Category: Literature/Literary Studies
Reimagining the Opium Trade Era: Bureaucratic Modernity in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy and Kunal Basu’s The Opium Clerk
The Sino-British opium trade of 19th century has long been a subject of discussion and analysis in academic and literary circles. Two notable literary works that explore this complex phenomenon include Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy and Kunal Basu’s The Opium Clerk. Through their respective narratives, Ghosh and Basu provide a nuanced understanding of the opium …
Historical Metafiction and the Quest for Black Self-Authority in Laurence Hill’s Novel “Someone Knows My Name”
Rewriting history in fiction is not a new phenomenon in literature, since historical novels engage fictional characters in a real historical context to offer a glimpse of past times. However, historical metafiction offered a different framework. It is working under postmodernism by asking “what happen” through a repetition of history. This paper sought to analyze …
Naturalism and Realism: An Interplay in the Works of Stephen Crane
All literature is founded on some concept of the nature of man. When any major literary trend appears, it assumes or defines man’s place in the universe. The medieval idea of man was that of a fallen creature, living in a dualistic world that was divided between good and bad, moral and immoral, God and …
From Visual Tools to Body Parts: Functions of Eyeglasses in The Pickwick Papers
The Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological advancements enabled most members of the Victorian middle class to afford eyeglasses and facilitated the improvement and mass production of frames and lenses. This explains the popularity of eyeglasses among Dickens’s fictional characters such as Samuel Pickwick and Snubbin. Eyeglasses are associated with aging, social standing, power, and authority …
The Correlations Between Sound and Meaning in Fuzûlî’s Su Kasidesi (The Eulogy with the Repeated Word “Su”)
Repetition of sounds, i.e. alliteration and assonance, supports, and even sometimes forms, various meanings in literary works. Literary scholars argue that the well-known poet Fuzûlî uses repetitions of sounds masterfully in his poems. In this study, we provide evidence for this claim by analyzing Su Kasidesi (The Eulogy with the Repeated Word “Su”) in the …
Subaltern Bugis Women in Short Story “Ketika Saatnya”: Spivakian Postcolonial Studies
This study aims to reveal the phenomenon of social-cultural facts of Bugis women as subalterns in the short story “Ketika Saatnya,” written by Darmawati Majid. The problem in this research is the narration of the third-world women in Darmawati’s Ketika Saatnya. This study uses the subaltern theory by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The term subaltern refers …
The Sleeping Beauty topos in The Monk and Dracula
A hundred years separate two of the most successful masterpieces of English Gothic Fiction: The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. The significance of this circumstance goes beyond mere chronological coincidence and is revealing of a closer connection between the two texts. Such a connection, made up of a …
Politics as Truth Procedure in Divergent Novel
Politics as a truth procedure is a collectivist politics. The political moment is only meaningful if it is materially collective or shares the same “social dimension” as others. Politics as a truth procedure is manifested in the Divergent novel through events and interactions between characters. The formation of five factions (such as Abnegation, Amity, Candor, …
Rejuvenating English Literature with German Humour: De Quincey, Jean Paul, and Thomas Carlyle
In an article published in London Magazine in December 1821, De Quincey begins by stating that French literature is now in ‘the most abject state of senile . . . imbecility’ because of having isolated itself from any intercourse with foreign literature. To rejuvenate itself, English literature should implant into itself German literature after 1789, …
The Play of Contraries in Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”
Persepolis, a graphic memoir in two volumes by Iranian writer, filmmaker and graphic artist Marjane Satrapi, is the most subversive of contemporary memoirs that defy easy categorization. Unlike other Iranian memoirs riding the wave of popularity following the Islamic Revolution, it stands out as a unique mix of the contraries. The proposed paper examines the …
Extrapolating the Nigerian Condition in Hangmen Also Die
One Nigerian playwright whose brief pilgrimage on earth has been blessed by providence to create enduring and provocative plays about Nigerian situations and who appears prophetic in his writing, is Esiaba Irobi. In a greatly tumultuous tragic play entitled Hangmen Also Die, Irobi in 1989, projected in the play that fragrant abuse and misappropriation of …
