In The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster presents the issue of remarriage of a widow, which was a controversial social issue of the Jacobean England. Most of the recent readings of the play have focused on the moral assessment of the Duchess` remarriage, within the context of the norms of the contemporary society. Those socio-historical approaches have not paid much attention to the fact that women`s sexuality is the cause of the tragedy. Ferdinand and the Cardinal plot to confine the Duchess` sexuality within the family. Despite her brothers` warning against her remarriage, the Duchess secretly marries her steward Antonio. Her transgressive marriage threatens her brothers` familial authority, since it shakes the basis of patriarchal order of the society. It is certain that she marries her social lower not because of her sexuality, but because she intends to revolt against her brothers` familial ideology. The whole process of the punishment and execution seems to be deliberately structured as the realization of moral justice. But if we read the play in the political perspective, it reveals the sexual politics within the play. It is certain that she perceives her brothers` oppression as infringement on her political authority. Therefore, even in the face of the impending death, she never loses her dignity and claims her political identity as a ruler by saying that she is "the Duchess of Malfi still."

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the patriarchy, one of the most dominant ideologies in the Renaissance, tried to oppress and control the so-called "others"-women, nature, including younger sonsand how the women coped with the oppression and control in order to achieve ideal love and marriage in Shakespeare`s comedy, As You Like It. However, this play reveals that his concerns are not limited only to the sexual inequality of the binary opposition, but are extended to various problems such as the usurpation on nature by civilization. As You Like It presents the problems of political power regarding primogeniture or usurpation between brothers. As these problems are related with those of human nature, and it is impossible to settle such problems in the corrupted society, this play explores the possibility of ideal settlement in the context of pastoral, the "carnivalesque" space. In the forest of Arden, Orlando realizes his desire to achieve education and inheritance by joining the ideal male community, the exiled Duke Senior has formed. With this, Orlando expands his understanding of his own self and of woman in the process of courtship led by Rosalind, achieves social and political reward through marriage. Furthermore, he restores the brotherliness by nature`s power of healing the wounds. Therefore, the forest of Arden seems to devote to realize the vision of equality and wish fulfillment of the deprived and marginalized others. Notwithstanding, the forest of Arden is presented as the place based on reality. And this play criticizes civilization by permitting various voices. This comedy glorify the female characters as subjects who have inherent and subversive power. Of course, female characters are contained to the ruling order of patriarchy through marriage. But in the attempt to go beyond the patriarchy, Rosalind`s positive role should not be underestimated. Through her efforts the marriage takes important meaning in showing us the possibility of desirable human life. Sometimes Shakespeare takes the attitude of criticizing the reality in order to present a way to solve the sexual and civil problems. However, he proposes the ideal community based on mutual respect and love as a substitute for the prejudiced and corrupted civilization. It is most important thing that his diagnosis and prescription still shed their meaningful light on the present and the future. That`s why the scope of his literary imagination transcends time and place.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a short poem, one of Keats`s great odes. The urn described in this poem is of marble, and we may infer that the scenes on it are carved in relief. These scenes are two and separate. The one described in the first three stanzas is of "mad pursuit," in which a youth pipes under a tree while another youth pursues a maiden. The other scene is of a sacrificial procession, in which a priest leads a garlanded heifer to a "green altar" and is followed by a company of pious worshippers. But no matter how critics and scholars have described the urn, it is a funeral urn which contains the ashes of the dead, of a civilization that is past. Up to the present, critics and scholars have studied this poem on a basis of the meaning of the last two lines and how they should be interpreted. T. S. Eliot, for example, regarded them as a blemish. This kind of approach does not seem to be a useful interpretation, because Eliot does not consider the historical and ideological context of the poem as New Critics do and the urn`s concluding remarks about `beauty` and `truth` might appear to be apt and interchangeable, furthermore the idea of beauty and truth is related to the oppressive political conditions of Keats`s day. I treat "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in relation to the imagination and historical consciousness. In Keats`s early poetry, his imagination has an aesthetic tendency, later tends to be not only sympathetic imagination, but also political and historical consciousness as expressions of desire for human and society betterment. Despite this poem`s expressed and laudable desire to find sexuality and beauty behind the turmoil and mutability of everyday life, it betrays ideologically a form of oppression that Keats and his age never escaped, even when they situated themselves knowingly and firmly against political and ideological tyranny. In other words, the desire of sexuality in the first three stanzas and the love of beauty and truth in the last two lines are the keys to understanding the historical dimension of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", because they display that utopian longing with which emerge from within a context of historical contradiction and hardship in his day. In conclusion, this poem demonstrates the powers of Keats`s sympathetic imagination and historical consciousness.

