Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6020008

Authors: Stefanie Jakobi

Taylor Swift’s songwriting is frequently analyzed through the lens of confessional songwriting, blurring the boundaries between factual and fictional storytelling. This article proposes understanding her work as transmedia meta-autobiographies, a genre characterized by self-reflexivity and the questioning of autobiographical rules. Drawing on Mueller-Greene’s definition of meta-autobiography and intersectional theories, the study analyzes Swift’s lyrics, music videos, and paratextual elements, specifically focusing on selected works after her split with Big Machine Records, as this marks a different era in her creative work and is also linked to the discourse around her re-recordings. The analysis demonstrates how Swift utilizes transmedia storytelling to perform the act of remembering and writing, effectively staging her “self” across various media formats. This self-representation could according to the rules of the genre function as a counter-narrative to traditional male-centric autobiographical forms by centering girlhood. However, the article also highlights contradictions regarding authenticity and the commodification of this identity.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6020007

Authors: Hasan El-Shamy

This study examines the hypothetical issue of the impact of ancient Egyptian beliefs on Africa as a whole. Several focal points are explored. These include (1). The situation of the discipline of folklore within allied academic specializations. (2). Culture diffusion within Africa, and (3). Spoken folk stories as the only field that integrates, in the space and time continuum, culture on the one hand, with its bearers/(society), on the other. (4). [Beside the] colonial past, the problem, is a result of a number of academic factors that include: (a). The establishment at universities of African studies departments that confine the continent to the sub-Saharan tier excluding Africa of the North; thus, folklore is isolated without a proper stage for studying it academically (see Dorson 1972); (b). The stereotyping concerning the capacity of scholars with unfamiliar names or recognized departmental membership as capable of dealing with theory or innovation, though some of their ideas are adopted by the famous without accrediting the source; (c). Ignoring the unfamiliarity for the family (especially under conditions of secrecy; cf. bias, ethnocentrism); and (d). Inadequacy of academic classroom pedagogy on the basics of verbal lore. Folklore in its original, mainly verbal branches, as represented by Stith Thompson’s monumental works on motif (1955–1958), and its predecessor by Antti Aarne on Type, (1910, 1928, 1961/1964), whose coverage, especially on Africa of the North, is seriously lacking in both the Type and Motif Indexes. The tracking of this line begins with recent calls for need for morphological studies of a South African tale (Dseagu [2001] 2021). An association among various regions of Africa with ancient Egypt concerning mythological contacts merits this investigation.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6020006

Authors: Purnima Mankekar

In this article I interrogate how the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist aligns with as well as problematizes racial capitalism. The optic of racial capitalism enables me to trace the film’s articulation of race relations within the US and the power of white supremacy internationally, particularly as they manifest in the geopolitics of the US empire. The optic of racial capitalism foregrounds the inextricability of what Cedric Robinson termed racialism and the historical development of capitalism(s). The film demonstrates how racial capitalism is naturalized through the creation of aspirations for the symbolic markers of upward mobility and the acquisition of wealth, which is to say, cultural as much as financial capital. The film also illustrates that racial capitalism is a work in progress; it is neither singular nor homogeneous in its effect as it mutates across the world; it derives its power from the construction of racial infrastructures, political–economic institutions, states and, as I will argue in this essay, through regimes of racial affect.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6010005

Authors: Kumiko Saito

Time travel in science fiction, a subgenre distinct yet often overlapping with alternative history, often explores historical contingency through counterfactual scenarios to produce alternative histories. Yet some works deliberately negate this potential, presenting time travelers who refrain from altering the past despite possessing the apparent ability to do so. This essay examines this underexplored narrative mode through a comparative analysis of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Miyabe Miyuki’s The Incident at the Gamō Residence. Framing the narrative device as a non-interventionist history, it explores how both novels deploy time travel not to revise history but to confront the ethical, emotional, and cultural implications of engaging with historically traumatic events that remain causally intact. Drawing on science fiction theory and historiographical debates, the essay argues that these texts redirect the function of time travel toward ethical reflection, embodied experience, and the formation of national identity. While Kindred presents history as an ongoing system of racialized violence that resists reconciliation, The Incident at the Gamō Residence frames historical violence through affective memory and postwar nostalgia, facilitating symbolic closure. Together, these novels demonstrate how time travel can serve as a critical apparatus for negotiating national trauma without recourse to historical revision.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6010004

Authors: Nishant Upadhyay

This paper examines how Dushyant Kumar’s collection, sāye meṅ dhūp (lit. Sunlight in the Shadows), reinvented the classical ġhazal genre as a vernacular weapon of anti-authoritarian dissent—not by abandoning ambiguity, but by recalibrating it under conditions of constraint—during India’s Emergency. This study argues that Kumar’s work constitutes a radical departure from the genre’s traditional emphasis on the abstract longing of the lover for the beloved and other tropes which are peculiar to writing ġhazal in the Perso-Urdu world. Instead, Kumar systematically repurposed its conventions—its ambiguity, its metaphors of the beloved and the garden, its themes of sacrifice—to mount a sharp polemic against Indira Gandhi’s regime. Through an analysis of ġhazal-s selected for their range of polemical strategies—from direct satire and political allegory to the recasting of traditional themes like martyrdom—this paper demonstrates how Kumar’s conscious use of a blended Hindi–Urdu vernacular was central to his political project. By writing in “the language I speak,” he dragged the elite ġhazal into the public square, transforming it into a medium for articulating collective disillusionment, resistance, and a scathing critique of a democracy in crisis. Kumar’s work thus stands as a testament to the ġhazal’s potent, and often overlooked, capacity for explicit political engagement.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6010003

Authors: Donald Thomas Carte

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 academy and just as passionately defended that territory against their neighbor’s incursions. At times, authors and their intentions have been central to literary criticism, while at others, they are intellectually discarded or severely reduced in importance. Much of the friction caused by the shifting focus of literary criticism is driven by impassioned rhetoric and convictions that leave little room for compromise. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened the possibility of a dispassionate arbiter, one that, should the literary community have the courage and conviction to embrace and exploit, could offer a new level of harmony between divergent literary theories.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6010002

Authors: Timothy S. Miller Arwen Paredes

Peter S. Beagle’s decision to feminize the formerly masculine figure of the unicorn in his influential 1968 fantasy novel The Last Unicorn represents a key moment in the evolution of this now ubiquitous image, one embraced today as a symbol of pride by LGBTQ+ communities. The novel and its 1982 animated film adaptation have themselves remained popular among queer and especially trans audiences, who have often found the narrative resonant with their own experiences. This essay provides a preliminary overview of the queer history of the unicorn symbol and continues into a trans reading of the novel, arguing that these responses to Beagle’s work by contemporary readers reflect dimensions of the narrative congruent with concerns about gender performance and misrecognition; gender dysphoria; and queer temporalities. The nature of the fantasy form itself, we maintain throughout, can also particularly enable reparative readings by queer and trans audiences.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature6010001

Authors: Qianyi Ma

This essay examines how contemporary Anglophone Chinese women writers rewrite the imagery of Chinese snake women through speculative retellings that foreground sisterhood, queer desire, and diasporic identity. Drawing on queer diaspora studies and feminist criticism, I argue that Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake (2024) revise the figure of the Chinese snake woman to imagine forms of female intimacy and kinship that transcend heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks. In these works, sisterhood operates both as a familial bond and as an intimate, queer relation charged with affective, physical, and occasionally erotic intensity. The original White Snake legend—one of China’s Four Great Folktales—has long invited queer readings, especially through the complex relationship between White Snake and her companion Green Snake. In dialogue with the Chinese snake myth, Lai and Koe relocate the snake woman into speculative worlds shaped by queer desire, racial marginalization, and transnational migration. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai reimagines the reincarnations of the half-snake Chinese mother goddess Nu Wa across colonial South China and near-future bio-capitalist Canada, portraying a cross-temporal lesbian love between the protagonist and the titular Salt Fish Girl. In Sister Snake, Koe’s protagonists—serpent sisters Su and Emerald, separated between Singapore and New York—disrupt normative family scripts while forging a fragmented but enduring affective bond. Through the motif of the Chinese snake woman, these works construct imaginative spaces in which intimate sisterhood subverts patriarchal and national containment, advancing a queer vision of female togetherness.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5040028

Authors: Danil Fokin Monika Płużyczka Łukasz Wróbel

We present a psycholinguistic test battery designed to examine the cognitive and affective processes involved in reading Polish poetry. This toolkit combines reader profiling (vocabulary, memory and reading proficiency) with tasks that assess the influence of lexical, textual, affective and poetic features on recognition, context restoration and association generation. Pilot data confirmed the reliability of the measures and their sensitivity to recognised psycholinguistic effects. Vocabulary size and delayed memory rehearsal strongly predicted performance in content restoration, while recognition and association latencies were closely related, indicating shared retrieval mechanisms. Structural and affective properties also influenced responses: line-final words improved recognition but impeded association, with these effects being moderated by word length and frequency. Words that were negatively valenced, abstract and hardly imaginable were restored more accurately than positive or concrete ones. These findings demonstrate the potential of the battery for profiling readers and provide new insights into how Polish poetic language engages memory and associative processes.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5040027

Authors: Peter Jarrett Schmidt

To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. This essay primarily focuses on satire. I first give a brief overview of key ideas from the last several decades on genre theory, particularly prose essays that explore what poetic genres are and if they evolve. I then survey ways to understand how the history of satiric poems furnishes valuable perspectives on contemporary developments in ecopoetry, which is defined as poetry linking ecological and social crises. The role of satire in ecopoetry has been too little studied—even though poets themselves, prodded by environmental degradation, have long valued the genre. At the heart of the essay are readings of poems by Jorie Graham, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Jenny L. Davis, and others. Their work provides test cases for my hypothesis that the climate crisis is causing satiric poetry to adapt, modifying its methods and goals. When elements of a genre are no longer suited for contemporary needs, innovative poets get to work. Yet contemporary innovations paradoxically reaffirm the ancient legacy of satire’s importance.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5040026

Authors: King-Kok Cheung

My sinuous life as a humanist traversing disciplinary, periodic, geographical, and national borders has yielded palpable wonders, the most wonderful being the opportunity to live and connect many lives. I was made bilingual, bicultural, and cosmopolitan in colonial Hong Kong, a classicist at Pepperdine University, a Renaissance scholar at Berkeley, an intersectional Americanist at UCLA, and a polyglot comparatist by UCEAP. The many splendors of literary America unraveled by Bruins of disparate stripes have driven me to herald the variegated beauty of Chinese American heritage. I have gone from being an outsider, a suspect even, in both English and Asian American studies to being a humanist resource. It behooves me to usher in, among the Bruins, my mother tongue—the language of the Tang poets, gold miners, and the Transpacific railroad workers, and to stage Cantonese opera. “In my end is my beginning.”

