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Sami Tchak is renowned for his novels that skillfully blend elements of literature and research, creating a fictionalized portrayal of both worlds. While commentators have examined various aspects of Tchak's work, none have explored the connection between literature and social sciences in his novels through their shared element, the book. This article demonstrates how his novel Le continent du Tout et du presque Rien (2021) aims to dismantle the assumed boundaries between form and content, reality and fiction, scientific discourse and literary expression. Through the fictionalization of ethnology books and African novels, it challenges preconceived notions, revealing the scientific elements within literary discourse and the literary aspects within scientific discourse. The novel combines a genealogical approach, addressing the Other through the lens of ethnology's influence on Africa's perception, with a genetic approach, aligning itself with the African literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing examples from pioneering, established, and emerging African writers' works, this article advocates an enrichment of global literature through Western and African writers' and critics' acknowledgement and celebration of the existence of a plurality of literary canons. It limns the Africanization of global literature and the globalization of African literature by arguing that African literature has unduly suffered from biased comparisons and subsequent denigrations by Western critics, who often uncritically dub Western literature the canon that needs to be sheepishly emulated by African writers who wish to enjoy global or universal acclaim. The article concludes that both global and African literatures would be enormously fecundated if their writers and critics were to acknowledge the existence of regional canons and masterpieces, thereby encouraging literary communities to nurture and celebrate their own canons and masterpieces, alongside the canons and masterpieces of other societies, in a spirit of creative complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently 'literary'. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre's most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as 'tedious'. Focusing on Thomas Coryate's eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I aim to provide an overview of the relationship between women's writing and the 'canon', to suggest some reasons for its continuing marginality to that canon, and to outline briefly the ways in which the particular character and qualities of early modern women's writing require a rethinking of many of our dominant narratives about the literary history of the period. In this I draw upon the work of many critics whose work has shaped my thinking, and who are mapping out exciting new trajectories for the future direction of this field. The second part of the article focuses on setting out some ways in which early modern women's writing might provide productive challenges to current orthodoxies about the canon of Renaissance Literature. Finally, I turn to the future, and some ideas about how the category of 'women's writing' itself needs to be repositioned and reconceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race formation, canon formation, and the writing of linguistic history can all be understood as processes of standardisation that differentiate through inclusion and exclusion of selected characteristics (of a human group, language use, or literary work) in synchronic moments and artificially link those moments to create diachronic histories that can span millennia. As we will show in this essay, Thomas Warton's The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1775–1778) enacts all three processes simultaneously in ways that are inextricably entangled, and structured by an ideology of standardisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, the editors lay out the rationale behind this special issue. The goal of this issue is to identify and disrupt the complacency surrounding the medieval and early modern canon with a view to achieving two things. Firstly, we hope to uncover new approaches to the study of premodern literature that might result in a more accurate and inclusive account of what texts were of greatest significance to readers and writers in medieval and early modern England, even if those texts have typically been excluded from discussions of the medieval and early modern literary canons over the past three centuries. Secondly, we hope to draw attention to some of the problematic roles that medieval and early modern English texts have played as foundation stones of the English literary canon, and how they might equally serve to disrupt some of the assumptions on which that canon has traditionally been founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By questions of "canon," we mean questions of what is fictionally true of some character, story, or world. What is canon is treated as authoritative or official, usually by creators and fans alike. But disputes about canon have arisen as storytellers and publishers have sought to capitalize on the popularity of their characters, churning out more and more stories to meet