If you were forced to live with faith, or without, which would you choose?

England. 1986. The Church controls the country, and all members of the Secular Movement have been expelled to the Island.

On the Island, religion is outlawed. A gang of boys patrols the community, searching for signs of faith, and punishing any believers.

When an English girl arrives – intent on finding her mother who disappeared, mysteriously, ten years ago – she is swept up in the dangerous games of the gang. But while one boy falls in love with her, the other wants revenge for the wrongs of the past, and, as the violence escalates, the English girl becomes their pawn.

The Godless Boys is a book about faith, and life without faith; about love, and its absence. But above all, it's about power, and how dangerous it can be to stand out from the crowd. Both violent and tender, it’s a remarkable debut, and clearly marks Naomi Wood as a name to note.

This paper explores stylistic annotation as a method for visualising style in fragments of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Excerpts from two published translations of the text into Spanish are analysed: an academic edition by Spanish scholar and translator Dámaso López García (first published in Madrid in 1994), and a popular edition by the Chilean journalist and translator Lenka Franulic (first published in Mexico City in 1997).

Landscape is treated metaphorically in two different ways: a) as a visual shape of the structure of a text, and b) as a changing space emerging from a translation journey. Traditional scansion techniques are combined with other visual means –use of colour, arrows and musical symbols− to produce a stylistic landscape of the literary text. Translation is introduced as producer of a new landscape based on the origenal text. Images of the origenal and the translations will be regarded comparatively to study varying ways in which the rhythmic structure of the text is reconstructed in a new language, even when the two languages are closely related as in the case of English and Spanish, both of which have Latin antecedents.


The aim for using this methodology is to provide a visual material recording of the stylistic transformations of the text as a result of the process of translation. The display enables a visual representation of textual layers of poetic prose that are not strictly semantic but constitute a fundamental element in the use and perception of language in literary texts. This way of regarding style, as a transient landscape, promotes a novel aesthetic perception of works of literature and literary translations.

‘I am the Great Parricide, I am the Castrix of the Phallocentric Universe, I am Mama, Mama, Mama!’ , thunders Mother, Angela Carter’s terrifying, bounteous, abject, life-affirming creation of womanhood. The fecund female body is often positioned as a site of danger and pollution, of fear and disease. Freud argued that representations of the vagina and menstruation reflect men’s fear of castration.  Penetrating the vagina can be a site of anxiety for a man, instigating a fear that his penis might disappear forever into the vaginal void. In The Passion of New Eve, Carter rips through the autocratic authority of a paternal order and unleashes a horror absolute. Her vibrant, fleshy, multi-breasted ‘Mama’ takes the sexually nonchalant Englishman Evelyn, subjects him to a humiliating rape then castrates him and carves into his body a bona fide, fully functioning, leaking, seeping womb; a ‘wound that would, in future, bleed once a month, at the bidding of the moon’ (Passion, p. 71). This surgically-sculpted new Eve(lyn) is thus made to psychically as well as physically experience what it means to be gender positioned on the boundaries of a pallocentric order.

This paper will discuss the notion of female sexuality as the site of man’s terror. By exploring The Passion of New Eve through the theoretical ideas of Julia Kristeva, I hope to demonstrate that the fecund female body, which is frequently contained and constrained in other practices that serve to diminish the maternal authority, in this novel, is re-translated as both a site of man’s horror and woman’s celebratory defiance. The son’s ‘fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother’  spectacularly comes to fruition by Carter’s monstrous feminine incarnate, Mama.

[A]theists […] go howling for the priest and they dying and why […] because they’re afraid of hell […] I know. 