A Stylistic Analysis of the Use of Language in “L’État Z’Héros ou la Guerre des Gaous” by Maurice Bandaman
This article examines the stylistic analysis of the use of language in L’Etat zhéros où la guerre des gaous by Maurice Bandama. Every literary work is an expression of a language and if, consequently, it is inscribed as a social act in this language, it is at the same time an innovative individual formulation. Language …
A Study on the Application of Tiger Metaphors in Diaspora Woman’s Growth Narrative – Focusing on Tae Keller’s Novel: When You Trap a Tiger
Korean-American author Tae Keller applied Korean tiger stories such as Sister and Brother Who Became the Sun and the Moon and A Bear and A Tiger Who Want to Be Human to the 2021 Newbery Award-winning book When You Trap a Tiger. In this growth narrative of diaspora woman, the aspects of tiger metaphors being …
Puruyanan: The Waray Concept of Home in Selected Poems of Victor N. Sugbo
To examine how puruyanan, the Waray concept of home, is integral to the overall poetics of Victor N. Sugbo, this study appropriates Prospero R. Covar’s concept of kapaligiran which is composed of three realms—namely kalikasan or the natural realm, the cultural realm, and the supernatural realm—as constituent parts of puruyanan. The Waray and English self-translations …
Distinguished Female Kanshi Poets Princess Uchiko and HaraSaihin — Paternal Influence and Artistic Freedom
Chinese poetry in Japan prospered in the Heian and Edo periods. This paper points out the common characteristics of the two most outstanding female Chinese poets of these periods and elucidates why they are regarded as leading female Chinese poets of their times. Princess Uchiko was the daughter of Emperor Saga (786-842) and was assigned …
Rereading Classics: Edges Between Worlds in James Joyce’s “Eveline”
The hypothesis underpinning this essay is that, in Joyce’s “Eveline”, wish worlds, speculative extensions and intention worlds allow the protagonist to mentally escape her reality; explore new dimensions; and awake her desire to change her condition. The above-mentioned worlds are strictly bound to the sea, which can be seen as both a limit and a …
In the Origins of Brazilian Haiku – Guilherme de Almeida
Haiku is a trendy poetic genre, read and written by many worldwide. Originating in Japan, this small piece of three verses, seventeen syllables, a word for the season (kigo), and other strict rules has gained different scents and characteristics, and it also happened in Brazil. Haiku as a genre was introduced in Brazil mainly through …
A Queen and a Masque: Anne of Denmark’s Political Aims in Samuel Daniel’s The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses
In recent years, scholars have laid the foundations for reconsideration and a new interpretation of the figure of Anne of Denmark (1665-1714) and her cultural and political role – being variously influenced by the approaches of new historicism and gender studies (see Barroll 2001; McManus 2002). By focusing on the role she played in the …
Mark Twain’s Historiographic Metafiction about Joan of Arc
This article argues that, in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Twain adopts the narrative technique of “historiographic metafiction” to draw parodies of gender norms and the genre distinction between history and fiction. Twain features the narrator as a nostalgic historian to satirize gender criticism that ascribes to Joan childlike simplicity, thereby maneuvering within conventions …
What Draws Young Men Overseas? Identifying the Impact of Overseas Business Experiences on Young Men in Dickens’s Life and Novels
In this article, I focus on the impact of overseas business experiences on the young men in Dickens’s life and fiction, and how their absence and return propel his novel plots. Dickens’s lifetime (1812–70) parallels the expansion of the British Empire. I mention that Dickens’s five sons obtained jobs overseas, and Dickens fully acknowledged the …
Map-Making and the Adoption Atlas in ‘Killing Karoline’ by Sara-Jayne King
The recent proliferation of adoption narratives in mainstream media provides fertile narrative soil for sowing the seeds of adoption activism, awareness, and agency. Spanning the genres of autobiographical films to children’s animation, such narratives frame the representation of adoption across ages and cultures. However, adoption studies show that members of the adoption triad (first parents, …
The Psychology of the Other; Narrating Diaspora Identity and Psychic Trauma in Leila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land
