Literary Imagination Research Articles

Mysterious Interrelation: NLP and Literary Imagination

This research study examines the emerging topic of investigating the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) in the context of literature. The literary domain has transformed with the incorporation of AI-led NLP beings, illustrating their progression from simple tools to intricate characters wrestling with profound philosophical inquiries. This research paper will explore the burgeoning relationship between Natural Language Processing and literature, focusing on the complex intersections that shed light on the depiction of intelligent machines and the ethical dilemmas they pose in literary works. This investigation will involve multiple aspects: primarily, the depiction of NLP entities as characters within stories, analyzing their emotional complexity, development, and interactions with human protagonists through Qualitative Literature Review and Textual Analysis Methodology. Furthermore, it will examine the ethical quandaries associated with NLP, encompassing issues of autonomy, morality, and the ethical obligations inherent in their development and existence through a few case studies.

Law, justice and decoloniality in Petina Gappah’s works: an Ubuntu perspective

ABSTRACT The emergence of law and literature as a transdiscipline has unravelled fascinating insights into the role of literary imagination in raising pertinent jurisprudential questions and envisioning alternative legal universes. The literary front can expand legal literacy, humanise the law, and offer perspectives that are otherwise overlooked in conventional jurisprudence. This article explores Petina Gappah’s representation of law and justice in The Book of Memory (2015) and Rotten Row (2016), focussing on how she innovatively deploys politico-aesthetic means to expose ambiguities, ambivalences and inadequacies in Zimbabwe’s legal system. It contends that Gappah uses the literary medium to underline how the exclusion of customary law from the country’s common law system undermines the delivery of justice. Considering that the texts are alive to the limitations of both customary and common law systems, the study argues for a legal pluralism that harnesses the progressive aspects of the two legal cultures. By drawing on Zimbabwe’s humanist philosophy of Unhu, the study places studied texts within a growing decolonial narrative that critiques the coloniality of legal frameworks in formerly colonised nations.

Religion, secularism, and postsecularism in Chinese internet literature

Abstract Internet literature emerged in China in the 1990s and became commercialized in the early 2000s, with readers paying an access fee, which is split between literary platforms and their contracted writers, to access popular novels. While the most popular genre is fantasy, a type of imaginative literature devoted to invoking magic beyond the limits of empirical reality and scientific rationality, the primary source of magic for Chinese fantasy is traditional Chinese cosmology and its concrete applications in everyday practices. These ideas and practices, the onto-epistemic-practical foundation of Chinese religion before the twentieth century, were considered superstitious and targeted for elimination in modernizing and secularization processes. However, they have not only survived but taken up a new life in fantasy novels, which depict them as the antecedents of, alternatives to, or more advanced forms than modern scientific endeavors at engineering natural environments and enhancing human bodies. This is why I see online fantasy literature as a palimpsest bearing the traces of Chinese religion, Chinese secularism, and the social conditions of contemporary China. In bearing such traces, this literature exemplifies the postsecular.

Dystopian Visions and the Making of Privacy Law

This article explores the role of references to dystopian literature in the context of developing privacy laws. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of a large corpus of legislative and judicial texts from Germany and the United Kingdom, I demonstrate that references to popular dystopian works of fiction like Orwell’s 1984 have animated and shaped the legal recognition of privacy. Specifically, dystopian visions are evoked as reasons that warrant the legal protection of privacy rights. I explore lawmakers’ vision of a technologically empowered totalitarian state and discuss how these connect to historical, contemporary, and hypothetical examples of unjust regimes. I argue that literary imaginations of dystopia are often themselves built on historical experience, suggesting that the aptness for social critique is, as literary critics suggest, built into dystopia as a genre. I furthermore explore how the theme of democracy is employed as a counterpoint to fears of dystopian totalitarianism. Portraying privacy invasions as harmful to democratic ideals discursively amplifies their dangerousness—and thereby works to justify regulatory intervention. My research findings prompt us to view legal norms as a cultural artifact that reflect cultural imagination and literary narratives.

Unraveling the Ethos of Literary Imagination in the Basātin al-ons of Akhsetān Dehlavi

Abstract Basātin al-ons (The Gardens of Fondness, 1325–26) is the sole surviving work of an erudite courtier named Akhsetān Dehlavi (1301–51), who spent most of his adult life in the service of the sultan Gheyās al-Din Toghloq (r. 1320–24) and his son Mohammad b. Toghloq Shāh (r. 1324–51). This work exemplifies one of the earliest efforts by an Indian writer to interweave history, autobiography, eulogy, and folklore in the Persian genre of stylized prose (nasr). Against this backdrop, my essay examines the preface of the Basātin al-ons to elucidate the factors that motivated Akhsetān Dehlavi to narrate a collection of Hindavi tales in Persian prose.

