This article proposes a new approach to the nature of a core set within fantasy fiction that regards it as a speculative literature of the exploration of subjectivity, one which at its limit conjectures fresh possibilities for the subjective world. T...
Forests and forestry have been recurrent topics in Finnish environmental poetry since the 1970s, reflecting the importance of the cultural meanings of forests and forest-related livelihoods in Finland. Despite the recent forest boom in Finnish contem...
In this essay, we intend to demonstrate how the cities of Havana and Cádiz became mutable literary subjects that accompany the female characters of the narratives of female writers of the past decades from Havana (Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Ena L...
This article investigates the representation of objects in La Jalousie (1957), a novel in the nouveau roman tradition written by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the ‘new novel’ sought to render the material world with objective cl...
Lisbeth Bergh’s nonfiction picturebook En lappefamilie: tekst og bilder fra Nordland (A Lappish family: text and pictures from Nordland) from 1905 is one of the first Norwegian nonfiction picturebooks for children about the life of Sámi....
This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror,...
Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam War, which ravaged human and nonhuman lifeworlds. Le Guin offers two competing discursive systems through which to interpret human and nonhuman alterity—Te...
Survival and death are the two most important things in life. The ancient Chinese people attached great importance to death, so the funeral ceremonies were very complete. Since its inception, Taoism has actively participated in funeral activities, so...
In this paper I explore how fears of incorporation, sexual violence, permeability and ‘leakiness’ and metaphorical and literal villains are negotiated within the contemporary fairy tale retelling tradition. Through the close reading and c...
This article argues for the critical need to value the voices and creative work of contemporary women writers in Australia. Historically, women writing in Australia have endured erasure, dismissal, and suppression. I argue that there is still, in the...
In the minds of ancient people, tombs and burials were where the lives of this world ended and another type of life began. By incorporating the concepts of life found in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and the widespread belief in ghosts and immortal...
Book covers are often the first component seen before a reader engages with a book’s contents; therefore, careful consideration is given to the text and image features that constitute their design. This study investigates the effects of the pre...
The impact of WWI on Russian society was immediately disruptive. This effect affected every sphere of social and cultural environs. Although previous research has established that WWI was a major topic of the cultural discourse of that time, the way...
Throughout his life, Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) tackled crucial issues of modernity, such as the urban experience and conflicting notions of selfhood. This article explores some aspects of his narrative practice that enrich our understanding o...
Commentary that observes the frequency of the appearances of images of disaster pervades much of the discourse surrounding postwar Japanese popular culture, and especially Japanese science fiction. Against such approaches, I argue that it is more pro...
This article examines Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) memoir Recollecting and Such (Omoidasu koto nado; 1910). I argue that Sōseki invites the reader to imagine breath through his literary representation of both p...
In this article, I explore a set of poetic works from early 20th-century Japan that took cinema—films, movie theaters, screenings, sets, and a variety of cinematic technologies—as their main subject. An enormous range of poets, including...
Within literary criticism, the second-person narrative is frequently read within the conventions of the modern realistic novel, tackling the narratee/protagonist as a narratological problem. Such an approach, however, overlooks a core component of wh...
Some claim there is a lack of attention to black studies in current literary and academic fields in Spain. Even though there is an emerging wave of Afro-Spanish writers in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, many of them denounce the strug...
A systematic socio-cultural study of the uses of Christian poetry in the late antique Greek-speaking Mediterranean is still lacking. Most literary overviews restrict themselves to an overview of the extant texts and some programmatic reflections in t...
This paper traces the complex relationship between classical literature and Christian doctrine in the first four centuries. In the earliest period of Christianity, we can identify two attitudes of Christians towards Greek literature: the hostile atti...
This article presents some recent trends in French historiography that concern the relationship between history and literature. Among the recent developments are “experiments” carried out by a few historians, which are characterized by an...
My essay explores challenges posed to the discourse of rights from new technologies of the human as these are represented in a range of cultural texts—Spike Jonze’s film her, Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up, Ian McEwan’s...
A debate over whether children’s nonfiction should “speculate” was launched in 2011. Understood within the context of changing demands on children’s nonfiction, it reveals a contested construction of childhood and suggests tha...
