World Literatures: Literary Concepts and Critical Contexts

Özet

This chapter offers a comparative reading of Şehbenderzâde Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi's A'mâk-ı Hayâl (1910) and George MacDonald's Lilith (1895), arguing that two dream-visions composed in mutual ignorance ‒one in the late-Ottoman, the other in the Victorian-Scottish world‒ are structural and metaphysical counterparts. Both arise from the same cultural emergency: a spiritualist reaction against the scientific materialism each author opposed, and both are the late, summary statements of writers whose public doctrinal vocations had collapsed and been reconstituted as visionary fiction. The study reads the two novels comparatively across a series of shared structural and generic categories: the allegorical dream-vision, a realist frame grounding the fantastic, the anti-materialist thesis novel, epistolary mediation, a fairy-tale substratum, a metaphysically governed fantastic, recursive mise en abyme, the central symbol of the mirror, and the dissolution of dualities through ego-death. The two works correspond closely across every category. The deepest convergence is doctrinal ‒the Sufi fenâ/baqā and MacDonald's Eckhartian Gelassenheit‒ and against rivals such as Bunyan, Carlyle, and Stapledon, only Lilith answers to the full set of categories at once. The chapter concludes that the philosophical dream-quest of the modern period is best understood not as a national possession but as a transnational response to a shared crisis of meaning.

Anahtar Kelimeler: A'mâk-ı Hayâl; Lilith; comparative literature; allegorical dream-vision; mirror symbolism; vahdet-i vücûd (unity of being)

Özet

This chapter discusses Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen as a narrative of resilient becoming enacted through material and discursive spatial transformations. Rather than simply applying established theories, the analysis critically engages with and unsettles Bhabha’s concept of the ‘Third Space’ and Massey’s theory of gendered spaces, arguing that these influential frameworks cannot fully account for the complex intersections of gender, race, and class that the protagonist faces. By foregrounding Adah’s navigation of both physical and discursive spaces, this chapter demonstrates how her inner ‘Presence’ drives her to actively redefine and create empowering new spaces of identity and agency. This approach not only offers fresh insights into postcolonial and feminist spatial theory but also frames Second Class Citizen as a powerful call to dismantle oppressive ideologies, resist systemic injustices, and create alternative spaces, laying a foundation for hope among African women in the diaspora.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Buchi Emecheta, resilient becoming, gendered and third spaces, material and discursive spaces, spatial agency

Özet

In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys depicts the socio-political dimension of colonisation on communities, among many other issues. The inquiry examines Wide Sargasso Sea from a postcolonial perspective; the colonial historical context warrants further examination. Consequently, the historical context is fundamental. Therefore, the colonial historical context of Wide Sargasso Sea is crucial; hereafter, the study uses new historicism to analyze social change and reformations, both colonial and stemming from the implications of supremacy. New historicism's importance of historical context and how it operates in the creation of social structures. Postcolonialism shows the difference between the colonized and the colonizer; new historicism clarifies the historical dimension of a text through context

Anahtar Kelimeler: Postcolonialism, Historicism, Communities

Özet

This chapter explores anti-Catholicism as a driving socio-political and cultural force in late 18th-century English Gothic fiction, focusing on Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797). Emerging alongside Romanticism and acting as an emotional antithesis to Enlightenment rationality, the Gothic novel served as a subtextual vehicle for expressing 18th-century England's deep-seated anxieties regarding Protestant supremacy, national identity, and the historical trauma linked to the English Reformation. By contextualizing these narratives within historical landmarks like the Act of Supremacy, the Jacobite Risings, and the Gordon Riots, this study demonstrates how Catholic Europe was framed as a primitive, superstitious, and despotic ‘Other’ against Britain's self-image of secular modernity and empirical progress. While both texts expose the hypocrisy, institutional cruelty, and patriarchal tyranny of the Catholic Church through predatory monastic figures and oppressive topographies like the Inquisition, they diverge significantly in their narrative execution. Radcliffe utilizes a rational aesthetic grounded in terror and the sublime, projecting Protestant anxieties outward onto external, calculating agents of the Inquisition to restore domestic order. Conversely, Lewis utilizes explicit supernatural horror and transgressive excess to internalize this historical hysteria, showing that true gothic terror originates from a repressed depravity within the monastery walls. Ultimately, this chapter argues that both authors construct an ideological binary that functionalizes Catholic degradation to implicitly validate and celebrate Protestant tolerance and modern secularism.

Anahtar Kelimeler: anti-Catholicism, the other, Gothic fiction, religious tyranny, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe

Özet

Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017), a leading African novelist and feminist, provides a
comprehensive depiction of African women’s experiences in her eight novels. In her semi-
autobiographical debut, In the Ditch (1972), Emecheta offers her perspectives on poverty,
sexism, and classism, while also addressing racism, injustice, and female independence. The
protagonist, Adah Obi, whose life closely parallels Emecheta’s own, marries at seventeen,
immigrates to England with her husband, later divorces, and raises five children as a single
mother. Adah endures persistent poverty and strives to overcome adversities typical of a
postcolonial context. The narrative focuses on Adah’s involuntary immersion in the
dehumanizing British welfare system, documenting her efforts to support and nurture her
children independently. Through Adah’s characterization, Emecheta reveals the lived realities
of Nigerian women and highlights their agency in navigating social constraints. As an
ambitious sociology student and civil service librarian at the British Museum, Adah faces
financial, social, cultural, and psychological crises. Her experiences are described by the
concept of permacrisis, which refers to ongoing and profound instability or turmoil, seen
through the perspective of an immigrant woman. This paper first situates Buchi Emecheta
among other African women writers and then examines the dynamics of poverty, sexism,
classism, and racism across African and British cultural contexts, focusing on the notion of
permacrisis.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Buchi Emecheta, permacrises, poverty, sexism, classism, racism