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5040025

Authors: Winfried Menninghaus Vanessa Kegel Kirill Fayn Wolff Schlotz

Ease of cognitive processing is an important predictor of aesthetic liking. However, many acclaimed artworks are fairly complex and require substantial cognitive effort. Are they aesthetically liked despite or because of this increased cognitive challenge? The present study pursued this question experimentally. The high syntactic complexity of Heinrich von Kleist’s narratives provided the test case. According to literary scholars, this high syntactic complexity should support increased levels of how “suspenseful,” “intense,” “interesting,” and evocative of a sense of “urgency” the texts are perceived, and it should thereby also support higher overall aesthetic liking. This expectation is in line with recent models in empirical aesthetics according to which higher ease of processing and higher cognitive challenge are not mutually exclusive, but can conjointly drive aesthetic liking to higher levels. The standard hypothesis of cognitive fluency instead predicts a disfluency-driven negative effect on aesthetic liking. We tested these two predictions in two studies by presenting excerpts from Kleist’s narratives in their original vs. syntactically simplified versions to participants. Results differ substantially depending on how the target variables are statistically modeled. If ease of processing and cognitive challenge are modeled separately as predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings, higher ease of processing is a strong positive and higher cognitive challenge a largely negative predictor. However, when the two complementary cognitive variables are modeled conjointly, they are both positive predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings. Their predictive power differs, however, significantly. Only the positive effect of ease of processing is pervasive across all readers. That of cognitive challenge is substantially modified by individual differences. Specifically, it was observed for readers who (1) are of higher age, (2) like to read narratives in general, and (3) reported prior positive experiences with Kleist. Supporting the ecological validity of our findings, readers meeting these criteria are more likely than others to actually read Kleist outside the laboratory.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5040024

Authors: Inge van de Ven

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 or conflicting narrative accounts. The story we selected is “In a Grove” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (orig. 藪の中/Yabu no naka) from 1922 in the English translation by Jay Rubin from 2007. To investigate how readers evaluate trustworthiness in narrative contexts, we combined quantitative and qualitative methods. We analyzed correlations between reading habits (i.e., Author Recognition Test), cognitive traits (e.g., Need for Cognition; Epistemic Trust), and trust attributions to characters while also examining how narrative sequencing and character-specific reasons for (dis)trust shaped participants’ judgments. This mixed-methods approach allows us to situate narrative trust as a context-sensitive, interpretive process rather than a stable individual disposition.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030023

Authors: Brandy E. Underwood

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 communities throughout Los Angeles were impacted by unrest in 1992. From Yamashita’s Buzzworm, a character always tuned into the radio, to Beatty’s Nicholas Scoby, the protagonist’s best friend who is on a mission to listen to every jazz song ever made, these writers render secondary characters who are most concerned with the consumption of music and the act of listening as a form of culture sharing. In fact, these characters utilize portable devices, particularly the Walkman, to bring personal music and media consumption into public spaces. In this paper, I argue that characters like Buzzworm and Scoby facilitate the creation of specific sonic textures that allow authors to break down artificial barriers of racial representation in the aftermath of urban unrest. These writers highlight the act of listening in order to limn the cross-cultural impact that the 1992 unrest had throughout the Southern California region.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030022

Authors: Gail Turley Houston

This case study examines the reproductive choices of republican couple Eliza Sharples (1803–1852) and Richard Carlile (1790–1843) and the conflicted political and personal trajectories of those choices. This includes examination of his initial public writings supporting birth control methods set next to his retrogressive attitudes about women’s roles and his increasingly conservative and patriarchal attitudes about sexuality while using Sharples’s pregnancy out of wedlock to make his case for “moral marriage.” It sets his ideas next to Sharples’s proto-feminist uses of her pregnancy (confinement) vis-à-vis his confinement in jail as she seeks to show how her “confinement” does “labor” for republican and feminist causes. The paper highlights a crisis when the jail rescinded Sharples’s right to visit Carlile and studies the rhetoric used in the heated, desperate, triangulated exchanges between the jailors, Carlile and Sharples.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030021

Authors: Christine A. Knoop Stefan Blohm

The theoretical question of what makes texts “literary” has a long tradition in literary studies. At the level of concrete individual encounters/transactions between readers and texts, literariness has been shown to reflect how actual readers pre-categorize, approach, and process texts. Literariness has been approached from three different angles: the study of formal and semantic features of literary language, which dates back to the formalist beginnings of the concept; the study of literary reading modes and the generalized literary categories in which they are grounded; and the study of actual reading experiences. We argue (1) that these three aspects are mutually dependent and, in fact, constitute three sides of the same coin and (2) that different texts and genres instantiate distinct literariness profiles, that is, distinct ‘literarinesses’ in the mind of the reader—what makes a text literary differs between text types. Building on previous work in linguistics, literary studies, psychology, and stylistics, we discuss the cognitive implications of these two central claims for the reader. We also integrate our approach with extant research on genre-specific profiles and develop a set of ideas for future research in this field.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030020

Authors: Hannah Armour Sibylle Baumbach

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 attention into educational practice. This paper examines her use of different short prose forms as a means of cultivating attentional capacities in young children and adolescents, while simultaneously providing educators with adaptable tools for designing exercises targeted to varying levels of attentiveness. Through close analysis of two narratives, “The Purple Jar” and “The Good French Governess”, we argue that Edgeworth’s short stories and tales experiment with various degrees of (narrative) complexity to foster the development of two key attentional habits, the transition of thought and the abstraction of attention, both essential for navigating everyday environments. Our findings suggest that Edgeworth’s literary experiments not only contribute to our understanding of attentional affordances of different short fiction forms and help advance knowledge about literature and cognition; they also underscore the pedagogical potential of “attention narratives” in educational contexts.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030019

Authors: Maria Miruna Ciocoi-Pop

This article investigates the role of space in the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides, focusing on The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002) through the lens of spatial theory. Drawing on key thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Doreen Massey, the study explores how Eugenides constructs spatial environments that not only frame but actively shape the identities, desires, and traumas of his characters. In The Virgin Suicides, suburban domestic spaces are shown to function as heterotopias—sites of surveillance, repression, and mythologized femininity—while Middlesex engages with transnational and urban spaces to narrate diasporic and intersex identity as dynamic, embodied, and liminal. The analysis reveals that Eugenides uses space as both a narrative device and a thematic concern to interrogate gender, memory, and power. Rather than passive backdrops, the novelistic spaces become charged arenas of conflict and transformation, reflecting and resisting dominant socio-cultural discourses. This study argues that space in Eugenides’ fiction operates as a critical register for understanding the politics of belonging and the production of subjectivity. By situating Eugenides within the broader field of literary spatiality, this article contributes to contemporary debates in literary geography, gender studies, and American fiction.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030018

Authors: Carolyn Elizabeth Brown

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 the latter characters are more complicated and politically adroit than they are often judged to be. They are Machiavellian as well, but Shakespeare conceives them within a more appreciative view of the concept of realpolitik. This essay explains the characters’ strategies by relating them to Machiavelli’s tenets of achieving and maintaining political power. The central quandary of the play is the lack of a male heir to the throne. Cordelia attempts to solve the problem by marrying the King of France for political reasons. She has an alliance with Kent, who helps her to justify her invasion of her homeland with French forces. Once the plans for a surprise attack go awry, Cordelia does not follow Machiavellian strategies and is consequently killed. Ironically, Edgar is as ambitious as Edmund, whom he lets plot against his father and bring about Gloucester’s slow decline so as to inherit his father’s fortune while Edmund incurs the blame for his father’s demise. Like Kent, he enlists a disguise for self-advancement. The most adroit Machiavellian characters—Edgar, Kent, and the King of France—all survive through chicanery and cunning. Shakespeare illustrates that secular methods of governorship defeat the old world of divine politics.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030017

Authors: Santiago Juan-Navarro

This article re-examines Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks” (1956) and “Instructions for John Howell” (1963) through the lens of reader-response theory, hermeneutics, and cognitive narratology. Traditionally viewed as examples of the fantastic, these stories are interpreted here as complementary explorations of passive and active reading, offering a literary dialectic that parallels the reflections articulated in Cortázar’s Rayuela [Hopscotch] (1963). Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s theories of textual gaps and reader cooperation, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of appropriation, and more recent approaches to cognitive immersion and narrative engagement, this study argues that both stories dramatize reading as an ethical and political act. “Continuity of Parks” illustrates the dangers of uncritical textual consumption, culminating in the protagonist’s epistemic and existential annihilation, while “Instructions for John Howell” presents a model of insurgent readership, where the spectator’s appropriation of the play foregrounds the risks and possibilities of narrative intervention. By analyzing the use of metalepsis, destabilized focalization, and narrative layering in these stories, this article highlights how Cortázar anticipates contemporary concerns regarding reader agency, interpretive autonomy, and the sociopolitical implications of literary engagement.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030016

