Great Novels Research Articles

Premchand, the playwright and the drama critic: Evaluating Hindi theatrescape in colonial India

Besides writing some of the greatest novels and short stories in Urdu and Hindi, Premchand, the doyen of Indian fiction, also engaged with the genre of drama: he translated several European plays into Hindi and Urdu, authored three original plays, and reviewed contemporary plays and commented on different performative traditions in his articles. Drawing upon the paratexts of Premchand’s plays—especially the prefaces to Sangram (1923) and Karbala (1924), his articles such as “Hindi Rangmanch” and “Bhartendu Babu Harishchandra”, and his reviews of contemporary plays—the essay studies Premchand’s attempt to institutionalize Hindi drama and theatre as a distinct tradition: it explores how he outlined dramaturgy and aesthetics of playwriting and performance, mapped the history and modernity of Hindi drama, diagnosed the ills that ailed Hindi theatre and suggested remedies. Furthermore, it explores how he hailed the advent of Naya Drama (New drama) in Hindi and scrutinized modernity in theatrescapes in colonial India.

Смерть А. Чехова как финал эпохи: между журналистикой, литературой и философией (на материале публикаций в газете «Новое время»)

The purpose of the article is to analyze publications in “Novoye Vremya” devoted to the death of A. Chekhov. During the viewing of the newspaper for 1904–1905 it was possible to find more than 50 relevant materials of different genres. These are, in particular, notes on the writer's last days; the meeting of the coffin in St. Petersburg at the Nikolaevsky railway station; the arrangement of the grave at the cemetery of the Novodevichy Monastery; memorial meetings and lectures. The most interesting are the obituaries and memoirs of the leading journalists of “Novoye Vremya”. N. Engelhardt, V. Rozanov and V. Burenin, recognizing Chekhov’s outstanding talent, nevertheless assess him as a minor author and refuse to put him on a par with the great novelists — Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. M. Menshikov and A. Suvorin, in turn, talk about the end of the “golden age” of Russian literature. At the origins of this era stood Pushkin, who overcame romanticism and turned to the poetry of reality, and its finale is associated with the death of Chekhov, who always remained within the framework of the realistic tradition, but mastered techniques that were soon adopted by modernists — new romantics. In a sense, Chekhov mirrored Pushkin’s creative path.

Patrick White and the path to Sarsaparilla: How a great novelist became a great unread

Patrick White and the path to Sarsaparilla: How a great novelist became a great unread

The Corporeity Discourse and the Body “Arguments” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Works

The subject of this research is the discourse on the body and corporeity in Dostoevsky’s works on the example of four out of his “five greatest novels”. The questions of the body and corporeity are often eliminated in philosophical studies of Dostoevsky’s works which allows researchers to conceptualize the content of his novels more easily. This tradition and its inconsistency can be revealed through a brief historiographical review. The author of the article, on the contrary, regards the corporeity as an important part of Dostoevsky’s philosophical and anthropological ideas. Thus, two main aspects of the discourse on the body and corporeity found in various proportions in the writer’s works: 1) corresponds with materialistic philosophical anthropology, and 2) matches the Christian patristic anthropological tradition. In addition, the article describes Dostoevsky’s non-formalizability of corporeity which stands above the materialistic interpretations of the man and the standardized, not problematized body. This is achieved through cultural and historical, biographical and ideological contexts of Dostoevsky’s writings. The hermeneutic analysis of the four novels texts provides an opportunity to briefly outline the concept of the body and corporeity understanding. Thus, the author identifies three modes of corporeity underlying the body problematization in Dostoevsky’s novels: the scientistic mode, the otherness mode, and the religious mode (based on the anthropological tradition of Eastern Patristics). Unlike the materialistic concepts of a onefold approach to the man, Dostoevsky offers twofold (or even threefold) concept dissecting corporeity through its most non-formalized manifestations. The body for Dostoevsky is both universal and unique. On the one hand, it complicates the corporeity conceptualization, but on the other hand, it enhances its importance in the writer’s works. The results of the research can be used to elaborate new non-reductionist interpretations of Dostoevsky’s literary legacy.

