Imagination Of Writers Research Articles

Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer's Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia

Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer's Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia

Post-apartheid transnationalism in black South African literature: a reality or a fallacy?

The quest of this paper is to probe whether globalising post-nationalism impacts on post- apartheid black South African English literature in a manner that suggests a blurring of distinctive African identities. This is done against the background that black South African literature right from its written beginnings in the early 19th century has coalesced into a taxonomically distinct entity forming a non-negligible component of South African literature written in English. I first analyse two post-apartheid novels written by the black writers Niq Mhlongo (Dog Eat Dog, 2004) and Sindiwe Magona (Beauty’s Gift, 2008). Secondly, I consider three post-apartheid novels by the black writers Phaswane Mpe (Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 2001), Kgebetli Moele (Room 207, 2009) and Kopano Matlwa (Coconut, 2007). I approach an examination of the five post-apartheid novels by separating them into two categories, as a way of indicating that black South African literature of this era remains as stylistically varied as that of earlier periods, albeit broadly within a mould continuing to characterise it as black. In order to justify an underlying common allegiance to localised identity cutting across the two categories in which I place these five post-apartheid novels, evidence of such a pervasively black feature is explained inter-categorically, even as intra-categorical affinities are demonstrated. I trace these two levels of typology within the conceptual framework of two main groups of theorists. The first group consists of commentators such as Carrol Clarkson in her assertion that the identity of black Africans in the post-apartheid era as portrayed in the fiction of writers such as Phaswane Mpe is such that “educated and urbanised individuals should no longer identify” with and share beliefs having to do with African identity and “a common and accountable response to that which the community represents.” The attitude of these critics has led to Leon de Kock seeing both black and white post-apartheid literature warranting interpretation with a “sense of a post-national configuration—indeed, now a transnational constellation.” I demonstrate in this paper that post-apartheid fiction written by blacks not only defies theorists’ subordination of imaginative writers’ centrality in social discourse, but goes further specifically to chafe against normative characterisation as transnational. The second main category constituting the theoretical matrix within which I examine the discourses of the five selected novels includes theorists such as Rob Gaylard, in his observation that Es’kia Mphahlele “can be seen as the founder of a tradition of black writing that runs through writers like Miriam Tlali, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda to Phaswane Mpe,” with the thread splicing them together being a grounding of these authors’ writings in the philosophy or worldview of Afrikan Humanism.

The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner

Reviewed by: The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner Karen Harvey Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner, eds. The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. xviii + 560 pp. Ill. $90.00 ( 978-1-4696-4). The eighteenth-century term "generation," as the editors of this volume point out, has no modern equivalent. Connoting human, animal, and plant reproduction, embryology, reproductive health and heredity, the term is capacious in ways that the closest modern equivalent "reproduction"—simply is not. And generation did not only concern the physical body. The soul, mind, and emotions were all engaged in the processes of generation. Moreover, the working together of the physical, material, and immaterial in the processes of generation—if we can make such distinctions for this period—were the concern of philosophers and politicians, scientists and satirists. "Little wonder," the editors of this volume note, "that reproduction in its broadest sense should have claimed so significant a space in the public imaginary" (p. 9). The Secrets ofGeneration amply captures this capacious understanding of "generation." The book is organized in four thematic sections. "Generation, Species, Breeding," including essays on blood, race, and incest, demonstrates that ideas about how generation worked held broader political and philosophical implications. The chapters in "Fetus, Child, Mother" explore the relationship between mother and child, understandings of personhood, and the violence and deformity that could occur during gestation. The section, "Pathologies, Body Parts, Display," considers how new medical and aesthetic practices shaped representations of the reproductive organs (the female pelvis, the ovary, and the penis) and indeed of the whole body (whether fat or lean, alive or dead). The final section, "Attitudes, Tropes, Satire," considers how fruitful the topic of generation was for a range of printed texts and imaginative writers, from Aristotle's Masterpiece to midwifery books to verse satires. [End Page 446] Twenty-two fascinating chapters written by scholars from several disciplines explore generation in a number of guises, from the medical to the literary, the biological to the economic. Space necessarily precludes a discussion of every chapter but each one discusses an aspect of generation in creative and engaging ways. Readers will learn about both medical and lay theories about conception and gestation, about attitudes to the roles that men and women played in generation, about the changing ways that the human body was represented and about which particular aspects of the process of generation made eighteenth-century men and women laugh. The risk for such a wide-ranging volume on such a topic is that the final product becomes a collection of disparate studies. Yet the editors have done a wonderful job of crafting a coherent volume that illustrates but also adds to the richness of this field. Given that the volume covers the whole of the eighteenth century, some discussion of change in the Introduction would have helped readers situate the various chapters and gain a sense of the contours of the several momentous transformations over this period (for example, nervous science, anatomy, and changing ideas about gender that affected how people understood the specific contributions that men and women made to conception). Nevertheless, this minor omission is outweighed by undoubted richness of the chapters. Throughout these chapters, a number of important recurring themes emerge. Several chapters ask what happened when generation went wrong or failed, thereby illuminating deeper understandings of the processes of reproduction and the body more generally. A second theme is the link between the body and mind and the many ways in which this affected the process of generation, not least the development of the unborn. The relationship between new knowledge and new ways of visualizing the body is a third and fruitful theme. Overall, then, the themes raised by these chapters touch not only upon reproduction but relate to our broader understanding of the processes and representation of the body in the long eighteenth century. This book will be essential reading for those interested in the history of reproduction, but any scholar working on the history of the body would do well to consult within its pages. Karen Harvey University...