Authors: Nontembiso Patricia Jaxa

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 intended to explore the efficacy of stylistic sentences in the isiXhosa creative work Ukhozi Olumaphiko. In Ukhozi Olumaphiko, the author artfully employs periodic, cumulative, and balanced stylistic sentences for the realization of different purposes in the story. In this study, content analysis has been used as a qualitative and quantitative research technique, as it allowed for a detailed examination of the novel Ukhozi Olumaphiko. Stylistic sentences were identified, interpreted, and coded, using integer coding for classification. Employing literary stylistics as a theoretical approach, the stylistic sentences were analysed according to their literary impact and effect. The findings indicate that the author utilises periodic sentences predominantly in the beginning stages of the story, a spread of cumulative, balanced, and periodic sentences in the middle stages, and periodic and cumulative sentences more in the end stages of the novel. The stylistics mentioned enhance the themes, textual meanings, and narrative features of Ukhozi Olumaphiko text and are useful in weaving suspense in a way that captures the reader’s attention and evokes emotions.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5030015

Authors: Jill Channing

T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has long been examined through the lenses of modernist alienation and psychological paralysis. While previous scholarship has emphasized the poem’s existential themes and innovative form, it has often overlooked the central role of gendered discourse in shaping Prufrock’s communicative anxieties. This article argues that Eliot critiques patriarchal norms by portraying Prufrock’s paralysis as a product of masculine performance anxiety—his fear of miscommunication, emasculation, and judgment in interactions with women. Drawing on contemporary sociolinguistic frameworks by Deborah Tannen and Jennifer Coates, the analysis reveals how Prufrock’s internal monolog reflects early 20th-century anxieties around shifting gender roles and expectations. By situating Prufrock within both the literary traditions and sociocultural tensions of Eliot’s time, the article offers a new interpretation of the poem as a subtle but powerful commentary on the constraints of patriarchal communication. This reading not only deepens our understanding of Eliot’s engagement with gender but also reframes Prufrock’s alienation as a socially constructed and gendered crisis.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020014

Authors: Hannah W. Nahm

This essay defies the literary ghettoization of Asian-authored narratives and interrogates the space delineated as mainstream American feminist literature by placing Ng’s Everything in dialogue with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Kingston’s Woman Warrior (focusing on the first chapter, “No Name Woman”). It proposes a dialectical reading of Ng’s contemporary novel as a synthesis of Chopin’s and Kingston’s works and shows how Ng accounts for the reality and complexity of our intersectional identities—mixed racial parentage, nonbinary sex, or gender. Ng underscores the urgency of considering intersectional bodies and communities, especially relevant to our current times. It calls for a reading that accounts for both White people and people of color, both men and women, and both straight and queer. It reevaluates the thorny questions of the ethics of motherhood and intergenerational trauma that Chopin’s and Kingston’s narratives explore. This article encourages ongoing conversations about interethnic and intersectional fissures and affinities.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020013

Authors: Kirren Chana Jan Mikuni Simone Rebora Gabriele Vezzani Anja Meyer Massimo Salgaro Helmut Leder

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 presentation of verbal (text) and visual (image) features on memorability and aesthetic evaluation in the context of book covers. To this aim, 50 participants took part in a memory recognition task in which the same book cover information was encoded in a learning phase, and either text or image features from the book covers acted as an informational cue for memory recognition and aesthetic evaluations. Our results revealed that image features significantly aided memory performance more than text features. Image features that were rated more beautiful were not better recognized as a result. However, differences in memory performance were found in relation to familiarity and, in a non-linear fashion, the extent to which the book’s contents could be inferred from the image’s informational content. Additionally, reading behavior was not found to influence memory performance. These results are discussed with regard to the interplay of text and image informational cues on book cover perception and provide implications for future studies.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020012

Authors: Alexandra Effe

Autofiction often interweaves the (phenomenologically) real and the unreal. It is definitionally in some way about the author as a real-life person but also frequently features elements that are impossible by real-life standards, or at least seem highly unlikely. This article argues that autofiction provides a training ground for imaginative acts and has the potential to change our understanding of what is possible, not only in literature but also in life. This article substantiates this hypothesis by integrating models from Text World Theory, Unnatural Narratology, and a Predictive-Processing account of reading, as well as neuroscientific research on the default mode network and on literary writing and reading. The article finally draws on reader responses from the platform “Goodreads” as tentative evidence for how autofictional texts affect intuitions about the (im)possible.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020010

Authors: Laura Christine Otis

Recent cognitive literary studies of fiction have begun to reveal patterns in the ways authors engage readers’ bodily and environmentally grounded imaginations. This study brings fiction writers’ craft knowledge into conversation with neuroscientific, cognitive, and literary studies of multimodal imagery and other embodied responses to fiction reading. Developed through years of literary experiments, craft knowledge involves using language not just to engage readers’ senses but to broaden their understandings of how senses work. A close analysis of Edwidge Danticat’s craft techniques in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) affirms some recent literary and scientific findings on how language can activate readers’ sensory and motor systems. Danticat’s cues to readers’ imaginations present a relational, environmentally engaged kind of sensorimotor experience that may widen scientific understandings of how sensory and motor systems collaboratively ground cognition. By helping diverse readers imagine a young Haitian American woman’s movements, sensations, and emotions, Danticat’s craft also does political work, depicting the inner lives of characters under-represented in widely published fiction.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020011

Authors: Robert Kyriakos Smith

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 expatriate who immigrated to the U.K. in 1950 and remained there until his death in 2018. He was famously Anglophilic; and given his notorious insistence that culturally the West Indies are derivative, not creative, it is unsurprising that Naipaul depicts Black Power as an empty form that Trinidad and Great Britain import to their detriment from the U.S. In its fictionalization of the story of a real-life figure on the periphery of Black Power, Guerrillas presents Black Power’s presence in Trinidad and the UK as a failure and a sham. My article traces Naipaul’s transformation of what was originally a journalistic account into his novel Guerrillas in order to highlight the tendentiousness of his representation of Trinidadian Black Power. The plot of the novel repurposes the crux of Naipaul’s essay “The Killings in Trinidad” in which he reports how a Trinidadian Black Power poseur known as “Michael X” conspired in the January 1972 murder of a white woman named Gale Ann Benson. Crucial to Naipaul’s dismissal of Black Power as a derivative fiction, this article argues, is the fraudulent Michael X, himself a mimic man par excellence in his embodiment of Black Power as an empty and parodic form devoid of original content. I demonstrate how Naipaul’s marginalization of Caribbean Black Power depends on formal mimicry and on his selection of this marginal player/mimic man as representative of the movement in Trinidad.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020009

Authors: Simona Laghi

The circulation of Il Principe in the British Isles increased significantly in 1584, thanks to the editor John Wolfe. His aim was to spread Machiavelli’s works not only in England but also across Europe and Italy, where the book had been included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum since 1557. Machiavelli’s advice to rulers on how to acquire and maintain power, ensuring peace and stability, attracted a diverse readership, from members of the royal court to reformers, philosophers, legal scholars, and even playwrights like Shakespeare. This paper, departing from the influence of The Prince in England, focuses on how the ambiguous figure of the principe nuovo served as a model for discussing diverse forms of government and political theories. It will be shown that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure enters the political debate by representing Duke Vincentio as the embodiment of a tyrannical Machiavellian prince, offering an indirect criticism of the rule of King James I of England and VI of Scotland.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020008

Authors: Irene Mizrahi

This article critically examines the star persona of Lola Flores, an iconic Spanish flamenco artist, within the historical and political context of Francoist Spain (1939–1975). It argues that Flores’s carefully constructed star image not only persisted into post-Franco Spain but also served as a covert vehicle for the continued propagation of National-Falangist Catholic ideology. The article primarily focuses on two major productions: the book Lola en carne viva. Memorias de Lola Flores (1990) and the television series El coraje de vivir (1994). Both portray a linear and cohesive version of her life from childhood to her later years, carefully curated to defend and rehabilitate her image. While many view Flores as a self-made artist, the article argues that her star persona was a deliberate construct—shaped by Suevia Films, a major Francoist-era film studio, and media narratives that aligned her with traditional gender roles, Catholic values, and Spanish nationalism. Despite emerging in post-Franco Spain, Flores’s narrative does not mark a rupture from the ideological frameworks of the past. Instead, it repackages Francoist values—particularly those surrounding patriarchal gender norms, suffering, and the glorification of sacrifice—to ensure her continued relevance. Suevia Films (1951) played a significant role in shaping her star persona as a symbol of Spanish folklore, aligning her with Francoist ideals of nation, Catholic morality, and submissive femininity. Her image was used to promote Spain internationally as a welcoming and culturally rich destination. Her persona fit within Franco’s broader strategy of using flamenco and folklore to attract foreign tourism while maintaining tight ideological control over entertainment. Flores’s life is framed as a rags-to-riches story, which reinforces Social Spencerist ideology (a social Darwinist perspective) that hard work and endurance lead to success, rather than acknowledging systemic oppression under Francoism. Her personal struggles—poverty, romantic disappointments, accusations of collaboration with the Franco regime, and tax evasion—are framed as necessary trials that strengthen her character. This aligns with the Catholic ideal of redemptive suffering, reinforcing her status as the mater dolorosa (Sorrowful Mother) figure. This article highlights the contradictions in Flores’s gender performance—while she embodied passion and sensuality in flamenco, her offstage identity conformed to the submissive, self-sacrificing woman idealized by the Francoist Sección Femenina (SF). Even in her personal life, Flores’s narrative aligns with Francoist values—her father’s bar, La Fe de Pedro Flores, symbolizes the fusion of religion, nationalism, and traditional masculinity. Tico Medina plays a key role by framing Lola en carne viva as an “authentic” and unfiltered account. His portrayal is highly constructed, acting as her “defense lawyer” to counter criticisms. Flores’s autobiography is monologic—it suppresses alternative perspectives, ensuring that her version of events remains dominant and unquestioned. Rather than acknowledging structural oppression, the narrative glorifies suffering as a path to resilience, aligning with both Catholic doctrine and Francoist propaganda. The article ultimately deconstructs Lola Flores’s autobiographical myth, demonstrating that her public persona—both onstage and offstage—was a strategic construction that perpetuated Francoist ideals well beyond the dictatorship. While her image has been celebrated as a symbol of Spanish cultural identity, it also functioned as a tool for maintaining patriarchal and nationalist ideologies under the guise of entertainment.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5020007

