Emily Dickinson’s ecological ethics is notable for her humble and tolerant attitude toward nature, namely her reverence for natural wonders and mysteries, her non-discriminatory appreciation of natural diversity and complexity, her recognition of the significance of nature itself rather than that of “human value.” With such ethical attitude toward nature, Dickinson presents her ethical choices correspondingly through the personae and narrators in her nature poems. First, they remain humble to nature, no matter it is spectacular or trivial, graceful or destructive, and choose to be modest observers and admirers to honour the sublimity and inscrutability of nature. Second, they are always sympathetic with “Nature’s People” no matter these wild lives cater to human beings or not. They choose to live in a state of symbiosis, namely a state of harmony instead of cutthroat competition. Third, Dickinson establishes positive abstinence with her “ascetic paradoxes”, which proposes to abstain human beings from their animal-like appetite to prevent the unprotected nature from being spoiled and keep themselves open to higher possibilities. Her ecological ethics is positive: it is mutually beneficial to sustainability of nature and human spiritual self-realization, and to potentialities of coexistence of human beings and nature in the long run.

The paper focuses on the representation of the horse in Nurgun Botur the Swift, a Yakut heroic epic recorded by a writer and scientist Platon Oyunsky. The current research objectives are to consider the horse imagery in Nurgun Botur the Swift and identify the horse with the epic hero. The horse is an important element not only in the spiritual culture of the Yakuts but also in that of other ethnic groups. In the paper, the comparative, descriptive and historical methods, and the method of interpretation are applied in building and systematizing of materials and linguistic sources. The English version of Nurgun Botur the Swift is used as the basic research material. Nurgun Botur the Swift embodies the image of the horse as a true friend of the epic hero, Nurgun Botur, and overall, as the magnificent creature with the hyperbolic features. The Yakut epic storytellers traditionally adorn the heroic horse with the superb qualities such as unusual strength and endurance, beauty and intelligence. Therefore, the epic is filled with many archaic words and phrases, parallel and complex constructions; traditional poetic forms only emphasize the romanticized image of the epic horse. It is so because this mythological creature symbolizes the desire of the Yakuts for freedom, goodness and justice. Thus, the image of the horse is one of the most common in the Yakut heroic epic tales; the physical and mythical attributes of horse imagery convey complex nexus of symbolic meanings.

This paper argues that Jane Austen is one of the wisest female writers who have approached the feminist case during the conservatism of the Georgian era, Regency period and beyond. Although hushed and unassertive, she adopted a reconciliatory strategy trying to gain the willful acceptance of society to the change in women’s positions, one step at a time, with each work and character adding a new emancipatory dimension to her prototypes. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), her argument may seem frail and anti-feminist because she makes her leading heroines sacrifice their existence and identity for the sake of society, but within the paradigm of the final win-win ending, all is happy; the leading heroines move a step ahead in stressing their individuality while still observing the roles dedicated to them by society. Sense and Sensibility may be regarded as a hushed and dwarfed image of feminism but the subtle gains of acceptance in this novel pave way for the appearance of an eloquent giant and an all-time favorite, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813).

Frankissstein: A Love Story, Winterson’s latest novel, shows the author’s critical thinking on the transhuman technological issues. From making a study of three characters, this paper will demonstrate how the transhuman dream continually propels the enhancement of human properties with the help of constantly changing technologies, and their ultimate goal is to make human morphological freedom come true. This article will discuss from three aspects. Firstly, it will explore the transhuman theme embodied in Prometheus myth and its different understanding of human nature, which contributes to grasping the essence of Winterson’s dual narration. Following this, we will examine the modern Promethean representative character, Victor Frankenstein, who realizes the purpose of creating being by transforming the human nature (its biology) through science and technology, which is the manifestation of Enlightenment Humanist ideal. Thirdly, it will be clarified that Victor Stein’s disembodied posthumanist stance in the modern article is in fact a kind of transhumanist thought, and his radical goal is to achieve the ultimate ideal of transhumanism—the freedom of human nature—by completely getting rid of the fragile corporeal body. However, this ideal will lead to the dualist variant of mind and body—the opposition between information and matter.

