Identity In Fiction Research Articles

COGNITIVE-MATRIX ANALYSIS AS A TOOL FOR EXPLORING CULTURAL IDENTITY OF A FICTION AUTHOR: A STUDY OF M. PORTER’S “A GRANDMOTHER BEGINS THE STORY”

The present paper belongs to a series of articles with a focus on ethnospecific concepts and identity construction in multicultural fiction from a cognitive-functional perspective. It seeks to take a new look on ethnospecific concepts, namely those which belong to an author’s idioconceptual subsystem, the latter being understood as a unique configuration of concepts in one’s mind, and constitute cognitive matrices. In accordance with N.N. Boldyrev’s research, the term «cognitive matrix» is used to denote a system of interconnected cognitive contexts which open onto different conceptual domains. The aim of the study is to demonstrate the potential of using cognitive-matrix analysis to reveal the connections between the cognitive contexts in the structure of an ethnospecific concept which unfold in a work of fiction, as well as the conceptual domains they are related to, on the one hand, and the many facets of an author’s cultural identity on the other. The paper outlines the results of the cognitive-matrix analysis of the concept BISON as represented in the novel “A Grandmother Begins the Story” by M. Porter, a Canadian writer of Métis background. Detail is given on several cognitive contexts in the structure of the concept in question pertaining to the following conceptual domains: NATURE, HISTORY, SPIRITUAL CULTURE, SPACE, TIME. The results obtained show that the ways in which the ethnospecific concept BISON functions in the text under consideration are affiliated with the writer’s identity and allow her not only to implement her creative ideas but also actualize her cultural identity in fiction.

Phenomenological Narratives: Exploring Space and Identity in Fiction

Phenomenological Narratives: Exploring Space and Identity in Fiction

The Art of Localization: Exploring Native American Heritage and Identity in Christine Day's Fiction

The Art of Localization: Exploring Native American Heritage and Identity in Christine Day's Fiction

The Rambutan Orchard: Ecocritical Reading of the Kelantanese Malay Identity in Fiction

The Rambutan Orchard: Ecocritical Reading of the Kelantanese Malay Identity in Fiction

Female Self-objectification and Identity in Fiction “Before She Sleeps” by Bina Shah

This novel is about women's objectification and identity through the concept of polyandry. This research highlights these types of problems related to women that are increasing in society day by day. This article aims to illustrate Polyandry and pain in women. They do not have the choice to live their life freely. They are like scapegoats in a patriarchal society. Polyandry is an ancient Greek word that means many men. It is first practiced in India. This article is wrapped with the viewpoints of some writers such as Tiwari, Goldstein, and Peter. This article presents a clear picture of Green City. Though it looks like a prosperous city yet it is proved a hell for women. In this regard, women chose an underground place to live named Panah. They deal with forty clients in order to win bread and butter. Men use different types of techniques to tempt women, such as whisky and champagne, to fulfill their purposes. Women in Panah provide them intimacy in the shame of lullaby, not sex. So, the study explains traumatic realities and also the relationship between agonies and physical distortion concerning the women characters, along with the concept of polyandry, which affects the life of women.

Retracted: Mental Writing and Mental Health and Cultural Identity in Doris Lessing's Science Fiction.

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2022/2215829.].

Mothered/Othered Daughters: Mother Abjection and Diasporic Identity in Ethnic American Short Fiction

Mother-daughter relationships are usually fraught with tension, which is intensified by the cultural and social conditions under which the mother and the daughter live in culturally diverse societies. Immigrant mothers affect their daughters’ identity formation as they simultaneously nourish and hinder their initiation into the societies they reside in. Through adopting Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject as a psychoanalytic critical framework, the study examines the extent to which the ambivalent feelings the daughter usually shows towards her mother are embodied in the conflicting feelings she experiences towards the two cultures forming her identity as a second generation immigrant. This is done by analysing the connection between the mother-daughter relationship, the diasporic daughter’s identity and the cross-cultural relations she forms in a culturally diverse setting as manifested in four short stories written by four ethnic-American writers: “Everyday Use” by the African American Alice Walker, “Two Kinds” by the Chinese American Amy Tan, “Aunt Moon’s Young Man” by the Native American Linda Hogan and “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter” by the Arab American Laila Lalami.

Divergences, commonalities and convergences: Nationalism and the poetics of identity in Nigerian fiction

With more than 200 nations yoked together by the British solely for the purpose of colonialism in Nigeria, little wonder that questions bordering on lack of converging ideologies have consistently informed the nation’s narrative. If what unite the several ethnicities are paradigms that are vestiges of colonialism, and other scaffolding commonalities that necessitate the creation of a new identity, the question then is are these constructs synergistic enough to smoothen over the differing schisms and create long-lasting unifying parameters that moderate true nationalism? Using sections from selected novels, this article attempts to appraise the nebulous narratives that connect Nigeria’s various ethnicities, despite the presence of seemingly irreconcilable ethnic divergences. The study traces the manifestation of ethnicity in Nigerian fiction from the biased presentation by the first generation of writers to the ‘national’ fictionalization by contemporary writers. It discovers that though there is improvement in the presentation of multiculturalism and ethnicity in contemporary Nigerian fiction, there is still much to be written about the multicultural aspect of Nigeria’s postcolonial experience. The article concludes by theorizing that failure to harness the merits of the commonalities has been the bane of Nigeria since independence and proposes a re-engineering of multicultural ethics and also admonishes for a reconstruction of a new national character.

Sensation Fiction: New Directions

2022 marks forty years since Patrick Brantlinger posed the question ‘What is Sensational About the Sensation Novel?’ Since then, scholars have continued to probe and extend early definitions of sensation fiction as a short-lived subgenre dealing with secret crimes taking place in genteel Victorian settings. Research on sensation fiction has developed apace, and scholars have developed approaches utilising methodologies from media studies, history of science, disability studies, and beyond. In doing so, they have greatly expanded the range of sensation novelists studied. Such research (benefitting from the enormous spread of digitisation since Brantlinger’s article) has also highlighted the significance of serialisation, adaptation, and experimentation in sensation fiction and the relationship between form and content has continued to be of interest. The past decade has also seen an interest in sensation as a global publishing phenomenon and this has led to scholars tackling more fully issues of race, racism, and national identity in sensation fiction. The articles in this issue build upon these recent interventions and seek to point out possible new paths in the study of sensation fiction.

Crisis of an Individual’s identity in Rasheed Amjad's Fiction

ر شید امجد کے افسانو ں میں فردِ وا حد کی شنا خت کا بحران
 Rasheed Amjad holds a recognized place in the genre of Urdu fiction. He laid the foundation of bringing the old visions of mysticism in conformity of scientific innovation. The topics discussed by him are very much developed in thought. In this genre he has discussed many aspects in term of an individual and his or her problems. While exposing the internal and external aspects of a person on individual and social levels we see a crisis of a person's individual identity in Rasheed Amjad’s short stories.

Mental Writing and Mental Health and Cultural Identity in Doris Lessing's Science Fiction.

As one of the most outstanding female writers in post-war Britain, Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has a strong spirit of the times in her works. In order to further understand the characteristics and spirit of the times in Doris Lessing's novels, Doris Lessing's science fiction is taken as the research object in this study, through in-depth research on novel storytelling, philosophical psychology, thematic forms, etc., from the perspective of emotional psychology model, to deeply analyze the characteristics of psychological writing, mental health, and cultural identity in their science fiction. Doris Lessing's science fiction reflects the political, cultural, and historical background of the times, and on this basis, it reflects humanitarian concerns through characters' psychological writing and cultural identity. It is shown in the results of the study.