Özet

This chapter intends to focus on two canonical Southern short stories. One of them is William Faulkner’s “Dry September” (1931) and the other is Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (1963), which it reads as a single, transhistorical account of racial terror. This text, which blends Critical Race Theory with the historiography of lynching, contends that both short stories dramatise the same fundamental grammar: an empty accusation, the mobilisation of white womanhood, the defence of whiteness as a form of property, and the transformation of individual conscience into collective violence. While Faulkner intends to tell the lynching through a faceless crowd and a silenced victim, Welty transmits the story via the murderer as the first-person narrator. When read together, these two short stories expose the lynching not as a mere aberration but rather as an ordinary, ritualised technology of racial control. As this chapter suggests, the logic of this technology echoes through the twenty-first century’s social lynchings.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Keywords: Critical Race Theory, lynching, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, assaultive speech, whiteness as property

Özet

Mythologies are mainly narrated from the male perspective. It is mostly about the hero and his journey to success. The female voice has been marginalized. A woman doesn’t only need a room of her own but also a voice of her own. This is the case with Odysseus’ wife Penelope. Homer’s Odyssey is mainly based on Odysseus’ travels and adventures. This tale is also narrated from a male perspective. Penelope is the one who suffered the most, and her voice in the tale has been silenced. In this paper, Penelope will gain her voice again, and the reader will find out what happened during her husband’s journey. Considering Margaret Atwood’s feminist retelling of The Odyssey, The Penelopiad, a deep character analysis will be applied to the Tale of Odysseus by using the notions of notable feminists, such as Virginia Woolf, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Mary Wollstonecraft; Penelope will gain her voice back.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Voice and agency, feminist narrative theory, marginalization, Odyssey

Özet

Carol Ann Duffy’s 2015 play Everyman is a re-creation of medieval morality play of the same title, it brings medieval/contemporary concerns together under the subject of mortality. Based on Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, the play re-creates the confrontation with the mortality; the focus on the salvation and judgment in the medieval play shifts to contemporary existential concerns and the collective responsibility towards environment in Duffy’s adaptation; shedding light on the inequality, responsibility, and religious doubt the individual, on a larger scale, the humanity, faces in a more secular and material world. Everyman addresses today’s audience by maintaining corporeal and incorporeal aspects of mortality in medieval ages, and by turning to 21st century consumerism, ethics, eco-critical concerns. The play is explored through Vermeulen and van den Akker’s metamodern approach, as it oscillates between despair, irony and hope, critiques the current existentialist and moral dilemmas-both human and non-human-with a subtle implication of call for action and sincere reckoning. This study enables for a metamodern analysis of Everyman arguing that it reimagines death in the contemporary society, amidst the ecological crisis, materialism, and ambiguity, as both an individual moral reckoning and collective responsibility connecting history with the present. The study further implicates that metamodernism is not restricted to oscillation between modernism and postmodernism, but a cultural tendency that transcends any period, and it enables for new possibilities for reading adaptations of pre-modern texts from a metamodern lens.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Adaptation, Death, Metamodernism, Morality.

Özet

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the interrelated dynamics of patriarchal oppression, the racial marginalization of women, and the exploitation of the nonhuman world, using an ecofeminist comparative approach to analyze Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Many theorists and scholars have described ecofeminism as a means of identifying and analyzing the interconnected historical, material, and conceptual structures that dominate women and nature (Mies & Shiva, 2014, p. 14; Zein & Setiawan, 2017, p. 2). At the beginning stages of ecofeminism, Western capitalist patriarchy was supported by an array of dualistic thinking, culture, nature, mind, body, subject and object, to substantiate that all subjugation should apply to both human and nonhuman bodies (Avcil, 2021, p. 941; Merchant, 2005, p. 194). The traditional ecofeminist models have been criticized for their failure to adequately represent the intersectionality unique to Black women who have experienced both gender and ecological oppression as a result of slavery, colonization, and ongoing racial discrimination (Power, 2020, p. 73). Therefore, an ecofeminist analysis must involve multiple species as well as multiple forms of oppression to provide a thorough explanation of how African American women interact with their social and physical environments. The central research question in this study concerns Morrison and Walker's portrayals of the relationship between the natural environment and their Black female protagonists. It seeks to answer the question, "How do Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Alice Walker's The Color Purple use the non-human world and ecological relationships to express postcolonial resistance, spiritual healing, and self-actualization in the face of intersectional oppression towards women?

Both novels contribute distinct and overarching ecocritical concepts of Black womanhood. Tar Baby removes Morrison from anthropocentric stories and gives the environment the status of a postcolonial protest entity (Wardi, 2011, p. 1). The environment and animals at Isle des Chevaliers, Avenue des Fleurs represent a political, activist realm and bear witness to the suffering colonialism inflicted on the land and animals (Morrison, 2004, p. 9). Finally, Morrison uses Jadine's cultural disconnect from her roots, as well as the colonial division of both land and people, to demonstrate the parallel between them (Al-Halbosy, 2019, p. 145). In contrast, in The Color Purple, Alice Walker provides an eco-feminist perspective toward the natural world and incorporates concepts of spiritual healing and reciprocal responsibility. The transformation of Celie from a person abused without a voice into an empowered agent is profoundly tied to her change in perception of God, whom she now sees as present in the natural world (p. 135). Literary ecofeminism therefore provides a transformative place through which both the healing of one's own self and the healing of the earth can occur together. This chapter uses comparative analysis to demonstrate that both Morrison and Walker have dismantled patriarchal, anthropocentric structures and offered insight into Black women's ability to act for themselves within their relationship with the more-than-human world.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Ecofeminism, African American Literature, Black Feminism, Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism