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The article examines the character and role of Godfrey, military captain of the First Crusade, as presented in the poem "La Gerusalemme liberate" by Torquato Tasso. Topics discussed include difference in the figure of Godfrey with other poetic figures of Giambattista Vico, reason that Vico uncharacteristically introduces a poetic figure so close in time to his own, and the passage in Vico's book "Scienza nuova" about Godfrey.

The number of LGBTQ picture books—literary works for children containing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer characters and themes—has increased considerably since 2000. While different segments of this category of books have been examined, there has been a limited examination of the entire genre. Using 234 English-language LGBTQ picture books available in the United States between 1972 and 2018, I conducted a content analysis of the main themes and central characters as well as investigate how the main themes changed over time and the extent to which they reflected the larger historical contexts in which they were created. I find that very few LGBTQ characters are cast as main protagonists and some (i.e., bisexuals) are completely absent. Similarly, I find an increase in diversity of themes over the decades yet with most centering on marriage, parenting, and domesticity. Together, LGBTQ picture books convey a limited view of the LGBTQ lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about typography and its contribution to the meaning-making process in children's storybooks. This study applied the systematic framework for a distinctive feature analysis of typography to explore the manifestations of typography in 24 recently published Arabic children's storybooks and outline typography's ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions as interpreted according to the Arabic sociocultural context. The findings show a pattern of visually manipulated typographic representations in terms of weight, expansion and spacing, curvature, connectivity, orientation, irregularity, and colors. In its ideational function, the typography constructed, reflected, and evoked visual images of real-life representations. In its interpersonal function, the typography communicated educative, social, and cultural messages and values to young readers. In its textual function, the typography supported dramatic atmospheres, matched the tone and rhythm of the story, harmonized with the stories' themes, reflected the characters' emotions and thoughts, and highlighted or differentiated incidents, concepts, and characters. The typography was found to be a promising communicative resource in Arabic children's storybooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article first summarizes the results of literary scholarship on the character of God in Hebrew Scripture: authors such as Jack Miles, W. Lee Humphreys, and Avivah Zornberg discern a 'round character' in biblical texts, a divine persona who acts and reacts from out of particular desires, wants, and insecurities. The second section indicates a few factors explaining why constructive Christian theology typically finds this literary God-character unusable. The third section makes an argument for the usability of the God-character in Christian theology. The term haecceity —Latin for this -ness—epitomizes its proposal, which retrieves two twentieth-century thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and K. H. Miskotte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on an interdisciplinary book club discussion about Zadie Smith's historical fiction novel, "The Fraud". Topics include the novel's structure and its treatment of chronological shifts, the portrayal and development of characters from different backgrounds, and the use of historical sources in depicting events like the Tichborne case. Panelists also discuss the novel's exploration of political themes and historical changes.

Carlos Fuentes's 1962 novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz is a fundamental work in twentieth century fiction. The theme of choice permeates and complicates the novel's plot. Behind these choices is what appears to be a win-or-lose mentality, as Artemio seems to perceive the world as divided between chingones and chingados. This dichotomy is one that echoes the discourse of Mexican intellectual, writer, and diplomat Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in his well-known book on Mexican identity, El laberinto de la soledad (1950). Building on previous criticism that studies the intertextual relationship between the two works, this paper argues that Fuentes's protagonist embodies Paz's theoretical description of un hijo de la Chingada, simultaneously paying tribute to Paz's book while also questioning and problematizing its dichotomous thinking. Artemio's individuality, highlighted by the novel's opening ("Yo despierto...") and its closing ("moriré"), is something often overlooked by criticism that views Artemio Cruz as a trope, more than a man. Throughout the novel Artemio encounters doubles of himself that force moments of reflection. These doubles haunt him on his deathbed, creating a crisis of conscience that complicates the reader's interpretation of Cruz as protagonist. To presume that Artemio Cruz is merely a literary manifestation of Paz's theory is to overlook the craftsmanship behind his construction as a complex character who reflects on how