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ES Review : Spanish Journal of English Studies
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 2531-1646 - ISSN (Online) 2531-1654
Published by Universidad de Valladolid

[21 journals]

Cecil Gerahty’s The Road to Madrid: An Anglo-Irish Falstaff in
Spain’s Theatre of War
- Authors: Jonathan P. A. Sell
  Pages: 11 - 28
  Abstract: The main goal of this article is to make better known a largely neglected work on the Spanish Civil War, The Road to Madrid, and its author, Cecil Gerahty. The work, which combines war reportage with travelogue, is first situated in its publishing context and then its chief claims to historiographical notoriety are explained. There follows a survey of the biographical data available for Gerahty’s life and a sketch of his character and personality based on the internal evidence of his book. After a general overview of The Road to Madrid’s contents and main characteristics, Gerahty’s connoisseurial attitude to the conflict and his aestheticisation of trauma are examined, with a discussion of their possible causes and consequences.
  PubDate: 2018-12-12
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.11-28
Unraveling the Mysteries of Childhood: Metaphorical Portrayals of Children
in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction
- Authors: Teresa Gibert
  Pages: 29 - 50
  Abstract: Most metaphorical expressions related to children in Margaret Atwood’s novels and short stories can be grouped into two coherent sets. The predominant negative set includes a wide range of monsters and hideous animals, whereas the much shorter list of positive representations encompasses sunflowers, jewels, feathers, little angels, gifts and lambs. Negative representations of children in Atwood’s fiction are generally rendered in an unconventional manner and reflect the frustration felt by realistically portrayed characters in their everyday experience. On the contrary, favorable expressions have a tendency toward stereotype and often belong to the world of memories, dreams and illusions.
  PubDate: 2018-12-12
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.29-50
All the Park’s a Stage: Westworld as the Metafictional Frankenstein
- Authors: Miguel Sebastián Martín
  Pages: 51 - 67
  Abstract: This essay presents a literary analysis of the TV series Westworld (2016‒), created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who take Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) as its hypotext. In so doing, the paper will firstly trace the literary and film sources of the series, particularly Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is the myth informing the overall diegetic universe of the series as an architext. Secondly, it will comment on the reflexive elements present in the series, looking at certain key sequences that exemplify its metafictional dimension. The main contention will be that the series success lies in the combination of these two dimensions, the Frankensteinian and the metafictional, since both contribute to emphasise the postmodern philosophical questions posed by Nolan and Joy.
  PubDate: 2018-12-12
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.51-67
Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889): A Transcendental Mythopoesis of
Desire and Death
- Authors: Mayron Estefan Cantillo Lucuara
  Pages: 69 - 96
  Abstract: In this article, I propose a new reading of Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889) focused on explaining how this volume of verse appropriates the figure of Sappho, rewrites her failed romance with Phaon, and amplifies her archetypal image of tragic lover through a mythopoetic narrative that refashions different classical myths of desire, despair and death. I present all these myths jointly, discuss their assonances with the Sapphic archetype, and reveal how they constitute a coherent and elaborate mythography that portrays Sappho as a tragic heroine who, through the power of myth, embodies a universal paradigm of human affectivity.
  PubDate: 2018-12-12
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.69-96
Blackness and Identity in Sarah Harriet Burney’s Geraldine Fauconberg
(1808) and Traits of Nature (1812)
- Authors: Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez
  Pages: 97 - 115
  Abstract: One of the latest rediscoveries within the field of the Burney Studies is the oeuvre of Frances Burney’s half-sister, Sarah Harriet Burney, who also was a famous novelist during her lifetime. This paper focuses on two black characters in Geraldine Fauconberg (1808) and Traits of Nature (1812). By using a gender and postcolonial criticism, I analyze Sarah Harriet’s portrait of blackness and how this author approached the marginalization of the blacks in early nineteenth-century Britain, which is closely related to the oppression suffered by the heroines in her works.