Guerre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and: Londres by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Reviewed by: Guerre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and: Londres by Louis-Ferdinand Céline Kai Maristed LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE Guerre Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 192 pages. LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE Londres Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 576 pages. WHEN A FIRST novel by an unknown Louis-Ferdinand Céline appeared in French bookstores in 1932, it swiftly sold an unheard-of fifty thousand copies. Voyage to the End of Night, a bitter reckoning with the First World War and the capitalist free-for-all that followed, narrowly lost the Goncourt Prize due to language deemed crude and objectionable, and cynical descriptions of brutal warfare and brutal sex. But Céline's barrier-breaking style (brief sentences in street lingo, yet grammatically deft) would soon liberate a generation of writers in France and beyond, including Hemingway and Henry Miller. Now considered to be one of the great works of European literature, Voyage figures on the Guardian's list of "100 Greatest Novels of All Time." Yet, after informally asking around, I find that few American lit majors today have ever heard of Céline, who went on to write ten or so more novels. In 2019 the sensational unveiling of a secret trove of two thousand unpublished pages brought Céline back into the spotlight, boosted by recent articles in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The light's not always flattering. Many readers and critics reject the man and thus his work. Céline is now known to have penned, in the late 1930s, three anti-Semitic pamphlets, so grotesque that some at the time took them for satire. Fearing arrest as the Allies drew close, he fled Paris in panic and disgrace, sans his drafts but with his wife and their cat under his arm. He's seen as a weirdly gifted pariah: even, in Adam Gopnik's words, "an evil genius." (Gopnik simultaneously advises readers "to admire" Céline.) Most of the current commentary skims lightly over the two novels extracted to date from the trove, Guerre and Londres, before diving into the familiar debate about Morality of the Artist versus Value of the Art. Can there be gradations or mitigating circumstances? Or must an unyielding line be drawn? (My own thoughts can be found in an essay written for Agni shortly after Peter Handke won his Nobel.) What about the two unearthed novels? Edited by Gallimard from pages smeared with corrections and illegible words, they are nowhere near final form, and so thick with argot as to require a dictionary appendix. Otherwise, they are a study in contrast. [End Page 73] Laurel and Hardy, if you will. To the book world's surprise, Guerre, at barely 150 pages, shot to the top of the best-seller lists for weeks last spring and is still going strong. Londres, a dense six hundred or so pages, came out in October to similar buyer enthusiasm, despite reviewers' caveats. Apparently, the French, at least, still have an appetite for Céline, who is regularly set on a level with Proust, and whom Philip Roth termed "a very great writer." Guerre is breathtaking. Its immediacy, its ostinato of physical pain, its lewd and desperate milieu of wounded soldiers in a field hospital behind the front lines, will either repel or draw you in with its sardonic wit and glints of tenderness and trapdoor twists of narrative. Like Londres, it is narrated by Ferdinand, a fictional alter ego, both salty and shy, whose story is informed by Céline's own devastating experiences during the war. Its opening lines set the tone for all that follows: "I must have stayed there for another part of the following night. All my left ear glued by blood to the ground, my mouth as well. Between the two there was an immense noise." Around him lay dead comrades, already being pillaged by rats. It rains. Against the odds, Ferdinand makes it to his feet, is discovered by a friendly British soldier, tries in his brain fog and the barrage of explosions in his ears to escape back to his own missing unit. But the Brit prevails, and Ferdinand finds himself eventually in hospital...

Ethnography in Literature Studies. I: The Native Tribes (“Inorodtsy”) Question and “Anna Karenina”

Literary texts are undoubtedly a promising historical source, the study of which lies at the intersection of the tasks of historical anthropology and the study of sources. In this respect, it is particularly promising to turn to the texts of Russian classics as historical and ethnographic sources, including “Anna Karenina” — one of the greatest novels of world literature, which has had a huge impact on the world's perception of Russia and Russians. The novel constantly reveals the prototypes of its main characters in comparison with the events of the time. For example, Count Pyotr Valuev (1814—1890), who served as Minister of State Property and Chairman of the Committee of Ministers of the Empire, was the main prototype for Alexei Karenin. Throughout the novel, Karenin, like Valuev in real life, is confronted with problems related to the corrupt buying and selling of “inorodtsy” lands. This led to a series of widely discussed scandals and eventually became a central issue in the programme of the Bashkir national movement on the eve of the Russian Revolution. The historical facts underlying the “inorodtsy settlement case” provide an insight into Valuev's life and work. This sheds new light on the character of Karenin in the novel and its relevance for contemporary readers, as well as on the possibilities of using the text of the novel as a historical and ethnographic source. The article is the first in a series devoted to ethnographic literary studies.

