Restitution—“the act of restoring something to its original state,” as in “the return of something to its rightful owner”—is a complex issue, given that “the original state” of the thing in question no longer exists and cannot in fact be “restored.” A return to the “rightful owner” may be legally straightforward, but, I argue here, the legal is not identical to the ethical and certainly not to the aesthetic. My example is the famous portrait by the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt of Adele Bloch-Bauer—a painting known as The Woman in Gold and the subject of an acclaimed film made in 2015. In a prolonged courtroom case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, Maria Altmann, the heir to the Bloch-Bauer fortune, won The Woman in Gold, which had been in the Austrian National Museum in Vienna for more than sixty years since World War II. Altmann quickly sold the painting to Ronald Lauder, the founder and director of the Neue Galerie in New York for $153 million—the highest price in history to date in 2007. What is the ethical import of such a “victory”? And how do we relate the aesthetic value of the painting to that of the film that made it so famous?

Why does literature have a basic affinity with ethical criticism? It looked as if ethical criticism had definitely disappeared from literary studies during the 20th century. However, by the end of this century, its scholarly legitimacy was reestablished. The debate between Levinas and Derrida played an important part in this revaluation of ethical criticism. This is why this paper starts off from their controversy in order to demonstrate that the ethical dimension of literature cannot be derived from any theory of ethics or whatsoever theoretical approach. The base of ethical criticism, instead, is constituted by the specific communicative conditions of literature itself as I will argue at the end of this paper.

In Ibsen’s dramatic works the fictional self is divided into two opposing representations. On the one hand there is the character, representing the idea of a semper idem, somebody who, independent of the changing situations, remains in the same mood, always sticking to the ideals of a constant idealistic personality. On the other side the person, who continually switches from one state of mind to another without linking the single moments of existential expression together to a chain of being. These two types of human representation, the ideal and the existential, have found their main configurations in Henrik Ibsen’s dramas Brand and Peer Gynt. In these two plays Ibsen intends to show how this moral guideline leads into human catastrophes and decline. Life understood as an uninterrupted succession of ethical sameness is, due to Ibsen, the best guaranty of destroying what you want to take care of. Brand’s wife and child become victim to his way of acting consequently and last not least he is punished by God, whose voice tells him that he is “the God of love.” Finally I intend to show how the inherent beast in man turns out to be even more beastlike than that of wild animals, then in opposite to the wild beast men has the ability to control and domesticate their animal instincts.

Toni Morrison’s Home is not only a hopeful story of racial and war trauma as well as its healing but also a realistic mirror to the ethical problems of modern medicine in America. This paper intends to revisit the scenes of Cee’s illness and healing in the light of interdisciplinary medical humanities by focusing on the unethical routes and unexpected consequences of medical progress, on the human exploitation and bio-politics inherent in medical knowledge production and medical power so as to discover the hidden racial violence and ethical problems that Morrison intends to reveal behind the veil of 1950s America. The contrast between Cee’s healing under biomedicine and folk medicine illustrates Morrison’s implicit criticism towards the dehumanized medical system and brutal medical racism in America, as well as her hope for humane and genuine healing in African American folk medicine. This paper will help readers understand African American’s distrust in hospitals and the implication of the choice of different healing methods. It will also help readers become more aware of the link between medicine and literature and inspire them to reflect on the predicament of modern medicine in a multicultural world.

The limitations of humanism have emerged, and the absence of an inner self in contemporary human beings has also become a genuine concern these days. Will the role of literature, which has mirrored human life and the inner self, be terminated? How can a human being make ethical judgments in literature, an expression of ethics, if a human being has no inner self? To answer these questions, in this article, I focused on Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Human, especially on Keiko Furukura, the protagonist, who lacks an inner self and figures out that this absence has an effect on ethical matters. I also considered the one part of development of humanism into post-humanism in literature, during the analysis of the novel, examining the symptom of the “internal empty cave,” a phrase used to describe the “minds” of young people, which is seen as a pathology of modern Japanese society and a problem of the moral education proscribed by the Japanese government. Furthermore, I reviewed the role and ethics of literature through an analysis of Convenience Store Human, concluding that it warns and implicates contemporary society as it is aiming to move from a humanist to a post-humanist worldview.

