English Literature and Language Review

2021 ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Schrank

This essay examines the political uses to which Behan puts language in his autobiographical fiction, Borstal Boy, both as an instrument of domination and a means of liberation. Identifying Standard English language and literature as important components of the British imperial project, Behan creates, as a linguistic alternative, ‘englishes’, a composite language in which differences of geography, class, age, education, and occupation create a demotic speech of great variability and expressive force. In so doing, Behan sabotages the cultural assumptions and justifications for colonial exploitation embedded and validated in Standard English literature and language.


2020 ◽  
pp. 139-153
Author(s):  
O. G. Sidorova

The paper deals with Sir Thomas Browne, a doctor of medicine, philosopher, and writer of the English Baroque. His legacy holds an enduring appeal for scholars and, more importantly, survives in English language and its literature. It is demonstrated that Browne’s prose played an important role in the shaping of English literature and language, and that his philosophical and scientific views were eclectic. As a separate topic, the article considers problems of translating his prose into other languages. Translations can be spot-on, as shown in the article, when a coincidence of the ‘time of culture’ (Popovich, Borges) between the original and the culture of the translation occurs. For translations into Russian, a problem arises due to the inconsistency (polyglossia) of the 17th-c. Russian language. The author provides a comparative analysis of Browne’s original essays and their Russian translation. She finds that V. Grigoriev’s translations of Browne’s diptych discourses rely on a complex historical stylization, use 18th-c. Russian language, and have proved themselves as a factor of cross-literary communication.


Author(s):  
Elena del Carmen Martínez López

The aim of this work is to demonstrate and illustrate the pervasive existence of points of convergence between literature and language in general and form and meaning in particular. Specifically, the connection between language and literature is explored with specific reference to one of the germinal works of English literature, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the light of the principles and taxonomies of Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory, with special focus on requests. A further twist added to the analysis presented in this work comes from a relatively fine-nuanced contrastive (English-Spanish) analysis of requests strategies using as the database of analysis a Spanish translation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Rodríguez, 2018).


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