Category: Literature

The reason for Wallace Stevens’ skepticism regarding cultural colonies is clear. Most of the people in America are descendents of immigrants who bring with them their own cultural ideas to a colony. That is the reality of the American situation, and it is also Stevens’ modest understanding of the reality of an America that was …

In 2008, Matt Ottley’s Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music was awarded the Book of the Year: Picture Book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA). Ottley’s book is challenging in its form and content: it uses words, illustrations, and music to tell a sustained, multi-layered narrative about one …

The relationship between fiction and history is quite an obvious one, especially in postcolonial African settings, where it is more often than not that postcolonial African writers use their writings- creative or otherwise- to challenge the apologetic colonial Eurocentric historical discourses. This paper will demonstrate how African novelists portray in their imaginative creation a history …

Save as a Favourite

The paper explores the ways in which the narrative perspectives relate the interconnectedness between human characters and nonhuman characters, Saluni the human and Sharisha the whale in particular, through the process of ‘intra-action’. In contrast to ‘interaction’ which assumes that there are separate agencies that precede the interaction, ‘intra-action’ recognizes that distinct agencies do not …

The interference with arts contributed effectively to the development of the expressiveness of the literary text ,and to supply it with an indicative depth. Moreover, such interference gave the receiver the ability to interact with all creative genres. Literature today does not only benefit from the other arts but also from the social transformations, and the …

T.S. Eliot admits the two serious problems he had not solved properly: the Furies, the disruptive perspective of the play. Eliot complains that the Furies never succeed in being either Greek goddesses or modern spooks and the audience cannot decide whether to see this drama as a tragedy of the mother or the salvation of …

“At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” exasperatingly asks Conversation in the Cathedral, the highly acclaimed novel of Mario Vargas Llosa, “one of the finest novelists of twentieth century Spanish America,” and the 2010 Nobel Laureate. Although the question remains unanswered in the novel, it pervades each facet of life in Peru under …

War narration is inseparably linked with the image of death, which is a very sensitive issue. This paper shows how in two different cultures the writers succeed in turning death into something good, heroic, and even beautiful. I am interested how the representation of death and dying can arouse aesthetic pleasure and fascination. As philosopher …

Sharing similar historical development, fairly equally placed under the eastern bloc pressure, Romania and Finland slowly became involved in a process of mutual cultural reception. Two relatively exotic presences, with short literary traditions, the two cultures, inherently and abruptly divergent, have undergone important changes during the past century, precisely the period during which they got …

Save as a Favourite

The essay attempts to discuss the literary meaning of immortality and the symbolic interaction of vampire figures in Anne Rice’s works. The referring works includes: Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned(1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), and The Vampire Armand (1998) . Vampires are more …

Zora Neale Hurston, a Harlem Renaissance African American female writer in the 1920s, grew up at Eatonville, an all-black community in Florida. Her three-act play De Turkey and De Law (1930), set in Eatonville, is the writer’s recollection of her childhood. Eatonville folks in the play are talk masters. They everyday congregate on the front …

This paper offers a dialogical comparison of the writings of Japanese Buddhist Anarchist pioneers Uchiyama Gudo (1874-1911) and Takagi Kemmyo (1864-1914). Although both authors denounce the modern imperial state that sprang from the Meiji Ishin (1868) as dystopian, they imagine differing utopian alternatives. Gudo and Kemmyo conceptualize oppression and liberation through the unique narratives of …

Save as a Favourite

This paper examines feminism as a literary ideology, which attempts to win for women a status of recognition and parity in a male-dominated society like Nigeria. This article deals essentially with the emergence of the ideology and literary personalities behind it. It focuses sharply on Zaynab Alkali’s brand of feminism as demonstrated in the delineation …

Representations of conflict permeate Australian junior historical fiction, including acts of extreme violence, acts of political protest and acts of war both within and beyond the nation’s boundaries. A broad survey of the novels by Australian authors on Australian topics published since 1945 reveals a strong tendency to place children at the centre of significant …

Save as a Favourite

The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the use of qualitative methods in the field of library and information science (LIS) research. According to J.D. Glazer (1992), the successful research is not measured by the formality of an approach but by its success in achieving its ends, i.e., to generate accurate and …

The loneliness of human existence becomes an overriding theme in literature and drama of the 20th century, especially due to the emergence of the European Avant-Garde movements, Sigmund Freud’s theory of the subconscious, and the philosophy of Existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus) which focused on an individual in an alienated world devoid of meaning or …

Today, biotechnology is radically changing the terms of life: in the past human beings manipulated the external, and today humans turned upon themselves, manipulating their own bodies. The dissolution of the boundary between human and technology has raised questions about identity, humanity and our responsibilities towards new life forms. Meanwhile, globalization transforms the reach of …

Despite the importance of Children´s literature in Ecuador, little is known about works written in the last 15 years. In this paper I will discuss El sueño de Manuela (‘Manuela´s Dream’) by Edna Iturralde as a review of national history. In this process, I will use a theoretical framework developed by Maria Nikolajeva and Milena …

