Max Saunders notes ‘the ethical intricacy and subtlety’ of Parade’s End, which he regards as ‘a massive exploration of the nature of virtue.’ ‘The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity all make their appearance,’ he observes, to which I would add the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. ‘Virtue and goodness themselves are explicitly invoked,’ he adds. ‘But Parade’s End does not flinch from the confrontation with [its characters’] weaknesses.’ Ford’s exploration of the possibilities for ethical endurance and regeneration is joined by an equal recognition of what Martha Nussbaum, calls ‘the fragility of goodness.’ Life is an ‘egg-and-spoon race,’ as Valentine notes, and virtue a thing to be ‘prized,’ in part because of how precarious and prone to fragmentation it is. As Nussbaum explains, this recognition of began to be made by ancient Greek drama in tandem with the recognition of virtue itself by ancient Greek philosophy. And as befits its status as the most humanistic of the primary schools of contemporary moral philosophy, virtue ethics has been the one most informed by dialogue with literature, with key figures like Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor in addition to Nussbaum making frequent reference in their work to modern literature alongside modern moral philosophy. In this essay, I extend that dialogue by placing Ford Madox Ford’s work in conversation with two crucial recent works of virtue ethics by Eric Silverman, each focused on terms vital to Parade’s End: chastity, which Ford invokes from the start, and love, which comes to predominate. In The Prudence of Love: How Possessing the Virtue of Love Benefits the Lover (2010), Silverman enumerates how love counter-acts the fragmentation, dislocation, and nostalgia Ford’s characters face. Using terms derived from Silverman’s conception of love as ‘a disposition toward relationally appropriate acts of the will consisting of disinterested desires for the good of the beloved and unity with the beloved hailed as final ends,’ I will argue that Tietjens’ and Valentine’s love for one another helps them integrate their psyches and acquire the epistemic goods of self-awareness, irony, and empathy, which foster eudaimonia or well-being, even in the midst of catastrophe. In Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age: Is There Still a Virtue of Chastity? (2021), Silverman answers ‘yes,’ explaining how the virtue helps solve problems resulting from the ‘unwise, imprudent, unjust, intemperate, or otherwise vicious expressions of sexual desire’ which are just as endemic in Tietjens’s and Valentine’s world as moral fragmentation, dislocation, and nostalgia. Using terms derived from Silverman’s conception of chastity as ‘an excellent personal disposition toward sex, sexual pleasure, and relationships that supports the flourishing of both the individual and those effected,’ I argue that both before and after they have sexual intercourse, Tietjens and Valentine are chaste in the philosophical sense and that their virtue in contrast to the violence and negligence of war and sexual vice is one reason they are forgiven for their legal infidelity and their union blessed at the close of Parade’s End.

The present study examines the influence of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) on the development of the main female protagonist’s personality in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013). While Blue Jasmine loosely adapts the structural framework of Williams’s play, the character of Jasmine Francis emerges as a contemporary reconfiguration of Blanche DuBois, offering a complex portrayal that oscillates between assertions of autonomy and moments of fragility and failure. This conflictive depiction challenges a cohesive feminist interpretation, instead presenting a character whose agency is both advanced and undermined within the narrative. Whereas Williams’s work reinforces traditional gender paradigms, Allen’s adaptation interrogates and selectively subverts these conventions, creating a portrayal that is simultaneously progressive and ambivalent. By juxtaposing representations of femininity across two distinct historical and cultural moments, Blue Jasmine reflects the evolution of gender discourse while exposing the enduring complexities and paradoxes of feminist struggles in a patriarchal society. This intertextual analysis accentuates the continued necessity of engaging with gender dynamics to advance the pursuit of genuine equality.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was an unprecedented event in the history of England which led to the dethronement of King James II and the coronation of a Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, and his wife Mary, James’s daughter, as new monarchs. Because the deposition of a Catholic King was conducted with general public consent, writers of that period did not consider the event worth commenting on, and hence there was a tangible air of silence and passivity around the Glorious Revolution. John Dryden, a convert Catholic, lost his title of Poet Laureate as a result of the revolution but did not entirely retire from writing. He turned to playwriting and translating Virgil, Juvenal and other classics, not only to make a living but also to be able to convey implicit messages to the new king and his reign. The aim of the present article is to analyse Dryden’s allusions towards the political circumstances of post-revolutionary England, hidden between the lines of his translations of Virgil, against the background of the literary passivity in that period as one of the reasons which made Dryden decide to make political comments in an implicit and disguised manner.

This paper explores the role of audiovisual works and narratives as indicators of emerging mindsets and developing trends. Increasingly, audiovisual cultural productions point to preferences in terms of tastes and to ideas that materialize and normalize both in niche communities and in a mass context. Through an in-depth content analysis approach, we present the North American television series 'South Park' as a case study. The premise and consequent research results point to the ability of this show, over several decades, to translate changes in mindsets, representations, practices, and objects that give rise to macro and micro patterns. This way, it becomes evident that there is an important role to be played by these sources in the analysis of sociocultural trends. Resumo O presente artigo explora o papel de obras e narrativas audiovisuais como indicadores de mentalidades emergentes e de tendências em desenvolvimento. Cada vez mais, as ofertas de produções culturais audiovisuais apontam para preferências em termos de gostos e para ideias que se materializam e normalizam tanto em comunidades de nicho como num contexto massificado. Mediante uma abordagem de análise de conteúdo em profundidade, apresentamos a série norte americana audiovisual 'South Park' como um estudo de caso. A premissa e os consequentes resultados da investigação apontam para a capacidade desta produção, ao longo de várias décadas, traduzir mudanças em mentalidades, representações, práticas e objetos que dão lugar a macro e micro padrões. Desta forma, pretende-se sublinhar o importante papel a desempenhar por estas fontes na análise de tendências socioculturais. Palavras-Chave: Tendências; Estudos de Tendências; Audiovisual; Análise de Conteúdo

In this essay, I explore “peripheral pedagogics”– the wholly unforeseen ways of fantasizing others, and learning from them, when English situates young Indian readers of Nadine Gordimer’s 1989 story, “Once Upon a Time.” While students need little help in noticing the story’s realist portrayal of post-Apartheid South Africa, only detailed analysis of crucial passages enables them to appreciate her ironic treatment of folktale cliches and time-worn conventions of children’s stories. Reading Gordimer in a course called New Literatures in English, they see how colonial fantasy meets postcolonial forensics in such partnered narratives; how, further, the teller and her tale reflect mutually gothic fear and the monstrous, both indeed emanating from much the same consciousness. The interpretive light Gordimer casts on Homi Bhabha’s (1988) “Other Question” and the colonial strategies of othering he discusses in The Location of Culture add to their discovery that cliches are to fiction what stereotypes are to social studies. Rather than asking what stereotypes are, the class here begins to ask what stereotypes are for (and why they return to wake us from deep slumber). The actual circumstances of Gordimer’s story are inseparable from its telling. No learning is complete, however, unless the peripheral recognizes that the telling is the story— the one who tells and those to whom it is told share equal opportunity in this learning. Theoretical debates do not count for much if we do not believe that the values we teach are not always at odds with those inherent in such stories as Gordimer’s.