Ethical literary criticism is a theory of interpreting and analyzing literature from an ethical perspective. It examines literature as a unique expression of ethics and morality within a certain historical period, and argues that literature is not just an art of language, but also an art of text. Ethical literary criticism is aimed at interpreting literary texts, claiming that almost all literary texts are the records of human beings’ moral experiences and contain ethical structures or ethical lines. Ethical lines form the main ethical structure. Compared to the written text in literature, the text of oral literature, which can be termed as brain text, is stored in the human brain. The material and fundamental existence of literature is based on written context. The evolving definition of literature is dependent upon the culture and context from which it originated.

English author George Orwell (1903-1950)’s novella Animal Farm (1945) is an allegorical portrayal of the difficulty of creating classless societies because of power-hungry leaders. Likewise, Yaşar Kemal (1923-2015)’s children’s novel entitled The Sultan of the Elephants and the Red-Bearded Lame Ant (1975) depicts elephants and ants in an anthropomorphic portrayal of totalitarianism. This study intends to disentangle two authors’ socialist realist depiction through these works from distinct literatures. Therefore, the study aims at comparing and contrasting Orwell’s and Kemal’s selected works to indicate how socialist realism functions through the genre, characters and content in the works. The study applies the tenets of socialist realist literature stated by Maxim Gorky (1868-1963), who is among the leading founders of socialist realist literary theory, to enrich the close reading of the selected works. The analysis indicates that although they appeared in different countries and years, they bear parallelism in terms of genre, characters and content within the context of socialist realism. However, while Animal Farm warns against the betrayal of the revolution through Orwell’s suspicious approach to the realisation of a socialist society, The Sultan of the Elephants and the Red-Bearded Lame Ant creates hope out of despair for a socialist society.

This paper examines the process of marginalization as experienced by Hamid’s protagonist, Changez, in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) from Bhabhian perspective. It highlights the West’s tendency to destroy the non-Western ways of knowing—something achieved through its institutionalized education systems. The experience of marginalization proves epiphanic for Changez as he stops looking at the world from the Eurocentric optics. Marginalization, thus, turns out to be a springboard for Changez, as it enables him to adopt mimicry as a form of colonial subversion. While it acts as a catalyst in Changez’s acculturation, mimicry also discloses the ambivalence of the colonial discourse and deauthorizes America’s position of subjectivity. It empowers Changez to question the Western ways of thinking. It challenges epistemic violence, American ethnocentrism, and impels the reader to perceive marginalization as a privileged postcolonial motif and mimicry as an anti-colonial tool that set Changez against the imperial machinery of silencing.

This article aims at investigating the transformation of the contemporary Arab protagonist into an existential antihero in Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hell Fire Society (2018) which is set during Lebanon’s civil war. The crafting of postmodern antiheroism in the context of war has become a medium to voice out the traumatic experiences of this individual around whom events of death, loss, destruction, and chaos are centered. The representation of the antihero in postmodern Anglophone Arab war fiction is of paramount importance as it reclaims the past through depicting historical events. It also dwells on the representation of the antihero’s psyche reflecting the complex nature of the antihero figure in times of conflicts. This research is theoretically framed using The Archetypal Antihero in Postmodern Fiction (2010) by Rita Gurung to scrutinize the character’s evolution and transformation into an antihero, and trauma studies including Cathy Caruth’s readings of traumatized literary figures and her findings of trauma in her Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995). It also incorporates Craps and Beulness’ ethical direction of trauma to understand how war can shape and influence the antihero’s transformation, and to position the existential Arab antihero in Hage’s novel in the field of Anglophone Arab war fiction. Thus, interweaving politics, history and psychology, this article aims at bridging the gap between postmodern Anglophone Arab war literature and the concept of antiheroism through examining the deranged psyche of Hage’s protagonist Pavlov in order to delineate the metamorphosis he undergoes to becoming an existential antihero in the context of war.