  PubDate: 2018-12-12
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.97-115
“WE NEED CHARACTER!”: Remembering Alexander Crummell’s Appeal to
Postbellum African Americans
- Authors: Laura Gimeno Pahissa
  Pages: 117 - 133
  Abstract: The following article offers a study and reassessment of the controversial figure of Alexander Crummell, an African American leader whose influence has been neglected by most scholars. His postbellum ideas on the advancement of black people influenced some of his contemporaries like Booker T. Washington and even later leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois. The article also offers an interpretation of two of Crummell’s most famous speeches on the future of his race, which suggest possible solutions to the tensions and problems experienced by his people after the end of the Civil War.
  PubDate: 2018-12-12
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.117-133
Writing, Aging and Death in Margaret Atwood’s The Door
- Authors: Pilar Sánchez Calle
  Pages: 135 - 156
  Abstract: In The Door (2007) Margaret Atwood continues her movement from the trickster aesthetics of previous works (1965‒1986) towards the more human vision that she had developed in her poetry collection Morning in the Burned House (1995). The Door includes poems written between 1997 and 2007, and they trace similar concerns to other works published at this stage of Atwood’s career, such as The Blind Assassin (2002) and Moral Disorder (2007). My aim in this article is to explore the predominant themes in The Door, such as childhood memories, the writing process as a voyage into a dark underworld, death, aging, and the passing of time. Those reflections are accompanied by a formal analysis of the selected poems, where I discuss Atwood’s poetic voice, the different structures and rhythms of the poems, as well as the repeated presence of motifs such as the cellar, the underground world, and the well.
  PubDate: 2018-12-13
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.135-156
The Plight of Not Belonging: Jean Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” and
“The Day They Burned the Books”
- Authors: Carmen Laguarta Bueno
  Pages: 157 - 172
  Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of the short stories “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1962) and “The Day They Burned the Books” (1960), set in London and in the Caribbean respectively, with the aim to demonstrate that, no matter their origin, Rhys’s protagonists are often confronted with a feeling of non-belonging that sometimes makes them fluid, unstable beings. Furthermore, it aims to demonstrate that, although in some of her writings Rhys seemed to be very critical of the attitude of the colonizers and to align herself with the colonized Others instead, her attitude towards the empire can also be very ambivalent at some points. Ultimately, the analysis of these two short stories suggests that the ambivalence present in Rhys’s works could be a direct consequence of her peculiar positioning as somebody in between two different cultures, and, consequently, uncovers to what extent the process of colonization affected those involved in it.
  PubDate: 2018-12-13
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.157-172
Searching for an Environmental Identity: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
(1996) by Kiran Desai
- Authors: Carmen Escobedo de Tapia
  Pages: 173 - 192
  Abstract: This paper analyses Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1996) from an ecocritical perspective, with the aim to highlight that contemporary Indian narratives in English still honour a conceptualisation of nature as a place in which one can find peaceful and spiritual solace and retreat. Moreover, Desai presents in this novel the themes of identity and alienation closely linked to the natural environment, which justifies an ecocritical reading of the novel in the light of concepts like “place,” “dwelling,” and “thinking” as explained by Heidegger (“Building Dwelling Thinking”). These become especially illustrated in the development of the main character, Sampath Chawla, who searches for his genuine identity in the midst of the hullabaloo caused by the clash between tradition and modernity, the local and the global in the postcolonial microcosm of Shahkot, a small northern Indian village. This analysis, therefore, proves how the aforementioned Heideggerian concepts become especially relevant when it comes to identifying what we think ("thinking”) and, most specifically, what we are (“being”) as related to the natural environment, which fully justifies an ecocritical lens.
  PubDate: 2018-12-13
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.173-192
Of Holes and Wounds: Postcolonial Trauma and the Gothic in Catherine
Jinks’s The Road
- Authors: Bárbara Arizti Martín
  Pages: 193 - 214
  Abstract: This paper analyses Catherine Jinks’s The Road (2004), a multi-protagonist novel, looking into the relationship between personal and historical forms of trauma in the context of postcolonial Australia and following Rothberg’s comparatist approach. More specifically, and taking advantage of the many synergies between the traumatic and the gothic, it studies the novel’s reliance on gothic tropes like the uncanny and the abject in order to demonstrate that both theme and narrative form work together against the overcoming of individual and national plights. The indigenous paratexts that frame Jinks’s story, read in the light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on history, prove particularly meaningful in this respect.