public demand, and at the same time engaging with growing fan bases. As audiences have become more involved, and as fictional worlds have become messier, the authoritative nature of canon—and who authorizes it—has begun to erode. In this paper, we characterize canon as an article in the evolving relation between authors and audiences. More specifically, we characterize canon as an intangible good, subject to a form of cultural negotiation, resting on a power relation between producers and consumers of fictions. In Part I, we consider the author's evolving role, and the rights of the creator to a story, character, or world. In Part II, we discuss the emerging activities of fans, particularly as they weigh on issues of canon. In Part III, we discuss canon as being subject to cultural negotiation, highlighting the importance of power dynamics in this negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of readings of Adalbert Stifter's 1844 Studienfassung of "Die Narrenburg" as an expression either of orientalist fantasy or of Austrian inner colonialism, this article traces the text's confusing geographies through its intertwined figurations of native and exotic plants. Often thought of (due to the etymology of vegetare) as idle, passive, inert, and mute, flora in this text suggests the tracks of colonial exploration and horticulture, as well as of orientalizing literature, and is implicated in the literary framings and formats that promote a nineteenth-century canon of "Germanness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Hölderlin develops a new understanding of canonicity by way of related concepts such as law, measure, and harmony. The final version of his novel Hyperion "bends" the straight rule of the canon—the metaphor underlying the notion of a literary canon—against itself, transforming it into a Heraclitean bow: a dynamic play of conflicting tones or voices. Diotima, the novel's female protagonist, has an especially important role in this transformation: not simply through her diffuse physical beauty, which flows out into her surroundings rather than being concentrated into a plastic form, but through her voice and above all her words, which correct Hyperion's own Platonizing interpretation of the Heraclitean doctrine—an interpretation that tries to conceive of the discordant unity as visual rather than radically acoustic and musical. This counter-Platonic reading of Heraclitus contributes to the political radicalness of Hölderlin's novel, which regards the agonistic polis, ultimately extended to include the relationship between human beings and nature, as itself representing the highest unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the canonical narratives and assumptions about German literature in German Studies. The authors argue that traditional German literary texts should be re-examined to focus on voices of difference, such as linguistic, queer, racial, religious, and sexual differences. The article discusses two major responses to the conservatism and dominance of canonicity: including neglected voices in classes and creating a counter canon. The authors emphasize the need for close re-readings of the traditional literary canon to decenter it and highlight the diversity of voices within it. The article includes case studies that examine how canonical texts juxtapose voices of difference from different perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

Starting from interdisciplinary theories of canon, this essay zooms in on literary canons and the canon of the field of German Studies in particular. In comparison to many kinds of canons, academic canons, it is argued, are structured based on different and frequently opposing assumptions. On this basis, a distinction is made between the adjective "canonical," which refers to the supposedly stable functions of legitimate or illegitimate authority, and the adjective "canonic," which evokes the specific forms of critical self-reflexivity required in academic contexts. The concluding discussion addresses the specific challenges of the canonic design of German Studies in the North American context. As an interdisciplinary discipline operating at a distance from Europe, the canonics of global German Studies are relatively undefined. This can be interpreted positively as a source of freedom and flexibility but also as a challenge of self-definition in relation to various disciplinary-canonic architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of John Milton (both in poetry and prose) offered some striking theological and political innovations in the context of the seventeenth-century upheavals in England. This article aims to show that the work of the English women prophets active in England at the time offers a valid context in which to reassess and re-read Milton's work. This observation has occasionally been made in relation to specific prophets, but it has not been pursued in any detail. This article examines the concept of "prophecy" itself as formulated by Milton, and establishes its connections to the activity of women prophets; it also explores its connotations in terms of gender and its consequent implications in terms of opening the public and religious space to the work of female authors. It subsequently examines the