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Introduction: Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-30 Jacob Risinger, Daniel Williams
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Sherlock Holmes, the Chronologists, and the Cocaine Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-28 William Nelles
A distinctive school of “Sherlockian scholarship” has grown up around the Sherlock Holmes series, one corollary of which is that a consistent chronology of Holmes's life can be assembled by cross‐referencing the datable events in the stories. Holmes's use of cocaine throughout the series provides a test case for analyzing the consequences of the Chronologists' emphasis on the biographical sequences
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Defamiliarizing Romance: The Arabic sīra in the English Literary Classroom Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-23 Shazia Jagot
This article explores the ways in which the Arabic sīra a genre loosely akin to the romance or chivalric epic can be incorporated into undergraduate teaching on medieval romance. Drawing on my own pedagogical experience and guided by ongoing critical work on decolonising and diversifying the curriculum, I demonstrate the values and challenges of bringing Arabic texts, read in translation, into modules
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(Hi)stories in Pictures: Use of Folk and Tribal Art Forms in Two Pictorial Biographies From India Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-08-13 Rishav Dutta
Pictures have always been one of the fundamental tools for storytelling that serve as a spigot for folk narratives and performances. Although in India, folk art styles feature stories from the traditional repertoire, increasing focus on use of folk and tribal art in graphic novels and innovation in esthetic strategies problematize the perceived fixity and primitivity associated with “folk.” To accommodate
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Mental healthcare spaces, ambivalence of caregiving, and Indian memoirs of psychiatric patients Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-18 Sree Lekshmi M S, Aratrika Das
Mental healthcare facilities in hospitals and rehabilitation centres are crucial for providing medical treatment and care. These therapeutic environments manifest as both fulfilled, empathetic spaces of care and as sites tainted by denial of care and exploitation. This article utilises illness memoirs or ‘pathographies’ as an entry point to understand the intricacies of experiential facets of caregiving
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Teaching Guide for: ‘Chaucer's gender‐oriented philosophy in The Canterbury Tales’ Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-27 Malek J. Zuraikat
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-26
No abstract is available for this article.
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Illusions of textuality: The semiotics of literary memes in contemporary media Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Tong King Lee
This article seeks to account for the phenomenon where cultural productions are able to transcend different chronotopes and masquerade in myriad forms while sustaining an illusion of itself as a text. Using the Barthian distinction between work and Text as its framework, the article argues that multimodal semiotics offers a theoretically viable perspective on the global circulation of cultural artifacts
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Social network analysis, habitus and the field of literary activity Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Li Li, John Corbett
Social network analysis that draws upon the correspondence of writers has the potential to indicate aspects of the writers' habitus, that is, the economic, social and cultural capital represented by the relations between authors, poets and dramatists, and their correspondents. Social network analysis can visualise and reveal otherwise covert aspects of the field of literary activity. In particular
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-02
No abstract is available for this article.
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Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Thomas Scherer, Jasper Stratil
Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-24
No abstract is available for this article.