Authors: Wuna Zhou Siyu Huo

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney depicts a love story between Frances, a Dublin college student, and Nick, a married, middle-class actor. The author creatively integrates film narrative and digital media narrative into the novel, thus employing different media for expression. When the novel was successfully adapted into a TV series in 2022, fan participation, media interviews, and actors’ interpretations fleshed out the characters, extending the process of cross-media remediation. Frances gradually accomplishes self-construal in the process of cross-media narrative, searching for the individual self, relational self, and collective self. In this article, Frances’ individual, collective, and relational selves are analyzed by exploring the effects of film and digital media narrative and cross-media remediation. We develop new perspectives on the interaction of multiple media and the intersection of narrative techniques. In breaking down the barriers between the text and the real world, millennials’ breakups, adherence to communist ideals, and awakening of female consciousness are well depicted. Due to Rooney’s cross-media narrative, the novel’s features could also bring the readers a film-like experience, thus making it suitable for visual adaptation.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5010006

Authors: Dustin Gish

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-be princes, or political leaders. However, a more nuanced understanding of Machiavelli’s reflections on human nature in his writings, especially The Prince, reveals that there is a philosophic core within his approach to political success, the acquisition and maintenance of state. But while there is no doubt that Machiavelli openly rejected the idealism of certain ancient and medieval thinkers, whose imagined republics only ever existed in theory, and instead candidly advised princes to seek and wield power, his work reflects not only a profound engagement with the harsh realities of a political landscape dominated by practical necessity but also a project of far-reaching scope. With the concept of “effectual truth” as his guide, Machiavelli proposes radical means to overcome fortuna with virtù and establish the foundations of power in order to bring about that conquest. The fulfillment of his mission and mandate to those who follow his lead represents the Machiavellian enterprise.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5010005

Authors: Gillian Dooley

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 published in Cambridge University Press’s ‘British Authors: Introductory Critical Studies’ series. In 1972, she moved to Australia with her husband, Brendon. Although by this time she had published two volumes of poetry, her first novel, A Change of Skies, was not published until 1991. It concerns a Sri Lankan linguistics academic who moves to Australia with his wife, and the adjustments they have to make to Australian ways. Since then, she published two more novels, The Pleasures of Conquest (1996) and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2009). In this paper I will attempt to draw together these three coordinates in Gooneratne’s career: English literature, especially Jane Austen; Australia; and Sri Lanka. What did Gooneratne learn, as a novelist, from her study of Austen? How did her time in Australia influence her as a novelist? And how did she negotiate the difficulties she identified in her fellow Sri Lankan writers?

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5010004

Authors: Hui Lyu

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 that the novel dismantles traditional dichotomies, such as culture/nature, self/outer environment, and human/nonhuman, and presents these categories as part of a dynamic, interconnected ecological assemblage. The analysis examines three aspects of the assemblage in the novel: first, the assemblage of nature and culture; second, the assemblage of human and nonhuman; and third, the dynamics, contingencies, and uncertainties of the ecological assemblage. This study concludes that though written at the end of the 19th century, The Country of the Pointed Firs anticipates contemporary ideas of assemblage theory, demonstrating its enduring relevance to contemporary ecocritical discourse.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5010003

Authors: Myriam Marie Ackermann-Sommer

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 grief is not acknowledged in a patriarchal context. My approach uses close readings and psychoanalytical insights to understand the female protagonist’s voiceless rage. The narrator of the framing narrative is a young woman trying to understand a mysterious family trauma—how little Henrietta, the daughter of her uncle Simon and his ex-wife, Essie, died. The starting point of the story is a distorted version of the accident, told to the narrator by her mother, Lily, and according to which it is Essie’s mistreatment that caused the little girl’s death. Through the narrative, the narrator encourages Essie to tell her own side of the story. In the embedded narrative, the mother reveals that it was in fact the father’s negligence that caused the death of their child. Father and mother subsequently develop differing models of mourning. Simon, a linguist, creates a whole new idiom enabling him to keep commemorating the dead child. In contrast, Essie, the mother, is determined to destroy any discourse that might account for her trauma, and to undermine the father’s very public mourning process. The narrator acts as a kind of therapist, allowing Essie’s discourse on loss to emerge after decades of repression. On the masculine/feminine, father/mother binary axis, I will observe, based on the study of this fascinating short story, that the father’s mourning involves mastering language, while the mother experiences loss through the sheer inability to speak up—at least until the narrator, Vivian, empowers her by giving her a voice.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5010002

Authors: Andrew Moore

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, political legitimacy, and the origins of sovereign power. Measure for Measure is concerned with illicit activity and ineffective government. But in this comedy—this “problem play”—Shakespeare is especially interested in the political mechanism by which authority and obedience are restored. How is a delinquent population, used to license, brought under control? Shakespeare examines one strategy in this play, one he has seemingly adapted from the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Multiple critics have recognized that the story of Duke Vincentio and his deviant deputy, Lord Angelo, bear a striking resemblance to the story Machiavelli tells about Cesare Borgia and Remirro de Orco in Chapter 7 of The Prince. Here, I build upon these analyses to offer a new account of Shakespeare’s relationship to Machiavelli and political realism more generally. The Cesare story provides Shakespeare with an opportunity to explore how spectacle and theatricality can be used—not only to subdue an unruly population but to legitimate sovereign authority. However, Shakespeare delves deeper than Machiavelli into the mechanism whereby political authority is reestablished, first by considering the psychological conditions of the Duke’s subjects (both before and during his spectacular display of power), and second, by emphasizing the need for individual citizens to will sovereign authority into being. As we will see, in Shakespeare’s Vienna, order can only be restored once the delinquent people beg to be governed.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature5010001

Authors: Yutaka Okuhata

On 1 July 2024, Ismail Kadare, one of the most prestigious and successful writers in Albania, died at the age of eighty-eight [...]

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4040021

Authors: Wendy J. Glenn

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 people, particularly young girls, wanting to navigate their worlds in ways that challenge conventional love, do not have the same power and privilege given their gender, age, and lack of financial autonomy. The young adult novel Furia invites young readers to evidence an adolescent character whose love of sport serves as a form of liberation from social constraints in a way that likely feels more resonant and doable, more real somehow. The protagonist’s engagement with and dedication to sport invite complications of ideological assumptions about love, particularly gendered narratives that position girls and women as bound by devotion This paper draws upon the youth lensand methods of critical context analysis to better understand how the protagonist is positioned as an athlete and a young woman and to offer interpretative thinking that explores how this title can help us (and young readers) think about love through the lens of sport.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4040020

Authors: Todd Foley

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’s black market surrogacy scheme, and finally ends up withdrawing into a spiritual state of atonement for her previous deeds. This article examines the relationship between human and animal in the novel, suggesting that the conceptual separation of these categories is intimately related to the various problems the novel depicts throughout Chinese modernity. By focusing on the critical possibilities offered by the novel’s title, Wā 蛙, as a homophone with both “baby” (wá 娃) and the “wa” of the mythical female progenitor Nüwa (娲wā), I suggest that Mo Yan offers a new concept of life, best referred to simply as wa, in response to certain crises of modernity. As an ambiguously generative reconceptualization of life, wa denies conventional and simplistic distinctions between human and animal while incorporating elements of spirituality and unknowability into an otherwise overly rationalized and monetized idea of the human.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4040019

Authors: Sarah Hoem Iversen Brianne Jaquette

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 article reads this popular children’s novel in conjunction with Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia (1910), which, while well-known in its time, does not have the classic status of The Secret Garden. Drawing on theory about the narrator–narratee relationship in children’s texts, this comparative analysis considers how knowledge about gardening is constructed and narrated in a work of fiction and a work of nonfiction, respectively, particularly in terms of how the child reader is addressed, constructed, and positioned. We investigate how constructions of childhood are linked to the concept of gardening, both mediated through books and the act of reading, and as an activity that children are invited to undertake. Both texts present knowledge about gardening as something which is constructed both through reading and studying and through practical experience. However, while in The Secret Garden, child characters co-construct knowledge more collaboratively, the adult narratee in The Children’s Encyclopaedia more strongly instructs the “young gardener”. The garden in both texts eventually becomes a way to socialise children; however, the act of gardening also allows a temporary freedom from those social roles.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4040018

Authors: Emma Joy Reay

In this article, I analyse the function of supporting child-characters in contemporary videogames. I integrate Stephen Zimmerly’s typology of sidekicks in Young Adult literature with critical writing on the ‘Daddening’ of videogames, a coinage that refers to the rise in the number of videogames that centre on the filial bond between a father figure and a child. Bringing these ideas into conversation with each other allows me to expand Zimmerly’s sidekick typology to include the ‘Ludic Gateway’, the ‘Morality Certificate’, and the ‘Disciplinary Tool’. I explore each category in greater depth using two case studies: The Last of Us series (2012; 2014; 2020) and the God of War series (2008; 2018; 2022). These commercially successful, critically acclaimed franchises rely on young deuteragonists to humanize and redeem the gruff, aggressive, violent male player character. Furthermore, the child sidekicks also serve to regulate the player’s in-game behaviour by way of a parasocial relationship. Using a close reading approach, I demonstrate that the supporting child-characters function as meta-critical devices to discipline gaming communities and the video game medium itself.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4040017

Authors: Sophie Vallas

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 Second World War Jewish genocide transmitted to younger generations, the desk powerfully materializes transmission in its potentially traumatic, obsessional, and violent dimensions. This essay deals with the way first- and second-generation women, in the novel, develop ingenious, creative but also uncompromising responses to the inescapable duty of remembrance. While the dominating male characters freeze memory in timeless, petrified representations, these female writers expose its terrible necessity while hiding nothing of the damages memory causes to witnesses and descendants. They claim a right of inventory and use the desk as an echo-chamber reflecting both the suffering voices of children and the dark presence of defaulting fathers and failing mothers, thus allowing for a new generation to be born with a more bearable heritage.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4040016

