Published in Neophilologus
This paper tries to read What Where as Beckett's realistic and pessimistic presentation of the ontological conditions of the human history, which the play defines as investigation, exploitation and quest for the ultimate truth. Its analysis finds that this presentation has important threads in common with the criticism of civilization in the later ...
Published in Neophilologus
The woman known as Julian of Norwich, the first female author in the English language, survived a pandemic which tore English society apart. The first outbreak of the bubonic plague in Norwich was in 1349 when Julian was only six years old and continued for another twenty-one years of sporadic outbreaks in East Anglia. Despite this formative experi...
Published in Neophilologus
Numerous invectives against Quevedo’s works were disseminated from 1626 to 1635, coinciding with the publication of his most polemical texts: Política de Dios, Buscón and Sueños. Among the earliest ones, there is a diatribe against the political treatise by the Jesuit priest Juan de Pineda, handwritten and now lost. Quevedo replied to it quickly, i...
Published in Neophilologus
The word fornication occurs once in the works of Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz, but it occurs in a pivotal moment, as one of the three “spirits” sent by God during the noche oscura, the purgative process described by Juan’s poetic and prose works of the same name. Lust and romance seem to have a special, uncelebrated place in the dark night mostly...
Published in Neophilologus
This article reconsiders the anonymous thirteenth-century poem “L’altrier cuidai aber druda,” a bawdy pastourelle that is one of a number of texts in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 844 that are written in a hybrid between French and Occitan. Contextualizing the poem within its sole manuscript witness, a songbook thought to ...
Published in Neophilologus
This paper examines Shakespeare’s use of the relative which with personal antecedents. The personal use of which was acceptable in Shakespeare’s period, when the animacy parameter had not yet been established for the choice of relative pronouns, although it was being replaced by who and whom and became confined to things in the eighteenth century. ...
Published in Neophilologus
In this article, I examine some intertwined themes that link Stendhal’s first novel, Armance (1827), to two of his subsequent works of fiction: the incomplete novel Le Rose et le vert, written in 1837, and its precursor, a fragmentary novelette entitled Mina de Vanghel, written in 1829–30. The article demonstrates that the heroes of Armance and Le ...
Published in Neophilologus
The article examines the literary representation of masculinities in the context of border crossings in the Mediterranean area and specifically the relationship between multilingualism and gender identity. The discussion is based on comparative close-readings of two auto-fictional novels which embody border crossings in the form of migration, globa...
Published in Neophilologus
The Anglo-Norman Bible Stories, contained in Ms Brit. Libr. Harley 2253, an Old Testament narrative including Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, is of interest to the study of Old French bible adaptations, in that its contents present parallels (canonical and apocryphal) to some of these texts. This may aid us in narrowing down the sources used by their ...
Published in Neophilologus
Da Silva and Tehrani’s (Roy Soc 2016, 10.1098/rsos.150645) article using statistical phylogenetic analyses to trace the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales was widely reported in the popular press as proof that the Brothers Grimm were “right after all.” Its conclusion that some folktales had been passed down orally for 6000 years within indivi...
