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The article focuses on the impact of scientific experiments in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," depicting their societal disruption through horror and violence. Topics include the Gothic nature of science, comparisons to other nineteenth-century fears influenced by the Industrial Revolution, and the philosophical underpinnings of positivism, emphasizing the nuanced portrayal of Comtean ideas in the novella.

When Lucky Jim first appeared in 1954, it received varied responses from different classes of readers and critics. Of course, the general response was favorable. It was positively reviewed by [...]

This study queries into the ethical functions of diasporic fiction through carrying out a textual as well as a contextual study of The Famished Road. As an account of the politically marginal and the socially displaced, the diasporic novel is imbued with a singularity of form and content. Formally speaking, diasporic fiction is non-canonical, since it belongs to the space between nations and cultures. Furthermore, it partakes of a dialogic form which novelizes minor discourses and genres. In terms of content, the diasporic fiction opens up and narrates a liminal space and consists of the search for a utopian alternative to the dystopian status quo. The concurrence of these four qualities turns the diasporic novel into an account of experience at its extremes. However, the diasporic fiction is ethically radical not because it shows how different human experience is at the moment of exception, but because it points toward what Badiou calls an ethics of truths in singular situations. The diasporic experience results in a radical ethical system of truths that, far from succumbing to an overarching ethics of difference and a logic of us versus them, highlights the human truth at the heart of the experience of diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the supernatural occurrences in the Marquis's castle, several characters of Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance adhere to the tenets of Lockean empiricism to interpret their sensory perception. Conversely, a few characters adopt Cartesian scepticism to dismiss the validity of sensory experience. To date, no exhaustive study of Ann Radcliffe's fiction has inspected the incorporation of Lockean empiricism and the Cartesian method of René Descartes into her novels. By conducting a historical analysis of the philosophical scene of the Enlightenment era, this paper aims to substantiate that not only does A Sicilian Romance encompass seminal philosophical notions of the age of Enlightenment, but it also points to the shifting philosophical scene within this period, characterised by the dominance of empiricism and the residuality of Cartesianism. By examining the reflection of these philosophies in Radcliffe's novel, this article challenges the supposition that the Gothic novel necessarily contains anti-Enlightenment impulses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding that scholarly discussions generally commend the deployment of metafictive techniques in children's literature, metafiction's subversive edge is blunted in those children's books that depict the solace offered by books as the panacea for all the conflicts within a given narrative. That said, as Joe Sutliff Sanders contends, it is possible for a children's book to highlight the salvific power of books while encouraging close reading. In A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–2006), written by Daniel Handler using the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, the defamiliarized relationship between metanarrative signifiers and their referents induces readers to adopt a critical approach toward Snicket's story. Drawing on Gerald Prince's theory of metanarrative signs, the present study explores the ways in which Handler's exploitation of metanarrative space destabilizes the narrative methods incorporated in his own story, thereby propelling readers to consider forming a more interrogative relationship with books and fictional narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iain Banks’s first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), set the scene for a literary career renowned for playful transgressions of genre and form. The novel addresses the topical debate on human subjectivity by capitalizing on the Gothic and postmodernism, both of which demonstrate a mutual concern with human subjectivity with a distinctly anti-humanist slant. This study argues that the novel partakes in the foregoing debate through an engagement with a literary tradition inextricably entwined with the discourse of humanism, namely, the Bildungsroman or the novel of formation. Despite the novel’s striking overlap with the Bildungsroman, the examination of its significance has been relegated to the periphery of scholarly attention. Accordingly, drawing on and expanding Linda Hutcheon’s notion of postmodern parody, this study posits that Banks’s novel is a postmodern parody of the Bildungsroman, which taps into subversive Gothic elements in its setting and characterization, which are the two cardinal constituents of the Bildungsroman, as its ironic catalyst in a bid to critique the status of Man in postmodern times. In other words, the novel reprises the tradition of the Bildungsroman with ironic critical distance, depicting the horrific disintegration of humanist subjectivity into posthuman monstrosity instead of his teleological advancement toward positive identity formation and social incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a quintessentially postmodern territory, Paul Auster's fictional world is laden with suicidal doppelgangers, whom Auster employs in the third volume of his celebrated triptych The New York Trilogy, namely The Locked Room (1986), as a structuring device geared to echo a postmodern world of hermetically locked rooms. Despite the striking presence of suicide in Auster's oeuvre, its significance as a thematic phenomenon has received surprisingly scant critical attention. The present study seeks to narrow the current lacuna by establishing a complementary relationship between suicide, the double-motif, and the characteristic postmodern mode of existence in The Locked Room. The study is carried out by applying Anthony Giddens's psychosocial account of suicide in "A Typology of Suicide" (1966), which in addition to providing an etiological analysis, helps to contextualize the structuring device of suicidal doppelgangers in the postmodern milieu of the novel. The upshot is a coherent tripartite nexus, in which an ultimate narrative of identity loss, suicide, and the double-motif correspond to