Literary texts are inextricably linked to the context of the time when they were written — culture, historical, and social situation at a particular time influences writers’ consciousness and determines the forms and special features of the content of their literary work, as well as literary work affects the consciousness of society. Therefore, in order to fully understand the peculiarities of a particular author or literary work and their role in literature and culture at that time, the study analyses literary works of the Latvian writer Antons Austriņš (1884–1934) in a broader context. This goal defines the specificity of further research and determines its interdisciplinary methodology using theories and schools of a biographical approach, new historicism, structuralism, semiotics, hermeneutics, etc. The specificity of the late 19th century and early 20th century European culture situation marked by a change of culture paradigms made an essential impact on Austriņš’ world perception and determined the peculiarities of his artistic searching. His search for an individual expression makes the writer a part of the existing culture paradigm of his epoch. European culture at that time witnessed the coexistence of two opposed culture types — realism and modernism. In Latvia, their coexistence was especially obvious as features of realism and modernism appeared in the work of almost all younger generation writers. Austriņš’ prose in this respect is a typical phenomenon of Latvian literature as it accumulates traits of several culture types. Significantly, the writer’s individual spiritual searching (solutions of his personal ethical and aesthetical problems, hesitation between the traditional and decadent values) fostered by the liminal situations of his life are organically related to the changes in the culture situation in general. Therefore, the coexistence of several literary trends and types in Austriņš’ prose was determined not only by the culture situation but also his individual life experiences.

Latvian literature of the interwar period, the 1920s–1930s, developed concurrently with European literature, attempting to acquire new ideas and forms of expression and customize the “alien” impulses into “one’s own” cultural and literary space. In the 1930s, modernistic trends in Latvian literature coexisted with those antipodal literary tendencies which belonged to the national ideology-based literature of positivism. The paper is aimed at analysing the expressions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism in the Latvian literature of the 30s of the twentieth century focusing on the works by the representatives of the second generation of modernists for whom irony was one of the most important features of cosmopolitanism. The expressions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism incorporated in Latvian modernists’ prose works are traced via analysing cosmopolitan style. Among various dimensions of cosmopolitan style, the representation of detachment, treatment of the world as a source of pleasures, and cosmopolitan outlooks, experiences, values have been observed. Irony in Latvian modernists’ works of the 1930s is revealed via both allusions to untypical personalities of West European cosmopolitan writers and literary characters — strangers — who are striving to become cosmopolitan. Searching for an innovative form and style, modernists engaged in a “cosmopolitan conversation” with “cosmopolitan aesthetes” preventing the national literature from provincialism. The research has been carried out by applying cultural-historical method, content analysis and structural-semiotic method.

The present article considers the first years of the literary process in Latvia after the occupation and joining the USSR in the summer of 1940. The object of research is the journal “Soviet Latvia” published in 1940–1941. This journal brought together writers who were members of the newly formed Latvian Writers’ Union and was the official mouthpiece of the new authorities. The subject of analysis is the policy of the journal, selection of authors and texts. The propaganda of the achievements of Soviet culture as well as literature have become one of the most important strategies for the incorporation of the Baltic republics into the USSR. The content of the journal clearly gives evidence of the breakdown of Latvian identity and of one of the first attempts to construct a new Soviet identity. Particular attention was paid to two main requirements for literature — ‘partiinost’ (party spirit) and nationality. Literature, influencing the minds and feelings of the readership, was called upon to create a ‘new world’ for the inhabitants of Latvia who had escaped executions and deportations. The connection of the Latvian people with the Russians who had carried out the Great October Revolution, as well as with other ‘fraternal’ peoples living in the USSR, was especially emphasized. By analysing literary texts specially selected for publication in the first Russian-language journal in Latvia, an attempt was made to study the context of the formation and changing of the identity of Latvian inhabitants.

The present paper reveals the potential of actualizing the subject of festivities for expressing the life experience acquired in exile and in the land of settlement on the example of previously little known poetry by seven émigré authors born in Latgale (south-eastern part of Latvia). The mentioned traumatic experience in Latgalian poetry of exile is mostly treated within a binary opposition “native land (past) — foreign land (present)” that is brightly revealed by comparing celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and New Year as observed in Latvia, to the reality of the land of settlement. Lyrical hero provoked by an acoustic impulse (hearing festive tunes or toll of the church bells) carries out a dream journey into the past where s/he visits native home and recalls most important codes of one’s national festive culture (tradition of hospitality and cooking, lit candles, going to the church) that help surviving in the foreign land. It is noteworthy that, in the course of time, hope for the return of the Golden Age (past, native land), that is more characteristic of Christmas poetry, vanishes, hence the works under analysis — mostly Easter and especially New Year poetry — more and more often express the authors’ despair and doubt.