work of two specific women prophets (Mary Pope and Elizabeth Avery) alongside that of Milton during the years 1647–1649, as offering equally legitimate responses to the debate concerning monarchy at the time, and it ends by examining Milton's final epic (Paradise Regain'd) as a poetic approach to the concept of female prophecy. The conclusion shows the renewed potential opened by this new research and considers its consequences for the seventeenth-century literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Ghassān Kanafānī's study on resistance literature in occupied Palestine, specifically focusing on the literature of Palestinians within the Green Line. Kanafānī's study aims to introduce this literature and culture to a wider Arab readership and the Palestinian community in exile. The study examines how political and social constraints influence literary form, the connection between literary movements and political consciousness, and the unique contributions of literature in resisting dominant political and cultural pressures. Kanafānī emphasizes the significance of resistance in asserting Palestinian identity and dignity in the face of enforced isolation and cultural erasure. The article also discusses the challenges faced in studying and understanding resistance literature, including the cultural embargo imposed on Arabs in the occupied land, limited access to education and publishing, and the control of content by Israeli authorities. Despite these obstacles, poetry, particularly popular poetry, has emerged as a powerful form of resistance and expression for Palestinians. The article underscores the importance of comprehending the objective conditions under which this literature was produced and the commitments and responsibilities it upholds. It concludes by examining the shift from love poetry to nationalist poetry and the role of resistance literature in the occupied land. [Extracted from the article]

By the late nineteenth century, Black women used poetry, short stories, novels, and nonfiction to confront a white, patriarchal society and protest the lynchings of Black people and voting disenfranchisement of Black women. Woman's Era became the first periodical written by and for Black women, which preserved a piece of intellectual strategy as elite Black clubwomen's marketplace of ideas. This article explores the contributions of Woman's Era , which also was the first to integrate into one journal various literary forms, thereby lending credence globally to many voices regularly overlooked by the white and male-dominated Black press. Their writings were a form of literary activism helping to legitimize Black women as change agents who fought socially and politically for their communities and collective rights as enfranchised citizens. This article complements the historical canon about Black clubwomen's social and political contributions through literary interventions in their communities, states, nation, and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central topic of the Romanian post-1989 literary life, the problem of revisions of the literary canon triggered a fierce debate between rival intellectual groups, a confrontation having as one its main goals the obtaining or, on the contrary, the preservation and consolidation of symbolic power within the national cultural field. Positioned in the epicenter of this "battle" - in his capacity as creator, together with Nicolae Manolescu, of the literary canon of the sixties-, Eugen Simion made his position known through two types of actions. On the one hand, through articles and interviews in which, recognizing the reality and necessity of periodic readjustments of literary structures and hierarchies, he strongly supported the imperative of having, as a fundamental principle in the process of revising the canon, the aesthetic criterion. On the other hand, by initiating and carrying out the monumental General Dictionary of Romanian Literature. A true canon of Romanian literature, "from its origins to the present day", GDRL illustrates, more than any polemic or theoretical approach, the vision of the critic E. Simion on Romanian literature in its totality and organicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the contemporary German literary public spheres, zooming in on the relation between a republic and its reading public. In the fraught political topography of contemporary Germany, marked by the arrival and eventual acceptance of over one million Syrian refugees since 2015, the rise of the extreme right-wing party Alternatives for Germany, resurgence of discussion on German colonialism in Africa, and extended public debate around the controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the essay centralizes questions of race, colonialism, and migration. Connecting these key terms with current debates on decolonizing and diversifying the literary canon, the essay argues that decolonization is a direction, not a destination; it is a method, not a product, and attempts to decolonize a national literary canon must be conducted in connection with the larger public spheres, indeed by decompartmentalizing the classroom and the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dongmei Wang's book, "Ideas and Methods: The Writing of British Literary History Within the Framework of Chinese Discourse," examines the influence of Chinese discourse on the writing of British literary history in China from 1920 to the present. Wang's research is based on an extensive database of historical material made possible by new electronic technologies. The book explores the impact of Chinese conceptions of literature, views of literary history, and historiographical methods on the writing of British literary history in China. It also discusses the issue of canon formation and the presence of Chinese discourse in Chinese books of British literary history. This book is recommended for those interested in Sino-British literary relations. [Extracted from the article]