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A novel for an ageing population? Masculinity and demographic shift in David Lodge's Deaf Sentence (2008) Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-26 Stefano Rossoni
This article examines David Lodge's novel Deaf Sentence (2008), which focuses on the life of Desmond, a retired professor of linguistics. I argue that this text offers a standpoint through which readers can visualise the global phenomenon of population ageing and address the question of global responsibility. I look at Deaf Sentence within the tradition of the Bakhtinian polyphonic novel and through
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English studies in India: Its past and its future Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Sambudha Sen
This essay argues that English departments in India have had two advantages that their counterparts in the west lack. First, the ability to speak and write correctly in English is understood as a social and professional resource and this prompts large numbers of college students to opt for an English major. Second, English literature has unfolded, historically among several highly developed literatures
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‘Delicate ironies quite imperceptible on its surface’: Henry S. Whitehead's weird tales and American empire in the Caribbean Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Michael Goodrum
This article mounts an initial exploratory engagement with the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, framed by American imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the interwar years. It situates Whitehead and his work within the wider historical context and shows how Whitehead himself used and played with history as part of his fiction. The article considers the role of light in Whitehead's fiction and
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Literature and global responsibility: Narratives, questions, and challenges Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Stefano Bellin
This introductory essay offers a theoretical framework for discussing the relationship between contemporary literature and global responsibility. After surveying recent conceptualisations of collective responsibility, the introduction presents the definition of global responsibility that frames the Special Issue. ‘Global’ is understood here in the double sense of worldwide and comprehensive: it draws
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The “practical mode of teaching” and the state of English studies in the United States Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Dennis Denisoff, Laura M. Stevens
In the United States, student eagerness to pursue concentrated study in English literature as well as in other humanities fields has plummeted after the financial crisis of 2008. Envisioned strong career demand and high wages upon graduation are major drivers of program choices, and such demand is articulated through wealthy industries that can also offer funding to universities. That said, it becomes
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Futures of english studies: Australia Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-21 Paul Giles
This paper considers the professionalization of literary studies in Australian universities. It traces ways in which its interdisciplinary formations have been shaped not only by the cultural contexts of colonialism and postcolonialism, but also by institutional factors and budgetary pressures. Nevertheless, it argues this framework has also created intellectual opportunities for positively reshaping
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The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth-century studies Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Rebekah Mitsein
This article is about why Africa is overlooked in eighteenth-century literary studies. Africa’s neglect is not merely a problem of attention. Neither the parameters of the field nor the tools of the discipline appear particularly suited for engaging Africa as anything other than an invention of the European imagination. In what follows, I seek to bring more clarity to the origins of this paradox and
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“For the planet. For home”: Generating planetary responsibility in the climate fiction of Los Angeles Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 Edwin Gilson
This article argues that three prominent recent works of Los Angeles climate fiction—Maria Amparo Escandon's L.A. Weather (2021), Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun (2021) and Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2016)—generate a sense of planetary responsibility. Despite their regional settings, these novels possess a planetary consciousness, illuminating the local-global connectivity of climate
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Letters for Ukraine. Textual and institutional forms of global responsibility Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Núria Codina Solà
This essay analyses the epistolary correspondence between six Ukrainian and German-speaking authors published by WeiterSchreiben, a literary platform that belongs to the non-profit organisation WIR MACHEN DAS and which seeks to promote the work of exiled writers from regions affected by war and other humanitarian crises in the German cultural field. The essay argues that the collaborative, self-reflexive
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Rainbow in Gethen: Queer utopia and community collectivism in Ursula K. Le Guin's “Coming of Age in Karhide” Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Aleena Achamma Paul, Swathi Krishna S.
This essay seeks to examine how Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995) set in the planet of Gethen in the fictional Hainish universe envisions a political utopia of sequentially hermaphroditic humans to offer a succinct critique of traditional gender roles and conventional sexual customs while celebrating the potential of collective responsibility. While maintaining
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The supply-chain sublime: Spectacles of unagency in fictions of planetary economy Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Spencer Robins
This paper is about the literary representation of supply chains: the political-material pathways by which goods are produced and delivered to consumers. It considers the ethical and aesthetic problems posed by the fact that the daily lives of people living in consumer societies in the Global North are deeply dependent on material networks that sustain violent relations between people and with earth’s
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Bequeathing “new sincerity” in the age of the homo digitalis: Confessionalism and authorial self-consciousness in David Foster Wallace and Bo Burnham Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Sergio Lopez-Sande
The notion of “New Sincerity” has become central to the study of David Foster Wallace's prose over the years. The present article explores how the tonal arrangement that characterises the movement has lived on to influence contemporary art, examining Bo Burnham's popular comedy musicals as a notable example of this influence. Wallace and Burnham's common stance concerning cultural reception is argued
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Tracing social connections in the Victorian Jewish Writers Project Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-23 Brandon Katzir, Lindsay Katzir
In March 2022, we launched the Victorian Jewish Writers Project (VJWP), a digital collection of texts written by nineteenth-century British Jews accompanied by short articles on significant authors, places, and events of the Anglo-Jewish world. When we began building the collection in 2021, our conceptual framework was clear: Victorian Jewry is underrepresented both in Jewish Studies and Victorian
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Importing Arcadia into 18th-century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Arjun Motwani
Eyles Irwin (1751–1817), an East India Company official who spent much of his life in the British settlement of Fort St. George, Madras, was one of the earliest practitioners of anglophone belles lettres in the Indian subcontinent, and his writings predate the development of a robust culture of English-language literary composition in the colony by quite a few years. The scant scholarly attention he
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“The heat of a multitudinous assembly”: Striking short fiction and the rise of feminist potencia Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Madeleine Sinclair
This article considers how a recent wave of Latin American short fiction captures with immediate topicality new forms of transversal political subjectivity engendered by the international feminist reinvention of the strike in the 21st century. Drawing on Verónica Gago's theorization of the political cartography of feminist potencia (power), alongside the work of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato and Sayak
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-03
No abstract is available for this article.