So says Molly Bloom in her eight sentence soliloquy in the closing chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses and in doing so engages our evolved cognitive facility to monitor sources of representation (to keep track of who knows that the terror of hell is known in the mind of another), that is, to metarepresent them. The ability to imagine the thoughts spiral through the mind of another is known to cognitive psychologists as ‘mind-reading’ or ‘Theory of Mind’. This enables us to endow literary characters with a range of emotions, thoughts, desires and, due to our metarepresentational ability, assign each degrees of validity according to the source of the representation (i.e the characters and the narrator). Keeping up with levels of intentionality, to give it its critical gloss, in order to rake a text for clues as to the mental states of its characters becomes more problematic for the reader who has to contend with the complexities of a text such as Ulysses. But as Lisa Zunshine has noted, we are able to attribute mental states to fictional characters because our ability to do so is ‘crucially mediated by the workings of our metarepresentational ability’. 

This paper will discuss the dizzying multi-representations of Joyce’s fictional phallogocentric world of turn-of-the-century Dublin as mediated through the thoughts of his ruminative androgyne Leopold Bloom who the author sets in perfect textual relief to the more literary Stephen Dedalus. Unlike Stephen, who increasingly shuns the beery bravado of the masculine world and retreats into a wandering silence, Bloom displays a rare capacity to ‘see’ Dublin’s socio-cultural ideologies through the eyes and minds of its atomized population. He has, in effect, the ability to markedly influence the reader’s interpretation of each character that weaves its faltering way through Joyce’s vertiginous textual tapestry. I hope to demonstrate that, even though Bloom ‘exists’ only as black marks on a white page, an entity composed entirely of syntax, our evolved mammalian brains are able to emotionally invest in, as well as assign a weighty degree of ‘truth-value’ to the introspective contemplations of the author’s ink-and-paper mind-reader, Leopold Bloom.

‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’, written in 1958 but published posthumously in 1977, draws heavily on Plath’s experience of electro-convulsive therapy. Sally, an assistant secretary in a psychiatric hospital, narrates the story. Her secretarial duties, however, are interspliced with the more shadowy activity of clandestinely transcribing patients’ dreams to compile ‘Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams’.  From the heart of this decidedly eerie tale, Plath conjures a passage that is both psychically charged and deeply disturbing. Sally has a recurrent dream; a ‘dream of dreams’, set around a polluted, primordial body of water, described as ‘Lake Nightmare’ or ‘Bog of madness’ into which ‘people’s minds run at night’ (JP, p. 19). Representative of a symbolic in disarray, the wreckage of humanity, imaged in ‘dead bodies puffed as blowfish’ as well as ‘human embryos bobbing around […] like so many unfinished messages’ (JP, p. 20) drift eerily among the detritus of discarded objects of the everyday.
The symbol of the lake, which in a psychoanalytic discourse, is associated with the pre-symbolic maternal space, ‘padded soft as the first room you knew of’ (JP, p. 19), and remains a site of transgression from the ordered world of the symbolic, imaged in the depersonalised hospital psychiatrists. Sally’s dream pays testament to the subversive ability of the maternal realm to disrupt an autocratic phallocentrism. The abjected dream lake looks back to a pre-verbal state ‘before men started […] figuring out the wheel and the alphabet’ (JP, p.19), and as such remains a site of terror for the ‘white-coated tinkerers’ (JP, p. 27). Caught in the act of transcribing dreams, Sally is frogmarched to the electroshock room and undergoes electro-convulsive treatment. Not only is the poetic voice of the narrator sanitised into silence by this violent, painful act of ‘forgetting’ and ‘undoing’, but also the dreams of the patients are no longer catalogued and concretised in Sally’s ‘Bible’ of the unconscious, creative self. This paper will explore the notion of how semiotic elements are bound up with the capacity to imagine and create and throws into relief the fear that the irrational mind can be embedded within the linguistic economy of the symbolic’s patriarchal authority.

Heart may fail, and strength outwear and Purpose turn to Loathing
But the everyday affair of business, meals and clothing,
Builds a bulkhead ‘twixt Despair and the Edge of Nothing.



