• Women's Studies Review
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.207-237
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• 2009

This paper aims to show that Sylvia Plath searched for the female poetic voice, by tracing the aspects of her early poems. This study attempts to demonstrate that Plath disclosed the violence of male-centered literary tradition against women poets although her early poems seem to be written from a male point of view. In her poems, "Snakecharmer", "Full Fathom Five", and "The Colossus", it is particularly found that Plath hoped to be empowered with the poet's voice, which nevertheless resulted almost in silence or babbling. Plath, indeed, devised a strategy in order to show that, for women poets, the patriarchal literary tradition is a destructive power rather than a generative one. Namely, women poets are not able to fully grow out of a male-oriented tradition. On that account, she tried to represent in her early poems herself who sought to be empowered with an authoritative voice, invoking the male muse, but this ended in failure. Plath was skeptical about the way she had desired to find her own voice by relying upon the male muse, and she needed to free herself from that literary tradition.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.56 no.7 s.106
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• pp.79-95
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• 2006

The relationships between costumes and literature are the remarkable characteristics in the history of Japanese costumes. Among them, the literary designs which have literary subject matters seem unique to Japan. In Japan, the history of the literary design traces far back and its examples are abundant in various literatures in the Heian era. It is particularly notable that the literary designs take a relatively large part of Kosode pattern in the pre-modern period, the Edo era, which can be cleary seen in Kosodehinagata-bon, a collection of Kosode pattern of those era, in addition to various sources of extant relics or paintings. These literary designs lie the tradition of the literary lyricism as aesthetic sense in the japanese costume history. The literary lyricism means the lyrical mood evoked by literature. The purpose of this study is to examine how the literary lyricism which has supported those literary designs was formed and developed. The literary designs on costumes related with the relationships between literature and formative art, for example painting. Those typical example, which started in the literature tournament, utaawase, was devised for matching up with the character of the assembly. They continued as a sort of the intellectual amusements. In the pre-modern period, the literary designs developed In relation to not only subject matters but those expression. Moreover, it shows the extremely typical example that a series of Kosodehiinagata-bons, consisted solely of literary designs, was enjoyed as a device of reading materials like poem anthology.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.7
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• pp.157-203
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• 2005

The Epic of Gilgamesh drew heavily upon Mesopotamian literary tradition. Sin-leqe-uninni, the editor of Standard Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 13th century B.C.E. adopted the Old Babylonian version as well as older Sumerian tales about Gilgamesh. He also was very successful by extensive use of materials and literary forms originally unrelated to Gilgamesh. The epic opens with a standard type of hymnic-epic prologue. This study lens a measure of vindication to the theoretical approach by which Morris Jastrow recognized the diversity of the sources, which underlies the epic and succeeded in identifying some of them. Thanks to the ample documentation available for the literary development of the epic, we can trace the steps which its author and editors took with the result that the epic inspires fears and aspirations for more than three thousand years.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.497-515
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• 2009

Culture as a source of identity, as Edward Said says, can be a battleground on which various political and ideological causes engage one another. It is not mere individual cultivation or private possession, but a program for social cohesion. Sensitively aware that a national culture should be independent from Europe, Walt Whitman enacts a new form of literature by placing different cultural values against Old World tradition. His interest in autochthonous culture originates from his deep concern about national consciousness. He believes that literary taste directed toward highly-ornamented elite culture is an obstacle to cultural unification of a nation. In order to represent American culture of the common people, Whitman incorporates a lot of cultural material into his poetry. Since he believes that America has many respectable writers at home, he urges people to adjust to their own taste instead of running after foreign authors. Whitman differentiated his poetry from previous literary models by disrupting the established literary norms and reconfiguring cultural values on the basis of American ways of life. In his comment on other poets, he concentrates on the originality and nativity of poetry. By claiming that words have characteristics of nativity, independence, and individuality, he envisions American literature to be distinguished from British literature in literary materials as well as in language. Whitman s language is composed of a vast number of words that can fully portray the nation. He works over language materials in two ways: reterritorialization and deterritorialization. Not only does his literary language become subversive of the established literary language, but also makes it possible to express strength and intensity in feeling.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.4
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• pp.57-76
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• 2006