Linguistic and Philosophical Features of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones

Henry Fielding was one of the great novelists of the 18th century. Today, he is universally acknowledged as a major figure in the development of the novel. His literacy works have been evaluated by many critics. He proved exceptionally controversial and his reputation has variously soared and crashed in the course of three centuries. This study, first, attempts to scrutinize and perfectly judge the real value, essential nature and intrinsic aspects of Fielding’s two classics, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. It is claimed that on examining the works of Henry Fielding, concentration should be given to exploring the extent of the foreign influence on his works. Some critics are of the opinion that they are not incorporated within the framework of the picaresque novels. This study underscores the picaresque elements in the two classics, and stresses the similarities and points of resemblance between the English and Spanish picaresque novels. Second, this study examines the various stylistic features of Fielding’s narrative technique, and his use of satire to discuss important concepts such as chastity and charity. Third, it attempts to show Fielding’s philosophy of human nature, and to what extent his writing unfolds the basic philosophical characteristics of the 18th century lines of thinking. It concludes, among other things, that no narrative devices are worked out haphazardly or merely for amusement; rather, they are used for both didactic and artistic purposes. In this sense, then, the mark of shame bestowed by earlier critics on Fielding as intrusive narrator is eliminated on the account that his presence within the text is directed for teaching purposes. Goodness in his philosophy consists of the twin virtues of charity and chastity, and the latter is a symbol of the national control of passion.

Personality between negative and positive In the novel "Mahabad, a homeland of mist"

Abstract Narrative and structural theories study the components of novel, the most prominent of which is the “Novel Character " component, as it is the first thing that occupies the writer's mind at the starting of the novel. The novelist uses some characters to express what is on its mind of imagines to embody the idea, and through the characters of the novel, the reader can understand the events and the course of the narrative work. On the basis of this importance that the character plays in the narrative construction, we chose it hoping that we will answer a number of questions that are summarized in the following: What does the character represent? - What are the types and classifications of the character in the novel? - How did the characters appear to us in the novel "Mahabad, a Homeland of Fog"? What are the psychological, social, external and intellectual dimensions of its formation? We preferred the works of the great novelist Jan Dost because he is one of the most important contemporary Kurdish novelists, who is characterized by the smoothness of ideas, the robustness of the construction and the depth of meanings. His novel "Mahabad, a homeland of fog" is considered one of the novels that deals with the issues of Kurdish society; Therefore, we were keen in this study to reveal part of Jan Dost's vision of the Kurdish personality and its dimensions in the conditions of wars and crises, such as those experienced by the Kurdish society when the Kurdish Republic was established in Mahabad. Keywords: Character, a novel , Mahabad a Homeland of Fog , Kurd

Ekalavyan (Ekalaivan) in Jayamohan's Novel "Venmurasu" (Colored Ocean)

The Venmurasu is a magnum opus written by author Jayamohan in 26 novels spanning 25,000 pages, which started in January 2014 as a daily chapter on the website. This novel is one of the greatest novels in the world. Varnakadal is one of the 26 novels featured in Jayamohan's Venmurasu. It unfolds in the Mahabharata as the story of the neglected, the defeated, and the passed over. In this, only the history of Ekalaivan, who is one of the representatives of the lower class people, has been taken as the subject of study. This review also explains the plight of Guru Drona, who refused to train him in archery despite being the prince of Asuranadu Garudakulam and the social conditions in which he was treated as an outcast because of being a Vedar clan member on the basis of caste difference. Composed with a different storyline from Vyasa Bharatham, this novel highlights the author Jayamohan's over-imaginative status, the rise to power of the people born into the upper class, and their transgression of the oppressed. Moreover, this analysis also shows that the voices of Ekalavya's father, Hiranyathanus, and mother, Suvarna, are the voices of the lower class against the ruling class.

The Reception of Jane Austen in Early Modern China: A Canonical Perspective

In China, Jane Austen has undergone an amazing metamorphosis from an obscure foreign writer disregarded or disapproved of for a long period to a great novelist highly acclaimed and fully acknowledged. Only recent years have seen the publication of a few scholarly articles on the reception trajectories of Austen in the Chinese academic world. This article revisits the issue, particularly the reception of Austen in early modern China from a canonical perspective. During the first major wave of literary translation, Austen was absent in the translation projects of dominant male translators, especially in Lin Shu’s choice. It was not because of their gender discrimination as generally considered, but because of their lack of canon consciousness. The literary light of Austen, too bright and too sparkling to ignore, was finally shed upon the Chinese land, but her canonical place was not instantly recognized. The wartime translators’ efforts to render Pride and Prejudice into Chinese reflect the difficulty in the making of a canonical Austen under very different historical circumstances.