This essay reads James Joyce`s Ulysses , not merely an aesthetic Modernist text, but as a product of the colonial metropolitan culture, exclusively dealing with "Proteus" episode with the issues of imagined community and national allegory based on the theoretical generalizations of both Benedict Anderson and Frederic Jameson with the concept of Foucaultian heterotopia. My critical reading also problematizes the allusions behind the highly elaborate technique of the stream of consciousness in the episode through the lens of Irish colonial commodity culture. Thus, this approach can help understand how Stephen`s self-conscious meditation or self alienation, both as a Modernist hero and a colonial intellectual reflected in the text, intermingles with the anti-colonial attitude against the metropolitan commodity culture towards the new imagined (national) Irish community.

Facing the environmental destruction committed globally in size and degree, the late twentieth century has observed the emergence of environmental-related movements in various fields. Humanities including literary criticism and literature, for example, have shown a great concern in environmental degradation, and revealed the fact that Western industrialized civilization is the root cause of the environmental ruins. As a reaction to the growth-oriented civilization, some ecological movements like deep ecology and ecofeminism and environmental literature have shown a tendency of going back to the primeval age, in order to gain an ecological wisdom that we desperately need for a human-nature harmonious culture. This primitive urge originated in Rousseau whose motto is known as the "Return to Nature." Since contemporary primitivism owes Rousseau a debt of its general definitions a great deal, it has been identified with Rousseau`s primitive urge, which is called Rousseauism. Both Rousseau and the post-1960s environmental-related movements and literature that have adopted the tendency of Rousseauistic primitive urge, however, have been criticized, because they give the impression that, relying on primitive urge alone, they avoid the hard reality of environmental illness. Herman Melville seems to be fascinated by primitivism in the Rousseauistic sense. Based upon his own experience, he portrays the Edenic primitive people and culture of a South Pacific island in his first novel Typee. The author-narrator Tommo deserts the whaling ship which is "the floating ambassador of civilization," and escapes into the primeval village of Typee Valley. There he finds a paradise. He is well treated by the natives and is satisfied with himself there. However, being a civilized man, he cannot endure the primitive life any longer and must finally escape back into the civilized world. Melville`s Typee bears out the fact that in reality we cannot go literally back to the "good old days" of primeval life, and that, instead, we need to rehabilitate what Rousseau calls "inner naturalness" or "primitive sensibility" in our mind. Since this sensibility exists in the human mind diachronically, we do not need to fall back on primeval culture, the primitive urge which has been blamed for its naive, retrogressive, and escapist tendency in time of environmental crisis. Once primitive sensibility is restored in the human mind, chances are that we can live harmoniously with nature without totally giving up our civilized culture. All in all, primitive sensibility rather than primitive urge has to be the real meaning of primitivism.

Daniel Defoe`s Moll Flanders, that represents a close relation between the rise of the 18th-century modern novel and the English middle-class, has been criticized on account of the lack of an organic unity. This article aims to analyse this work by dividing its inconsistency into the inconsistencies of both Moll and a moral theme such as Moll`s moral story and a happy ending. Then I look at the cause of this inconsistency. I come to a conclusion that this inconsistency can be solved when this work is regarded as a work of irony. Nonetheless, Defoe is a writer who may be approached from several perspectives. He is called a forefather not only of modem English novels but also of realism because of his objective prose style. He has a great influence on the style of the later 19th-century novelists including Jane Austen. Most of all, the creation of Moll Flanders as a lively woman is the most impressive achievement of Defoe as a novelist even to the 21th-century readers. In short, Moll appears to have a relation to many heroines from Geoffrey Chaucer`s "Wife of Bath" through William Thackeray`s Becky Sharp to Magaret Mitchell`s Scarlett O`Hara whom we cannot hate despite their cunning strategies for survival in a hostile environment.