From the late 1920s to the 1930s, Korea's fine art community focused on traditional viewpoints as their main topic. The traditional viewpoints were discussed mainly by Korean students studying in Japan, especially oil painters. Such discussions on tradition can be divided into two separate halves, namely the pre- and post-Sino-Japanese War (1937) periods. Before the war, the modernists among Korea's fine art community tried to gain a fuller understanding of contemporary Western modern art, namely, expressionism, futurism, surrealism, and so forth, on the basis of Orientalism, and borrow from these schools' in order to create their own works. Furthermore, proponents of Joseon's avant-garde fine arts and artists of the pro-fine art school triggered debate on the traditional viewpoints. After the Sino-Japanese War, these artists continued to embrace Western modern art on the basis of Orientalism. However, since Western modern fine art was regressing into Oriental fine art during this period, Korean artists did not need to research Western modern fine art, but sought to study Joseon's classics and create Joseon's own avant- garde fine art in a movement led by the Munjang group. This research reviews the traditional view espoused by the Munjang group, which represented the avant-garde fine art movement of the post-war period. Advocating Joseon's own current of avant-garde fine art through the Munjang literary magazine, Gil Jin - seop, Kim Yong-jun and others accepted the Japanese fine art community's methodology for the restoration of classicism, but refused Orientalism as an ideology, and attempted to renew their perception of Joseon tradition. The advocation of the restoration of classicism by Gil Jin-seop and Kim Yong-jun appears to be similar to that of the Yasuda Yojuro-style restoration of classicism. However, Gil Jin-seop and Kim Yong-jun did not seek their sources of classicism from the Three-Kingdoms and Unified Silla periods, which Japan had promoted as a symbol of unity among the Joseon people; instead they sought classicism from the Joseon fine art which the Japanese had criticized as a hotbed of decadence. It was the Joseon period that the Munjang group chose as classicism when Japan was upholding Fascism as a contemporary extremism, and when Hangeul (Korean writing system) was banned from schools. The group highly evaluated literature written in the style of women, especially women's writings on the royal court, as represented by Hanjungnok (A Story of Sorrowful Days). In the area of fine art, the group renewed the evaluation of not only literary paintings, but also of the authentic landscape paintings refused by, and the values of the Chusa school criticized as decadent by, the colonial bureaucratic artists, there by making great progress in promoting the traditional viewpoint. Kim Yong-jun embraced a painting philosophy based on the painting techniques of Sasaeng (sketching), because he paid keen attention to the tradition of literary paintings, authentic landscape paintings and genre paintings. The literary painting theory of the 20th century, which was highly developed, could naturally shed both the colonial historical viewpoint which regarded Joseon fine art as heteronomical, and the traditional viewpoint which regarded Joseon fine art as decadent. As such, the Munjang group was able to embrace the Joseon period as the source of classicism amid the prevalent colonial historical viewpoint, presumably as it had accumulated first-hand experience in appreciating curios of paintings and calligraphic works, instead of taking a logical approach. Kim Yong-jun, in his fine art theory, defined artistic forms as the expression of mind, and noted that such an artistic mind could be attained by the appreciation of nature and life. This is because, for the Munjang group, the experience of appreciating nature and life begins with the appreciation of curios of paintings and calligraphic works. Furthermore, for the members of the Munjang group, who were purists who valued artistic style, the concept of individuality presumably was an engine that protected them from falling into the then totalitarian world view represented by the Nishita philosophy. Such a 20th century literary painting theory espoused by the Munjang group concurred with the contemporary traditional viewpoint spearheaded by Oh Se-chang in the 1910s. This theory had a great influence on South and North Korea's fine art theories and circles through the Fine Art College of Seoul National University and Pyongyang Fine Art School in the wake of Korea's liberation. In this sense, the significance of the theory should be re-evaluated.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.93-120
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• 2018

Constance Fenimore Woolson is among those whom scholars have for long been trying to rediscover and add to the list of representative American writers. The primary methodology has been regionalism, based on the fact that most of her work portrays remote, exotic regions in and out of America. Still, Woolson remains obscure to general readers as well as literary critics outside a small circle of her scholarship. This essay attributes that obscurity to Woolson scholars' blind reliance on regionalism's nationalistic assumption in reading Woolson's multifaceted writing, and proposes to explore her nationally and regionally displacing view of the rigidly stereotypical and ideologically biased binary opposition between the center and the margin in postbellum America. The essay takes as an example the only story by Woolson that has never been reprinted or anthologized until very recently, "In Sloane Street," and examines why it resists the scholarly endeavor to regional categorization. The examination especially focuses on how the story exposes the Americanizing conceptualization of the region and its limits. The essay concludes with an attention to the story's ending where Woolson abruptly yet deliberately introduces a form of almanac as the main character Gertrude's mode of daily record. The attention to that uniquely hybrid genre in the American literary tradition, which encompasses the public and the private, the universal and the local, sheds light on Woolson's authorial intention to deconstruct the Manichean view of literary regionalism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.315-338
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• 2014

