The Trespasser focuses on the story of the main character Sigmund’s extramarital affairs, addressing ethical dilemmas, ethical choices, and ethical tragicality. Sigmund’s ethical dilemmas reflected in two aspects: One is the imbalance between Sigmund’s emotion and social morality, namely, the disequilibrium between physical pleasure and social moral norms, aesthetical freedom and social moral responsibility, individual experience and social moral cognition. The other is the conflicts between his multiple ethical identities, including the conflicts between the identities of husband and lover, and between the identities of father and lover. Additionally, it reveals his ethical choice of emotional freedom over social morality in the former ethical dilemma, as well as its constant escape via space transfer in the latter ethical dilemma. The former choice reflects the preference of physical pleasure, aesthetical freedom and physical experience over social moral norms, social moral responsibilities and social moral cognition. While the latter choice displays the ethical path of “lover-family-suicide” through the spatial framework of “leaving home-returning home-abandoning home,” which is intended to present the tragic outcome of individual’s ethical dilemmas. The ethical tragedy has two causes. On the one hand, man is incapable of truly knowing his own body and of incorporating social morality into the experience of self. On the other hand, man disregards what the society demands of him. Meanwhile, these ethical dilemmas and choices reveal not only Lawrence’s critique of the industrial capitalist society’s suppression of humanity, but also his compassionate values of life.

The concept of post-truth in fictional discourse explicates the ways of constructing a new reality—hyperreality. As a postmodern literary text creates a pluralistic ambience, wherein any interpretations are possible, post-truth is of great significance for producing the narratives of hyperreality in textual space. Salman Rushdie’s most recent novel, Quichotte (2019), is a postmodern reimagining of Don Quixote written by Miguel de Cervantes to satire the culture of that time. In Quichotte, Rushdie shows a post-truth world on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse to draw attention to the challenges facing contemporary society. The writer cunningly presents the pandemonium of life and volatile identities under the conditions of blurring a line between fact and fiction. In the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, post-truth appears to be a distinguishing feature of creating meanings and writing vanishing reality. Such structural and conceptual characteristics of the novel as inter/hypertextuality, metafictional narration, and the elements of magic realism have been analysed to illustrate how they transform hyperreality in the book. The article primarily focuses on the literary forms of representing the narratives of post-truth and hyperreal identities in Rushdie’s novel through a reinterpretation of the most topical concerns of contemporary issues.

In Paradise, Morrison depicts the process of a group of African Americans who go through all the hardships to establish and manage Ruby town. Starting from the ethical perspective, this paper analyzes the ethical dilemmas of race and family faced by African Americans through sorting out the various experiences of African Americans, and explores the ethical redemption thoughts and ethical connotations displayed in Morrison’s works.

The current study attempts to show how Vladimir and Estragon, who are two of Samuel Beckett’s main characters in his play Waiting for Godot (1952), are meant to represent humanity during the time after World War II. That is, Vladimir and Estragon’s waiting for Godot is much like all of humanity’s waiting for the pandemic to fade away or disappear. The similarity between the two characters and humanity is studied and analyzed through the lens of postmodernism, and more specifically, existential theories. The study posits how the main aim of the two characters in the play is simply to wait for Godot. Their wait is justified by the relief, safety, and the hope that the best is yet to come displayed by both characters. Thus, the two characters resemble all of humanity waiting for the end of the pandemic, or even for the perfect vaccine to come along that helps prevent people from dying from such a pandemic. The common absurdity in the way these two characters behave while waiting is very much like the absurdity that can also be seen in the everyday life of people who are uncertain of what will happen or what this horrifying pandemic will lead them to. However, this study is different as it highlights how Samuel Beckett’s two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, represent humanity during the pandemic and could be seen the same as the people today waiting for a miracle to happen and the hopes of finding a solution for COVID-19.

