This article illustrates how the postcolonial postanthropocentric perspective is employed to analyze the conflictive relationship between the “centripetal” and “centrifugal” forces, suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin, on the representations of racial and cultural hybridity in contemporary Britain. Concepts such as deterritorialization, liminal space and the violence of colonial desire are used to the postanthropocentric reading of contemporary British ethnic novels. Through a comparative analysis of novels by V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips’ novels, this article argues that the rhetoric and practice of dichotomy in social life and literary works inevitably leads to the reinforcement of ideologies of colonialism, racism and patriarchal sexism, and the rhetoric and practice of solidarity and empathy create positive visions of cross racial community.

Contemporary Anglophone Arab novelists seek to negotiate traumatic issues related to diaspora, adaptation, fragmentation, and identity transformation. They attempt to reveal how dislocated diasporic identities are weighed down by ambivalent wounded consciousnesses. This paper sets out to negotiate the issue of dislocation narratives of diaspora in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019), its representation, and its impact on transformation and self-discovery. It also reveals narrative experimentations and techniques as a way of artistic representation to expose the crisis and conflict of individual choice and existentialism. Aboulela uses a spatial metaphorical journey to open a space of spiritual freedom of the self through traveling and crossing boundaries to a religious space. In this regard, the protagonists of the novel travel to achieve a transformation within the consciousness of the individual intellectually and spiritually. It is in this sense that the diasporic characters of Bird Summons have finally eloped from an elusive matrix of inside and outside, being and becoming, social dissonance, and ambiguities of identity.

This paper aims to explore the metanarrative elements in Philippa Pearce’s classic children’s novel Tom’s Midnight Garden and how the story is analyzed from a psychoanalytic point of view. Fantasy is an important feature of children’s stories and many texts in children’s literature use fantasy to create an archaic realm for their setting. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a time-slip narrative that blends both fantasy and reality. The novel talks about an unusual relationship between two individuals, Tom and Mrs. Bartholomew (Hatty), who are lonely but yearn for companionship in the modern world. The kind of dream telepathy that transpires between Tom and Mrs. Bartholomew leads to their strong connection not of the real world, but of their fantasy. The plot is re-visioned as a story narrated to a child at three levels: realistic, imaginary, and psychoanalytic. These features render the story a metanarrative pattern, that is, a story within the story.

A crucial heterogeneous feature of Louise Glück’s poems is the polyphonic narrative. This poetic discourse narrative strategy is embodied in the following three aspects: firstly, through the role setting and interpretive variation of the images of Western classical texts, it constructs the multiple interpretive tension of ancient and modern dialogues; secondly, through the dissemination, extension, communication, and integration of individual life experiences in the perspective of the other, it constructs the interactive subject field of subject-object dialogues; thirdly, through the penetration and interpretive resonance of private space in the public sphere, it constructs the temporal and spatial dialogues of universal meaning. These three aspects enable Glück’s poems to realize the dialectical unities of individuality and universality, singularity and plurality, and synchronicity and desynchronicity, forming an intertextual structural system of polyphonic narratives and a paradigm for the formation of world literary classics.

One outstanding issue in African literature is prison and exile writings. In such literary works, freedom, prison and exile have different interpretations and symbolism, especially in relation to female writers. Accordingly, the research seeks to show the symbolism of prison and exile in Assia Djebar’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero. Albeit the selected works exhibit restrained bodies either in prison or exile, the study sheds light on the unfettered minds of Djebar’s and El Saadawi’s characters. It focuses on the positive side of both prison and exile. The analysis unravels that the real meaning of prison or exile, for women like Sarah, Nadjia and Aicha in Djebar’s texts and Firdaus in El Saadawi’s novel, goes beyond the confines of its space. Despite the fact that women are imprisoned or exiled, they are free from the social shackles, while other free women are imprisoned or exiled by abiding to social conventions. Thus, the internalized prison is the most atrocious experience and the true exile is living in the past and accepting social practices. For Djebar’s and El Saadawi’s characters, prison or exile is regarded as a room of one’s own to ponder about the true meaning of freedom.

In a world where postmodern feminism aims at inclusivity and intends to do away with the politics of defining categories, the overturning of the landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade judgment complicates the very notion of reproductive rights and justice. It further brings under scrutiny the institution and practice of motherhood and abortion. Literary fiction dealing with the issues of abortion is numbered but within that limited oeuvre, Red Clocks (2018) by Leni Zumas approaches these issues from an essentially postmodern perspective. The trope of multifarious vantage points of four major characters, the Biographer, the Mender, the Wife, and the Daughter; with the overarching life story of the polar explorer Eivør Mínervudottír simultaneously offers conflicting and converging notions of motherhood, agency, and freedom. The speculative setting of the novel adds to the crisis and the dystopian air further problematizes the issues. By employing the method of close textual reading and anchoring on the theoretical models of feminist critical dystopias and feminist epistemology (postmodern narratives) this research paper intends to investigate the narrative space of the novel to depict the variegated shades of motherhood, the nuances of abolishing the abortion rights and the autonomy over the body.

