Narratives of Erasure

This chapter examines R.K. Narayan's novel The English Teacher as a narrative of caste erasure. As he goes on to construct his “authentic,” “brahminical” India, he effectively erases caste-others by creating an exclusive, selective imaginary of Indian nation as upper-caste. This construction requires caste erasure and suppression of “queerness” that constantly poses a threat to caste-based ideological formulations of Indian society as brahminical, Hindu, and hetero-normative. Through the close reading of the text, the author shows that caste not only damages Dalits, but it makes a deleterious impact on the upper castes and by extension on the whole Indian society.

Negative Impact of Ideology in Albanian Literature

Ideology as a form of ideas and as a practical tool with determinative purposes in certain circumstances may become very influential and risky, too. Albanian literature, as one of the East Bloc countries where communism was installed as a political system after the Second World War, severely suffered the ideology consequences in art. The purpose of this research is to focus on some problems related to the limitations, restrictions, deviation, regression created by ideology in literature. Concrete case studies will complete the theoretical frame through the analytical, historical, aesthetical, and interpretative approach. The hypothesis sustains the idea that the political ideology of the Albanian dictatorial system has found many ways to damage the most representative authors and their artistic works of Albanian literature. The ideology claimed “the compulsory educational system” by interfering in the school textbooks, by excluding several authors from those textbooks, by denying their inclusion or the right for publication, or even by eliminating them physically.

Reflection of Ideology and Politics in Travel Writing

The chapter focuses on the ways in which politics and ideology are incorporated into travel writing. The analysis of two travel books involving the U.S. American and the Soviet Russian cultures, namely Little Golden America (One-Storied America, 1937) by Soviet humorists Ilf and Petrov, and A Russian Journal (1948) by American novelist John Steinbeck, reveals the two factors of importance influencing the depiction of politics and ideology in travel writing, namely the authors' identity including their personal ideologies and the polarity of bilateral political and ideological relations between the nations concerned. These two factors predetermine the specific issues of political and ideological nature described and explained in travel writing and the angle and character of their interpretation and evaluation by the authors.

Indigenous Australian Detective Fiction as Political Writing

Indigenous voices emerged within Australian detective fiction with the greatest clarity in the 1990s. This chapter examines the figure of the Indigenous Aboriginal detective created by Indigenous writers as an underrepresented character and speaking subject within Australian detective fiction that both traverses and disrupts conventional elements of literary style. Certainly, the conventional characteristic elements of crime genre are present within detective fiction written by Indigenous writers, but this literary post-colonialist analysis explores how Indigenous writers such as Mudrooroo (“The Westralian,” “The Healer,” and “Home on the Range”), Philip McLaren (Scream Black Murder), and Sally Morgan (My Place) juxtaposed elements of style to both highlight constructs of reality in Australian detective fiction while simultaneously providing fresh perspectives on both the Indigenous detective as a figure of political interest and Australian Indigenous detective fiction as political writing.

Uprootedness, Resentment, and the Will to Power in Emily Brontë

The chapter reflects on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and brings into the discussion the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt. It emphasizes Heathcliff's personality as an expression of the will to power, a theme that has been developed both by Arendt and Nietzsche. It will be argued that the will to power is the outcome of uproodetness, a notion developed and thoroughly examined by Simone Weil. Finally, the present study elaborates on Christopher Lasch and Carl Jung simultaneously and seeks solution to a problem that also characterizes the contemporary Western societies, the liquidation of norms and values (cultural updootedness, in other words), the destruction of the past, of a world within which human beings develop their own sense of personality and identity, a world that, simultaneously, functions as a positive simulator in order to avoid resentment and destruction.

A Representation of British Gendered Imperial Politics in Fiction for Children

The chapter explores the gendered imperial politics in short fiction for children through analyzing “The Mowgli Stories” and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” selected from nineteenth-century colonialist author Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894). The reason for the selection of the stories is that they have not attracted the interest they deserve as products and perpetuators of the gendered imperial ideology. The chapter asserts that they both reflect the British concerns about the future potential Indian rebellions after the Mutiny of 1857 and applaud the faithful colonizing Indians' struggle against the rebellious ones through masculinist power of body and language. The stories narrate the masculinized bodily actions of the double outsider animalized characters involved in violence after the rebellion of one of them in colonial India. Thus, the chapter indicates the author's response to the mutiny through the techniques empowering masculinized imperialism in allegorical fiction for children.

“Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority”

This chapter intends to analyze Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time (2016), the fictional biography of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his three traumatic “conversations with power.” Barnes's narrative explores themes that are not only central to the composer's biography but of more general concern, the function of ideology and politics in culture and social life: the role of censorship in a ruthless regime and its traumatic effects on the psyche of an artist whose conscience must confront the insupportable demands of totalitarianism. The analysis of the novel aims first to investigate how the dominant political apparatuses of Stalinist power and their repressive ideological discourses affected the composer's personal and artistic life; second, to discuss the complex portrait of Shostakovich that comes to life in Barnes's representation. References will also be made to Barnes's two main sources: Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994) and Solomon Volkov's Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich (1979).

Intertextuality in Political Discourse

The chapter presents the discussion on intertextuality role in political discourse, namely in key leaders' political speeches. Intertextuality highlights the uncontested dialogicity of political discourse and takes it to the next level of decoding the speaker's message to the audience. By means of intertextuality, political leaders establish links with their audience outlining common values with the support of history, cultural traditions, and religion. Research into the speeches by key politicians allows the authors to reveal trends of intertext usage in European and American political discourse.