TEMPS, MEMÒRIA I MITE: LA NARRATIVA DE CIÈNCIA-FICCIÓ D’ANTONI MUNNÉ-JORDÀ (1994-2015)

Antoni Munné-Jordà (Barcelona, 1948) is considered one of the most outstanding authors of contemporary science-fiction literature in the Catalan language. In addition to tracing his dedication to the genre as a specialist and popularizer, this article examines the five novels, Llibre de tot, La paciència del mar, L’única mort, Poso el comptaquilòmetres a zero and Michelíada, and the short story anthology, El mirall venecià, which he has devoted to speculative fiction between 1994 and 2015. The analysis of Michelíada, one of his most risky, complex, and outstanding contributions, is especially dwelled on as a futuristic novel that parodies Homer’s Iliad. Following Isaac Asimov, Munné-Jordà understands science fiction as the literature that deals with human responses to the changes brought about by science and technology. Like the greatest novels of the genre, his work denotes a similar concern for the future of humanity or the destructive capacity of Earthlings. Whether projected into a future time or into the past, Munné-Jordà’s speculative fiction about other worlds reflects on memory and myth and, like the best science fiction by Wells, Ray Bradbury, Dick, or Vonnegut, it asks about the present time and conjures up a future that may be fateful.

The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan

Reviewed by: The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan Dominic Rainsford (bio) John Mullan. The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Pp. x + 431. £16.99. ISBN 978-1-4088-6681-8 (hb). John Mullan is the current Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature at University College London. It is a position with a certain profile in Dickens studies, albeit attached to broader interests and with affinities to literary journalism more than strictly academic research. Previous holders of the Chair have included Karl Miller, founding editor of the London Review of Books, who wrote vividly and eccentrically about Dickens in Doubles (1985) (and for whom, as an awed and besotted student, I wrote my own first essay on Bleak House), and John Sutherland, in whose copious writings about the entire range of Victorian fiction Dickens frequently appears. The Artful Dickens is dedicated to Sutherland, and John Mullan's emphasis on "tricks" and "ploys" owes something to his predecessor's highly successful strategy of promising to take his readers on a quirky exploration, disentangling mysteries along the way, in "crossover" books such as Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1996) and Inside Bleak House (2005). The book begins with the claim that Dickens's technical skills as a writer tend to be underestimated. While it is tempting to object that the last few decades have seen dozens of scholarly books and hundreds of articles that imply the opposite, the claim may still be true as far as Dickens's wider readership (let alone his non-readership) is concerned. Mullan does not assume that his readers know any Dickens criticism at all, and yet, given that he seeks to reveal Dickens's "qualities of formal ingenuity" (8) to a hitherto unsuspecting audience, it is impressive that the book does contain fresh and powerful readings, and that it includes evidence of considerable scholarly effort. This becomes apparent a few pages into the Introduction, where Mullan writes very evocatively about Dickens's manuscripts, describing what he has seen with his own eyes, in the Victoria and Albert Museum and elsewhere, to convey a strong sense of how Dickens must have worked, and above all how seriously he took his choices of word and phrase, sentence by sentence (9 ff.). Mullan divides his emphasis between Dickens's writerly skills and the other traits or qualities that make his work not just good but unpredictable, spectacular, and unique: Dickens as literally (8–9), but also metaphorically, a magician. "From one artful sentence to the next, he was, and is, the most exciting novelist writing in English" (14). The claim not just that Dickens was, but that he is, "the most exciting novelist" has weight coming from Mullan, who is also known for his former column in The Guardian, "Elements of Fiction" (collected in How Novels Work), which addressed the techniques of many present-day authors. Mullan's knowledge of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature [End Page 218] comes frequently to the surface in The Artful Dickens: when, for example, he describes Dickens's tendency to "discover" the monstrous, hinting at "a kind of horror fiction (H. P. Lovecraft? Stephen King?) that has not yet been invented" (29); and when he compares Dickens's innovative use of present-tense narration with James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, or Don DeLillo (85–88); and when he notes that, "[w]ell in advance of … novelists of the late twentieth century, [Dickens] has learnt to include within his narrative his reader's expectations about the designs of the novel" (308). However, Mullan also charts a peculiar affinity between post-Dickensian novelists, from Henry James to Iris Murdoch (127), and some of his best-known contemporaries, such as Trollope (363), insofar as they enjoyed Dickens despite themselves, envying his abilities while being baffled by them, and denigrating the very talents that held them enthralled. Dickens's seriousness as a writer needs to be explained, in other words, even– or perhaps especially– to his would-be peers. After the lively Introduction, The Artful Dickens divides into thirteen chapters, each with a gerundive title expressing Dickens in action in a technical or thematic...

