The Tragic Muse (1890) is published in the extremely difficult publishing circumstances: the sale of his books is declining and his correspondence with Macmillan about his royalties anticipates poor sales of his new novel. Being full of creative energy, James is forced to re-examine his artistic means, which eventually leads him to his experiments in the theater in the 'Dramatic Years' which begins in 1891 and continues until 1895. James's dilemma of such state is reflected in his delineation of the two artists, Miriam and Nick, in The Tragic Muse. Miriam is presented as a brilliant and successful actress who enchants her audience as a whole on a London stage, while, Nick, a lonely painter who is not fully convinced of his work. To think of the fact that James often compares a novelist to a painter, such contrastive delineation of Miriam and Nick reflects James's state of mind at this stage: he is inclined to be a playwright, although he knows and is afraid of the unfavorable theatrical world. The Tragic Muse is a turning point in James's career.

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Henry James, who was a lifelong theater lover, made an attempt to study "histrionic temperament" in The Tragic Muse. James employs two famous portraits of great tragediennes: Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, by Joshua Reynolds and Portrait of Rachel by Jean-Leon Gerome in this work. What interested James in these portraits seems to be the fact that they both represent the fusion of actress, model, and muse. The character Miriam Rooth is also referred to as "the Tragic Muse," and she also plays the three roles referred to above. The painter Nick Dormer, whose talent up to this point has been mediocre, embarks on an "inspired flight" when he paints the portrait of actress/muse Miriam. However, the aesthete Gabriel Nash criticizes Miriam as an actress for stooping to accommodate the vulgar taste of the general public. Even Peter Sherringham, who is Miriam's admirer and suitor, complains that she is so engaged in the business of "make-believe" that she has lost her true self. The thrust of this article is to point out that, in spite of these unfavorable judgments, it is still possible to regard Miriam as the serious and devoted type of artist like many of James's other fictional characters. This is true in the sense that her voraciously passionate sensibility enables her to capture and embody on stage what James calls "the air of reality".

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The so-called new woman novels in the late-nineteenth century England described women's radical ways of living and promoted the improvement of their social and legal status. Although James's The Tragic Muse was published around the same time in 1890, little scholarly attention has been given to their comparative analysis. In his novel, James conveyed the message that women should achieve autonomy in their life and choose their spouses or partners depending on what they really wanted in their lives. In this essay, I argue that James presented the heroine Miriam Rooth as a new woman who sought after her independence by acting. She refused the marriage proposal by an aristocratic diplomat in order to succeed in her career and chose an actor and owner of a theater for her husband. Her choice was based on her own determination. Miriam was different from the conventional Victorian women who depended on husbands and devoted their lives to families. The author also depicted the changing value in marriage among both middle-class and aristocratic women and emphasized the importance of equality between men and women in their relationship. James presented new matrimonial concepts by juxtaposing the lives of mothers and their daughters. The mothers were concerned with their family lineage and economic status in their marriage, while the daughters chose their partners who would respect their career and independence.

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This paper examines the role of an aesthete Gabriel Nash in the Tragic Muse by Henry James. James described Nash as a typical aesthete at the fin de siecle England and illustrated for us the difficult situation confronting artists during rise of mass culture. He supports Nick and Miriam in their quest to become artists. But he himself is a dilettante too pure to the concessions for the world of art. Rather he is a redeemer of art, and he tries to persuade Nick to become a portrait painter rather than a congressman. Nash aspires to see Miriam rise to the top of the artistic world surrounded by all the aspects of industrial society; photographs, interviews and 'deafening newspaperism'. But he predicts that Miriam's identity, swayed by people's capricious mind, would finally materialize as simply one of new goods towards consumerism. In the end, the disappearance of both Nash's portrait and himself symbolize the coming of mass culture and also eternity of art.

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The enigmatic structure, or more precisely the seemingly disordered arrangement of poems, of D.H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers is discussed in close reference to his black-and-white sketches, originally intended for the cover page for publication and apparently abandoned later. The poet's inclination toward ancient Greek philosophical views is closely examined: his placing figs at the base of the hierarchical tree as a symbol of the life-generating forces inherent inside the femininity, together with his view on the hierarchy of life with the rose at the crest of the Lawrencian Tree of Life. It was shown that the poem "The Figs" typically and symbolically shows his world view, unfortunately quite alien to the Christian thinking, which he had probably and secretly rejected in an early period of his life. The present author finds it quite noteworthy that such a bizarre combination of D.H. Lawrence and Empedokles really produced an outstandingly unique view on the world, crystallising into his version of Tree of Life.