The major aspect of Pinter`s plays is struggle for power, domination or possession which is carried out between men and women. However the women in Pinter`s plays seem to have greater awareness both of their own natures and of the nature of men. This understanding gives women a strength, a capacity for survival, that the male characters lack. Furthermore, the women alternate between the roles of mother, wife and whore for their power or possession. However, Pinter`s female characters change from the conflict for power or domination in early and middle plays to reconciliation between men and women.. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a man and a woman try to get their president barren marriage reconciled reality with fantasy in The Lover. Sarah lives as a puritanical woman who has to exclude sex from her respectable marital life. And Richard, the husband has superior mind and greater maturity. Richard articulates most fully the eternal male`s view of the dichotomy of the female image and sets up the social stereotypes of wife and whore. Richard gives the most explicit definition of the split female image and makes the most neat classification of women as respectable and graceful wives and as lustful whores. Sarah realizes the necessity of combining love, respect and sexuality in marriage to keep it alive. Richard, although he recognized the same necessity himself, is too conventional to accept undisguised sexuality within the respectability of marriage. Social conformity is more important for him, wheres Sarah is bolder in questioning obsolete social forms. Thus Richard sticks to traditional masculine ideology and the social and moral hypocrisy it entails. Sarah creates a lover game to break out of Richard`s dual existence. They enter into an elaborate game, evidently to satisfy Sarah`s fantasies and permit her a more fluid. Richard has appreciated the way she is and understood the psychological necessity for the game. Richard`s psychological needs, which make the fantasy games as much important to him as to Sarah. Richard adopting the Max-persona, participates in the game positively and he finds an outlet for his repressed erotic desires in the elaborate games he has invented with wis wife. Without losing balance, he keeps his sobriety and lucidity in mind and proceeds to a mutually satisfying solution. Sarah plays the roles of wife and lover(whore). Sarah appears in the wholeness of her personality, in the integration of the beauty, grace, elegance and with that men assign to the wife and the lust they attribute to the whore. Sarah and Richard, by the lover`s game, move into an exploration of the fetishistic illusions that can both sustain a marriage and induce a nervous breakdown: they finally achieve the reconciliation of reality and fantasy.

This study is to examine the concept of modality in English in accordance with a range of semantic and pragmatic criteria and to analyze how modality is used in the linguistic expressions in the possible worlds after making some preliminary observations. To accomplish the purposes of the study, it is organized as follows: Following the introduction in the first chapter, the second chapter deals with the concept of modality in relation to the grammatical system of mood in English. Chapter 3 discusses the characteristics of modality. The discussion is based on the fundamental distinction drawn between epistemic and deontic modality. Epistemic modality is concerned with matters of knowledge or belief on which basis speakers express their judgments about states of affairs, events or actions and deontic modality is concerned with the possibility or necessity of acts in terms of which the speaker gives permission or lays an obligation for the performance of actions at some point in the future. The contrasts and similarities between epistemic and deontic modality are explored in detail in terms of subjectivity and non-factuality, and the modal notion of proposition and event, and possibility and necessity. In chapter 4, modality is examined in relation to language use. The main focus is on certain categories of utterance function derived from Speech Act Theory and which a number of linguists have cited as a basic framework for the discussion of modality. The categories of discourse function discussed here are based on those proposed by Searle. In chapter 5, the study is summarized and concluded.

This study investigates if actual usage of modal auxiliaries for epistemic modality is properly shown in some of the English textbooks and how they are dealt with in those textbooks. One of the most misunderstood areas for EFL students is the modal auxiliaries. The modal auxiliaries cannot be directly imparted to the learner only through the explicit teaching of their grammatical rules because of the complex interrelationship between the forms and functions. Three English textbooks are examined to see how well they reflect the actual usages of the modal auxiliaries and how well they provide the contexts for the usage of modal auxiliaries. Those English textbooks examined do not quite exactly reflect the actual usages in relation to the corpus-based information. The modal auxiliaries which are not covered in the textbooks should also be taught when using these textbooks. Suggestions are given to supplement the textbooks. It is necessary to give more data (native speakers` actual production models) to students and to have them develop their sensitivity to the proper usage of modal auxiliaries according to their functions.

This study investigated the relationships between personality traits and English learning. Many researchers have investigated the influence of personality on L2 learning. Most of the previous studies are dealt with individual personality behaviors or tendencies rather than with a global point of view. In this article, the researcher tried to consider these individual personality variables from the holistic personality point of view. The researcher reviewed literature related to personality factors on L2 learning and then selected and categorized the 16 variables on L2 learning into the five domains of personality traits based on the NEO Personality Inventory Revised (NEO PI-R). The personality traits theory used in this study is based on the Five Factor of Personality theory. According to this theory, human personality traits consist of five domains such as Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The personality variables frequently mentioned in L2 study may belong to one of the domains of this inventory. Through this investigation, the researcher suggested several research questions and predictions on the relations as a summary. Also, the researcher discussed certain implications for L2 researchers and educators.