This contribution discusses Nie’s concept of ethical literary criticism. Nie’s interpretation differs substantially from the body of work that is usually captured under the umbrella notion of ethical criticism in the West. The originality of Nie’s approach lies in the fact that he seeks to rigorously differentiate moral and ethical criticism, the former being guided by the need to pass judgement from the commentator’s/reader’s current perspective, while the latter sets out to understand the specific evolution of literature as a tool of facing and resolving dilemmas around good and evil, duty and pleasure, loyalty and freedom, etc. This is what makes Nie’s iteration of ethical literary criticism so interesting for intellectual historians; the distinction between contemporary significance and historically evolving meaning also brings his understanding of literature and culture into productive proximity with hermeneutics. The article also offers a brief parallel with Marxist ideas of cultural evolution, particularly those of Engels and Porshnev.

Ethical literary criticism regards literature as the carrier created and developed by human beings to show ethical relations and express their attention to them. From the abstract and comparative analysis of the ethical relations and moral problems described in the literary works and their consequences, the educational function of discovering the essence of human nature and guiding the progress of human civilization derives. When the Chinese academic discourse system constructed by Chinese scholars represented by Professor Nie Zhenzhao interacts with Durkheim’s dichotomy of divinity and vulgarity, and the ensuing incest taboo theory, a complementary interpretation of the incest taboo in One Hundred Years of Solitude from an interdisciplinary perspective will bring us a lot of new findings. Professor Nie’s Sphinx Factor points out that ethical rules distinguish human beings from beasts, while Durkheim’s dichotomy separates the sacred from the vulgar. When both of them explain and criticize the history of incest in the Buendia family, the common direction is that the behavior of denying ethical rules ultimately led to the destruction of the family.

The paper examines a monumental shift in identity—colonial to anticolonial—of the principal character of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez, within the literary and theoretical tradition of postcolonial bildungsroman. The tradition of Western bildungsroman is appropriated and reconfigured by Postcolonial Bildungsroman: a new genre that radically dismantles the Western nexus of power and knowledge. The postcolonial bildungsroman offers a liminal space between the colonial and the postcolonial experience—one that leads to decolonization, the recovery of the indigenous and the subversion of the colonial apparatus. The Reluctant Fundamentalist would be investigated as an erziehungsroman and zeitroman novel: two variations within bildungsroman. Postcolonizing Bildungs/Erziehungs/Zeir(Roman) focuses on the examination of the central character’s development of character, enlargement of vision and socio-historical factors that shape his anticolonial consciousness. The anticolonial narrative structure and tropes decenter the West from the position of authority and project the (ex)colonized at the center—a major goal of postcolonial studies. The hero sheds his Eurocentric vision of the world and moves towards indigenous selfhood in the quest of finding his true identity. This investigation challenges the reader’s presuppositions, biases and theoretical baggage about a Pakistani hero’s inability to grapple with the colonial machinery in the post-9/11 phase. It impels a reengagement of all colonial-colonized relationships in a postcolonized world.

Utpal Dutt’s didactic socio-political play The Great Rebellion, set against the backdrop of the Sepoy Mutiny, India’s first war of Independence in 1857, offers a gripping saga of indigenous resistance to the domination and exploitation of Western Imperialism. It is a classic exemplar of Dutt’s Theatre of Revolution that exuberantly constitutes radical anti-colonial ethos, colonial violence and nationalist resistance. The drama conveys the playwright’s revolutionary propaganda against the emerging trends of imperialism, fascism and capitalism in Indian society. Dutt explicitly portrays the pain and pathos the autochthonous people went through in the wake of the British colonial expansion in the Indian subcontinent. The play chronicles the chaotic socio-political conditions and political violence that led to the outbreak of an organized rebellion against the rule of the British East India Company in 1857. Dutt’s counter-hegemonic discourse delineates a violent history of Western hegemony and colonial repression that bred and gave rise to a strong cultural, intellectual and dynamic force against British Empire’s oppression. Furthermore, Dutt attempted to destabilize colonialist myths and challenged the implicit fallacies of Western dominant discourse by reviving colonial history from his own perspective, which is in itself a form of anti-colonial resistance. He also employed a historical setting to foster a sense of national identity among his contemporary audience. This article aims to explore how Utpal Dutt’s The Great Rebellion produces a counter-hegemonic narrative to the authoritative ideologies of control and subjugation. A re-reading of Dutt’s drama as a text of resistance provides a better understanding of the dialectic of repression and resistance that shapes Utpal Dutt’s dramatic world. The study adopts Frantz Fanon’s principles of violence and resistance with a view to establish strategies of anti-colonial resistance in the text.