Logistics support as efficient business and transport

Overcoming physical barriers between buyers and sellers, when the delivery of the goods in question or of passengers when it comes to passenger traffic, is the main task of logistics, practices and skills. When it concerned modern trends clearly we can say that the future has already begun. In this paper, we will point to a growing, you might say revolutionary developments in the field of passenger traffic - crossing the 1000 km in 10 minutes is no longer a figment of the imagination of talented and imaginative writers of science fiction. This is already a reality that should be expected as a mass phenomenon in the coming short-term period. When Serbia is concerned, progress is evident in logistics - as confirmed by and large, do not now recorded infrastructure projects to be implemented no later than the end of 2020.

Criticizing Kings: Gender, Classical History, and Subversive Writing in Seventeenth-Century England

AbstractThis article provides one of the first studies of two late works by George Chapman, “Pro Vere” (1622) and “A iustification of a strange action of Nero” (1629). Through a close examination of these works, and through situating Chapman’s texts alongside other neglected works of the 1620s that voiced opposition to the Stuart court and kings, the article examines the critical and subversive role that classical history and gendered language played in forging ideological conflict in England during the Stuart period. More broadly, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of studying imaginative writings for understanding Stuart political culture.

Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin.

Between 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists - including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer 'attacks' from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies - and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510. Daniel Wakelin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii+345.

<i>Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510</i>. Daniel Wakelin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii+345.

Text, Representation and Revision: Re-visioning Partition Violence in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas

Partition is a complex historical reality that continues to puzzle the minds of scholars, historians and imaginative writers, who, ever since its occurrence, have endeavored to comprehend, through their numerous texts and writings, the subtle nuances of the complex strands that shaped the making of this seminal event. The present study attempts to examine, through a comparative analysis of Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Sahni’s Tamas, how the profoundly sensitive and deeply perceptive imagination of both Singh and Sahni create texts which re-enact, with sheer clarity and force, the happenings of partition and hence enable the readers to re-vision the complexities involved in its occurrence, create awareness/consciousness in them regarding those historical blunders, the consequences of which are still borne by the people and also urge them to revise/reform their attitudes, thinking and practices so that their present as well future is safeguarded against such catastrophic events.

