Booker Prize Research Articles

Analysis of Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse from the Perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism

The Lighthouse is an excellent contemporary novel that tells the family tragedies of two generations which involve numerous individuals and families. After being shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, it has been noticed by many researchers and scholars from home and abroad. Starting from the perspective of ethical literary criticism, this paper intends to have a detailed analysis of the ethical issues existing in The Lighthouse through the method of close reading. This paper also attempts to have an insight into the moral and ethical problems in modern families, or the problems between contemporary people, trying to analyze the main characters’ self-developments of morality and the author’s ethical values from the discussion of the main characters’ ethical choices, the construction of ethical identities and the human and human relationship in this novel.

A Thematic Interpretation of  Selected Novels Of Tim O Brien

Author from the United States who enlisted in the military during the Vietnam War. “The majority of his works are about Vietnam during the conflict, and his latter works often investigate the life of Vietnam soldiers after the war. O'Brien is perhaps most known for his book, which was published in 1990 and titled The Things They Carried. This book is a compilation of connected semi-autobiographical tales that were inspired by O'Brien's experiences during the war. The latter was referred to be " a masterpiece of modern war fiction" by The New York Times in the year 2010. Going For Cacciato, O'Brien's book about the conflict that was published in 1978 and won the National Book Prize, is another reason for the author's widespread reputation. In spite of the fact that O'Brien is most known for his writings on the Vietnam War, he is also highly regarded as a teacher and instructor of creative writing. From 2003 to 2012, he was the holder of an endowed chair in the Master of Fine Arts programme at Texas State University–San Marcos. The purpose of this article is to provide thematic interpretations on a selection of Tim O'Brien's works.”

On Violence Writing in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Ian McEwan is one of the most preeminent contemporary British writers. His masterpiece Saturday is longlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize. Revolving around the protagonist Perowne’s one-day life, the novel portrays a realistic picture of British society after the “9·11” terrorist attack. So far, scholars have interpreted Saturday from the perspective of space, trauma, intertextuality, culture, and ethics, while few studies have touched upon the violence writing in this novel. Therefore, this paper will explore the manifestations and roots of direct, structural and cultural violence in Saturday based on Johan Galtung’s violence triangle theory. The study of violence writing in the novel can reveal not only hidden violence problems in British society but also McEwan’s appeal for a harmonious society. Meanwhile, the solution to violence issues McEwan provides in the novel is also instructive for modern people to cope with violence dilemmas.

How supranational literary prizes shape translation flows

Abstract This article explores how literary prizing shapes translation flows by comparing bibliographic data on the translations of prize-winning books. It focuses on two prizes in particular, the Booker Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), both of which generate significant numbers of translations but for very different reasons. The article develops the idea of ‘prizing logics’ to help explain these differences, singling out factors that appear to play a role: (1) the prize’s translation policy (especially important for the EUPL) and (2) the prize’s prestige and focus on commercial success (particularly relevant for the Booker). It shows that translations of EUPL winners are largely a result of state support, which is linked to the prize’s aim of spreading European diversity and reinforcing unity through literature, while the Booker is more focused on literary quality and stimulating commercial success, thereby leading to many translations of its winners.

Spectral Trans Figures: The Ambiguous and Atemporal Hijra Body in Narcopolis

Over the past decade, the hijra, a marginalised subculture referred to as the ‘third sex' in India and ‘transgender' in Western contexts has become a prominent presence in Indian anglophone literary fiction. This paper delves into the anatomies of aesthetics and ideologies that make the feminine-identifying hijra body coherent in Jeet Thayil’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel Narcopolis (2012). It explores how the novel enables the reader to create a stable image of the hijra body through acts of voyeurism and recasts this body into ambiguity by writing its existence outside temporal logics. It ultimately proposes that this is a project of epistemic violence that creates certain modes of trans narratives within which hijra lives and bodies are memorialised, never living.

