Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock: A Manifesto of Maya’s Psychological Predicament

The present paper aims to explore Anita Desai’s Debut novel, Cry, the Peacock as a manifesto of Maya’s psychological predicament. Cry, the Peacock is Anita Desai’s first novel published in 1963. Anita Desai is one of the most known and distinguished Indian English novelists with worldwide fame and name. She is gifted with extraordinary penetration and sharpness of vision. Her works have provided her with worldwide fame and attention. The novelist is accomplished with prospecting psychological insight. Majority of Anita Desai’s novels are the true and real manifesto of women’s situation and predicament. Cry, the Peacock is a manifesto of Maya’s psychological predicament. Desai’s has very well explored the inner or interior world of woman, her anger, frustration and storm raging inside her mind and heart through the protagonist of this novel. The novelist’s concern with the emancipation of Maya can be seen in almost every page of the work. She often peeps into the interior or inner psyche of her main characters instead of just focusing on the outer view. She is a master in composing the psychological novels. She very well knows how to explore the psychic depth of her main protagonists as well to analyse and examine their motives in details. The novelist is generally considered as a trendsetter in the area of psychoanalytic study. Through her extraordinary penetration of vision and sharpness, the novelist has brilliantly portrayed the inner turmoil going on in the psyche of Maya who is a hysterical personality. She is successful in bringing out the frustration, loneliness and claustrophobia of Maya.

Christian Context of Historical Novel (Zakhar Prilepin’s “Abode”)

The specificity of the synthesis of elements included in the historical narrative, and Christian motives, images in the novel of the largest contemporary Russian prose writer Zakhar Prilepin is comprehended in the article. The relevance of the article is due to the need to build a coherent and consistent history of the development of Russian literature over the past two decades, an important part of which is the legacy of the popular writers. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian literary criticism “Abode” is considered from the proposed perspective: its genre specificity is analyzed in a Christian context. It has been established that, despite the presence of elements of documentary, adventurous, love-psychological novels, in terms of genre, “The Abode” can be attributed to a historical novel (it depicts a turning point in Russian history through a conflict between historical figures and fictional “average” heroes, combines historical facts and fiction). At the same time, an interest in eternal moral issues, problems of life and death, conscience and duty, love and fidelity in their Christian understanding becomes a feature of Prilepin’s understanding of the historical theme. In their work, the authors of the article used comparative historical, biographical, socio-cultural methods, as well as the method of a holistic analysis of a work of art.

Genurile romanului românesc (1933-1947). O analiză cantitativă

This article puts forward a quantitative account of the subgenres of the Romanian novel during the 1933-1947 period. It shows the massive domination of the social novel and the Bildungsroman and analyzes the dynamics of genre and popular literature – adventure novels, detective fiction, SF, etc. – within the first period of massive literary production in Romanian literature. The article is the result of the MDRR (Muzeul Digital al Romanului Românesc – The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel) projects, set out to archive the Romanian production of novels from 1845 (the year of the publication of the – arguably – first Romanian novel) to 1947, right before the establishment of the communist regime. The first part is a quantitative analysis of the novels according to DCRR (Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc – The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel). The second part analyzes the “dynamics of popular subgenres,” meaning adventure novels, policiers, SF novels, and children’s literature. The third part envisions “the social novel” as a predilect genre of the interwar period, the fourth occasions a reading of the “historical novel,” while the last two sections describe the evolution of sentimental and psychological novels.

Feminism, Freedom and the Hierarchy of Happiness in the Psychological Novels of May Sinclair

May Sinclair, in her psychological novels The Three Sisters (1915), Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), and The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1919-1921), develops a concept of happiness which critiques the social, psychological, and physical constraints that are placed upon women due to their emotional labour. For Sinclair, some forms of happiness are better than others, creating a hierarchy of happiness across her work. Drawing on contemporary affect theory, this chapter offers an analysis of Sinclair’s complicated and deeply ambivalent representation of the feeling of happiness. The concept of happiness in Sinclair’s writing is protean. Certain forms of happiness must be resisted; for example the infantilizing contentment of Harriet Frean or the manipulative selfishness of Mary Cartaret. Still other forms should be actively pursued, for example Mary Olivier’s ecstatic and rapturous relationship with nature. Happiness can also become parasitic on suffering. Sinclair seems to be suggesting in both Mary Olivier and The Three Sisters that self-sacrifice, even self-abnegation, is the route to the “perfect” happiness. Affect can be dangerous in Sinclair’s work. To experience affect is to be affected and therefore the safest happiness is ecstatic: to be outside of the self, to be beyond the body.

Zwolennik Bourgeta. Stefan Żeromski i psychologia powieści

The article presents young Żeromski’s fascination with the writings of Paul Bourget. Basing on the Polish writer’s journal entries concerned with Une crime d’amour and Mensonges one can trace an ambivalent attitude towards those psychological novels developed in the late 1880s. By young Żeromski’s standards Bourget falls behind other masters of prose he admires at the time, namely Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. Still, despite Bourget’s didacticism, the aspiring youth cannot refrain from fascination for the descriptions of characters, whose emotions so often so clearly mirror his own. There are at least a few plots (an aspiring writer’s ambitions in the great world, the memory of a love lost etc.) which could have caught Żeromski’s attention as valid attempts to capture experiences known to him as well. It is therefore the identification process that stands in the way of condemning the moralistic ambitions of Bourget and allows the French writer’s works to remain an important point of reference for the Polish witer’s upcoming writing endeavors.