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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.

Cormac McCarthy’s fiction has been widely acclaimed for its unstinting exploration of the subterranean recesses of human subjectivity and its inarticulate horrors. His third novel, Child of God (1973), achieves the foregoing by tapping into Gothic and postmodern features, both of which demonstrate a corresponding concern with human subjectivity. As a literary tradition intimately intertwined with the teleological discourse of humanism, the Bildungsroman or the novel of formation can provide an optimal point of departure for participation in the contemporary debate on human subjectivity. Despite the distinct imbrication between Child of God and the Bildungsroman, a systematic study of its significance vis-à-vis the novel’s stance on human subjectivity in postmodern times has not been conducted. Accordingly, the present study stakes out a new terrain in postmodern Gothic studies by establishing a line of communication between the Gothic, postmodernism, and the tradition of the Bildungsroman based on their relationship with the discourse of humanism. The interplay reconfigures the significance of Gothic horror in the postmodern world. In particular, the current paper argues that Child of God is a postmodern parody—in accordance with Linda Hutcheon’s definition—of the Bildungsroman, which draws on subversive Gothic elements in order to make a polemic statement about the status of Man in the postmodern world. It will be demonstrated that the novel reiterates the elements of the Bildungsroman with ironic critical distance, portraying the horrid dissolution of humanist subjectivity rather than its teleological progress toward positive identity formation and social integration. It will be indicated, however, that although the protagonist edges toward posthuman monstrosity in such a way as to limn the failure of the Bildungsroman and its humanist tradition, the posthuman liminality and marginality ensuing from this disintegration are not celebrated in the novel, as its Gothicity serves to voice the consequent horrors of this dissolution.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is generally known as a nature poet or a “worshipper of nature”. Yet, his nature poems are not merely confined to the portrayal of the physical elements of nature but are marked by his enlightened spiritual vision. The belief in one life flowing through all, which is a prominent feature of Wordsworth’s nature poetry is a prevalent theme also in the treatment of man and the universe in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s philosophy_ a Sufi mystic whose philosophy is most famously associated with the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud or “the oneness of being”. This paper is an attempt to critically analyze the traces of pantheistic and mystical elements underlying Wordsworth’s poetry, and more importantly compare this with Ibn al-‘Arabi’s stand on the matter. Through analysis of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology, particularly his concept of unity of being and his emphasis on the importance of the faculty of imagination, this study first meets the controversy surrounding the pantheistic elements in Wordsworth’s nature philosophy and then attempts to demonstrate that the mystical doctrine of unity in all beings and the reliance on intuition and imagination as a means of perception of divine immanence is evident in both Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology and Wordsworth’s nature poetry. This study also reveals that Wordsworth’s attempt to get to coalescence of subject and object via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, resembles the mystic’s yearning for transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divine.

Novels as cultural products are the representatives of a society which has been configured with a variety of discourses. Being involved in perpetual discursive practices, these discourses are constantly attempting to hegemonize their desired meanings via utilizing discursive strategies to marginalize the competing discourses. With Philida, André Brink makes a strong statement on the formation of the identity and power of indigenous African women. He sheds lights on the discursive practices that a female black African slave depicts to not only to gain voice, but also to construct a solid identity and power. Pertaining to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's notions in discourse theories, the authors of this paper analyze Philida to provide a new reading of the construction of a woman's identity. Thereby, first we are going to discover the conflicting sub-discourses which have had impacts on the formation of the characters' identity and power. Subsequently, since novels are the reflections of societies, we explore the major conflicting discourses in the actual society of South Africa. Finally, not only will we discuss Brink's views on the identities of Afrikaners and the indigenous Africans, but also we argue women's lower discourse has initiated to elevate during the timespan from slavery to post-apartheid era.

This study discusses the affirmation and negation of Orientalist tropes in Kae Bahar's Letters from a Kurd. As novel by a London-based Iraqi Kurdish novelist, Letters from a Kurd exemplifies many of the issues which inform literary production in transnational and diasporic contexts. While references to recent studies of world literature by David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, Pheng Cheah, and Rebecca Walkowitz provide a framework for discussing and understanding the conditions of the novel's production and circulation, Edward Said's critique of Orientalism provides us with a critical standpoint for discussing the novelist's representation of the Kurdish society. The findings of the study suggest that, despite the demands of the global market and the Orientalist history of the English language, the novel provides a nuanced representation of the Kurdish society by debunking Orientalist fixities stereotypically attributed to Middle Eastern communities.

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 capitalism.

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.

At the end of the 19th century the British Empire faced numerous challenges, both external and internal. The cultural and political elite from across the Empire tried to find a solution to these crises. Alfred Milner was a member of this cultural and political elite. He contended that in order to safeguard the Empire, the Anglo-Saxon race had to embrace what he called \"Constructive Imperialism\" and gain an \"imperial consciousness\". The aim of this article is first to analyze the nature of the crises the Empire faced, and discover the way in which they shaped Milner's brand of Imperialism; second to situate Alfred Milner's Constructive Imperialism in its cultural and political milieu; third to find its roots in the greater history of the British Empire; and finally, to understand why Alfred Milner failed to convince the Empire to embrace Constructive Imperialism. In order to reach its defined objectives, this article examines Alfred Milner's Constructive Imperialism from a historical standpoint and then utilizes the Contrapuntal Analysis of Edward Said to further investigate its narrative.