Good Grief: On The 2023 Booker Prize

Good Grief: On The 2023 Booker Prize

Ne rien avoir ou ne rien être, au gré des variations : une analyse de l’œuvre Nous qui n’étions rien de Madeleine Thien (trad. Catherine Leroux) en tant que « nouveau » roman historique

Various Variations from Having Nothing to Being Nothing, an Analysis of Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (and its French Version) as a “New” Historical Novel
 Traditionally, historical novels have been subjected to various negative preconceptions and have often been categorized as lowbrow. Despite their popular and commercial success, authors of such novels rarely win prestigious literary awards. However, 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing,' a historical novel by Madeleine Thien published in 2016, was critically acclaimed and received high praise, winning two major Canadian prizes— the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Its French translation, 'Nous qui n’étions rien,' also gained significant recognition, as Catherine Leroux, Thien’s translator, was awarded a Governor General’s Literary Award for the French version in 2019. The novel has been translated into thirteen other languages, another significant sign of consecration. In this paper, two questions will be explored. Firstly: what characteristics of 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing' (and of its French translation 'Nous qui n’étions rien') explain its critical success? Secondly: do these characteristics match those of the 'new' historical novel? 'New' historical novels are here understood as well-documented, complex, and intertextual works that started to appear in the 1980s and tend to break away from the tradition of historical novels based on bewildering action and detailed descriptions, often written in plain language. A general finding is that the appreciations of the juries of two important English-language literary prizes in Canada, as well as many reviews published in different journals and magazines, mention that the book’s complexity and the reflections it prompts are two major positive aspects of the novel. As for the writing itself, whereas Thien’s style has been deemed 'simple,' consistent with traditional historical novels, Leroux’s version does not appear to be as accessible. Nevertheless, it was lauded by critics and the Governor General’s Literary Awards jury. It is worth asking if this more formal and literary style was not seen as an additional strength by the French institution and reviewers. A brief analysis of fiction works winning major prizes in Canada in the years prior to and following 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing' has also been conducted and seems to indicate that historical novels tend to win more prizes in English Canada than in French Canada.

WOMEN’S WRITING AS IMMATERIAL LABOUR IN THE CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY BELARUSIAN LITERATURE

The goal of this article is to analyse women’s writing as immaterial labour, focusing on the case of contemporary Belarusian literature as the contribution to the de-Westernizing of creative labour studies. First, the paper focuses on language choice specific for contemporary Belarusian literature and educational opportunities as the prerequisites to begin a writing career set in the 1990–2000s. Second, the paper outlines the environment providing publishing and showcase opportunities, emphasising the mid-2010s as the period of increased diversity. And third, the paper assesses the conditions that influence creative expression sustaining the labour of creating writing in 2020–2023. Within this argumentation, the paper investigates the state of specifically women’s writing in Belarus, considering the problematics of equal opportunities. Thus, in the 1990– 2000s women’s writing wasn’t on the agenda aimed at the preservation of the field and relating it to the Belarusian language. In the 2010s educative and showcase opportunities supporting the efforts of young writers provided an equally beneficial environment for men and women writing in Belarusian or Russian. The representation of women writers increased, including more women writers awarded with book prizes by both state and independent organizations although still not equal with men writers. During 2020–2023 it is mostly recognized women writers over 40 years old, especially currently in emigration, who produce literary works that are successfully published in Belarusian or Russian. Younger women writers have less opportunities for publication and showcase, switching to autofiction of shorter formats barely sustaining their efforts as labour. Interestingly, in both cases the most common themes are ancestry and corporality, making women representation in contemporary Belarusian literature less diverse. This affects the demand in literary works by women writers among diverse groups of women as the reading audience, making the labour of women writers in Belarus more precarious.

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field.

Research on tokenism has mostly focused on negative experiences and career outcomes for individuals who are tokenized. Yet tokenism as a structural system that excludes larger populations, and the meso-level cultural foundations under which tokenism occurs, are comparatively understudied. We focus on these additional dimensions of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English, and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Using data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, we test and find for non-white authors (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work across multiple dimensions of tokenism, analyses that address inequality across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.