Realist Fiction as the Rightful Genre of our Time: Realist Fiction after the Postpositivist Intervention

Realist fiction, which had a pivotal place in 19th. Century literature, has lost its central position in the contemporary literary scene as modernism, postmodernism and poststructuralism have raised some serious challenges against it, advocating experimentalism in fiction, instead. Still, in our age, when globalization and capitalism breed different forms of marginalizations and injustices in societies, it is the realist fiction that better than any other form can depict the struggles and pains of these marginalized lives. Thus, realist fiction deserves to be considered a major genre of our time rather than a second-rater. This paper attempts to investigate into the present state of realist fiction in the literary scene, and it argues that, with the significant theoretical backing from the postpositivist realist critics, it can move toward reclaiming its position in literature today. Postpositivist realists base their defense of realist fiction on the notion that the representation of reality, identity and experience in realist fiction, in spite of being theory-mediated and affected by ideologies and discourses, is possible, as these objects of representation are real and important for being real. The paper maintains that the postpositivist support can favorably affect the present place of realist fiction. Still, the rightful realist fiction of our time, in tune with the developments in the theories of knowledge and fiction, unlike the 19th. century realist fiction, has patches of experimentalism, while keeping its realistic ethos, which further indicates that the contemporary fiction is the fiction of an era affected by postpositivist realist concepts.

Narrative and Linguistic Representation of Cornish Identity in Fiction and Screen Adaptations (the Case of Poldark)

This paper explores how Cornish national and regional identity is construed in works of fiction: W. Graham’s Poldark literary series (1945-1946) and its BBC screen adaptation (2015-2019). The research looks into the linguistic and narrative representations of nationalism and regionalism in Cornwall and demonstrates how Cornish national identity is represented. We focus on how the plot, the setting, and the means of characterization are employed to build a sense of Cornish national identity.

Subversion and Exclusive Identity in Palestinian Fiction by Women

Palestinian fiction by women subverts and challenges the existing gender paradigms and traditional patriarchal norms in the Arab culture. This paper explores Huzama Habayeb's novel Velvet with the theoretical backing of Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, thus maintaining that a critical focus on the nexus between distinctive performativity and exclusive identities offers an alternative stance to the oppressive patriarchy in the Arab world. With the recent refugee crisis in the Muslim world, these narratives become extremely important and relevant, offering a space where issues of gender, identity, patriarchy, and religion erupt and coincide. Unveiling the construct of the female gender as only a set of performative norms instead of being an existentialist reality offers distinctive gender configurations and a site of exclusive identity for women. The paper establishes that Palestinian fiction by women has become a site for women's actualization where they defy and resist male hegemony.

Georgian Hero of the Soviet Era Against the Universe: Science Fiction as a Nation’s Coping Mechanism

To download this paper, please, click here . This paper analyses the process of constructing the national identity in the Soviet Georgian science fiction. Using the postcolonial approach, I argue that the genre provided Georgian writes with the unique possibility to imagine the future of Georgia, independent from the Russian oppression. The article concentrates on three strategies that serve this very goal: the first strategy entails placing Georgia in the centre of the future communist society; the second strategy entails transforming the historical rival of Russia, Western Europe and the United States of America, into Georgia’s arch-enemy; while the third strategy concentrates on the critique of the imperialist worldview. In all three cases, the narratives containing nationalistic sentiments still manage to stay within the borders of socialist realism.