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Brian Friel founded Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 and tried to offer the responses to the Northern Ireland problem through art. Friel's preoccupation with defining Irishness is presented through politics, history and language especially in Translations and Making History, which were performed by Field Day. However, Dancing at Lughnasa and Wonderful Tennessee, which were both written for the Abbey Theatre and premiered in the early 1990s, move away from the historical and political dimensions and they give quite different impressions from the plays written for Field Day. Both Dancing at Lughnasa and Wonderful Tennessee are set in modern Ireland and they examine the private lives of the characters in relations to the family. Hence it seems that Friel changed his approach. Therefore, in this paper I will study these two plays and find if Friel's search for Irishness continues in them.

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After a brief survey of relevant criticism, a reading of Of Mice and Men is presented focusing on the theme of the "feminine in man." First, the way in which the male ranch workers-in particular, George-have been traumatized by the economic and social conditions in California in the 1930's is examined. Then, the way in which Lennie, the idiot-child, serves as a guide-one who can lead the traumatized characters toward a path of healing-is discussed. Next, the feminine presence in the novel is outlined. The center of this presence is, of course, the one female character, Curley's wife, but key male characters also embody attributes of the feminine. Finally, the tragic rejection of the feminine by the male-dominated world is discussed, and the question of George's emotional growth throughout the novel-his movement toward recognition of the feminine in himself-is addressed. In the concluding remarks, consideration is given to how this reading of Of Mice and Men places it in the American literary canon.

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The movement to legalize same-sex marriage was revitalized in the 1990s in the US. This paper examines the reasons for this revitalization and analyzes the movement in relation to feminism. Gays/Lesbians called for same-sex marriage rights in the 1990s because of the influence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a lesbian baby-boom in the 1980s. At the same time, NOW, a liberal feminist group in the US, officially declared support for same-sex marriage. One reason for solidarity between liberal feminists and gays/lesbians was that both groups shared liberal values, including the pursuit of freedom, equality, and justice through social reform and legal change. Both groups also resisted the conservative thinking expounded by the Moral Majority and Reagan supporters. These conservatives opposed same-sex marriage and attacked both gays/lesbians and feminists during the 1980s. However, queer theorists started to criticize this movement in the 2000s because the legalization of same-sex marriage leads to assimilation, normalization, and loss of sexual diversity. They also criticized activists for prioritizing legalization of same-sex marriage over issues of poverty and discrimination against lower class queers. I analyze their criticism of the same-sex marriage movement and explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of the movement.

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One of the central issues in linguistic theorizing is whether advances in syntax and semantics go hand-in-hand, which typically means our grasp on the grammar of a construction goes forward with our grasp on its meaning. In what follows, we present an illustration of this point involving adjuncts. Current minimalist syntactic views of adjuncts have attempted to account for them by feature checking (or licensing) at LF, not surface syntax. In light of the distribution of English adverbs, we argue for a picture of the semantics of Japanese adverbs, one in which we show that these elements are frequently not adjuncts, but rather complements and/or parts of a complex predicate with the head verb. Examining in detail data involving adverb scope, we propose that its interpretation is in accord with surface structure, which enables us to provide a clearer picture of how the syntax and the semantics of adverbs fit together. It thus turns out that the LF-based analysis of adjuncts lacks empirical validity.

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A recast enables teachers to give feedback by reformulating a learner's immediately preceding utterance without interrupting the flow of the lesson, which is important especially in communicatively oriented classrooms. A great amount of recast studies unanimously find that recasts are the most frequently used corrective feedback and the efficacy of recasts is generally acknowledged. Nonetheless, the issue is still controversial. While some studies find recasts effective, others imply that recasts have little impact on second language acquisition. The aim of this paper is to investigate three of the potential factors that might account for these different findings on the effectiveness of recasts by reviewing the literature on recasts: the various definitions and operationalization of recasts, the ambiguity of recasts, and using uptake as a measure. This paper reviews findings from both experimental and observational studies that investigated the nature and roles of recasts in the second language education so that recasts can be used more effectively in real classrooms.

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