the choices he has made have shaped his life and legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay assesses the long history of political disappointment with Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities , including George Orwell's description of the novel as a counterrevolutionary text that depicts the French Revolution as "no more than a pyramid of severed heads" (59). It suggests instead that the novel's nested use of prophecy and hindsight, borrowed to a certain extent from Thomas Carlyle, supports a reading of revolution as the natural and inevitable result of injustice. Thus the novel can be read along a line of development from Walter Scott's historical novel Waverley , which sees the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion as a foolish mistake, to William Morris's News from Nowhere , in which the protagonist's desired socialist revolution is seen from the far future to have succeeded. Sydney Carton's final prophecy takes part in a vision of the post-revolutionary future that is permitted to omniscient narrators, but usually forbidden to literary characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kim de l'Horizon's Blutbuch contributes to the contemporary posthumanist discourse of the German‐language literary landscape by developing an original way of narrating memory through transformative materialities. This article explores two forms of memory narration that de l'Horizon evokes and combines in their text resulting in a productive space of tension between the protagonist and their environment. On the one hand, the main character grasps narratives as layers of skin (Gehäute) that serve as a physical boundary of the figures in the text. On the other hand, de l'Horizon proposes a memory narrative that aims to permeate these skin boundaries to reconnect the human self with surrounding matter in a fluid, symbiotic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Dickensian Dimensions" makes use of Dickens's manuscript revisions to uncover the extra dimensions of emotional depth and temporal complexity that his sentences acquire in the immediate midst of composition. When the effects of those little changes were offered to a group of serious ordinary readers in the UK, their responses to selected passages from David Copperfield showed how much the tiny revisions could matter emotionally. The second part of the essay considers revised passages from Dickens's next first-person narrator, Esther Summerson of Bleak House. We suggest that Esther's apparently coy evasions can be more sympathetically read as writing problems stemming from her existential situation as a virtual non-person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas written texts are often perceived as silent, stable, and solitary, attuning to the sonic dimensions of literatures means recognizing how sound crosses borders and opens ears to multiplicity and simultaneity. In this essay, I propose resonant reading as a way of listening to the voices underlying a literary narrative and amplifying its themes, then I advocate for why this attunement towards aural literacies is especially important for borderlands narratives. I demonstrate resonant reading through a comparative analysis of Valeria Luiselli's 2019 novel Lost Children Archive and two other novelists she references: Cormac McCarthy and Roberto Bolaño. While McCarthy was credited with writing the "Great American Novel" and Bolaño was celebrated as the greatest Latin American literary voice of his generation, both of these writers shared borderlands narratives where characters move between Latin America and the United States. By citing these writers as intertexts in her own exploration of migrant journeys towards and across the U.S.-Mexico border, Luiselli demonstrates how multiple texts create thematic resonances together, beyond what each text achieves individually. I argue that an attunement towards resonance in literature offers a new way of understanding intertextuality as sharing more complete and inclusive stories of peoples and places. In conclusion, this essay, by synthesizing Transnational American Studies and Literary Sound Studies, sheds new light on how sonic methodologies change how the reception and reputation of literatures are understood across the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article examines how Australian literary fiction by women is received in the United States. In particular, it considers how books are positioned by publishers, reviewers and authors as relevant to an American audience as well as to what extent Australian literary fiction's appeal is borne out in reviews and in an online forum, Goodreads. To address these questions, I examine the US reception of three diverse literary novels by Australian women: Waanyi author Alexis Wright's The Swan Book (Atria Books, 2016), Charlotte Wood's The Weekend (Riverhead, 2020), and Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel (Little, Brown, 2013). I argue that recent Australian literary fiction by women makes an appeal to US readers through a combination of "transnational orientation"—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—which are leveraged by publishers in book design and endorsements, and "authorial disambiguation", in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. Efforts to draw attention to a novel's currency for a US audience are unevenly evident in reviews in broadsheets and trade publications, as well as on Goodreads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an exploration of the problems of writing autobiography and biography articulated by Laura Marcus, I show how Yeats, Wittgenstein and Woolf, identify the note as the form that keeps alive the life that autobiography and biography are always paradoxically in danger of making absent. The promissory note written for autobiography's impending realisation suggests that the past is best retrieved by means of a structure of permanent postponement for the future. Proust's invocation of memory through the device of sliding metaphors, analogies and comparisons, by contrast, involves a translation of moments of the past through deliberate paramnesia, operating according to the translational structure of displacement articulated by Freud in his analysis of dreams. Once put into narrative form, an autobiography will never tell the story of the self alone, of the individual life, for to write an autobiography will always mean to fabulate one's own 'family novel' (Freud's 'Familienroman') in the terms of a romance in which the writer acts out their own desires as a character within a drama whose script has already been written by others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the sixteenth century in Valencia, Spain, Juan Lorenzo Palmireno wrote self-help manuals aimed at the 'literate country lad of slender means and few connections who plans to better his lot by moving to the city', in the words of Richard Preto-Rodas. In Estudioso de aldea (1571) and its sequel El estudioso cortesano (1573), Palmireno guides his rustic reader in the art of self-fashioning and the presentation of a polished image, in speaking well to prosper in his urban milieu. The success of his books provides a historical, real-life connection to the struggles of many literary characters of the period, including Sancho Panza's social-climbing ambitions, pícaros and pseudo-pícaros, courtiers and would-be courtiers. Today, the pragmatic objective to articulate clearly and project an image of culture, sophistication and clear thinking dovetails with students' aims with their university education. At a time of crisis in the humanities, with student debt making US academia increasingly vocational, convincing students of the importance of studying Early Modern Spanish literature can be challenging. Palmireno's manuals are immediately relatable given the parallels to students' educational goals and views on the purpose of a liberal arts education, and they give historical context to the 'great works' of Golden Age Spanish literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on scenes from Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown, and The Last Saturday, this article examines the multifarious ways in which sound is employed, and silence is created, in Chris Ware's graphic literature. In examining these various aural and textual examples, focus will be given to the ways that sound and silence heightens character alienation and isolation, themes readily identifiable to readers of Ware's oeuvre. It will be argued that during the moments of alienation, Ware's characters' isolation is enhanced by moments of silence and the manipulation of diegetic sound. Further, I will examine the employment of what I term 'sequential absence of sound' and 'reverse sequential absence of sound'. Sequential absence of sound is created by removing previously observable diegetic sounds from proceeding panels to create a sense of absence, while the use of reverse absence of sound utilises diegetic sound after periods of silence to draw reader attention to the period of silence just passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial income disparities have increased in the US since 1980, a pattern linked to major social, economic, and political challenges. Yet, today's spatial inequality, and how it relates to the past, remains insufficiently well understood. The primary contribution of this article is to demonstrate a deep polarization in the American spatial system—yet one whose character differs from that commonly reported on in the literature. The increase in spatial inequality since 1980 is almost entirely driven by a small number of populous, economically important, and resiliently high-income superstar city-regions. But we also show that the rest of the system exhibits a long-run pattern of income convergence over the study period. A secondary contribution is historical: today's superstars have sat durably atop the urban hierarchy since at least 1940. Third, we describe six distinctive pathways of development that regions follow between 1940 and 2019, with certain locations catching up, falling behind, and surging ahead. We explore the role played by initial endowments in driving locations down these pathways, finding population, education, industrial structure, and immigrant attraction to be key distinguishing features. These insights are enabled by a fourth contribution: methodologically, we use group-based trajectory modeling—an approach new to the field that integrates top-down and bottom-up views of the evolving national spatial system. We conclude by exploring implications for the mid-twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calcined mixed clays are one of the most promising alternative supplementary cementitious materials. However, their standardized use is difficult due to the wide range of compositions of the raw materials. The reactivity potential of different clays