Armenian by birth, French writer Henri Troyat, who was honoured with worldwide acclaim, received a contradictory valuation, and for decades was accepted with stubborn reluctance in the literature world. Though in Armenia, there should have been a certain scientific fascination towards his literary works, his ignorance of Armenian roots and issues resulted in a boycott against his personality. Our nationalistic narrow-mindedness secluded him from our cultural life, not granting us an opportunity to acknowledge his real value. This article touches upon “The Spider” (“L’Araigne”), a novel by Henri Troyat, its relationship with the Armenian literary praxis. Parallels are drawn between the novel under discussion and the novel “The Death” by Nar-Dos, a psychological realist Armenian writer of the classical period. The protagonists in both novels, namely, Gerard Fonseca and Levon Shahian delve down into death ideology: they write and translate books by European philosophers, but they both die as a result of their ambitious aspirations.

This article explores the ambivalence of Indianness in Ahmed Essop’s debut collection of short stories, The Hajji and Other Stories (1978), against the contested discourse of the nation. The article is underpinned by Bhabha’s theory of nation and narration, specifically the authenticity and context of cultural location and representation. The image of cultural authority, like that of the Hajji, is ambivalent because it is caught in the act of trying to compose a powerful and religious figure, but stuck in the performativity of typical South African racial, class and religious prejudice. Essop’s ambivalent narration evokes the margins of the South African space, the Indian minority; it is also a celebratory or self-marginalisation space. The ambivalence of the characters resonates across the collection—the insincerity of the Fordsburg community towards Moses and the two sisters; the deceitful Hajji Musa, the hypocrisy of Molvi Haroon seeking refuge with the perpetrator of blasphemy against the Prophet, Dr Kamal’s pretence of having virtues and the charade of the yogi. In essence, the characters display virtues of Indianness and Muslim/Hindu piety that they do not actually possess.

Conrad’s short story “Il Conde” portrays an elderly aristocrat whose preoccupation with conventions and rituals indicates that he has reduced his identity to performing a social role. The assault of a robber shatters his stance of dignified reserve and undermines his assumption that he has succeeded in constructing a stable, invulnerable persona of a sophisticated gentleman which cannot be challenged in the confrontation with others. Goffman’s concept of the performed self elucidates the protagonist’s response to the traumatic experience and his frantic attempts to sustain his idealized persona. Goffman construes the self as the product of interaction, a socially constructed image rather than a substantive immutable entity. This self-image relies on the coherence of personal front, i.e. appearance and manner as well as the presence of the audience who observe and interpret the performance that an individual gives while interacting with others. Hence, the tactics that the Count employs to cope with the shock can be viewed as an attempt to defend his self-image by restoring correspondence between appearance and manner that the robber’s disrespectful act of violence has subverted.

This paper examines Mia Couto’s idiosyncratic appropriation of magical realism as a discourse of ‘postcolonial utopianism’ in his Sleepwalking Land (1992). It argues that this literary gesture emanates from the very complex realities of post-independence Mozambique on one hand, and the ability of magical realism to render them and articulate future aspirations concurrently on another. Despite being a robust condemnation of this depressive atmosphere, the novel draws on a postcolonial discourse which coalesces the magical, the historical and the utopian to critically ‘re-read’ and ‘re-write’ the neocolonial formations of the day in an attempt to envisage a better future. In the light of Bill Ashcroft’s recent contribution to the field of postcolonial studies, i.e. his formulation of postcolonial utopianism, the paper scrutinizes the impact the Mozambican past, through memory in particular, has in framing utopian thinking and futuristic visions as opposed to the western versions of utopia/nism. Extrapolating Couto’s novel as a form of utopianism can open prospects to step beyond the traditional binarisms emblematic of postcolonialism generally and postcolonial literary criticism particularly. It sets the debate of what constitutes more an African dream in post(-)colonial Africa—past, present, or future musings—and the role of the African in this debate.

