英米文化 Vol. 47(2017)

William Blake, English-romantic poet and copperplate engraving artist, often compares human to vegetable organism in his late prophetic books. This paper is an attempt to analyze the unity of ‘contraries’ through the association between Blake's world of vegetation and the Bible, especially, The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. First, I trace the sources of inspiration for Blake in Celtic culture, Christianity and philosophy. And next, I discuss the unity of contraries into ‘the Poetic Genius’ as Blake's dialectic in his world of vegetation.

Around the time when Blake wrote “To the Muses” in his first work, Poetical Sketches, muses were the very existence of scholarship. But gradually his confidence in muses began to waver. Muses are the daughters of ‘Mnemosyne’ and so Blake regarded the works inspired by muses as not exactly a good art. For Blake, ‘the Poetic Genius’ is the most important existence.

As for the common terms between Blake's prophecy and The Book of Ezekiel, I deal with two specific examples, the analogy of human likened to vegetable and ‘four.’ Both also have the similar plot, the division and unity of the personified ‘Jerusalem,’ and the process in which Jerusalem went to ruin, and later it was rebuilt as a theocracy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the results of my research on translations of Charles Dickens's Sketches of Young Couples in the Meiji era. In 1882 (the 15th year of Meiji) ,KASE Tsurutaro translated and published five pieces in Sketches of Young Couples as Seiyofufujijou. This is the very first Japanese translation of Dickens's work. While researching translations of Dickens's work in the Meiji era, I found that there are two more pieces in Sketches of Young Couples translated into Japanese. Both of them were done by a novelist, TOKUDA Shusei in 1896 (the 29th year of Meiji). It has been known that they are translations of Dickens's work, but the originals have not been confirmed. Interestingly, Sketches of Young Couples has been least read and moreover least studied among Dickens's works from the day of its publication to the present.

In this paper, I firstly give general outlines of Sketches of Young Couples itself and how Kase's translation has been assessed by critics. Then I examine Tokuda's translations and Dickens's influence on Tokuda. Finally, by analyzing a trend in translations of Dickens's works in the Meiji era, I consider why Tokuda translated such minor pieces.

This study observes the representation of ghosts in The Haunted Man to decipher Charles Dickens's awareness of communities or social consciousness. The ghosts in this novel are depicted as the mean of communication; they have power to form a group of people and make them share a certain idea and consciousness. Media-based societies began to be formed in the Victorian Age. Traditional village-type of communities kept its identity by direct exchange of information among the people living in the area. The societies in the nineteenth century, in contrast, arose from elusive networks that connect people living in different places by such means as newspapers and railroads. The present sociologists would call this collective entity which enabled the modern societies to emerge the media. In the nineteenth century, however, what we call the media today was not yet named and only few people were conscious of it. In order to express this mysterious informational complexity which produce the modern public, Dickens used ghostly images into which three other form of influence are integrated: memory, plague and publication. This analysis suggests that The Haunted Man is the novel which is directly linked to Dickens's understanding of the media.

It is widely known that scientific factors must be taken into account in reading the works of P. B. Shelley. However, Shelley's view of science, being different from the views common to most Romantic poets, has not been correctly understood. Although the romantics generally associated the scientific outlook with the trivialization of the mysteries of nature, Shelley recognized the value of scientific knowledge as a means of understanding nature. For this reason, his works include a variety of overtly scientific images.

Through his works, Shelley aimed to accomplish a sloughing off of the ‘familiarity’ that veils human vision; in this sense, he sought to realize the natural beauty often obscured in daily life. In order to achieve this, scientific learning enabled Shelley to recognize miraculous aspects of seemingly mundane phenomena.

So as to clarify the particularity of Shelley's scientific imagination, similarities between his ideas and the work of scientists will be highlighted and in so doing will elucidate how they informed Shelley's sense of wonder with respect to nature. Moreover, Shelley's views of life show similarities to those of scientists, as well. In expressing life as an uncreated, eternal existence, he offered an innovative poetic interpretation of the universe.

This essay investigates the image of perforation in Henry James's short fiction “Crapy Cornelia” and in his autobiography in order to demonstrate how the image serves as a tangible embodiment of memories.

In “Crapy Cornelia,” perforation is most obviously symbolized by the opening Central Park setting in New York. James recognized the park as a nostalgic as well as fictional space surrounded by sky-scrapers, as if it were a fantastic past perforating the heart of the modern city. In this place, the protagonist White-Mason vacillates between Mrs. Worthingham, the sky-scraper-like figure representing the new society, and Cornelia, a Central-Park-like figure representing the old one. When he recognizes Cornelia in Mrs. Worthingham's apartment and, after meditation, decides to choose her, his perception is described as a physical act of reaching an antique society through “perforation of the newest newness.” Although White-Mason finally reaches Cornelia's home where they share old memories, his memories are fictional and affected by the present just like Central Park.

After the publication of this tale, James wrote his autobiography. Here again, James emphasized that memories are fictional and created through the interaction between the present and past, employing the image of perforation of the present in order to reach the forsaken past. In this way, perforation embodies the concept of memories for the author.