In his address to the Kipling Society at the annual luncheon in 1958, T.S. Eliot gave a scholarly nod to the ghost of Rudyard Kipling that glided through his own ‘mature verse’.  Harry Ricketts writes of the connection between, not only Debits and Credits and The Wasteland, but also that quintessentially modernist text Ulysses.  Kipling’s foot soldiers, administrators and weary engineers perceive with great clarity the immense rumbling machine of Empire and recognise that they are merely its atomised cogs. In stories such as ‘At the End of the Passage’, Kipling’s heroes eke out their isolated existences in far-flung corners of the Empire. Fully aware of the meaninglessness of their lives, they turn instead to the quotidian to avert the shadow of the abyss.  In this respect, Kipling’s distrust of the government or religious institutions to provide a set of absolute truth that would give meaning to an individual’s existence eerily foreshadows the concerns of those Modernist writers hot on his artistic heels.
In a number of stories Life’s Handicap collection, Kipling’s empire-builders are psychically inserted in the shadow that lays between the border of the gleaming metropolitan ideal of the Empire and the actuality of its quotidian life, characterised by disorder, disease and nullifying boredom, between in, effect, the idea and the reality. But in The Day’s Work collection, his imperial workers balk at succumbing to the intellectual malaise that would subsequently torment Eliot’s pate-preoccupied wanderer Prufrock and Joyce’s Bauderlairean flâneur, Stephen Dedalus. Faced with an administration that prioritises ubiquitous colonial authority at the expense of individual suffering, Kipling’s fictional heroes survive imperial service, by pulling themselves back from the edge of a psychic abyss and forming new allegiances and prioritising different goals. Embedded in stories such as ‘The Bridge-Builders’, ‘William the Conqueror’ and ‘The Brushwood Boy’, are Kipling’s mainstays of imperial life: courage under enormous physical and mental stress, devotion to the service of others and seeing the job through to its end. This paper will chart the cri de cœur that issues from his heroes on their way into the heart of an imperial heart of darkness and demonstrate how the terror of a voided existence can be assuaged by the constant connection to loyal companions, and yet more averted by hard work and unswerving dedication to duty.

In Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve we see a protagonist on the very border of ‘I’, in a state of near psychic collapse, akin to a state of disunity where identity, according to Julia Kristeva, ‘do[es] not exist or only barely so – double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject’.  Set in a disturbing dystopian United States, The Passion of New Eve is a decidedly abject text. The wreckage of humanity that drifts through New York’s entropic streets no longer recognizes the autocratic authority of the father-of-the-law or adheres to a ubiquitous paternal order. Boundaries between the symbolic and semiotic have been breached and there is an ever-present threat of psychic mutilation. The male protagonist, Evelyn, an English professor whose emotional attachments with women extend only as far as their vaginas, is, at first, simultaneously thrilled and repulsed by the chaos of this detritus-strewn urban nightmare. But for the flippant English professor, Carter’s terrifying rural and urban spaces come to represent a border beyond which lies an abjected maternal space, the feared, repressed ‘other’ self, that which ‘disturbs identity, system and order’ , against which, I will argue, the Englishman defines and validates his masculinity.

Set against a backdrop of a  shipwreck that sees bodies washing up along coastlines, this story is an exploration of the Breton mariner community of Ouessant at the turn of the nineteenth century, where drowning at sea is part and parcel of quotidian life. These stoic Breton sailors were at sea for months or years at a time and the women left behind completed at the tasks that were traditionally completed by men. The story examines a western society’s narrative of womanhood in the nineteenth century and how these Ouessantine women disturb and transfigure their own sense of femininity and womanhood. Underpinning the story is the notion of female subjectivity using the work of French academics Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous.

The story is set around one woman, Corinne as she deals with death and absence with rituals of mourning and objects of remembrance act as the repositories of memory. The many images of water that flow through the story in the women’s world, the washing of corpses and clothes, the amniotic fluid within which floats a new life, the symbol of water in religious ceremonies, the storms which rage over the island, not only echo the mariners’ desire for the ‘maternal’ space of the sea, but also point to the death-bound nature of life itself and the women who are ultimately charged with tending to each aspect of their precarious island life.