"How Dark Is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love" by Leith Morton is a comprehensive examination of the evolution of romantic love in modern Japanese literature, with a focus on the poetry of Yosano Akiko and her husband Yosano Tekkan. Morton argues that Akiko's poetry and the Myōjō circle, which she was a part of, played a crucial role in the development of modernism in Japan. The book analyzes various poems, texts, articles, and works from the late 19th century to around 1918, providing valuable insights for scholars of poetry, modernity, and Japanese literature. It also includes translations of previously untranslated works, making it a valuable resource for researchers. [Extracted from the article]

This article analyzes evidence from a manuscript ledger belonging to the London bookselling firm of John and James Rivington during the early 1750s. The ledger shows that the Rivingtons, at the center of the London book trade, frequently swapped or acquired books from other booksellers for retail sale in their shop. The price valuations in the ledger also reveal that the books traded between booksellers were valued at a much steeper discount off the retail prices than previous studies have found. This article concludes by suggesting that the wide range of booksellers in their inner circle and the steep discount of prices for those on the inside explains how the Rivingtons and others at the center of the London trade were able to maintain their monopoly and also why they underestimated the threat from booksellers outside their network. The swapping of books gives insight into the retail experience and shows booksellers stocking common books even before there was an established canon of English literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes a look at the forms and functions of Romanian memoir writing in the 19th century, endeavoring to demonstrate that the literary quality is only one of the many criteria which determine its canonical status, others being its political and social value or its contribution to the coherent narration of the national culture. In order to better evaluate this hypothesis, I then propose the particular case study of Zamfir C. Arbore (1848-1933) and his memoirs as an early Narodnicist, Anarchist and political prisoner in the Russia empire, and afterwards as an exile to Switzerland, close associate to some of the great left-wing thinkers of his time and producer of clandestine literature. After going through the substance and technique of his memoir-writing, I come to the conclusion that such works, which the canon of literary tradition often avoids, are an integral part of the social memory which memoirs are a witness to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetic principles defined by Aristotle in his Poetics gave birth to an aesthetic tradition which dominated Western culture and literature up until the twentieth century. All his successors believed that, in order to achieve literary value and public acclaim, a text should comply with criteria such as unity of the subject (mythos), harmony of the parts (taxis), clear inclusive meaning (dianoia), etc. - in other words, structure. However, many authors departed from this ideal and gave free rein to their fantasy, conceiving plethoric, multi-layered, anarchic works, which tended to be, most often than not, excluded from the literary canon. During the twentieth century, with the modern and then the postmodern turn, not only the practical creative Aristotelian rules, but also the very idea of structure was contested. In this paper I make a survey of some of the main critical thinkers who opposed Aristotle’s model of closed works: M. Bakhtin, C.-L. Strauss, J. Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, U. Eco, F. Moretti, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carl Djerassi (1923–2015) has contributed a canon of literary works that attempt to bridge the gap between the ‘two cultures’, viz. literature and science. This article focuses on his last work of fiction titled ‘Chemistry in Theatre: Insufficiency, Phallacy or Both’. The preface of this book details his vision of ‘chemistry-in-theatre’, his three-stage method of writing a science play, and the concept of ‘plays on the page rather than plays on stage’. This is followed by two plays representative of Djerassi’s vision and method, titled ‘Insufficiency’ and ‘Phallacy’, which the present article seeks to explore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western culture and literature have been