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Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical tragedies, such as Dynamo, Days Without End, The Iceman Cometh and More Stately Mansions, are characteristic of the misogynistic murder motif. In these tragedies, the male protagonists actually kill or are motivated to kill their mistresses, wives and mothers. We argue that this unique phenomenon is in essence a matricide in disguise, which originated from August Strindberg's philosophy of misogyny and O'Neill's own adolescent psychological trauma. The revelation of O'Neill's misogynistic murder motif and its genealogical origin from the perspective of biographical criticism helps to explicate the dramatist's sense about the tragic fate of human beings.

In Vinegar Girl, a 2016 fictional adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, Anne Tyler exhibits an ambivalent treatment of the female predicaments left by William Shakespeare: while she invests her modern version of Katherina with linguistic and intellectual independence emblematic of female resistance to patriarchal disciplines, she somehow acquiesces in the fixed familial place and the stereotypical images of women in the monolithic patriarchal system. When the novel was introduced into the Chinese mainland in 2017, the Chinese publisher, out of commercial concerns, advertised it as a highly feminist text through the delicate manipulation of the translation of its title and a series of paratextual manoeuvres, to the detriment of the novel’s ambiguous complexities of gender issues. The marketing strategies nevertheless backfired on one of China’s social media platforms and rendered the novel a relatively ‘failed’ feminist text against China’s unique market and media background in the last decade.

Waveriders are of high lift-to-drag (L/D) ratio in hypersonic states; however, low volume of loading limits its application in practical engineering significantly. Raising the upper surface is a method to increase the volume space for waveriders, and this article studies the effect of the upper surface shape on the aerodynamic performances based on a single swept waverider configuration. Cubic polynomials were employed to construct the upper surface to replace the freestream-traced surface, and 2 parameters, the trailing edge thickness and inclination angle of head, were extracted as design variables. Analyzing the flow field using computational fluid dynamics techniques, raising the upper surface only had effect on the aerodynamic performance from the upper surface, but nearly no effect on the lower surface, and thus the design of upper and lower surfaces can be decoupled. As the trailing edge thickness and inclination angle of head increase, the volume of waveriders grows rapidly, while the loss in L/D ratio is limited. Compared with expanding the lower surface, raising the upper surface yielded better aerodynamic performances. The results indicate that raising the upper surface is a feasible and efficient approach to increase the loading volume of the waverider and hence promote its application in engineering.

The recent decades have witnessed substantial progress in stylistic research within digital humanities. Among others, Douglas Biber’s multidimensional model considers the full set of core lexico-grammatical features and counts as an efficient tool for identifying stylistic variations. As the representative of Chinese American literature, Amy Tan’s novels have been thoroughly explored as regards their representation of ethnic and cultural issues, while there is a scarcity of academic discussion on their stylistic uniqueness. In this context, the present study reflects on the stylistic differences among Tan’s six novels across Biber’s textual dimensions with the aid of MAT and R. The aim of this incorporation of data statistics and text analysis is two-fold. First, to delineate the stylistic variations among Tan’s novels along six main dimensions defined by Biber. Secondly, to determine whether there is a statistically significant correlation between any two dimensions in Tan’s novels. Previous multidimensional analysis-based stylistic research primarily starts and ends with the first step, while this study further investigates the possible correlations to better reveal Tan’s stylistic distinctions and avoid the loss of valuable information. This qualitative and quantitative comparison of stylistic variations demonstrates that computer-assisted methods can identify significant linguistic characteristics which literary critics might have ignored and eventually provide a more detailed interpretation of Tan’s works.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing chronicles three border-crossing journeys of the 16-year-old protagonist Billy Parham, in each of which there appear some sporadic descriptions of animals, namely, wo...

Since its publication in 2001, Life of Pi has been interpreted from various perspectives, such as biblical allusion (Kyser), shipwreck narrative (Dwyer), maternal cannibalism (Thorn) and cultural m...

Parody is regarded as a ‘beside-or-against’ song. Based on the theories of parody and intertextuality, this paper analyses the parodic means adopted in Umberto Eco’s short story ‘Granita,’ which is...

The double swept waverider is a classic example of the planform-customized osculating-cone waveriders, delivering satisfactory performances over a wide range of velocities. The nonlinear increase i...

Although described by Walt Whitman himself as “ the most innocent thing I ever did” (Traubel 157), and by 1968 as “one of the most sensitive lyrics in the language and one of the most astute diagno...

According to Joan Herrington, “The action of The Piano Lesson,” the fourth play in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, which depicts two contemporary African American siblings quarreling over the dis...

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) tells the fantastic story of a 16-year-old boy drifting across the Pacific Ocean for 227 days with a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Since its publication, Life of Pi has be...