Transgeniality is a shared mental-spiritual attitude or disposition supported by a high degree of image originality that sporadically appears in the work of world writers belonging to different epochs and cultural-linguistic spaces. It is often revealed in mutual transcendence and dynamics of (philosophic-spiritual) content and form of expression of a work. In contrast, transgeniality is seldom manifested and explained by direct influences or concrete intertextualities (in form, motifs, etc) between literary works. Thus, it seems to be absolutely sure that the British poet Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844–1889) did not have any knowledge of the existence of Kristian Jaak Peterson (1801–1822), today considered as the first great poet in the Estonian language. Juhan Liiv (1864–1913) did not and could not know the work of Hopkins either, and no proof can be found of his being acquainted with the work of Peterson. All of them belonged to the “belated writers” in the sense that their work started to be fully celebrated only after their death and was added to their respective national literary canons posthumously. All these poets worked in a “periphery,” both in the sense of geophysical location (Ireland, Estonia) and intellectual-spiritual ambience (ignored or rejected by aesthetical-literary main (centric) currents of their time). Yet all these writers became appreciated later by the posterity and by today have gained, at least to some extent, wider international recognition, as literary creators who significantly renovated the aesthetics of expression in poetry, embodying in their work a keen and intense ethical philosophical strive for transgressing traditional morality. In all three cases it meant seeking a fuller understanding of our existence and the “other.”

In her Pulitzer winning poetic work Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey devotes her elegies to her mother, Native Guards in the Civil War as well as the Katrina-beaten American South. She historicizes the elegy writing so that the private stories and experiences are endowed with historical features. Out of Trethewey’s perceptions of histories to be alive, concrete and ever-changing, she doubts the traditional way of historicizing based on visual and textual documents. This article looks into the poetic techniques the poet deploys to realize her historicized elegy writing as well as its cultural influences on reserving and refreshing collective memories of African American people in the South.

The present paper offers a comparative study of the poetry of the seventeenth century Metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne and the prominent Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Reflecting on the controversy over determining the scope of comparative studies, Susan Bassnett argues that comparative studies in literature do encompass as well those studies conducted on the works of authors writing in the same language. Furthermore, comparative studies need not focus on incongruent and dissimilar elements in the works of the compared authors. Accordingly, the present article attempts to conduct a comparative study of the works of two English poets belonging to two different literary traditions and separated from each other by a span of more than a hundred years. Reading the poetry of the two in the light of the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of their production and the intellectual and philosophical presumptions of their authors, we found out that there are a number of characteristic features common in the poetry of the two which connect their literary productions through invisible thematic and structural threads through the years. These resemblances include the two poets’ inclination towards an experience of the sublime that reverberates in their poetry, the celebration of childhood visionary innocence, glorification of nature and natural beauty, pantheism, mysticism, and the philosophical and spiritual concept of felicity or joy.

Literary canons reveal important insights regarding definitions of literature in specific periods and cultures. Canons considered in Anglophone literary criticism expanded significantly throughout the past five decades to include, for example, various non-fiction genres. One of these genres is the slave narrative. Despite the now widespread inclusion of slave narratives in literature anthologies, there is still little literary criticism dedicated to this genre. In particular, comparative studies focusing on more than one specific author or text omit the fact that among the many contributors to this unique type of autobiographical writing were many enslaved Muslims. This fact alters today’s understanding of the polyglot nature of the New World’s literary history, as it also adds a commonly concealed angle to the concept of Arab American identity. The present study discusses three slave narratives associated with Job Ben Solomon, Omar Ibn Said, and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua and it highlights their importance for literary scholarship concerned with categories of autobiography, American literature, and historical fiction. The selection of the three authors in particular allows for considerations of amanuensis, translation, creolization and polyglot inclusion of African tribal language in the context of their narratives’ literary values.

In the search for meaning, literature has been approached from several varying viewpoints over time. One of these approaches involves viewing it as a member of a specific class which can be engaged in a comparative study. This is based on the Aristotelian notion of mimesis as production, representation and creation of the probable as artists do not just create what they see but what could happen, accounting for the nature of art as a heterocosm. Thus, the approach this paper seeks to take is the phenomenological one which in a comparative manner, searches for core values which are embedded in all literary texts. It will do this by way of searching out the poetic symbol of the hero that cuts across genre form in The Tempest by William Shakespeare and The Slave by Elechi Amadi. This image will also be considered in its contextual form as “slave” taking into account the social and historical contexts presented in the texts.

During the past several decades, acoustic narrative study has attracted more and more scholars’ attention. Intellectual community both in China and abroad has put forward lots of inspiring ideas and conceptual terms, making continuous efforts to sharpen the critical edge and expand the boundary of the theory. The fruitful theoretical discussion and empirical criticism practice among Chinese scholars represented by Fu Xiuyan and western scholars represented by R. Murray Schafer and Melba Cuddy-Keane undoubtedly laid solid theoretical foundation and set practical norms for the future study of acoustic narrative. This paper will evaluate the significance of the rise of audionarratology by tracing the history, commenting on the recent developments and depicting a vision for its prospect.