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” by Maximillian E. Novak

Reviewed by: Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” by Maximillian E. Novak Nicholas Seager Maximillian E. Novak. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.”. Newark: Delaware, 2014. Pp. x + 239. $75. Defoe is sometimes accused of cobbling together the Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) out of a motley mix of unconnected essays written many years earlier. The present book comprises eleven of Mr. Novak’s previously published essays, some lightly (and tacitly) revised, with a new introduction and afterword. The oldest essay was originally published in 1982, though most are more recent: eight are from 2007 or later. Mr. Novak explains that the essays are “partly products of my writing the extensive notes and introductions to the three volumes” of Robinson Crusoe that will be published as part of the laggard Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. Collectively the essays situate Defoe as an experimental and innovative novelist during the “miraculous years of inventiveness and imagination” from 1718 to 1724 in which he produced his major prose fictions. Robinson Crusoe is the focus of all of the essays, though there are insightful comments on the author’s other [End Page 114] novels. No less than Defoe’s essays in the final part of Crusoe, Mr. Novak’s pieces hang together surprisingly well in their repurposed form. In Chapter 1, “Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form” (first published in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel in 1996), Mr. Novak demonstrates that Defoe progressively explored ways of rendering “independent characters who tell their stories as emanations of their character and experiences,” as he advanced from works like A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718), through Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), to The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Mr. Novak shows in Chapter 2 how Defoe’s interest in the techniques of realist painting, and in Chapter 3 how his “sense of the inadequacy of language,” informed his practice as an imaginative writer. These aesthetic and intellectual contexts account not only for his vivid attempt to render “the Thing itself”—to find a form of verisimilitude that did justice to lived experience—but also for his conceptual investigation of the inherent difficulty of so doing. Defoe emerges not as a naïve realist and accidental novelist, but as a man with a vast range of interests that he brought to bear on the form and content of his fiction, whether as an effort to capture realistically a seascape during a torrent or to flag the deceptive uses of language by self-apologists like Roxana. Chapter 4 addresses Crusoe’s early reception, particularly Defoe’s playful yet persistent presentation of the novel, in the Serious Reflections, as an authentic memoir that is simultaneously allegorical and satirical. For Mr. Novak, neither autobiographical allegory nor topical satire satisfactorily explains Defoe’s generic achievement in Crusoe; he prefers the broader label “fiction,” which defines an imaginative work designed to entertain the reader by producing a “world vividly imagined” and foregrounding a “novelistic character, with a variety of emotions and a history that weighs on his memory.” But though Defoe was deliberately working out questions of form, including technique and genre, for Mr. Novak Defoe is above all an artist of ideas, who in Crusoe explored the complexity of social, ethical, and anthropological themes such as cannibalism (chapter 5), utopianism (chapter 6), seafaring (chapter 8), and exile (chapter 10). In these chapters, the practical-minded Defoe, the topical writer who was trying to ascertain how navigation might be improved and how colonies could be established in the Caribbean, exists alongside Defoe the thinker, prepared to investigate utopian possibilities despite his pessimism over their achievability and concerned with “exile as both a painful physical and a psychological state,” a metaphor and a real condition. The point is not just that Defoe simultaneously established a new realism committed to rendering the physical world and explored the multitudinously symbolic potential of fiction, but also that these aspects of his works are inseparable, just as the distinction...

Nusantara: History of a Concept

The dictionary meaning of ‘Nusantara’ is ‘Indonesia’ (in Indonesia) and ‘Malay World’ (in Malaysia), but different meanings have been attached to the concept throughout Southeast Asian history. It appears in fourteenth-century Javanese texts but largely disappeared from written materials for a time, and surfaced again when its almost magical qualities were (re)discovered in the late twentieth century. The meaning of the term has changed over time. In 1334, Gadjah Mada, the chief minister of the Majapahit Empire, used it to refer to the maritime fringes (the nusantara) of the Majapahit Empire. During the anticolonial struggle, the term captured the imagination of writers, novelists, poets, and politicians in Indonesia and in British Malaya but it then disappeared from public debates, only to resurface in the 1990s with the emergence of a Nusantara youth culture and a politicized Nusantara Islam in Southeast Asia.

Neoliberalism and the Institution of Modern Literature

Jeffrey Di Leo argues for the acceptance of the reality of the university’s corporatization, not to wallow in defeat or produce more Jeremiads, but so collectively we may work locally and nationally, even internationally, to move beyond statistical outcome measures as the standard for all we do — research, instruction, or service to the university and community. Moreover, we must realize that the adversarial or counter-cultural humanistic model of modern (post-romantic) literature, as an institution, has been superseded by the historical consignment of all imaginative writings to the increasingly digital clouds of the global marketplace. In essence, we must invent new vehicles to cleave this miasma with creative vision, which this book provides examples of as it speeds along its inspiriting way.

