Seung Cho

DOI: Vol.70(No.2) 215-244, 2024

This article aims to analyze J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose and enrich the hitherto insufficient scholarship of this play by focusing on the author’s deployment of childhood tropes within it, whose complex constellation of themes has resulted in its absolute dearth of critical attention. It argues that the play critiques the romanticized ideal of innocent imagination dislocated from the reality of human experiences and chronological time. Central to the thesis is Mary’s tragic entanglement with a Celtic fairyland, reminiscent of Peter Pan’s Neverland, leading to her transformation into a vindictive child ghost, simultaneously menacing and vulnerable. This transformation becomes a potent metaphor for the danger and fragility of the myth of perpetual childhood. However, the article also casts a sympathetic glance at Barrie’s rendition of romantic childhood by illuminating the lingering presence of childhood within the adult psyche, embodied in Harry, Mary’s middle-aged son, whose adult profile remains unrecognized by his returned ghost mother until the end. The anticipated reunion between Mary and Harry occasions a reconciliation between childhood and adulthood, revealing the unsettling fragility of adulthood as well as its secret yearning for the consolation and enchantment of childhood innocence. Ultimately, Mary Rose emerges as a poignant reflection on the complexities of growing up, challenging conventional notions of both maturity and childishness, while calling attention to the imperishable claims of childhood in one’s adult life, braced up against its temptation but constantly in need of its charm.

Mary Rose, J. M. Barrie, childhood, ghost, island

Aegyung Noh

DOI: Vol.70(No.2) 245-268, 2024

As a children’s fantasy ushering in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863) has been much remarked as regards its ‘natural theology’ which finds religious teleology in Nature. Kingsley’s moralization of Nature which renders his fantasy ‘pedagogical’ necessitates the intervention of literary instruction in its narrative. The observational, essentially scientific learning of an unschooled chimney sweep turned a water-baby is juxtaposed with the literary learning/reading of the child reader addressed as “my dear little man” in the narrative of the pedagogical fantasy. While this juxtaposition denotes the writer’s negotiation between Darwinian nature and symbolic ‘Word,’ the religious origin of Nature, the literary and imaginary core of his fantasy fundamentally counters the way Victorian scientific discourses reduce Nature to empirical facts. The ‘semantic’ expanse of his literary Nature which infinitely expands by the plasticity and generative possibility of language rivals the confining materialist mapping of scientific Nature. Closely examining The Water-Babies’ literary expanse of Nature filled with word exercises and imaginary storytellings on natural species and phenomena, which stages some semantic and literary lessons for the illiterate protagonist as well as the reader, this essay reflects on the cultural and educational implication of the linguistic and literary learning posited before the illiterate child protagonist grows into a “great man of science” at the end of his journey. It concludes The Water-Babies’ emphasis on literacy and imagination demonstrates Kingsley’s clerical and scholastic concerns about the mid-Victorian state of spirituality and humanities.

Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, pedagogical fantasy, semantic expanse of literary nature, literacy

Ungyung Yi

DOI: Vol.70(No.2) 269-294, 2024

Scholarly interpretations of Mina Loy often analyze her poetry as products of her eugenicist beliefs. Her poem “Parturition” is frequently paired with her unpublished polemic “Feminist Manifesto,” which emphasizes the concept of a racially superior mother and her offspring. However, I argue that Loy’s “Parturition” disrupts the racism and classism at the core of eugenics, rather than embracing the British colonial impulse. The power to modify eugenicist othering lies in her ever-evolving perspective in the poem. Loy’s kaleidoscopic poetics weave through early 20th-century feminist campaigns, largely represented by social purists and liberal moralists, offering a multifaceted lens that undermines dichotomous binaries regarding female sexuality, marriage, and legal sovereignty. “Parturition” exemplifies this intervention by embracing a spectrum of perspectives and experiences of maternity. Through vivid and visceral depictions of the childbirth experience, rendered through her feminine language use, Loy disrupts and challenges the cultural (de)valuation of motherhood. She highlights the physicality of the sexual, profane maternal body as an organ of reproduction and parodies the myth of the Virgin Mary to demystify the culturally assigned sanctity of maternity. The poem, thus, advocates for an inclusive and fluid understanding of maternity that transcends racial and class boundaries. “Parturition” presents childbirth not as a monolithic event but as a kaleidoscopic interplay of emotions, sensations, and identities through a mother subject’s conscious unfolding. It reframes maternity as a dynamic and evolving concept. In doing so, Loy’s poetics critically dialogue with contemporary feminist discourse, offering a more expansive and inclusive representation of female experiences.

Mina Loy, “Parturition”, “Feminist Manifesto”, eugenics, kaleidoscopic poetics

Jie-ae Yu

DOI: Vol.70(No.2) 295-312, 2024

This article aims to scrutinize how Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas brings to light the protagonist’s perceptions of an ideal world in reaction to sustaining issues of human wretchedness and necessity which in turn entail diverse paradoxical occurrences. The writer’s The Mask of Anarchy and Peter Bell the Third, composed after the traumatic incident of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, prompt him to revisit his earliest work Queen Mab one year later in order to obtain a practical view of counteracting human misery caused by a wide range of political and social oppressions of his era. Shelley’s frustrating experiences with the ironic limitations of reform result in him embracing the inevitable dual facets of humanity. Unlike in Queen Mab, this positive awareness of necessity serves to elucidate the author’s rejuvenated sense of vitality and love, which he considers to be the ultimate source of human yearning for freedom from the enslavement of distress and despondency. Shelley’s insightful vision, vigorously expounded in The Witch of Atlas, enhances underlying thoughts on poetry and the writer which he embodies in his later literary works, such as Epipsychidion, Hellas, and A Defence of Poetry. The paper explores a variety of his related poems and prose writings in order to enrich readers’ understanding of the formation and development of his prominent poetic thoughts regarding the three interconnected thematic concerns. These diverse works reinforce the poet’s enduring and frustrating reflections on the paradoxical and irresolvable aspects of the real world and unyielding human aspirations.