can hardly be estimated on the basis of simple characteristics so far. This review aims to identify and compile the factors that determine reactivity. At first, an overview of the methods to evaluate reactivity is presented in order to provide a definition of this term. Subsequently, the reactivity-determining factors are compiled and subdivided into the characteristics of the raw material (chemical and mineralogical composition), the parameters of calcination (furnace type, temperature, grain size, retention time, and cooling), and the characteristics of the calcined material (physical properties and amorphous phase). Interrelations are discussed qualitatively. In the second step, a quantitative literature analysis was conducted to quantify correlations between the different factors and reactivity. However, since the characterization methods in the literature are very different, the data can hardly be analyzed quantitatively. Consequently, this paper points out what information is needed to conduct profound, comparable studies to evaluate the reactivity potential of clays. [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]

Alice Munro is a chronicler of women's lives in her contextual time and space, although her subtle and incisive psychological insight and understanding of womanhood render certain aspects of her characters' nature universal. Her short fiction describes and gives voice to a range of female identities and realities, often outlining sexual pleasure and desire with a sincerity and ingenuousness atypical for her time. This paper explores four Munro stories – "Memorial" (1974), "Accident" (1982), "Nettles" (2001), and "Trespasses" (2004) – included in her middle collections, which combine the female experience of an adulterous sexual act with a child's traffic-related death, focusing on the voice and sexual role of the protagonists to establish coherent links with the seemingly disengaged fatal accidents. My reading and interpretation of the stories attempt to signify the connection between the two themes in the author's corpus which, I argue, stems from her personal biography. The literary analysis is built on previous literature on the author and short story theory, and ultimately aims to understand, support, and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Try to Remember (2010), author Iris Gomez explores the main character Gabriela's coming-of-age story through philosophic introspection. As a young immigrant from Cartagena, Colombia, Gabriela helps her family thrive in the United States; the most taxing circumstance in this endeavor is her father's mental illness. Nevertheless, Gabriela acquires self-knowledge through reflection on her thinking self and personal examination of the discourse of love through her relationships. Her philosophic investigation includes address of concepts such as tabula rasa, standpoint epistemology, the Greek classification system of love, and ontology. Philosophers and theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Mariana Ortega, and Ofelia Schutte will be applied to analysis of this novel. Ultimately, the character of Gabriela finds freedom as central and critical in her own definition of Latinx immigrant woman subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Van Gogh is a character that appears in a verse drama entitled The Yellow Chair, a story within a story, in A. S. Byatt's Still Life, the second novel of the Frederica Potter Quartet. In this novel, both Van Gogh's paintings and a major life event – his agon with the French artist Paul Gauguin in Arles – are represented on stage. This paper argues that Van Gogh's self-mutilation is a mimesis of the various facets of the myth of the sun depicted in his numerous paintings (i.e. the life and death of vegetation in nature, the rising and setting of the sun in the sky, and the division of the white sunlight into both complementary and spectrum colors). The myths of fertility incorporated in Van Gogh's narrative in the novel epitomize the main character Frederica Potter's erotic experiences, who, as a Cambridge undergraduate, believes that the body is the ultimate source of all good in the world and that "marriage [is] the end of every good story."1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to highlight some of the paradigm limitations with which the relationship between industry and literature in Italy, starting from Elio Vittorini onwards, has been conceived. By methodologically addressing all the main characters' stories of the industrial literature as life stories (especially that of Marcello in Bianciardi's L'integrazione), the article draws out a series of extra-literary markers showing how this genre of narrative relies more on socio-economic factors such as emigration, precariousness, and depression than on strictly authorial poetics in which it is commonly ghettoised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Jacques Rancièreʼs radical democratic concept of dissensus, my article centres on the epistemic, affective and verbal forms of resistance depicted in Sharon Dodua Otooʼs debut novel Adas Raum. In four diegetic narrative strands, a police order of the visible and the sayable damages and assimilates the characters' lives. According to Jamika Ajalon, stories are lost in colonised space, but at the same time self‐determined stories have been shared generation after generation in order to stay alive. The everyday of Ada, but also of supposedly minor