The Finitude of the Human and the World of the None-Whole: On the Aesthetics of Existence in Korean Modernist Literature in the Posthuman Age

Posthuman discourse calls for a fundamental shift away from modern anthropocentric thought. This shift stems from the reflection that many of the problems in the modern capitalist world, including climate change, are rooted in anthropocentric attitudes and ways of life. Amid rapid climatic and technological changes, transforming our way of thinking is essential. This paper argues that such a transformation is possible through the exploration of new subjectivities that incorporate the other, transforming the self in the process. It examines how 1930s Korean colonial modernist literature illustrates this search for new subjectivities. Based on this exploration, this paper also concretizes the tendencies and problems in our society, particularly concerning technological fascism, through recent Korean fiction and discusses the significance of the literary imaginations of 1930s colonial Korean modernism in the posthuman era.

The Moral Law of Ngozi Crime in Two Zimbabwean Novels: The Case of Emmanuel Ribeiro’s Muchadura (1967) and Solomon Mwapangidza’s Rebel Soldier (2013)

The modern Western-inspired Literature and Law movement has inspired African works of art in which the creative imagination perceives itself as a form of moral law. In Africa, a literature and law movement has given rise to dynamic discourses of human rights. Human rights scholars have then tended to read imaginative works with a legal handbook on the side to try to verify the veracity of legal acts in works of art. In these legal-literary perspectives, the question regarding the extent to which the literary imagination imagines itself as a source of indigenous law is undervalued. This current desktop study examines what can be gained by prefacing African and indigenous literature as the point of departure when debating the elements of a contemporary literature and law movement in Africa. My unit of analysis consists of two novels, Muchadura (You shall confess) by Emmanuel Ribeiro, and Rebel Soldier (2013) by Solomon Mwapangidza. My argument is that in the two novels the narrativisation of the ngozi crime challenges current understandings of transitional justices such as retributive, compensatory, restorative, distributive, and emancipatory justices and denies the stability ascribed to them in African legal scholarship.

Genre, Place, and the Persian Literary Imagination in the Punjab, ca. 1650–1750

Abstract This article examines descriptions of the Punjab, particularly Lahore and its environs, in Persian writings from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. Specifically, it traces the usage and movement of topographical registers and imagery across genres and literary forms that are usually studied separately, highlighting the ways in which they interacted with (and resisted) each other. It suggests that such experimentations with the writing of place were central to the ways in which individuals engaged in processes of self-fashioning. Further, it argues that such experimentations with literary-topographical themes and registers also helps explain the increasing interest in the Punjabi qiṣṣa and other regional narratives in Persian during this period. These observations help to further nuance understandings of the ways in which genres and languages interacted in the early modern Punjab.

“Un prophète discret”

Abstract This article analyzes how the French fascist and collaborationist author Pierre Drieu la Rochelle thought critically about the forms and the functions of the modern writer-prophet. In essays dedicated to the cases of D. H. Lawrence and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as to his own ideological and literary trajectory in the interwar years, Drieu defined the true prophet as a writer of decadence, one compelled to narrate and embody the decline of the nation. By assuming this burden, the writer-prophet in turn becomes doomed to be misunderstood or ignored by his decadent contemporaries. This logic of prophecy’s ultimate failure provides a key to understanding the political and literary vision of Drieu’s autobiographical fascist bildungsroman Gilles (1939). Finally, this article considers how Drieu’s linking of prophecy and literary posterity can be seen as anticipating his recent controversial inclusion in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Music as incarnated beauty in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion: a neoplatonic reading

Abstract In this study I examine key conceptual parallels between J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary imagination and a Neoplatonic mythopoetic. Specifically, I discuss how Tolkien’s Silmarillion deploys a transcendental conception of Beauty that, I argue, suggests similarities with the notion of Beauty discussed by Plotinus in his Enneads. Following the scholarship of Lisa Coutras (2016) and Michael John Halsall (2020), this study analyzes key sections from Tolkien’s work to demonstrate a Neoplatonic influence. This influence, I argue, is best understood via an incarnational logic that understands musical harmony and tonal beauty to be signs that signal an ultimate transcendent source in Tolkien’s legendarium. Falling short of arguing for a direct influence of the Neoplatonic tradition on Tolkien, this study seeks to demonstrate only a plausible link between Neoplatonic sources and Tolkien’s work.

