Contenu du sommaire : Jeunes chercheurs

Robert Howard's The Surprisal is a comedy that seems to belong to the Restoration tradition of anti-Puritan plays. A certain number of structural factors as well as an ad hoc reactivation of prior stereotypes indeed seem to make the play something of a Royalist manifesto, similar to The Committee, by the same author. But a more in-depth reading shows that inconspicuous yet revealing ambiguities undermine this surface discourse. A new, more complex interpretation then emerges, possibly resulting from the social and political diversity of the theatre's audience, from the difficulty to adhere uncritically to the royalist discourse given the real monarch's shortcomings, and from the necessity, even for a courtier such as Howard, of preserving both a manifest political loyalty and a space for subversion.

This article investigates the fears raised by female alcoholism and the legislation it led to in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. It explores the interplay between gender and inebriety by focusing on Duxhurst, a farm colony for female inebriates founded in 1895 by Lady Isabella Somerset, a wealthy philanthropist, Temperance advocate and Christian socialist. The history of the colony reveals tensions between a traditional approach to excessive drinking and a more novel, medical angle. The cottages where inebriates lived were synonymous both with a socially-inclined utopian scheme and a rather conservative, normative attitude to womanhood and deviant femininity. This article will endeavour to address the pioneering methods employed at the colony as well as the praise and criticism it received, in order to determine how far the Duxhurst experiment represented a radical break with previous practice.

This article proposes to confront the tenets of metaphysical detective fiction, a sub-genre of experimental fiction associated with Postmodernism, with Chesterton's Father Brown series, with which the genre of metaphysical detective fiction was first identified. The expression was originally coined by the American critic Howard Haycraft to single out Chesterton's unusual detective stories, but since Michael Holquist's founding article “Whodunit and Other Questions: Meta-physical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction,” it has come to describe the postmodernist take on detective fiction, in the works of authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov or Alain Robbe-Grillet. However, Holquist does not acknowledge Chesterton's defining role in the birth of the genre and falls short of a precise definition for its “metaphysical” quality. Such “dual” discomfort is equally palpable in most studies of the genre. Significantly, they have ignored Borges's role as a mediator between Chesterton and contemporary metaphysical detective fiction. Through a survey of the “Father-Brownian” intertextuality in some of Borges's Fictions, this paper aims to examine the “metaphysical” quality of Father Brown stories, in order to account for the recurring critical unease in defining Chesterton's role as an innovator of the genre.

This paper discusses the memory of the First and Second World Wars in British public schools where officer fatality rates reached 18%—as opposed to 11% nationally—and 13.4% in the first and second conflicts respectively. It suggests that, partly as a result of the Great War, commemorations were an occasion for public schools to articulate new discourse on service and fighting. The paper sheds light on the corporate forms of remembrance chosen by public schools seeing to it that the memory of servicemen killed in action was kept by the institutions they had just attended. It also considers the way public schools' discourse on war was sometimes reassessed and nuanced in the twentieth century, progressively moving away from traditional ideals of Muscular Christianity and military preparedness. It finally focuses on contemporary commemorations of the Great War as public schools engaged with their own centenary projects, resorting to digital formats accessible to the general public and offering balanced overviews of the war with references ranging from Rupert Brooke's “The Soldier” to Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War.

This article examines the inner workings of intermediary consciousness as a locus of insight in the novels of Henry James and Natsume Sôseki. Both authors use motifs of liminality to fashion and explore rituals of social intercourse, marriage, and dying—not to mention the passage from ignorance to insight. In both, we find traces of a cultural exchange between East and West. James's Japan (as portrayed, for example, in The Portrait of a Lady) is at once fascinating and disturbing, charged with sentiments that gained a foothold in the West when, halfway through the nineteenth century, Japan opened up and things Japanese became fashionable. By contrast, the image of the West present in Sôseki's work owes much to William James's notions of consciousness, which Sôseki pursued during a two-year stay in England, on a government grant, during the Meiji era.

Spengler's landmark work The Decline of the West (1918) greatly contributed to the expansion of political and philosophical theories which regarded the “degeneration” of European societies as an inescapable fact. It has often been observed that D.H. Lawrence's fiction and non-fiction reflect a common feeling throughout Western Europe in the early twentieth century which was fed by Spengler's theory. A new, close reading of both Spengler's and Lawrence's writings reveals just how similar their ideas were: from the conceptions of urban and rural spaces, their development and man's spiritual connection with them, to the belief in a new beginning in rural areas, and the reinstatement of a spiritual connection with the land.

The work of the modernist poet Hugh Mac
Diarmid, famous for his Scots poems and his political commitment of the mid-20th century, is rarely ever considered in relation to the religious or the divine. Although a declared atheist, the Scottish poet nonetheless kept talking about God in his poems, lamenting God's death in verse combining regret and anger. His poems, still heavily suffused with Judaeo-Christian metaphysics, voice the type of incomplete nihilism theorised by Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1882). This article explores the ways MacDiarmid's poetry directly confronts the divine and the concepts usually associated with it. This confrontation may be expressed in lexical forms, or take the shape of poetic catalogues which seek to render the immanence of a detheologised infinite, to challenge godly perfection, and to reveal that poetic form can become the very place for metaphysical rebellion to materialise.