Introduction, Habib Ajroud; Murdering Mothers: Popular Representations of Women and Crime in Early Modern England, Sandra Clark; Selfhood and Otherness: Bicultural Women’s First Person Narratives Resolving Dualities of Self, Saloua Chérif Essayah; Masculinity in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Mark Lilly; Sexual Metaphors and Changing Models of Science and Rationality, Helen Haste; Revisionism and the Disruption of History in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Muhsin J. al-Musawi; The Significance of Dualities in the fiction of John Updike, Hassine Ben Azouna; Reflections (on Editing Writers’ Letters), Janet Fouli; Duality and Duplicity in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nessima Tarchouna; Flouting the Laws of Duality: Hybridity in Midnight’s Children, Faiçal Marrouki; Arthur and the True Psyco/path: Rewriting the Imaginary Indian in M. T. Kelly’s A Dream Like Mine; J. A. Wainwright; On When Locke’s “Mind Is Reduced to That Freedom in Which It Would Have Acted”: Shelley and the Principle of the “As-If”, Mohamed Lazhar Bouazzi; The Real and the Ideal: America and the Chartist Dream, Anne Murray; Two-Nation Conservatism, Mouhiba Ellouze; Sociolinguistic Dualities in Tunisia: Myth or Reality, Itesh Sachdev and Sarah Lawson.
ABSTRACT:
The present volume starts with feminist and gay views on duality. Sandra Clark goes back to anti-feminist attitudes in early modern England and shows how female violence disrupted the social order and how the punishment inflicted on women attempts to reinstate that order. Nonetheless, her study of the popular literature of the time elicits the emergence of a “female subject-position”, and the opening of a new space “for the expression of female subjectivity”. For her part, in a study of first-person narratives, Saloua Chérif explores the divided vision of bicultural women writers in the USA. In the last paper of this section, devoted to Brideshead Revisited, Mark Lilly deconstructs Evelyn Waugh’s complex relation to “homosociality”.
Helen Haste’s paper addresses the metaphorical dimension of the very notion of dualism. She voices the feminist position of a need to be liberated from dualism encouraged by developments in fuzzy logic and chaos theory.
Muhsin Musawi’s paper deals with the disruption of history in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Its object is to show how in these two novels “history is questioned, redrawn and discredited against a contextualized background of Creolization as diversity, Orientality or Africanity as displacement, and gender domination as Colonialist ”.
The Christian dualities structuring the work of John Updike are the concern of Hassine Ben Azouna’s paper. The paper asserts Updike’s “dualistic vision of the universe” through a host of elements in his work, and his view of the importance of crisis in preserving our humanity “in an increasingly inhuman, insignificant and vain world”.
Janet Fouli’s paper examines the predicament of the editor of letters, caught in the writer’s contradictory attitudes towards disclosure and dissimulation. The paper also points out another contradiction: that between the necessity for editors to remain invisible while enacting their very agency. Coming to terms with the ephemeral character of the editor’s work, Janet Fouli asserts that “truth can only be subjective”.
In her study of Heart of Darkness, Nessima Tarchouna sees Joseph Conrad as grappling with the “whisper of the wilderness” against the background of rampant imperialism, and comes to the conclusion that in this case duality looks very much like duplicity.
Faiçal Marrouki shows how, against the customary wishes of politicians, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children sets about flouting the laws of duality that govern the power relations established by the imperialist order. Symbolising the whole process, the number one thousand and one stands out as that which triggers off the magic dimension, thus disrupting logical binarism.
Defiance of “stereotypical constructions of Native peoples” makes up the object of J.A. Wainwright’s paper on M.T. Kelly’s A Dream Like Mine, while Lazhar Bouazzi’s paper offers a new reading of the Romantic concept of representation.
The last section of this volume deals with history and linguistics. While Mouhiba Ellouze looks at Thatcher’s legacy in Britain as a reincarnation of Disraeli’s two nations, Anne Murray addresses the Chartists’ stubborn dream of democracy in America. Anne Murray points out that the Chartists were fully aware that the application of their principles in America did not produce “general prosperity but racism and conquest.” Asking whether the Chartists were not informed about the results of American ‘democracy’ for the continent, she asserts that [t]hey knew...[a]nd ...did not care.” Itesh Sachdev and Sarah Lawson explore the thorny issue of the linguistic situation in Tunisia. Their findings suggest that in Tunisia a linguistic duality favouring English over Arabic may be superseding the older duality favouring Arabic over French.
