This article exemplifies an action research-based approach for addressing conversation skills in an EFL setting. In many EFL contexts, especially those where English is a required subject, getting students to speak can be a challenge. In 2011, at a private Japanese university, a year-long action research project was conducted to help 160 first-year students taking mandatory English classes spea…

The lay eulogy, given by a friend, colleague or relative of the deceased, was a new element in French religious funerals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, emerging indirectly from a wider programme of post-Revolutionary funerary reforms. The innovation attracted criticism from a range of political viewpoints, for offending against the virtues of truth, equality and good taste, or usur…

as the French cotton industry expanded during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the desire to create a secure source of material inspired several concerted efforts to promote the cultivation of cotton in Mediterranean France. these projects drew upon longstanding French links to cotton production along the shores of the ‘middle sea’, presenting a sharp contrast to the increasin…

This article considers the potential benefits of taking a ‘backwards’ approach to writing Roland Barthes’s life. To write a person ’s life‘forwards’ risks privileging, teleologically and deterministically, the end of their life and career over all those earlier stages that led (up) to the finality of mortality – to the point that the ‘end’ comes to explain, colour and over-det…

Sarah Bowdich’s story‘The Booroom Slave’ has elicited little critical attention except in recent studies mainly investigating the black and white lithograph that accompanied its first publication in the Forget Me Not Gift Book in 1828. This article, however, focuses specifically on the text as an important tale of travel enhanced by its various strategic retellings. In the ‘Booroom Slav…

This article examines the role of family structures in the representation of RAF terrorism in contemporary German-language theatre and literature by comparing Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006) and Bernhard Schlink’s Das Wochenende (2008). In the case of Jelinek’s play, we explore its sources (both in Schiller’s eponymous tragedy and in popular discourses on terrorist chic) i…

In the middle of the 18 th century in Europe,‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘citizen of the world’ suddenly appears on the title pages of several literary works. What characterizes the cosmopolitan? And why does the term emerge at this particular moment in literary history? This article sets out to reveal the history of how ‘cosmopolitan’ is appropriated in French by tracing the origins and sema…

This article analyses three novels based on Richard Savage, the scapegrace eighteenth-century poet immortalized in Samuel Johnson’s first major biography. Charles Whitehead’s Richard Savage: A Romance of Real Life (1909–42), Stanley V. Makower’s Richard Savage: A Mystery in Biography (1935), and Gwyn Jones’s Richard Savage (1744) each engage with ethical and formal problems posed by J…

This article examines the problem of labour in the late eigh teenth-century French colonial world through are ading of three archived colonial projects from the 1780s and 90s, none of which ever came to fruition. The first proposed are settlement of a group of gypsies from the Black Forest to French Guiana, subsequently the most notorious penal settlement in French history. The second suggested…

This article argues that Pietro Chiari’s La filosofessa italiana (1753), regarded as the first modern Italian novel, constitutes a project of appropriation of French and British novelistic models. Pietro Chiari is seen manoeuvring his text in a field of conflicting interests, between a readership that seems insatiable for foreign novels, and a cultural élite hostile towards the genre as well…