Silent Conversations in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Ruskin Bond’s Rusty novels

The essay undertakes an analysis of the connections and conversations between Rudyard Kipling’s Kim(1901) and Ruskin Bond’s largely autobiographical Rusty(1955-) novels. Kipling’s Kimhas evoked many literary responses and reactions across India. While writers such as Sarath Kumar Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, T.N. Murari,and even Sashi Tharoor have boldly written back to Kim, Ruskin Bond silently acknowledgesit in his Rusty series of children’s fiction. At times, Bond’s pointed and conscious avoidance ofKipling becomes his means of accepting Kipling’s influence on him. The essay traces the implicit dialogue between thesetwo Anglo-Indian authorsand their protagonists.It undertakes a close reading of theirnovelsto analysethe evolution of English literature and Anglo-Indianism in India, whilealsoexaminingthe divided identities of the authors and their fictional protagonists.

Competing Fantasies and Alternative Realities: Salman Rushdie's The Golden House

This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,” a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is “real.” Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, cosmopolitanism offers a radical alternative to identities and cultural practices built on the idea of the nation: cosmopolitans imagine themselves instead as part of a global community that cuts across national and linguistic boundaries. This book argues that fin-de-siècle writing in English witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers’ attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. It offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a field of controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light a variety of literary responses. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness. It investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents English-language literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.

Subject or Object? The Anti-Hero of the Allegory and the Hero of the Anti-Allegory

Referring to the British writers’ prompt reaction to the Brexit crisis, in developing what has already come to be known as BrexLit, Robert Eaglestone remarks the “cultural and emotional landscapes” created by such literary responses, which attempt to “humanize” major political dilemmas. Ali Smith, commenting on the same speed of writing books “pressed against the contemporaneous,” considers this as the result of history repeating itself with us failing to be aware of it, evidence of what we might call a community of unreliable remembers. The paper focuses on Ian McEwan’s 2019 The Cockroach, a novella offering a reversed Kafkaesque metamorphosis, a pretext to satirize Brexit and to meditate on how the antiheroic character caught in this allegorical transformation devolves from subject into object. I argue that this process of objectification (using Martha Nussbaum’s concept, derived from, but not limited to the feminist critique) contributes to the disembodiment and further relativization of memory.

Villainy in France (1463-1610)

This is a book about the outward manifestation of inner malice—that is to say, villainy—in French culture (1463–1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining insights from legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts (broadly conceived). While few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel. Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject’s significant ‘Frenchness’ and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. Villainy’s particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L’Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries; in so doing, it reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.

Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918)

This is the first of four chapters that deal with the theme of impossible nostos in the context of war and its aftermath. Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier was one of the first literary responses to the Great War and to the invisible wound of shell shock. The chapter argues that West also anticipated Joyce’s Ulysses by opening a dialogue between her own generation and Homer’s Odyssey. Less explicitly than Joyce, she has appropriated key elements of Odysseus’ nostos and either rearranged or inverted them. Although the novel announces itself in its title as a story of male nostos, what immediately strikes the reader is that it is told not from the perspective of the returning soldier, or Odysseus figure, but from that of a latter-day Penelope. The chapter also argues that West’s purpose is to highlight her society’s destabilized notions of home and homecoming, and challenge the prelapsarian reading of the last summer before the war and the Ithacan images of England used to recruit fighting men and mythologize the home front.

‘Spain! Most Pleasant were my wanderings’: Robert Southey's Pedestrian and Mountaineering Writing in the Iberian Peninsula

This article explores Robert Southey's literary responses to his walking experiences in Spain as he recounted them in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). Published after a four-month visit to the Iberian Peninsula, Letters departs from previous travelogues in offering, apart from factual details, subjective impressions of the places visited both in prose and verse. Nonetheless, I argue, Southey adopts a more intimate and self-reflective mood when he relates his pedestrian excursions in verse, not only showing a deeper aesthetic engagement with the natural surroundings but also acquiring an inward look. Moved by the bodily exertion of walking and hill climbing in Spain, Southey produced a series of poems in which the fragility of memory, the feelings of isolation and distress and the related poetic incapacity are explored. Encompassing examples from Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poems, in this essay I read Southey's poems in Letters as aligned with and contributing to the then emerging Romantic pedestrian poetics, though at the same time showing their ideosyncracy derived from Southey's complex approach to the Other in ‘a land of strangers’.

Dialogical Memory and Immemorial Poetics: The Ethical Imperatives of Holocaust Literature

Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethics and Paul Celan’s dialogical poetics, this article interrogates the impossible memorial and ethical demands that literary responses to the Holocaust place upon their readers. While Levinas reveals our position as summoned to radical responsibility, Celan shows us how that responsibility plays out in the form of ethical reading. By attending to the imperative commands found in Celan’s longest poem, “Engführung”, this article demonstrates how Holocaust literature memorializes the Shoah through an invocation of Levinasian ethics and the concept of the immemorial—that which exceeds memory. Following the discussion of Levinas, Celan, and “Engführung”, I turn to Primo Levi’s “Shema”, a paradigmatic text that likewise directly challenges us, calling us into question as readers during the moment of reading and demanding an attentiveness to the text that proves beyond our ability to deliver. Throughout, I aim to show how dialogical memory enables us to better comprehend the ethical burden we encounter in the literary texts of the Holocaust.

A Homage to Civil Society? Literary Responses to Germany’s Refugee Crisis by Jenny Erpenbeck and Bodo Kirchhoff

Although Angela Merkel refused to close Germany’s borders in 2015 when faced with thousands of migrants, her response to this humanitarian crisis made shortfalls in EU policies abundantly apparent. It became obvious that the Schengen Agreement, and the Dublin Regulations were no longer workable in view of a global movement of people that had not been experienced on such a scale since the end of World War Two. Literary greats, Jenny Erpenbeck and Bodo Kirchhoff, have dealt with the related challenges emerging for civil society in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Their protagonists’ responses to encounters with refugees and irregular migrants serve as a litmus test for dominant values of the middle class and a truly civil society. My contribution suggeststhat literary representations of German middle-class encounters with refugees explore aspects of civil society during the European migrant crisis, illustrating gaps and failures in German and EU policy.