Literary Production Research Articles

Social realism and labour strikes in interwar Bombay: what has socialism got to do with it?

ABSTRACT The 1920s and 30s were a period of frequent, industry-wide labour strikes in the cotton mills of Bombay city. Labour upheaval inspired literary production in Marathi, the primary language of many workers in the city. In the early 1930s, the prolific and beloved Marathi writer Bhargavram (Mama) Varekar published a play and a novel set in the mill district of the city (Mumbai in Marathi); social realism was the mode of depiction in these works. The setting, storyline, and many characters in the play and the novel were the same, but the resolution of the central conflict in these works – the tussle between millowners and millworkers – was different. At around the same time, a textile worker from the city, P. S. Sawant, wrote a play when he was on strike; it was performed in the mill district of the city. Both the plays by Varerkar and Sawant proposed co-operation between millowners and workers as a solution to the strike. The novel, though, left the conflict unresolved. Does genre itself account for a different ending? What was the politics of depiction of the working class in these works? What role did the literary history of the region and the politics of the conjuncture play in influencing them? The paper argues that political economic categories deployed by the city’s Marxists at the time inform the play and the novel. But the authors take great pains to skirt a socialist horizon. In its absence, the works reflect the perspective of social reformers who had an important presence in working-class neighbourhoods and imagined the mill district as an insular space where socialists and socialism were intrusions from outside.

“To Brew a Prefabricated Medley of the Wreckage of All Groups”: The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers in the Federation of Associations of Soviet Writers

The Federation of Soviet Writers’ Associations (FOSP) is examined for the first time from the perspective of the sociology of the literary process. The traditional historical and literary question of who created the FOSP and why is replaced here by a more significant problem from the point of view of the literary process: why did the FOSP emerge in the conditions of competition on the market of literary production, who needed the FOSP most in the conditions of the market economy, and, finally, whether there was any prospect of the FOSP continuing to function after 1932. It is shown that the FOSP and its institutions, first and foremost the Federation publishing house, were the legitimate product of the NEP era and served the strategic goals of the Proletarian Union of Soviet Writers. Since the “genetic code” of the FOSP, like that of the Proletarian Association, belonged to the NEP era, the Federation had no chance of taking root in the economic and political conditions of the 1930s.

“I feel as lonely as a wreck at sea”: Reviewing Fernando Pessoa’s Youth Literary Companion, Charles Robert Anon

When initiating the journey to explore Fernando Pessoa’s (1888-1935) literary world, one rapidly becomes conscious of the vast literary output developed by the author. With means of understanding his whole literary universe, it must be acknowledged that Pessoa was bilingual, and that English, and Portuguese language cohabited in his literary universe. One is struck by astonishment when discovering that there are in fact so many English-writing literary characters, so many texts, anthologies, fragments, and literary projects in English. This study revises Pessoa’s pre-heteronymic process and the creation of English literary characters who are introduced into a dialogical chain, which later becomes a more serious literary depersonalisation process in his adulthood. By revising Pessoa’s youth companion Charles Robert Anon, this study intends to outline the Portuguese authors literary process and the starting point and evolution of what later became his most exceptional concept: the heteronyms. Through his character and the texts he signed, Anon represents young Pessoa’s “intellectual anxieties and existential concerns of a young intellectual entering adulthood” (Zenith in Pessoa 2001: 7). This study sustains that the edition, publication, translation, and critical analysis of the totality of Anon’s literary production is an important element to shed light in the understanding of Pessoa’s drama-in-people and adult writings.

Literature and Mysticism in the Wake of Silvano Panunzio: From The Divine Comedy to the European Literature of the Twentieth Century

This article introduces one of the forgotten figures of religious and literary studies: the Italian scholar, philosopher, metaphysician, poet and writer Silvano Panunzio (1918–2010). His contribution has so far been relegated to the margins of academic debate, and, currently, there are no academic studies on his work, in which mysticism plays a pivotal role. Panunzio believed that the transcendental and mystical dimension is fundamental for fully understanding the social, cultural, historical and political events of humanity. Another relevant aspect of his work is the importance he gave to literature and its relationship with mysticism, as in the case of Dante’s Divine Comedy or other European and Eastern writers and poets, such as Goethe, Shakespeare, Ibn Arabi and Dostoevsky. Significantly, Panunzio saved from oblivion the work of a forgotten man of letters of the nineteenth century, Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), who proposed the first symbolic and esoteric interpretation of Dante’s literary production and of European medieval love literature. Raising awareness of the intellectual amnesia around the figure of Silvano Panunzio may be a useful contribution to future research, both in the field of religious and literary studies.

Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012)

News of the discoveries of natural grottos filled the pages of newspapers and journals throughout the nineteenth century. Additionally, artificial grottos opened regularly for the entertainment of the public and were commonplace in the cultural and literary products of the period. In this article, I analyse neo-Victorian appropriations of nineteenth-century grottos as Foucauldian heterotopias through two case studies: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012). Overall’s and Fox’s novels illustrate how the heterotopic features of the Victorian grotto are expanded in neo-Victorian fiction as counter-spaces of emplacement that enable heterochronic forms of resistance.

Apie gaidį ir „žemčiūgą“: žvilgsnis į XIX amžiaus lietuvių literatūrinę savimonę

This article examines seven different renditions of Aesop’s fable “The Rooster and the Pearl”, written by various 19th-century Lithuanian authors. The aim is to show how these texts reflect the demands of early readers and the literary consciousness of 19th-century Lithuanian society. The differences in the texts and their significant features are revealed by comparing them with each other and with the original sources, where such sources can be identified. Of particular interest is the inclusion of Lithuanian elements in these narratives, typically used for their evocative imagery or to capture the reader’s attention. The influence of social and cultural life on literature is bidirectional. As societies change over time in cultural, ethical and other ways, these changes inevitably affect literary production. The ethical perspective is relevant to the plot of The Rooster and the Pearl, but the specificity of the texts analysed is determined more by aesthetic and persuasive qualities, thus serving as precursors to shifts in literary consciousness.

Blog Serials: Digital Literature, Seriality, Readerly Performativity

Abstract The 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s were a period that witnessed dramatic changes in the literary scene in South Korea. Literary production’s engagement with digital media was one of the major changes in this period, when the divide, collision, and merge between pre-digital and digital came to affect almost every aspect of the society. This article explores the divergent strands in the development of digital literature, the new affordances of the digital environment that affected the literary serial vis-à-vis the print serial, and a virtual and actual community that readers and writers created through their engagement with literary texts and beyond. Through close analysis of a blog serial of Hwang Sŏgyŏng’s Evening Star (February 27–July 21, 2008; 102 episodes in all), which represents one of the significant moments in the early digital serialization of South Korean literature, this article discusses various types of performativity and participatory culture generated by and connected to the blog serial and participants.

The Periodical as Political Educator

Abstract This essay discusses how forms like political magazines, cultural journals, and party newspapers produced by twentieth-century anticolonial, left, and oppositional movements instituted practices of alternative pedagogy and political education across the Global South. These “revolutionary papers” served as a pedagogical infrastructure encompassing a critical curriculum drawn from ongoing movements, alternative histories, and regional literary production, to be used for collective practices of debate and inquiry. The essay introduces a series of digital teaching tools featured in the issue that study revolutionary periodicals such as the Cairo-based Afro-Asian literary magazine Lotus and underground pamphlets from the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. These teaching tools are accessible, interactive resources that provide archival, literary, and historical insights on movements and associated print cultures and are designed as pedagogical aids for the classroom and for political education in community settings. Along the way, the essay reflects on anticolonial periodicals as a resource for ongoing debates around decolonizing the university, and the possibilities presented by digital humanities approaches for the study of anticolonialism and Global South cultures.

Nihilism in Modern Literature: The Case of The Catcher in the Rye

The present research examines cultural implications of the 1951 novel The catcher in the rye by J. D. Salinger. The paper analyses the intradiegetic sentences made by the novel's main character, Holden Caulfield, and investigates on the inferences drawn from them. To this end, it would be used a structuralist methodological approach created by Gérard Genette and Roland Barthes in the 1970s. The conclusions reached indicate that around the date the book was written, a new type of nihilism was common for new generations in themes, characters, and symbols found in literary productions. In such manner, it is suggested that realist literature with intimate and existentialist characters, as well as other cultural objects, allow us to infer which are the daily life conditions. In the case of our work, those conditions are based on social discontent and cultural alienation of adolescents, which is in this research outlined as a new type of nihilism.

The Dichotomy within Masculinity in Fadia Faqir's The Cry of the Dove: A Self-Orientalist Approach

