of the fish. First of all, he goes too far out, where he is alone with no sight of land, and of any other fishermen. The marlin he has hooked, when it comes out of the water for the first time, tells Santiago that it is two feet longer than the skiff. That is, it is impossible to take the fish aboard. Then why doesn't he realze that it is bound to be attacked by sharks on his long voyage home? His justifying excuse, 'I must kill you, fish, because I am afisherman', changes into an apology, 'I shouldn't have hooked you. I'm sorry, fish', when he is exposed to the shark's forays. The old man fails more than twice in judging when the fish will come up, so his fight with it actually takes much longer than he expected. He repeatedly wishes the boy were with him during his fight with the fish, and that with the sharks, and he confesses to him, 'I missed you', after he returns home. That is, the old man needs the boy not only as a helper but also as company. The old man, Santiago, is more convincing as a human being than as a superhuman being. He commits a lot of mistakes-as A. Pope says 'To err is human, to forgive, divine.'-, and, alone on the sea, he misses the boy. His being typically human endorses that he is a human fisherman, not a superhuman being, nor a legendary king, nor Christ. It is true that Santiago is not as ordinary as other fishermen. First of all he is more ambitious for honour and applause, and adventurous. With more gifts and faith he makes every effort to be an ideal fisherman, though he is not always successful. He tries to endure till he is on the point of collapse. His sportsmanship is without question here, and meaningful. The old man's manly, stoic attitude toward the tragic result is quite contrary to that of the nameless Cuban fisherman who was crying in the boat when he was picked up, half crazy from the loss of his great marlin, eaten up by sharks. Though the latter's experience was the source of this literary masterpiece, the author apparently idealized his fisherman. However much as he may have idealized Santiago, he did not go so far as to make him anything other than a human fisherman. The old man, Santiago, is undoubtedly no more than human being, but in extreme situations, he fights, as a representative human being with excellent gifts and human defects as well, to the extent of going beyond his limits. And he also accepts the result of his fight with both grace and pride as a man. These are what make Santiago as well as the story itself so charming, moving, and encouraging to us.

著者

山科 美和子 釣井 千恵 Miwako Yamashina Chie Tsurii 桃山学院大学兼任講師 桃山学院大学兼任講師

出版者

桃山学院大学総合研究所

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.24, pp.237-260, 2010-03-19

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how lexical processing skills relate to the reading ability of EFL learners. Our KAKEN research group (supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), No. 19520532, from 2007 to 2009) has developed the CELP Test, Computer-Based English Lexical Processing Test, to measure English learners' ability to process words. The results in the CELP Test provide us with data on accuracy (the number of correct answers), and processing speed (reaction times in seconds). The present study concerns the following questions : 1) Can the higher score in the CELP Test predict potential extensive readers ? 2) Will the score in the CELP Test improve through reading extensively ? 3) Do the learners who gained higher scores in the CELP test perform better in the fast reading task? Results may be summarized as follows : 1) There seemed to be no correlation between the pre-test score in the CELP Test and the number of words the subjects read. The higher score in the CELP Test could not predict potential extensive readers. 2) Comparing the pre-test score with the post-test score, there was not much gain in accuracy, but reaction times improved. The speed of lexical access was correlated with the number of words the subjects read. The results suggested that the more the subjects read, the more lexical access may improve. 3) We may be able to say that some learners with higher CELP Test scores might process sentences faster.

著者

小野 良子

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.13, pp.51-70, 1998-12-21

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Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion was composed as the Twelfth Night masque for the Court Christmas. Ben Jonson wrote the masque in answer to the request from Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham who had returned from a Spanish mission. Charles and Buckingham had made a secret journey to Spain to negotiate the prince's marriage with the Spanish Infanta and to bring her home to England. The Spanish match had been a favorite and ambitious project of King James. However, after long negotiations the prince and the duke returned home resentfully, and the Jacobean court was divided between James and Prince Charles concerning England's Continental policies. Jonson's masque dealt with the safe return of Prince Charles from his misson to Spain; and yet the subject-matter was to pay homage to King James's political wisdom and the consequent triumph for the victorious return of his son. Neptune and his court was dentified with James I and his court and the argument of the masque was presented as an ideal version of the recent political events. In fact, Charles's mission to Spain brought nothing fruitful to England; and much worse, King James was pushed into a new and hard course in foreign policy. Nevertheless, Jonson's loyalty to the State as the court poet urged him to rewrite English history and to create another myth of Jacobean England as the 'Fortunate Isles'. Jonson was convinced that the poet had obligation to serve the State and to sustain wise government by providing the monarch with good counsel. Yet Jonson was never ignorant of the fact that the masquewriter's function which the poet himself believed to be was not identical with the one that the court audience expected. Jonson's awareness of this gap was demonstrated in the comic dialogue between the 'Poet' and the 'Master-Cooke' of the masque. The main masque celebrated the ideal reign of James I by identifying it with the myth of Ocean God, Neptune. And, by the employment of the poet figure as masque-writer of the masque in progress on the stage, Jonson exposed that the masque world was an illusion, a fiction created by the poet. The meta-masque device introduced in Neptune's Triumph was thus a Jonsonian way of manifestation that the poet's invention alone could achieve the ideal transformation of the Monarchy.

