Papers by Wendy Nakanishi
The Journal of English Language and Literature, 2002
The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 2015
URBAN, DAVID V. ‘‘An Allusion to Luke 23:39 in Addison’s Cato,’’ N&Q, 60 (December 2013), 555... more URBAN, DAVID V. ‘‘An Allusion to Luke 23:39 in Addison’s Cato,’’ N&Q, 60 (December 2013), 555–556. As Caesar’s forces draw near, fellow senator Lucius says, ‘‘Cato, ’tis time thou save thyself and us.’’ Ignoring contextual subtleties, Mr. Urban sees an allusion to the thief on the cross’s reviling Christ, ‘‘save thyself and us,’’ perhaps in Addison’s mind from his work on Milton the previous year: in Paradise Regained Satan ‘‘tells the Son to turn stones to bread so that he can ‘save thy self and us relieve.’’’
The Journal of English Language and Literature, 1999
Candlin & Mynard ePublishing eBooks, Aug 1, 2020
Wendy Jones Nakanishi tells us the story of her path as a Western woman who came to rural Japan f... more Wendy Jones Nakanishi tells us the story of her path as a Western woman who came to rural Japan for a career in higher education and the benefits and challenges she faced there. She shares her experiences of living the life as an employed university worker, on the one hand, and as a woman in a male-dominated family, on the other.
English Studies, Aug 1, 1990
Transnational Literature, Oct 29, 2015
This paper proposes to compare and contrast two novels that take as their theme the reflections a... more This paper proposes to compare and contrast two novels that take as their theme the reflections and regrets of a lonely male protagonist. In the case of Bruno's Dream (1969), the main character is Bruno, a sick old man nearing death. In The Remains of the Day (1990), it is the butler Stevens who, preoccupied with his work, has always kept to himself and now discovers a longing to establish human contact with others. Bruno and Stevens are depicted as essentially alone. In the drama of life they are spectators rather than actors. They are 'insider outsiders.' Bruno inhabits a large household in London and Stevens heads the staff of an English country house, but both hold themselves aloof or apart from those around them. That the sense of alienation Bruno and Stevens experience is so acutely described may be attributed in part to the fact that they are the creation of authors who have acknowledged feelings of being 'insider outsiders' themselves: inhabiting England but not native to it. Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland and taken to England as a baby. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan but has lived in Britain since he was six years old. Whether or not they influenced each other as writers or on a more personal level, Murdoch and Ishiguro knew and respected each other's work. In an interview published in the Paris Review in the summer of 1990, Murdoch observed that she rarely read contemporary novelists but that she had enjoyed Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills. 1 Ishiguro, on the other hand, has claimed in a recent interview that as a budding novelist, he aspired to emulate Ian McEwan, with Murdoch along with William Golding and Doris Lessing representing 'the Establishment'. 2 In another interview, he described her as one of a tiny respected elite of writers that he hoped he might one day join. 3 Bruno's Dream is set in mid-century London and in a particular area of the city: the dwellings inhabited by the ill and dying Bruno and the other characters in the novel are located in a specific area bounded by Brompton Road cemetery and the Lots Road power station, with the former symbolising death and the latter, love, regarded by the writer as a form of energy. 4 The first section of The Remains of the Day is set in the summer of 1956 as Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall, a country house near Oxford, embarks on a six-day journey to Weymouth. It is framed as an autobiographical memoir composed by Stevens. In retailing the first-hand memories of this elderly servant, the action of Ishiguro's novel stretches back over four decades, with Stevens's reminiscences of his first beginning work at the Hall and incidents he witnessed and participated in there.
Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Mar 30, 1990
English Studies, Oct 1, 2010
PART ONE: CREATING A CULTURE OF LETTERS PART TWO: CREATING A CULTURE OF LITERACY PART THREE: FROM... more PART ONE: CREATING A CULTURE OF LETTERS PART TWO: CREATING A CULTURE OF LITERACY PART THREE: FROM LETTERS TO LITERATURE
Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Jan 31, 2005
... In The River Ki, it is Hana rather than her husband who checks their daughter's stru... more ... In The River Ki, it is Hana rather than her husband who checks their daughter's struggle for an independent life. ... Kirino and other such current bestselling female authors of detective fiction in Japan as Miyabe Miyuki, Nonami Asa, Shibata Yoshiki, and Matsuo Yumi can be seen ...
Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Oct 31, 2005
English Studies, Dec 1, 2011
English Studies, Dec 1, 2010
A Severed Head, published in 1961, by the Anglo-Irish author Iris Murdoch, has proved one of her ... more A Severed Head, published in 1961, by the Anglo-Irish author Iris Murdoch, has proved one of her most commercially successful works. One of its primary attractions is that it is about sex. With its themes of marriage, incest and adultery within a group of educated and civilised people dwelling in well-to-do areas of 1950s London, it has been said that A Severed Head anticipates the sexual revolution of a period subsequently dubbed the “Swinging Sixties”. But its roots lie even deeper. It is also possible to see Murdoch's novel as a modern reworking of the licentious Restoration sex comedies penned in the late seventeenth century by such writers as William Wycherley, Sir George Etherege and William Congreve. Murdoch is indebted, too, to Freud. While Freud and Schnitzler believe that man engages in sex because of his fear of death, for Murdoch, love can enlighten and elevate the individual, allowing him to transcend the selfish limitations of self. This possibility is also hinted at in such a Restoration co...
English Studies, Dec 1, 2013
The Bell has proven to be one of the most enduringly popular of Iris Murdoch's twenty-six nov... more The Bell has proven to be one of the most enduringly popular of Iris Murdoch's twenty-six novels. It was a critical and popular success from its first appearance in 1958, earning its author plaudits as the foremost writer of her age. This tale of a lay community housed in a country house beside an Anglican abbey is also one of the most apparently conventional of her works, taking place in a recognizable contemporary Gloucestershire that is peopled by a cast of recognizably human and fallible characters in search of salvation from worldly troubles. Beneath the apparently “ordinary” world depicted in The Bell, however, we find that it is a novel filled with doubles that often form contrastive pairs, representing a world of opposites, of duality. The superficial or the “apparent” is often different from “reality,” the secular life contrasts with the sacred, hatred is opposed to love, the unconscious mind knows truths that the conscious mind either is unaware of or is reluctant to admit, and the agonies of th...
English Studies, Feb 1, 2013
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Papers by Wendy Nakanishi