Search

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.

This paper reads Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses through a postcolonial critical perspective. It argues that the author rewrites the history of Islam by utilizing postcolonial strategies of historiographic modality and spatiality in order to challenge Islam as a colonizing force and deconstruct what he considers its essentialist creeds. Ironically, Rushdie negates postcolonial discourse by essentializing Islam and evaluating it from an imperial perspective and a Eurocentric point of view. Such practice undermines his claims to modality and to spatial history writing and compromises his decolonizing project against Islam.

This article examines an early dramatic monologue by Charlotte Bronte and finds that Bronte pre-dates Victorian women poets in use of the form. Her early practice makes her a contemporary of Robert Browning and gives her precedence over Alfred Tennyson. The study investigates both how Bronte developed the form and why she introduced it into poetry. Without denying her childhood training in depiction of fictional figures, the findings point in the direction of Bronte's readings in seventeenth-century drama and her earlier writing of a short play as a more directly relevant background that made the monologue possible. Her personal motive for using it in poetry is initially a reaction to Robert Southey's discouraging response to her experience of poetry writing. The poem complains of literary marginalisation and asserts female poetic potentials. It embodies Bronte's culturally forbidden dream in an objective manner. However, the dramatic form proves to be more than a personal mask. It allows Bronte to contra...

The focus of this article is “The Ballad of the Dark Ladie,” a short fragment by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Critics often overlook the piece in their reading of Coleridge although it has an interesting story between the lines. Besides enriching the unfinished surface one, the submerged tale carries significant revelations about Coleridge’s literary relationship with foreign cultures and elements, the Dark Lady in this particular case. The present study intends to divulge the hidden tale in the text and to use its revealed construct to throw light on Coleridge’s engagement with the Other in his literary experience. It employs a formalist reading of the text and pays attention to point of view. It also invokes culture and allegory in the process of eliciting the significance of the embedded tale. My reading intimates that Coleridge’s imaginative aspiration towards the exotic Other is more congenial to his poetic creativity than other modes of the imagination. It also suggests that this Other might as well be the Orient. However, despite such harmony, Coleridge has his own personal concerns about his romantic quest of the Orient.