The word diaspora invokes trauma. Being positioned in the in-between space and the struggle to assert identity, attempting to rearticulate one’s existence, and negotiating a state of being subject to othering and social discrimination all boil into the trauma hovering around diaspora characters. In Once in a Promised Land, Leila Halaby responds to Arab Americans’ …
Happiness and Heartlessness Represented in Cantonese Opera: With Reference to Burning of the Incense and Scent of a Lady
Cantonese opera is seen as a treasure stemmed from the Southern part of China, and was made extremely popular in Hong Kong from the 1930s to the 1980s. Being adapted largely from traditional Chinese folklore, fiction and mythology, Cantonese opera concerns essentially with figurative representations of human emotions and behaviour, logically related to the manifestations …
Violence for Self-respect in the Indian Socio-political Context: The Psychological Intricacies Perpetuating Yellow Journalism in Siddhartha Deb’s Surface
This article will read Siddhartha Deb’s novel Surface (2005) to illuminate how an unsuspecting individual becomes prey to yellow journalism. And which Deb imaginatively presents through a diffident journalist’s desperate effort to bolster self-respect by achieving an admirable professional standing among his peers. In the process, to gain readers from the Western countries, Amrit Singh …
Sustained Moment of Insight in Simeon Dumdum’s if I Write You This Poem, Will You Make It Fly
A rich structure of Filipino beliefs about animals inspires this paper to compare them with poetry, particularly, the poetry of the contemporary Cebuano writer, Simeon Dumdum Jr., which, in a very unusual discourse, suggests an extraordinary level of perception into the nature of the relationships between people and animals. Dumdum’s recent poetry collection, If I …
A “Skillful Artifice” of the Impeccable and the Masculine: Examining Gender and Trauma in Fun Home
As a text, Fun Home represents a closeted homosexual father to a lesbian daughter in a nuanced yet complex way. Through a non-chronological narrative, the writer/illustrator Alison Bechdel somehow realizes that her father has presented a domestic farce in his lifetime. After his death, which she believes is an act of suicide rather than an …
Eating, Chatting, and Talking Back: Japanese Modern Schoolgirls’ Agency in the Early Twentieth Century
The eyes are important interpretive tools when analyzing modern schoolgirls of the early twentieth century. Scholars in the field of girlhood, such as Kan Satoko, have pointed out that modern Japanese girls’ culture is characterized by sentimentality. The eye, an organ that exudes tears, has many symbolic meanings in the modern subgenre of girls’ novels. …
Disease Selects its Victims: Inequality in Falling Ill to Infectious Disease in Bleak House
Though unnamed, the infectious disease in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) is definitely smallpox. The fever, delirium, blindness, and scars that Esther suffers from are the main symptoms of smallpox, and she easily identifies her disease. The process of Esther’s contraction of smallpox reflects both facts and falsehoods about the medical environment at the time Dickens …
Filipino American Identity Development in Something in Between
Identity development is essential in all human lives. Adolescents who are members of ethnic minority groups are seemingly more confused about their identity. This paper was to explore Filipino American identity development of the main character, Jasmine de Santos, in Melissa de la Cruz’s Something in Between. It is analyzed within the theoretical framework of …
“Fraternal and Sisterly Love”: Observing Disintegration and Resilience in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Shirley
The Brontës in 1845 were a tight-knit community in Haworth of three grown-up sisters and a brother – Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell. In chapter 33, “And you”, Jane Eyre passionately claims to St. John, “cannot at all imagine the craving I have for fraternal and sisterly love”. The fictional Jane Eyre, the orphan, is …
“There Is Always the Other Side, Always”: Women’s Voice and Identity in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Kanafani’s Umm Saad
Published in the 1960s, Ghassan Kanafani’s Umm Saad and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea portray a gendered image of women under the shadow of patriarchy and post-colonialism. With this in mind, this paper calls into question the differences in the representations of women’s voice and identity from the perspective of a female author and a …
‘Climate Fiction Narratives’: A Study of Maja Lunde’s Novels – The History of Bees and The End of the Ocean
