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‘According to the Rhythms of the Arid Lands’: Mary Austin’s The Land of Journeys’ Ending

Publication . Alves, Isabel Maria Fernandes, 1964- ‎

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between nonfiction women’s writing and nature within the North American literary tradition. In the United States, the association between humans and the natural world has primarily been a male-narrated experience, as nature, especially wilderness, has historically been a place for defining masculinity. In the final decades of the twentieth century, however, women’s literary responses to nature have received increased attention, and numerous critical works have currently identified a tradition of women’s nature literature in the United States. In this regard, I propose to read Austin’s The Land of Journeys’ Ending (1924), a lesser-known work that values the feminine voice, one that is attuned to the rhythms of the desert plains. The book, a hybrid form incorporating memoir, travel narrative, historical investigation, and ecological study, describes Austin’s journey through the Southwestern United States in 1923. Imbued with a feeling of wonder and respect for both the land and the people of the region, Austin explores how human and non-human lives adapt, survive, and bloom in the arid deserts of the Southwest. Contrasting with the urban, modern, glamorous rhythms of the Jazz Age, which characterized much of the literary work produced during the 1920s, Austin’s book exemplifies how the American Southwest was perceived through a woman’s writer perspective and how she responded to the discovery of the wild American landscape. In today’s world, where a mechanistic conception of nature prevails, I consider that Austin’s voice and her beliefs in adaptation, adjustment, and ecological sensitivity deserve to be heard.

2023Journal article

Open access

Cultural memory in contemporary fiction: F. R. Leavis’s and Matthew Arnold’s intellectual presence in A. S. Byatt’s work

Publication . Cheira, Alexandra Isabel Bugio Bonito Batista, 1972-

The concept of “cultural memory” serves as the foundation for this article, which explains the complex relationships between two prominent figures in the history of English letters, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, as well as how A. S. Byatt’s own work was influenced by their combined, though occasionally diametrically opposed, approaches to literature, culture, and criticism. As a result, this article begins with a discussion of the conflictual continuity and/or sustained ambivalence in Byatt’s critique of Leavisite criticism. It does this by first looking into Leavis’s position within the larger literary criticism context and then focusing on how Leavisite criticism fits into Byatt’s critical thought. Thus, Byatt’s assertion that Leavis made English literature the focal point of university education is examined by first looking into Leavis’s Cambridge. Lastly, Byatt’s criticism of Leavis’s idea of English studies is looked into in the context of critical evaluations of English literature’s place in higher education, at the same time that Byatt’s work is used as a prism to analyse the Arnoldian matrix of the Leavisite concept of “moral seriousness”. Afterward, Byatt’s critical work is critically examined in the framework of culture, society, and literature, continuing Arnold’s legacy.

2024-09Journal article

Open access

Experiencing and envisioning food: designing for change

Publication . Bonacho, Ricardo; Eidler, Mariana; Massari, Sonia; Pires, Maria José Pereira, 1971-

Experiencing and Envisioning Food: Designing for Change contains papers on gastronomy, food design, sustainability, and social practices research as presented at the 3rd International Food Design and Food Studies Conference (EFOOD 2022, Lisbon, Portugal, 28-30 April 2022). The contributions explore potential solutions to current problems in the food system, and outline scenarios on the future of food and nutrition. The book aims at academics and professionals that interact with the food sector.

2024-04Book

Open access

Music, the avant-gardes, and counterculture: invisible republics

Publication . Duarte, Anabela

This book studies how the complex relationship between music, the avant-garde, and counterculture challenges all sorts of boundaries. By exploring the avant-garde as a thoughtful inquiry into experimentation, creativity, and originality, we bring to the fore the "invisible republics" of culture, the ephemeral, the suppressed, and the unconformity of artistic and political undercurrents. Avant-garde and experimental art are international in scope, and their trajectory, as we see it, has been to expand themselves towards a new enlightenment, a critical project, and a rhizomatic entity, albeit with tacit harmony and cohesion. From Bucharest to Paris, London to New York, Paris to Brazil, Cuba, or Chile, to name a few, the same urge for the unknown and anti-art poetics emerged almost simultaneously in every field. We ask how these separate geographical territories (and practices) speak to each other and how this might reshape scholars' historical understanding of European and American modernity.

2024-12-01Book

Open access

‘Lift me up!’: the new major siscourses of care and ageing in Doris Lessing’s "The Diaries of Jane Somers"

Publication . Zarebska, Zuzanna

The genre of Reifungsroman considers different temporal aspects of individuation. It aids and assesses the capacity of an older person to re-story their life, enter meaningful relationships, make amends with the past and productively evolve as an individual. Instead of focusing solely on the present, time is seen as a continuum in Reifungsroman with a special emphasis on the past events and narratives. This article will trace the late life transformation that Jane and Maudie undergo as all life is mutable and finite, awareness of which can make us more compassionate. In The Diaries of Jane Sommers, written by Doris Lessing and published in 1984 the narrator tells the story of the relationship she constructs with an elderly friend, Maudie, whom she meets in the streets of London and who triggers her identarian metamorphoses. Maudie embodies all the stereotypes of an old woman, she has crone-like features and an unforgiving temper. From the physical maladies to emotional suffering, Jane Sommers is herself a source of discomfort and displeasure to those around her. As the narrative unravels and cleanses Jane from rampant egoism, as she bathes after each visit to Maudie’s home, she deconstructs her old narratives and transitions into an empathetic self. As Maudie shades her trauma in words and being bathed by Jane, both undergo a process of healing. Maudie dies with dignity and out of this sacrificial moment of catharses, the meeting of the now and then, new Jane is born. She erases the old wry Jane, an ambitious and vain journalist in a women’s magazine, only concerned with success and everlasting youth, who spends time and her financial gains on material goods. This article will look into the discourses on ageing and the genre of Reifungsroman in The Diaries of Jane Sommers, Lessing’s fifth novel, published under a pseudonym and separately as two separate books: The Diaries of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could against criticism from various editorial boards. I will analyse the processes of resignification of the minor discourses and their relationship towards the major discourses on growing older. I will consider Jana and Maudie as a two-faced Janus and a dyad of the old and the new, the ich and the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful: a crone, a witch and young woman whose polyphony of voices can re-story the narratives of women and ageing.

2024-09Journal article

Open access