The Frank Watson Book Prize in Scottish History

The Frank Watson Book Prize in Scottish History

Wayward Feeling: Audio-Visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa

Thank you for taking the time to talk to us about your book, Wayward Feeling: Audio-Visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa. The book has just been awarded the University of the Free State Book Prize for Distinguished Scholarship for 2022. Congratulations on the award! Before we delve into a discussion of the book, could you tell us something about yourself, your background, and the work that you do?

Мотивы и образы Ф. М. Достоевского в романе иорданской писательницы Кафы Аль-Зоаби «Холодное белое солнце»

The aim of the study is to prove the high degree of influence of Russian classical literature on contemporary prose of the writers in the Arab East today, which has emerged as a result of the growing interest in the Russian classical literature in Arab countries in the past. The article analyzes the novel “Cold White Sun” by the Jordanian writer Kafa Al-Zou’bi, which was shortlisted for the Arab Booker Prize in 2019. The conceptual content of the novel is examined, including its themes (the individual’s loneliness in the world, the predestination of fate, atheism, the redemption of crime, etc.), as well as the artistic techniques of the realization of the author’s idea (imagery, reference to the author in the text, the significance of the natural background, etc.) and the aesthetics of language (choice of lexical units, semantic fields, etc.). The scientific novelty of the work is determined by turning to the little-studied material of the latest Arabic literature in domestic literary studies that represents the postmodernist trend of the 21st century, and attempts to establish its close connection with Russian classical literature. The research results indicate parallels in motifs (youthful maximalism, victimology, etc.) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s imagery (the atmosphere of Petersburg, the room-as-coffin, etc.) discovered in the book by the Jordanian writer.

A Study Of Family Ties In The Novel The Lowland By Jhumpa Lahiri

True to the words of Michael J. Fox, Family is an important place to share love and care among the relations. Family relationships help the child to develop communication skills and builds trust and respect. The keys to developing healthy family relationships include making relationships a priority, communicating effectively and providing support for each other. Families vary in the expectations they hold regarding children’s behavior and this leads to differences in family relationships and communication styles.  In the novel The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri portrays the life of two inseparable brothers Subash and Udayan and how their life gets changed when they grow up. Their ideologies are changed and as a result, Udayan becomes a naxalite and Subash takes up further studies at Rhode Island much against his brother’s wish. The novel depicts the relationships between the two brothers Subash and Udayan and between Udayan’s wife Gauri and Subash and between Gauri’s daughter Bella and Subash. Thus it is a sort of complicated family relationship that Lahiri portrays in The Lowland. The Lowland was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book award for Fiction.

Animal representations in Margaret Atwood’s novels: a study based on pan-indexicality model

Abstract Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author of more than thirty-five books and the winner of prestigious literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General’s Award. Her influence on Canadian literature and contemporary literature as a whole is phenomenal. Nevertheless, little is known with respect to how Atwood represents animals covering the full range of her novels. This paper reports on the analysis of animal representations in Atwood’s seventeen novels through Python programming and close reading under the framework of a new semiotic research finding, a pan-indexicality model within the context of literature and the environment. This study investigates the frequencies of animal vocabulary in the seventeen novels, the changes of animal representations in her novels before 1990s and after 1990s, and the implication of the ever-changing animal representations during the fifty years. This paper concludes that nonhuman animal descriptions in Atwood’s novels of 1970s and 1980s run at a high level and decrease in her novels of 1990s, while scientific animal descriptions increase in her novels of 2000s and 2010s. Nonhuman animals in her novels of 1970s and 1980s are instrumentalized as a vehicle for indigenization and national individuation from the United States, and scientific animals in her novels of 2000s and 2010s are instrumentalized in the service of environmental apocalypticism. This study suggests that the pan-indexicality model can be employed to understand the meaning of signs in literature and the environment from the perspective of authorial intention, with reference to authors’ encyclopedic knowledge, personal experience, social, and cultural background information.

“Feminism Passed Her By”: A Feminist Critique on Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger and The Photograph

Penelope Lively is a female British novelist whose novel Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize in 1987. Scholar Mary Moran argued that Moon Tiger is “a feminist history”. Challenging this argument, this article analyzes the characterization and plot in Moon Tiger and The Photograph, arguing that the two novels do not show enough feminist consciousness, but convey the support for male hegemony and misogyny complex instead.

