Abstract Charles II was a figure of controversy during his reign and continues to be one of the most iconic and well-known British monarchs; the portrayals of this King vary significantly from one author to the other and from one period to the next, but they invariably focus on his penchant for frivolity and his sexual liaisons. One of his favourite royal mistresses is Nell Gwyn, the oyster girl, turned orange seller, turned actress, turned mother of Dukes. The figure of ‘pretty, witty’ Nelly has fascinated biographers, filmmakers and novelists for centuries due to its Cinderella-like undertones and the natural fascination that the first female performers have exerted on the public imagination. This paper studies modern rewritings of Charles’s and Nell’s affair and of the two lovers themselves, to trace the attitudes towards the King’s illicit affair and towards the actress’s social climbing. The aim of this paper is to question the motivations for these re-imaginings and to help discover the reasons why the monarch and his “Protestant Whore”The name comes, legend has it, from Nell Gwyn herself and is an anecdote that has been recounted innumerable times. Granger explains that “the story [...] is a known fact; as is also that of her being insulted in her coach at Oxford, by the mob, who mistook her for the duchess of Portsmouth. Upon which she looked out of the window, and said, with her usual good humour, Pray, good people, be civil: I am the protestant whore. This laconic speech drew upon her the blessings of the populace, who suffered her to proceed without further molestation” (Granger 2010: 429).have become the focus of such varied re-writings and two of the most prominent characters of the British public imagination, surpassing the boundaries of their professions, to become part of popular culture.

Abstract Jane Eyre never-endingly mesmerizes readers and scholars alike thanks to its fairy-tale echoes, but Charlotte Brontë also wrote this novel as a tale of her own myth-making about two fairies: Jane and Edward Rochester, because only fairylands of fantasy and daydreaming might empower an unprotected woman in Victorian times. This article explores Jane Eyre’s life journey and life-writing as if she were a fairy. She begins as a changeling child who torments malevolent adults and consoles herself in fairy tales. When Jane becomes a woman, whose fairy wings of rebelliousness and freedom cannot be torn by social rules or by any mortal, she is eventually crowned by her fairy godmother – Charlotte Brontë – with the diadem of love and gender equality as Titania, a queen in her own right, who chooses to marry her Oberon: Rochester.

Abstract This paper is a linguistic study of the copy of the Prick of Conscience in Oxford, St John’s College, 57 (SJC). The principal aim is to determine the provenance of the text’s scribal language. SJC was made by a professional scribe, also responsible for copying other popular contemporary works. These include manuscripts of the prose Brut Chronicle, some of the stories of the Canterbury Tales and the unique Tale of Beryn in Alnwick Castle, Duke of Northumberland, 455, the source of the designation of this scribe as the ‘Beryn Scribe’. In LALME, only the language of the last-mentioned of this scribe’s productions was analysed, and localised to South Essex. It has been assumed that the Essex localisation of Alnwick Castle 455 is valid for all this scribe’s texts, including SJC, and that he was a ‘consistent translator’ into his own scribal dialect. Nevertheless, the language of SJC shows features whose distributions are not characteristic of Essex. The original Prick of Conscience was composed in Northern Middle English. The retention of a deal of Northern features in SJC casts doubt on the idea of its scribe as a ‘consistent translator’. The exemplar used by the SJC scribe is unknown and was not necessarily written in the same variety as the original. Still, some information about it can be gleaned by comparing SJC’s language with those of four other manuscripts to which it is closely related within the stemma of the Prick of Conscience.

Abstract Jewish jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography Really the Blues (1946), co-written with Bernard Wolfe, has received some critical attention to date, most of which concerns the book’s depiction of white-to-black passing, its display and discussion of jive, and its construction of the white Jewish hipster as a countercultural figure in postwar America. Building on existing studies, this essay revisits these themes in order to foreground two largely unacknowledged aspects: a) the book’s encapsulation of Whitmanesque “American multitudes”, i. e., its attempt to reflect the internal diversity and multiplicity of U. S. culture, which complicates the autobiography’s frequent compression of the black-white-Jewish triad into a more convenient black-white binary; b) and its significance as one of the earliest extended postwar American Jewish reflections on World War II and the atrocities of Nazi Germany. All of these elements – the passing narrative, the promotion of the hipster ethic, the linguistics of jive, the encapsulation of multiplicity, and the immediate postwar context – must be considered together in order to unravel the autobiography’s investigation of, and simultaneous complicity in, the racial paradoxes that continue to haunt color-conscious America.