Traces of Scheherazade in Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen: A Transcultural Intertextual Reading

This paper examines the transcultural intertextual influence of Scheherazade, the legendary queen and the storyteller of The Thousand and One Nights, on Drabble’s The Red Queen (2004), which has a subtitle, “A Transcultural Tragicomedy.” It discusses how an appropriation of Scheherazade was utilized by Margaret Drabble in writing, The Red Queen. “But appropriation is what novelists do,” Drabble writes in the “Prologue” of her novel, adding, “whatever we write is, knowingly or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere.” This paper is a syncretic reading of The Red Queen to show the universality of womanhood and cross-cultural parallels. In this novel, which is based on the memoirs of an eighteenth-century Korean crown princess known as Lady Hong or Lady Hyegy?ng, the protagonist comes from the history of the East, just like Scheherazade, “to retell [her] story.” Also like Scheherazade who narrates stories in order to live, the Korean Princess uses storytelling as a strategy for survival. Moreover, the intentions of the novel can be seen in a feminist tradition of historiographic metafictional re-workings of the Orient and the Arabian Nights.

Representations of Girlhood and Girl Stereotypes in Victoria Aveyards’ The Red Queen Collection

Given the fact that girlhood studies is a new area of investigation which intriguingly demonstrates various ways through which girlhood is structured by different social and cultural codes, we intend to examine girl characters in The Red Queen collection as it was the New York Times Best Selling series. This investigation reveals the way cultural and social norms prescribe specific gender roles and shape different versions of girl characters in this series. To find girl stereotypes in The Red Queen collection, such girlhood theories as Girl Power, Reviving Ophelia, #LIKEAGIRL, Girl Effect and Girl Up have been taken into consideration. Various depictions of girlhood in The Red Queen collection are represented through characters who have different ethnic backgrounds and come from different social classes. This implies that the formation of girl identity has a lot to do with social, economic, political and cultural structures. However, identity formation, as we see in the collection, is an ongoing process and can change in the course of an individual’s self-development.

Revisiting Van Valen's Red Queen Hypothesis

Leigh Van Valen was an American evolutionary biologist who made major contributions to evolutionary theory and is particularly remembered by his groundbreaking paper "A New Evolutionary Law" (1973) where he provided evidence from fossil record data that this law maintains that the probability of extinction within any group remains es­sentially constant through time. In order to explain such unexpected result, Van Valen formulated a very influential idea that he dubbed the "Red Queen hypothesis". It states that the constant decay must be a consequence of evolutionary interactions among connected species within ecological networks. In Van Valen's picture, species do not merely evolve: they also coevolve with other species. As a consequence, when thinking in adaptation to an external environment, the other species must be considered as part (may be a major part) of such external world. Van Valen's law provided the first complex systems theory of coevolutionary dynamics and inspired a whole range of theoretical and experimental developments and scholars from very diverse fields, from economics to physics. In that respect, Leigh Van Valen's contribution percolated far beyond its original formulation. Red Queen arms races are nowadays considered a widespread feature of complex adaptive systems.

Red Queen Effect in German Bank Industry: Implication of Banking Digitalization for Open Innovation Dynamics

This study analyzed the firm’s actual case in an environment where the financial industry’s paradigm changes due to technological development. It focused on Deutsche Bank’s competitive action at the heart of the digitalizing European banking industry. This study presents the competitive dynamics among firms and the effects of such dynamics on firm performance. Based on the competitive dynamics between Deutsche Bank and other banks competing in the European banking industry, the Red Queen theory was applied. This study has shown that Deutsche Bank’s innovative actions in the digitalizing European banking industry are necessary and are a factor that can lead to successful firm performance in a hyper-competitive environment. Firms need to develop a capability to quickly capture the opportunities to innovate and take advantage of them to stay ahead of their competitors.

Building Inclusive States

Fragility arises when states are ineffective and when they are also illegitimate and unaccountable. These features are interconnected. People don’t want to cooperate with, or cede resources to, a state they cannot influence. We present a simple framework where the key to exiting fragility is a balance between the state and society. The state needs to develop more capacity, but to do this society needs to develop the ability to discipline and control it. We emphasize the existence of this type of “virtuous circle”—a phenomenon we call the “Red Queen effect.” We argue that the way of thinking about state-building is in terms of both widening the corridor in which the Red Queen effect operates and devising strategies to get into the corridor. We show how the framework helps account for the diminishing fragility of the state in post-apartheid South Africa, Somaliland, Sierra Leone, and Colombia.

AGENT MODELING OF COMPETITION AND COEVOLUTION OF FINTECH AND REGTECH2 IN THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL ECOSYSTEM: THE RED QUEEN EFFECT

This paper examines the competition and co-evolution of FinTech and RegTech2 in the global financial ecosystem using the methods of evolutionary economics. A simple agent-based model is built on the NetLogo platform and the emergence of cycles of technological dominance in the ecosystem is shown. The paper also discusses the “technological arms race” of regulators and system participants as a result of the co-evolution and competition of two technology groups, known as the red queen effect.