As part of culture, literature is closely linked with humans; it is man-made, envisaged for people, and reflects the inner world of man and different stages of human life. At the same time, it is a reflection of reality and a construct that is formed and exists according to its own laws, which differ at various stages of development. Thus, literary texts are related to the time and space in which they are created.

Man and one’s space of existence are in interaction with each other. Space influences and determines the peculiarities of one’s perception. But man is also looking for a suitable organic place of existence. This peculiarity also applies to literary characters. At the end of the nineteenth century, European culture underwent rapid changes due to industrialization, the development of communication system, and urbanization. Many philosophers point to the spiritual crisis, describing which they make use of such concepts as culture, civilization, and nature. The opposition of the urban and the rural environments is becoming more pronounced, and the urban environment is perceived as contradictory and chaotic, while opportunities to harmonize the personality experiencing crisis are being sought in the rural environment. The problem of relations between the urban and the rural environments entered also Latvian literature, it was addressed by such well-known authors as Jānis Akuraters, Fricis Bārda, Edvards Virza, Viktors Eglītis, Antons Austriņš, Andrejs Upītis and others. The aim of the present study is to reveal the peculiarities of the dichotomy of the urban and the rural environments in the Latvian fiction of the first decades of the twentieth century, by using one Latvian author’s writings as an example. Such an approach allows not only for considering the peculiarities of the depiction of the urban and the rural environments, but also for analysing the subjective and objective reasons determining the emergence of these peculiarities. It is important that the prose of Antons Austriņš (1884–1934) features emphasized spatiality: descriptions of the space are detailed and reflect the peculiarities of the characters’ personalities. The peculiarities of the spatial structure and the semantics of Austriņš’ prose were determined both by the European cultural context (philosophers’ findings, works by other authors) and individual peculiarities, which, in turn, stemmed from life experience and environmental, educational, family, psychological and emotional peculiarities. The depiction of the urban and the rural environments in Austriņš’ prose has a wide semantic spectrum, which develops in the interaction of the spheres of nature, civilization and culture. The most important feature of Austriņš’ perception of the world is the ambiguity of the assessment of phenomena. Nature, civilization and culture exist in close interaction, but there is often a contrast between these spheres, which is related to the human concept of Austriņš’ prose. The author’s characters are torn apart by contradictions, so they cannot find a suitable place to live: in a rural environment, they see opportunities to harmonize their personalities, but they cannot stay there for long and tend to a city where cultural and civilization interact.

The literary scholars who study the artistic world of L. Dobychin’s novel The Town of N noticed that in Dobychin’s world people, things, and natural phenomena exist discretely, disorganized, in continuous chaotic movement. This Chaos recognizes only one, very conditional, border—the border of the Town of N. Like any space, the Town of N contains comic and tragic elements. The nature of the comic in the novel has remained little examined until now. The article analyzes the laughter situations that are present in the novel. The answer to the question—what are people laughing at in the Town of N?—on the one hand, allows us to consider the socio-cultural situation in the county towns of the Russian Empire on the example of Dvinsk (nowadays Daugavpils), and on the other hand, to analyze the evolution of the consciousness of the protagonist of the novel. In the novel, laughter situations are divided into two large groups—everyday laughter situations associated with the daily life of the Town of N and literary laughter situations associated with the comprehension of literary texts that define the consciousness of the era of the early twentieth century. It is also important to contrast the culture of laughter of children and the culture of laughter of adults. The adolescent crisis of the protagonist manifests itself primarily in a change of life orientations, in the destruction of myths. Laughter becomes a kind of destruction and overcoming of the old system of values, a factor that accompanies the hero from the world of childhood to the world of adults.

Having originated on the threshold of Modernism, literary Aestheticism is a reaction against the objective perception of art, an affirmation of aesthetic subjectivity, and an expression of writer’s cosmopolitan imagination that due to its “cosmopolitan ethos” prevented many national literatures from having an air of provincialism. A complete detachment from social concerns and the aestheticization of art, highlighted by employing a cosmopolitan style and new narrative forms, contributed to the depiction of cosmopolitan locations, international and metropolitan settings, cosmopolitan circles, “strangers” in the world of pleasures (Bohemianism), as well as cosmopolitan outlooks, experiences, and values. After the loss of national independence (1940), the development of Latvian literature was halted by the sovietization and ideological censorship of culture and art, which, demanding the reflection of social aspects of reality and typization in literature, turned against any manifestation of individualization. The paper is aimed at studying the attitudes to aesthetic cosmopolitanism in Soviet Latvia periodicals Karogs [Flag] and Literatūra un Māksla [Literature and Art] within the 1940–1950s—the period of time when the aesthetic component was rapidly losing its basic value and became the decisive means for educating the Soviet man. The research allows concluding that the distinctly negative attitude to aesthetic cosmopolitanism and to writers representing it was part of a great ideological struggle targeted against the West European avant-garde trends on the whole and writers—“renegades” in Latvia, without highlighting one specific trend or tendency but reducing them to the category of “-isms” harmful for the Soviet power, which do not show “the reality of flourishing life.” The research has been carried out by applying cultural-historical method and content analysis.