moulded, in their main aesthetic conceptions and creative practices, by Aristotle’s principles. Starting from his seminal text Poetics, ancient, medieval, and modern (from Renaissance to the twentieth century) aesthetics, poetics, rhetorical and grammatical theories have reiterated, amplified, adapted and reshaped the concepts of imitation (mimesis), subject (mythos), meaning (dianoia), order (taxis), unity of the whole and harmony of the parts, etc. On this basis, they demanded that literary works should have - as a prerequisite of aesthetic value and artistic success - a structure, a unitary composition, a centred form, a logos, a cogito, a synopsis or any other formal pattern. This brought about the exclusion from the canon of the works failing to complain with these criteria. In this paper I retrace the Aristotelian tradition, from Horace, Cicero and Quintilian to Beda and Dante, from Minturno and Scaliger to du Bellay and Boileau, from Sydney, Dryden and Pope to Mathew Arnold, the Chicago School and Northrop Frye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dennis Patrick Slattery's The Fictions of Our Convictions: Essays on the Cultural Imagination (2023) investigates how beliefs, expressed through personal and cultural stories or myths, construct our self-understanding and worldviews. Part I, comprised of thirteen essays, utilizes his own life story and literary classics such as Homer's Odyssey, Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Melville's Moby-Dick to reflect on a wide array of themes central to the volume: addiction, healing, imagination, and the power of language to both distort and reveal what is real. Part II provides cultural vignettes that reflect on civic matters pertaining to civility and democracy as well as existential matters such as trust, friendship, and aging. Slattery's interdisciplinary hermeneutic is deeply informed by the depth psychological perspectives of C. G. Jung and James Hillman and the mythological vision of Joseph Campbell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annabel L. Kim's book, "Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature," explores the presence of fecal scenes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature. Kim argues that the resurgence of the corporeal in literature during the war-ridden twentieth century reflects the vulnerability of human bodies. The book employs an excremental hermeneutics to engage with the presence of fecal imagery in texts and its implications for epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political questions. Kim's analysis draws on feminist and queer critical insights and contributes to the emergent field of Waste Studies. [Extracted from the article]

Cosmopolitanism promises to go beyond national thinking and tradition‐bound parochialism by reemphasizing the interconnectedness of individuals, communities, and cultures. This article probes the politics of adaptation of the left‐leaning Cantonese Union Film Enterprise (Zhonglian 中聯, 1952 – 1967) in colonial Hong Kong, and scrutinizes how it embraced world literary classics to enhance the prestige of Cantonese films. It focuses on three 1955 adaptations: An Orphan's Tragedy (Guxing xuelei 孤星血淚; from Great Expectations), Anna (Chuncan mengduan 春殘夢斷; from Anna Karenina), and Eternal Love (Tianchang dijiu 天長地久; from Sister Carrie). The founding of Union was a conscientious response of Cantonese film workers to the call of the Cantonese Film Clean‐up Campaign (Yueyu dianying qingjie yundong 粵語電影清潔運動) in the 1940s, launched by leftist filmmakers from Shanghai (Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生, Situ Huimin司徒慧敏) and supported by Cantonese film leaders Ng Cho‐fan 吳楚帆 and Lo Duen 盧敦. The study interrogates the predicaments and vicissitudes of Union's cosmopolitan stances as it wrestled with the cultural politics of Chinese cinema during the Cold War. It elucidates the ethnically rooted and culturally cosmopolitan Cantonese progressive cinema. The social realism represented by Union is not local or passé. The Union artists envisioned from below a humane and cosmopolitan community inhabited by workers and intellectuals, locals and diasporic Chinese subjects, which connects people beyond their parochialism and nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Queer between the Covers: Histories of Queer Publishing and Publishing Queer Voices" explores the production, dissemination, interpretation, celebration, and censorship of queer literature from the 19th century to the present. The collection of essays goes beyond the traditional definition of queer literature to examine the collaborative processes involved in publishing and protecting queer literature in Great Britain, the United States, and France. The essays discuss topics such as the use of collage in queer texts, the role of small presses in queer publishing, and the subversion of censorship. The article emphasizes the importance of access to queer literature and the ongoing threat of censorship. [Extracted from the article]

