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Working within the acceptable limits and traditions of the eighteenth-century oriental discourse and readership, Lady Mary Wrotley Montagu weaves her Turkish Embassy Letters to picture Islam as Muhammedism, and Turkish Women's Islamic beliefs as superstitions. Viewing the East through her own British socio-political and religious prejudices, she copies Rycaut in representing Islam. She selects and reports some un-Islamic practices to impress her readers. A close reading of the Letters and the Islamic cannon proves Lady Montagu's conclusions to be fictitious. The reason behind all these misrepresentations of Islam and the East is Montagu's refusal to recognize Islam as a religion. The few times she tries to overcome her inner resistance of the \"other,\" she appears to be embarrassed and the best she can come up with is to resort to her Christian values as a basis for judgment. Finally, she repeatedly invokes Christianity as the sole \"genuine\" religion whenever she mentions Islam. Such one-sided representation of the \"other\" in these Letters has become a dangerous literary phenomenon that urgently demands further research.

For generations of critics, the greatest problem The Taming of the Shrew presents is finding a rationale for Katharine's dramatic transformation and for the mixed reaction of the audience. This paper argues that theories of game and play can explain much of the courtship behavior in Shrew. Game theory provides a paradigm of power that governs social activities; play theory involves a transcendent sphere that can exist within a game. The more consistent body of knowledge that game insists upon countered by the multivalent aspects of play provides access to a dynamism between cultural repression and extension, alternatives of constraint and exuberance. Conflating the two theories of play and game allows the reader to observe the intermixture of two theoretical spheres and move toward a realistic explanation for Katherine's eventual submission to Petruchio's power. Play and game theories can also account for the mixed reactions of enjoyment and revulsion in contemporary audiences. Since play is transcendent and voluntary, male-identified or tradition-bound audiences enjoy the play for its lighthearted exuberance. Woman-identified or \"resistant\" audiences, on the other hand, assume a role comparable to game theorists and see Katherine's transformation as a result of coercion brought about by her husband's more powerful agency.

Through close textual analysis of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, this article argues that the hero of the play is an English Elizabethan mental state of being more than a stage depiction of a historic hero. Religion, ancestry, vision, and nature are fictional characteristics, which remarkably distance Tamburlaine from the Mongol historic leader Timur Lenk. Tamburlaine is redefined in an attempt to show how Marlowe borrows the destructive long-lasting military actions of Timur Lenk to fill a fictional being who is innately different, made of the four elements of nature represented on the Wheel of Fortune, and with no religion, no history, no personal ambitions, no secular or heavenly references. As such, Tamburlaine is released to destroy the then threatening Muslim East and is made to ignore his voluntarily personal guarantees to invade the whole world - thus the West is saved.

This study argues that Oliver Goldsmith's major fictional works focus on the conflict between family and selfish individualism. The works discussed are The Citizen of the World, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Traveller, The Deserted Village, The Good Natur'd Man, and She Stoops to Conquer. Taken individually or collectively, these works present the family as the most important and favorable social institution. Positive social characteristics, such as stability, order, cooperation, moderation, and common sense, distinguish the characters who belong to stable families. Courtship, marriage, friendship, and the home are essential components to forming stable and ordinary families. On the contrary, negative social traits, such as selfishness, extremism, and instability describe the negatively individualistic characters.