著者

日下 隆平

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.9, pp.113-138, 1994-12-20

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In recent years, there has been a growing inclination to re-examine the way that Irish exiles was perceived by British contemporaries in colonial England. The purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between Irish exiles and British dreamers at the end of the nineteenth century. The image of Ireland in the colonial age was derived from the Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser. While he had distaste for the rebel Irish, he regarded the charming landscape of Ireland as an Arcadia. This Spenser's point of view was sustained by William Makepease Thakeray and Anthony Trollope. At the end of the nineteenth century, some British people used Ireland as a stage for their dreams and ideas, such as Ann Horniman and Maud Gonne. Their viewpoints were based on a kind of colonialism. It is no exaggeration to say that 'Celticism' might be approximated to 'Orientalism'. In the 1880s, a certain kind of Irish literary emigrant was advancing to prominence. Oscar Wilde, George B. Shaw and W.B. Yeats were three examples of a breed which can be traced back to middle-class Irishmen on the make, who were mainly engaged in the journalistic profession in England. They were not the average Irish emigrant. One of the typical examples was Justin McCarthy who migrated from Cork journalism into the world of Fleet Street, and afterwards became a Parnellite MP. W.B. Yeats spent his youth travelling back and forth between England and Ireland. His view of Ireland is inseparable from his emigrant status. Consequently, he could discover or re-create the image of Ireland, as seen in The Shadowy Waters. M. Gonne, who had spent her childhood in Ireland, was magnetized to the revolutionary era in Ireland. She identified Ireland's independence with her own independence. In this study, therefore, the interaction between Yeats and Gonne will be dealt with as one between an exile and a dreamer.

著者

ヘンリー・ジェイムズ 出原 博明

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2, pp.79-101, 1990-07-17

著者

小野 良子

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.15, pp.57-71, 2000-12-20

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The female figures in Shakespeare's comedies, such as Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night, are traditionally portrayed as healthily asexual heroines by women actors on the modern stage or screen. The disguised heroine as witty, eloquent, and beautiful boy who is erotically alluring to another female figure in the play reveals in the final act the female body in the female clothes to celebrate her own marriage to a male superior. The cross-dressing of the female figure is simply taken for granted as a theatrical convention and never raises sociopolitical issues concerning sexuality and gender among the modern audience. However, for the critical reader of Shakespeare's plays transvestism and 'the body beneath' of the female figures are of much consequence in speculating on the representation and its reinterpretation of the Elizabethan stage. Every Shakespeare student knows that there were no professional women actors on the English stage before 1660, and that the female roles had been played by young male actors. The taking of female parts by boy actors should not be dismissed as the convention. Indeed, this fact has raised crucial issues of postmodern cultural criticism among Shakespearean readers. From the recent critical point of view, identity, either gendered or sexed, has been seen as a historical production. The human subject is considered the ideological product of the relations of power in the Elizabethan patriarchal society. The theatre then becomes an agent of the absolutist state, reproducing the state's strategies and celebrating and confirming its power. The purpose for my essay is to examine the process by which power is produced and legitimated on the Shakespearean stage and to lead to the argument which explores possibilities of reinterpretation and its cultural production of Shakespeare's comedies on the modern Japanese stage. This paper traces the contemporary anti-theatrical campaign and its discourse which condemned the closs-dressing of the boy actor as the threat to the male identity and hierarchical society itself; and then speculates upon the relation between the boy actor and the woman he plays-the imaginedbody of a woman, a staged body of a boy actor-and how clothes embodied and determined a particular sexual identity and contradictory fantasies of the body beneath.

著者

野原 康弘 Yasuhiro NOHARA 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.10, pp.41-65, 1995-12-20

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This article concerns the Numerals in Chaucer (1340?-1400), concentrating on the historical transition of the composite numerals. A numeral '24', for example. There used to be three types to read such a numeral 24: TYPE I: four and twenty, TYPE II: twenty and four, TYPE III: twenty-four. In Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) composite numerals from '21' to '99', the units came before tens. TYPE I and TYPE II were quite common at the age of Chaucer. TYPE III, which was completely unfamiliar to people in the later middle ages in England, is now familiar to the modern ear. TYPE I is the traditional way among Germanic Languages and TYPE III comes from French language. Although TYPE I was often used until the middle of this century, TYPE III has taken its place lately. The final aim of this article is to explain why this transition occurred. I believe that a great number of TYPE III set-phrases influenced its transition.