Review: House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964, by Nikhil Rao

Nikhil Rao House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 312 pp., 2 tables, 53 b/w illus. $90 (cloth), ISBN 9780816678129; $30 (paper), ISBN 9780816678136 Of all the cities founded by the British in the colonial era, Bombay (now known as Mumbai) has most captured the imagination of writers. Over the past decade or so it has served as one of the primary subjects of a rich body of scholarship that vastly expands our understanding of the complexities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial cities in South Asia. This scholarship shows the important role of local populations in the making, imagining, and inhabiting of the colonial city, thus not only providing compelling insights into the architecture and urbanism of this era but also adding nuance to our understanding of colonial processes that shaped the urban environment. Nikhil Rao’s House, but No Garden , which focuses on the construction and inhabitation of apartments as a new residential mode of dwelling as well as on global processes of suburbanization, is an important contribution to this emerging body of research. Rao’s book reveals that the events associated with Bombay’s suburbanization in the twentieth century are vital to our understanding of urban land management, apartment dwelling’s role in the creation of middle-class identities and meta-identities, and the contemporary city. This work is significant for several reasons. First, it spans the period from 1898 to 1964, straddling the colonial and postcolonial eras (India became independent in 1947) and thus encompassing a part of the twentieth century that is relatively understudied in Indian cities. Many urban histories end around 1918, and anthropologists and sociologists often focus on the contemporary city. Urban historians writing about colonial Bombay prior to 1918 are referring to a limited geographical area of about 22 square miles in the southern third of the island of Bombay; in that period the northern third of the island remained undeveloped. In contrast, scholars writing on the contemporary city refer to …

The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler (review)

Reviewed by: The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler Emma Lipton Claire Sponsler. The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 308 + 7 plates. $65.00. Claire Sponsler’s admirable new book is a corrective to the vision of John Lydgate as a writer of court, monastery, and city that puts his dramatic entertainments at the center of inquiry. This focus is an alternative to the centrality of urban religious drama in recent medieval criticism and to the frequent omission of Lydgate from histories of early theatre, but Sponsler also has a more ambitious agenda. “Attending to theater history,” she argues, calls for a “rethinking of the development of vernacular literature in England” (4) and acknowledging a “conflict between poetry and performance as forms of cultural prestige in late medieval England” (5). The “London-based, secular, and Chaucer-centered canon,” she claims, represents “only a slim segment of the corpus of imaginative writings in Middle English” and does not account for the “many other works that were widely heard and seen—in mimetic performances, viva voce recitations, processional tableaux, wall hangings, or on the page of manuscript books” (4). Through analysis of Lydgate’s mixed-media productions, Sponsler puts “theatricality” rather than poetry “at the hub of public culture” (11). The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project has for decades encouraged and facilitated the expansion of archival work on the drama beyond the play texts themselves to consider a range of records documenting performance. Building on the research for her recent TEAMS edition of Lydgate’s mummings and entertainments, Sponsler employs a dazzling array of records and also theorizes the ways that “the materiality of both performances and their [End Page 381] written residue” (15) shapes drama studies. Ultimately, Sponsler uses the archive to produce not a history of performance but a cultural history of the meanings of performance. As Sponsler notes, Lydgate’s dramatic works are by a known author and a known compiler, John Shirley, who often added rubrics that spoke to details of performance, audience, and occasion, providing a unique and underutilized resource for studying early English theatre. In her first chapter, Sponsler observes that Shirley did not include markers of performance within the body of the text (such as costumes, gestures, staging), tending to emphasize the “literariness” of Lydgate’s dramatic works, rather than their theatricality, perhaps converting them into texts for private reading that could have been produced specifically for the Beauchamp household in the 1420s. She notes that the mise-en-page of Lydgate’s plays and poems in Shirley’s anthology are the same, suggesting the “flexibility of texts in this period” (25) and the fact that “the generic definition of a play was in flux throughout the premodern period” (30). While the book begins by emphasizing the unique archive of Lydgate’s performance pieces, the last chapter, “On Drama’s Trail,” by contrast, addresses the practical difficulties of drama research through a case study of A Mumming of Seven Philosophers, a moralistic poem contained in a miscellany (Cambridge, Trinity College Library MA R.3.19) along with selections from several works known to be by Lydgate. Through a study of scribal hand, language, style, thematic content, and records of court entertainments, Sponsler makes a tentative case for attributing this poem to Lydgate and for locating the performance venue in the court of Henry VI. Her larger purpose is to demonstrate the simultaneously essential and inconclusive nature of documentary research on the drama. The penultimate titular chapter is characteristic of the book’s movement among astute detailed readings of Lydgate’s texts, contextual documents, and large claims about dramatic history. For example, Sponsler quotes from the Parliamentary statute of 1427–28 stating that anyone marrying the dowager queen Catherine without the king’s permission would forfeit his land and possessions during his lifetime. This statute also established that the infant king could only give permission to marry his mother after he came of age. Similarly, at the end of the “Hertford Mumming,” the King defers judgment on a...