A Saga of Cosmopolitan Friendship in Time of the Breaking of Nations: A Study of Ali Smith’s Autumn

Brexit, Britain’s exit from the supranational polity of the European Union has unsettled the vision of European unity. Rather than nourishing an “and/ both” cosmopolitan view even in the limited context of continental relationship, Britain inculcates an “either/ or” jingoistic nationalism fed on Euroscepticism. English literature has a long tradition of invoking political issues and Brexit has inaugurated a new sub-genre, ‘BrexLit’. The paper seeks to attempt a detailed study of Scottish writer Ali Smith’s novel Autumn (2016), designated by The New York Times as “the first great Brexit novel”. The first of the seasonal quartet, this novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and bagged the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Embedded in the Brexit Britain, the novel raises questions of citizenship, particularly in relation to immigration, and mirrors the loss of cultural conviviality. The paper discusses anti-immigrant toxicity, the upsurge of nostalgic appetite for national heritage, and the territorial social ontology of the contemporary English national outlook. The paper studies, in the context of the narrative, how the media resorts to post-truth politics and right-wing nationalistic propaganda in media resulting in the death of democracy and the end of dialogue. The paper explores how the novel advocates an inclusive, realistic cosmopolitanism through Elisabeth-Daniel friendship.

Problems and Prospects of Translating Indian Literature: With Particular Reference to Geetanjali Shree's Ret Samadhi


 
 
 
 Many of us have read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Voltaire, Anne Frank, Marquez, Murakami, Borges or even Valmiki, Kalidas, Tagore, Kabeer and Premchand only in translation. Some things are mislaid in translation, but the gains are enormous. Translations brighten the rich literary world of Indian languages and literature. 'Ret Samadhi' (2018), a Hindi-language novel by Indian author Geetanjali Shree, is deftly translated by Annie Montaut into French as 'au-delà de la frontière' (Beyond the Border, 2020) and Daisy Rockwell into English as 'Tomb of Sand' (2022) for a global audience. Tomb of Sand became the first novel translated from an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize of 2022. The story is not driven by plot but by language. It has an exciting and rhythmic use of words, making it challenging for many people to understand, and its translation into any language is difficult. The translation is founded on the idea that the essence of a document may be abstracted from its meanings and replicated in the particular ways of another language. The paper examines translators' specific linguistic and cultural challenges while translating Ret Samadhi. It assesses the effectiveness of different translation strategies employed by various translators in conveying the original text's meaning and style. The study also investigates the impact of translation on the reception of Ret Samadhi in different cultural contexts and explores the prospects of translating Indian literature in future. The present paper also underscores the significance of translation in promoting intercultural dialogue and understanding and enhancing the global reach of Indian literature.
 
 
 

Long Journey to Freedom: An Interpretation of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard from the Perspective of Existentialism

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the debut work of the 2006 Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai. There are many discussions on the novel from the perspective of ecocriticism, but existentialism in the work has received less attention. This article intends to start with Sartre’s existentialism, expounding how the protagonist Sampath lives in an absurd world, gets rid of the control of others and seeks the freedom he desires in his heart. This paper believes that by shaping Sampath’s image of pursuing freedom, Kiran Desai embodies his exposure to the absurd society of India and her yearning for spiritual freedom.

Cheiron 2023 Book Prize.

The winner of the Cheiron 2023 Book Prize is Christina Ramos for the book Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2022. Dr. Ramos is an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Narrative and Trauma: An Analysis on Briony’s Traumatic Mind Tour in Atonement

On the basis of James Phelan’s unreliable narrative, Northrop Frye’s U-shaped narrative structure and Cathy Caruth’s Trauma theory, this paper studies Ian McEwan’s Booker Prize nominated novel Atonement and analyses the protagonist Briony’s behaviour responding to a traumatic experience and her efforts to heal the trauma. It provides readers with ways to help them get out of similar predicaments, and a new research perspective combining trauma theory with narratology for the interpretation of novels.