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Affinity by Sarah Waters tells the story of sexless and genderless spirits (and of their human bodily forms, the spiritualists) slowly taking possession of one woman, Margaret Prior, who actually, unknowingly, shelters inner predispositions to spiritualism prior to the spirits' intervention, giving thus credit to what her surname had proleptically heralded from the very start. It all occurs via ocular centrism, embodied by a powerful Gaze, slithering throughout the plot. It first mesmerises the spiritualists-to-be before catapulting them into a maelstrom of reversals and distortions. This twisting manoeuvre can be read as an attempt to outroot and erase previously assimilated societal constructs. The spirits' genderlessness can then deploy unencumbered. A liberating emancipation is finally completed. This article first dwells on ocular centrism before dealing with all the reversals and tiltings progressively coming up to the surface, as well as with genderless metonymic substitutes acting on behalf of the spirits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Rose Tremain’s The Road Home, the culture clash of the British and the East-Central European is portrayed through a complex symbolism centred on images of food, consumption and waste. This literary representation may shed light on British literary auto-images, as well as hetero-images of the Eastern European immigrant. The novel’s presentation of this culture shock is defined by the cultural historical and economic circumstances of the parties. Food and material provide the symbolic sphere where the relationship between Britain and East-Central Europe is characterized in terms of capitalist worldview as opposed to a post-communist existence. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the most important intertext for Tremain’s novel. Hamlet is obsessed with the vulnerability of material in light of the spiritual value attached to it in the form of human soul. Stephen Greenblatt’s ideas on food, waste and the Christian belief in divine existence residing in material objects - ideas that originate in early modern times - shed light on the motif of material and food in The Road Home. Seen through the symbolism of food and the idea of differing values being attached to matter, the narrative identity of Lev, the protagonist of Tremain’s work, experiences drastic change due to his encounter with the capitalist, British ‘other’.

The article focuses on the concept of George Eliot and Fakir Mohan Senapati's fictional works. It states that Eliot's novels demonstrate an inclusive vision of human connectedness that belongs to a special moment in the history of literature, particularly the 19th century historicist realism. It explores the idea of the Western cultural exceptionalism based on the writings of Eliot and Senapati. It argues that the reading of Senapati underscores the ways the narrative conventions Eliot inherited while allowing to expand the social scope of British fiction.

In this article the author discusses portrait paintings and issues surrounding portraiture. Cited are the early Renaissance images of an Italian saint of the era, Bernardino of Siena, as rendered by the artist Sassetta. Under discussion is the notion that the image of saints need not reflect the individual features in order to be sacred images.

The article analyzes imaginability, conceivability, possibility and the mind-body problem. It tries to show that those who continue to be favorably impressed by philosopher Fodor V. Kripke's line of thought have underestimated the resources that are available to materialists. The mechanisms that are responsible for a number of modal intuitions are unreliable. This might be taken to show that the line of thought presupposes a general skepticism about the ability to obtain knowledge of modal facts. And, by the same token, it might be taken to show that the line of thought in question suffers from a disabling flaw.

This paper sees a systematic unity between Smith's theological view and scientific study of society. Smith's theological outlook as to a benevolent deity is grasped as a metaphysical doctrine in his system of social science. It arises from the fact that while Smith's opinion concerning God's attributes is established, in the first instance, on the basis of his empirical study of nature, it also stands irrespective of other facts which are not in line with the patterns of order and design. Smith's metaphysical proposition as such is methodologically suggestive in that it proposes theoretical possibilities for progress and harmony and rules out the features of conflict at the analytic level. This implies a difficulty in subscribing to a conventional interpretation that introduces the "two Smiths" view (the duality of his method and vision). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE following passage from Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) amply conveys this novel s sense of its generic mandate. Lennox's protagonist Arabella, left motherless in the country with her [...]

The Irish Revival was in its ascendancy when James Joyce embarked on his career as a writer. And while there is increasing evidence that he had sympathy with the movement's [...]