Critics who interpret Caleb Williams as a political novel try to trace in this novel the ideas manifested in Godwin`s political writing, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, while justifying this critical approach by Godwin`s statement that this novel was written in the same tone and mood in which he wrote Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Critics, however, ignore the fact that Caleb Williams is not a political propaganda which embodies Godwin`s political ideas, but a novel created by Godwin the novelist. In short, Godwin in this novel tried to show the tyranny and influence of ideology on a society and individuals by delineating "things passing in the moral world" and giving "a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism", instead of maintaining his political arguments. If seen in this way, the ending of this novel where Caleb condemns himself as the murderer of Falkland who victimizes Caleb, is understandable though its message seem contradictory to Godwin`s political arguments in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, because Caleb is so much influenced by the aristocratic ideology manifested in Romance literature that he comes to regard himself as a criminal who destroys or subverts the myth established by the ideology. There is, however, one more important reason why Caleb cannot blame Falkland. Caleb realizes that Falkland, like himself, is also the victim of the ideology which demands Falkland should maintain his reputation or semblance of honor by any means. This fact implies that we are victimized not by any particular individual, but by the ideology whose tyranny "intrudes itself into every rank of society".

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changes in human and animal`s relation depicted in the eighteenth and nineteenth children`s literature. The intersection between the increasing interests in the animal rights and the sympathetic attitude towards animals depicted in the children`s literature seems to open up the possibility to explore the changes in the human and animal`s relations from the ecological perspective. For this purpose, I examine Jonathan Swift`s Gulliver`s Travels, Arabella Argus`s The Adventures of a Donkey, E Burrows`s Tuppy, and Anna Sewell`s Black Beauty. Reason which has been efficiently used to justify human superiority to animals becomes a target of satire and sometimes reversely given to animals in Gulliver`s Travels. Moreover in The Adventures of a Donkey and Tuppy, the similarity between humans and animals are highlighted and sometimes animals possess much better quality than humans. Particularly the emphasis on "feeling" seems to elevate animals almost equal to humans in terms of its moral status. Some human`s sentimental attitude towards animals and talking animals`s strong resistance to human`s cruel attitude towards animals persuade the readers into believing that animals are not simply machines but living creatures who feel the pain and pleasure. However those talking animals interestingly are not asking for their freedom, which modern day animal rights activist might argue. In The Adventures of a Donkey, Balaam recognizes their rights based on human`s religion and law, but he asks not for a liberation, but for a merciful treatment from his human master. Similar message spoken by a mother of Black Beauty as well. But those animals are only accepting human rules of the upper class, who is described to exercise sympathy towards animals, in contrast to the lower class who is mercilessly inflicting pain and suffering to animals. To the children, the major readership of those texts, human and animal relationship depicted in those texts seem to give a very strong impact on the ways in which they understand the relation between humans and animals. Obviously those texts seem to improve humans`s understanding of animals at the advantage of the persecuted animals and in that sense they contribute to the causes of animal rights movement and ecological understanding of humans and animals. However, they also strengthen the boundary between humans and animals at the advantage of the former and tend to discipline the lower class for their lack of sympathy.

Since Oroonoko was first published in 1688, critics have tried to tie down the thematic of the narrative. It is often viewed as the first abolitionist text, political allegory, or feminist manifesto. In this polemic, Behn`s narrative voice is the often focus of discussion. It would appear that often times the role that the female narrator plays in Oroonoko, overlooking the tension that is created by Behn`s choice of narrative voice. This article argues that the narrator plays a crucial role in how we view the relationship between the two main characters in the novel. Moreover, the relationship between Oroonoko and Imoinda is much more subtle and complex than may first be guessed at by the representation in Coramantien; in fact it is only through the mediation of the narrator and the intrusion of mercantile slavery that readers can get a glimpse of the profoundly troubled relationship between this man and woman, which is based upon power and gender structure in society.

Chiefly through the comparison between the two distinctive artistic styles of James Gillray and William Blake, who shared the radical history of the British Romantic period but represented the experience in drastically different ways, this essay attempts to explore the artistic revolution in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Particularly focusing on some questions like why Blake made his prophetic poems, especially the ones he published in the 1790s, so hard to understand with common sense, and what the most conspicuous differences between the two artists are, this essay also aims to read the features of Gillray`s and Blake`s visual strategy in their works. As is known, one enjoyed the greatest popularity even by publicly displaying his works and being liked by George III, and the other failed even getting enough number of customers for sustenance during his life time, which obviously resulted, to a large extent, from the artists` attitude toward the radical mood of the period. To deal with this issue, the essay examines revolutionary aspects of the artistic practices of the two engravers and the issue of audience of their art works as well. Additionally, building upon the previous scholarship on this topic, the essay goes over the artistic influence among some famous engravers and painters to re-evaluate Blake`s stylistic debt to Gillray and others: especially as to Satan, Sin, and Death that many artists, including Blake and Gillray, imitated each other. In a sense, this essay argues, Gillray`s popularity came from his quick and acute reading of the political events that he made available for the wide mass public including in the middle-and lower-class people in cheap price. In other words, his engravings are designed, from the outset, to reach as many audiences as possible through the use of familiar iconographic characteristics of caricature and by regularly updating the subject of them in accordance with different socio-political happenings taking place around the actual customers. Furthermore, Gillray`s engravings might have had the pathological function of relieving the socio-political anxiety that widely pervaded the mass public. On the contrary, the obscurity or the prophetic mask in Blake`s engravings originates from his witnessing the indictment of not a few of his close acquaintances such as Thomas Paine in 1792, William Sharp in 1794, and Joseph Johnson in 1798-and in effect, he was put into trial for seditious utterances in 1804. Such dangerous political surroundings and fear of being indicted for the Royal Proclamation against Seditious Writings and Publications promulgated and reinforced in 1792 undoubtedly affected Blake`s artistic style of cloaking his radicalism in obscurity opposed to the more explicitly readable iconographies Gillray adopted. Even though both Gillray and Blake were members of the Royal Academy respectively in 1778 and in 1779, their revolutionary artistic styles are so much different from the conventional manner of the time that highlighted realistic description of the world, i.e., Classicism, bolstered by London Society of Antiquaries and the new Royal Academy. This essay also tries to show that the importance of artistic revolution through the examination of the two engravers in order to claim that it was not only by books and pamphlets that the radical spirit of the age was represented, and among different types of artists, engravers were one of the different groups of artisans who participated in the revolution through their works fulfilling important roles in mirroring and constructing socio-political circumstance during the early 1790s. Here at the center of the engravers were James Gillray and William Blake, one with conspicuous witty caricature and the other with obscure prophetic mask.

This paper examines Edgeworth`s view of the mother-daughter relationship that has been overlooked in the Edgeworth criticism. Focusing on her first heroine-centered novel, Belinda, it shows how Edgeworth pursues an alliance with women through the endorsement of literary women and through the representation of the enlightened heroine. It begins with investigating the influence of female predecessors on Edgeworth`s novel writing and her recognition of the female tradition. Then, it shows how Edgeworth rewrites the conventional courtship model through the representation of the maternal/filial plot. It illustrates how the heroine`s maturity explains the insignificance of the courtship plot and how Belinda centers on the critical role the enlightened heroine plays in reconnecting the mother-daughter relationship and establishing the tradition of a community of women. Edgeworth`s express confidence in the enlightened condition of women is the achievement of female novelists` collective efforts in constructing a recognizable and respectable tradition.