The research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project “The Baltic Germans of Latgale in the context of socio–ethnic relations from the 17th till the beginning of the 20th century, project No. lzp–2020/2–0136.” The history of mentality/mentalities is a significant branch of modern historical science, the relevance of which as a component of social history is only increasing. The purpose of the article is to define some features of the mode of thinking/world perception of Latvians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries based on the analysis of the lexical composition of Latvian folk anecdotes. This investigation is based on the linguistic analysis of Latvian folk anecdotes (5671 items), published in 1929–1930. The subject of the history of mentality has three facets: way of thinking/perception of the world, ideas about man and various phenomena of the world, existing forms, and norms of human behaviour. The revelation of the mode of thinking/world perception embodied in verbal texts demands the use of linguistic analysis in three aspects—structure of texts, structural and functional. The analysis of the lexical thesaurus of Latvian folk anecdotes reveals the mythological mode of thinking/world perception of Latvians. The incomplete isolation of a person from the surrounding world and the resulting concreteness defines this way of thinking. Such features of this mode of world perception indicate narrowness and density of the sphere of human contacts, which was characteristic of the life of Latvians living in the territory of Latvia.

The paper focuses on the semantics of religious festivals in the Latvian childhood memoirs of the 20th century. It is based on the autobiographical portrayals of childhood in Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš’ Baltā grāmata (White Book), Annas Brigadere’s Dievs. Daba. Darbs (God. Nature. Work), Jānis Klīdzējs’ Cilvēka bērns (A Person’s Child), and Vizma Belševica’s Bille. The choice of looking at these memoirs specifically was determined by the factor that they originated in different historical periods of the 20th century, i.e. they provide an insight into the transformations of the semiotics of childhood memories, which have been dictated by the historical period. The semantic fields in the works of the reviewed authors differ, especially if we compare the childhood memoirs which took place prior to World War II (Jaunsudrabiņš and Brigadere), with the memoirs that took place later (Klīdzējs and Belševica). Up until the mid-20th century, childhood semantics were founded on the literary tradition of the late 19th century in the memoirs written by Latvian authors—home and the rural environment as indicators of a happy childhood. Authors whose memoirs are sourced in the second half of the 20th century came to experience World War II. The childhood semiotics in 20th century literature encompass typological similarities and differences which have been determined by the authors’ experience, and which have been gained in different times and spaces. A child’s existence in real time and space is their own individual experience, and in the same way, each author’s artistic world’s time and space category reproduction forms are individual. However, all the analyzed works have a more or less religious context typical of them, which is revealed by stories about celebrating religious festivals.

The paper is aimed at analysing the novel Russian Skin (2020) by Latvian prose writer Dace Rukšāne and focuses on the problem of self-identification, transformation of woman’s identity under the impact of political and social changes in the context of a binary opposition “one’s own—alien.” Within the frame of everyday life in Soviet Latvia, this literary work reflects and brings to the forefront the specificity of the inclusive identity, when the opposites “one’s own” and “alien,” in the result of interaction, are seen not as dualities but rather as a new wholeness embodying both opposites. Via the theme of partner relationships, so characteristic of this writer, the author employs the model of intimate relationships between two outwardly incompatible worlds—the world of the main heroine of the novel (a Latvian) and that of her partner (a Russian), representative of the colonizing power, to symbolically show not only the existence of two causal world principles, but also the possibility for the two outward opposites’ merging into a new entity characterised by inclusivity. This is just the mother—a bearer of a new life—who strives to create “one’s own” (a new-born) from the “alien,” and who, due to transformations in self-identity, becomes the embodiment of the “alien” among “one’s own.” The novel is the interpretation on the issue, widely discussed in Latvia in the context of preserving national identity, concerning the development of hybrid/inclusive/multiple identities, and on factors responsible for this (invasion, occupation, ethnic relations, interaction between cultures etc.).

The present article focuses on the literary activity of a Victorian writer Charles Reade; in particular, it deals with the peculiarities of reception of his matter-of-fact-romances in Russia in the 1850–1860s. The main objective of the research is to study genre characteristics, poetics and aesthetics of a matter-of-fact-romance and its Russian translation reception in the indicated decades. During the 1850–1860s, three novels of the given genre were translated into Russian, one of them twice. In the paper, one of the three novels is studied by means of historico-literary and typological methods; a comparative analysis of the original with the Russian translation is conducted as well. The matter-of-fact romance Hard Cash (1863) was translated into Russian a year later after its publication in England. The translated version was published in the established literary journal Otechestvennye zapiski [Native Notes] (in volumes 152, 153 and 154) in St. Petersburg. A comparative analysis of the Russian translation of Hard Cash with the original reveals that the Russian version represents a professional literary translation having retained a distinctive Reade’s writing style. Meanwhile, it is notable that the anonymous author of the Russian translation interprets some psychological and moral issues along with of the main heroes in his own way, sometimes exaggerating the tragedy of the narrative; in general, such translation “liberties” do not distort the main meaning. Conducting the present research and working with the library archives and other documentary sources, the authors of the given article revealed only one translator who worked on Reade’s novels—E. N. Akhmatova, a famous Russian translator, writer and publicist of the XIX century. It is known for certain that she translated a matter-of-fact romance It’s Never Late to Mend and a reformist novel Put Yourself in His Place. In the mid-1850s, it was a common practice for Russian translators not to mention their names when publishing Russian translated versions of foreign literature, especially if the authors of the originals were referred to the so-called “second-rate” writers who worked to satisfy the needs of mass readership of the original.