UNDERGRADUATE LANGUAGE PROBLEMS IN SHORT STORY THROUGH CREATIVE INTERPRETATION

This paper is conducted to shed the light on English language problems Libyan undergraduate students face in short story through creative interpretation in reading and writing. Creative writing is a wide range of literature and it deals not only with language but also with the wide imagination of writers. However, it is well known that if language problems increase, then even the imagination cannot help because writing techniques and creativity go on the same path. It has always been a great help for the writers to organize and deliver their writing in a suitable form. Most Libyan students cannot, they have many problems in composing, therefore; when they are asked to conduct a creative writing task, they find it enormously difficult and challenging. Those who have the ability to produce are the talented and skillful ones. In this paper, the aim is to encourage and motivate Libyan students to be effected to creative reading and writing as well as grow their skills and talents. Furthermore, this paper will deal with language problems in reading and writing that are mostly common in all levels of learners, and it will focus mostly on the scope of short story. In addition, the purpose of this paper is to provide ideas, suggestions, and solutions according to the problems that are encountered throughout this study. Reading this paper, will help Libyan EFL teachers realize that creative writing is a talent or a skill that has to be practiced; therefore, we will provide ideas to help teachers avoid favoring students who have the talents and skills in reading and writing over others by treating them equally, helping them grow their ability in being creative. There are some important elements that will be discussed throughout this study and the most elements of all is for Libyan EFL teachers and students to understand that there is a significant relationship between what the learner writes and what he/she reads which is called creative reading. In this paper we will present how the reading skill is also neglected by Libyan students. Students do not read for interest unless they are forced to do so for different reasons. Reading skill is not practiced by Libyan students even in their first language. Unfortunately, Libya is a culture that does not encourage, support, facilitate and provide for reading. Therefore, in this paper, the aim is also to help Libyan students learn that reading someone's piece of work is an essential step for developing the skill of creative writing and that provides the history or background about the expected text, even an imagination for an inspired story. Furthermore, providing this paper is to help Libyan students believe that the more the learner reads, the more he/she writes and creates. We would like students to believe that inspiration and imagination are the path for a readable and meaningful story which leads the writer to creativity. And, we believe that if EFL teachers find a way to provide creativity, students will gain the knowledge needed to write and read creatively.

From dialectics to dialogue: Bakhtin, White and the ‘moorings’ of fiction and history

Scholars have noted the ‘remarkable proliferation’ of historical fiction in the postmodern period, and Hayden White has described the neo-historical novel as ‘the dominant genre and mode of postmodernist writing’. This recent acknowledgment of the status of neo-historical fiction raises questions about the long estrangement between the discourses of history and the historical novel since 19th century historians began defining their discipline as a social science. Historians remain preoccupied with timespace specific ‘observable or perceivable’ events, while imaginative writers also engage hypothetical and invented ones, however, this article argues that the theoretical grounds for a vigorous interdisciplinary dialogue between fictional and non-fictional historiography are apparent in the work of White and Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of the novel and concepts of dialogism and polyphony are now much discussed in scholarly discourse. By remaining open to the historical referent, rejecting structuralism’s closure in the text, and acknowledging the subjective tendencies in all forms of historiography, White and Bakhtin make new and exciting conversations possible in an environment in which history and fiction can be defined as competing but complimentary discourses.