Nikolaj Lübecker's book, "Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé," explores the role of poetry in contemporary society. Lübecker argues that poetry can be seen as a form of solid and consistent thought, capable of challenging and reimagining our understanding of the world. The book examines the works of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, highlighting their contributions to the redefinition of human existence and the relationship between the individual and the environment. Lübecker emphasizes the ecological nature of subjectivity and the importance of relational dynamics in shaping our perception, emotion, and action. The book ultimately celebrates the power of poetry to inspire and enrich our lives. [Extracted from the article]

When we think of the Beat Generation most of the names that come to mind are from male writers in the movement. However, women Beat writers were as productive as their male counterparts but are not so often heard of, published, or accounted for their contributions to the literary scene of the times. This essay aims at analyzing the contribution of women to the Beat Generation and evaluate possible reasons for their absence in the literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orlando, Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel, has been skillfully analysed for a century, with a great focus on its gender representations and fantastical historical narrative. We have chosen to centre our research on a particular moment before the protagonist's self-imposed exile and gender change, in which he and his lover, Sasha, escape the court's trappings and wander into a performance of Othello. We argue that the choice of the play is relevant in multiple ways. Firstly, it showcases Woolf's dedication to referencing the literary canon and illustrating the protagonist's immature relationship with literature. Secondly, it is important because it specifically engages with nineteenth century literary criticism, Shakespearean criticism and performance, and its connections with white supremacy. Finally, it is pertinent due to the centrality of public discourse around interracial relationships in the early twentieth century, and how the character of Othello signifies a danger to British decency and the maintenance of heteropatriarchal relationship norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the introductory formula zhuan yue 傳曰 ("a transmitted source says") in early China, together with its "quotations" and their parallel texts. Rarely found in pre-imperial texts, the zhuan yue formula gained prominence especially from the mid-Western Han onward. As a vague, unspecific gesture of reference, the formula was flexibly applied to varying functions but also used with limited patterns and regularity. Both the formula and the quoted material are almost never found in the core texts of the "Five Classics" (wujing 五經); instead, zhuan yue appears to indicate sources that existed as an open repository outside of the emerging canon. Thus, in marking the non-canonical body, zhuan yue also helped define the canonical one. Finally, another usage of zhuan yue —which emerged in early Han times if not earlier—as an introduction to specific zhuan -commentaries of the classics is clearly a separate function altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Saramago After the Nobel: Contemporary Readings of José Saramago's Late Works" is a collection of essays edited by Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas. Published in 2022, the book commemorates the centenary of José Saramago's birth and explores the impact of receiving the Nobel Prize on his life and literary trajectory. The contributors, from various countries including Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, offer in-depth analyses of themes such as god, travel, death, human-animal relations, power dynamics, and style. The book is a valuable resource for those interested in Saramago's late works and encourages new readings and intertextual dialogues. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the place of the urban chronicle in the complex processes of literary canon formation in Chile. These processes have proved sensitive to political, aesthetic, social and economic factors at both local and global levels. I argue that the recognition and support of Chilean critics, publishing houses and scholars is essential for writers to become canonized in the country. An analysis of the resistance, acceptance and eventual canonical recognition of the work of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel concludes that the genre of the urban chronicle has gradually entered the canon through different streams; first anti-canonical, then conventionally canonical. This has happened in spite of the ongoing predominance of the genres of narrative, poetry and drama in the Chilean literary establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the place of Zionist tropes in the 17th century poems of Rabbi Shalom Shabazi in comparison with those found in medieval Sephardi poetry. Centuries after Shabazi's death, Yisrael Yeshayahu and several other Yemeni Zionists, located Shabazi's messianic poems in the literary and historical canon of Zionism. By correlating Shabazi with Yehudah Halevi and other Sephardi poets as heralds of Zionism before the establishment of the State of Israel, Yeshayahu and his fellow activists sought to determine a leading role for Yemeni Jews alongside what Sami Shalom Chetrit