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Character Types (character + type)
Selected AbstractsRhotacization and the ,Beijing Smooth Operator': The social meaning of a linguistic variable1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2008Qing Zhang Recent sociolinguistic studies on style have focused much attention on the construction of social meaning in situated discursive practices. Despite a general recognition that the linguistic resources used are often already imbued with social meanings, little research has been done on what these meanings may be. Focusing on rhotacization, a sociolinguistic variable in Beijing Mandarin, this article explores its imbued social meanings and sociocultural associations. I demonstrate that rhotacization takes on semiotic saliency through co-occurrence with key Beijing cultural terms and frequent use in written representations of authentic Beijing-ness. Furthermore, this feature is associated with the ,Beijing Smooth Operator,' a salient male local character type, and is ideologically construed as reflecting its characterological attributes. The findings of this study shed light on the meaning potential of a linguistic variable, rhotacization in this case, which can enhance understanding of the possibilities and constraints for its use and meaning in new contexts. [source] Going Dutch in London City Comedy: Economies of Sexual and Sacred Exchange in John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605)ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 1 2010Marjorie Rubright Conventional approaches to London city comedy have explored the genre's dependence upon character types. Through a consideration of the ways in which English and Dutch ethnicity is represented in city comedy, this essay reveals that a critical and methodological revision is necessary. In John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan and Thomas Middleton's The Family of Love, puns and double entendres vivify characterizations of Dutchness and Englishness as unstable and problematically proximate. What emerges is a study of the chiastic interplay of differences and similarities that constitute Englishness and Dutchness in London city comedy. I argue that across the Anglo-Dutch relation identity was more of an analogous phenomenon than a digital one. In tracing how English-identified characters "go Dutch," this essay argues that city comedy was actively exploring and keeping in play the fluidity of signifiers of ethnic difference, especially language, diet, and religious belief. (M.R.) [source] Sophia Lee and the Genre SérieuxJOURNAL FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES, Issue 1 2010PETER HYNES Abstract This article measures the influence of Denis Diderot's theory of the genre sérieux on English drama of the later eighteenth century, using Sophia Lee's The Chapter of Accidents as its principal test case. It concludes that, while Lee borrowed extensively for plot devices and character types, she did not adopt many of the innovations that in Diderot's view constituted the heart of his programme of reform. A number of reasons for this neglect are suggested, foremost among them the practical demands of English stage production in the 1780s. [source] Female Characters on the Jacobean Stage Defying Type: When is a Shrew Not a Shrew?LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2007Anna Kamaralli This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Seventeenth Century Section. Within the dramatic conventions of the Jacobean period one of the stock female character types that would have been familiar to the audience was the shrew: a woman, usually a wife, who is outspoken and argumentative. This article examines two plays written early in the seventeenth century, John Webster's The White Devil and William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and considers their presentation of female characters who manifest behaviour that might be considered shrewish. It argues that the plays contain passages that frame a sophisticated attack on such misogynist classifications of the female. The characters in question do more than fail to be confined by the traditionally limited female types, they seem to deliberately call into question the existence of such types, and highlight their nature as artificially constructed and imposed, and inadequate to define the possibilities of womanhood. Both plays challenge the convention that silence in a woman should be equated with virtue by presenting situations where a woman's virtue demands that she speak. More particularly, they both mock the conventional Jacobean typing of shrewishness, the former by presenting good-wife-as-shrew, the latter by presenting shrew-as-oracle. [source] | ||||||||||