Eger Journal of English Studies

The Wor(l)d of the Law

Brigitta Gyimesi — 2024-01-28

Given that they are fundamentally linguistic phenomena, legal texts allow for hermeneutical and ontological uncertainty in their interpretation. Utilising the framework of speech act theory, Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” provides a good example of how linguistic performativity works on the legal-political level. A set of legal texts create a legal discourse which we deem binding, but which can equally be regarded as an “autonomous” or “possible world.” In possible worlds theory, the discourse and worldview created by legal texts is only one of the many ways to interpret and make sense of reality.

Introduction: on the Rebellious Marys

Éva Antal — 2024-01-28

Rebellious Eliza

María José Álvarez Faedo — 2024-01-28

Eliza Haywood was an acclaimed eighteenth-century writer, actress, translator, publisher, bookseller, journalist and the editor of The Female Spectator (1744– 1746). Being aware of the difficulties females had to endure at the time, she challenged them, exploring other alternatives in her newspaper. This article will explore the different literary techniques Eliza Haywood employs in her periodical to be able to offer her own common-sense and astute moral instruction to her readers, teaching them to turn the hardly appealing fates that their families had arranged for them into ones they could benefit from.

Jacobin Enthusiasm and the Logic of Loss in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Dragoş Ivana — 2024-01-28

Written in the radical Jacobin context of the 1790s, Mary Hays’s novel lies at the intersection of reason, as theorised by William Godwin, and feeling, as portrayed by Claude-Adrien Helvétius, both seen as sources of virtue and truth. Emma vacillates between these two faculties of the mind in order to propel into action an early feminist mode of expression and agency fuelled by her reading practices, particularly when she comes across Rousseau’s Julie; or, The New Heloise. I argue that such reading practices prove to be perilous, or rather quixotic, as they highlight a female enthusiast whose laudable intellect and eloquence are eclipsed by her overriding passions, which, contrary to Helvétius’s sensationism, obstruct the development of her own character.

“O wretched and ill-fated mother!”

Dóra Csikós Janczer — 2024-01-28

By the end of the eighteenth century, motherhood had come to be seen as the ultimate source of female identity. The maternal body was invested with different meanings; it was simultaneously glorified and demonised, depending on whether it was submitted to patriarchal control or not. The cult of motherhood constructed women as naturally submissive and nurturing; any unconventional expressions of maternity were branded as monstrous. The re-assessment of the sanctity of motherhood is one of the key features of Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice. The novel challenges prevailing ideas of domesticity as represented in the idealised mother figure. The lack of the cult(ivation) of motherhood, the reassessment of the trope of the monstrous mother, and the creation of a heroine who defiantly refuses to become a wife and ends up mothering a disruptive text, make Hays one of the formidable rebellious Marys.

“[L]ines, evidently written by a female hand”

Maria Parrino — 2024-01-28

A celebrated public figure who became an iconic woman, Mary Robinson was an actress and a member of a community of eighteenth-century intellectual women writers. This study discusses her first novel, Vancenza (1792), and focuses on the relationship between the young protagonist, the orphan Elvira and her dead mother. By analysing Elvira’s explorations and discoveries in the castle and eliciting the features of the Gothic in the novel, I intend to show how the discourse of authorship is framed within the daughter’s urge to find out about her origins and her mother’s revelatory written texts.

Rebellious Marys at the Crossroads

Éva Antal — 2024-01-28

The context of the present article is my research on philosophies of female education and the questions of female Bildung in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England. Female writings seem to rely on the theoretical background provided by the well-known male authors in order to present a critical and ironical reading. In my study, I highlight the ways of development expressed in the open and closed spaces in Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels. In the quite autobiographical Mary (1788), in accordance with the characteristic aversion to the household, the heroine feels at home in nature, or on the road (cf. homelessness). Meanwhile, having left the suffocating milieu of her home and her marriage, she finds her peace and partner in her own way. In the unfinished novel, Maria (1798), the prisonlike environment of the wife with her actual imprisonment in the Gothic asylum, physically represents the patriarchal restraints in women’s lives. Maria is a rebel, she leaves her husband, and later her readings free her mind. In both novels the heroines struggle with the expectations of the age and their paths of life display the possibilities for development offered to a young woman in the second half of the eighteenth century—in the framework of Wollstonecraft’s early Bildungsromane.

Women Characters’ Cross-Cultural (Self-)Development in Mary Margaret Busk’s Zeal and Experience

Antonella Braida — 2024-01-28

This article focuses on the importance of women characters’ education in Mary Margaret Busk’s Zeal and Experience: a Tale (1819) and Tales of Fault and Feeling (1825). A translator and cultural mediator, Mary Margaret Busk (1779–1863) was one of the first women writers to publish review articles on European literatures in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a high-brow, conservative journal with a large readership and, it has often been assumed, mostly written by male authors. This contribution intends to analyse the importance of women characters’ education in her tales, which also foregrounds her interest in cross-cultural relations.

English Literature and its Hungarian Reception

Brigitta Gyimesi — 2024-01-28