There is general agreement that the modern discipline of Comparative Literature was founded in the United States after World War Two and that its most prominent early practitioners were political exiles who were comfortable in reading and often writing in two or more European languages as well as engaging the English literature of their host nation. The second generation of Comparative Literature scholars tried to follow in their footsteps, especially so far as the emphasis on languages was concerned, but they also tried to break away from the heavy emphasis on the classics of European literature which had been a feature of the work of the first generation.

Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Christo reveals the influences of adventure tales from Ariosto to the Arabian Nights. Although far too long to assign in an undergraduate World Literature survey, it deserves recognition for its influence, much as the work of Mo Yan will always be considered pivotal not for its literary excellence but for its representations of a difficult periods in history. This article looks at the universal themes of vengeance and the ideal women in Dumas’s wide-ranging but erudite yarn, which, for example, characterizes the king of France as an effete enemy of the people by having him annotate an edition of Horace’s poems, but also, in its entirety, establishes the great cultural watershed of Paris, France, in the 1840s, during the ferment leading up to the revolution of 1848 that so influenced Marx and hence so much of the world, including China.

This essay examines the concept of unwilling sacrifices in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. While scholars typically attend to the forms of self-sacrifice in the novel, I explore the forms of sacrifice that are compelled by the aristocratic class of pre-revolutionary France and the fraternity of republican citizens of post-revolutionary France. Dickens demonstrates how both ruling classes resort to unwilling sacrifices to preserve political power, structure society, and justify their means of existence. The proclivity for such sacrifices, according to Dickens, leads to the degeneration of society. As the figures of Monsieur the Marquis, Madame La Guillotine, and Doctor Manette exemplify, the implications of unwilling sacrifices affect each level of society, ranging from the national to the individual. Dickens shows how unwilling sacrifices turn society against itself: they upset social harmony, destroy communities, sever familial bonds, and dehumanize individuals. Dickens censures equally the aristocracy and the republican fraternity for the demands they place on the members of society to give up their livelihoods and their lives. The adverse effects of unwilling sacrifice are ultimately a warning to Dickens’s contemporary English audience. Thus, Dickens emphasizes throughout A Tale that the forced spilling of blood is no way by which any society can be maintained or rehabilitated.

This paper focuses on Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela and Carolina de Jesus’s Quarto de despejo to compare the different kinds of violence the protagonists endure and how representational violence has silenced Brazilian women writers’ voices. The reception of both literary works is different as Clarice Lispector’s and Carolina de Jesus’s literary voices and literary works are appropriated into mainstream discourse. In A Hora da Estrela, Lispector critiques the supremacy of the dominant discourse and presumed transparency through Rodrigo’s oppression of Macabéa’s agency and life. In Quarto de despejo, Audálio Dantas alters Jesus’s text by severely editing, changing, and selecting entries he believes to be important. Both literary works depict the various forms of violence women have to overcome to survive in the city of São Paulo. Macabéa and Carolina face violence on different levels as each protagonist tries to fight against victimization to shape their own subjectivities.

Chinese cinema uses the consumer habits of young professional women to reimagine post-feminist gender identity. These films employ the visual economy of chick flicks to shape the representational concept of an urban middle class. In them, post-feminist women gain agency not by subverting the dominant patriarchal social order but through economic advancement and emotional independence. As an example of this process, this article looks at how Go Lala Go! (2010) legitimizes women’s financial freedom and career success within the grand narrative of nation building and economic development, foregrounding the cultural politics of consumerism by portraying young professional women’s coming-of-age story in a globalized China. It juxtaposes the career success of the female protagonist Du Lala with the new financial independence and transnational commercialization of China. Go Lala Go! aestheticizes the struggles of young office workers as they climb corporate ladders to achieve economic success.