  PubDate: 2018-12-13
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.193-214
Subversive Wanderings in the City of Love: Constructing the Female Body in
Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
- Authors: Laura de la Parra Fernández
  Pages: 215 - 232
  Abstract: In this article I analyse the deconstruction of the public/private dichotomy in the city of Paris in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight (1939). Through the exploration of Sasha’s aimless wandering through Paris in her failed quest for romantic love, this paper aims to explore Rhys’s Paris as a city which is hostile to women who fail to perform conventional standards of femininity. These standards are in turn encouraged and set by the promise of happiness; thus, the mimicry of femininity—whether intentional or not—exposes ongoing power dynamics in gender roles, the construction of the bodies of others through political ideals of happiness and love, and the subversive potential in Rhys’s novel, even if the protagonist is crushed at the end by the private side of the emerging totalitarian regimes on the eve of the Second World War.
  PubDate: 2018-12-13
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.215-232
The Dead Republic, by Roddy Doyle: The Wisdom of Comic Heroism
- Authors: Aída Díaz Bild
  Pages: 233 - 254
  Abstract: Roddy Doyle is a writer who has reflected that human existence is an interplay between comedy and tragedy, and that therefore all kinds of evils—fanaticism, absolutism, dogmatism—result from cultivating only the tragic perspective. This becomes obvious in The Dead Republic (2010), a novel in which Henry Smart’s comic attitude to life allows Doyle to offer the reader a detached and non-sentimental view of contemporary Irish history. Both John Ford and the IRA want to reshape Henry’s story as a Republican hero to fit their own notion of Irishness and it is precisely in Henry’s response to this perversion of Irish history, politics and national identity that he reveals himself as the perfect comic hero and debunks all efforts to mystify the past.
  PubDate: 2018-12-13
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.233-254
The Audible Light of Words: Mark Strand on Poetry and the Self
- Authors: Leonor María Martínez Serrano
  Pages: 255 - 280
  Abstract: The aim of this paper is to look at American poet Mark Strand’s thinking about what poetry is all about, as expressed in his poetry collections and prose works, especially in The Monument (1978), a book of “notes, observations, rants, and revelations” about literary immortality, but also a meditation on “the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book”; in The Continuous Life (1990), a collection of luminous pieces on various aspects of the literary enterprise, including reading, translation and the multitude of selves making up the self; and in The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention (2000), a collection of insightful essays in which the poet discusses the essentials of poetry as something made by the human imagination, the meaning or content of a poem, and the creative process with the guidance of such preeminent minds as those of Carl Jung, Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens.
  PubDate: 2018-12-14
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.255-280
Loanwords in the Living Speech of the Fishermen of Cadiz: The Case of
Anglicisms
- Authors: María Mercedes Soto Melgar
  Pages: 281 - 302
  Abstract: The object of this study is to recognise and analyse foreign words and loanwords deriving from the English language which have been documented in the spoken language of fishermen from Cadiz. The Anglicisms collected in this study pertain to a maritime lexicon used by sailors along the coast of Cadiz. Of the 682 seafaring voices collected during a series of semi-guided interviews conducted from La Línea de la Concepción to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, twenty-one have their origin in foreign languages such as English, French, Portuguese and Italian; nine of these are of English origin.
  PubDate: 2018-12-14
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.281-302
Gillian M. E. Alban. The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction:
Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive
- Authors: Burcu Gülüm Tekin
  Pages: 303 - 305
  Abstract: Reseñas
  PubDate: 2018-12-14
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.303-305
Emron Esplin. Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan
Poe in Spanish America
- Authors: Christopher Rollason
  Pages: 307 - 311
  Abstract: Reseñas
  PubDate: 2018-12-14
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.307-311
Marisol Morales-Ladrón, editor. Family and Dysfunction in
Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film
- Authors: María Jesús Lorenzo Modia
  Pages: 313 - 317
  Abstract: Reseñas
  PubDate: 2018-12-14
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.313-317
M. G. Sanchez: An Interview
- Authors: Sarah M. Abas
  Pages: 319 - 330
  Abstract: Entrevista
  PubDate: 2018-12-14
  DOI: 10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.319-330