This paper discusses the only full-length novel by Hu Shih, The Suchness Island, and its implication of literary ethics. This paper argues that Hu reveals the evils of various superstitions and idolatry practiced in the name of tradition, while addressing the necessity of overcoming superstition to enlighten the people. In this respect, The Suchness Island should be viewed as having literary ethical implications that triggered an awakening in society to reform many of their customs.

This study employs ethical literary criticism to uncover the social and natural ethics manifested in the conflict between the paternal figure (Egeus) and his daughter (Hermia) in Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Furthermore, it examines the ethical choice made by Hermia. It argues that the conflict between Egeus and Hermia serves as a manifestation of social ethics. The father-daughter conflict prompts readers to contemplate the social and natural ethics that were prominent throughout the Renaissance era. Hermia’s ethical choice reflects her emotional needs, rebellious spirit, and Shakespeare’s progressive ideas regarding ethics. It also serves as a demonstration of ethical wisdom. This study provides a thought-provoking example of ethical choices.

In Coetzee’s oeuvre, Age of Iron literally, and perhaps most explicitly, exhibits the idea of home in a maternal narrative with regard to both the narrative itself and the influence of Coetzee’s authorship. By calling it a maternal narrative, this essay premises the argument not only on the fact that the story is told by a mother to her self-exiled daughter, but also on the recurring moments of motherhood, the prominent absence of a husband-like figure, and the implication of the children’s filial duty. Besides the fictional parent/child bond, there is also another narrative thread, the ethics of alterity. The novelist prepares a dual approach to alterity, with one part Vercueil while the other the black people, for readers to appreciate Mrs Curren’s wrestling with her ethical predicament as a liberal humanism, namely, her sympathy with the blacks and complicity with apartheid. All these narrative techniques are used to effectively integrate the novelist’s emotions, particularly his connection to liberalism in South Africa and his mother Vera, with the historical, ethical, and political context of the novel. This essay will try to test this assumption and dig out the influence of Coetzee’s authorship behind these tensions.

The novel Yimeng Zhi Bei 《遗梦之北》 written by Lee Yoke Kim (Li Yijun), a Malaysian Chinese writer, was nominated as one of the top ten Chinese novels in 2012 by the Yazhou Zhoukan journal (Asia Weekly)¹. Set in a small town in Malaysia, the story gives a lucid account of the living environment of the Chinese who immigrated to Nanyang, and keeps record of the folk beliefs and living practices among the people of that era. The novel follows the fate of several generations of women from the Ye family, describing their internal worlds, their sorrows and joys, and how they pursue a profound level of spirituality in life. This paper explores the deep impact of polytheism and the notion of predestination, situating the mysteries and realities of the novel’s female protagonists’ lives in the context of the history of Chinese women in Nanyang. ¹Lee Yoke Kim was born in Penang, Malaysia, and is originally from Wenchang, Hainan Province. She is currently the Vice President of the Malaysian Chinese Writers’ Association and writes mainly fiction and prose. She has won the first Malaysian Outstanding Young Writers Award (马来西亚优秀青年作家奖), the Shuangfu (双福) Novel Excellence Award, and the first prize in the first Singapore Fang Xiu (方修) Literature Award for prose. She has published several books, among them the novels Spring and Autumn on the Move 《春秋流转》, The Three Sections of the Mirror 《镜花三段》, North of Lost Dreams 《遗梦之北》; the short story collections Pining Lovers 《痴男怨女》, Collected Writings of Li Yijun 《李忆莙文集》, The Beach of Dream Sea 《梦海之滩》, Woman 《女人》; and the prose collections Hardships of Passed Days 《去日苦多》, Heedless 《漫不经心》, City People 《城市人》, Until the End of Time 《地老天荒》, Gallant Years 《岁月风流》, The Earth’s Red Dust 《大地红尘》, Times of Sound 《年华有声》, Falling in Love With A River 《爱上一条河》, and others. In 2012, she was awarded the 12th Malaysian Chinese Literature Award (马来西亚华文文学奖). situating the mysteries and realities of the novel’s female protagonists’ lives in the
context of the history of Chinese women in Nanyang.

This article juxtaposes traditional and contemporary East African feminist narratives with reference to Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib and Nadifa Mohamed’s Orchard of Lost Souls. Most feminist narratives in East Africa directly confront patriarchal traditions with the least sensitivity to the masculine audience’s reaction. The writers adopt the Western strand of feminism that largely upholds gender stereotyping of the masculine gender and presentation of feminine gender as the innocent victims of patriarchy. A new generation of feminist writers however, refrain from the focus on patriarchy and express their subjects through multiple voices that turn their novels into great dialogues. This analytical study was carried out on novels by writers from East Africa to interrogate modes of narration by pioneer and contemporary feminists. Five novels by East African novelists were purposively sampled. In spite of most of the writers expressing feminist subjects, Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib and Nadifa Mohamed’s Orchard of Lost Souls demonstrated the supposed diversity in the narrative mode. The study adopted the narrative analysis qualitative design. Data from secondary sources enabled the theoretical comprehension and qualitative analysis of primary texts. The study proceeded through close textual reading of the primary and secondary texts while Mikhail Bakhtin’s monologism and dialogism formed the theoretical basis of interpretation. It was found that most pioneer feminist writers adopted the monologic mode to impose feminist ideology while contemporary writers present the feminist voice as one of the many voices in conversation with other voices in the novel.