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Multiply-translated Chaucer in the Korean classroom Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-26 Yea Jung Park
This paper introduces a teaching experiment that uses a set of local translations of a European medieval text—in this case, Korean translations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—as teaching texts in the Korean classroom alongside the original work. Students compare a range of translations dating from all periods of the 20th century, including one from as early as 1915 and others from the 1960s, 1980s,
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Teaching Chaucer in Tunisia: An interdisciplinary approach Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-21 Wajih Ayed
Pedagogies of the premodern in anglophone contexts face many obstacles, like cultural differences, linguistic remoteness, and stereotypical representations. In EFL learning and teaching settings, student motivation, cultural adequation, and historical imagination are also needed. In Tunisia, this was further complicated after the Jasmine Revolution when newly radicalised students of English resented
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Philology and racist appropriations of the medieval Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Eduardo Ramos
Recent decades have seen an increase in white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages. While many medievalists have sought to distance medieval studies from racist appropriations, these appropriations echo positions advanced and legitimized by philologists especially during the nineteenth century. Medieval studies as a discipline developed in the nineteenth century during the rise of nationalist
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-21
No abstract is available for this article.
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Crafting and collecting cyanotypes: Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-27 Sophia Franchi
This essay reads Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853) as an example of Victorian imitative art by reading it through the lens of Victorian domestic handicraft. It does so in order to resituate Atkins's work within the history of scientific visualization and to contribute to the increasing complexity scholars of visual culture and of the scientific image have
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Reading the museum Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Lindsey N. Chappell
The museum is not a neutral container, a passive collection of art and artifacts. Rather the museum is itself a historical argument, using objects and their relations to write our collective stories. This essay shows how the museum, as it developed within nineteenth-century European imperialism, directs meaning both within and beyond literature. The museum integrates readers into its collections and
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Rethinking the nineteenth-century museum via the Ottoman imperial museum Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Sezen Ünlüönen
Most accounts of the Ottoman Imperial Museum view the museum primarily as a Westernization project for the Ottoman Empire. In such readings, the museum follows a teleological trajectory toward the European norm. This article reads several of the early practices of the Ottoman Imperial Museum (such as interactive museum displays and the sultan's casual gifting of museum holdings to other European monarchs)
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Toward an immunological turn in nineteenth-century studies Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-04-29 Travis Chi Wing Lau
This essay surveys the evolution of scholarship that embodies what (Anderson and Mackay [2014], Intolerant bodies: A short history of autoimmunity. Johns Hopkins University Press) have called the “immunological turn,” an interdisciplinary critical movement that takes immunity and vaccination as its primary critical objects. While interest in the relationship between immunology as a field in the life
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Chaucer's gender-oriented philosophy in The Canterbury Tales Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-04-23 Malek J. Zuraikat
The manipulation of gender in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is utterly opaque. While “The Knight's Tale” potentially entices readers to think that Chaucer defines a woman regarding her relationship to man, “The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale” suggests that the poet views a woman as an independent figure whose identity has nothing to do with man. This apparently controversial portrait of gender causes
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Tobacco for the flower garden: Plant collecting and plantation crops in nineteenth-century Britain Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Lindsay Wells
This essay analyzes the understudied practice of collecting, marketing, and displaying colonial plant commodities as garden ornaments in nineteenth-century Britain. From the early modern period onward, British garden writers discussed tobacco, sugarcane, coffee, tea, and other colonial crops in their books and magazines, often citing colonial agriculture as a point of interest to curious gardeners
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-04
No abstract is available for this article.