Han’s The Enchantress has been widely viewed as a romantic historical fantasy, partly due to the complicated psyches of the exotically depicted protagonist in the novel. In addition, the protagonists’ complex psyches exert a significant impact on their self-development. However, to date, the extent to which the protagonists’ psyches are responsible for their action and subjectivity has not been investigated. Hence, this article concentrates on examining the protagonists’ desires through a psychoanalytic lens proposed by Jacques Lacan. Lacanian concept of objet petit a is utilised to study the protagonists’ constant search for the lost object of desire. Hypothetically the present study argues that through a psychoanalytic lens, The Enchantress is neither a romantic-historical fairy tale that enthrals numerous readers, nor a demonstration of the possibility of the cultural exchange between the East and the West. Instead, it is a psychological drama of objet petit a. Hence, I aim to identify the substitutes for objet petit a and expound how protagonists’ psyches affect their selfhood and narrative progression in the novel. In short, the psychoanalytic approach proves to be an effective method to examine the mother-child relationship in Han’s literary writing and enriches the academic study on Han Suyin.

Mythology was fascinating first of all as a perfectly harmonized artistic system with its own laws and logic. A myth can reveal the essence of all the main problems and contradictions of the present, as it can accumulate in itself everything that goes beyond time and personal values. In mythological texts, figurative and expressive techniques are intertwined into a single whole, while creating a clear picture of events, with diverse plot twists. Greek and biblical myths have been deeply researched over the past two centuries, and the myths about the Muslim world and the ancient Turks, who are our ancestors, and the Altaians (the ancestors of the Turks) of ancient times have remained unexplored and untouched. Since this category of myths still remains unexplored, it is of interest for study and detailed consideration. At one time, they did not reach the same popularity as, for example, the myths of ancient Greece, so they were forgotten for centuries.

This paper focuses on Anita Moorjani’s memoir Dying to be Me (2012) to outline the identity of the patient-narrator who narrates her illness story to reconfigure her life which has been altered by the sudden onset of Lymphoma. In recounting the subjective experience of her illness, Moorjani plots her growth as an individual who claims voice and agency and regains it by decolonizing the hegemonic tropes of medical science. The illness narrative maps the patient-narrator’s journey from her illness to healing and subsequent restitution. The paper highlights the problems associated with the beginnings of such illness narratives and the efforts made by the narrator to locate an inception moment to narrate her story. The present article revisits the theoretical postulates of Arthur Frank, Arthur Kleinman and Shlomith Rimmon Kenan on illness narratives. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of “narrative identity,” Roy Schafer’s concept of narrative and Edward Said’s thoughts on beginnings and origin, the paper aims to delineate the problem of “beginnings,” the dilemmas associated with identity and the various patient perceptions which shape Moorjani’s memoir.

This essay studies the characteristics of Korean literature of critical realism produced in the late 1910–1930s in comparison with those of European critical realism. It studies the literary trend of critical realism, the major literary trend of Korea in the late 1910–1930s, and ascertains that it is a new flow with its new ideas and aesthetic principle quite distinctive from the outdated in the past. The origination and development of critical realistic literature in Korea turned out to be somewhat different from its counterparts in Europe in the light of socio-historical environment and creators’ makeup. Although they both acutely criticized the reactionary and unpopular reality of the exploiting society, the Korean literature of critical realism is characteristic in that it reflected the reality of colonial and semi-feudal society, set the humiliated and poor working masses as the hero, sympathized with their lives as well as bitterly criticized the contemporary reality, harshly oppressing and exploiting them.

Ramin Bahrani’s film, The White Tiger, is Balram’s journey based on the New York Times bestseller novel by the same name. The film is publicly supported by an incredible number of reviewers. But some reviewers denounce it as a politically exploitative and unjust depiction of India and Indians. The present paper aims to explore the polysemic nature of the film through review analysis. Drawing insight from Stuart Hall’s concept of encoding-decoding, the article analyses reviews of The White Tiger from the day the movie came out until the most recent ones on IMDb. As a result, two major perspectives emerged from the analysis: (1) an Orientalist perspective and (2) a nationalist standpoint. It also helps to understand different frameworks of knowledge through which the viewers decode the film.