Shelley, The Witch of Atlas, Queen Mab, necessity, vision

전신화 Seenhwa Jeon

DOI: Vol.70(No.2) 313-333, 2024

This paper critically examines the interplay of narrativity and truth within the epistolary form of Alice Munro’s “A Wilderness Station,” proposing the protagonist Annie as an embodiment of the female trickster archetype. Set against the backdrop of a mid-nineteenth-century murder on the northern Canadian frontier, the narrative unfolds through a series of differing accounts provided by the involved characters. Monroe’s use of a narrative form composed entirely of letters and memoirs, devoid of a mediating narrator, prompts readers to consider how to interpret these divergent narratives. The epistolary form compels readers to interrogate the ways in which each letter-writer’s different positions and perspectives shape their responses and interpretations. Annie’s own letter, a text that challenges the preceding discourses, invites readers to question the judgmental certainties of the authority figures and to reevaluate the official narrative of historical events. Monroe further subverts conventional historical narratives by portraying Annie as a protean trickster and storyteller, whose shifting stories and strategic deceptions underscore her resilience and adaptability for survival. Annie breaks the boundaries of the monolithic narrative and binary logic of Scots-Calvinism represented by Minister McBain. In the final letter, Old Annie emerges as a figure who confidently navigates the narrative terrain, telling stories that embody metaphorical truth. By making the narrative open with gaps and unknowns rather than complete and coherent, Monroe keeps Annie’s story open to different readings, avoiding narrative appropriation or subordination. Monroe’s short story thus envisions an alternative form of truth through Annie, a subaltern character who straddles the line between imagination and reality.

Alice Munro, “A Wilderness Station”, epistolary narrative, metaphorical truth, female trickster, 엘리스 먼로, 「황야의 간이역」, 서간체 서사, 은유적 진실, 여성 트릭스터

김석 Suk Kim

DOI: Vol.70(No.2) 335-358, 2024

The History of British-American Criticism 2 (1996), which marks the final installment to Sangsup Lee’s trilogy on the history of British-American criticism―in addition to The History of British-American Criticism 1 (1985) and Poetics of Complexity: a Study on New Criticism (1987)―stands out from other works of similar nature in that the text treats the British Aestheticism as an artistic theory requiring spotlight in its own right. Nonetheless, the sense of Arnoldian ‘disinterest’ and the objective balance duly maintained by the author toward critical works of the aesthetic movement begin to crack once he confronts, after his more than evenhanded assessment of Walter Pater, the radically subversive ideas of Oscar Wilde, going so far as to recall, in such stringent expressions as “shameful end” and “our justifiable hatred,” the moralistic piety of the bygone Victorian era. Embracing ‘close reading’ as one of the central scholarly legacies bequeathed by Lee, the present inquiry attempts to closely examine Lee’s take on Wilde and show the problematic grounds as well as certain blind spots informing and circumscribing the former’s critique of the latter. If, in the process, Lee’s reaction to Wilde’s aesthetic theory turns out to reflect anxiety and resentment toward the uncanny possibility of exposure and contamination by such Wildean motifs as ontological indeterminacy and spectrality, I argue that such defence mechanism calls for a vigilant reflection on our part on our changing ontological conditions and their limits even or especially in a period spurred on by the so-called posthumanistic discourse.

aestheticism, Jean-Luc Nancy, Walter Pater, Sangsup Lee, Oscar Wilde, 장 뤽 낭시, 심미주의, 오스카 와일드, 이상섭, 월터 페이터

왕은철 Eunchull Wang

DOI: Vol.70(No.2) 359-383, 2024

J.M. Coetzee skillfully disrupts and deconstructs the conventional boundaries of autobiography, coining the term “autre-biography” to encapsulate his unique approach that lies somewhere between autobiography and fiction. His profound engagement with the genre of autobiography dates back to 1984, when he delivered an inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town titled “Truth in Autobiography.” This lecture laid the groundwork for his 1986 essay, “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” where he intricately challenged the notion of truth-telling within the realm of autobiography. This paper delves into the complexities of Coetzee’s multifaceted perspectives on autobiography, positing that his overarching theory of autobiography significantly influences and permeates his own autobiographical works. Through meticulous examination, this paper aims to unravel Coetzee’s intricate narrative techniques and shed light on how his conceptualization of autobiography shapes the thematic underpinnings of Boyhood and Youth. In both Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee fearlessly confronts uncomfortable truths about himself, demonstrating a willingness to expose aspects of his life that may not align with his personal interests. Despite the elusive nature of these revelations, Coetzee’s unconventional foray into crafting his own autre-biography attests to his earnest and, at times, ruthless commitment to portraying the “aura of truth” surrounding his life and times. For him, the culmination of confession lies in the relentless pursuit of truth for oneself, emphasizing the profound and transformative power of scrutinizing the past through a lens of unflinching honesty and ultimately achieving a sense of forgiveness.

J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood, Youth, autobiography, autre-biography, J.M. 쿳시, 『소년 시절』, 『청년 시절』, 자서전, 오트르전기, 고백