This paper develops a postcolonial reading of Yemeni Ahmad Zain’s recent novel entitled Steamer Point (2015). The foundational claim of the paper is that the story is a powerful attack on the hegemonic nature of the cosmopolitans, and that Aden history has been used as an allegory to comment on the current situation in Yemen. The findings show that the story is caught up between two dominant voices: one that exalts the cosmopolitans and their lifestyle, and the voice of resistance that views the cosmopolitans as oppressors who have marginalized the indigenous people and treated them as subalterns. In Zain’s novel, Sameer appears to represent the former who is fascinated by the English lifestyle while Nagib is introduced as an anti-colonial voice that promotes violence as a means of resistance against them. The story is twofold, on one hand, it bitterly criticizes the cosmopolitans for having persecuted the indigenous people, considering them as their inferior ‘Other’. On the other hand, it strongly attacks the colonized subjects for having embroiled themselves in infighting, thereby failing to reconstruct their own society. This in-betweenness situation of the author is embodied in the character of Sameer who admires English lifestyle, however, he admits later on, that inside, he is on the same boat as Nagib and Saud. Thus, Sameer’s ambivalence symbolizes the author’s attitude towards the current situation of Yemen, while he advocates radical social change, he is so skeptical about the means of it.

Kiran Desai’s Booker award winning novel The Inheritance of Loss concentrates on the fate of a few vulnerable undocumented expatriates. The void which Biju, an Indian émigré, senses in USA in the story and his fracas for coexistence and quest for distinctiveness represent the fight of all those marginalized people, who, in the deficiency of a sound pecuniary condition are under the clemency of the overriding class. Desai farsightedly exposes the inconsistency between superficial ingresses of extravagance and majesty and the self-effacing genuineness of mistreatment, predominantly of the expats. The present research tries to portray this very battle of an expat against the age old despotism of the privileged people in an altogether extra-terrestrial country. The current investigation has highlighted the everyday life of the émigrés, their calamities, tirades and ignominies, their imaginings and longings, fears and interruptions through the folios of the novel.

Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand’s Bakha and Irish Nobel laureate dramatist Samuel Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir have encompassed the whole world where Bakha is from the East and Estragon and Vladimir are from the West bearing uniformity in their voices. They are standing in the labyrinth of waiting as if waiting is the essence of human existence. Through the characterization of these three characters, Anand and Beckett have depicted the existential and identity crises of humankind on earth. They represent those people who are entangled with their surroundings and circumstances being completely unaware of their forthcoming future. Although the three protagonists have been shaped from two different worlds, there is a symphony of voices. The protagonists of both texts bear resemblance to some incidents of the contemporary world which are socially, culturally and politically significant to the world intelligentsia. This is a qualitative study and the objective is to critically analyze the unending waiting of homo sapiens (the scientific name of human beings) in relation to their existential crisis and their optimism for a better future in light of the masterpieces Untouchable and Waiting for Godot. The psychological trauma and never-ending waiting of the three protagonists Bakha, Estragon, and Vladimir can be observed through the lens of the materialistic class distinction, attempt of mimicry, oppression of the high caste, identity crisis of the inferior class and their living under the fear of continual domination and exploitation. To elucidate these socio-psychological dynamics, psycho-analysis and post-colonial theories and writings have been considered.

The acceptance of neo-Confucianism during the Edo period in Japan was not a simple imitation or entire collection of the advanced country’s high-quality resources by the backward country under cultural deficit, but a process of selection, absorption, transformation and localization. Its absorption was embodied in the transition from “nature” to “artificiality,” as well as in the transition from “respect” to “sincerity.” The transformation covered “Li-Qi Dualism,” “Monarch-Subject united in righteousness,” “Change of Ruling Imperial Family,” etc. During the Edo period, Japan’s absorption and transformation of neo-Confucianism showed features like indirect-to-direct, passive-to-active, subjective-and-selective, practical-and-applicable. Moreover, it followed the internal rule that based on Yamato people’s values, thinking mode and aesthetic orientation, to form an ideological system with Japanese characteristics in the process of continuous collision, digestion and fusion with Confucianism.