Kathleen Klein’s notion of a feminocentric mode of crime writing asserts the need to reformulate the genre’s problematic traditions that are aligned with stereotypical representation of women characters. Kishwar Desai’s novels appropriate Klein’s vision of a feminocentric model in the context of Indian crime fiction and highlight the suffering of women through her female protagonist, Simran Singh. Taking a constructive detour from the usual macho detective themes, she traverses into the domains of crime that have a gendered impact and deals with the theme of female infanticide, commercial surrogacy, sexual harassment and rape from a female point of view. In this light, the present article examines the ways in which Desai’s works disrupt the genre’s long-established tropes and propose an alternate form of discourse through a feminist literary analysis of her crime series, Witness the Night (2010), Origins of Love (2012), and The Sea of Innocence (2013).

The present paper aims at exploring cosmic satire in the poetry of Dorothy Parker. The focus will be on selected poems in which Parker sarcastically attacks the human condition, making man who sees himself as the center of the cosmos or the universe the main target of her satiric arrows. To establish a theoretical framework for the paper, the researcher presents a brief overview of satire in general: its origin, definition, kinds, and techniques, with special reference to cosmic satire and its main focus. In her satirical poems, Parker vividly exposes human faults, mocking man’s failings in a humorous and witty manner.

The article is devoted to the aesthetically valuable picture of the world in the poetics of N.V. Gogol and F.M. Dostoevsky. As well as icon of the world with iconic images belonging to her which serves as a way of demonstrating and expressing the tune full of divine grace. The discovering of the Russian icon began and the interest to this phenomenon arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. Various researches concerning painting and icon painting, as well as literature and philology, philosophy and theology appeared. Many literature researches were dedicated to the “iconology,” the study about the icon, combining problems connected with an image, icon painting and icon worship. The comparison of an icon and a picture, icon painting and religious painting, icon canon and the creative freedom took an important place. When considering icons from the aesthetic point of view, unusual opportunities for studying both the Orthodox culture and elegant literature appear. The “icon” proceeds to the literary context and as a general idea embraces a level of mind, defines the type of the mindset. The “iconicity” becomes not just a religious art or architecture term, but also a term about a piece of art. Therefore, the iconicity of the verbal types of art is difficult and complex, but very relevant and topical.

Literary works from the peripheries of South Asian countries such as Pakistan and India have been functional in diverting the overriding western operative logic of pure aesthetics. At the same time, these writings highlight the inequities perpetuated by capitalism and its corollaries which globally persist as neocolonialism and neo-liberal imperialism. With an overview of the literary works from pre-partition and post-partition India and Pakistan, the paper illustrates how these crucial writings weigh against the homogenizing, ahistorical, and essentializing readings of capitalism spread across European and American literary works. Despite the diverse framings, the arc of all these literary writings forge connections between capitalism’s detrimental legacy through tropes that represent the ruinous shared histories of European colonization and catastrophic effects of American imperialism. In addition, the paper argues that the writings from peripheries which critically disclose the genesis of capitalism and its subsequent forms have the potential to transform the history of English literature. The study gives an overview of how these literary voices resonate strong resentment against oppressive systems and most authentically reflect the struggle for freedom and equality across different cultures and classes. Significantly, these writings persistently exhibit distinct cultural expressions that reveal capitalism in sites where race, power, language, and empire intersect. In summary, the paper cannot emphasize enough that the English literary canon will gain immensely by including translations of these literary works from South Asia that defiantly expose the inter-sectional consequences of capitalism.

The classics of world literature are not only passed down from generation to generation in the form of paper texts including translated works but also transmitted in a cross-media way and acquired a new life form in this way. Especially in animation adaptations, the classics of world literature are important cultural capital and an inexhaustible source of creation. The aim of this paper, which is divided into three parts, is to explore the function of cultural capital played by world literary classics in animation adaptation. Firstly, it is argued that literary classics are the source of animation creation and the common assets of all the social classes. Secondly, it is believed that animation adaptation provides a new way for the cultural transmission of literary classics, and there are successful adaptation practices of literary classics in various periods. Thirdly, it is believed that literary classics, as cultural capital, can play a historical role in the animated adaptation, which can also be evidenced by the development of Disney, the representative of animation companies. The author concludes that the literary classics passed down through time are the common wealth of human beings and the cultural capital that can be utilized, and moreover, it is the artistic guarantee for animation adaptations to obtain cultural values.