Authors: Emma-Louise Silva

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 studies and children’s literature studies, the unfolding of negotiations between memory and imagination as authors create narratives of life writing is underexplored. This article examines how negotiations of memory and imagination unfold on paper during the writing processes for Roald Dahl’s Boy (1984), David Almond’s Counting Stars (2000), and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). While positioning itself in the field of cognitive literary studies and the archival study of creative writing processes, this article aims to generate insights on the reconstructive approach to memory, which considers episodic remembering as imagining the past. By transposing the study of the dynamics of writing processes, or genetic criticism, to children’s literature, I explore notes, mindmaps, manuscripts, and typescripts held at the archives of Dahl, Almond, and Woodson to chart how they imaginatively incorporate memories of their youth into their life writing. As such, this research informs understandings of the narrative genesis of the authors’ works, while drawing on the manifestations of their literary creativity in an attempt to broaden knowledge regarding memory and imagination.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4030015

Authors: Odette Kelada

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 modern period, a continued lack of awareness, recognition and education on Australian women’s writing despite targeted awards and the achievements of the feminist movement. This piece reflects back across time, drawing on interviews I conducted and PhD thesis research with women writers in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century, and maps how the legacies of gendered notions of writers impacted women at this pivotal era to consider what this may mean for women writing today. It also explores how feminist theories such as écriture féminine are helpful for framing and understanding the responses of Australian women writers to the shifting notions of sexual difference and agency in writing. This article aims to provide insights into the complexities of liberation for women from the past to modern times, and the impact of gender on creative expression in Australia across changing social periods.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4030014

Authors: Cheng-Ting Chang

The status of adults and children in children’s literature is a complex, long-debated issue. Marah Gubar introduced the kinship model, challenging the notion of children as voiceless and emphasizing their agency as human beings. This study argues that the model can serve as a fruitful framework for examining the representation of children in death-themed picturebooks because the phenomenon of death places children and adults in a relatively equal position and implies similarities between them. It analyzes 11 picturebooks featuring agential child protagonists and published in the UK, the US, Japan, and Taiwan. The analysis is directed at four representations: the independent child, the atomized child, the helpful child, and the analogous child and adult. Each exploration describes whether and how the texts illustrate the model’s key points: (1) a child’s voice and agency; (2) the relatedness, connection, and similarity between children and adults; and (3) the gradual, erratic, and variable nature of development from childhood to adulthood. The findings highlight the heterogeneity of agential children across cultures and suggest that scrutinizing childhood requires engagement with adulthood. This perspective inspires us to reconsider the adult-child dichotomy and expand our imagination of what children can be across cultures.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4030013

Authors: Krzysztof Rybak

More and more informational picturebooks on environmental topics have been published in recent years, many focusing on the inevitable climate change. Conversely, there is still a tendency in contemporary picturebooks to represent the climate traditionally, irrespective of actual climate change. A particularly interesting case is the representation of the seasons, especially in books aimed at the youngest ‘readers’, such as wimmelbooks. Not only are they crucial for developing emergent and visual literacy, but they also contain normative images that constitute a prototype for the child. The ‘norms’ picturebooks present are based on the authors’ ideologies that constitute all informational picturebooks as their authors interpret facts. Hence, this article aims to analyse the visual strategies used and the ideologies expressed by wimmelbooks from Poland and Germany in representing the seasons (Marcin Strzembosz’s Jaki to miesiąc? [2002] and Ali Mitgutsch’s Mein Wimmel-Bilderbuch: Frühling, Sommer, Herbst und Winter [2007], among others). The preliminary research shows that the authors seem to propose traditional, idyllic, ecologically normative images of the environment, which I propose to call econormative (inspired by the word ‘aetonormative’), such as snowy winters, sunny summers, etc.; hence, wimmelbooks seem to assent to stereotypical depictions of the seasons associated with the notion of ideal childhoods set in econormative environments.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4030012

Authors: Joe Sutliff Sanders

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 that the rules of critical engagement might be different in different genres of children’s nonfiction.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4030011

Authors: Inger-Kristin Larsen Vie

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. It contains Bergh’s own illustrations and text passages in Norwegian, English, and German, which signals that the book addresses a national and international audience. Simultaneously, the book is published in an era characterized by an increasing interest in indigenous tourism, demonstrated through the popularity of world exhibitions and «human zoos». In this article, I explore Bergh’s nonfiction picturebook in the light of “human zoos” and “living exhibitions” at the beginning of the 1900s and how her book alludes to the depiction of the Sámi for entertainment and information purposes. My close reading shows how the book reflects the categorization and systematization of the world and of exotic ethnic groups at the time. Furthermore, the reading confirms the book’s very distinctive position in Norwegian children’s literature history, and how it may have acquired a particular role in the promotion of Norwegian tourism at the beginning of the 20th century.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4020010

Authors: Jessica Allen Hanssen

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” narrators: he struggles to articulate emotions and is incapable of telling or understanding lies. His point of view (POV) is an extreme form of first-person limited, with Christopher at times seeming (or even yearning) to be more computer than human. The limitations of Christopher’s experience are reflected in his narrative self-presentation, and while, ordinarily, these would damage any sort of achieved authority, they instead underscore the book’s powerful thematic messages. Christopher’s narrative fallibility echoes the developmental stage of its crossover young adult (YA) audience: Curious Incident works with fallibility to establish a strong narrative voice that inspires an empathetic connection between Christopher and his implied reader. This article therefore considers how narrative fallibility is linked to constructions of adolescence in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and further explores the relationship between the narrator and the implied reader(s). Positioned within narratology-based theories and secondary research on Haddon and representations of neurodiversity in YA literature, it provides guidance for teachers and scholars who might question the value of authenticity in this or similar novels.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4020009

Authors: Richard Grange

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 multiscient sprite, not a human seeing and telling, but something else which possesses unhuman-like qualities. This paper uses an analysis of the narrator’s voice, character, and choices to access two other characters created by the story being told—the narratee and the implied reader, both of whom may well be thought of as child characters produced by the text. A profile of these two products is then presented. Through a close textual analysis, which draws out untagged parts of Northern Light’s narrator’s speech, an examination of the kinds of characters the narratee, and implied reader could be seen to be is gathered. The narrator’s ability to intensely empathise with characters is passed onto the narratee and also normalised by aspects of the story, including the alethiometer, a device from the created world of the story which is imbued with strikingly similar qualities to the narrator. Lyra, the book’s protagonist, and the instrument interact with each other in a manner akin to the narrator and narratee, both having an agency which the implied reader could be bestowed with from reading the text.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4020008

Authors: Geoff M. Boucher

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. To motivate acceptance of this proposed approach, I begin by surveying the existing state of debate in the critical field. I notice the emergence of widening agreement on the idea that fantasy is a literature of the impossible. I then develop the logical implications of this widening agreement in the critical field, arguing that it entails a representational definition of fantasy literature, which implies a modal approach to the core set that defines this literary order. I suggest that the marvellous mode, the kind of writing which represents the impossible, is a broad class that includes other speculative literatures, and that what differentiates these is the referential world within which the impossible happens. The aim here is to break up monolithic conceptions of the impossible, while pointing to a motivation for developing an understanding of the specificity of a core set of fantasy texts that proceeds by way of contrasts. After explaining why I am extremely skeptical about the definition of science fiction as a “literature of the possible”, I probe descriptions of the difference between fantasy and sci-fi. I propose that whereas some science fiction is a literature of conjectural objectivity, guided by the “cognitive novum”, a significant group of fantasy texts is a literature of speculative subjectivity, guided by an “affective novum”.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4020007

Authors: Melissa Jenkins

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 aspects of what it meant for a child to engage in play. Many games centered travel, becoming sites for children to simulate adult agency in movement through space. This paper examines the stories told by narrative card games and board games about travel, especially travel within and between urban centers. The games present the city as microcosm of the world. Child players are invited to construct multiple national and ethnic identities as they pretend to be city travelers. The games attempt to teach children, and their caregivers, how to travel. I argue that the structures and aims of the games evolve over time, keeping pace with new mores surrounding work and leisure travel. I also argue for connections between games and the “set moves” of narrative fiction and theatre.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4020006

Authors: Yanxin Lu

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 on Penglai Island, having the power to elevate a person to immortality; the elixir stolen from the Queen Mother of the West by Heng’E; the immortal herbs pounded by the Jade Rabbit; and the medicine used for treating diseases. In addition, Li Bai’s poems also contain elixir liquid (danye 丹液), potable gold (jinye 金液), and other substances referred to as yao. Unlike specific terms like “cinnabar”, these names are more general in nature. The medicines, their names, and the general terms in poems carry different emotional implications, e.g., his admiration for immortality, and a means to criticize his own time, to express his aspirations and lamentation over the passage of time. The “Yao” also serves as a symbol of healing and nourishment, especially in the context of friendship. All these points deserve to be meticulously explored.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4020005

Authors: Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

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. Recently, while acknowledging the very real and ongoing impact of this historical omission, some feminists have issued a call to turn away from a narrative of women’s history as ‘serial forgetting’ and towards an acknowledgement of the affirmative capacity of feminist remembering. At the same time, memory theorist Ann Rigney has advocated for a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies, away from what she perceives to be the field’s gravitation towards trauma and instead towards an analysis of life’s positive legacies. In this article, I combine both approaches to investigate one feminist memory-keeper’s archive, analysing what it reveals about ‘the mechanisms by which positive attachments are transmitted across space and time’. Throughout her life, little-known ‘between-the-waves’ Australian feminist Ruby Rich (1888–1988) performed multiple intersecting activist activities. While she created feminist memories through her work for various political organisations, she also collected, stored and transmitted feminist memories through her campaign for a dedicated space for women’s collections in the National Library of Australia. Propelled by fear of loss and inspired by hope for remembering, Rich constructed a brand of archival activism that was both educational and emotional. In this paper, I examine the strategies Rich employed to try to realise her dream of effecting intellectual and affective bonds between future feminists and their predecessors.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4010004