Post 9/11 literature turns out to be a signifier for terror oriented discourses. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows (2009) critiques the US discourses on war on terror by highlighting the terror disseminated by a globalized world order and traces its germination in the past by historicizing aggressive nationalism of the superpowers. The terror is manifested through the state exigencies triggering extreme reactions in the name of freedom fighting and guerrilla warfare. This paper interprets Shamsie’s vision of history and the linear development of terror from colonization onwards to World War II through post 9/11 war on terror. Shamsie discusses the ‘others’ point of view who have been the victim of holocaust, colonization of the Subcontinent and Soviet and American interventions in Afghanistan. The study concludes that the exploding globalization in the world nurtures terror networks and only the love for humanity based cosmopolitan vision can turn out to be a savior in post 9/11 transnational times.

The article proposes a new perception of The Lazarus Project (2008) by Aleksandar Hemon. Literary transformation of the past events in light of historical experience, their reinterpretation, and adoption appear within the novel in the forms of history representation and memory production. The author’s position in the book is actualised through its structure with alternating chapters and realised in two conflicting identities: a historian who just records events, and a creator who builds up the conditioned reality of the characters’ world. The analysis of the novel’s structure displays the hybridity of narrative strategies in historical, fictional, and biblical dimensions. Including photography in literary hybridisation highlights a means through which the forms of the representation of the author’s worldview get separated from existing practices and recombine with new ones. The conjunction of biography, photography, space and time frames in The Lazarus Project refers to a specific type of narration that underlines its transnational character. The article also deconstructs the examples of biblical allusions and as direct so indirect references to the Bible that can be a way of transcending historical barriers. Originality in research of Hemon’s novel as a representative of migrant literature consists in revealing the influence of transcultural narratives of contemporary postcolonial fiction on the migrant identity. The application of an interdisciplinary approach intends to demonstrate the diversity of narratives in the book as an original piece of postmodern metafiction.

Although the Epistolary literature played a fundamental role in the development of European novel, its tradition in Albania is very poor. The main reason is that Albanian literature used to have an ideological character; as a result of this, it refused intimate view of the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Only after the 1990s, letters became an important literary device in Albanian contemporary novels. The most common form is the use of “interpolated” letters, which supply the narrative works with metaphysical subjectivity. This is due to the fact that letters, diaries, meditation, etc., are forms of personal communication and consequently reflect a deeper relationship of the Being with the self and with the world. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the features of letters in the novels written by Astrit Delvina, Elvira Dones, Bashkim Shehu, etc. The main method used in this paper is a comparative approach through which we aim to analyze the use of “interpolated letters” as a specific stylistic device, as well as a transition “tool” from modernist to postmodernist novel.

Toni Morrison’s latest novel God Help the Child presents the ethical dilemma of a young black woman who is traumatized by her childhood experiences and undergoes transformation before accomplishing maturity and wisdom. Morrison demonstrates her ethical choice by juxtaposing issues of race and materialism and apposes two modes of relationships between characters in the novel: “conditional relationships” represented by Sweetness, Louis and Booker, which leads to Bride’s spiritual dilemma and physical regression; “unconditional care”, embodied by Steve, Evelyn and Rain, which brings Bride out of her dilemma and leads to the recovery of her body and her humanity. The present article aims to elaborate on ethical dilemma, ethical choice and ethical theme of the novel in the light of the theory of ethical literary criticism, in which Morrison’s plotting and characterization will be analyzed in the context of colorism and materialism, and the theme of “natural love”, as a healthier and more lasting relationship bonding based on empathy and mutual care, will be revealed.

The article deals with Edward P. Jones’s postmodern historical novel The Known World. The first part of the article concentrates on the revision of the official history of slavery. It is argued that the novel reconsiders the realities of the past through the narrator’s invention of facts. This symbiosis, when history becomes fiction and fiction becomes history, opens the possibility of filling the gaps that have been created by the grand historical narrative. In this particular novel, it is the invisibility of black slave holders in the dominant discourse of slavery. In the second part of the article, it has been argued that the novel correlates with recent criticism related to organic racial identity and with essentialist views about collective consciousness. The research then can be located in a broader paradigm of destabilizing the ideology of identity that privileged race, gender, and sexual orientation. The author pays particular attention to the technology of inventing the black slave owner’s consciousness. It is concluded that the black slave owners’ identities have been constructed through the interpretation of the raw material of the experience with a reference to the formulated practices and protocols of white slave owners. Although some of the slave owners understand that they are trapped into the ideology of slavery, they cannot escape it. They become rather ambivalent about owning people of their race but still cannot resist the social structure. Being inserted into the ideology of slavery, they must obey it.