Discovering the imaginative capability of technology writers: Its indicators, roots, and cultivation

Extant research regarding writer imagination is scant, which suggests that additional studies would be beneficial. The aim of this study was to explore the indicators, roots, and cultivation of the imaginative capabilities of technology writers. For the purpose of this study, we analyzed 6 renowned case writers in Taiwan through in-depth interviews. The results indicated 10 indicators of imaginative capability, which concurred with the results of previous research. We also identified 8 roots of imaginative capability, in which personality traits emerged as the most decisive root for technology writers, whereas the other roots can be purposively nurtured or can be developed as the writer becomes socially mature. In addition, we identified 9 methods for cultivating this capability, which can be categorized into information internalization and self-disciplined engagement. The results of this study provide an understanding of how technology writers’ imaginative capability can be assessed, and contribute insights into the complexities that various roots endow upon diverse imaginative capabilities through the use of distinct methods of cultivation.

John Bunyan and Socinianism

This article recovers John Bunyan's engagement with Socinianism in his doctrinal and imaginative writings. After surveying the rise of Socinianism in seventeenth-century England, the article augments the known theological contexts of Bunyan's disputes with the Quakers and the Latitudinarians by showing that he charges these groups with slighting the Son and so associates them with anti-Trinitarian heresy. Bunyan's recourse when affirming the Trinity is to biblical typology, a hermeneutical method and manner of structuring narratives which Bunyan uses to uphold the embattled orthodox views of Christ's divinity, the propitiatory atonement and justification by faith.

The Double

This article explores the psychological and literary aspects of the Der Doppelgänger, The Double. A Double is related to the concept of multiple personality. Such mental conditions are classified as instances of dissociation. However, a much earlier history of a Double exists in literature rather than in psychology. In the literary past, a “Double-Personality” embodied the creative imagination of writers. Aspects of this condition have been reported in all cultures. In some societies a “Double-Personality” is thought to manifest great power whereas in others it represents illness. After Freud, writers fostered psychoanalytic speculations about this condition. The dynamic issues of this condition are discussed together with literary examples by world famous authors. Persons manifesting this condition frequently employ symbols, allegory, and other creative devices. While reason, observation, and experiment are the modes of science, appreciating the symbolic behavior associated with this condition is also important. Clinicians and others should carefully attend to how symbolic behavior may be employed by patients to describe symptoms of their condition not easily conveyed with clarity by complete rationality. There is special value in recognizing how persons may utilize this condition to further their fictive goals. Without this understanding, treatment may be less effective and improvement may not occur.

Secret histories revealed: The journal of Joseph Elisée Pèyre-Ferry

Abstract This article examines the recently published (2005) journal of a French officer and soldier fighting in the final year (1802–1803) of the Haitian Revolution. Napoleon Bonaparte’s failed campaign to recolonize the French territory of Saint-Domingue has been the subject of historians and imaginative writers alike, but Pèyre-Ferry’s journal complicates previous representations of the French mission to subdue its former colony and reinstitute slavery. As captain of the grenadiers, Pèyre-Ferry fulfils his military duty but uses his journal to launch a subtly feminist critique of colonialism through the perspective of a male soldier. Indeed, Peyre-Ferry’s close relationship with his mother, played out in his journal, is the medium through which his anti-colonial and pro-feminist sentiments take shape. What emerges in this remarkable journal is a radical critique of the racist assumptions implicit in the colonial venture.

Advancing a Typology of Media Content: Analysis of a Literary Journalism Story

The way stories are told to the public in any society, even the most draconian ones, always leaves some room for trivia non grata to beholders in the ruling authorities. Seditious messages passing for praises do find their way into public discourse to rub power holders the wrong way. Since symbolic representation of reality makes it impossible for any text to be seamlessly closed, linguistic cracks and loopholes open up endless possibilities for the imaginative writer with a hidden political agenda in authoritarian societies.