Authors: Marco Alviz Fernández David Hernández de la Fuente

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 Porphyry of Tyre and Iamblichus of Chalcis. Accordingly, the archetypical image of Pythagoras became a major ideal for which every pagan philosopher aimed in Late Antiquity. Henceforth, masters and their disciple circles comprised a micro-society which can reasonably be analyzed as a whole. Suffice it to say that they were small and cohesive charismatic communities whose isolation from the outside world aroused a living harmony from which emerged long-standing emotional bonds. Consequently, the Pythagorically rooted κοινός βίος (Iambl. Vit. Pyth. 6.29: τὸ λεγόμενον κοινοβίους) can easily be ascertained in the biographical literature around the philosophical schools from Plotinus to Damascius (cf. Porph. Vit. Plot. 18.6-14; Procl. In Resp. passim). It is a way of life in common which was also known at the old Athenian Academy (according to Plato’s only explicit reference to Pythagoras (Resp. 600a-b: Πυθαγόρειον τρόπον τοῦ βίου) and has sometimes been defined even as “coenobitic”, in analogy with other contemporary phenomena. But from our point of view, it can be better understood through an analysis of the concept of συνουσία—that is, the meetings of philosophers with their companions (ἑταῖροι) in a specific place which turned into a sort of spiritual household. With this contribution, we aim at focusing on the redefinition of the Neoplatonic συνουσίαι as a legacy of the Platonic notion of συνουσία, stemming from Pythagorean κοινόβιοι. To sum up, we will revise this issue and the state of the art, with the redefinition of Late Antique συνουσία as a terminus technicus in the biographic literature around the Neoplatonic Schools, aiming at opening new paths for the understanding of the Pythagorean–Platonic heritage in Late Antiquity.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4010003

Authors: Shuchu Liu

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, Du Fu became sensitively aware of the existence of life. Government service was the main way to realize the value of life for scholars of Tang, and this way was frustrated by reality for a long time, particularly for the poet Du Fu, who faced the crisis of settling his life. Although Du Fu wanted to find a place to settle his life in the other dimensions of the human world, in the real and imaginary drunken world and the natural world, he could not overcome the frustration concerning the relationship between the ruler and the minister, and he often felt the pain of nowhere to settle his life and the insignificance of life when its meaning becomes absent.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4010002

Authors: Laura Tosi Alessandro Cabiati

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 ‘a horror story’, before affirming that ‘horror and the fairy tale walk hand in hand’ (del Toro 2017, p [...]

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature4010001

Authors: Ryan Atticus Doherty

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 of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3040032

Authors: Lianlong Wang

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 the combination of epitaphs and tomb inscriptions has a historical origin. The establishment of a unified dynasty in the Sui Dynasty provided an opportunity for the integration and development of Taoism in the north and south. The Mao Shanzong (茅山宗) in the southern region began to spread to the north, gradually integrating Lou Guan Dao (樓觀道) and becoming the mainstream of Northern Taoism. The epitaph of Wu Tong in the Sui Dynasty is engraved with rich Taoist symbols, and the epitaph text adopts the language content of “Zhen Gao” (真誥), which is a typical representative of the integration of Northern and Southern Taoism and reflects Taoism’s concern for death.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3040031

Authors: Peter Vorissis

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, Argento locates his characters, rather than in urban environments, in rural spaces (forests, fields, mountains) where the supernatural elements of their stories blossom. Suspiria represents a primarily aesthetic exploration of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary horror, while Phenomena uses these two modes to examine the conflict between the rational and irrational, the natural and the supernatural. Dark Glasses initially appears to be one of his more traditional gialli, but it abandons these tropes with a simplified plot evoking the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”; this shift is accomplished by moving the action of the film out of Rome and into the dark forests of the countryside. Dark Glasses, I argue, therefore represents a self-conscious move to unite in a single film the two major strands of Argento’s filmography and to expose some fundamental elements of his general cinematic approach—namely, the unique capacity of stylized aesthetics and irrational elements to convey the experience of very real, human terror and evil.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3040030

Authors: Sneharika Roy

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—Terran industrial capitalism, grounded in physical and symbolic violence, and Athshean ecosocialism, rooted in an ethics of non-violence and forest-centred nominalism. Le Guin appears to suggest that both “readings” of Athshea are locked in an intractable, adversarial logic, typical of the “paranoid” reading practices that Eve Sedgwick would theorise twenty-five years later. In its sensitivity to the spectrum of negative affect covering anticipatory anxiety about forestalling pain, symmetrical suspicion, and fear of humiliation, the novella offers an uncanny prefiguration of paranoid practices. Le Guin suggests that the way out of the paranoid clash of civilisations can be found in two “reparative” reading stances—Selver’s reinterpretation and rearrangement of components of the oppressor’s culture into new, unexpected wholes (hermeneutic reassemblage) and the alien observers’ valorisation of disinterested curiosity over action as a categorical imperative (cerebral equivocity). Le Guin thus seems to offer a reparative poetics avant la lettre.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3040029

Authors: Aileen Miyuki Farrar

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 repress women. Meanwhile, critics such as Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Lucie Armitt have offered studies of the interplay between Gothic horror and fairy tales. However, these studies have limits, often emphasizing the violence, self-mutilation, and cannibalism of women, like those in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s versions of “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. This paper argues that “Rapunzel” (1812) is key for understanding the Gothic and feminist discourses of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Firstly, this paper argues that a self-reflexive and self-productive relationship between subjectivity and desire shapes and disrupts the Gothic, fairy-tale, and feminist discourses of Jane Eyre, resulting in a specular feminine-I that has inspired pluralistic readings of the text. Secondly, an analysis of the Rapunzelian metaphors of ‘wicked’ hunger and ideological towers unmasks the double consciousness that not only fetters feminine subjectivity but delimits the domestic structures of marriage and home. Multiplying the ways nineteenth-century Gothicism, fairy tales, and feminism may interact, Brontë’s specular study of feminine desire makes way for a productive and agential feminine speaking-I.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3040028

Authors: Nicola Welsh-Burke

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 comparative analysis of two twenty-first century Young Adult (YA) retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ from the 2010s (Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce and Elana K. Arnold’s Red Hood), I argue that this representation and negotiation of sexual, violent, and gustatory appetites is made possible due to the intersection of the fairy tale, horror, and YA genres, creating a unique space in which the lycanthropic and human figures are sources of dread and intrigue and the terrifying and absurd. In doing so, I argue that this contemporary tradition continues the well-established narrative of the fairy tale as a site of simultaneous high dramatics and interrogation of the everyday.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3040027

Authors: Qiong Yang

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 pioneer of mourning poetry, his personal expressions as well as the scenes and objects in his mourning poems have become fixed imageries of mourning, which have been applied to the epitaphs written by later literati for their deceased wives, enhancing the mourning attributes of these inscriptions. Some renowned poets such as Wei Yingwu 韦应物 (737–791) from the Tang 唐 Dynasty (618–907), and Li Mengyang 李梦阳 (1473–1530), from the Ming 明 Dynasty (1368–1644) would personally write tomb inscriptions while creating mourning poems for their deceased wives. Reading these two kinds of texts from the same author side by side not only deepens our understanding of both types of text, but also helps to examine the intertextual interactions between these two literary forms.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3040026

Authors: Karoliina Lummaa

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 contemporary art and literature, contemporary sylvan poetics in Finnish poetry has remained an understudied topic. Moreover, the wider ecocritical discussions on the artistic and poetic dimensions of forest management and economy are still scarce, at least in the Nordic cultural context. To ignite these discussions, this study examines the meanings of forest clearings in contemporary Finnish poetry. Theoretically, this study draws from ecocriticism, with a particular emphasis on ecopoetics. By focusing on typography, rhetorics and thematics, this article shows how forest poems written by Jouni Tossavainen, Janette Hannukainen and Mikael Brygger combine technical forestry terminology with affective language and visual means to express anthropogenic changes in forests, resulting in a specific expressive style conceptualised as the poetics of lack. This poetics consists of ideas and rhetorical and typographical elements that together denote and express a variety of experiences, emotions and thoughts regarding a lack of trees, as well as a lack of natural organisation in forest growth.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3030025

Authors: Guodong Meng

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 instructions concerning the arrangements for funerals and the inheritance of family traditions. These instructions not only reflect Tang funeral concepts and the importance of arrangements for the afterlife, but they also allow us to perceive the characters and personalities of the deceased, which are valuable new materials for the study of ancient Chinese biographical literature.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3030024

Authors: Wei Wang

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 immortals, burial ceremonies evolved during the Wei and Jin 魏晋 dynasties (220–420) into an integrated and unified notion of burial. The funeral ritual’s imaginative and fanciful depictions of the hereafter express sentimental devotion to life and contemplation of death. The burial ceremony and tomb architecture change in accordance with how the concepts of sacrifice and ghosts develop. The features of people’s belief in ghosts and immortality are reflected in particular burial practices. The popularity of necromancy burials and ghost marriages during the Middle Ages (third to sixth centuries) bring to light the binary antagonism between the soul and the body in burial, as well as the emphasis on spiritual freedom and physical immortality in the life philosophy.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3030023

Authors: Dorothea Trotter

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 adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations often return to the darker and more horrific elements of the source texts; this includes body horror and an emphasis on physiological differences. This article employs structural, cultural, and folkloric interpretive lenses for the analysis of three contemporary, audio-visual fairy tales to discuss the way contemporary fairy tales include disability and difference as social constructs that are shaped by cultural attitudes and anxieties. The stories’ plots are driven by the protagonists’ “otherness”, and these texts feature transformations that provide clues to understanding current standards of beauty and normality. I argue that newer adaptations place an emphasis on finding resolutions to difference that challenge the traditional idea that if one has a face or body that strays from the standard of the norm, one must die, relegate oneself to the margins, or join others like oneself.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3030022

Authors: Carolin Jesussek

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, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3030021

