<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Translation has been essential to the development of languages and cultures throughout the centuries, particularly in the early modern period when it became a cornerstone of the process of transition from Latin to vernacular productions, in such countries as France, Italy, England and Spain. This process was accompanied by a growing interest in defining the rules and features of the practice of translation. The present article aims to examine the principles that underlay the highly intertextual early modern translation theory by considering its classical sources and development. It focuses on subjects that were constantly reiterated in any discussion about translation: the debate concerning the best methods of translation, the sense-for-sense/ word-for-word dichotomy - a topos that can be traced to the discourse on translation initiated by Cicero and Horace and was further developed by the Church fathers, notably St. Jerome, and eventually inherited by both medieval and Renaissance translators. Furthermore, it looks at the differences and continuities that characterise the medieval and Renaissance discourses on translation with a focus on the transition from the medieval, free manner of translation to the humanist, philological one.</abstract>

“De interpretatione recta...”: Early Modern Theories of Translation

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This essay measures the extent to which gift-giving fails in an economy of reciprocity. Reading James Joyce’s story “A Mother” in terms of Derrida’s notion of the gift as “absolute loss,” I consider the implications of an economy of loss for Joyce’s notion of sacrifice. Thus, I argue that the absence of an economy of sacrifice integrating “absolute loss” engenders the zero-sum game at the heart of Dubliners. I depart from other readings of the short story in the context of an economy based on the ideal of balanced reciprocity, since these versions deny the pure gratuity of gift in its connotations of sacrifice and loss. While such theories form a good starting point for analyzing the “moral economy” of Dubliners, they tend to overlook the fact that the only means to counteract the paralysis resulting from reciprocity is through the suspension of the economy of exchange.</abstract>

“Talk of contracts”: Gift-giving vs. Reciprocity in James Joyce’s “A Mother”

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article, which brings together film, psychoanalysis, literature, and art, focuses on the role of paintings in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993). Scorsese conveys the imprisonment of New York aristocrats within the framework of social conventions and their evasions of social restrictions through his employment of paintings. Because the protagonists’ emotions are not revealed often, the director communicates their dramas and actions with the help of the paintings they own or appear next to. The paintings operate as Jacques Lacan’s Other, an entity that watches over the characters to make sure they conform to its selfperpetuating rules. Scorsese’s use of paintings shows that the characters perform for the Other and seek to maintain the status quo. While most characters perform within a Lacanian symbolic order, their different responses to a variety of paintings underscore the flexibility of the symbolic order.</abstract>

Lacan Frames Scorsese’s Paintings in The Age of Innocence

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Masculinity as a notion encompasses a number of identities, including psychic and social ones. During the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, masculinity as a construct underwent many changes, which affected notions of work, property ownership, sexuality, as well as power struggle with men-rivals and women. The concept of ‘manliness’ became a new moral code as well as a social imperative. Embracing this ideal was a challenging and testing experience for many men as they negotiated power, privilege and status in both the private and the public spheres of life. The Edwardian age, a transitional time in British history, became preoccupied with the consequences of the Boer Wars, gender formation, imperial policy, economic changes and many other factors. This article explores the paradigms of English masculinity and the construction of male identity as a cultural signifier in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and its Russian film adaptation by Igor Maslennikov. Doyle contextualizes multiple facets of masculinity from the normative to the transgressive, from the private to the public, as well as from the effeminate to the manly as his characters are affected by the anxieties and tensions of their society. After an in-depth analysis of manhood in the novel, the focus of the article shifts to Maslennikov’s adaptation and its cinematic use of the literary text, as the film interrogates masculine codes of behavior, relationships with women and the male power struggle represented in the novel. The film becomes a visual interpretation and a powerful enhancement of the narrative’s tensions and concerns.</abstract>

Seeing the Novel, Reading the Film: Unveiling Masculinity, Englishness and Power Struggle in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article deals with the dramatic art of stand-up comedy. It locates Arab American stand-up comedy within a broader American humorous tradition and investigates the way Arab American performers use this art to negotiate and (re)construct their identity. The main question in this article is the way Arab American stand-up comedians define their relationship to the Arab and the western worlds in the process of establishing their Arab American identity. Three humor theories - the relief theory, the incongruity theory, and the superiority theory - are deployed in the study to examine the representation of Arabness in selected Arab American performances. The study argues that Arab American comics minstrelize their own diasporic origin through reinscribing a range of orientalizing practices in order to claim their Americanness.</abstract>

Performing Arabness in Arab American Stand-up Comedy

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Starting from the presupposition that art and art criticism in the United States of America are closely linked and that the very meanings and receptions of art works have been reflected by various writings in the field of art criticism, this first part of a comprehensive study on the topic attempts, on the one hand, to divide the historical evolution of American fine arts and art criticism into several distinct periods, and on the other, to evaluate the major directions of art criticism by considering its historical periods as being markedly ideological or cultural, as the case may be. Thus, considering the approximately 150 years of historical accomplishments of art criticism in the United States, I will argue that the starting point of American art criticism is visibly cultural, while the next two periods are characterised by ideological art criticism, noting that the ideological orientation differs in the two time frames. The fourth moment in the evolution of art criticism marks the revival of the cultural, so that, within the fifth, the postmodern art criticism could no longer grasp a clear distinction between the cultural and the ideological. The present article will focus on the first two important orientations in art criticism in the United States, 1865-1900 and 1908-1940, respectively; a future study will consider the remaining three periods, following this historicist approach of art criticism in the United States.</abstract>

American Art Criticism between the Cultural and the Ideological (I)

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article examines how instruments have changed the Crown of Canada from 1867 through to the present, how this change has been effected, and the extent to which the Canadian Crown is distinct from the British Crown. The main part of this article focuses on the manner in which law, politics, and policy (both Canadian and non-Canadian) have evolved a British Imperial institution since the process by which the federal Dominion of Canada was formed nearly 150 years ago through to a nation uniquely Canadian as it exists today. The evolution of the Canadian Crown has taken place through approximately fifteen discrete events since the time of Canadian confederation on July 1, 1867. These fifteen events are loosely categorized into three discrete periods: The Imperial Crown (1867-1930), A Shared Crown (1931-1981), and The Canadian Crown (1982-present).</abstract>

Canada’s Evolving Crown: From a British Crown to a “Crown of Maples”

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 41 (2023): Issue 1 (December 2023)

Volume 40 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 39 (2022): Issue 1 (December 2022)

Volume 38 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 37 (2021): Issue 1 (December 2021)

Volume 36 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 35 (2020): Issue 1 (December 2020)

Volume 34 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 33 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019)

Volume 32 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 31 (2018): Issue 1 (December 2018)

Volume 30 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 29 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017)

Volume 28 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 27 (2016): Issue 1 (December 2016)

Volume 26 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 25 (2015): Issue 1 (December 2015)

Volume 24 (2015): Issue 1 (June 2015)

Volume 23 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014)

Volume 22 (2014): Issue 1 (August 2014)

Volume 21 (2014): Issue 1 (January 2014)

Volume 20 (2013): Issue 1 (June 2013)

Volume 19 (2012): Issue 2012 (December 2012)

American, British and Canadian Studies

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  Founded in 1999 as the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, American, British and Canadian Studies is currently published biannually by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, under the aegis of the Research Centre for Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at LBUS and the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. It is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone Studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 