The COVID-19 pandemic, as an unprecedented global phenomenon, has deeply affected higher education and academia. It has also forced us to reconsider the place of the Humanities during periods of severe economic and social crisis. This special issue gathers papers on the impact of the current pandemic on topics within the field of English Studies.
English Studies during Pandemic Times
Culturemes in an Italian-English Bilingual Food Blog during COVID-19
Sabrina Fusari
This paper presents a parallel corpus study of culturemes in the Italian and English versions of the food blog Juls’ Kitchen – Stories and Recipes from Tuscany during COVID-19 total lockdown in Italy (9 March-18 May 2020) to ascertain how some culturemes may have shifted due to lifestyle changes originating from COVID-19 measures. Three categories of culturemes are analyzed: time-related, food-related and lockdown-related. The results show that lifestyle changes have affected not only the practice and narration of cooking but also such fundamental tenets of culture as time, in different ways in the Italian and English version of the blog.
Pandemic and Politics in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Michelle Gadpaille
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, readers and scholars turn to previous pandemic writing. Among the accounts of past pandemics, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) might not be the most familiar, although it stands out, not merely because of its female author and futuristic, dystopian mode. Its real distinction is that it predicts the social and political fallout of a pandemic in ways that echo the global experience of coronavirus reaction over the last few years, specifically, the ideological polarization created by anti-pandemic measures.
Reviews
Tomović, Nenad. Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching. Belgrade: FOCUS – Forum za interkulturnu komunikaciju [Forum for Intercultural Communication], 2019.
Miloš D. Đurić
Horváth, Kornélia, Judit Mudriczki and Sarolta Osztroluczky, eds. Diversity in Narration and Writing: The Novel. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.
Anett Schäffer