Climate fiction (Cli-fi) is a genre that is gaining momentum over the last decade due to the proclivity in the environmental imagination towards issues concerning climate change. As such, this interdisciplinary area calls upon new voices in the literary scape to address pressing environmental concerns that plague us today. In a growing dystopian world where …
A Tale of Difference and Resilience in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
Human society, locally or globally, is characterized not only by its diversity but also by interdependence which accords harmony among people even within a varied global context. For instance, in the time of COVID-19, we saw people dealing with the pandemic by extending physical, mental, and logistic support, transcending the demarcated lines of religion, nation, …
Flooding of Lust – A Review of “Norweigian Wood”
In the story, the young people may love two different persons at the same time. This can be seen as their feeling of lost in growing. The lust that belongs to puberty had caused the young men and young women to be addicted to sensuality. On one hand, physiological reactions compelled them to love a …
From Jungles and Rivers: Animals in Malaysian Indigenous Literature in English
Recent developments in the local literary arts scene have seen the emergence of publications on folktales and fables of Malaysian indigenous people in English. Central to these publications is the presence of animals, whether as symbols, voices, or characters. Nonetheless, critical reaction to this presence has been sparse at best. As animals are paradoxically recognised …
A Comparative Analysis of Metaphors Constructing Danger and Force Dynamics in Buddhism Discourse
This study aims to compare the metaphors used to conceptualize danger and their force dynamic patterns in the dharma books of two prominent monks, the Venerable P.A. Payutto and Buddhadas Bhikkhu, who represent Normative Buddhism and Intellectual Buddhism, respectively. Three dharma books of each monk were selected for analysis and they were read to determine …
A Cross-cultural Analysis of Self-examination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Chinese Philosophy and Tragedy
Western culture and Chinese culture are two completely different cultural systems in the world, while both of them can be analyzed together at a microscopic level. Although the protagonists in Chinese drama are not as complex as in Shakespearean drama where the characters are shaped by more than two aspects, the struggle of personality can …
Who is Oliver? Unexecuted Wills and Threatened Legal Rights in Oliver Twist
In this paper, I examine the unexecuted wills and the difficulty in exercising legal rights in Oliver Twist. In Dickens’s novels, the making and exercising of wills is very important because these actions are required for inheritance. The decision of to whom a person will bequeath their fortune exposes a character’s desire for money, affects …
“Visual Colonization”: A Discussion on “Visual Expression” in Geling Yan’s Novels
Visual culture has increasingly shifted into a dominant culture in contemporary society. More and more visual factors appear in non-visual arts and affect their creation methods, which results in “visual colonization” (Wei, 2009). As a non-visual art, literature is also influenced. This paper illustrates the film adaptation of literary works as a way of “visual …
The Republic of Heaven: A Return to Mother Earth and Ancient Pagan Religions in ‘His Dark Materials’
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is primarily regarded as an attack on religion and is thought to specifically discredit Christianity. However, the novels show no signs of the cynicism expected from an apparent atheistic venture to free humanity from its faith. Instead, the series brims with uplifting themes that are traditionally religious, such as …
“The Human Condition” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
In his essay about two brother-painters, the van Velde brothers, Samuel Beckett presents a view that both of them share a profound interest in “the human condition” which precedes their interest in painting. This view is related to Beckett’s own conception of art. He himself was interested in “the human condition” in his creation of …
Representation of Spirituality in Elizabeth Gilbert’s (2006) Eat Pray Love and its Reception in a Chinese Context
Elizabeth Gilbert’s (2006) memoir Eat, Pray, Love depicts her journey of self-discovery following a difficult divorce. Her travels consist of three phrases – (1) pleasure-seeking in Italy, (2) finding spirituality in India, and (3) maintaining a balance between the two in Bali. The author’s truth-seeking journey has resonated with a huge readership worldwide. The research …
Panethnic Moments: Mestizaje and the Philippines in Discourses of Hygiene and Disease
Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness refers to a new consciousness defined by ambiguity and an attentiveness to difference; mestiza consciousness’s refusal to let go of difference is what sets it apart from earlier theories such as Jose Vasconcelos’s La Raza Cosmica. My essay explores the linkages between Asian identity and the Latin American concept of mestizaje …
Filial Responsibility: A Pragmatic Reading on the Fictions of Ernesto Lariosa
The family is an essential social unit. It is in the family that people are prepared for the public community. The relationship between the members of a family affects how each person participates in society. However, there are situations where people have to choose between their family or society. In the stories “Ug natumba ang …
Energy’s Proleptic Promises: Locating Infrastructure and the Future Anterior in Yamashita and Lerner
This paper draws on recent developments in the energy humanities to argue for a more multifaceted account of the temporality of infrastructure (beyond the dyad of continuity and apocalypse) and for the vital role of literature in making an anti-apocalyptic temporality apprehensible. The argument consists of two steps. First, by interrogating our physical/emotional reliance on (energy’s) infrastructure, this paper intends to excavate a …
Double Consciousness in British Asian Writing
My father’s work took us all over the world, then to a British boarding school. The result was a duality that ran through me; this was a sensibility that was very British but at the same time very Indian. This sensibility impacted the way I wrote my novel Begums of Peshawar (Hachette, 2018). Focusing on …
Evolution of Narcissistic Narration
The study is done to show how the fictional world is influenced by the character’s “Narcissism” and whether it keeps the inner narcissist in check or if it can turn an otherwise a good and positive character into a narcissist independent of the kind of civilization the character is a part of. For the study …
Space as a Sign System’: Exploring Lexical Semantics in Relation to Cultural Geography – A Case Study of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’
The research paper attempts to examine as to how the idea of ‘space’ when regarded as a literary construct, may be ideally mapped in a given text: first in terms of the literal and obvious elemental descriptions of ‘cartographic geography’ available to a casual reader-aka-somnambulist at a cursory glance; and second, in terms of its …
Moral Choice and Compliance: Exploration of Justice in “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”
Set in an urban locale of early 20th century Progressive America, T.S.Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” accounts the psychophysical inertia of a man namely Prufrock through his confessional dramatic monologues reverberating within his subjective mental space. Considering monologues as a reflection of an individual’s past or current experiences with others, the paper …
Writing the Feminine: John Fowles’s Modern Myth
John Fowles writes courageous and other-worldly women characters. John Fowles explores relationships between men and women and has built his major themes around the contrast between masculine and feminine mentality. Fowles has always constructed his fictions upon the principle that women are intrinsically better, more authentic, and freer than men. Throughout his fiction, women tend …
Regaining the Decay of Human Values
The myriad of ethnic and sub-ethnic groups in Indonesia causes similarly numerous creations, communication, and performance of folklore. Today, however, tales which are classified in verbal lore and believed as people’s fictional works are decaying since almost all tales still use local-regional languages, which generally have become unpopular. Furthermore, modern life-style strongly relies on technology-based …
Regionalism and Issues: Understanding Indian Unity in Diversity Through Literature
To understand regionalism,we need to know various dimensions of the region.Region as a social system,reflects the relation between different human beings and groups whereas a geographical unit,is delimited form each other.Regionalism is an ideology and political movement to advance the causes of regions.At the international level,regionalism refers to transnational cooperation to meet a common goal.Regionalism …
Hope and Destruction: A Comparative Analysis of the Consciousness of Death Between Patriotism and Sinking
Sinking (沉淪, 1921), the renowned Chinese novel by Yu Dafu was often compared with a Japanese novel, Melancholy in the Country (田園の憂鬱, 1919), given that both of them are categorized as I-novel. Nevertheless, another Japanese novel, Patriotism(憂国, 1961) by Mishima Yukio actually shares more similarities with Sinking in the aspects of content and the core …