has called "Ashkenazi-Zionist 'history makers.'" In Shabazi, Yemeni Jewish leaders found an exemplar of time-honored Yemeni Judaism in a way that resonated with Zionist ideals. The article posits the existence of a continuum between Hayim Nahman Bialik's use of medieval Sephardi poetry and Yeshayahu's use of Shabazi's work; it explains why Yemeni Zionists chose Shabazi in particular as the linchpin of their argument for a proto-Zionist Yemeni cultural heritage; and also indicates the methods used by Yemeni Zionists, and Yeshayahu in particular, to successfully establish Shabazi as a forerunner to Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its introduction as an analytic and theoretical tool for the examination of racism in education, CRT scholarship has proliferated as the most visible critical theory of race in educational research. Whereas CRT's popularity can be viewed as a welcome sign, scholars continually caution against its misappropriation and overuse, which dilute its criticality. We draw from the cautionary ethos of this canon of literature as the impetus for examining CRT's terrain in social studies education research. Starting from Ladson-Billings's watershed edited CRT text on race and social studies in 2003, this study provides a comprehensive theoretical review of scholarly literature in the social studies education field pertinent to the nexus of CRT, racialized citizenship, and race(ism). To guide our review, we asked how social studies education scholars have defined and used CRT as an analytic and theoretical framework in social studies education research from 2004 to 2019, as well as how scholars have positioned CRT within social studies education research to foreground the relationship between citizenship and race. Overall, findings from our theoretical review illustrated that contrary to the proliferation of CRT in educational research, CRT was slow to catch on as a theoretical and analytic framework in social studies education, as only seven of the articles in our analysis were published between 2004 and 2010. However, CRT emerged as a viable framework for the examination of race, racism, and racialized citizenship between 2011 and 2019, with a majority of these studies emphasizing (a) the centrality of race as a core tenet of CRT, (b) idealist interrogations of race, (c) the perspectives of teachers of color and White teachers in learning how to teach about race, and (d) the role of race and racism in curricular analyses that serve as counternarrative to the master script of the nation's linear social progress in social studies education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sámi issues occupy only a marginal position in the textbooks, and the textbook authors offer stereotypical and exotifying portrayals of Sámi culture, establishing a dichotomy between the Sámi and the majority population ([19]). As King Harald of Norway declared at the opening of Sámediggi (The Sámi Parliament) in 1997: "Den norske stat er grunnlagt på territoriet til to folk - nordmenn og samer" ([18]) [The state of Norway was founded on the territory of two peoples - Norwegians and the Sámi]. In the text selection, however, the textbook authors impose the Norwegian state borders on Sápmi and make an arbitrary division within the field of Sámi literature, which includes authors from all of Sápmi. The tendency pervades across all four textbooks: the collection of Sámi folk literature is never mentioned in the chapters on folk literature in Norway but only in short comments in and introductions to the text anthologies. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the issues of literary impudence and homosexuality so much repudiated by African feminist theorists in Calixthe Beyala's erotic novel, Femme nue, femme noire. It reflects on the pertinence of using African feminist ideologies in the criticism of Beyala's fictions considering the fact her novelistic themes run contrary to the African feminist postulation where homosexuality, sex work and other transgressive tendencies constitute a strange and imported phenomenon. This article analyses the radicalization of African feminism through a close reading of Calixthe Beyala's Femme nue, femme noire by highlighting recourse to subversion as a radical tendency in Beyala's writings, which consists not only subverting the status quo through engaging in taboo-related discourse but also defending the sexual independence of the modern African woman as a form of emancipation. It concludes that the novel exhibits a new African feminism which is neither adapted to the collective feminist ethics nor to the African literary canon but to the individual feminine reality aimed at the total emancipation of the African woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though as of late there has been a renewed interest in the aesthetic ideals in early Medieval England, the conceptualisation and experience of ugliness in Old English sources has been largely neglected. Drawing on the recent research carried out on aesthetic emotions and folk aesthetics, and despite the lack of academic materials on artistic and literary canons of ugliness, the purpose of this paper is to look into the terms that rendered the experience of ugliness and its closest emotional