During most of the 16th century, Spanish Poetics was understood as something difficult to figure out. Therefore, the first poetic standards that organized and fixed the new way of doing poetry — both in their principles and in their uses — did not appear in the Iberian Peninsula until almost the last two decades of the 16th century. However, this fact does not imply that the Spanish poets were not caught up in the new winds of change, which had started early in the same century in Italy. Therefore, some treatises, which seek to explain and systematize a new poetic regulation just all in Spanish, rather than in Latin, begin to appear timidly from 1580 onwards. This article will attempt to propose and summarize four distinctive features that explain why the modern Spanish poetic treatises come so chronologically late regarding the rest of Europe. In addition, it will point out the fundamental aspects of the new modern Spanish Poetics, considering the most significant titles that were published in Spain at the dawn of the Early Modern Age.

Many a great well-known English writer has drawn on Arabic culture. Unfortunately, those writers have not acknowledged such a cross-cultural interaction, which has been tackled by few studies. It is surprising that writers in the field have left out of their account Arabic and Islamic echoes in the poetry of Alexander Pope. This paper argues that an intertextual reading of Pope’s “Ode on Solitude” uncovers a possible affinity between Pope and Islamic culture in terms of the relationship between nature, happiness, and solitude. This paper argues that Pope’s “Ode on Solitude” restructures, appropriates, and even (in some cases) translates some Quranic verses and the Hadith. This paper moreover suggests that a hypertextual relationship between Pope’s poem and Islam can be obviously detected.

Rabindranath Tagore is considered the great philanthropist of Indian literature. Throughout his life, he has sung humanitarian songs to honor and pay his respects to people. This article uses some basic research methods such as: text analysis method, intuitive method and interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary method to analyze, evaluate and make judgments about Tagore’s humanitarianism. He often looks deeply into the inner world of people with the eyes of human love and praises the noble love between people sincerely with kindness. He directed people to the philosophy of action, helping to awaken the people of India to a sense of freedom and democracy when the mysterious mist of religion covered the country for thousands of years and the harsh doctrinal ideas of religion were ingrained into the subconscious of Indian people, taking them out of the passive taciturn habit in the metaphysical, mystical mist to actively seek for beauty and happiness in life.

Arab theatre has heavily relied on European dramatic conventions since its emergence late in the 19th century. For more than a century, the Arab theatre has indeed drawn on a variety of dramatic techniques and adopted traditions it found functional to treat contemporary issues. The aftermath of WWII witnessed radical changes in the Arab social and political structures that required new approaches to portray them. These transformations have naturally been displayed in the literature, including drama, of the period. Consequently, the Avant Garde, the Absurd and other traditions smoothly found their way in the heritage of Arab theater. Arab playwrights also relied on European myth for their subject matter. They adapted various myths to the Arabic stage. The Antigone myth is one of the enduring myths that was used, though in different ways, by both classical and modern playwrights. Arab playwrights also adapted this myth for their own purposes. This paper is devoted to the Arab playwrights’ employment of the myth. Two Arab Syrian playwrights, namely Saadallah Wannous and Jihad Saad, have drawn upon the myth to expose the evils of the systems. The plays are Wannous’s The Unknown Messenger in Antigone’s Funeral and Saad’s Antigone’s Migration.

This essay argues that the playwright Henrik Ibsen was ahead of his time and his thoughts had anticipated ours at the present time. The paper accentuates Ibsen’s revival in modern and contemporary Egyptian drama. As a dramatist who discussed social and political problems in his plays, it is implausible to dissociate him from the political and social problems of the Arab World, especially in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The aim of this essay is to show how prominent Egyptian dramatists such as Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Rashad Rushdi, and No’man Ashur have been influenced by Ibsen’s social drama and theatrical techniques. On the other hand, Egyptian playwrights and Arab theater directors are influenced by him; consequently, they have adapted and appropriated some of his plays into Arabic. The essay concludes that Ibsen has an impact on modern and contemporary Egyptian drama and theater in terms of themes and techniques, and that the revival of his plays and themes in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries correlates with the political and social upheavals across the Arab World. The essay is informed by Julie Sanders’ theoretical underpinnings of adaptation and appropriation in an effort to show the significance of adapting and appropriating Ibsen’s plays by Arab dramatists and theater directors.