The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan

Reviewed by: The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan John Batchelor The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist. By John Mullan. London: Bloomsbury. 2020. ix+428 pp. £16.99. ISBN 978-1-4088-6683-2. The bibliography of major secondary works on Dickens is now huge. As with Shakespeare, where the bibliography is as extensive as the sea, the task of reading through enough secondary works on Dickens to arrive at a sound judgement of a new one is daunting. For my money the best work on Dickens begins with John Forster's indispensable Life in three volumes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–74), and has been followed by valuable critical studies from Humphrey House, F R. and Q. D. Leavis, John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, John Carey, Vincent Newey, J. Hillis Miller, Harry Stone, and others. A cluster of biographical studies coincided with the second centenary of Dickens's birth, including especially those by Michael Slater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Claire Tomalin (London: Viking, 2011), and most intriguingly Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). There is no shortage of good books on Dickens. So do we need a book like this, which focuses sharply on Dickens's methods? The answer to that is: read it, and you will discover that we do indeed need it. This book by John Mullan is a careful, painstaking, and thoughtful unpicking of Dickens's narrative strategies, exploring in detail the different ways in which each of his modes—including the rhetorical, comical, moral, Gothic, and riotously farcical—contributes to the impact of his work. John Mullan is right to say that Dickens is an 'epicure of fear' (p. 319) and drowning, the terror of drowning and the effect of drowning on the human body. In David Copperfield, the emotionally charged death by drowning of Steerforth, David's friend and little Em'ly's seducer, stirs in David a deep homoerotic Liebestod for his flawed dead hero. Earlier in the same novel, drowning threatens the sexually awakened Em'ly in what Mullan rightly describes as an extraordinary passage in which Dickens violates all narrative conventions. David as narrator anticipates Em'ly's future as a fallen woman. The little girl runs along a 'jagged timber' and is in danger of falling into the sea. Looking forward into a future that only he as first-person narrator can know, David wonders whether 'if the life before her' (that is, her seduction by Steerforth) 'could have been revealed to me at a glance', he would not have done better to have allowed her to drown (p. 287). Drowned humans can also be pillaged, as they are by Gaffer Hexham in Our Mutual Friend, and drowning is a fit punishment for the sexually violent schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, whose name recalls that of Murdstone, David Copperfield's brutal stepfather. These names evoke a chain of significance: a headstone marks a grave, while sex, shit (merde), and death link these two narratives. Much lighter and funnier meanings appear in Flora Finching's blushingly confused banter with her former suitor, Arthur Clennam, in Our Mutual Friend. [End Page 290] Mullan rightly finds this foolish character good-hearted and generous, and finally sympathetic. Flora Finching is based on a woman Dickens had once loved: 'In 1855 he had eagerly arranged a reunion with the former Maria Beadnell, whom he had unsuccessfully courted more than twenty years earlier.' He was disappointed to find her 'now in her mid-forties, stout and silly' (p. 153). Stout and silly though she may be, she is also good-hearted and generous-spirited, and as Flora she emerges as a 'rounded' figure in more than one sense. Although crazed, Flora is well worth listening to. She erupts into an unpunctuated monologue which has a central theme: 'The withered chaplet my dear,' said Flora, with great enjoyment, 'is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what's-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and look upon the ashes...

The Interpretation of Gregor's Transformation in The Metamorphosis from the Perspective of Existentialism

The Metamorphosis is one of the greatest novels written by Franz Kafka in 1915, which depicts the surreal and absurd transformation of Gregor Samsa into a beetle. Existentialism is borrowed to help interpret the implications of Gregor's transformation. After the transformation, Gregor lives in hatred, dread, absurdity, hopelessness, helplessness and despair. He is isolated, estranged, alienated by his family and the society. Centering on Gregor's transformation, this paper discovers that the authentic existing situation of the underprivileged is entirely revealed in this novella; the pathetic dark side of the human existence is vividly depicted and presented via transformation by Franz Kafka, who meanwhile deeply explores the negative sensations of human existence.

