• Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa. Old English Semantic Primes: Substantives, Determiners and Quantifiers. Atlantis 28.2: 9-28.
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• Tuire Valkeakari. Huck, Twain, and the Freedman's Shackles: Struggling with Huckleberry Finn Today. Atlantis 28.2: 29-43.
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• Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo. Roger Waters' Poetry of the Absent Father: British Identity in Pink Floyd's The Wall. Atlantis 28.2: 45-58.
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• Bill Phillips. Frankenstein and Mary Shelley's "Wet Ungenial Summer". Atlantis 28.2: 59-68.
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• Mireia Trenchs Parera. Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness in Three EFL Educated Readers of English Literary Texts. Atlantis 28.2: 69-87.
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• María Jesús Sánchez and Luisa María González. Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje. Atlantis 28.2: 89-107.
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• Marta Frago. Arte y seudoarte: patrones de ironía en las novelas y guiones de Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Atlantis 28.2: 109-122.
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Interviews

• Gerardo Rodríguez Salas. 'Time and Tide': An Interview with Carmel Bird. Atlantis 28.2: 125-132.
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Reviews

• J. Hillis Miller 2005: Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James, reviewed by Henry Sussman. Atlantis 28.2: 135-139.
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• T. S. Eliot. 2005 (1922): La tierra baldía. Edición bilingüe. Introducción y notas de Viorica Patea. Traducción José Luis Palomares, reviewed by Paul Scott Derrick. Atlantis 28.2: 141-145.
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• Ángeles de la Concha, ed. 2004: Shakespeare en la imaginación contemporánea. Revisiones y reescrituras de su obra, reviewed by Celestino Deleyto. Atlantis 28.2: 147-151.
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• Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, ed. 2005: The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations, reviewed by Celia Wallhead. Atlantis 28.2: 153-158.
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• Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, eds. 2004: Perspectives on Travel Writing, reviewed by Pere Gifra Adroher. Atlantis 28.2: 159-163.
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• Paul Lyons 2006: American Pacificism. Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, reviewed by Paloma Fresno Calleja. Atlantis 28.2: 165-170.
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• Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi, eds. 2005: Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, reviewed by María Isabel Seguro Gómez. Atlantis 28.2: 171-176.
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• Ana Martín Úriz y Rachel Whittaker, eds. 2005: La composición como comunicación: una experiencia en las aulas de lengua inglesa en bachillerato, reviewed by Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez. Atlantis 28.2: 177-184.
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• Margery Palmer McCulloch, ed. 2004: Modernism and Nationalism. Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939. Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance, reviewed by Carla Rodríguez González. Atlantis 28.12: 185-190.
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Old English Semantic Primes: Substantives, Determiners and Quantifiers

Javier Martín Arista
Universidad de La Rioja

María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
Universidad Complutense de Madrid

The aim of this journal article is to apply the methodology of semantic primes to Old English. In this preliminary analysis the semantic primes grouped as Substantives, Determiners and Quantifiers are discussed: I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY, THIS, THE SAME, OTHER, ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL and MUCH/MANY. After an analysis of several instances of portmanteaus, allolexy and non-compositional polysemy, the conclusion is reached that even though the nature of the linguistic evidence that is available does not allow for native speaker judgements, semantic primes represent a powerful theoretical and methodological tool for the lexical and syntactic study of Old English.

KEYWORDS: Semantic universals; Natural Semantic Metalanguage; substantives; determiners; quantifiers; Old English

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Huck, Twain, and the Freedman's Shackles: Struggling with Huckleberry Finn Today

Tuire Valkeakari
Providence College, Rhode Island, USA

This essay revisits the decades-long debate about racial representation in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and suggests, looking beyond the rigid binary of either demanding a ban on the novel or belittling its racially offensive aspects, that in racial terms Twain's creation of the Huck-Jim relationship reflects what was in the author's own life and worldview a muddled terrain of good intentions, confusion, wavering, and inconsistency. While Twain may not have inscribed his incomplete struggle with the 'race question' in the novel deliberately, such an imprint was a de facto outcome of his writing process. A cusp text, Huckleberry Finn is, on the one hand, shackled and diminished by its view of African Americans as Others; on the other hand, the novel does contain an effort, albeit a flawed and unfinished one, to transcend the limitations of post-Reconstruction racism and racialism. This article examines these tension-ridden dynamics of racial representation in Huckleberry Finn by focusing on Twain's portrayal of Jim as a father figure for Huck (a relationship that temporarily transgresses the depicted era's prevalent racial hierarchies) and on the novel's noteworthy, though lamentably incomplete, deconstruction of meanings conventionally attached to whiteness and blackness in nineteenth-century America. This essay argues that Huckleberry Finn–a complex text of whose different layers and threads Twain was not necessarily in full control–both illustrates and mimics historical processes whereby shackles of racialized perception are at first partly opened and then, disappointingly, partly closed again.