著者

藤森 かよこ

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.13, pp.71-92, 1998-12-21

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Much description about sexual troubles, conflicts or oppression, in Winesburg, Ohio has been stimulating the readers to clarify its significance and functions. This issue was one of the reasons why the novel was unfavorably ctiticised just after its publication. Still in 1919 there survived the remains of puritanically genteel tradition in literary criticism, which regards sexual matters as unworthy to think of. However, in the post Freud era, the readers never fail to perceive Sherwood Anderson's insight about sexuality as real aspects of human existence. Even rough reading leads us to find the mutual permeation between the sexual desire and spiritual aspiration which the characters are tortured with. Sex cannot be explained only from sex; spirit cannot be explained only from spirit. This is one of the recognitions we share in the present, postmodern age when all kinds of dichotomy, including a binal oppsition of flesh and soul, already have been deconstructed. Some feminist critics notice that the sexual conflicts of the female characters are more compassionately described than those of the male ones. As one feminist points out, this is because the author identifies the feminine with a pervasive presence of a fragile, vulnerable, hidden something that seeks tenderness, communication and deep relationship in body and soul. Yet this kind of criticism should be blamed for its essentialism, since it presupposes that the feminine belongs to women. Women are not necessarily feminine; men are not always masculine. Anyway it is certatin that the author sympathizes more with the female characters, but it does not mean that this novel is in favor of feminism. In the novel men are allowed to leave their small town, but women are confined within their suffocating life with frustration and irritation. Men are qualified to consume and use women's love and concerns, though women are expected to be exploited by men. As a whole, Winesburg, Ohio is one of the stereotyped, male-centered novels in which various kinds of victimization of women are repeatedly presented. But what we should pay more attention to about this novel is not the author's sympathetic but traditionally sexist attitudes toward women, but the occasional, brilliant moments when something beyond the gender system are revealed. A strange man in "Tandy" confesses that he has been longing and looking for an ideal woman, "something more than man or woman." In "Sophistication," George and Helen feel embarrassed in their encounter, because their respect and love to each other is impossible to be represented in the customs and codes which the gender-bound society implicitly forces lovers to accept and obey. Kate in "Teacher" does not know how to express her love except in eccentric ways, because she is too sensible and too intelligent to get involved to the sexual relationships which the gender-bound society expects her to have. Gender is a hierarchial order of sexes; gender devides people into men as upper, dominant class and women as lower, subordinate class. The sexual troubles of the female characters are caused by their gender-bound society, which makes it difficult to create and keep equal, fair sexual relationships and communication between men and women. Needless to say such a sexual hierarchical system obstructs not only the fulfilment of women's love but also that of men's. Some male characters also suffer from sexual expoitation, because they are required to be strong enough to be utilized by women. Love is impossible in the gender-bound system. Sexual relationship is likely to be mutual exclusive and mutual expoitative there. The significance of a prevalent presence of sexual troubles in Winesburg, Ohio lies in that the distortions and absurdities that the gender-bound system impose on people are exposed through them. Although Anderson did not know about a "gender" concept at all, which has been academized since 1970s, his insight and sensibility enabled him to grasp what we call the gender troubles. Winesburg, Ohio is gender-bound in the episodes and anecdota, but it dreams and visions "something more than man or woman" in a utopia beyond gender. If this novel's tone sounds dark and gloomy, it is partly due to the impossibility of a utopia.

著者

日下 隆平

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.12, pp.25-46, 1997-12-20

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social changes in the later nineteenth century had a great impact on Yeats, through his literary works. Yeats was brought up in the ancien regime: Victorian, Protestant, Ascendancy Ireland. The Ascendancy, here, represented the dominant Irish Protestant class. Some of them were Anglo-Irish absentee landlords of the ruling class. Yeats's family, which had a farm in Kildare, belonged to the Ascendancy, too. His youth spanned the period that inaugurated the decline of this Irish Ascendancy, as the outbreak of the Land War then shows. This paper is made up of three sections: In the first, Yeats's sensitivity to the times, such as the sense of an ending, is illuminated in such poems as "The Second Coming". In the second section, I make it clear that the apocalyptic vision which can be seen in the poem is derived from the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. In the last section, the process in which Yeats came to identify himself with Jonathan Swift is dealt with. Swift's Gulliver, who was isolated between Yahoo and Houhyhnhnm, represents a symbolic figure for the "Ascendancy which was both colonized and colonialist", to use Eagleton's words. Yeats regarded him as an example of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and followed him.