In The Great Hunger (1942) Patrick Kavanagh opens an Irish postnationalist discourse. Taking advantage of historical revisionism and postcolonialism, he not only demystifies a romantic nationalist ideology rooted in rural Ireland but also searches for an autonomous literary tradition free of the Irish Literary Revival, supposedly an outcome of a colonial influence. As a farmer-poet, Kavanagh deconstructs in two ways myths of rural areas, to which the Revivalists aspire. Contrary to Revivalism, he reveals that rural Ireland is not an idealized place where national identity arises and individual spirits are restored. It is instead a cruel place where farmer Maguire, deprived of health, wealth, and love, is tortured by hard labor in the field, moral regulations imposed by the Church, and his mother's domestic authority, all of which leave him unmarried until age sixty-five. Kavanagh also challenges the Revivalist tradition, led by W. B. Yeats commonly referred to as the poet of the nation, by indicting its reliance on former colonial authority and its lack of a sense of communal autonomy, both of which are diagnosed as "provincialism" by Kavanagh. Given that modern Irish literature has been strongly colored as nationalistic during the course of anticolonial resistance, Kavanagh's critique of the Revival in The Great Hunger, whose proponents blindly beautify the lives of farmers, runs directly against the grain of the founding ideology of the Irish nation-state. His voice, like that of a whistle-blower, disclosing the harsh realities of rural Ireland, ushers in a "post"-nationalist perspective on nation and national myths in Irish poetics.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.23-38
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• 2003

Seamus Heaney, a famous Irish poet after Yeats, has written some pastoral lyrics from his experiences of farm life and childhood memories. These poems, in spite of his simple overt praise of a rustic farm life, have layers of meaning with their vast allusiveness and implications. He is an extremely literary writer dealing with history from the Celtic myth and a long English literary history. Though his style reminds that of a Victorian poet through his allusions of nature, he is a modern poet of innovative skills and senses. The explication of his representative sonnet sequence, the "Glanmore Sonnets" will reveal exquisite, complicated poetics of a modern poet. The poems are basically love poems, and the love is directed to his beloved wife, his lifetime companion. The poems relate the cultivation of a land to the poet's excavating language from the classics and to the images of love making. Through a careful reading of the sonnets this article will broaden our knowledge on how a modern love lyric of layered meanings can retain the past tradition in its complicated poetics.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.29-46
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• 2017

Chinese literature once had its splendid era in the Tang and Song Dynasties culminating in Tang poetry and influencing the literatures of its neighboring countries. However, during the past centuries, it has largely been "marginalized" on the map of world literature. On the one hand, large numbers of foreign literary works, especially those from Western countries, have been translated into Chinese, exerting a huge influence on the formation of a sort of modern Chinese literary tradition. On the other hand, few contemporary Chinese literary works have been translated into the major foreign languages. With the help of the rise and flourishing of comparative literature, contemporary Chinese literature has been moving toward the world and had its own Nobel laureate. The author, after analyzing the reasons why Chinese literature has been "marginalized," argues that Chinese literature will develop steadily in the age of globalization. Globalization in China has undergone three steps: first, it has made China passively involved in this irresistible trend; second, the country has then quickly adapted itself to this trend; and third, China has started to play an increasingly leading role in the first decade of the present century. In this way, contemporary Chinese literature and comparative literature studies will steadily develop with the help of the "Belt and Road" initiative.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.38
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• pp.215-243
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• 2015

This paper looks at the literary mood of southwestern Russia in the late Russian Empire, while examining the writers of this area and their literary tendencies. Southwestern literature was formed in the late Russian Empire, and prospered centering around Odessa. Because of the uniformity in the Soviet culture, however, it could not stay alive but disappeared in the history of Russian literature. Odessa, the center of southwestern literature was a multiracial region unlike other Russian cities. A unique culture was created, therefore, combining the western European culture and local ethnicity. Jews in Odessa could enter into the Russian society and assimilate naturally. They could utilize their talents as a strength to enrich the Russian culture without giving up their cultural heritage. For example, in lingual aspects, using Yiddish was not against the Russian culture. In addition, it contributed to interesting new coinages and led to efforts among writers to minimize the gap between the two languages. Many Jewish writers showed special interest not only in Yiddish but also in French, German and other languages. Therefore, they took the lead in translating and introducing west classics. As evident in the way Yiddish language was formed, mixing their language with other languages enabled jews to soak their way into other cultures naturally. Their yearning for the Russian and western European cultures, combined with their unique sense of humor, led to generic twists and problematic experiments. From another point of view, it is also unusual that southwestern literature diversified locational settings and heroic characters in literary works. European style heros, appearance of multiracial people, pain or waggery experienced by Jews in their assimilation process, thrilling revenge to unfair violence of Russians, and espiegle swindlers are the new domains that southwestern literature pioneered. In summary, southwestern literature was formed in a heterogeneous cultural climate, which was entirely different from the Russian Empire. In this regard, it was in deviation from the Russian literary tradition. From the Soviet point of view, it existed as a heresy which was against the Russian Empire.