KEYWORDS: Mark Twain; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; racial representation; Huck-Jim relationship; black manhood; Toni Morrison

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Roger Waters' Poetry of the Absent Father: British Identity in Pink Floyd's The Wall

Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

In spite of being one the most remarkable and arresting products of late-twentieth-century British popular culture, Pink Floyd's The Wall has received little scholarly attention. This paper focuses on how in The Wall and in its companion album, The Final Cut, the individual life history and the present predicament of its protagonist stand for the postwar period in British history as a whole. The latter represent the identitary crossroads at which the nation was placed after the collapse of the welfare state system and the major socio-economic and political transformation it underwent at the dawn of Thatcherism. In order to show this, we draw an outline of the historical context in which The Wall is inscribed and attend closely to the film's complex temporal structure and rich symbolism. We conclude with a brief discussion on how The Wall leaves in sketch an alternative to the present situation which is based on a retrieval of interhuman affects and on justice as the supreme political virtue. As both love and justice bury their roots in the more humane side of the past tradition of the British nation, the work's Utopian thrust has inevitable conservative overtones.

KEYWORDS: British identity; post-war; welfare state; Oedipal father; ultra-liberalism; Thatcher; Pink Floyd; Roger Waters

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Frankenstein and Mary Shelley's "Wet Ungenial Summer"

Bill Phillips
Universidad de Barcelona

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has attracted a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from the Feminist, to the Marxist, to the Psychoanalytic. Some of these interpretations have relied on the scantiest of evidence while others are simply mistaken in their analysis of the period. Ecocriticism reminds us of the importance of nature in our understanding of literary and cultural texts, and this is never more appropriate than in an analysis of Frankenstein. It is well known that the idea for the novel emerged at the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, during the stormy month of June 1816. So much is explained by Mary Shelley herself. It is not well known, however, that the stormy weather was the result of an Indonesian volcano, which affected the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere for three years, leading to crop failure, riots and starvation. Mary Shelley's other writings of the period, as well as Frankenstein, reveal her interest in, and concern for, nature and the countryside. To a large extent, the novel is a reflection of these concerns at a time when the natural world was in crisis.

KEYWORDS: ecocriticism; Mary Shelley; Frankenstein; English literature; nineteenth century novel; romanticism

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Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness in Three EFL Educated Readers of English Literary Texts

Mireia Trenchs Parera
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

This small-scale study of three educated readers aims to contribute to the exploration of the process of reading literary texts in a foreign language. By means of a think-aloud procedure and post-task interviews, the study explores the repertoire of strategies used by educated, non-native readers of literature and their progress in the use and awareness of those strategies after receiving academic instruction. Results evidenced the use of a great variety of cognitive, support and metacognitive strategies although, over time, some of them became less frequent or even disappeared. The study shows that repertoires of strategies change in time but also that each reader changes differently. The article draws pedagogical implications and provides recommendations for further research into the process of reading literature in a foreign language.

KEYWORDS: adult; language awareness; university; EFL; ESL; language learning; literary texts; metacognitive strategies; reading; reading strategies

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Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje

María Jesús Sánchez and Luisa María González
Universidad de Salamanca

The aim of this paper is to find which type of instruction is appropriate for learning vocabulary in a foreign language. In this research three lexical fields (Look, Temperature and Weather) were taught in a different way. One group of students of English as a foreign language got conceptual instruction of this vocabulary. Another group got the same instruction and was also exposed to native organization. This was inferred from their semantic networks by using the Pathfinder procedure which provides empirical networks with information about how subjects organize lexical material. Results show that when the vocabulary was not difficult both types of instruction had a similar effect on students. However, if the lexical field was very hard to learn, teaching with native organization was a critical factor for learning.

KEYWORDS: learning; lexical instruction; English language; expert; native speaker; foreign language; Pathfinder procedure

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Arte y seudoarte: patrones de ironía en las novelas y guiones de Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Marta Frago
Universidad de Navarra

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala uses irony in a good number of her novels and screenplays to evaluate, as a theme, the adulteration of art. Specifically, she turns to three different patterns of irony to articulate it. Each of these patterns is distinguished by the matter that it censures: the merchandizing of art, the idolatry which art may raise, and the corruption of art by the culture of entertainment. But all of these have elements in common. Jhabvala composes the patterns by establishing paradigmatic models of relationships between characters, which are also caricatured in various degrees. In order to understand how these structures are shaped and how they articulate the issue of art, I will develop and illustrate each of them in this article.

KEYWORDS: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; irony; film and literature; screenwriting; screen adaptations; literature and arts

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