one another's contradictions and undecidability. The aporetic indeterminacy rooted in the foregoing trio reflects the author's literary conception of postmodern existence in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of decades following the publication of Welcome to Hard Times, E. L. Doctorow produced a valuable body of works which, despite their thematic and structural differences, reflect a unique view of American life and values. While some critics state that Doctorow saw capitalism as the evil foundation of the American society, others contend he was more preoccupied with the stylistic techniques which enabled him to represent a fictionalized history of the United States. The present article aims to explore the representations of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque in Doctorow’ Welcome to Hard Times and Billy Bathgate. The article demonstrates that through a Western and a gangster story, Doctorow has challenged many of the structures and hierarchies established in the gender as well as socio-political contexts in which he wrote his novels. The research shows both novels create significant carnivalesque moments which enable Doctorow to challenge to dominant generic, gender, and social ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the established poetic idea of Ireland as a unified whole, new Irish poetry encourages a perspective toward homeland alongside with a corresponding revision of Irish subjectivity as liminality. Introduced by Homi Bhabha as a postcolonial cultural term, the idea privileges hybrid cultures and challenges solid or authentic ones. Moreover, this liminal rationale entails a corresponding chronotopic rendition, as Bakhtin intends to theorize it, whereby the notion of spatio-temporality assists the poet in rethinking the Irish identity. An archeologist shrouded as a poet, Heaney's early work, North (1975), is an attempt to reterritorialize the Motherland while Station Island (1984) represents the deterritorialization of the land, a collection in which Heaney proposes an alternative notion of Irish identity. The present study seeks to show how Heaney's aforementioned poetry collections manifest a transition from a patently nationalist reception of land to a tendency to liminal spaces. Hence, a critical juxtaposition of these two works bears witness to an endeavor to move beyond the solid, reductionist perspective of the unified Ireland into a state of liminality with respect to Bhabha's idea of hybridity. Furthermore, it is argued how Bakhtin's idea of chronotope can accommodate to the accomplishment of such a poetic project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional approach to literary adaptation, which insisted on rigid adherence to the source and denounced any deviation from the established text as unprofessional and negligent, has been substituted with attitudes that define the adaptation-source relation in new ways. Bakhtinian dialogism, as one of these approaches, redefines this relation in terms of a persistent contact between the two sides as the participants of a never-ending, all-inclusive network of relations. The idea of carnivalesque, a key part of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, can be used in adaptation studies to reflect both on the nature of adaptation-source relation and the internal mechanisms and techniques used by a particular adapter to reverse and suspend the orders and hierarchies established in its source work. Within this framework, the present study investigates Bakhtinian carnivalesque in Justin Kurzel and Billy Morrissette's cinematic adaptations of William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606). Kurzel's Macbeth (2015), set in Scottish Highlands during the 11th century, seeks to retain the Shakespearean air while addressing its contemporary issues mostly by highlighting or adding to the elements of carnival within the play. Morrissette's Scotland PA (2001) takes a radically different stance toward the play, though. He transforms Shakespeare's bloody tragedy into a dark comedy about the revolt of the lower class against the social structure. The study suggests that while these two adaptations take different, and at times opposing, approaches toward the play Macbeth, they both point to the carnivalesque potential of the play which can be released in and adapted to various sociocultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the beginning of their presence in the United States, blacks faced an all-encompassing process of marginalization and inferiorization imposed by the dominant white America, so they had to adopt different kinds of strategies in order to fight marginalization and find the respect and recognition they longed for. In the 1920s, young African American writers, greatly influenced by the modernist primitivism of the post-war Europe and the hedonistic zeitgeist of the Jazz Age America, opted to give a primitive, exotic portrait of Negro life. They naïvely believed that their primitivist representational strategy could prove their unique features and worth to whites and thus could bring them a more secure status in society by fascinating the post-war disillusioned Americans. Wallace Thurman was one of these writers who was extremely marginalized because he was not only black, but also homosexual. Trying to dispose of his subalternized status in society, Thurman went for a decadent, primitivist representational strategy since he held that an exotic portrait of Negro life, which catered to the taste of dominant whites, could grant him recognition and respect of which he had been deprived due to his "non-normative" skin color and sexual orientation. This paper tries to analyze Thurman's marginality and its influence on his choice of primitivism through a critical analysis of his play Harlem. It also aims to show that Thurman's goal to achieve recognition through the exotic representation of Negro life was a naïve, simplistic agenda which never materialized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The baroque culture of the seventeenth century has considerable affinities with the culture industry of late capitalism. This paper focuses on Caryl Churchill and David Lan's A Mouthful of Birds, premiered by Joint Stock at Repertory Theater in 1986, and tries to discover the baroque elements the play incorporates. This study is mainly concerned with the text of the play and does not deal with its performance or choreography. The writers aim to show that Churchill's play is informed with baroque techniques, which although at times make compromise with the premises of capitalism, yet enhance its potential to criticize the culture industry of late capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]