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Kingsman, not My Fair Lady: dialect and stereotype in the films The Secret Service and The Golden Circle

Publication . Soares, Carla M.

The way characters in film are portrayed, through dress code, behaviour and speech, is often revealing of social patterns and social critique, independently from the film genre or the target audience. This article focuses on the portrayal of lead and supporting actors in the two instalments of Kingsman, The Secret Service and The Golden Circle (2014 and 2017 respectively, both by Mathew Vaughn), departing, in the first case, from a Pygmalionesque transformative idea and, centered in Harry/Galahad’s (Colin Firth) motto “Manners Maketh Man” to partially portray social context in Britain and extending its “tongue-in-cheek” critique to the American Southern culture in The Golden Circle, in purposely biased portraits. The emphasis is on how dialect, particularly accent, aid in the construction or deconstruction of stereotypes, both in British and North American contexts, and how they reflect particular views of the world(s).

2024Journal article

Open access

Reading in silence: translations of homosexual-themed fiction in state-socialist Hungary and Estado Novo Portugal

Publication . Gombár, Zsófia

The present study examines the Portuguese right-wing and Hungarian communist regimes’ attitudes towards homosexuality and sexual minorities through an analysis of English-language literary works translated and published in Hungary and Portugal between 1939 and 1974. One of its main objectives is to contribute to the scarce body of research on the history of non-normative sexualities by mapping literary works in English that might have been read by the queer community as possible self-help literature in the two countries. Besides the prevailing publishing practices, the modi operandi of the Hungarian and Portuguese censoring apparatuses are compared to see what kind of translated literature with homosexual content was or was not allowed to be published under the two opposing dictatorial regimes and why. The research draws heavily on the book censorship files stored at the National Archives of the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon along with the findings of the Hungarian project English-Language Literature and Censorship (1945-1989) and the project Intercultural Literature in Portugal 1930-2000: A Critical Bibliography.

2022-10-18Journal article

Open access

Natural in verso

Publication . Duarte, José, 1984-; Gato, Margarida Vale de, 1973-

É um conjunto de reflexões e criações, por académicos e escritores em português e inglês, sobre a leitura, a escrita, a ação ambiental e a natureza. Impulsionado por uma homenagem a Ralph Waldo Emerson, com o qual alguns dos textos estabelecem diálogo, este livro pretende contribuir para modos de “escrita da natureza” em Portugal. Organizado pelo Grupo de Estudos Americanos do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa. Esta publicação integrou-se no Congresso Internacional Naturally Emerson, organizado pelo Grupo de Estudos Americanos do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa.

2024-10Book

Embargoed access

The archaeology of absence in Kamila Shamsie’s "A god in every stone"

Publication . Martins, Margarida Pereira

Approximately 1.4 million Indians were recruited to the First World War. Despite their role in the war and the high number of deaths, most of the literature in English on the Great War has been narrowed down to British experience. However, in recent years their stories have been emerging through fiction, in academic research and educational projects resulting in a more complete picture of the war and who was involved. A British arts education group engaged students in a project designed to teach and share the stories of forgotten soldiers from World War I. Writing about the project in The Guardian in 2018 Kamila Shamsie claimed the aim was to teach school children about the war and the involvement of non-British recruits whose narratives had up till then been unknown. In academia, respected scholars such as Santanu Das or Claire Buck have undergone thorough research on the representation of Indian recruits through an analysis of literary texts and artefacts states that war memories of the Indian sepoy whose stories were left behind and forgotten on the battle ground. According to Das, the lack of stories by Indian recruits does not mean that history cannot be rectified since it is possible to recover the experience and memory of the recruits. Recently emerging literary representation of the Indian recruit provided historical insight into their experience shedding light on new perspectives of the War. The aim of this article is to analyse the representation of Indian recruits and their experience of World War I in Kamila Shamsie’s 2014 novel A God in Every Stone. I argue that through fiction, it is possible to construct a broader and more inclusive understanding of this historical event as well as to uncover deeper complexities and anxieties on the Indian colonial experience.

2024Journal article

Open access

Was culture a commodity ‘all’ victorians could afford? – Notes on the first british public museums

Publication . Martins, Cláudia Susana Nunes

The etymology of mouseion gave rise to the word ‘museum’ and initially referred to the temple of the Muses. It is noteworthy to recall that the first museum was the Alexandria Museum, set up by Ptolemy in 300 B.C., as a temple, a library, an astronomical observatory, an amphitheatre, a botanical garden and a research venue (Anico 105). The outset of museums can be found later on in private collections, which continued until mid-18th century. Additionally, with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, museums started being regarded as an ally to combat myths, dogmata and superstitions and thus ‘Curiosity Cabinets’ were gradually replaced by the first public museums, such as the Galleria degli Uffizi (1571), in Florence, the British Museum (1753), in London, and the Louvre Museum (1793), in Paris. Simpson (126–127) considers these new cultural spaces as a means for European powers to re-write their history and exhibit their past deeds, as well as a way to show off the heritage they unlawfully gathered in their colonial periods, in line with the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, in London. Taking these assumptions into account, we aim at describing the birth of the first British public museums and the resources they wished to make available to their visitors (e.g. admission fees, facilities, lighting and guides), so as to reflect on the underlying concept of access to culture in Victorian mindset. Was culture a commodity then? In line with Kelly (Culture as Commodity), cultural products and services may have symbolic or even status-symbolic dimensions and this understanding leads us to a further question related to the target audiences of Victorian museums: Were they supposed to be accessible to everyone? Or were they merely for “the initiated” vs. “the primitive” (Chu)?

2021Journal article

Open access