/library/oar/handle/123456789/11192 2025-12-25T21:10:23Z 2025-12-25T21:10:23Z Dent, Kelly /library/oar/handle/123456789/13091 2018-03-20T13:09:58Z 2016-10-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The unbearable trauma of being : death, hope, and (in)humanity in the work of Cormac McCarthy Authors: Dent, Kelly Abstract: For as long as the self-christened homo sapiens has roamed the Earth, various mythologies and their respective afterlives have followed without fail. Through the work of Cormac McCarthy, this paper seeks to explore the connections (if any) between mortality, hope, and the intrinsically human need for narratives of the afterlife. The term “after(-)life” is understood to denote not simply the realm that supposedly awaits us after physical death; throughout this paper, the after-life is also investigated as that mode of being which occurs follow a point of trauma, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or epistemological in nature. Three of McCarthy’s most pivotal novels (The Road, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) will be discussed in relation to the question of trauma, hope, and inhumanity, and what it means to be after the human experiences a distinct collapse in meaning. Finally, this paper endeavours to discuss such questions as “why this human need for hope?”, “how does hope persist in the face of inhumanity?”, and “is it this resilience that makes us human?”

2016-10-01T00:00:00Z Martinez-Garcia, Laura /library/oar/handle/123456789/13090 2018-03-20T13:11:42Z 2016-10-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Nell Gwyn’s many after-lives : taming ‘the Protestant Whore’ in 21st century popular fiction Authors: Martinez-Garcia, Laura Abstract: Ever since her supposed self-fashioning as ‘the Protestant Whore’ in the 1660s, Nell Gwyn has become a figure of fascination, revamped and reinterpreted in a multitude of ways along the years: from the black and white films of the 1930s, the story of this Restoration orange seller turned Royal concubine continues to excite the imagination of not just film makers, but of novelists, artists and even jam makers nowadays, as much as it inflamed Restoration audiences. The aim of this paper is to analyse the discourse that lays at the basis of three modern-day reconstructions of Nell Gwyn’s figure in an attempt at drawing a connection between celebrity, pop culture and historical fiction so as to explain the reimagining of this actress as an innocent strumpet, a scheming shrew, a dignified lady and all things in between; this paper takes ideas on celebrity and historical fiction as the theoretical basis upon which to build the criticism of these revampings of Nell Gwyn to better understand the survival of her figure three centuries after her death.

2016-10-01T00:00:00Z Maiti, Soumava /library/oar/handle/123456789/13088 2018-03-20T13:10:12Z 2016-10-01T00:00:00Z

Title: ‘Borne again in repetition’ : reincarnation, afterlives, and cultural memory in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome Authors: Maiti, Soumava Abstract: The present article reads the social and cultural afterlives of a particular marginalised group in colonial Calcutta in Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel The Calcutta Chromosome, and seeks to examine how these reconstructions of afterlives are linked with the ancient Indian philosophy of rebirth and reincarnation. This study seeks to understand the significance of body and ghost in reconstructing the afterlives and analyse the role of cultural memory throughout that process.

2016-10-01T00:00:00Z Gil-Naveira, Isabel /library/oar/handle/123456789/13085 2018-03-20T13:10:17Z 2016-10-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The afterlife in chicano literature : children as priests and totemic animals in Bless Me, Ultima and “The Moths” Authors: Gil-Naveira, Isabel Abstract: The concept of the afterlife and the relation with the dead varies from one culture to another. In this sense, from the years of the Civil Rights Movement onwards, Chicano literature has re-appropriated Mesoamerican and Native-American beliefs that differ from those of Catholics and Anglicans alike. Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless me, Ultima and Helena María Viramontes’s short story “The Moths” share an atmosphere full of myths, beliefs and mysticism where the main characters–a boy, a girl and their grandmothers–establish a strong connection with the natural and the unnatural. Unlike most criticism, which focuses on the rites of passage from childhood into adulthood and the helping role of the grandmothers, this paper analyses the rite of passage of the grandmothers to the afterlife, emphasising the deconstruction of the ontology of life and death. Through two main mechanisms—the role of the children as priests and the relation that exists between the grandmothers’ souls and their totemic animals—this paper highlights how the authors address the cyclical component of time and history and stress the connection between the death passage and rebirth for the Chicano community.

2016-10-01T00:00:00Z