The purpose of the research is to analyze the stylistic originality of Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana: the Fortunate Mistress (1724) in the context of ideas about the nature of human essence that developed in the process of transition from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment with its characteristic re-evaluation of the role of reason and feeling in private and public areas of human life. So, the purpose stipulates the usage of methodological basis of the study including cultural and historical, historical and literary, comparative, philosophical and aesthetic research methods. The article refers to “non-emotional discourse” firstly, as to the characteristics of the spiritual mood of the epoch, which researchers called the period of initial capital accumulation and the formation of an economic person, and secondly, as to a general characteristic of Defoe’s novel style, with a tendency of a rather meagre and emphatically detached presenting of Roxana’s story, in which infrequent descriptions of the emotional and psychological state of the character become extremely bright and semantically significant. The analysis of the novel emphasizes the ambiguity of understanding the depicted events and characters, expressing the duality of the author’s position, reminiscent of a game with the reader. The analyzed form of narration demonstrates its similarity to the genre of a pseudo-memoir novel, having a particular interest in private life prevailing and seeking the French novel tradition of the early Rococo. The study enabled us to conclude that a new type of character is being formed in Defoe’s novel, rational and prudent, upholding the values of hedonism and the primacy of his own desires, which will find its embodiment in the European Rococo novel and will be open to further modifications in the literature of the next centuries.

This article demonstrates the “structure of feeling,” Raymond Williams’ much-debated concept as it appears in his autobiographical novel Border Country (1960). By drawing upon the nuances of Williams’ cultural theory, it is the purpose of this article to trace his attempt to articulate diverse dimensions of the “structure of feeling” in this novel. Furthermore, this article touches upon Williams’ various epochal classifications of culture such as dominant, residual, emergent and pre-emergent cultural elements as well as the ramifications of the communal and individual realities of England and Wales within the two time frames of the 1920s and the 1950s. Consequently, this article illustrates the manner in which Williams cultivates his artistic talent to embrace both subjective and collective experiences to capture the multi-faceted generational emotional energies depicted in Border Country.

Can John Silver in Treasure Island be simply labeled as “evil”? This paper aims to tap into this problem from the perspective of neuroethics. Silver’s evil fails to obscure his impressive traits such as poetical talkativeness, frugality, self-discipline and his trust in others, which is physically based on his maturely developed Theory of Mind. Besides, the witness and imagination of buccaneers’ judicial execution of hanging frequently activate Silver’s mirror neurons. With the mimesis of hanging in his brain, the blended sensation of horror, depression and regret buzzes in his mind. As a result, Silver sets up a principle of survival, with some altruistic behaviors as disguises, thus presenting a character before readers with moral ambiguity and the duality of human nature, which can be identified as Stevenson’s strategies to break away from the Western literary tradition and a future feeling as modernity.

This paper explores Mahmoud al-Wardānī’s employment of the theme of decapitation in his historical novel Heads Ripe for Plucking. It shows how the author uses this physical impairment to replicate his sociopolitical concerns under the reign of successive totalitarian political regimes in his country. The novel constitutes an elastic Egyptian setting capable of providing a terrifying panorama of tyranny and political oppression throughout the history of Egypt. The leitmotif of multiple beheadings along with the fragmentary structure of the narrative functions as an allegory for the historical forces which impeded the nation’s development. Furthermore, the paper traces al-Wardānī’s interplay of magical realist and science fictional tropes as apt modes of expression to expose injustice and lack of democracy and to reflect the future dystopian existence the author aims to warn against.

