This paper explores Jonathan Swift’s view of nature as represented in his satirical and utopian work, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It is well recognised that Swift’s book holds a significant place in the tradition of anti-utopian narrative. This socio-political satire utilizes certain forms of literary and rhetorical trope inherited from Thomas More, such as first-person narration and the seemingly realistic account. It remains uncertain, however, whether Swift’s book can be recognised as an ecological, utopian work. This paper attempts to examine Swift’s rhetorical approach in this regard and appraise the text’s ecological views.

After careful consideration of the rhetorical and the ecological elements in the author’s book, it is argued that Swift adopts a narrative technique that makes the story deliberately complicated to encourage readers to participate in a discussion of utopian and anti-utopian systems. As such, there are three different viewpoints developed in the work: the views of a sane but immature Gulliver, an insane but also more mature Gulliver, and finally Gulliver as accomplished narrator. Through analysing these transitional stages, the text’s views on ecology involving pastoral, agricultural landscape and simple lifestyle surrounded by non-artificial ‘nature’ are shown as an embedded and integral part of the author’s satirical and utopian vision.

Recent studies have indicated that A Tale of Two Cities depicts the French Revolution as a critical period in which information technologies had developed and information transmission had accelerated and that it thereby represents the idea that social changes and technological development are inseparable. Those studies, however, have paid little attention to the end of Book 2 and the beginning of Book 3 of the work. These chapters clearly illustrate the impact of the means of communication on people’s lives, making them the most significant part of this work of fiction in regard to its consciousness of communication. This paper verifies that the aforementioned chapters are crucial for comprehending the understanding of the media presented in this work. This study first focuses on the dates of events in which those chapters progress. The time they span is sufficient to deliver messages from Paris to London by telegraph but is not long enough to do so without electric wires. It then reaffirms the meaning of the dates by examining the fact that Charles Dickens had set this scene in winter before changing his manuscript. Finally, it analyses Darnay’s travel across the English Channel, which is repeatedly impeded, to clarify that this novel delineates the substantial gap of communication between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This study argues that Christina Light’s actions in Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima are motivated by her oppressed queerness to strike out against a patriarchal society whose upper classes she had married into. In previous studies, her marriage with the Prince described in Roderick Hudson is regarded as the transcendence of the boundary between social classes. However, more investigation of her desire to get out of herself clarifies that the issue of social class is intricately entangled with her hidden queerness.

Being forced to repress her queerness on entering the upper class appears to have made her empathetic toward the common people when she reappears in the later novel. Furthermore, she aspires to retain her queerness after her encounter with Lady Aurora. However, James never releases her queerness completely from the confines of patriarchal authority. She manages to act out her sexual affection toward Lady Aurora, but her immanent societal values instill in her a sense of guilt. It might have been inescapable for James to represent her queerness as restricted and obscured in this social context. However, the fact that he exceptionally re-used Christina seems to allude to his complicated sentiment toward her sexuality. He was unable to leave her queerness undescribed while he concealed and repressed it behind the story of revolutionary activities. Thus, Christina is a meaningful character who struggles against imperious and patriarchal values to be true to her queerness.

This study focuses on Autolycus, a rogue in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611), and his movements from Bohemia to Sicilia, two countries with vastly differing cultures. I examine how his movements coincide with the situation of other individuals who, like Autolycus, moved from place to place in early modern England. This study clarifies the meanings behind Autolycus’ roles in the play. In Act 4, Scene 4, he coincidentally meets Camillo, a favourite of both Leontes and Polixenes, and Florizel, a prince of Bohemia. He is told by Camillo to swap clothes with Florizel and spontaneously accompanies them, escaping from the pastoral region where he grew up, to a country that is completely different from his own, by crossing the imaginary sea of Bohemia. Although during this period it was rare for ordinary people to travel to other countries, the spectators should have known Bohemia by name due to the royal marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine of Bohemia. This study aims to trace the route taken by Autolycus and reflect on how it represents the audience’s image of the scope of activities for peddlers, cony-catchers, and swindlers, from both geographical and historical viewpoints, in early modern England.

The coming of electricity to the Pacific Northwest during World War II was expected to provide new possibilities not only for economic growth but also for social transformation. This paper explores the various aspects of cultural representations of the development of the Columbia River basin, which extends between the states of Oregon and Washington. In the first part of this study, attention is paid to the narrative techniques used in two government-funded promotional films about dam construction produced by Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). After examining the rhetorical strategies that were employed in the BPA films to propagate the necessity of river development, our analysis turns to several songs sung and composed by Woody Guthrie, that were included in one of the films. Our discussion foregrounds this curious combination: a politically radical folk singer from the Midwest and a federal power agency rooted in the Northwest. Finally, we analyze several literary works that critically depict the Columbia River development and its aftermath. A careful comparative review of those works reveals the political unconsciousness of the region in the decades after the New Deal.

This study attempts to compare the themes of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1952) with the concepts suggested by Francis Fukuyama in his famous book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), and to show that the novel, written in the era that “has made all of us into deep historical pessimists” (Fukuyama 3), represents an ultimately dystopian world, the opposite of Fukuyama’s concept of “the End of History” of western liberal democracy. Defining the term “dystopia” as the idea of oppression, destruction, suffering, or trauma, this study goes so far as to regard the novel as nothing other than an ultimately dystopian novel, and finally concludes that Golding’s Lord of the Flies, deeply shadowed by the Second World War, can be construed as an antithesis to Fukuyama’s grand narrative theory of “the end of history” that entails the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Charles Edward Mudie (1818–90) first opened a small lending library in 1842. The library succeeded in attracting a large number of subscribers, eventually delivering the books to the colonies as well as all over Britain. He is well-known for encouraging reading among the Victorian middle-class, but he is rarely chosen as the subject of study.

I have therefore analyzed in detail a series of Mudie’s advertisements mainly in the Athenaeum from 1847 to 1863. As a result, it became clear that he tried to impress the public with the arrival of a sophisticated circulating library by placing a full-page advertisement with a high level of design ahead of other circulating libraries. He also used advertisements to refute criticism about his selection of works; he always added information, when he refuted, that would be useful for potential subscribers in the advertisements. In addition, both the subscribers and the library benefited by simultaneously buying and selling a large number of popular books, which could only be seen through advertisements. He also lent out novels that failed to meet his selection criteria in order to satisfy some subscribers, but kept his library’s established reputation by not listing them in advertisements.

From these facts, it is obvious that Mudie displayed his talent as a great businessman in advertising.