Dostoevsky and the Word “Jew”: A Quantitative Analysis of F.M. Dostoevsky’s Greatest Novels

Abstract The relationship of F.M Dostoevsky with Jews attracted the attention of numerous scholars throughout the years, many of whom attempted to grapple with the views of the great writer and their origin. In this article we will attempt to show this relationship by analyzing six of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, written through the entirety of his career. We are analyzing these novels using Distant Reading in conjunction with Close Reading, tools that are commonly used in the field of digital humanities, which enabled us to show visually the extent of F.M. Dostoevsky’s engagement with this topic. The study poses two research questions: 1. To what extent did the writer use the more denigrating term “Zhid”? 2. Can we see a correlation between the writer’s portrayal of Jews with the definition of Anti-Semitism as it was known during his era? The obtained results show that there is clearly a correlation between the definition of anti-Semitism as it was understood at the time of Dostoevsky and the “Jew” as depicted in his novels, as the financial motif is paramount in the depiction of Jews as this is the central topic in 49% of the negative sentences in which the word “Jew” appears, with 59% of these sentences classified as stereotypes. The negative financial stereotype constitutes 32% of the entire corpus. In addition, we found the term “Zhid” is commonly used by the writer, a variation of which constitutes 75% of the total terms used to depict Jews.

Материалы к реконструкции работы А.Ф. Лосева о Ф.М. Достоевском в литературной секции ГАХН

The article deals with one interesting historical and philosophical fact that is still poorly investigated in the field Dostoevsky's studies: the analysis of the work on Fyodor Dostoevsky conducted by the famous Russian philosopher Aleksei Fedorovich Losev while working at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN). The article also provides additional information about Losev's work at GAKhN in the 1920s, based on archival evidence. Particular attention is paid to the activities of the Russian philosopher at GAKhN's Literary Section in 1927-1929 (in the group for the study of ancient literature, in the Commission for the Study of Dostoevsky's work). The author cites numerous evidences of Losev's special attention to the work of Dostoevsky, including the fact that the Russian philosopher took part in discussions with reports on topics devoted to the work of the Russian writer. The author draws attention to the fact that the main point of Losev's analysis of Dostoevsky's work was the symbolism of the writer. Dostoevsky's work attracted Losev throughout his life. This is evidenced not only by youthful memories of his passion for the work of the great novelist, but also references to the Russian writer, which are observed in his works of different periods. The author notes that Losev turned to the study of the problem of the symbol in the works of Dostoevsky already in the 1920s, but the philosopher managed to publish these studies only much later. According to Losev, symbolic images permeate the entire work of the Russian writer. Losev's prose of the 1930-1940s also did not remain devoid of ideological contaminations in the spirit of Dostoevsky: suffice it to mention here such works of the Russian philosopher as Perepiska v komnate (Correspondence in the Room), Vstrecha (The Meeting), the novel Zhenshchina-myslitel' (The Woman-thinker). The same religious pathos of Losev's philosophical discourse is also present in his prose, for example, in the themes of man's estrangement from ideal life and rejection of the religious sphere. Based on a comprehensive analysis of archival sources, primarily the minutes of GAKhN meetings stored in the RGALI archive, and their comparison, the author presents, as far as possible, a picture of the activities and interests of the Russian philosopher, which helps to better represent the range of his scientific interests and significantly expands the possibilities for further research on this period of Losev's life, and also provides new materials for the history of GAKhN.

Suffering and Rejuvenation in the Novels of Chaman Nahal

This article discusses the partition between India and Pakistan. After partition how people became mentally disable and suffering from so many problems. One of the greatest novelists Chaman Nahal who has written the most famous novel “Azadi” during the partition of India and Pakistan in which he writes about historical and political events and rejuvenation, before and after the declaration of British division in June 1947 to vacate India after partitioning it.

The American Dream in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

The paper explores the corrupted idea of the American Dream in one of the greatest novels written on the topic, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even though the pursuance of the American Dream stems from the idea of hard work and success that is pure, truthful, and just, Jay Gatsby’s approach as a protagonist in achieving it leads to his demise. His relationships with other characters, particularly Tom Buchanan and Daisy Buchanan, were tainted because of the morally corrupted notion of the American Dream. This paper textually analyzes The Great Gatsby and explores that how Gatsby runs after a dream (Daisy) that he cannot achieve even after becoming financially wealthy, and how the corrupt ideals of the American Dream become the reason that he cannot fulfill his own dreams. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald's attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.