Culture is central in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s scheme of black identity construction. The concepts of culture and identity become substantial as Baraka’s nationalism gains momentum. The playwright decisively engraves black identity in a larger cultural context and a broader racial history. This can be explained in terms of Baraka’s espousal of an eclectic ideology that blends both culture and race. Culture and race transpire then to finally fuse. Consequently, Baraka moves in the direction of building identities that hinge on culture and declares blackness as intrinsic difference. The articulation of difference is comparable to the assertion of one’s self as absolutely distinct. Such paradigmatic blackness comes to the fore as a result of white identitarian hegemony and racial supremacy. I shall take issue in this paper with black identity formation and its dependence on culture. The second part of this paper sheds light upon the trope of blackness as categorical difference closely related to the notion of race. This paper demonstrates the paramount significance of culture in the construction of black identity, and dispels the silence of the critical literature on matters relating to culture, difference, and identity in several plays written by Baraka during his various shifts of ideological position. It also argues for the importance of black culture and the positioning of blackness at the heart of identity politics.

This paper revisits some of the stereotypical readings of women’s depictions in medieval literature as presented in Beowulf, Cynewulf’s Juliana, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of these women’s roles within the cultural and historical contexts of these literary works. To that end, a feminist reading of the female characters in the chosen texts, highlighting their strength, intelligence, and agency, is provided to challenge the popular images of medieval women which range from the helpless and subservient in warrior societies of Old English texts to the manipulative temptresses and evil shrews responsible for men’s failings in Middle English texts.

This article will analyze four novels that deal with the subject of cross-cultural marriage. Two novels are written by Muslim authors: Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) and Safi Abdi’s A Mighty Collision of Two Worlds (2002). While the other two novels are written by Western authors: Laura Fitzgerald’s Veil of Roses (2007) and Nell Freudenberg’s The Newlyweds (2013). The four novels revolve around a marriage between a Muslim female character and a Western male character. This selected corpus will be studied from the theoretical viewpoint of Gayatri Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” More specifically, I will discuss three main points in this article. First, I will study whether the Muslim female characters in the novels “can speak” and “have voice” since they are considered as “the least powerful” group by Spivak. Second, I will find out if those Muslim female characters are seeking a cross-cultural relationship with a Western man in order to escape their patriarchal and oppressive societies. In other words, as Spivak expresses this, are “White men saving brown women from brown men?” Finally, I will analyze the issue of cross-cultural marriage, between Muslim female characters with someone who is culturally and religiously different, from a Western point of view. Spivak argues that those who recount the experience of the subalterns cannot fully understand what this group is going through because they are outside the group. In addition to Spivak’s theory, I will adopt Edward Said’s viewpoint of “Orientalism” in order to analyze the last point discussed in the article. According to Said, Orientalist scholars provide a distorted image of the Orient and Orientals. Orientals are presented as “inferiors” and are seen as the “others.” Therefore, I will examine to what extent is the representation of the Muslim female experience by the Western authors accurate.

We exist through our bodies and as the materiality of our existence becomes a certainty, so are the conflicting and contradictory experiences around the body. For a woman, the body becomes a site of conflict between authorial/patriarchal dictates and the possibilities of achieving agency within the confines or limitations of discursive power. In this essay, I will be presenting a “subjected story” of a hybrid construct — “Dopdi Kuru” emanating out of Vyasa’s Draupadi Kuru and Mahasveta Devi’s Dopdi Mejhen; trying to explore how sexual politics and gender associations participate out in feminist struggles around body politics in India. The main thrust of this paper is to highlight how sexed bodies are produced through patriarchal interventions, and how bodies become the very agency through which women embody their lived experiences. This paper doesn’t hold up the romantic illusions of auspiciousness and fulfillment circulating around a woman’s body as part of the Indian thought process; rather forces us to witness the distressing spectacle of nudity and the violence of rape, that actually threatens a woman’s body; experiences that ultimately lead her to question the very ethos of society and achieve embodiment in contradiction t the established expectations of femininity.