The Aboriginal people, the first people of the land, were deprived of their basic human rights, dispossessed of their native land and were doomed to live a subhuman life due to the colonial invasion. The policies of the colonial government turned out to be pernicious in the lives of the Aboriginal people. Thousands and thousands of Aboriginal children of mixed parentage were forcibly removed from their parents and family, thereby the government attempted to obliterate even the vestiges of aboriginality. Institutionalisation and indoctrination of white values made an indelible mark in the lives of the Stolen Generation people that they had to wage a life-long battle to attain redemption. Doris Pilkington, in her life writing Under the Wintamarra Tree, brings out the horrors of institutionalisation, the agonising search for her Aboriginal identity, and the victimisation as a woman. The basic premise of the paper is that there is a strong connect between women and nature and women have an intrinsic wisdom of nature, especially the indigenous women who benefit as well as benefitted from nature. This paper endeavours to explore this symbiosis of indigenous women and nature as revealed in Doris Pilkington’s Under the Wintamarra Tree, through the lens of ecofeminism.

To approach the problem of women’s oppression internationally, this paper compares the ideas of two feminist canonical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) and Nawal El Saadawi (1931– ). Despite the fact that Wollstonecraft and El Saadawi come from very dissimilar cultures, religions and epochs, they have tackled the issue of women’s oppression, through their female heroines, in a strikingly similar way. Hence, principally through the application of the theories of both the American school of comparative literature and second wave feminism, the current study attempts to manifest how the respective authors have utilized the same techniques to expose the reality of the patriarchal social system and its direct role in women’s oppression. It is concluded that the authors’ socio-political contexts have influenced their writings considerably. The novelists have conveyed their own experiences through their writings to create an intimate text that in turn validated their stories. The paper also shows how El Saadawi’s prose has been a feminist revolution in Arabic literature, similar to that of the 18th century English literature led by Wollstonecraft.

Tom Stoppard, the British postmodern playwright, has used two postmodern sciences, quantum mechanics and chaos theory, as the basis of his plays Hapgood and Arcadia. However, studying these plays in detail shows that he has a paradoxical style. His treatment with these sciences seems to be in opposition to what is believed in postmodernism. This paper aims to study quantum and chaos theories in Hapgood and Arcadia through a Lyotardian perspective. However, Stoppard challenges Lyotard’s theories and his beliefs regarding postmodern science. It seems that Stoppard does not reach the full expression of a postmodern writer in this respect. Here, the researchers have tried to show Stoppard’s postmodern science is somehow “classical.” At the end, it is suggested that the duality in Stoppard’s attitude can be considered a postmodern move. He is actually practicing postmodern doubt and uncertainty by his dualistic behavior. All in all, it can be considered what Lyotard calls a case of “differend.”

The paper aims to explore a kaleidoscopic view of minority discourse seen through the concave lens of hybridity in Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish. The aim of the research is to locate minority discourse on the spectrum of plural existence with special reference to Pakistani-American marginalization. The hybridity of the term American dervish is studied in the context of identity clasped in the scope of minority narrative. Since minority is a term closely attached to power discourse, Akhtar’s narrative delineates the power dynamics of a South Asian community replete with paradoxical sub-existence of identities in the American landscape. The study spreads out the refracted vision of minority discourse while correcting the myopic view of religious affiliation. American Dervish provides a concave view of Pakistani-American lives in conjunction with their interaction to both American and dervish identities. Minority discourse has not been explored as an annexation connected to the protracted discourse earlier. This study provides a lens to divulge from myopic focal points to broader affiliation with the social narrative. Michel Foucault’s theory of power and Allen Thiher’s work The Power of Tautology: The Roots of Literary Theory are surveyed as theoretical bedrock of the study. The research thus delves into the meaning of minority in a diverse society, its divulgence into mainstream and the refraction into tautologically contrived and concocted identities and sub-identities forming means of affiliation to the preponderant narrative of the society. Future researchers can explore religious subsets within the global spectrum of plural societies.