Teaching Hemingway and Race ed. by Gary Holcomb

Reviewed by: Teaching Hemingway and Race ed. by Gary Holcomb Ian Marshall Teaching Hemingway and Race. Edited by Gary Holcomb. Kent UP, 2018, 248 pp. $35.00. In her seminal book, Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction, Amy L. Strong argues that "[o]pening the canon and recovering texts by women and people of color must happen concurrently with new readings of traditional texts" (13-14). Teaching Hemingway and Race has managed to do just that, deftly combining new readings of Hemingway's classic texts with lesser read ones and shedding new light on writers of color and the ways in which Hemingway influenced, and was influenced by them. The collection, edited by Gary Holcomb, follows in a line of books in the "Teaching Hemingway" series and is focused primarily on the subject of "race." As intimated in the Forward, written by the series editor, Mark, P. Ott, and noted in the introduction, written by Holcomb, the "collection intends to provide a practicable means for teaching the subject of race in Hemingway's writing and related texts, from how to approach ethnic, nonwhite international, and tribal characters to how to teach difficult questions of racial representation, without apology for Hemingway's sometimes troubling representation of race" (2). Its other objective is to "offer strategies to assist the instructor in teaching the contemporary student reader, trained to read through the multicultural studies lens, how to work through these troubling representations" (3). That this book tackles issues of race, racism, multiculturalism, and identity in the way that it does, makes it essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century or contemporary American literature, as well as for anyone interested in how a study of literature might provide an opportunity for dialogue, across disparate political, cultural, racial, and ethnic lines. The first part of the book (the first six of the ten essays), as Holcomb points out, is dedicated to questions of pedagogy. The remaining four essays "considers Hemingway's work in conversation with writings by black authors" (3). These, in some ways, are reminiscent of Holcomb's Hemingway and the Black Renaissance collection. The first essay, "Reading Between the (Color) Lines: Teaching Race in Hemingway's 'The Battler'" by Marc Dudley, tackles the thorny issue of racist language in Hemingway's fiction head on. Dudley takes us through a series of pedagogical steps he employs to prepare his students to read what he readily identifies as a bizarre, yet brilliant and complex text. He concludes that, because Hemingway drew on an historical newspaper account and changed one of the people presented in that account from white to black, he made [End Page 110] "this story expressly about race" (10). Dudley asks his students to probe why Hemingway so aggressively uses racial epithets in this story, and ultimately suggests to them that it is "both a false flag and a deliberate directive by the writer" (12). The racist language, then, demonstrates Hemingway's complex use of contemporary attitudes toward racial representation, and shows Bugs as both unmistakably Black, yet also unmistakably controlling in the text. The second essay, "Teaching Hemingway Short Stories through the Lens of Critical Race Theory" by Margaret E. Wright-Cleveland is focused on Hemingway's In Our Time, and excellent pedagogical strategies for the teaching of it that probe deeply into the text and the author, and the student's engagement with both. The essay grounds In Our Time in an understanding of a "racial education" and uses essential ideas from Critical Race Theory to teach the constructedness of race. The pedagogy described in this essay asks students to consider how their own society constructs races, ethnicity, social class, and nation (17) and invites them to explore in a comparative way, Hemingway's Oak Park as his first racial context. "Hemingway's Experts: Teaching Race in Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa" by Ross K. Tangedal "presents a teaching approach for Hemingway's complex nonfiction texts with a critical eye toward the complication of race" (30). Tangedal argues that Hemingway's depiction of race through his "experts" Belmonte, the Zuritos, Droopy, and M'Cola asks critics and readers to address the development of racialized characters...

Vagaries of (Academic) Identity in Contemporary Fiction

Aim. The article attempts to look at question of academic identities through the prism the academic novel. This literary genre emerged in English and American literature in early 1950s and centers on the image of the professor. In Slavic literatures the genre of the academic novel appears roughly in early 1990s, which is directly connected with the change of the political order following the fall of the Berlin Wall and disbanding of the Soviet Union. Contemporary Ukrainian literature with its post-Soviet heritage presents a unique source for the study of academic discourse.
 Methods. An interdisciplinary approach which combines sociological investigation of academic identity (Henkel 2005) and hermeneutic literary analysis is used for this study. In this respect three novels from the contemporary Ukrainian literature – “University” (2007) and “Kaleidoscope” (2009) by Igor Yosypiv, and “Drosophila over a Volume of Kant” (2010) by Anatoliy Dnistrovyj – are chosen for analysis.
 Results. Analysis of the novels shows that the literary representation of academics’ lives goes in line with the sociological findings, which, in defining a successful academic, put a strong accent on a discipline and academic institution. The interpretation of Yosypiv’s novels about a Ukrainian nephrologist at the American Medical School suggests that protagonist’s academic success is rooted in the field of applied science as well as an American institution of higher education, while Dnistrovyj’s novel sees a failure of a philosophy professor in the crisis of the Humanities as survived in post-Soviet Ukraine.
 Conclusion. The given novels of Igor Yosypiv and Anatoliy Dnistrovyj show that in case of academic identity theme, the academic novels support sociological studies, i.e. the discipline (Applied Sciences and Humanities) as well as the university rank (American vs. post-Soviet) play a decisive role in scholars’ academic life. This in its turn proves that the academic novel, like in the time of its emergence in the 1950s, continues to be a literary chronicler of higher education.