Authors: Jonathan E. Abel

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, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s famed early work of realism “Dancing Girl” (Maihime) as translating the effects of the panorama hall into literature. By the end of his career, Mori Ōgai’s narrator of Wild Geese (Gan) compares his own storytelling to stereoscopy. These two different visual medial affordances suggest two different techniques. However, I argue that it is in a third visual medium (one that draws on the marketing of panorama and the visual techniques of stereography) that we may find a metaphor suggesting a continuity between these two modes of realism, between Ōgai’s early career and his later opus, between Maeda’s medial understanding and Ōgai’s own. This third metaphor for understanding Ōgai’s narration implies his mode of narration is never flat, always polyphonous, and advertising one aesthetic on the surface while providing another within. In the end, this view suggests a modernist realism that understood and expressed its own limitations and was, therefore, all the more realistic.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3030020

Authors: Roberta Franchi

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 attitude shown by Tatian, Theophilus, and Tertullian, and the openness to Greek culture and philosophy demonstrated by Justin the Martyr, Athenagoras of Athens, and Minucius Felix. A notable change happened in the Alexandrian milieu when Clement of Alexandria and Origen started considering Greek classics the embodiment of an authentic Christian spirit. In keeping with Origen, Basil of Caesarea realized a good synthesis between Greek thought and Christian faith. Noting germs of divine revelation in ancient Greek thought, Christian authors took the tools of Greco-Roman criticism and ancient philosophy to develop their doctrine.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3030019

Authors: Jason M. Beckman

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 what second-person fiction aims to do: that is, draw the reader into the narrative and experience the world of the text firsthand. Seeking instead to theorize the ways in which second-person narratives involve the reader in the text and invite the act of perspective-taking, I turn to virtual reality, which is deeply invested in the cognitive mechanisms through which a sense of presence is produced and in questions of how the mediated experience of virtual reality can influence human thought and behavior. Examining Kurahashi Yumiko’s Kurai Tabi (1961), one of the earliest examples of the literary form in Japanese literature, I consider how the reader can experience presence during moments in the text, and how the text drives the reader’s identification with the “you” who is the target of the narration. Analyzing the second-person narrative as a virtuality provides a new avenue for understanding the reader’s cognitive engagement and experience of second-person fiction.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3020018

Authors: Samir Dayal

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 Machines Like Me, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These works share a concern with the implications of a relationship, a shared or co-produced world, in which both humans and nonhumans have agency. I conclude by revisiting the bifurcated discourses of antihumanism, especially through a brief consideration of an Afropessimist critique of the category of “Man”, to ask: What status, affordances, and rights, should be extended to nonhumans: robots, anthropomorphized commodities, humanoids, AIs, or human adjacents, or to those excluded or abjected from the category of “the fully human”?

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3020017

Authors: María del Mar López-Cabrales Inmaculada Rodríguez-Cunill

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 Lucía Portela, and Mylene Fernández Pintado) and Cádiz (Ana Rossetti and Pilar Paz Pasamar). The ironic and delusional visions of a ruined life due to the special period, economic crisis, and political xenophobia in Cádiz will be illustrated by Cuban-Spanish mapping of the analyzed authors’ works. Our hypothesis stems from the idea that there is a clear relation between the representation of the city and political, cultural, and patriarchal transgression that is quoted in these texts (Bataille), which relates to the experience of scarcity/poverty lived on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Our bibliographic search has focused on the literary expression of the experience of these cities from the point of view of female writers and protagonists. We concluded with a universal understanding of the experience of the space marked by literature and the gaze of women.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3020016

Authors: Monica Martinat

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 explicit determination to focus on narrative, along with a willingness to share one’s own historical subjectivity. By going through some of the examples from this approach, this article highlights how these literary reflexes make important contributions. However, it also points out the weakness of this proposed method of making history on epistemological grounds. That is, it abandons the form of historical writing that requires distance and an appreciation that history’s vocation is to propose solid but uncertain propositions (to paraphrase Zemon Davis). By insisting on emotional and sensitive understanding, the knowledge gained from these experiments only questions the scientific aspects of history and history itself. This recent trend is not exactly new, as it evidently links up with some of the consequences generated by the linguistic turn.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3020015

Authors: Andy Zuliani

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 clarity, and positioned itself against traditional fiction, with its reliance on metaphor, allegory, and other ‘projections,’ this article argues that such an aesthetic program is undercut by its own assumptions about the power of description and the primacy of the visual. In an analysis which hybridizes three separate strands of criticism—object-oriented ontology, Heideggerian phenomenology, and the models of ‘resonation’ proposed by Brian Massumi—I will argue that such a treatment of objects, with its exclusive reliance on visual description, measurement, and enumeration, ends up depriving objects of the vitality and dynamism that would justify such a fictional project in the first place. However, traces of this dynamism do survive the flattening sweep of Robbe-Grillet’s narration, and indeed offer from the cracks and fissures of the novel’s otherwise smoothly controlled style the possibility of an alternate ‘object-orientation’—one, I will argue, which suspends its cool optical detachment to allow, however briefly, the eruption of a messy, entangling register of touch.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3020014

Authors: Luca Cortesi

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 in which WWI literature, and in particular consumer literature, contributed to the representation of war among the mass population deserves further research. By drawing a parallel with the phenomenon of the American dime novel, this study is grounded on the analysis of the style, content, structure, and even of the ‘mere’ appearance of some 1914–1916 ‘mass’ publications aimed at the broader public. The goal of this article, therefore, is to stimulate a consistent re-evaluation of this strand of ‘consumer’ war literature and to focus on its importance as a culturological tool to have a better understanding of the cultural environment of that time.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3020013

Authors: Laura Miguélez-Cavero

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 the poetry by Gregory of Nazianzus. This paper seeks to address this matter by a combined reading of the best-known poetic forms (including the programmatic reflections by Gregory) and the poems copied in the Codex Visionum (now in the Bodmer Collection). Since the edition of the latter was completed in 1999, they have often featured in studies on the origin of monasticism and are well known in papyrological circles, but have received insufficient attention from literature and cultural historians.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3020012

Authors: Betsabé Navarro

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 struggle they experienced to see their stories published and state that Afro-Spanish literature is absent from Spanish universities’ curricula. Among the recent black voices that have achieved recognition in Spain is journalist and writer Lucía Mbomío, who condemns, in her debut novel Hija del camino (2019), the traumatic experiences that black women undergo with racism and sexism in Spain. With the aim of giving representation to the literature of Afro-Spanish women writers, the present article analyzes Mbomío’s novel from the perspective of black studies, black feminism, and cultural studies.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010011

Authors: Andrew Campana

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 some of modern Japanese poetry’s most canonical figures, took a diverse set of approaches to the subject matter, but all were less interested in portraying films themselves, and more in how poetry could use “cinema” and the “cinematic” to grapple with questions of memory, media, ecology, the body, and social change. Looking at these works—most of which appear here in English for the first time—we can find a new archive of early cinematic thought and sensation not bound to the screen.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010010

Authors: Gala Maria Follaco

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 of his literary output while suggesting new avenues for future research on space-time representation in twentieth-century literature. I focus on passive senses such as hearing and smell, and on material objects and physical sensations as narrative devices employed by the author in order to broaden comprehension and enrich the experience of objective reality. In particular, I examine Yukidoke (Melting Snow), a 1922 short story understudied thus far but that offers useful insights as regards the author’s intent to defy superimposed notions of affect and space.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010009

Authors: Baryon Tensor Posadas

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 productive to read these narratives of disaster through the critical lens of the genre’s engagement with the problem of futurity. My contention then is that these narratives of disaster do not merely function as imaginative repetitions or re-enactments of past events, but also take on an anticipatory quality, affectively preparing and the ground for and pre-empting responses to future events. I examine the work of Komatsu Sakyō (1931–2011) in particular, whose writing makes for an illustrative test case for articulating the premediative dimension of disaster narratives in postwar Japanese science fiction.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010008

Authors: Matthew Mewhinney

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 physiological and metaphysical experience and the rhythm of the narrative’s experimental poetic form. In concert with the theme of this special issue, I show how Recollecting and Such self-reflexively restores and evokes the corporeal experience of sensation beyond just visual perception: the narrative reveals itself as a poetic form of measurement and its first-person narrator a “rhythmanalyst”, someone who listens to the internal rhythms of his own body and then to that of the external world (Henri Lefebvre). The narrator’s awareness of the duration, frequency, and intensity of sensation as well as his regular compositions of metered verse—haiku and kanshi (traditional Chinese poetry as practiced in Japan; Sinitic verse)—are ways that the narrative measures the limits of life, memory, and sensory experience. The oscillation between prose and poetry in the narrative generates an organic rhythm, simulating the long and short breaths of a convalescing body, which invites the reader to breathe together—“to conspire” in the literal sense—with the text as a form of sympathy.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010007

Authors: Christopher Crosbie

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, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Henry’s invocation of an imagined future that understands the present as a theoretical past betrays a surprising indebtedness to Aristotle’s notion of time as “a measure of change with respect to the before and after.” Drawing on Aristotle’s theory that time depends upon a perceiving mind and that those unconscious of change mistakenly “join up the latter ‘now’ to the former and make it one,” this essay argues that Henry succeeds in altering his auditors’ behavior, and thus generating the history he desires, by merging their shared, lived present with his own fictive temporalities. A mode of persuasion famous in its ethical ambivalence, Henry’s rhetoric reveals how the very ontological assumptions governing perceptions of time may be manipulated, for good or ill, amid audiences who fail to critically envisage their own counterbalancing, imaginative histories.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010006

Authors: Literature Editorial Office Literature Editorial Office

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Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010005

Authors: Adam Lovasz

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 breaking point. Matter is reconceived as the sum of all images. Bergson introduces the dual concepts of cosmic “perception” and cosmic “memory”. Matter itself is reinterpreted as a continuum of all possible intensities of perception and memory. Bergson’s ontology has important epistemological ramifications. There is no sharp dividing line between consciousness and matter. In light of these insights, I propose a reading of Bergson’s relatively lesser-known lecture, “‘Phantasms of the Living’ and Psychical Research”, presented at the Society for Psychical Research in 1913. Here, Bergson elaborates upon the implications of his image-ontology for the possible post mortem fate of consciousness. In my concluding remarks, I suggest that Bergson’s observations may be of help in constructing an anti-reductionist and indeterministic epistemology.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010004