characters, such as the survivors of the Irish famine Lizzie and Alfie, is not only the site of violent Othering. Interconnected through different historical eras, the characters imagine other worlds at the margins. They develop creative counter‐strategies and safer spaces which can be understood, with Davina Cooper, as everyday utopias. I will show that the dissensual tension between experiencing the world as it is and the search for a better future can be seen as a central leitmotif of the novel. By giving back agency to marginalised subjects in narratives of resistance, Otoo's novel can be seen as an aesthetic artefact that brings to life world‐making, dissensual images which political activists can appropriate in their fight for equality and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has continued to shed light on the extent and significance of gender disparity in social, cultural and economic spheres. More recently, computational tools from the data science and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities have been proposed for measuring such disparity at scale using empirically rigorous methodologies. In this article, we contribute to this line of research by studying gender disparity in 2,443 copyright-expired literary texts published in the pre-modern period, defined in this work as the period ranging from the beginning of the nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Using a replicable data science methodology relying on publicly available and established NLP components, we extract three different gendered character prevalence measures within these texts. We use an extensive set of statistical tests to robustly demonstrate a significant disparity between the prevalence of female characters and male characters in pre-modern literature. We also show that the proportion of female characters in literary texts significantly increases in female-authored texts compared to the same proportion in male-authored texts. However, regression-based analysis shows that, over the 120 year period covered by the corpus, female character prevalence does not change significantly over time, and remains below the parity level of 50%, regardless of the gender of the author. Qualitative analyses further show that descriptions associated with female characters across the corpus are markedly different (and stereotypical) from the descriptions associated with male characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The epithet apostate is one of the most striking terms among symbolic characters of late antiquity. It has been applied to only Iulianus and described his paganist practices. Yet, there is another character from the same era that modern literature has left in the dark. After just seven years of Iulianus' death, Pap, the Armenian king, was labelled as impious by Armenian sources like the characterization of Iulianus by Roman Christians. Keeping these under consideration, this study aims to re-examine whether Pap could be named as a second apostate and to conclude that this was a unilateral glance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most fascinating aspects of human beings is their personality. Two models that are currently being researched and widely used in computational approaches are the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator and the Big Five (or OCEAN). In this study, we will briefly examine the history of these two models and the current state of their applications in the Digital Humanities field. Although categorizing research in Digital Humanities is a challenging task, we have chosen to include works that, while primarily psychological in nature, use methodologies and methods from Digital Humanities, specifically in literary texts. Consequently, we can divide this research into two categories. On the one hand, there are works that aim to study and identify the personalities of fictional characters in literature or movies. On the other hand, there are works that aim to recreate personalities in virtual characters based on a predetermined model. We will therefore examine the works proposed by the scientific community for both approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the portrayal of leprosy in medieval Scandinavian literature, specifically in the riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur. The author argues that leprosy in these sagas is depicted as a temporary affliction caused by women with magical abilities, rather than a divine punishment or opportunity for penance. The article explores the cultural conventions surrounding leprosy in these sagas and highlights its unique character compared to other contemporary literatures. The author also notes the increased interest in depictions of disability in the sagas and discusses the role of leprosy in various medieval texts, such as the romance of Tristram and Iseult. The article concludes that these sagas reflect anxieties about the loss of the normative and heroic male body, but ultimately reaffirm the heroes' pre-existing status in society. [Extracted from the article]

