Jean Rhys,William Orpen and the Frames of Modernist Representation

The female body as artist’s model and its exchange value—both the woman and her painted image—are deployed by Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist art context. This article considers the relation between literary modernism and the visual arts, between text and image, in her unpublished novel Triple Sec and short story ‘Tea With an Artist’. Using the fleeting relationship between Rhys and English painter Sir William Orpen, for whom she posed nude aged twenty-three, as my basis, I examine Rhys’s presentation of the power politics that constrain the female model in the contemporary art world. Her allusions to artists, models and artworks in her texts widen out to issues of frames and framing, where narratives of framed pictures, or the female model’s body within a picture’s frame, speak of social acts of framing, containment and objectification within modernist representational structures.     

Comerciar con la sangre de nuestros hermanos: Early Abolitionist Discourses in Spain's Empire

The proposal of Agustín de Argüelles to abolish the slave trade in 1811 was crucial in defining a new ideological stance within the Spanish political debate by adopting the moral condemnation elaborated by the British abolitionist movement. His initiative was the result of a coordinated strategy with the British authorities and was key in the construction of early abolitionist discourses in Spain. This article explores the political, ideological and diplomatic influence of Britain in the development of early anti‐slavery and anti‐slave trade discourses in Spain and the centrality of Argüelles' proposal.     

The Ethical Dilemma of Cross-Race Marriage: A Review of William Gardner Smith's South Street

Through the depiction of the tragedy of cross-race marriage in South Street, William Gardner Smith reveals the conflicts between marital ethics and ethnic passing in American society, making invectives against the repression and destruction of humanity in racial discrimination and prejudice. The racial complex, negative acculturation and judicial injustice combined together greatly do harm to the legal rights of cross-race marriage and result in the loss of social marital ethics, widening the gap between whites and blacks. The racist situational field leads black and white people into a terrific trap of marital ethics. Any of white people's restriction on or deprivation of blacks' marital freedom is a violation of social ethics. Family members as well as friends' well-meaning interference in cross-race marriage is unfavorable to the people pursuing happy marriages. This novel expands the themes of African American urban naturalistic fiction, blaming the systematic power and situational power, which are caused by white racism and black internalization of racism, for the hindrance, repression and destruction of the marriage based upon true love, and thus highlighting the greatness and limitation of human nature.     

People’s justice for everyone

Both William Dean Howells and Edward Bellamy imagine brotherhood as the basis for new social orders in response to the trauma of the Civil War. Responding to the way in which the Civil War had pitted “brother against brother” in a “house divided,” Howells and Bellamy differently seek to reconstitute the American national family through revisioning brotherhood as universal, just, and equitable. William Dean Howells’s 1890 Howells WD (1890) A hazard of new fortunes New York Signet Classics 1965  [Google Scholar] A Hazard of New Fortunes illustrates the difficulties of aligning men in brotherhood following the Civil War and amidst the economic upheaval of the last decades of the 19th century. Bellamy’s 1888 Bellamy E (1888) Looking Backward, 2000‐1887 (Cecilia Tichi, Ed.) New York Penguin Books 1985  [Google Scholar] Looking Backward and Howells’s Altrurian romances (A Traveller from Altruria [1894 Howells WD (1894) A traveler from Altruria In E. J. Cady, R. Gottesman, &; Da. J. Nordloh (Eds.), The Altrurian romances (pp. 5–179) Bloomington Indiana University Press 1968  [Google Scholar]], “Letters of an Altrurian Traveller, I‐V” [1893 Howells WD (1893‐1894) Letters of an Altrurian traveller, I‐V In Edwin J. Cady, Ronald Gottesman, and David J. Nordloh (Eds.) The Altrurian romances (pp. 181–263) Bloomington Indiana University Press 1968  [Google Scholar]‐94] and Through the Eye of the Needle [1907 Howells WD (1907) Through the eye of the needle. 1907 In Edwin J. Cady, Ronald Gottesman, and David J. Nordloh (Eds.), The Altrurian romances (pp. 265–442) Bloomington Indiana University Press 1968  [Google Scholar]]) demonstrate brotherhood’s importance to new visions of community. Brotherhood’s promise for remaking the nation gives rise to the Nationalist movement, which emerged to make real Bellamy’s vision of the future. Brotherhood is a powerful organizing principle for utopian endeavor in post‐Civil War America, despite the limitations coincident with brotherhood, such as the difficulty of imagining brotherhood across race and gender lines.     

