scholarly journals A Critical Inquiry into the Character Strengths of Alexandra Bergman in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!

Ars Aeterna ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-29
Author(s):  
Mária Hricková ◽  
Barbora Kolářová
Keyword(s):  
Character Strengths ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Inquiry

Abstract The paper focuses on the strengths and virtues of Alexandra Bergson, the central character of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1913). The novel deals with the harsh life of immigrants in America at the turn of the 20th century and describes the ways by which the pioneers sought to establish their existence and cope with their life’s tragedies. Using the VIA-IS (Values in Action Inventory of Strengths) classification, the paper attempts to show how Alexandra Bergson’s character strengths contribute to the value-based paradigm represented in the novel.

scholarly journals Women in Patriarchy: A Study of Sexual Colonialism in Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 52-59
Author(s):  
Dr. Deepali Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Australian Society ◽  
Women Of Letters

Colleen McCullough, a famous Australian women novelist, extensively deals with the issue of sexual colonization by exhibiting the fact that this world belongs to men not to women where women suffer and men cause them pain. Meggie, the central character in the novel is shown as the victim, sufferer and the colonized individual and Paddy, Ralph and Luke are shown as the epitome of the British colonizers who misused, misbehaved and degraded the women during their colonial rule. The novelist while sketching women characters does not asseverate as ostensible women of letters but for the delineation of patriarchy in the novel The Thorn Birds which clearly manifests her declivity in the vicinity of the infringement with women in Australian society. 

History as Destiny: Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain and Spengler

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 73-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Biddiss
Keyword(s):  
Central Character ◽  
New Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

THE novel which won the 1987 Booker Prize was Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. Its central character is an historian whom, on the opening page, we find already near to death. Even so, she is meditating about the completion of a new work: ‘A history of the world. To round things off. I may as well—no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez … The works, this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute—from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine.’ And she adds: ‘I'm equipped, I consider; eclecticism has always been my hallmark.’

scholarly journals Postcolonial dilemmas in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

IJOHMN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Abraham Panavelil Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Material Loss ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Diasporic Literature ◽  
To Come

The paper will try to analyze Kiran Desai’s Booker winning novel The Inheritance of Loss as story dealing primarily about the problems of migration faced by her characters, their tensions and dilemmas. One of the major concerns of diasporic literature is the problem of exile, displacement and the resulting consequences. Uprooting from one’s own home land is an agonizing process that brings numerous material and emotional traumas in the process of re-rooting in an alien land. The characters are often victims of circumstances and by the time they realize the problems, they are exhausted, miserable and frustrated.  Even when they come back after their traumatic experiences, like the Judge in the novel, they often develop a sense of distrust and anger. They are in a state of confusion from which they find it difficult to come out. The paper will focus on the experiences of some of the characters in the novel – Jemubhai Patel, the Judge, and Biju, the son of Judge’s cook who is the central character of the novel. The book seems to suggest that true happiness does not lie in material wealth or comforts, but in one’s own dignity, identity and sense of belonging. In the novel, the characters especially Biju has to undergo number of traumatic experiences that brought a lot of material loss, but he has a spiritual gain- the realization of what brings true joy in life.   Keywords: Alienation, Assimilation, Diaspora, Hybridization, , Identity, Immigrant, , Postcolonial

scholarly journals The voice of women in the Malayalam Literatures

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Saranya T
Keyword(s):  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Voice

The word bursa means keeping your face open. Barda's opposite is that sabita, the central character of the novel, has opened her face. He has also opened his mind. It is learnt that Muslims question the rituals of their religion, which sabita denies saying that it is the highest of all, and that only those who belong to their minds can reach heaven. Moreover, christianity withdraws from the true and light redeemer of the spiritual violations committed in the name of religion, the atrocities that take place within monasteries, and the spiritual and light that prompted him to get out of life that he had been conducting for more than twenty-four years. Although both belong to a different religion, this article reveals that their theocratic principles are the same.

scholarly journals The Dark Phase of Cultural Conflict in The Novel ‘Twilight in Delhi’

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Lakshmi B
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Drastic Change ◽  
Cultural Conflict ◽  
Dark Phase ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Muslim Culture

Twilight in Delhi is a very fine novel crafted by Ahmed Ali presenting the cultural conflict of pre-independence Delhi. Ali captured the very essence of the Old Delhi in the first part of the novel whereas moving to the last part he painfully portrayed the drastic change of the Old Delhi with a noted shift in the culture and tradition. The plot of the novel develops around the central character Mir Nihal and his son Asghar, with their contradicting ethics. Ali’s mastery in creating literary pieces is evident at the point where he changes his characters to powerful symbols to highlight the theme of the novel.  Mir Nihal, an upper-middle class person with his ideologies deep-rooted in the rich Muslim culture seems to pose a challenge to Asghar’s doctrine with its base on Western culture.

scholarly journals ‘Of Pride and Joy No Common Rate’: From the Surplus Women Problem to Surplus Jouissance in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Moore
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Surplus Labour ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Surplus Women ◽  
Condition Of Women

Abstract This article analyses Margaret Oliphant’s novel Hester (1883), arguing that it dramatizes a complex interplay of surplus labour, surplus capital, the figure of the surplus woman, and surplus jouissance. The central character, Hester, is read as a figure who embodies the surplus jouissance which is both necessary to and disruptive of modern capitalism, and which in the novel stands in opposition to the steady state of the respectable country bank, taken here to align with the Freudian pleasure principle. In support of this reading, the article traces a line from Hester back to the ‘surplus women debate’ of the 1850s and 60s, including Oliphant’s contribution to this debate in her 1858 article ‘The Condition of Women’. The novel itself is analysed through its epigraph, taken from a Charles Lamb poem of 1803, and through the multiple meanings of the concept of ‘chance’ which the text presents. My analysis proceeds by way of Freud, J. S. Mill, Marx and Lacan, finding that Lacan’s rereading of surplus labour as surplus jouissance ultimately provides the most productive way to read the text’s rearticulation of the surplus women problem.

William Kennedy, Ironweed (1983): fugitive souls and free spirits

2018 ◽  
pp. 197-209
Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Depression Era

This chapter is the first in the final section of The Existential Drinker, and notes that while the novel has many features of an Existential drinker text, it is also beginning to look to other ways of representing characters who commit to drinking. Although the novel is set in Depression-Era America its portrayal of down-and-outs in Albany is implicitly a counterblast to the greed of the 1980s. It has identifiable Existential elements, but these compete with other responses to the puzzle of existence, including a kind of spiritual comportment to the world which overlaps with some of the religious (Catholic) aspects of the book, and an occasional deterministic outlook. As well as the central character, Francis Phelan, the chapter also gives due consideration to his sometime girlfriend Helen, who lives in an arguably more wholehearted Existential manner than Francis.

The Novel of Its Times

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
C. Allen Speight
Keyword(s):  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World

This chapter examines how the theme of Bildung so central to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is bound up with a set of issues involving the relation between life and literature—the concerns philosophers and literary theorists have explored in light of famous problems of fictionality and theatricality, as well as more widely in terms of how artistic irony is engaged with the world itself and what sorts of strategies of narrative revision might be required for that engagement (as Goethe himself, attached to the themes and central character of his novel for more than five decades, clearly thought).

Androgynous motives in the novel “Pobeg Kumaniki” (“Bramble Sprout”) by Lena Eltang

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-160
Author(s):  
E. A. Poleva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The novel “Pobeg Kumaniki” (“Bramble Sprout”) by Lena Eltang fits in with traditions of modernism, where the images of the androgyny are related to the problem of finding and obtaining “intelligible integrity.” The paper analyzes the methods of embodying androgynous motives (auto-associative intertextuality, temporal and gender variability of perception of re-ality, Moras’ representation of himself as a woman, the homosexual intention of the hero, the relationship of duality with different-sex characters, etc.). The novel reveals the androgyny semantics in the context of the split Self and the search for the fundamental basis that would unite the parts into a whole. Androgynous motives correlate with the themes of creativity and love. It is due to the desire to compensate for the brother’s dislike and parting with him that Moras creates the text. The absence of love is one of the novel’s central manifestations of the splinter motif (disintegration, separation) that is antonymous to androgyny. The storylines of the two characters (Forge and Moras) test different ways of achieving integrity. Two vectors of movement towards wholeness are revealed: one towards complexity, multidimensionality (combining the diversity of the world and the Self in consciousness and text) and one towards simplification (the disappearance of fragmentation in the state of the embryo, representing pure potency). However, all the methods only manifest the limitations of human capabilities. Androgyny is still an ideal not to be realized during earthly existence. Therefore, the Central character disappears in the finale.

scholarly journals BARCAROLE PRINCIPLE IN A GENRE-COMPOSITIONAL ORGANIZATION OF “BERESTECHKO” BY LINA KOSTENKO

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Valentyna Saіenko
Keyword(s):  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
World Culture ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Time Flow ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
First Time

The paper deals with a historical novel in verse by the celebrated modern Ukrainian writer Lina Kostenko, for the first time analyzing it totally in a synesthetic way — through the component of musicality (namely barcarole principle of poetic creativity). The folklore origins of barcarole in the world culture have been traced, as well as the peculiarities of the absorption of the genre by professional music and literature, especially Ukrainian. Formation of the genre in the creative work of the author of “Berestechko”, who is the poet of a special musical feeling, deserves special attention. Barcarole is one of the forms of modernity in the creative thinking of Lina Kostenko; it is a natural writer’s way of perceiving reality and transforming it into an aesthetic system of artistic work (both in poems and the novel in verse). Being inclined to poetically adopt chamber and solo musical genres, the poetess creates a special voice polyphony in “Berestechko”, where each sense construct of a modern unity, i. e. novel lyric epos and barcarole, sounds both separately and complementarily, and the part of a protagonist merges into “I” of a speaker. The compositional function of barcarole in “Berestechko” is the modeling of a central character of the text. It is hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, spiritually undermined by the recent defeat. The barcarole elements are used for constructing the author’s version of this failure and its consequences, which spread around Ukraine as circles on water; absorbing a soothing rhythm of a song, which can cure the soul with love; shaping the architectonics of the text in the form of 'splashes'-'circles' with poly-functional titles and subtexts. In the genre structure of the novel, barcarole is essential both in the development of the theme and its stylistic implementation. In the unity of the work, one may notice “prelude”, the main part, and “postlude”, each part with its artistic sense. The images typical for a barcarole — water, boat, song, woman, love, etc. — are designed in accordance with the agrarian microcosm of the main character and its symbolic senses. Time flow, self-immersion, and love do not only spiritually heal hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, but give his life a direction and endow his figure with grandeur. The neoromantic potential of barcarole and the novel in verse correspond well and join in the final coda about the unshakable courage and heroism of the Ukrainian warriors. 

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