This paper provides an overview of the key aspects of Terry Pratchett’s reception in Russia, the stages of his entry into Russian culture as well as an analysis of the responses to his work of the mass reader and professional reader. Although Russian researchers have examined different aspects of Terry Pratchett’s work, to the best of knowledge, this is the first study to explore the writer’s reception in the Russian-speaking cultural field. Pratchett’s reception started later in comparison with other authors of fantasy but developed rapidly and went through three main stages in its development. The mid-90s of the last century – when Russian editions of Pratchett’s novels commenced to be published. 2004 – 2017 when critical responses and reviews started to appear, Pratchett’s fan communities and fanfiction based on his writings emerged, and first studies in academic journals. 2018 – until today when Pratchett’s biographies were released, publication of his major novels in Russian was completed, reprints and new translations of previously published books began. The result of the research allows the authors of the article to say with confidence that Pratchett’s popularity in Russia has not reached its peak yet.

The article aims at comparing the main characteristics of Ukrainian modernist drama to European dramatic models from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The methodology of the research is based on comparative typological, genealogical, and cultural-historical methods, which enabled us to define the foundations for the development of modernist theatre in Ukraine, as well as identify its general and unique characteristics. In the research, we show that despite the unfavorable conditions for the development of national culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main stages of Ukrainian modernist drama resonate with European dramatic evolution, from variations of the “new drama” (late nineteenth century) to avant-garde experiments in the 1910s and 1920s. The typological connection of the plays of Ukrainian early modernist writers (Lesia Ukrainka, O. Oles, S. Cherkasenko) with the genre paradigm of the “new drama,” as constituted in the works of H. Ibsen, A. Strindberg, M. Maeterlinck, W. Yeats, and others, is established. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a younger generation of Ukrainian playwrights got involved in literary life and exhibited a stronger interest in formal experimentation. In their search for a way to depict the socio-political difficulties of the moment, V. Vynnychenko, M. Irchan, Ja. Mamontov, I. Dniprovsky, and M. Kulish turned to German Expressionist “drama of the cry” approaches. The works of L. Kurbas and M. Kulish, whose efforts are regarded as the pinnacle of the Ukrainian avant-garde activity of the interwar period, get special attention.

Chinese scholar Zhao Xianzhang’s monograph Text–Image Theory: Comparative Semiotic Studies on Chinese Traditional Literature and Arts is one of the new achievements in literary semiotics in the 21st century. The book develops text–image theory from the perspective of literature and it is an innovative research on the basic issues in literary semiotics. The image theory of literature means that literature is a kind of “image-thinking” language logically connected with the world via image. Interculturality and Interdisciplinarity are important features of Zhao’s comparative semiotics. His contributions to discussions of Chinese traditional literature and arts and the relationship between text and image are sure to be longstanding.

From Rudyard Kipling to Zadie Smith: A Study of Modern and Contemporary British Diasporic Literature, authored by Xu Bin, breaks with previous classifications and researches modern and contemporary British diasporic literature as an independent academic field. As the first of its kind in China, this monograph includes both the imperial diasporic writers and ethnic writers from different continents and reveals their respective parts in the construction, dissemination and continuation of the cultural hegemony of the British Empire. It concludes, on the one hand, that imperial diasporic writers who are filled with colonial libido have successfully transformed the “Oriental imagination” created by former British literati into “imperial imagination,” and on the other hand, that ethnic writers have completely changed the racial nature of the British literary landscape into a more inclusive, “color”ful, though controversial multicultural theme park of British literature. Presenting the diversities and complexities of the British diasporic writings, this monograph sheds brilliant lights on methodology of diasporic literature research and is undoubtedly a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for future research.