Kawabata Yasunari's (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception, largely because of two factors: its early publication history; and the theft, in early 1954, of the notes that Kawabata would have used for completing the text. Kawabata Yasunari's novel Senbazuru (1952), at the urging of the critic Nakamura Mitsuo, was published in book form before serialization had finished. The sequel to Senbazuru, later titled Namichidori (serialized 1953–1954), was still unfinished when Kawabata's notes were stolen, and he left the text in a state that he himself described as mikan, 'incomplete'. The seemingly unresolved quality of the text is even more apparent when one considers that the two last-written chapters of Namichidori were subsequently not included in published versions of that text, giving the impression that the sequel to Senbazuru ends inconclusively. The present essay examines the narrative as a whole, inclusive of the two concluding chapters. The theory of finance in literature is applied to a pivotal episode near the end of Namichidori (characters invest in the stock market); and thing theory is used to show that, in crucial ways, the narrative ends conclusively, if all the extant chapters are read as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of Zimbabwean migrants to South Africa, in scholarship as well as the media, have tended to focus on the often spectacular violence experienced by these migrants. Southern African literary criticism, too, has often privileged the visual, the ocular, and the spectacle. In this article, I focus on a different sensory dimension: the literary representation of sound. I show how sound and soundscapes, as represented in selected literary works, can illuminate everyday aspects of migratory experiences. I focus on aurality, arguing that listening provides a new methodology for reading and interpreting migrant fiction about the lived experiences of Black Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa. Building on theories of the soundscape, I examine how literary representations of migrant listening practices are deployed to comment on lived experiences, and how migrant literary characters' encounters with other migrants illuminate the layered dimensions of forced migration. I argue that a sound-focused analysis of literary works, rather than a focus on the representation of visual spectacle and description, can give readers access to the sense of rootlessness experienced by migrants. Such an aural approach demonstrates that literary and creative works are useful archives of subverted and denied claims of belonging premised on ancestry and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "History of Britain," by John Milton is presented. It discusses Milton's gendered virtues as confirmed in the book, Milton's portrayal of Cordelia as head of an army, the power and ability of a woman reflected in the book, and Milton's establishment of Boadicea as a warrior queen like Cordelia.

The article focuses on exploring the influence of John Steinbeck's epic novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," on Cormac McCarthy's work, particularly "Suttree." It examines the central idea of unanimity in Steinbeck's masterpiece and its transfer to McCarthy's later works, including the development of characters like Tom Joad and Suttree, who embrace the concept of interconnectedness and collective responsibility.

When Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was first published in 1962, it was instantly lauded as a timely novel. In this essay, I investigate what is timely about The Golden Notebook through an analysis of the novel's complex temporality. Taking the book's phenomenal critical legacy as a signal indication that its timeliness is yet to be exhausted, I explore how Lessing's provocative figurations of time illuminate the ideological and representational structures that confine Lessing and her characters. In doing so, I also gesture, speculatively, toward how these structures might be subverted in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of literary characters has been acknowledged to be a thorny field. Since Alex Woloch's The One vs. the Many (2003), exciting advances are scarce. The present article proposes cognitive narratology based on Theory of Mind, which focuses on multiple levels of embedded mental states that reflect and keep track of other characters' mental states (conveniently summarized as "I know that you know that I know"1), as a new analytical framework to push forward the study of literary characters and at the same time to test the validity of applying such a cognitive theory in literary studies. Through an analysis of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, a young adult (YA) fiction popular all over the world, it is argued that the protagonist Percy, who is also the figural narrator of the novel, distributes his mind‐reading activities on other characters unevenly. The distance between minor characters and Percy determines whether the narrator's discourse about them is accompanied by the narrator's interest in reading their minds, which is most clearly illustrated when they are first introduced in the novel. When Percy meets Annabeth for the first time, he subconsciously tries to bring their relationship closer at the discourse level by creating three levels of embedded mental states that include both of them as cognitive agents. Although this strong passion has not yet been fully revealed explicitly at the story level, it is discernable in the formal features of Percy's discourse. As the story develops, Percy's mind‐reading of Annabeth becomes a subconscious habit, whereas his narratorial treatments of two other minor characters have been steadily kept below three levels of embedded mental states. In this light, the complex relationships between these characters can be shown in a