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Semblances of truth: The Romantic lyric revisited Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Chris Townsend
The ‘Romantic lyric’ as an idea or critical entity finds itself doubly maligned in contemporary lyric studies. As a perceived product of New Criticism, it finds itself accused by historicists of bringing about the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry in twentieth-century criticism, and, as a mimetic model of subjective expression, it’s disfavoured by lyric theorists who view it as a stepping stone towards the
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Global movements in Hisaye Yamamoto's short fiction Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Jeffrey Mather
This study focuses on the short fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto and explores how formal techniques, generic patterns, and thematic ambiguities associated with modernism “travel” and are enacted within specific social contexts. Through a close reading of two of Yamamoto's stories—“Seventeen Syllables” and “Wilshire Bus”—I argue that her fictionalized rendering of internment, racism, and social restriction
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Romantic objects, Victorian collections: Scribal relics and the authorial body Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Tim Sommer
Over the course of the nineteenth century, literary manuscripts came to be seen as tangible evidence of the creative process and as a key to the personality of the author. The material traces of writing were understood to outlive their creators and promise to resurrect the authorial body through the magic of the relic. This article reconstructs how authorial script gradually transformed into a collectible
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-01
No abstract is available for this article.
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State of the field: Early modern magic Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Katherine Walker
Magic has served as a source of fascination for early modern scholars throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. While critics continue to debate magic's relationship to religion and science, in recent years the focus has turned to knowledge-making and how magic contributed to a diverse range of discourses during the 16th and 17th centuries. This article first explores some of the significant historical
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Dispossessed by norms like autonomy: Rethinking relational autobiography with Butler and Berlant Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-24 Kim Schoof
From the 1980s onwards, relationality has been a key term in autobiography scholarship and life-writing studies, as it describes how the self in many instances of autobiographical literature emerges in relation to others. Yet, confusion reigns about the exact meaning and applicability of the term relational autobiography. Are all works of autobiographical literature to an extent relational, or only
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Victorian women travellers and amateur art collecting in Japan, 1863–1893 Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Margaret K. Gray
The majority of interdisciplinary studies on nineteenth-century Japonisme perpetuate an assumption that most connoisseurs of Japanese art in Victorian Britain were men. Despite recent feminist studies which have restored women to histories of private collecting and curatorship across Europe, there is a lack of consideration of how travelogues by women contributed to public discussions of Japanese art
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Anti-Judaism versus anti-Semitism: The racialization of Jews in late antiquity Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Yonatan Binyam
This article interrogates the arbitrary distinctions made between “anti-Judaism” and “anti-Semitism” by contextualizing the treatment of Jews in Roman late antiquity within the broader framework of premodern critical race studies. It illustrates the value of employing models such as racialization and monstrification when reconstructing the various iterations of anti-Jewish prejudice that populate the
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-01
No abstract is available for this article.
