Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) created a new genre termed “science nonfiction literature.” This genre blended environmental science and narrative while ushering in a new era of awareness and interest for both. With the contemporary climate cris...
The late Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) was an Italian philosopher whose work on Aeschylus has not yet been made available in English. In Il giogo: alle origini della ragione: Eschilo (The Yoke: At the Origins of Reason: Aeschylus, 1989), Severi...
In contemporary literary theory, Plato is often cited as the original repudiator of literary truth, and Aristotle as he who set down that literature is “imitation,” thus himself involuntarily banning literature from truth. This essay argues that thes...
The article identifies the Sundarbans landscape as a ‘marginal scape’ in the context of the Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979. It applies the conservationist vs. environmental (in)justice approach of ecocriticism to Amitava Ghosh’s The H...
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...
We are living in the sixth major extinction event on this planet [...]
The polarized initial reception of Philip Pullman as a “new atheist” has gradually yielded to more nuanced scholarly positionings of his work as inspired by a heterodox, even “heretical,” Christianity. But in his new series, P...
Ted Chiang’s short story, “The Great Silence”, takes the perspective of a parrot living in the Rio Abajo forest in Puerto Rico, sharing its habitat with the Arecibo Observatory. The story first appeared as the textual component of a...
In the Soviet era, Russian involvement in WWI long represented an ostracised and even forgotten event. This very attitude is reflected by Soviet literary criticism of WWI war literature. Taking into account both the studies which re-examined this par...
This article responds to the arguments put forth by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994). It argues that the said work is representative of the widespread tendency in literary the...
While fictional orality (spoken language in fictional texts) has received some attention in the context of quantitative register studies at the interface of linguistics and literature, only a few attempts have been made so far to apply the quantitati...
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...
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,...
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 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...
Jeanette Winterson’s magical realist love stories, such as The Passion, have been read by some critics in terms of a tendency to idealise romance as a transformative passion that transcends social structures. In this article, I propose that Win...
What does it mean to mourn for the loss of lives that are rendered ungrievable by history? More importantly, with what language does one grieve the loss or despoliation of lives that are rendered ungrievable through disremembrance? This study reads s...
While reports of the death of literature are greatly exaggerated, reports of the decline of Aestheticism, New Criticism, and the printed word are not. Literature as a critique of society is alive today, but to survive tomorrow in any form it will nee...
Yamashita’s use of mythic verism in Tropic of Orange and a reimagined doppelgänger trope in I Hotel depicts the ir/real nature of the taxonomy of identity and of Asian America and other minority groups being constituted in and beyond the m...
Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita’s first novel, Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), portrays protagonist Kazumasa Ishimaru as “a Japanese Santa Claus”, depicted as having a plastic ball spinning in front of his fac...
This essay explores Michel Serres’s “poetic dream of another epistemology” connected to an anti-Cartesian, sensorial view of knowledge. The philosopher alludes to empirical studies from the field of cognitive neuroscience, which hav...
This article challenges the dominant Christian-centered approach to Black religious life by exploring contemporary Womanist Buddhist and Black Buddhist practice, writing, and thought alongside writings of early East Asian Buddhist nuns, noting simila...
One of the mysteries of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is the metaphorical language it uses in describing conditions of the body. The human body is seen as an integrated system operating within the larger context of the natural system. Illnesses...
While many literary theories focus on materialistic concerns, less frequently have these theories focused on the spiritual matters arising from such concerns. A cosmological interpretive strategy focuses on such spiritual and cosmic themes rather tha...
The purpose of this research is to explore ecofeminist issues in Chimamanda Nagozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus. It examines the connections between women and nature as well as how unjustified patriarchal domination and Christianity impact t...
In his main work, Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson presents a panpsychist ontology which cuts through the Gordian knot of the mind vs. matter problem. Taking this age-old philosophical topic, Bergson pushes the dualism of mind and matter beyond break...
In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences...
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...
Over the past century, literary theory has branched out in several directions. Diverse schools of literary thought, such as Semiotics, New Criticism, Intentionalism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction, have passionately plowed new ground within the ac...
For authors who revisit their experiences of childhood to write stories for young readers, imaginatively drawing on memories plays a prominent role in the creative process. Whereas connections between memories and narratives have featured in literary...
This study turns to W.E.B. Du Bois’ late-career works of fiction for insights about the importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), especially Black public Land-Grant universities in promoting racial justice in the Unite...
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...
V. S. Naipaul’s 1975 novel Guerrillas is the earliest example of Caribbean fiction that purports to provide a realistic depiction of Trinidad’s brief but historically significant Black Power movement. Naipaul was an Indo-Trinidadian expat...
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...
When scholars view characters in King Lear through a Machiavellian lens, they read Edmund, Goneril, and Regan as stock Machiavels. In contrast, they often perceive Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar as selfless, apolitical characters. This essay argues that t...
For this article, we reviewed and synthesized narratological theories on reliability and unreliability and used them as the basis for an exploratory study, examining how real readers respond to a literary short story that contains several unreliable...
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...
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...
The political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli has often been reduced to the statement that ‘the end justifies the means’ and understood as an expression of realpolitik as a result of his pragmatic, even ruthless, counsel to would...
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...
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...
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...
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 &...
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...
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...
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...
The gothic genre in Latin American literature has been the object of fashionable interest in recent decades and seems to absorb all the elements of the politically correct agenda; however, in the current trend of absolute presentism that seems regula...
In the so-called West, feminist activists and scholars have long been traumatised by the erasure of their histories via dominant patriarchal narratives, which has served as an impediment to the intergenerational transmission of feminist knowledge. Re...
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...