During the long nineteenth century, Western publics experienced the invention and proliferation of commercial games for children. Card games, board games, and other parlor games were no longer for adults only; these new offerings formalized some aspe...
The third-person omniscient narrator of fiction texts for children holds the ability to access characters’ thoughts, fly where they will within the story, and interact with time and tense. Philip Pullman characterises this kind of narrator as a...
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon presents a remarkably complex narrator, 15-year-old Christopher Boone. Due to his implied autism spectrum condition, Christopher is possibly the ultimate in “reliable” narra...
Arrangements for the afterlife were important matters to the Tang 唐 (618–907) people. The newly unearthed epitaphs of the Tang Dynasty contain a large number of dialogues and words of the deceased before their death, as well as their ins...
Respecting life and protecting life are the core values of Chinese culture. As the greatest poet nurtured by Chinese culture, Du Fu showed a distinct consciousness of life in his poems. With the passage of time and the changes in his physical body, D...
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapt...
Epitaph and poetry are two different literary genres in ancient China. However, when they collectively address the theme of “mourning the deceased”, they demonstrate an evident phenomenon of permeation and interaction. Pan Yue, as the pio...
This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji,...
This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Ar...
The ways Gothic fairy tales and fairy-tale feminism interact are not always clear. An undercurrent of feminist studies of fairy tales is fueled by the 1970s Lurie-Lieberman debate, which focused on the question of whether fairy tales liberate or repr...
It is well studied that some Pythagorean principles lied at the foundations of the Late Antique Neoplatonic School. The main reason for that conclusion to be drawn is the two biographies of the Samian sage written by the Neoplatonic philosophers Porp...
At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view...
In a Christmas 2017 interview with the British magazine Fortean Times, the celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as &...
Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) evoke the act of listening to music as a way to dismantle stereotypical representations of urban resistance and to paint a diverse picture of how...
In the analysis of isiXhosa literary texts, the role of stylistic sentences in enhancing the meanings and reinforcement of themes and their impact in foregrounding the textual features has been largely ignored and under researched. This study is inte...
In her aim to establish education as a scientifically grounded discipline—conceived as “an experimental science” in her non-fictional treatise Practical Education (1798)—Maria Edgeworth pioneered the integration of literary at...
In Li Bai’s poems, the term yao or medicine is frequently employed as an idea-image. The meaning of yao can be further divided into four distinct types, each corresponding to its functions in different contexts. It represents the elixir found o...
With Great House (2010), Nicole Krauss offers a choral novel that interweaves the lives of several characters loosely connected by a huge, wooden desk that one of them relentlessly chases around the world. A possible symbol of the memory of the Secon...
Employing assemblage theory, this article furthers the ecocriticism of Jewett’s works by exploring the complex ecological network of humans, the natural environment, and nonhumans created in The Country of the Pointed Firs. This article argues...
In 1967, when she was a lecturer in English at the University of Ceylon, Yasmine Gooneratne (1935–2024) wrote an article on English literature in Ceylon for an English journal. Three years later, Gooneratne’s study of Jane Austen was publ...
On 1 July 2024, Ismail Kadare, one of the most prestigious and successful writers in Albania, died at the age of eighty-eight [...]
In Measure for Measure Shakespeare addresses a question that is both straightforward and hard to answer: how do we make people obey the law? Over the course of the play, this simple question gives way to a complex set of problems about human will, po...
Mo Yan’s 2009 novel Frog (Wā 蛙) traces the dramatic career of a rural obstetrician who saves lives through modern medicine, forces vasectomies and abortions through her implementation of the one-child policy, supports her nephew&rsq...
In the world of sports today, young people have access to models of women athletes who seem to have it all, women whose actions push on gendered assumptions of love and the associated roles of women as sacrificial and subservient. And yet, young peop...
This article focuses on a little-studied short story from Jewish American writer Cynthia Ozick, “What Happened to the Baby?” It explores the narrative elaboration of a distinctly feminine trauma—that of a mother in mourning whose gr...
Although there has been considerable previous scholarship on the garden and what it symbolises in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), less attention has been paid to the act of gardening itself within the text. The present artic...
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