Recent developments such as the escalation of violence and terrorism around the globe project man as having put himself in deep crisis. Humanism appears to be under serious threat as the traits of superior intelligence and moral rectitude which distinguish man from other animals seem not to matter any longer. In this article, I identify extreme violent acts as notably overlooked dimensions of posthuman crisis. Regarding their manifestation in poetry as posthuman metaphors of chaos, I discuss their deployment by some Nigerian poets in portraying the spate of violence and terrorism in Nigeria in recent times. Drawing theoretical inference from Posthumanism, the paper discusses the poems in the context of contemporary violent eruptions in Nigeria and how some poets have imaginatively recreated such bizarre socio-political occurrences. It regards these violent incidences as part of the emergent posthuman ethos that reflects a near global failure of human relationships—a kind of posthuman inhumanity.

This study explores the representation of food and crops in literature, focusing on the thematic importance of rice as a staple food in Asian countries. Rice cultivation in Asia has a long history that is intertwined with the legacy of Western colonialism, which disrupted traditional practices and exploited workers. Despite the disruptions caused by colonialism, rice remains an integral part of Asian culture, as reflected in myths, folklore, and legends. Recent studies in postcolonial ecocriticism have offered insights into the interaction between humans, nature, and the environment, taking into account the ecological crises caused by colonialism and its legacy. In this study, four rice-themed poems from Indonesia, Korea, and Vietnam are examined to explore rice’s cultural and spiritual values in the context of current global challenges. The research data were collected from printed sources and online platforms using “poems about rice” as the keywords. The result shows that rice has great socio-cultural importance in Asia, where it is revered as a sacred symbol and cultural memory beyond its commercial worth imposed by Western colonizers. Each poet represents a different country in East and Southeast Asia, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the significance of rice in Asian literature.

In this research, I reconstruct Vicente Rafael’s theorization of “motherless tongues” in Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation using the Deleuzian-Guattarian principle of becoming-minoritarian. I explicate Rafael’s theory of motherless tongues as an exemplification of “becoming-motherless” through the distinction between translation as war and translation as play. Motherless Tongues depicts how translation radicalizes language against the arborescent relations and hegemonic knowledge-formations authored by the U.S. Empire. To nuance this theory, I present some concretizations of becoming-motherless cited in the book, namely, the principles of Filipinized English, Vernacular Accents, and the Tagalog Slang. Lastly, I examine whether motherless tongues can overcome its metropolitan or academic configurations to assume an ethico-political stance. Hopefully, these tensions and new frontiers may lead us to a more fluid, inclusive, and critical understanding of becoming-Filipino today.

Masculinity and femininity are unremitting subjects of literature from Plato’s Symposium to the present. Embracing diverse gender roles by individuals in line with their sex, masculinity and femininity are a part of the cultural accumulation of societies and their concomitant traditions. These roles, which particularly catch the interest of sociologists, psychologists, feminist authors, and cultural scientists, play a crucial role in the cultural memory of societies. Femininity and masculinity regulate the behaviour of all individuals and their accompanying demeanours are acknowledged as behavioural patterns in society which place gender roles at the centre. Despite the growth of academic interest in gender culture in Turkey, the perusal of the transformation of gender roles delineated in literary texts remains largely ignored. This study examines two Turkish cult classic texts, The Book of Dede Korkut—redounding the ancient Turkish society before the advent of Islam—and Ömer Seyfettin’s The Rainbow—sketching contemporary Turkish society just before the establishment of the Republic—to throw light on the radical transformation of gender roles by specifically centring on the change of Turkish masculinity from a shared sphere welcoming women to its realm to a private domain having almost no room for women mainly due to religious values and nation-building process.

Expounded in the article are prerequisites to a cognitive and semiotic description of the Moscow text as it is represented in the Russian literature of the twenty-first century. The concept of supertext, or the invariable recurrent text structure, is introduced and applied to textual representations of cities; the typical imagery forming the Moscow text is elucidated, along with its verbal representations. It is suggested that the practical description of the Moscow text should be made on the basis of the literary works constituting the Russian literary canon, which will ensure the conformity of linguistics and literary studies within the framework of general semiotics. The article mainly explores the specifics of the contemporary textual representations, drawing upon works shortlisted for literary awards. The literary material is supplemented with extensive social and cultural context, which is done in accordance with the modern literary studies, when the corresponding extra-textual reality is taken into account alongside the text itself. An orientation towards the literary text is postulated as absolutely essential, as a solid corpus of literary texts is indispensable for describing complicated linguistic phenomena and mental images standing behind them. The latest texts about Moscow feature a decrease in the status of the usual cult places of the metropolis, the authors’ attention being redirected to urban images which have less historical or cultural significance.