1993 | ||
semiannually | ||
Chinese | ||
Literatures in English |
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1024-2856 | ||
English and American Literature Association of TAIWAN | ||
Bookman Books, Ltd. | ||
REAL: Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei wenxue pinglun]
Review of English and American Literature (REAL) is a journal of the English and American Literature Association of the Republic of China founded in 1993. REAL is published by Bookman Books Ltd. biannually (June and December) and is devoted to publishing innovative research results concerning English and American literature written in Mandarin Chinese. REAL was rated as the first-class journal by the National Science Council of Taiwan in 2003. Contributions from domestic and foreign researchers of English and American literatures are welcomed. |
Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei Wenxue Pinglun] vol. 11, Volume 11
Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei Wenxue Pinglun] no. 11
Something Queer in the Rear: A Rereading from the Reconciliation of The Shipman's Tale
What often surprises the reader in The Shipman's Tale may be the reconciliation between the Merchant and his wife in the end. There is no wrath, no brawling, nor bitter reaction of any kind in the revealing of his cuckoldry. As the story unfolds, the Merchant is shown to have his concern elsewhere. What concerns the Merchant is the fact that he might double-charge a debtor for a loan. Yet, to the reader's amazement, the Merchant does not want his money back. If the Merchant did not ask Daun John to return the money or a thing of monetary value, how could he possibly charge him by mistake? If it is not the money that settles the account, what does the story try to hint by "a thing that he hath payed"? Taking the ending reconciliation for the point of departure, this paper aims to facilitate a rereading of The Shipman's Tale, through latent sodomy suggested by potential textual support. Upon this premise, the paper carries on its discussions on the relationships between the Merchant and the Monk, the Merchant and his business practice, and finally between the Merchant and the Wife. This trilateral reading of relationships, among other elements found supportive, hopes to contribute to an alternative understanding of the tale.
The Orphan of Zhao in England: the Orient and Woman in the First Production of Arthur Murphy's The Orphan of China
This essay seeks to offer new approaches to the first production of Murphy's The Orphan of China via the revisionist perspectives of feminism and Orientalism, and to demonstrate the significance of the roles that gender and race play in structuring eighteenth-century English nationalism and imperialism. By exploring cultural conditions and transactions of femininity and nationality in the making, this article attempts to suggest that, in the first production of The Orphan of China, Orientalism and protofeminism are intended not only to invoke the relationship between the West and the East or between man and woman, nor merely for the self-examination of the home nation, but also to champion English cultural supremacy in Europe and to reinforce notions of English national identity.
From the Timorous to the Bold: Ethics, Politics, Heaney
This paper proposes to explore Seamus Heaney's strategy of articulation in his political poems, which stems from a keen awareness of "I-thou" difference. Part one begins with Heaney's response to his inclusion in an anthology of English poetry, proceeds to inspect the long-standing entanglement in language and literature between England and Ireland, and concludes with a speculation on Northern Irish writers' dilemma. Part two focuses on the ways Heaney mobilizes the other's voice and image to formulate a circuitous writing in order to evade the surveillance of the state apparatus. Part three reconsiders Heaney's circumlocutory strategy as symptoms of trauma to analyze the theme of introspection that prevails in his poems in the mid-1970's and the 1980's. The poet's dilemma between politics and writing, I will argue, is responsible for this theme, but it also helps him unwind his received idea about the "I-thou" relation through the English lyric tradition. Part four is devoted to "Mycenae Lookout" and Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which demonstrate a new vision of ethics as the poet comes to terms with binary oppositions, thereby shedding his timorous impulse to govern his tongue to become a bold writer who exercises the government of the tongue.
Ghostly China: Amy Tan's Narrative of Transnational Uncanny in The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning
Upon the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), Amy Tan became an instant star in the publishing world; and her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), was also a triumph. Tan's skillful renditions of mother-daughter relationships reach the hearts of millions of readers. Moreover, her work--which comes more than a dozen years after Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976)--has helped create a renaissance of Chinese American writing. Despite the fact that Tan refuses to be pegged a mother-daughter expert, yet both The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife center around the love and antagonism between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters. In The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), Tan continues to concentrate on the conflicts and final reconciliation between mother and daughter figures as she again and again invokes Chinese history and landscape to contextualize her portrayal of Chinese American experiences. China, in these texts, becomes a phantom space haunted by family secrets and ghostly past and serves to set off the protagonists' American present. In this paper I delve into Tan's deployment of what I call "narrative of transnational uncanny" in the three novelistic texts to discuss her technologies of representing China and Chinese American ethnicity.
A Dialogue between Literature and Medicine: Thanatological Concerns and Medical Ethics in Margaret Edson's Wit
The purpose of this paper is to deal with ethical concerns in thanatology as well as medical ethics in Margaret Edson's Wit, and to explore how the playwright exhibits some important issues in medical humanities education (patient-centered care, humane medical treatment, empathy towards patients, etc.) through meta-theatrical devices, concepts of life and death in the seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, and patient-doctor interaction and relationship. Besides, this paper will probe how the protagonist, Vivian Bearing, gets the meaning of life in perspective in the midst of routine medical treatment, inhumane medical care, and ethical imbalance in doctor-patient relationship.
Other Issues
120423, Volume 43
061523, Volume 42
122022, Volume 41
062022, Volume 40
December 2016, Volume 29
June 2016, Volume 28
December 2015, REAL Volume 27
June 2015, Volume 26
December 2010, Issue 17
Senses and Literature, Volume 16
Homing and Housing, Volume 23
Special Topic: The Fantastic, Volume 24
Translation and Literatures in English, Volume 25
Jun 2013, Volume 22
Beyond the Canon, Volume 21
Trauma and Literature, Volume 20
Time Matters, Volume 19
Everydayness, Volume 18
Everydayness, Volume 18
Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei Wenxue Pinglun] vol. 15 December 2009, Volume 15
Word, Image, Space, Vol 14
Landscape and Literature, Vol 13
Local color of modern landscape, Volume 12
The City in English and American Literature, Volume 10
Global English Literature, Volume 9
Innocence and manifest destiny, Volume 8
Modernism, Volume 7
, Volume 6
Renaissance: between innovation and tradition, Volume 5
Innocence and Manifest Destiny: The Core Issue of American Literature
, Issue 8