Readers' Advisory: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Fiction: Suggesting New Titles to Make All Readers Feel Like They Belong

Epochs of transition keep us on the alert. They ask us to keep our eyes open upon the distant horizons, our minds listening to seize every indication that can enlighten us: reading, reflection, searching, must never stop; the mind must keep flexible in order to lose nothing, to acquire any knowledge that can aid our mission. . . . Immobility and arrested development bring decadence; a beauty, fully unfolded, is ready to perish. So, let us not rest on our beautiful past.—Janet Erskine Stuart, RSCJ, 1914The above quote from Janet Erskine Stuart of the Society of the Sacred Heart, fondly referred to as Mother Stuart, was written in 1914, at a time when the world was in turmoil. A religious congregation that has included many remarkable and forward-thinking women, the Society has a reputation for persevering and growing stronger during times of change. Born out of the French Revolution, the society was formed in France to educate children in a time when a new world was emerging. Education endures as a core value of the Society—and most importantly, the concept of educating the whole person. Indeed, the goals that guide the Society of the Sacred Heart include a deep respect for intellectual values, social awareness, and personal growth in an atmosphere of wise freedom.

Raiding the Superhero Wardrobe: A Review of The Superhero Costume – Identity and Disguise in Fact and Fiction

The Superhero Costume – Identity and Disguise in Fact and Fiction , B. Brownie and D. Graydon, Bloomsbury Academic, 192 pages, 2016, 15 b/w images, ISBN: 978-1472595904 This review provides a costume designer’s reading of The Superhero Costume – Identity and Disguise in Fact and Fiction by Barbara Brownie and Danny Graydon (Bloomsbury, 2016). This book explores the superhero costume within comics, films and its translation into real life, and shows how difficult it is to stitch the line between symbolism and practicality, spectacle and realism, and ultimately between fiction and fact. While there remains some unevenness in how the gender of superheroes makes a difference to the costume and there is a lack of a useful conclusion as far as academic books go, this book discusses a lot of issues that could (and should) inform the designs within a superhero’s wardrobe.

Creating narratives from the Victorian photographic archive: re-imaginings of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work in Ulverton (1992) and The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (2014)

Contemporary historical fictions increasingly employ affective relations with Victorian photographs as nodal points within their narratives, introducing an archive-like structure of traces to the texts. The evocation of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s visual traces in contemporary neo-Victorian texts exemplifies this shift towards an archival subjectivity, particularly because such qualities are inherent in her original material. Photography critics have long noted that Cameron’s evocative portraits and illustrations suggest blurred relations between models and characters, outward appearance and the self, and the material and the ethereal. Drawing on work on creative readings of photograph albums, and on the idea of ‘rhythms’ of pictoriality in a text, I suggest that Cameron’s photographic albums create fluid meaning and narrative from a dialogue of image traces, intended to be interpreted by the viewer’s empathetic imagination. Taking this further, I argue that this Victorian form of visual narrative creates a kind of grounding for the modern use of pictoriality in fiction. I identify two novels that evoke Cameron’s character and style as part of multi-stranded narratives, Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992) and Michelle Lovric’s The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (2014), discerning within them structured compositions of subjective ekphrastic images which produce a form of novel-as-archive. In this form, narrative meaning is created from a focus on the successive scrutiny of images. In an unorthodox and cross-temporal relationship between word and image, the narrative aesthetics of a Victorian photographer become productive of plays of identity, representation, and structure in contemporary fiction.