Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal

Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal

Modern cultural, literary and linguistic perspectives

Issue 11 (2020/2)

Freeside Editorial Introduction

Stories connect people across societies: they weave their magic strands through time and space and bring to life eternal themes of the human condition. It is no surprise then that using stories as a focus can stimulate academic explorations in many ways. The articles of this issue of Freeside are drawn together by the common theme of stories through life and space. The theme is, however, approached from different perspectives and varying degrees of intensity.

 Four papers and a book review look at diverse stories in literature, ranging from Shakespeare's Macbeth, through an Irish tale (Óengus’ Dream) and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Fisherman and His Soul, a poem called A Midwinter Prayer by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom!, and the book review introduces us to Doreen Finn’s novel Night Swimming.

 The literary focus continues with an article on the translation of politeness strategies in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  Translation crosses a gap between languages and cultures, and this is further explored in the first article involving university students, whose knowledge of English and American cultural stories was probed. Students and university education are at the centre of the review of the book TED Talks Storytelling and its use in a course on presentation skills. The article on accents of English investigates the way in which speakers with one accent perceive speakers with the other accent. Languages differ across space but also across time, as the article on diachronic changes in absolute infinitive constructions in English illustrates. People, too, change across time and the article on Hungarian seniors investigates health ageing. Finally, the change in one person, Novak Djokovic, that correlates with his switch between using English and Serbian in interviews concentrates on how conceptual metaphor theory can help us to identify this.

With a selection like this, we trust that any reader will find at least one article, but perhaps several, of interest.

Contents:

ISSN 1786-7967

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