The recent influx of popular culture surrounding the Tudors suggests that something about the time period and the saga of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is particularly relevant to our modern sensibilities. Critical scholarship seems to be catching on to Tudor fever slowly; in her recent monograph, Susan Bordo explores Anne Boleyn’s fame and the way she has been represented culturally over time. Still, though the time period continues to be a popular subject, little has been written about recent adaptations, particularly in the realm of historical fiction. This paper explores the way that Hilary Mantel, in her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, paints the body of Anne Boleyn through battle imagery that maps her rise and subsequent decline over the course of the novels. The argument further explores the way this imagery prevents the reader from sympathizing too deeply with Anne; rather, I suggest that Mantel portrays Anne as the master of her own fate. Ultimately, I argue that through the imagery surrounding Anne Boleyn, Mantel creates a body of evidence where historically we have no body.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2013–14 stage production of Wolf Hall sparked an interest in studying Hilary Mantel’s novel from the perspective of performance. Overlooked in the hype building up to the show’s opening was the fact that one performance of the novel had already been given: Simon Slater’s narrative performance for the Wolf Hall audiobook. This article examines Slater’s performance in the role of Thomas More, paying attention to several moments of narration that help shape the audience’s understanding of the character. In the process, this article sheds light on the status of audiobook narrators as more than mere readers. Rather, any narrator plays an important role in shaping the experience of the novel felt by the listening audience.

This essay identifies the “methodological signature” of Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in the idea of pause, combined with the author’s use of pause—of the intentional gap in time. The novel’s achronological, seemingly random ordering, the absence of connective summaries, and most particularly the chapter rendered entirely in PowerPoint oblige the reader to connect moments and events, to understand relationships, thus drawing our attention to the workings of Time itself on the characters’ human strivings. As one character remarks, “Time is a goon.”

Theories of gender and nationalism contribute to understanding David Henry Hwang’s play, M. Butterfly (1986). By interweaving illusions about sexuality and cultural differences, Hwang creates an ironic play that addresses social myths of gender and national identity. A love affair between a diplomat named Gallimard and a spy named Song is placed within the larger context of a national discourse that hierarchically positions the East–West national identity within a framework that represents China as both other and woman. In M. Butterfly, subjectivity is created through a patriarchal, socio-sexual matrix that creates gender as a fictive category based on exclusions. I argue that the rhetoric of gender converges with the rhetoric of nationalism at the site of the body so that individual (gendered) identity cannot be separated from public (national) identity. The connections between gender politics and nationalism suggest that both discourses rely upon imaginative fictions to construct identity.

This paper examines the fictional minds’ mental functioning in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach. The study primarily depends on the terminology offered by Alan Palmer considering the operation of fictional minds. The paper argues that the initial fragile intermental units within the selected narratives disappear towards their ends because, encountering conflicts, the fictional minds tend to dissent intramentally. Therefore, these narratives can be read as representations of the breakdown process of the intermental units among the fictional minds. In Amsterdam, the incipient intermentality between Clive Linely and Vernon Halliday comes to its end when the two old friends’ strong egocentrism and aspectuality lead them fundamentally towards disrupting intramental thoughts and actions. And in On Chesil Beach, the development of Edward Mayhew’s and Florence Ponting’s small intermental unit halts when their intermental or shared thoughts are replaced by their inflexible intramental dissents. In both cases, the fictional minds are presented as being unable to go beyond their own perspectives, which are essential for the formation and maintenance of the intermental units. Accordingly, this paper analyses the breakdown processes of the small intermental systems in the chosen narratives.

The Summer Before the Dark is a representative work of Lessing’s women portrayal transition from focusing on their outside world exploration to on their inner world seeking. This paper analyzes the novel from mirror images of the heroine and the various implications. Throughout the novel, Kate is depicted looking into mirrors many times, and while she studies her images in the mirrors, adjusting her physical appearance according to different standards, she is actually going through different psychological states, the changes of which reveal the process of her inner growth, maturing, and attaining a final integrated self.

This Special Issue on “Desire, Spirituality and ‘Regimes of Truth’ in South Asian Literature” examines the nature of power and its manifestations in various discourses on desire and spirituality in contemporary South Asian literature. According to Michel Foucault, power is the “network of relations” in which entities confront each other. There is no “essence” to power, but only its specific relational forms. In this sense, power is both invisible and functional, and to analyze power relations, we cannot be satisfied with the analysis of actors who use power as an instrument of coercion, or even an analysis of the structures within which those actors operate. Rather, we must recognize that these diffuse power relations are in discourses, or what Foucault once called “regimes of truth.”

