Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2013 vol. 48.4

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    (Breaking) the law: Social control, self-help and violence in "The Tale of Gamelyn"
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2013) Ludwikowska, Joanna
    Fourteenth century England experienced social changes which influenced the attitude to crown law and triggered a growing distrust to law and its representatives. The progressing development of the gentry complicated the defining of offences, and diversified the means of punishing them. The Tale of Gamelyn presents a conflict between two brothers, sons of a knight, which went beyond the confinements of the household, transforming itself into a conflict between law and justice. Their feud is a cross-complaint concerning land, which soon turns into a spiral of violence in which one brother uses law to control and punish, and the other uses crime and violence to achieve justice. Using Donald Black’s theory of the sociological geometry of violence (2004) and of crime as social control (1983), this article will analyze the law in the tale as a tool of social control represented by Johan, and justice acquired with the use of self-help by Gamelyn. The article will attempt to prove that the story presents a complex relation between justice and law pinned across the varied spectrum of social classes, which Gamelyn changes a number of times, and will argue that the tale is an affirmation of violence as an underlying force of both law and justice, differing in presentation and realization according to social class.
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    “Much, I am sure, depends on you”: James Fordyce’s lessons on female happiness and perfection
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2013) Bronk, Katarzyna
    Conduct literature written for women has had a long tradition in British culture. According to scholars, such as Ingrid H. Tague (2002), it circulated most widely during the eighteenth century because new ideals of proper feminine behaviour and conduct developed. The Scottish Presbyterian minister and poet, James Fordyce (1720-1796), very observant of the transformations in his society as well as advocating the need to reform moral manners, likewise created a set of sermons dedicated to young women of the second half of the eighteenth century. He is worthy of close study not only because his Sermons to Young Women constitute an important yet understudied contribution to the tradition of conduct writing, but also because he records and disseminates opinions on female perfection both as a man of the church as well as the representative of his sex, thus presenting a broad scope of the official gender ideology of the eighteenth century. The proposed article engages in a close reading of Fordyce's rules and regulations pertaining to proper femininity, pointing also to the tone of his published sermon-manual and the socio-techniques used for the sake of perpetuating his ideological precepts for women. As such, the article is to prove that this popular eighteenth-century preacher, whose work was even mentioned on the pages of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not only offers a significant contribution to ongoing research on conduct manual tradition as well as on feminist re-readings of women’s history, but also adds more evidence to feminist claims of a purposeful campaign aimed at creating a selfaware and self-vigilant woman who almost consciously strives to become the object of masculine desire, and allegedly all for her own good.
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    Early Old English nominal system: Synchronic declensions in the "Vespasian Psalter"
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2013) Kolasińska, Paulina
    The study analyzes the Early Old English nominal system from a synchronic perspective, since a diachronic approach is unable to provide an accurate description of the language. The analysis is based on the full text of the Vespasian Psalter interlinear gloss. The nouns were grouped according to their inflectional endings, thus representing the synchronically functioning nominal system of Early Old English, contrary to the traditional, diachronic classification, which uses reconstructed stems to classify nouns. The Vespasian Psalter model is compared and contrasted with the latest ‘classical’ work on Old English, Hogg and Fulk’s A Grammar of Old English. Volume 2: Morphology (2011), which also aims at presenting Old English from a synchronic perspective.
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    Modals, speech acts and (im)politeness: Interactions in Shakespeare’s plays
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2013) Nakayasu, Minako
    This paper accounts for how modals are interrelated with speech acts and (im)politeness, to offer a new perspective to the interactions in Shakespeare’s plays. A variety of strategies to save or attack the hearer’s positive or negative face are taken into account within the frameworks of Brown & Levinson (1987) and Culpeper (1996), and the interplay between these strategies is observed in relation to the modals. Furthermore, this study analyses how speech acts performed with the aid of modals are associated with (im)politeness strategies, based on the inventory of speech acts proposed by Nakayasu (2009). It has been shown that there are more strategies to save or attack the hearer’s positive face in Shakespeare which are employed with the use of modals. The analysis reinforces the proposal by Kopytko (1993, 1995) that social interactions in Shakespeare’s time were positive politenessoriented, going further to extend the analysis to impoliteness, and suggests the interrelated nature of modality, speech acts and (im)politeness.