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Belatedness and innovation: Korean modernism Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-01 Kelly S. Walsh
If Japanese modernists, as Eric Hayot argues, conceived modernism and modernity as originating in the West, colonial Korean artists inevitably apprehended modernism from a double remove, through the mediation of Japanese literature and language. While they self-consciously sought to develop a distinctive Korean modernist poetics (one not prefigured by Japanese modernism), the sense of belatedness remained
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Beyond taxonomies: Vagrantly “inhabiting” the modernist classroom Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-01 Ruchi Mundeja
This article takes the current transnational turn in modernist studies as entry point to probe how that plays out in the classroom in non-Western locations that are often also the “locales” of that disciplinary shift. I propose a waylaying of the energies of dispersion and diffusion that currently animate the modernist field to decolonize the modernist classroom through a parallel vagrancy, but one
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-03
No abstract is available for this article.
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Narratives of the new diasporas: A theoretical approach Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-03 María Alonso Alonso, Bárbara Fernández-Melleda
This introduction offers a survey of Border Studies and Diaspora Theory to contextualize the ways in which contemporary fictions of migration in the 21st century have reinterpreted classic paradigms. Literature has played a paramount role in illustrating many of the challenges of narrating the experience of migration. This role is the motivation for this Special Issue as it examines the literary mechanisms
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Indigenous diasporas in speculative fiction: Writing through estrangement Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-03 Miasol Eguíbar-Holgado
This article explores diasporic dimensions of Indigenous experiences and narratives on Turtle Island, by looking at the Indigenous speculative fiction novels The Back of the Turtle (2014) by Thomas King, The Marrow Thieves (2017) by Cherie Dimaline, and The Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) by Waubgeshig Rice. The three evoke (post)apocalyptic or dystopic futures involving environmental crises and destruction
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Ethnic conflicts and the power of collective identity in Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-03 Anna Savitskaya
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2018 and winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2019, Guy Gunaratne's debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), depicts a cultural conflict unfolding in contemporary London. Set off as the result of a killing of a white soldier by a black Muslim boy, violent riots force Yusuf, a son of immigrants from Pakistan, to recognise his migrant background and question
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Female re-writings of the Jewish diaspora: Metamemory novels and contemporary British-Jewish women writers Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-03 Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
In keeping with the interdisciplinary dialogue featuring the fields of Diaspora and Memory Studies, some current fictions seem to have absorbed, reproduced and deconstructed those contemporary discourses that reflect on the complex relation between the individual and collective construction of memory in the diaspora. It is in this context that British-Jewish women authors deserve special attention
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Disorienting empathy: Reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's Exit West Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-03 Stefano Bellin
This article explores how literature can sensitise us to our potential implication in the injustice and violence of the global border regime. The violence of borders today sustains a large economic and political system that “produces precarity and disposability, exposes migrants and refugees to harm and exploitation, and reinforces global inequalities”. While it manifests itself in direct events, policies
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“A geography of the soul”: The displaced and the city in the work of Aleksandar Hemon Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-03 Rubén Peinado-Abarrio
Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon is a self-described diasporic writer interested in questions of identity, displacement, and exile. This article proposes an approach to the Hemonian displaced character based on two of the most influential conceptualisations of contemporary subjectivity: on the one hand, Rosi Braidotti's critical posthuman subject, a nomadic, multiple subject who embodies complexity
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Language questions: Translation, modanizumu, and modernist studies in Japan Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Kunio Shin
The recent rise of global modernist studies, while in itself exciting, may prove a rather mixed blessing if it fails to be accompanied with an awareness that translation is the ‘necessary precondition’ of global modernism, a process itself conditioned by the ‘uneven politics of language’. From this perspective, this article suggests that delving deeper into the ways modernist studies in Japan originated
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Whitewashing white permanence: The (dis)/(re)membering of white corporeality in early modern England Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Matthieu Chapman
In early modern English drama, black flesh is remarkable. In the Shakespeare canon, the visibly black flesh of the eponymous Moor of Venice in Othello and the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus has been the subject of scholarly analysis for centuries. Yet, in a field that has placed so much emphasis on flesh marked by color, unmarked flesh is imbued with assumptions of whiteness that make unremarkable
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Issue Information Literature Compass (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-26
No abstract is available for this article.