The representation of masculinity is a prevalent theme in literary studies that critique Orientalist discourse within Western literature. This exploration often highlights the dichotomy inherent in the portrayal of masculinity, contrasting the representations of Western and Eastern men in Orientalist texts. In her article "Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals," Lisa Lau (2009) introduces the concepts of 're-Orientalism' and 'self-Orientalism,' arguing that Orientalist depictions are not only perpetuated in Western narratives but are also internalized within Eastern literary productions. Lau posits that writers from Eastern backgrounds frequently do not wholly reject these Orientalist narratives; instead, they engage with and occasionally affirm them, thereby reinforcing a binary opposition between the East and West in their works. Despite the relevance of this theory, the contributions of Anglophone Arab authors, such as Fadia Faqir, have not been thoroughly analyzed through the lens of Self-Orientalism. Consequently, this study seeks to investigate the representation of masculinity in Faqir's The Cry of the Dove (2007) within the framework of Self-Orientalism, with a focus on determining whether Faqir challenges or internalizes Orientalist stereotypes. This theoretical perspective suggests that Anglophone authors tend to internalize Orientalist stereotypes, constructing a dichotomy that attributes negative characteristics to Eastern individuals while ascribing positive traits to their Western counterparts. Through a detailed examination of male characters in the novel, this study reveals that Faqir internalizes these Orientalist representations, thereby establishing a contrasting portrayal of masculinity: Arab and Muslim men are depicted as lustful, cruel, and hypocritical, in stark contrast to their Western counterparts, who are characterized as respectful, tender, and virtuous.

Exploring Literature in Islam Beyond (Secularized) Christian Normativity in Western Academia

Anyone specialising in Islamic theology at a Western university is aware of the fact that their teaching and research will either be recognised by the institution as falling under the category of “Islamic Studies” or “Divinity”. In the first case, Islam is predominantly considered a cultural phenomenon and studied as such. In the second case, for reasons that have to do with what Marianne Moyaert in her latest book Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other has conceptualised as “Christian normativity” and the “religionisation” of other faiths, Islamic theology is de facto understood as Islamic speculative theology (kalām). In both cases, the understanding of how Islam theorises and practices theology is significantly restricted, when not altogether ignored. This article unpacks the genealogy of the secular version of a Christian epistemic framework that dominates the study of Islamic theology in the West and engages with the issues related to its application in the field of Islamic theology. In doing so, it opens a critical space for the investigation of Islamic literary productions as both dissensual and consensual theological terrains, through the analysis of the poetry of two theologians and polymathic scholars from two different periods of Islamic history, namely Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235) and Sidi Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥabīb (d. 1390/1971).

On the Politics of Making Life in the Ruins of Empire: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities

Extractive capitalism and neoliberal politics have for years plundered Africa, causing extended ecological devastation and disavowing indigenous epistemologies that did not abide with Western anthropocentric thought. Literary production, however, has not failed to document life in the ruins of structural racism, amid the gradual effacement of local livelihoods, and native knowledges and belief systems founded on politics of living-with, as part of, instead of dominating over animal, plant, and Other. In Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) and Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) representations of the ongoing destruction of ecologies and ontologies under the weight of neoliberal practices and the impositions of overriding neocolonial ideologies are entangled with and moulded by the depictions of those marginal but often resilient social assemblages and their quotidian communal practices that resist being reduced to relics of a used-to-be. This article explores the ways in which the two novels unravel their protagonists’ stories while revealing the immense pressure neoliberal politics exercise over native land and indigenous epistemologies in modern-day Nigeria, all while offering glimpses into the multiple ways these assemblages resist and challenge despotic formations that dominate their ecologies.

Pastoral Rules: Pomerius, Gregory the Great and the Making of Patristic Tradition

Scholars have debated how the themes discussed by Pomerius in his De vita contemplativa found ample resonance across Gregory the Great's work, and reflect similar concerns. While it is impossible to determine whether the Roman bishop read the treatise authored by the North African rhetor, their parallel authority on the matter was recognised by Carolingian copyists, who often reported their works alongside each other. The discovery of a glossa sourced from Gregory's literary production in Pomerius’ manuscript tradition might both substantiate this claim and shed some light on the networks of medieval scriptoria.

"I Accuse" and "I Wander": on the Writer's Identity Formation from the SDGS Perspective

Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate the definition of writers, exploring the different configurations of writers in the context of diverse education, and learning about the importance of quality education for independent thinking and critical thinking. Method: This research adopts the methods of literature research and close reading of texts, analyzing historical works, academic monographs, and literary works to summarize the experiences, creations, and identities of contemporary Chinese writers, forming a comprehensive perspective. Results and Discussion: The writer is not only the material individual but also the creation main body, its position and the function in the literature field hold the balance. They are the primary force of literary production and the core of literary mechanism. After analyzing the history, definition and identity of a writer, we can divide the writer's identity into two types: the intellectual and the wanderer, which to some extent clears the fog of the writer's identity. Originality/Value: The current academic attention to the writer's identity is insufficient, the writer's identity structure in literary research is still not clear. This has led to a divergence of views in the community and the academic community on the writer, almost all the discussions are in disputes and conflicts, and the writer's identity which is very vague is more complicated. This study clarifies the definition of writers, provides a clearer definition and conclusion on the identity configuration of writers, and highlights the importance of quality education for independent and critical thinking.

The Impact of Using Writing-to-Learn Activities and Literary Products on Students’ Academic Achievement in Social Studies Course

The Impact of Using Writing-to-Learn Activities and Literary Products on Students’ Academic Achievement in Social Studies Course

New Chaotic Reality: Creative Writing Workshops for Long COVID Patients.

In a widely cited 2017 study, Robinson et al. (2017) found that 'emotionally expressive' writing makes physical wounds heal faster when compared to writing that did not engage the emotions. The Writing Long COVID project at Aberystwyth University engaged similar territory in a recent pilot study. Participants' writing activities explored how literary production can affect a person's experience of this new chronic condition, as well as contribute to our understanding of its symptoms. In this short essay, I show how we designed a course of short-duration online workshops that increased accessibility for people with Long COVID-related fatigue. I also argue that future Long COVID creative activities should let their timing, venue, content, and structure be influenced by the preferences of the Long COVID patient. The preliminary study suggests that the traditional parameters of the writing workshop, including its duration, could deter participation in potentially beneficial creative activities.

The Metamorphosis of the Novel <i>Moment in Peking</i> in Japan, Taiwan, and China

This article focuses on the migration of Lin Yutang’s most-read novel, Moment in Peking (1939), across linguistic, geographic, and media boundaries in East Asia from the 1940s to recent times. It aims to reveal how this novel, originally composed in English and published in the US during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, is translated, adapted, presented, and situated in different literary, cultural and ideological contexts in Japan, Taiwan and Mainland China. Drawing on the principles of Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation and the Manipulation School’s literary translation studies, my analysis highlights the agency of translators, adaptors and publishers in literary production conditioned by the evolving social, historical and political circumstances. The research contends that the metamorphosis of Moment in Peking embodies a literary power game directly linked to shifts in power dynamics between the three entities. At the cultural level, it provides insights into the intricate interplay of three distinct cultural imageries—competing, conflicting or assimilating within a relational framework.

Influence of Historical Events on American Literature of the 21st Century

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the influence of historical events on American literature of the 21st century. Materials and Methods: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The terrorist attacks marked a significant turning point, inspiring a wave of literature that grapples with themes of loss, trauma, and the complexities of patriotism. This era saw the rise of novels, memoirs, and poems that explore the personal and collective impact of the event, such as Don DeLillo's "Falling Man" and Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." Additionally, the economic downturn of 2008 influenced a body of work that critiques capitalism and explores themes of financial instability and inequality, exemplified by novels like John Lanchester's "Capital" and Jess Walter's "The Financial Lives of the Poets." The rise of social movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, has significantly shaped contemporary American literature, prompting a surge in works addressing racial injustice, gender equality, and social activism. Authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates with "Between the World and Me" and Angie Thomas with "The Hate U Give" provide powerful narratives that reflect the ongoing struggle for civil rights and social justice. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Historical materialism, trauma theory and cultural theory may be used to anchor future studies on assessing the influence of historical events on American literature of the 21st century. Encouraging the inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives in literary production and academic studies is essential. Government and private institutions should provide funding and grants specifically aimed at supporting literary works that address significant historical events.

Gender Representation in Postcolonial African Literature

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the gender representation in postcolonial African literature. Materials and Methods: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The study found that authors often critique patriarchal structures and colonial legacies that have influenced gender dynamics. Female characters in these narratives are depicted as resilient and multifaceted, challenging traditional roles and seeking empowerment. Works by writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tsitsi Dangarembga highlight the struggles and triumphs of women navigating postcolonial societies, reflecting broader themes of identity, autonomy, and resistance. Additionally, postcolonial African literature often explores the intersectionality of gender with race, class, and ethnicity, offering a nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of African women and men in a rapidly changing world. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Postcolonial theory, feminist literary theory and queer theory may be used to anchor future studies on assessing the gender representation in postcolonial African literature. Supporting emerging authors through literary grants and mentorship programs is essential for promoting diversity and inclusivity in literary production. Promoting gender-inclusive literary awards can incentivize authors to explore and challenge traditional gender norms in their works.

The Barfly and the Beatnik: the literary relationship of Charles Bukowski and Kay ‘Kaja’ Johnson

ABSTRACT This article examines Charles Bukowski and Kay ‘Kaja’ Johnson’s literary relationship. Despite Bukowski’s outsider status within the literary world, he corresponded widely with literary figures, including Johnson. Johnson was an early and active member of the Beat Generation who has largely been overlooked in literary histories. Recently scholarly interest in Johnson and her works , including her correspondence with Bukowski, has increased. However, due to the lack of primary sources and biographical information relating to Johnson, these scholarly works have understandably contained minor errors. This article aims to correct these errors, provide a fuller account of the Bukowski-Johnson relationship, and explore how it influenced, and was represented in, their respective literary productions.