Mukouda Kuniko no Koibumi (The Love Letters of Kuniko Mukouda), published posthumously in 2002 by the writer’s sister Kazuko, brought to public light the presence of Mukouda’s lover. Koibumi reveals the correspondence between the writer and her clandestine partner, a married man who was thirteen years her senior. Extramarital affairs are a staple theme in …

A number of narratives have been written in Italian in the 21st century by non-European migrants to Italy. Criticism has illustrated aspects of rejection and integration into Italian society. Postcolonial and other categories of interpretation have been adopted. The linguistic sides have also been explored. The paper will initially give a brief summary of these …

All kinds of information is consumed as quickly as it is produced in the communication era. The greed of the consumption era is reflected in human relations, leads to alienation from our environment and above all from ourselves. In the process of alienation, most clearly, human beings leave their labor and production created by their …

Transmotion, also visionary motion, according to Christy Stanlake in his depiction of Native American plays “refers to a critical awareness maintained by individuals with regard to the construction of their identities by self and others” (202). The transmotion, containing both mythic motion and material motion, is fast speed and when one looks again, “it’s gone” …

Alan Ayckbourn is a prolific British playwright whose plays are mostly classified as comedy. Many themes in his plays are about domestic interpersonal relationships. He also employs many spatial movements and placements in his plays. In Things We Do for Love, on the stage, Barbara’s house is divided into three levels. The audience can see …

This study follows the trajectory of female flânerie and the representations of Western metropolises in women’s writing during the early twentieth century. I shall analyze the transformations of urban subjectivity and alienation in the works of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) and Jean Rhys (1890-1979). Born in British colonies and later moved to England before turning 20 …

Museums and libraries have already established clear systems for historical objects, printed books and manuscripts. However, there are rarely any cataloguing methods or indeed any items on their catalogues on printing objects, namely engraved or etched copperplates and woodblocks. These objects are often neglected and become hidden collections in museums and libraries. The reason for …

In her submission to last year’s conference, “Mapping ‘The Underworld’ of Haruki’s Murakami’s Literary World”, A. Suzuki demonstrated that the topography contained in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood can be superimposed on a map of ancient Japan. In my paper, I propose to demonstrate that Murakami’s coming-of-age novel harbours a mythological intertext in the form of an …

This paper provides an intercontinental, cross-cultural, multi-disciplinary framework for an analysis of the influence of cultures and civilizations – both east and west – upon literature and national identity. It investigates the evolution of the cosmic consciousness of the English Modernist novelist and poet, Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) by scrutinizing the psychogeographic and subconscious dimensions of …

This paper explores the teaching / learning strategies employed specifically in three courses that focus on the genres of the Caribbean short story, novel, and women’s writing taught at The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad. These strategies range from interactive lectures, graphic organizers, posters, online forums, web pages, video …

The Iraq Universities Started to use automated systems in libraries and information centers since the last century, and suffered periodically from using a few old systems, including Baghdad University Libraries. It was difficult to find fit systems suitable to their multiple needs, in addition to the problems of using equipment material and lack of trained …

This study indicates how Nine Rasas of Bharat Muni can be applicable to the drama of any language of the world. Nine Rasas literally means ‘essence ‘ ,it is used as the sense of emotional state . These Nine Rasas are the backbone of the Natyasatra (Dramatics). In simple words Nine Rasas are complete nine …

The Sung School of Qing Dynasty basically inherited the philosophy from Jiangxi School of Sung Dynasty that poetry should be based on talent and poetics. With regard to poetics criticism, the Sung School analyzed the sound patterns, lexical and grammatical traits as well as organizations of the poems of Du Fu, who is one of …

In Salam Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, Saleem Sinai is the hybrid body which can be defined based on the result of comparison between Robert Young’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion. Born right at the midnight of the independence of India, Saleem Sinai’s personal history constituted of his memory is related with Indian History. Being a multi …

This is a literary study of the Talaandig folksongs and folktales. Its emphasis is on the courtship practices of the Talaandig people. Using the formalistic approach to criticism, these courtship practices can be gleaned from the literary devices and elements such as rhyme, rhythm, symbols and images, characters, plot, setting and theme. To know how …

This paper explores alienation as a global problem in reference to Indian Writing in English. We all live in a global world today where people with different backgrounds and roots come in contact with one another feeling the difference between home and exile. These individuals are torn between two cultures and are unable to totally …

Libraries are expected to be fully available in relation to all kinds of knowledge and information, regardless of social acceptance and the importance given to them in certain social frameworks. In many legal formulations, progressive proclamations, successful standardizations, there are still a number of limitations of civil rights and liberties, to which can sometimes contribute …

The modern global information society depends on numerous national infrastructures which have developed as intellectual capital, differing historical, sociological and political conditions, as well as a system of organization and presentation of information. The relationship between the pure and the trivial literature depends upon historical and personal particularities and relations. Thus we encounter the trivial …