Beyond the stereotypes: Mary Lavin's Irish women

This paper discusses Mary Lavin's place within the Irish literary tradition by means of an analysis of her representations of female characters. It argues, first, that Lavin's short stories depart from the short story tradition in general and the Irish short story tradition in particular by failing to subscribe to the cultivation of the romantic outsider and focusing instead on family relations and social responsibilities. Second, Mary Lavin's marginal position in a feminist or female literary tradition is explained through her unwillingness to portray women as victims and through the absence of a clear critique of patriarchy in her work. The paper then tries to characterise the relationship between individual and society in Lavin's short fiction in a more positive way, by focusing on the notions of individual fate and personal responsibility, which turn out to be crucial to Mary Lavin's philosophy. This philosophy is first discussed explicitly in a reading of the story ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Widow's Son’ and subsequently shown to lie behind the oppositions and dilemmas in several other stories. Finally, the article demonstrates how Lavin manages to realise her Nietzschean belief in an Amor Fati in some of her most positive female characters through a clever use of imagery and point of view, without thereby succumbing to sentimentality or cliché.     

A Byzantine hagiographical parody: Life of Mary the Younger

Abstract

In this paper, it is argued that The Life of Mary the Younger, an anonymous Byzantine text of the eleventh century, has a conscious intertextual dialogue with the oldest Byzantine Life venerating a holy woman, the Life of Macrina written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, between 380 and 383. The intertextual relation between these two female Lives takes the form of parody. Following Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody, this article shows how the anonymous hagiographer of Mary reworks Gregory's authoritative text to create a new work, a parody in terms of postmodern literary criticism, whose aim was to criticise old and contemporary customs, conventions and ideologies. In other words, the present article approaches and decodes the literariness, the function and ideology of Mary's Life in the light of Macrina's Life.     

四月的MICE——摩纳哥的袖珍富贵风

水边崖上的小小公国,雪地山谷的钟表佳人。摩纳哥港,停满了全世界的超豪华游轮;瑞士钟表谷,制造着全世界的超豪华钟表。这个因博彩业而生的袖珍小国,如今已成为地中海的名流场;相信来到这里的名流们,很多会戴上瑞士制造的豪华表。     

Mary McLeod Bethune's Feminism: Black Women as Citizens of the World

This article focuses on the particular moment of the 1945 United Nations charter meeting as a catalyst for a shift in Mary McLeod Bethune's feminist thought. The meeting, where Bethune served as the only African American female delegate, signalled a change in Bethune's thinking about equality for black women, so she used the founding of the United Nations as a platform to promote black women's alliances with other women of colour. Her idea was to reframe black women as citizens of the world, thus putting them in a numerical and ideological majority rather than keeping them in a minority position. Bethune has often been viewed as a reformer of race and gender issues in the early twentieth century, but a focus on her activism has hidden the intellectual contributions that she made to a form of black feminism that emerged out of her work with other clubwomen and through the United Nations in the 1920s through the 1950s. Specifically, this article argues that Bethune's intellectual work created a framework for African American women's feminism that emphasised anti-colonialism and their global alliance with other women of colour throughout the world.     

首届中国地方志年鉴奖获奖名单

综合奖一、特等奖　省级年鉴江苏年鉴 (2 0 0 4)上海年鉴 (2 0 0 3 )吉林年鉴 (2 0 0 4)湖北年鉴 (2 0 0 4)湖南年鉴 (2 0 0 4)　地市级年鉴温州年鉴 (2 0 0 4)武汉年鉴 (2 0 0 4)大连年鉴 (2 0 0 3 )西安年鉴 (2 0 0 3 )乌鲁木齐年鉴 (2 0 0 4)厦门年鉴 (2 0 0 4)杭州年鉴 (2