The bugle of justice: the romantic socialism of William Morris and George Orwell

This essay considers three possible applications of the concept of justice to the work of William Morris and George Orwell. It begins with a brief look at the treatment of criminals in Morris's utopian writing: a specific issue which anticipates some of the points of the modern restorative justice model. The bulk of the essay is devoted to the elaboration of four interconnected elements of the utopia of romantic socialism in Morris and Orwell: elements that provide the positive building blocks of the just society of human well‐being. The roles of the past, of nationality, of the natural environment, and of the demechanization of labor in the creation of the community of the future are considered. The final section, by drawing on several other specimens of socialist utopianism, examines the insufficiency of emotional ethical responses to injustice in producing a convincing version of ideal arrangements, and thereby highlights the value of the romantic visions of Morris and Orwell.     

生态批评视域下的《转折》

从生态批评视角详细解读威廉·华兹华斯的浪漫主义名诗《转折》,诠释文本字里行间所蕴含的自然哲学和生态主题,揭示诗人对于人与自然关系的深切关注和美好憧憬,警醒人类尊重自然,保护生态。     

生态城市首先是区域城市——解读生态巨匠威廉·里斯的生态城市思想

本文解读了生态巨匠威廉·里斯的生态城市思想:生态城市的本质在于最大限度地减轻区域的生态负担,实现途径是最大限度地实现“自运营”。文章同时阐释了这一生态城市思想对我国的启迪。     

Knowledge of Brahman as a solution to fear in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa/Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James suggests that the human experience of a fundamental and existential uneasiness can be found at the core of most religious traditions, and that these traditions constiute essentially a proposed solution to this uneasiness. The present investigation focuses upon the notion of uneasiness, particularly fear, and its solution in the early Hindu tradition. Through a close examination of textual expressions of both desire and fear from the R̥gveda, the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, and the Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, it is proposed that “liberation” in the early Upaniṣadic period, or at least the precursor to the traditional notion of liberation, actually meant freedom from fear, rather than freedom from karma or saṁs̥ra. The Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad suggests that the origin of duality is desire, and duality necessarily results in fear. By relinquishing the sorts of desires so frequently expressed in the earlier vedic literature, together with an understanding of the essentially non-dual relationship between the ātman and brahman, a state of complete freedom from fear (abhaya) may be achieved.     

'Talking in Fictions': Jennings on Parliament

Sir Ivor Jennings made many ground-breaking contributions to the study of Parliament. Among them are two books written in the 1930s, while Jennings was at the peak of his powers: Parliamentary Reform in 1934, ¹ and Parliament in 1939. ² This essay offers an assessment of Jennings' scholarship on Parliament. It commences with some observations on his method, and this is followed by an outline of the argument in Parliament and an appraisal of the book's originality and ongoing significance. The essay closes with some brief remarks concerning Jennings' Parliamentary Reform .     

The Use of Force in British Foreign Policy: From New Labour to the Coalition

This article studies the ideational underpinnings of the UK Coalition government's ‘liberal conservative’ foreign policy. It begins by suggesting that an Iraq‐centric account of Blair's foreign policy suggests a grand vision on the prime minister's part that was lacking from his earlier foreign policy adventures, which relied on a more conventional form of British statecraft. The second section contends that the Gordon Brown years 2007–10 and, since the end of New Labour, Coalition foreign policy, can be seen as a response both to the substance and style of Blair's highly personalised stewardship of foreign policy post‐9/11. The war on terror and the invasion of Iraq were accompanied by a seemingly open‐ended democracy promotion around the globe which was quite out of character with past British practice. The article argues, therefore, that under Brown and Cameron cautious pragmatism has tended to win out over the proclamation of grand strategic ambition.