response, aesthetic horror, in order to examine how these are employed in poetic texts. The findings from this study evidence a lack of use of terms for negative aesthetic experience in Old English poetry that suggests that the lexical domain of ugliness and related emotional responses were not fundamental constituents of the Old English formulaic style, while the lexical domain of beauty and its responses were. Additionally, this study highlights the fundamentally moral character of the idea of ugliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widely considered the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) is twice prefaced by an author who is aware of the risks he was taking in challenging the contemporary literary canon. Both texts lay out some of the Gothic particularities found not only in subsequent narratives of this kind, but also in fantastic tales, which will appear half a century later. The aim of this article is to track the origins of the fantastic in Horace Walpole’s prefaces so as to understand it better and discuss its development and divergence from the Gothic. Theories on the Gothic novel and the fantastic are also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Its premise is that the interpretive framework of American film after the 1950s was strongly shaped by the Cold War; the end of the Cold War is assumed to have changed those aesthetic interventions because it changed how Americans saw themselves and their country's new role in the world. Looking back upon the Cold War, it is highly ironic that the cultural initiatives of the early Cold War, covered by Barnhisel's book, partly stemmed from the desire not to have the United States defined abroad only by its popular culture. It uses popular films produced before and after 1989 to demonstrate the shift in how various popular film genres changed in their plots, symbolism, choice of heroes and villains, and portrayal of American life after the end of the Cold War. [Extracted from the article]

In the mid-sixth century, Cassiodorus wrote his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum to instruct the monks at Vivarium in their scribal work of collecting, codifying, and copying the Christian Scriptures, along with a vast array of Latin Christian literature. His text remained an essential handbook for monks and nuns working as scribes for centuries. Within it, he includes three authoritative canon lists which he takes from Jerome, Augustine, and the Septuagint. To modern scholars these lists often read as nonsense: he seems entirely ambivalent towards which books are "in" or "out" of the canon, he appears unfaithful to his source material, and none of these lists reflects his own system for listing or grouping the Scriptures. What then is the point of them? The answer lies in the importance that Cassiodorus, and other late antique authors, place on numbers as sources of allegorical interpretation in the search for higher meaning. Through a process of "holy arithmetic", Cassiodorus presents what he claims is an inner logic of these authoritative canon lists, bringing to light three different hermeneutical lenses for understanding what the Scriptures are. As allegories, those lenses can coexist in a complementary fashion, aiding Cassiodorus in his larger mission to codify a Latin Christian tradition. Examining Cassiodorus's approach to listing the canon and comparing it to modern scholarship on the subject bring into focus some of the key ways in which our own assumptions and methods differ from those of our late antique sources. It also opens up new possibilities for interrogating these sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "adbhuta-dharma" (Ch. weicengyou fa 未曾有法) has developed and changed throughout Buddhism's history. Indeed, the subject and the content of adbhuta texts as well as the meaning of the term "adbhuta" (marvelous phenomenon) varies across the scriptures. Looking through the scriptures, it would seem that they originated as narrative elaborations on various aspects of the Three Jewels—the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṃgha. Then gradually, "adbhuta-dharma" came to encapsulate those narrative elements in the scriptures related to the miraculous in the life of the Buddha as well as the careers of his disciples. As one of the twelve divisions of the Buddhist canon, the literary form of the adbhutas overlaps with other canonical genres, namely the nidānas, the avadānas, and the jātakas tales. This article will provide a careful analysis of adbhuta-dharma narratives in important Sarvāstivād in Sūtras, Vinayas, Abhidharmas, and other texts such as the Chuyao jing 出曜經 and the Buddhacarita (Ch. Fo suoxing zan 佛所行贊). These narratives are important because, while many monks and laypeople might have been left uninspired by the complexities of Buddhist thought and doctrine, miracle narratives were more accessible, playing an important role in popularizing Sarvāstivāda ideas and doctrines. These miracle stories reached audiences that other Sūtra narratives and exegetical works could not, helping in the dissemination of Buddhist thought and practice, as well as the later development and spread of Mahāyāna works in India and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]