This paper analyzes Saeed Roustayi’s 6.5 Per Meter (2019), a police crime drama, based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory. In order to portray social problems in a new light, Roustayi utilizes carnivalesque techniques such as mésalliance, ambivalence, disgusting characters, and abusive language in depicting the process of searching for, arresting, and executing a drug lord. This criminal is metaphorically kept in the carnival hell and forced to the carnival grave. Roustayi distances himself from the usual type of narrating social problems and crime so that he can bring unprecedented frankness, characterized by carnival, to the screen. Dialogism is depicted in the movie in the sense that both the criminal and the police officer are given voice to express themselves. Handcuffing the police officers in the movie is an instance of radical changes in hierarchies, where the dominant and the subordinate replace each other. Since carnival is associated with death and rebirth at the same time, the drug dealers who are executed at the end of the movie are replaced by others. Thus, even if the drug king is uncrowned, the audience leaves this cinematic carnival shocked and disillusioned, with the sense that the drug problem proceeds, probably with other kings.

Based on insights offered in the Symbolist oeuvres of Mallarmé and Yeats, this paper posits an interpretation of the Idea as the quasi-originary source of language, tracing the origins of the poetic to the notions of rituality and iterability. These qualities are characteristic of the prayer (considering, in particular, the Angelus devotion) and the neume (the earliest form of musical notation, which amounts to a chanting without words, a pure vocalization): the essence of poetry requires a suspension of knowledge, as in learning “by heart.” We ultimately locate the beginnings of the poetic in the “body of the letter” or the “carnality of sense”: at the zero point of metaphor where meaning is purely literal, the poematic, as passion of and for the origin, entails a self-voiding of language, a casting-aside of being. The contact with the body of sense is only possible if the poetic soul, bypassing the cogito, can derail absolute knowledge, since the quasi-originary promise of language—as the very condition of its possibility—is anterior to reason and to knowledge.

This study investigates undergraduate students’ perceptions about Waiting for Godot at a public sector university in Pakistan. The study explores how students’ identification of the existentialist themes from the play is affected by pedagogical approaches and teachers’ philosophy. Rosenblatt’s (1938/1994) reader response and Sartre’s (1956) existential framework have guided this study. The findings are based on data collected by semi-structured interviews from 15 participants. The study applies the qualitative mode of inquiry employing the thematic analysis method propounded by Braun and Clarke (2006). The key arguments based on findings reveal that participants’ responses were affected at first by their social and educational background. Participants connected existentialist themes that were very close to their life experiences and observations. Furthermore, the study highlights the role of teachers in developing participants’ understanding of the play. The results are useful for teachers, curriculum designers, and researchers as they bring some implications in the context of literary pedagogy.

The Italian doctor Ludovico Nicola di Giura (1868–1947) translated Liao Zhai Zhi Yi (聊齋誌異, literally meaning “Strange Tales Recorded in the Studio Liao”) into Italian. The book I Racconti Fantastici di Liao (Fantastic Tales of Liao), printed by the publishing company Arnoldo Mondadori in 1955, is the first complete Italian version of Liao Zhai in the Western world, and until now is the only complete version in Italy. The essay applies different theories and typical research methods of translation studies. In particular, it uses the methodological approaches proposed by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, known as “Cultural Translation Theory.” Through the application of these theoretical methods, the essay summarizes the work of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi translated by L. N. di Giura and, finally, analyzes the rewriting process of the translator in order to find out the ways in which he uses different methods and translation strategies in dealing with “non-equivalent words and expressions” to achieve an effect of “functional equivalence.” The author hopes that this work could attract more attention of both Italian and Chinese scholars concerning the translation of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi made by L. N. di Giura, providing a starting point for further studies and deeper researches.