Bilingualism is described as a communicative space in which official and alternative speech, imperial discourse, and anti-colonial resistance coexist. The tension between them creates the ground for numerous figures of postcolonial speech. It is characterized by a subversive, self-revealing tone, a hidden pathos of debunking the respectful attitude to the language of the colonizer. It is also about the maturation of Ukrainian literature in the national language in terms of hybrid identity, the integration of the upper circle of society in the imperial circles. The asymmetrical relationships between identifying oneself with the empire, the plots of official careers, official biographies, independent language behavior, and mental space are traced. The divergence between following the distorted national and psychological Little Russian identity and the historical memory of ethnic roots, the place of origin of Ukrainian statehood, and the connection with ancient traditions are revealed. The phenomenon of marginality appeared in the crossing of these components, with an almost inseparable center and periphery. They constantly cross and create the phenomena of diglossia, multilingualism, speech interference. The interaction of the donor language and the recipient language is based on the principle of transfer, recognition, assimilation on the margins of the discourse of power and its transformation into speech with opposite meanings. The complex language map of Ukraine illustrates the permanence of imperial policy, which only changed the forms of its presence in the subordinate territories and according to the conjuncture moved the assimilation boundaries towards complete absorption, appropriation, or apparent demonstration of ethnic identity. The application of the transfer methodology allows us to understand the complexity of nowadays integrational processes in Ukraine in the context of the cultural and historical situation of the first half of the XIX century.

This article explores how Nkem, the female character in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story Imitation (2009), builds a resistance space from where she exalts her subjectivity and rebels against an oppressive marriage that voids her. Her physical and mental paralysis is mainly triggered by an absent and distant husband called Obiora, who forces his wife into a materialization process that translates into Nkem being gradually infected by the fakeness and voiceless condition of the art pieces that he brings home from Nigeria. Consequently, she is commoditized and turned into one more imitational art piece in Obiora’s collection, stressing her immobility and dependence on her husband. However, the originality and uniqueness of the African Ife bronze head that Obiora brings with him at the end of the story trigger Nkem’s reflection, leading her to also recognize her own value. Through the projection of her subjectivity on the original African art piece, Nkem takes advantage of her in-betweenness as a Nigerian in the United States and her house’s interstitial status to create a “third space” where she can redefine herself outside the patriarchal ideology that Obiora epitomizes, as well as retrieve the African identity she had lost during the reterritorialization process undergone in her white American neighborhood. The redefinition of her relationship with the surrounding African items and the consequent appropriation of the space that this implies empowers her, since “territoriality is a primary geographical expression of social power” (Sack 5) and our identities and self-definitions are inherently territorial (Agnew 179).

The singular and constant interaction of form and matter, as well as the potential and dynamism of matter, have been overlooked in material morphology theory. Gilbert Simondon’s individuation theory ingeniously identifies these blind spots and defines “individual” as the consequence of the “individuation process.” By revealing the potentials of a “pre-individual” that has not yet been individuated as a focus, Simondon demonstrates how “pre-individual forces” as the conditions of natural and technological existence contribute to the formation of “individuals” such as organisms, non-organisms, biological entities, and individual technical objects. The “pre-individual forces” exist temporally prior to the individual and possess the energy of the sustaining constitutive force by which the individual sustains and evolves itself. The pre-individual condition of being is an endless “resource of potentiality” from which being emerges from becoming, which is analogous to Heidegger’s concept of “Bestand/standing reserve” in his “Question concerning the Technology.” Once the pre-individual is conceptualized as a “metastable being” in relation to its surroundings or “associated milieu,” the individual’s movement is termed as “transduction,” referring to an operation that generates itself by elaborating, concretizing, and structuring the surrounding area. Similarly to how deduction and induction seek to solve problems associated with an already individuated context, transduction is a problem-solving ability. While elucidating transduction in terms of “feedback loops” within the “associated milieu” of humans, science, and technology, the purpose of this work is to apply transduction logic to the convergence of transmedia, world literature, and digital humanities in terms of aesthetics and ethics.

To allow Americans to enter Saudi Arabia in 1945, King Abdulaziz sought counseling from the religious party where they issued a fatwa of permission. Only then were the Americans able to help the Saudis extract oil and build the world’s largest industrialized oil company, Aramco (McHale 622–623). The subject of this paper is not the oil industry but its consequences and impacts on Saudi culture. Focusing on television, this paper examines the impact of American pop culture and its neocolonial influence on Saudi culture. Through the first English Saudi channel, which was founded in 1957, American pop culture introduced America to Saudi citizens. It also examines the hegemonic impact of American pop culture on Saudi Arabia that, while being resisted by fundamentalist religious groups, has contributed to the reshaping of Saudi modern culture.