English and American Studies

The aim of this article is to explore the parallels between two late-nineteenth-century utopias,William Henry Hudsons A Crystal Age (1882) and William Morriss News from Nowhere (1891). Itaims to explore how these two works respond to the transition from a kinetic to a static conception ofutopia that under pressure from evolutionary and feminist discourses took place during the period.Particular focus lies on the way in which this is negotiated through the depiction of evolution, sexuality,and gender roles in the respective novels, and how the depiction of these disruptive elements may workas a means of ensuring the readers active engagement in political, intellectual and emotional terms.

The aim of this article is to explore the parallels between two late-nineteenth-century utopias,William Henry Hudsons A Crystal Age (1882) and William Morriss News from Nowhere (1891). Itaims to explore how these two works respond to the transition from a kinetic to a static conception ofutopia that under pressure from evolutionary and feminist discourses took place during the period.Particular focus lies on the way in which this is negotiated through the depiction of evolution, sexuality,and gender roles in the respective novels, and how the depiction of these disruptive elements may workas a means of ensuring the readers active engagement in political, intellectual and emotional terms.

On 10 September 1928, Morduch Max Halsmann fell to his death while hiking in the Tyrolean Alps. Three months later, his son was convicted of patricide and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. What lay between these events was the beginning of one of Austria’s greatest judiciary scandals, frequently dubbed “the Austrian Drey­fus Affair”. The murder case against Philipp Halsmann has received a modicum of scholarly attention especially in the last two decades; however, there exists to date no full-length account of the trial in English, and no detailed account of the efforts undertaken to rehabilitate Philipp Halsmann in any language. This article strives to close this gap. Drawing on the files held at the Tyrolean County Archives (TCA) and the Austrian State Archives (AStA), Hermine Hupka’s privately held correspondence, contem­porary media coverage of the trial and contemporary as well as recent scholarly publications, it attempts to rectify certain long-standing misconceptions and t...

This paper focuses on Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006), one of the most detailed and outspoken depictions of Victorian sexuality in recent years, drawing an exaggerated picture of sexual deviance smouldering under a thin veneer of repressed respectability. Focusing on issues such as pornography, rape, child abuse, and the sexual liberation of women in a patriarchal society, it is, on one level, little more than a feminist attack on Victorian hypocrisy and on a social system which fostered an ideal of femininity that denied women access to meaningful economic occupations and sexual agency. On a second level, however, the novel can be read both as a commentary on contemporary debates, and as a critical revaluation of the validity of offloading such concerns onto the Victorians. Implicating its readers in voyeuristic enjoyment of Victorian perversion, The Journal of Dora Damage constitutes a self-consciously parodical interrogation of the feminist politics of neo-Vi...

On 10 September 1928, Morduch Max Halsmann fell to his death while hiking in the Tyrolean Alps. Three months later, his son was convicted of patricide and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. What lay between these events was the beginning of one of Austria’s greatest judiciary scandals, frequently dubbed “the Austrian Drey­fus Affair”. The murder case against Philipp Halsmann has received a modicum of scholarly attention especially in the last two decades; however, there exists to date no full-length account of the trial in English, and no detailed account of the efforts undertaken to rehabilitate Philipp Halsmann in any language. This article strives to close this gap. Drawing on the files held at the Tyrolean County Archives (TCA) and the Austrian State Archives (AStA), Hermine Hupka’s privately held correspondence, contem­porary media coverage of the trial and contemporary as well as recent scholarly publications, it attempts to rectify certain long-standing misconceptions and t...

This paper focuses on Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006), one of the most detailed and outspoken depictions of Victorian sexuality in recent years, drawing an exaggerated picture of sexual deviance smouldering under a thin veneer of repressed respectability. Focusing on issues such as pornography, rape, child abuse, and the sexual liberation of women in a patriarchal society, it is, on one level, little more than a feminist attack on Victorian hypocrisy and on a social system which fostered an ideal of femininity that denied women access to meaningful economic occupations and sexual agency. On a second level, however, the novel can be read both as a commentary on contemporary debates, and as a critical revaluation of the validity of offloading such concerns onto the Victorians. Implicating its readers in voyeuristic enjoyment of Victorian perversion, The Journal of Dora Damage constitutes a self-consciously parodical interrogation of the feminist politics of neo-Vi...