The Investigation of Indonesian EFL Learners’ Perception and Understanding on Equality Values in “Jane Eyre” Novel: A Gender Perspective

This research investigated the Indonesian EFL Learners’ perception and understanding of gender equality values in one of the greatest novels, Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847 as the picture of women emancipation at the time. To this aim, 100 Indonesian pre-intermediate EFL learners were selected from among 125 students at one of the public universities in Banten. They were given a questionnaire and it was analyzed descriptively to explore the content of the story, equality values and the connection with the value of life. The analysis of the data revealed that first, there is still gender inequality between men and women. Second, self-expression, employment, and education were dominant themes found in the issues of gender inequality in the novel. Third, the gender values in the novel “Jane Eyre” are still related to the current reality or the environment. Moreover, extensive reading activities were impactful in rising students’ interest in reading and awareness of social issues. Therefore, this study suggests that the values of gender equality can be brought to be a good discussion in the class through extensive reading activities.

Introduction

On November 6, 2020, late in the sesquicentennial year of Dickens's death, two photographs of Dickens appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Arresting and similar images of the inimitable one sitting in a chair and revealed in half profile as taken by the Watkins Brothers circa 1860. Beneath them on the top of the Book Review section is the large-type title, “Dickensworld.” Indeed.The long essay that followed is ostensibly a review of a new biography of Dickens, but that is summarily dismissed, and what in fact is presented is a valuable musing on Dickens the man, his works, his afterlife, and especially his reputation, that begins with the following: This year is the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens — Dickens, who as time goes by emerges ever more conclusively as England's greatest novelist and the literary figure who has come to govern our sense of the Victorian era; to embody it, really. And who also happens, in all likelihood, to be the most popular novelist who ever lived.Readers of this journal will appreciate that ringing endorsement of the writer who we think, read, and write about. The author of that review essay is the venerable Robert Gottlieb, former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf book publishers and The New Yorker magazine. He is surely as informed on literary matters of the present and past century as anyone who has graced the pages of the New York Times, so his views command respect. As editors we welcome his affirmations, including on the value of aesthetic judgment and, implicitly, the value of what we do as literary scholars.As editors today we often are presented with essays and perspectives that grind critical paths and take hard work before they emerge in print. We regularly cry out for help to identify the new ideas so as to help the author express them to us uninformed though learned readers and editors. We thank all of our outside readers for their continued help and support in bringing new understandings and appreciations to the world of Victorian fiction, even while currently struggling with the many obstacles brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. And we appreciate Robert Gottlieb for bringing us back to the big picture, “Dickensworld,” and reminding a wide audience that Dickens matters a lot in these days when the humanities are being challenged as passé and irrelevant.Over the decades this journal has been open to all critical approaches, moods, and modalities, and has been well served—if we may say so ourselves—by a series of capable and respected editors. Things evolve, Dickens remains. We wish to thank our esteemed coeditor, Caroline Reitz—who has with our good wishes taken over as the executive editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection—for her companionship and dedication to Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction through Volume 51.For this current volume, we once more express our gratitude for important and practical assistance received from the following administrators at CUNY's Graduate Center: Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Julia Wrigley, former Interim President James Muyskens; Ph.D. Program in English Executive Officer Kandice Chuh; and Nancy Silverman, Academic Program Coordinator, Ph.D. Program in English. Anna Metreveli in the Business Office continues to be the ablest of facilitators.In addition, we extend thanks to Professor John O. Jordan, Director of the The Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Renee A. Fox, Co-Director; and Courtney Mahaney, Assistant Director of The Dickens Project. See also <http//dickens.uscs.edu>.We gratefully acknowledge our indebtedness to Paris Shih, a doctoral student in English at the Graduate Center who was our editorial assistant during the early period when this issue was in formation and to his successor Katharine Williams for their consistently efficient and reliable help.Finally, we thank the following members of the Journals Department at Penn State University Press for their encouragement, guidance, efficiency and support: Julie Lambert, Journals Manager; Astrid Meyer, Journals Managing Editor; and Rachel Lynn Ginder, Production Assistant and collaboratrice extraordinaire.—The Editors