more pragmatic way by adopting Theory of Mind analysis, thus enabling us to explore the cognitive pattern of the text and offering a new perspective for the study of characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the nature of fictional characters has received much attention in the last few years within analytic philosophy, most accounts fail to grasp what distinguishes fictional characters from other fictional entities. In this paper, I propose to amend this deficiency by defining fictional characterhood. I claim that fictional characters are fictional intentional systems, a thesis that I label as FIST. After introducing FIST, I compare it to some rival definitions of fictional characters found in the literature, explaining why FIST is preferable. Finally, I briefly delve into the implications of FIST for other issues related to the nature of fictional characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depicting the events initiated by a stranger's arrival to a rural Catholic parish in 1950s England, Hilary Mantel's (1989) novel Fludd is built upon fundamentally metaphoric foundations. Most noticeably, the novel's articulation of alchemy captures the defining opposition of literal and fantastical meaning at the heart of alchemical symbols. It does so via a metaphorical construction that is first outlined in the opening paratextual "note" and which provides the novel's narrative backbone. This article adopts a broadly cognitive approach to illustrate how metaphor fulfils multiple functions in the text, acting as a tool of characterisation, a means of narrative compression and a form of meta-textual referencing, all of which link to the novel's central theme of transformation, particularly in the context of contemporary Catholicism. In so doing, it draws upon Biebuyck and Martens' concept of the "paranarrative" to demonstrate metaphor's potential to fulfil a range of fundamental narrative functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cormac McCarthy's stated purpose in writing Suttree was to present a grand humanistic vision of individuals who exist as "the embodiment of a single soul." The essay explores a seemingly minor character, Oceanfrog Frazer, who elicits the novel's deepest moral concerns. His words and actions express an exemplary ethos of charity and openness toward others that represents the best of what humans can be. The essay first examines Oceanfrog's "jauntiness," his gentleness and sprezzatura, a quality of character that serves as an ethical ideal for McCarthy. Second, the essay undertakes a close reading of the two principal episodes in which Oceanfrog manifests his moral character. Finally, I show how these two episodes work within the joinery of Suttree's narrative structure, that is, how the deliberate juxtaposition of episodes illustrates, by showing and not telling, Suttree's emotional and moral development. Oceanfrog's acts of non-judgmentalism and charity in Howard Clevinger's store move Suttree to imitate him during a bitter Knoxville Thanksgiving. Oceanfrog's ability to connect becomes a touchstone for apprehending McCarthy's humanistic vision of not just Knoxville but the world as "the embodiment of a single soul." The significance of Oceanfrog proves that no character or event is ever "minor" in Suttree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the irony in Shakespeare's portrayal of blindness in King Lear. With attention to the play's "Dover cliff" scene, I show how Shakespeare puts a particular device—dramatic irony—to strange use. Such irony often serves ableist purposes with regard to blindness, such that the latter becomes dramatic irony embodied; being unable to see what others see means being unable to know what others know. Lear 's "Dover cliff" scene can seem an almost parodic instance of this, with a sighted character convincing an unsighted one that he falls from a cliff when he merely falls onto his face. I, though, argue that in this scene Shakespeare enacts a breakdown of dramatic irony, making it impossible to know who knows more than whom. This breakdown, I conclude, opens the question of what blindness can mean and be and in so doing creates another, more salutary irony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to identify some of the peculiarities of the 19th century outlaw novel in relation to the conventions and the stereotypes of the historical novel, focusing on N. D. Popescu’s novels. The author almost always proves rather undemanding about the accuracy of historical data, not necessarily for strictly literary reasons, but rather to better fit the adventures and actions of the characters in accordance with the moralizing intention of his writings, present in almost all his novels. It is not by chance that he always chooses the sources that best fit his stated intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In connection to literature, negative empathy is a sophisticated form of narrative empathy with fictional characters portrayed as markedly evil and seductive at the same time. Several studies on narrative engagement have explored negative empathy mainly from a theoretical perspective. Conversely, empirical approaches have rarely delved into the dynamics of the linguistic construction of the texts studied. To fill this gap, this paper employs computational techniques to investigate the language of a corpus of novels whose characters are particularly apt for the arousal of negative empathy. More specifically, this study uses Sentiment and Emotion Analysis to explore the lexical representation of emotions and to locate fluctuations in the emotional content of the texts. The ultimate aim is to assess both the potential and the vulnerabilities of Sentiment Analysis for detecting emotional shifts in a literary text and thus for revealing the intensity of its emotional content, which may facilitate the readers' morally challenging engagement with negative characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay asks what happens to theorizations of literary character when we consider the formally complex treatment of character within the pornographic or otherwise disreputable texts that proliferate across eighteenthcentury print. Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-94), a catalogue of women involved in London's sex trade, is a piece of character writing; its characters are the marginalized, racialized, and sexually commodified. We examine how repetition operates in the treatment of two women of West Indian origin, in separate annual editions, and show how Harris's List embeds its characters in sexual and racial economies of reiteration and circulation. We demonstrate how characterization in such texts has implications for scholarship on the eighteenth-century novel and our understanding of novel characters, showing how Frances Brooke's The Excursion (1777) and Thomas Holcroft's The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794-97) ambivalently incorporate the forms of character writing that Harris's List deploys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the portrayal of priests in 19th-century literature, highlighting both the troubled and virtuous depictions of these religious figures in various novels. Topics include the contrast between flawed and virtuous priests in literature, the cultural context influencing these portrayals, and the tension between faith and skepticism in literary works.

A literary criticism of the tragedy "Coriolanus" by William Shakespeare is presented. Topics discussed include the character of the protagonist Cnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, the failure of the protagonist to listen which alienated him from people around him, and the destruction of Coriolanus as a result of his being deaf to the suffering of the masses.

A literary criticism of the novel "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad is presented. Topics discussed include the existence of the character Jim through the storytelling of the character Charles Marlow, the act of remembering and recollection in terms of narrative and identity, and the court scene in the novel which exposes the tension between mediated and true memory.

A literary criticism of the psychological novel "Victory: An Island Tale" by Joseph Conrad is presented. Topics discussed include Conrad's representation of the Chinese servant Wang, the loyalty of Wang to the protagonist Axel Heyst, and Conrad's great interest in China as reflected on his allusions to the country and Chinese characters in his works.

The article focuses on a reconstruction of how British writer H.H. Munro, also known as Saki, created the short story collection "Beasts and Super-Beast." Topics discussed include the history of Munro's writing career, his focus on writing stories about the character Clovis Sangrail and his publisher's proposal to use "The Chronicles of Clovis" as the title of the collection.

A literary criticism of the 1671 comedy play "The Frolicks; or the The Lawyer Cheated" by Elizabeth Polwhele is presented. Topics discussed include the portrayal of Clarabell as a libertine heroine, the re-evaluation of the play as an early comedy featuring a female stand on Restoration libertinism, and the close association of the play with gay couple characters.

The burgeoning field of digital humanities has provided important modern technological means for text mining in literary works. Chinese classical poetry, as a treasure in the world's artistic treasury, holds significant value in recognizing the heritage of world culture. In this study, taking the 1589 Tang poems from the Tang Poetry Road in Eastern Zhejiang as an example, we constructed a research framework that explores the aesthetics of classical Chinese poetry landscapes and spatial imagery at the urban agglomeration scale by utilizing geographic and analytical tools such as Python programming, Gephi co-occurrence semantic networks, and GIS kernel density analysis. The framework exhibits three key innovations: (1) a text processing approach that treats individual characters as semantic units in ancient poetry texts, (2) a combined approach of Python programming techniques and Gephi visualization tool for social network analysis, and (3) a study focusing on the integration of textual and spatial aspects of literary landscape heritage corridors at the urban cluster scale. The constructed framework greatly enhances the efficiency and accuracy of Tang poetry text mining, it enables the extraction of natural and cultural landscape spatial imagery along the Tang Poetry Road, the construction of scene depictions, the identification of key regions within the scenes, and the derivation of location-specific strategies. This study broadens the scope of exploring the cultural heritage value of Tang poetry literature and provides practical guidance for the development of cross-regional heritage corridors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]