On 10 September 1928, Morduch Max Halsmann fell to his death while hiking in the Tyrolean Alps. Three months later, his son was convicted of patricide and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. What lay between these events was the beginning of one of Austria’s greatest judiciary scandals, frequently dubbed “the Austrian Drey­fus Affair”. The murder case against Philipp Halsmann has received a modicum of scholarly attention especially in the last two decades; however, there exists to date no full-length account of the trial in English, and no detailed account of the efforts undertaken to rehabilitate Philipp Halsmann in any language. This article strives to close this gap. Drawing on the files held at the Tyrolean County Archives (TCA) and the Austrian State Archives (AStA), Hermine Hupka’s privately held correspondence, contem­porary media coverage of the trial and contemporary as well as recent scholarly publications, it attempts to rectify certain long-standing misconceptions and t...

It is perhaps one of the least disputed points among neo-Victorian scholars that the twin practices of adaptation and appropriation lie at the heart of neo-Victorianism: Adaptation is a fundamental part of neo-Victorianism as a concept because all engagements with the Victorian in contemporary culture ... are necessarily adaptations or appropriations -be it of plots, characters, or intellectual concerns and cultural preoccupations. (Heilmann and Llewellyn, 2010, p. 244) Neo-Victorianists' interest in adaptation studies is evidenced by two special issues of the e-journal Neo-Victorian Studies (2.2; 5.2). In many cases (

This paper deals with the transfer of evolutionary game theory into the domain of historical linguistics. More specifically, it describes an attempt to account for the position of English word stress, which is not fully predictable on the basis of phonotactic and morpho-syntactic properties of individual words alone. Thus, _hotel_ is stressed on the last syllable and _lentil_ on the first, even though they are identical in terms of syllabic weight. The hypothesis we pursued was that word stress is not derived from word structure but from the rhythmic properties of utterances.

To test the idea, we modelled stress placement as a game where word types meet, choose possible stress patterns and get rewarded according to the quality of the rhythm they produce when uttered in sequence. Since we wanted to explain why English stress patterns can be variable, we hoped that our model would show that some word types do best, if they do not choose a single stress pattern all the time, but play a mixed strategy instead. As it turned out, the difficulties involved in capturing the complex realities of an actual language in terms of analytically manageable models were greater than expected, and we were forced to abstract and simplify radically. Nevertheless, our model did come up with some plausible and interesting predictions.

This contribution describes the problems which we faced and some of the strategies we developed for coping with them. On
a more general level, it attempts to show what can be gained and what is lost when one applies strict mathematical modelling methods to linguistic problems.

This chapter describes segmental and suprasegmental developments in Middle English phonology. It identifies major historical trends as well as the causalities behind them. Its focus on explanation also motivates a departure from the traditional order of presentation. Taking into account that rhythmic patterns are historically more stable than the properties of segments and impose strong constraints on their transmission, this chapter discusses Middle English word stress first, and explains how the integration of French loan words affected the system behind it. Next the rhythmic patterns are described which emerged from the expression of lexical stress and which constituted the environment for the phonetic realization of Middle English speech sounds. The final section describes developments in segmental phonology, both in unstressed and in stressed environments. An attempt is made to show how most of them can be understood as adaptive responses to rhythmic constraints on the phonetic realization of segments.

Forschungsrichtung, die sich der biologischen Entstehung der Sprachfähigkeit sowie der geschichtlichen Entwicklung einzelner menschlicher Sprachen aus evolutionstheoretischer Perspektive nähert. English lemma 3 evolutionary linguistics definition in English 4 an approach to the study of human language based on evolutionary theory and attempting to account both for the emergence of the language faculty and for the historical development of specific human languages. further explanations examples 5 0. Basics Evolutionary Linguistics is inspired by the Theory of Evolution. Going back to CHARLES DARWIN, the theory explains the existence of different biological species and their inheritable traits. Its core is simple: many phenotypic and behavioural traits of organisms are encoded in their genes. When organisms reproduce, copies of those genes are passed on to their offspring, which consequently develop corresponding traits. Since errors ('mutations') occur in the process, populations are normally characterised by genetic, phenotypic, and behavioural variation. At the same time, the phenotypic and behavioural traits for which gene variants code may either increase or decrease the chances of an organism to survive and reproduce (i.e. its 'fitness'). Since environmental resources sustain only a limited number of organisms, evolutionary theory predicts that gene variants with a positive effect on the reproductive success of their carriers will outnumber and oust ('be naturally selected over') their less advantageous competitors. Since the effect which a genetically determined trait has on the reproductive success of its carrier depends on environmental conditions, evolutionary theory also explains why species tend to diversify and to adapt to the ecological niches they inhabit. Thus, it accounts for both the diversity of life and the fact that living organisms appear purposefully designed to maximise the reproductive success of their genes.