This essay illustrates how the dichotomies between divinity and mystic experiences of the poet-saints along with bhakti on the one hand, and kings and poets of the sovereign states on the other hand exhibit diverse forms of power relations within the realms of Tamil literary tradition and Tamil culture. The interrelationship between textual tradition and devotional processes has impacted upon the power relations among the poet-saints, devotees and divinities in a number of different implicit ways throughout South India from the beginning of the Christian era. As for Tamil, the power relations that originally existed during the pre-Christian era between kings and poets within a dialogy of patronship, singing of the victories, praising of kings’ caliber and so on transformed into a very diverse form of power relation during the medieval and modern periods where divinity, mystic experiences of the poet-saints along with the perception of bhakti play a major role in determining the power relation, demonstrating the paradigm of what Michel Foucault claims—that power cannot be understood only as a juridical edifice of sovereign king, institution, group, elite, class, but rather as a technique, a form of power. Two works of Aṇṭāḷ, namely Tiruppāvai (sacred cowherd girl—containing 30 verses) and Nācciyār tirumoḻi (sacred utterances of the Goddess—containing 143 verses), are analyzed closely as to how they along with other similar texts play a significant role in the evolvement of diverse forms of power within the South Indian bhakti tradition, and thus exhibit a power relation involving the poet, text, divine and the devotee.

This essay examines how Gandhi’s understanding of his gendered and religious identity was shaped by colonial discourse. Mahatma Gandhi, like many of his Indian counterparts, came to believe in the powerful narrative articulated by the West that attributed British colonization of India to Indian effeminacy, apathy, and “deviant” sexual behavior. Gandhi’s capitulation to British ideals of masculinity in his youth made him focus his critical gaze on his body and it is these “experiments” with himself as a subject that facilitated the formulation of a novel anti-colonial discourse that restructured the body’s economy of pleasure, prioritizing self-discipline in the service of the nation. Gandhi’s example illustrates that traditions and histories are disrupted not just by the consciousness of dissident subjects, but also by representational practices. Western “regimes of truth” both facilitated Gandhi’s initial self-reproach and his later transformation of the figure of the Hindu ascetic and ascetic practices to contest and alter colonialist views of Hindu religion and masculinity. For Gandhi, nationalist asceticism functions as a “technology of the self” (Foucault), as essential to the process of ethical formation, as certain types of bodies, behaviors, and desires are constituted in and through the self-disciplinary practices of the colonized Indian male subject. At the same time, however, nationalist ascetics also became a domain through which to dominate marginalized castes, classes, religions, and genders.

When Abha Dawesar’s second novel Babyji was published in 2005, it was celebrated for its joyous depiction of love and sex between women. What has passed largely unnoticed, however, is the ways in which its representation of same-sex love is intimately tied to discourses of power. From the name of the main character, Anamika (which is also the name of an early South Asian lesbian organization), to the nickname of her first female lover, India, to that of her lower caste lover, Rani (queen), the novel maps networks of relations that simultaneously challenge and reinforce the regimes of truth intrinsic to Hinduism, class hierarchies, caste divisions and, indeed, the Indian nation-state. Such networks of sexual and romantic relation are also common to Dawesar’s other novels, Miniplanner (2000) and That Summer in Paris (2006). Drawing on the work of Ruth Vanita, Suparna Bhaskaran, Alison Donnell, and others, this paper will argue that Dawesar’s neglected oeuvre challenges both the often tragic arc of narratives depicting same-sex attraction set in the Indian subcontinent, and the Eurocentric trajectory of much contemporary theory and creative writing which privileges the diaspora as a place of liberation for South Asian queers. Instead, Babyji in particular queers the Indian nation (in Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s sense) and invites a Khush-centered, situated reading practice.

This article examines the poetry of contemporary feminist poet Kishwar Naheed (b. 1940) from Pakistan. Using Michel Foucault’s later writings, I look at the possibility of reading Naheed’s poetry as acts of parrhesia where her aesthetic self merges with an ethical voice to create a literature of resistance against laws of patriarchy and the nation-state. I demonstrate how Naheed reshapes the positionality of the poetic “I” and, in the process, transforms poetry-writing into an act of “truth-telling” by creating an assemblage of dialogic voices. I further discuss how Naheed uses this poetic assemblage to specifically challenge the Islamization of Pakistan’s legal system under the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988). Finally, I theorize feminist poetry from Pakistan as a discursive “game” of vacillating truths and desires that women poets like Naheed employ to weave together issues of collective identity and individual performativity through intersecting narratives of gender, religion, and nation.