캐나다의 정체성과 캐나다 문학에 형상화된 야생동물

This paper examines the representation of wildlife in Marian Engel’s Bear as a departure from that of wildlife in realistic animal stories in Canada. Canada’s vast wilderness serves as a green space to escape civilization, to explore the self, and to provide solace and renewal. Engel’s Bear firmly stands in this tradition, and this book occupies a central place in Canadian identity and in the Canadian literary imagination. In Engel’s Bear, amazingly complex textual qualities can be noticed. This complex textual grain subverts the stable paradigm that human language can reflect the lives of wildlife. The diverse discourses found in the colonel’s library amplify the meaning of Lou’s bear to an overwhelming degree and make its meaning uncertain. The numerous images and stories about bears are juxtaposed and superimposed like a mosaic, making it difficult to determine the meaning of the bear that Lou encounters. Engel’s Bear is a remarkably successful retelling of a Canadian wildlife story that draws on Canadian artistic traditions with disturbing resonance.

‘Une lueur douteuse’: Artificial Light and the Literary Imagination (1841–1913)

ABSTRACT The lighting of Paris underwent the most radical transformation in its history between the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. In turn, new degrees of brightness, colours, effects and rituals found their way into the literary imagination. This article specifically discusses literary scenes where lighting technologies - candlelight, oil light, gaslight - accompany depictions of emotions. I argue that lighting was a narrative device to generate tension, to stage certain emotions, to guide the reader's attention, and to depict interior emotional states. We will find that literary analysis offers insights into the connections between new technologies and the history of the emotions.

Rupture and Temporary Endings

In the early decades of the fifth/eleventh century, a young poet from Córdoba, Ibn Shuhayd al-Andalusī (d. 426/1035), composes a satire on inspiration and literary theft, after being accused of plagiarism. It came to be known as The Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons. It opens with an apostrophic frame, activating, from the onset, interstitial locations and alerting the readers to its unorthodoxy both as an intellectual attitude and a narrative strategy. In this epistle, the author revisits the old Arab myth that personifies inspiration as demons who live at the Mount-Parnassus-like Valley of ʿAbqar. The recrudescence of this myth, however, serves a particular purpose: it is designed to satirize the persistence of the classics, and to agitate the structures that make them legible. In the tales, the auto-diegetic protagonist experiences a writer's block, and is introduced to an attendant jinn who becomes the poet’s co-author and travel companion. As this recurs, episodic suspension becomes the structure that sustains the program of the work: it allows for new beginnings to emerge throughout the work and enables a series of (time) travels to the valley of ʿAbqar. Conceived within an Arabo-Islamic environment that places great value on the ability of art to persuade, The Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons’s satirical outlook comes with an urgent claim. Ibn Shuhayd is not asking for pleasant, disinterested appreciation, but for public reparation. Multiply imaginative and meticulously scholarly, Ibn Shuhayd’s epistle demands to be read through a twined lens. The present study takes this affinity seriously, tracing resonances of the epistle in Ibn Shuhayd’s scholarly writing to sketch how the poetic form and and the scholarly project jointly speak to a critical moment in the Arabic literary imagination. Key words: frame tale, apostrophe, inspiration, travel, al-Andalus, sariqa (literay theft), satire, praise, eidolopoeia

Heretical enemy or vanguard of commerce? The pirate in the 16th-century legal and literary imagination

This article uses legal and literary accounts of Francis Drake’s 16th-century depredations to consider the historical figure of the pirate in legal thought. Against the transhistorical figure of universal enmity of many international legal accounts, the article argues that the 16th-century pirate was a fundamentally contested figure reflecting contrasting juridical-political visions of world order. In the 16th-century Spanish imagination, piratical enmity, rooted in confessional identity, posed a threat to a universalising res publica Christiana and the juridico-political structure of Christendom. The emergence of a nascent English commercial imperialism challenging Iberian dominance in the Americas undergirded a quite different legal and literary piratical identity, Drake not heretical foe but vanguard of English imperial aspirations.

Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments

Abstract This research cluster offers four original case studies in Victorian and neo-Victorian ecocriticism. Clustered around the key concepts of form, materiality, and politics, its articles build on recent efforts by Victorianists to analyse interconnections of nature, agriculture, industry, and empire in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. The introduction first relates the cluster’s concerns to the latest scholarship in Victorian ecocriticism, and then turns to the aims and thematic focal points of the four contributions. The articles by Julia Ditter, Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Katharina Kalthoff, and Marlena Tronicke foreground the ecological project at the heart of a variety of fictional and nonfictional genres: the sensational novel, travel and nature writing, fantasy, and neo-Victorian gothic fiction. Ditter examines industrial travel narratives in the periodical press; Espinoza Garrido investigates the eco-colonial aesthetics of Florence Marryat’s sensation fiction; Kalthoff provides an ecofeminist reading of H. G. Wells’s mermaid tale The Sea Lady; and Tronicke examines material embodiments of the Irish Famine in the work of Paul Lynch. Together, these contributions offer fresh perspectives on the emerging field of Victorian ecocriticism and embrace the interdisciplinary dialogues facilitated by the environmental humanities for the study of nineteenthcentury literature and culture.

C.S. Lewis on Female Scholars: A Reply to John D. Rateliff

In John D. Rateliff’s study ‘The Missing Women: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lifelong Support for Women’s Higher Education’, Tolkien’s support of women is unfavourably contrasted with the supposedly dismissive attitude of C.S. Lewis. Rateliff offers three pieces of evidence in support of his argument that Lewis held a contemptuous attitude towards female research students in particular: a private letter by Lewis written in mock late-medieval English; Lewis’s comments about Damaris Tighe, the heroine in Charles Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion; and the character Jane Studdock in Lewis’s own novel That Hideous Strength. This paper argues that Rateliff’s evidence is not only limited but selective and misunderstood. What Lewis rebukes is academic complacency and vanity, not female researchers, many of whom Lewis respected and even befriended. The principle of biographical verification (grounding biographical speculations in biographical rather than imaginative literature) seriously complicates Rateliff’s argument.

Spatial Imagination in Sacred Narratives of Mountain Communities in Western Yunnan, China

Various sacred narratives have different emphases on the shaping of natural space. Creation myths reveal the basic structure of natural space. Sacred narratives of mountain gods focus on how and why mountain forests are the source of life and stability for nearly all the species in the area. The myth of the hunting god and the legend of the Flower Festival have a remarkable endemicity. The consciousness of the community of life, which is fundamentally constructed in creation myths, reveals visible and sensible pictures in these two types of narratives. The literary imagination of these sacred narratives focuses on establishing and breaking through spatial boundaries. In the intertwining of an imaginative narrative and a realistic existence, the sacredness of natural spaces is established and can be experienced. Mountaineers imbue their practices with gracefulness and nobleness in the dimensions of emotion and morality through storytelling in order to shape the morphological characteristics and the life essence of natural spaces. The shaping of beautiful places and sublime realms in these narratives is a vivid expression of cosmology.

World War 1 and Colonialism in Kenya: Perspectives through Historiography and Literary Imaginaries

ABSTRACT During World War I, what is today Kenya was part of the British East African Protectorate. Direct fighting took place within the region as the neighbouring Tanzania was a German colony. The cultural and economic repercussions of the war transformed the social landscape and colonial approach to the administration of the region. Historically, the war period between 1914 and 1918 coincided with the acceleration of British colonial intrusion into Kenya and a close control of the different aspects of the local communities’ political, social, and economic day-to-day operations. It was also marked by the transformation of large parts of present-day Kenya into white settlements. Moreover, during the war, mostly male members of the various Kenyan communities were conscripted into military service and forcefully pressed into the British war service. The war memories in works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, M. G. Vassanji and Margaret Ogola revolve around the sense of being caught in unknown crossfire, the inhumanity of conscription, causalities and other horrors of the war, and the irreplaceable loss of the most productive community members in the war.

Speculative Fiction South of the Mediterranean: A Literature of Crisis between Dystopian Anxieties and Utopian Alternatives

ABSTRACT Contemporary speculative fiction from the southern area of the Mediterranean is predominantly somber. It often describes worlds where political tyranny prevents the prospect of change, where the scars of the past keep cultures apart, and where technology is forced to harm nature and humanity because of the will of a minority in power. The emerging literary tradition of speculative fiction in this region has a rich history influenced by creative cultural and literary encounters, yet its ongoing contemporary development depicts a protracted sense of crisis rife with dystopian anxieties even as it remains open to occasional utopian alternatives. This article reviews the literary expressions of crisis in selected novels from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, where, in the last four decades, literary visions of a much-awaited cultural revival instead seek the reasons why change is still a distant prospect. While speculative literature often represents visions of the future, those from along the southern shores of the Mediterranean are laden with traumatic memories of the colonial past, the spleen of the postcolonial present, and the uncertainties of the future.

Making the Modern City: Architecture and the Literary Imagination in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler

Making the Modern City: Architecture and the Literary Imagination in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler