scholarly journals Hawthorne’s True Artist in The Marble Faun: The Jewish Miriam?

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 283-296
Author(s):  
Irina Rabinovich
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
History Of

The Marble Faun (MF), besides being a travelogue account of Rome, is a story about sin, guilt, suffering and abuse; it is also a tale about love and friendship. It is a story about the relationships between four different individuals united by their mutual love of art. The more interesting and convincing woman of the two female characters in the novel is unquestionably Miriam. Miriam is a rebel, an artist, and a compassionate and redemptive figure. Nevertheless, her art has been almost totally neglected, probably because most critics maintained that Miriam is an allegorical character lacking moral development or growth, whose function in the romance is limited to bringing about the Model’s murder and enacting the romance’s moral drama. The aim of this paper is to rectify a long and undeserved history of neglect and award Miriam her due status of Hawthorne's sole genuine artist. Keywords: art, Hawthorne’s female artists, The Marble Faun

scholarly journals A Gynocritic-intersectional Reading of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Najla R. Aldeeb
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Feminist Literary Criticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
Arabic Fiction

When Showalter (1981) coined the term gynocriticism to undermine feminist methodicide, feminist literary criticism established a clear methodological structure for application (as cited in Barry, 2009, pp. 17-20). However, as a result of technology, globalization and political changes, women suffer not only because of their gender but also because of their class, race or religion, which Crenchaw (1989) summarizes in the term “intersectionality” (p. 538). Shedding light on women’s multiple identities can help contemporary societies spot the discrimination that contemporary women suffer from; consequently, these societies can find solutions to eliminate the sources of women’s double marginalization. Race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation are intersecting loci of discriminations or privileges (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). Although this is a western paradigm, it can be applied to Saudi Arabian literature. The elements of gynocriticism and intersectionality are evident in the works of Raja Alem, a feminist writer from Mecca, Saudi Arabia and the first woman to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Due to the dearth of structured feminist literary criticism in the Arab world, this paper traces the history of feminist literary criticism and applies a gynocritic-intersectional model to Raja Alem’s novel, The Dove’s Necklace (2012) in order to examine the projection of women and help close the research gap in Arabic feminist criticism. The researcher probes the biological, linguistic, psychoanalytical and cultural depiction of the female characters in the novel along with their intersectional identities. The findings show that women’s overlapping identities influence the way they experience oppression and discrimination.

scholarly journals “Bordas sobre la trama esencial”: Needlework as Communal Rhetorical Practice in El obsceno pájaro de la noche

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Horan ◽  
Evan Chastain
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Culture Theory ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Rhetorical Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sense Of Touch

This essay applies a feminist synthesis of rhetoric and material culture theory to José Donoso’s novel, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970). Donoso’s novel depicts needlework as a communal rhetorical practice among women characters within enclosed communities. They sew, embroider, and repair. Drawing from Goggin and Tobin’s studies of needlework as rhetorical practice (2002, 2009a, 2009b, 2009), we investigate women’s needlework and sewing, contextualizing the historical and cultural referents within Chile’s long history of textile work, including the explication of epidermal aesthetics in Halart (2017). The paradoxically violent and restorative acts of sewing and repair provides the background for the many monologues the novel sets in the sewing circles of La Chimba convent. Each woman’s stitch enacts revenge for ongoing displacement and confinement to domestic spaces of home/convent. This essay argues that las viejas develop and claim a communal voice through their needlework upon the mute and bound monster of the imbunche, which becomes the fabric for their polyvocalic expression. In sewing the figure of the imbunche, the female characters participate in a tactile rhetoric that precedes verbal and occularcentric discourse and emphasizes the immediate and relational sense of touch. Our research is feminist as it recenters Donoso criticism on the female characters within his work, to showcase how their machinations and manipulations of materials enact an agency denied by a discourse and identity which prioritizes visual and verbal expression. We encourage Donoso studies towards a feminist focus on communities of women and process over individual and product.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Sub-version of Myth: Portrayal of Karna’s two wives in Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 277-292
Author(s):  
Yashika Bisht ◽  
Shweta Saxena
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters

Karna’s Wife is the first work of the writer, Kavita Kane who is “trying to portray a small chunk, a small aspect which has not been dealt with yet” in the Mahabharata. In Karna’s Wife, Kavita Kane portrays female characters like Uruvi and Vrushali who are victims at the hands of men and fate and how they still balance their lives and endure it all. Vrushali is the first wife of Karna and her husband married Uruvi and was deeply in love with her. Her rights, his attention, his love, everything is distributed. Uruvi who is Karna’s second wife is constantly seen striving throughout the novel to keep her husband away from Duryodhana’s evil camaraderie because she fears that this alliance will certainly lead to her husband’s catastrophe. It would be very interesting to see how these two women have come out of these gritty situations, faced the veracity and still lived mightily.

Female Christian prose today: A failed search for new women’s subjectivity?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
E. Chelpanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social System ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In her analysis of books by Maya Kucherskaya, Olesya Nikolaeva, and Yulia Voznesenskaya, the author investigates the history of female Christian prose from the 1990s until the present day. According to the author, it was in the 1990s, the period of crisis and transformation of the social system, that female Christian writers were more vocal, than today, on the issues of the new post-Soviet female subjectivity, drawing on folklore imagery and contrasting the folk, pagan philosophy with the Christian one, defined by an established set of rules and limitations for the principal female roles. Thus, the folklore elements in Kucherskaya’s early works are considered as an attempt to represent female subjectivity. However, the author argues that, in their current work, Kucherskaya and other representatives of the so-called female Christian prose tend to choose different, objectivizing methods to represent female characters. This new and conservative approach may have come from a wider social context, including the state-imposed ‘family values’ program.

Reading Statelessness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principal Subject ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document