Authors: Volker Gast Christian Wehmeier Dirk Vanderbeke

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 quantitative methods of register studies to interior monologues (and other forms of inner speech or thought representation). This article presents a case study of the three main characters of James Joyce’s Ulysses whose thoughts are presented extensively in the novel, i.e., Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Making use of quantitative, corpus-based methods, the thoughts of these characters are compared to fictional direct speech and (literary and non-literary) reference texts. We show that the interior monologues of Ulysses span a range of non-narrative registers with varying degrees of informational density and involvement. The thoughts of one character, Leopold Bloom, differ substantially from that character’s speech. The relative heterogeneity across characters is taken as an indication that interior monologue is used as a means of perspective taking and implicit characterization.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010003

Authors: José Mariano García

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 regular in the critics, it is not taken into account that there exists a previous tradition more or less connected with its European sources but in search of its own cultural character. I would like to comment on some specifically gothic novels published in Argentina between the 1980s and the 1990s, as well as a recent one by the prolific writer César Aira. Prins can be analyzed as an ambiguous culmination of the gothic tendency, as well as a symptom of the disorientation of a genre that threatens to become a label as broad as it is empty.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010002

Authors: Greg Bevan

Karen Tei Yamashita’s third novel Tropic of Orange (1997), set in Los Angeles and featuring an all-minority cast of characters and extensive use of magical realism, has been commonly received as an indictment of global capitalism. But the present study argues that such an interpretation depends upon foregrounding the most didactic portions of the text, and that engagement with the enacted drama of the novel reveals a more fully developed and equally enduring theme, that of the performative nature of ethnic identity.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature3010001

Authors: Paolo Pitari

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 theory today to discard the possibility of literary truth, and it provides counterarguments to the work’s main theses. Consequently, it criticizes the philosophy of pragmatism and its implications, and it offers a theory that defines fictional objects as existing and solves contradictions that commonly affect our debates on the ontology of fiction. The article does not provide a positive theory of literary truth, but it undermines its denials, which have become popular in recent decades.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040032

Authors: Chloe Renwick

In this article I argue that Helen of Troy in Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age I & II can be read as a figure for Elizabeth I during her final decade. Heywood appropriates multiple sources to emphasise images of age, decay and death which connect Helen and Elizabeth by evoking concerns that were prevalent as the Queen aged. Whether we date the plays as late Elizabethan or early Jacobean, Heywood was writing at a time when people were thinking (in anticipation or retrospection) about Elizabeth’s death and the end of the Tudor line. In The Iron Age II, Heywood shows Helen lament the loss of her fabled beauty when she gazes into a mirror and sees an aged face that resembles Elizabeth’s. With her despair compounded by her guilt over the Trojan War, Helen turns to suicide and Heywood ends the entire Age pentalogy with a glance to the succession. Ultimately, in his treatment of Helen, Heywood subversively brings to centre stage images that Elizabeth (and her government) had tried to quash and opens up new forums for political commentary at London’s popular theatres.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040031

Authors: Arianna Magnolo

This article aims to examine one of the myths belonging to the first part of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, i.e., that of Io. Starting from the philological analysis of the passages dealing with this myth and adopting an intertextual approach, I will argue that the Panopolitan assimilates Io to Isis following Lycophron, one of the authors employed as a model in his poem. Finally, I will also explain the meaning of this choice inside Nonnus’ work, taking into account its historical context. Nonnus wants to emphasize the role of Dionysus’ lineage in the civilization process, giving it an historical relevance. Therefore, the allusion to Lycophron assimilates Cadmus (Dionysus’ grandfather) to Alexander the Great, who is celebrated as a peacemaker in the Alexandra. Furthermore, Cadmus and his offspring can be connected to the Romans, who, at the time of Nonnus, played the same role in the rising Byzantine empire.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040030

Authors: Sergi Grau

This brief study addresses the controversial issue of the relationship with the body, with the flesh, on the part of pagan and Christian thinkers at a particularly important point in their evolution, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, a time in which Neoplatonic thinkers had to defend their doctrinal positions against the increasingly hegemonic position of the triumphant Christianity. In this sense, it is particularly interesting to approach the perspective of two authors who are not strictly speaking philosophers: in particular, Synesius of Cyrene, a thinker in the Neoplatonic tradition who became a Christian bishop, complemented also by some interesting reflections by Eunapius of Sardis, historian and biographer of Neoplatonic philosophers. In the light of this analysis, it becomes clear that the discussion on the value of the body and carnality is an essential point of doctrinal discrepancy in this period and, contrary to what sometimes appears, the discrepancy also pertains to the formation of the intellectual, and Christianity clearly appears as a doctrine obsessed with the flesh to the detriment of the soul.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040029

Authors: Rie Makino

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 face. Yamashita presents this magic realist hero as a satire of Japan in the 1990s, which became the developed nation needed to support the developing world under the new Marshall Plan. Focusing on Kazumaza’s participation in charity, this essay explores the gift economy embodied by this Japanese immigrant character. Inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1952 essay “Burned-out Santa Claus”, Kazumasa’s Nikkei subject position not only criticizes American capitalism but also Brazil’s postcolonial mentality. Supporting the idea that Lévi-Strauss sympathizes with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of innocence, the last part of the essay probes the idea of Kazumasa as an innocent subject who challenges the dichotomy between American capitalism and postcolonial Brazil.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040028

Authors: Alberto Jesús Quiroga-Puertas

The study of periautologia (“self-praise”) in Ancient Greek literature has been somehow overlooked even though its presence is felt in numerous works. The absence of the analysis of periautologia is even more remarkable in the case of the works composed by the sophist Libanius of Antioch given the autobiographical nature of most of his speeches. Thus, in this paper I surveyed the use and the purposes of periautologia in one of his speeches—Or. 2, To those who called him tiresome—in order to ascertain which rhetorical and literary strategies were deployed by Libanius. The sophist’s concern with losing his influence in the cultural and political milieu of the end of the fourth century AD contributes to explain the frequent use of periautological passages in his Or. 2.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040027

Authors: Edward B. M. Rendall

This article shows how temporal disorder diffuses into the wildernesses within early modern English drama. Those areas beyond the walls of cities and castles in—among other plays—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth thus flit free from the temporal rules that construct a play’s quotidian world, and the conspicuous partitions that enclose an otherworld in medieval iconography no longer seem clear within them. I argue that these spaces enact an unfamiliar and chaotic ‘otherworld’ within quotidian space, and characters’ ventures into these outer regions at certain points resemble movements into an ‘afterlife’. Journeys into a wilderness, then, parallel a shift from one temporal sphere to another, and characters encounter a post-death state of being within the play’s present.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040026

Authors: Paul Innes Katie James

Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III has long been the cause of debates about Tudor defamations of the last Yorkist king. Within this context, some attention has been paid to the play’s extreme compression of events that in fact took place over a period of seven years, from the death of George, Duke of Clarence in 1478 to the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. This study investigates the momentum of events to gauge the extent to which the representation of Richard does paint him in an entirely negative light. Detailed analysis of the timeline demonstrates that the way the play re-structures historical moments is designed to foreground not only the figure of Richard himself, with all its attendant associations, but also the very methods used to concentrate attention upon him. The self-referential nature of the play’s relationship to history points to its own constructions, foregrounding the techniques used to show not only the legend of Richard, but how it is elaborated. The play therefore draws attention to its own manipulation of events, which in turn makes any assumptions about its representation of Richard as villain open to question.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040025

Authors: Mitchell Gauvin

Citizenship is popularly associated with able-bodiedness, both physically and cognitively. However, disability studies over the last few decades has revealed the extent to which the idea of the nation as composed of able-bodied constituents is little more than fantasy, one that can create or galvanize barriers to full political and social participation. Part of this task has involved re-evaluating key works of canonical literature through the lens of disability. In the following paper, I apply this approach to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and argue that Beckett’s play disrupts not just the fantasy of a nation composed of able-bodied citizens but the language of able-bodiedness itself, which has implications for how we conceive of citizenship and participatory politics. While impairment has been critiqued in Beckett before, the extensive examples of pained and impaired characters in his works have often been subsumed under broader philosophical themes, such as existentialism, nihilism, or Cartesian dualism, and rarely linked to issues of citizenship, politics, or the social and built environment. I explore how Beckett’s approach to theatrical and linguistic performativity contributes to how he staged the experience of pain and disability that has implications for how we conceive of and practice citizenship.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040024

Authors: Ruth Yvonne Hsu

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 mainstream or conventional understanding of the idea of America and of the identity of the US nation-state as being built upon discursive technologies of amnesia and misinterpellation of the subject of US history and its Other.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040023

Authors: Heejoo Park

In Tropic of Orange (1997), Karen Tei Yamashita uses literary imagination to challenge the settler-colonial discourse on space and time in the Americas. The influence of Latin American magical realism on Yamashita is most pronounced in the orange, a nonhuman object imbued with human agency. The orange magically initiates cross-border movements of people that disrupt the binaries of local/global, East/West, and North/South, challenging the unequal distribution of freedom of movement across the globe. In this paper, I engage with Wai-Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time” to discuss the temporality of such border crossings. I propose that the cyclicality symbolized by the orange provides an alternative to linear settler-colonial management of spacetime.

Literature doi: 10.3390/literature2040022

Authors: Ahmad A. Ghashmari

This paper addresses the commodification of the human experience in late capitalism as depicted in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition and the potential of technology in helping the human subject in evading commodification. The novel shows how the virtual world and the physical world can become mutually supportive in allowing the characters to search for meaning, pattern and wholeness by using technology as an empowering force for the human subject while managing to avoid being consumed by a powerful capitalist market. The novel’s protagonist’s success in using technology as a humanizing force proves that humans can thrive within its sphere without necessarily being absorbed or overwhelmed by it.