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This chapter concentrates on England during and immediately following the time of Geoffrey Chaucer. It is well known that Chaucer himself dealt extensively with the sacrament of penance in his Parson's Tale. The chapter focuses on the works of John Burgh and William Lyndwood and concludes with a brief review of their connection to Chaucer's works. Both men were writing for an English audience, but they were abreast of the latest Continental commentators. For an understanding of their ideas of penance, it will be useful first to review the authorities upon which they drew. The chapter then looks at a sequence of important works from the mid-12th century and early 13th century that treated penance and confession and that acquired significant glosses. Keywords: fifteenth century; Geoffrey Chaucer; John Burgh; penitential theology; William Lyndwood

The article sets out to show the ideological significance of the quotations from Vergil, Lucan, Horace, Homer, and Ovid found in Vita Nova 16 [XXV], the celebrated passage where Dante cites these poets as examples of personification in classical literature. In the quotations from Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeolus and Juno speak to each other, and Apollo speaks to the Trojans. In his framing of the quotations, Dante appears implicitly to regard pagan deities like Aeolus, Juno, and Apollo as inanimate things, raising the question as to why the author of the Vita Nova understood pagan gods in terms of poetic tropes. Focusing on the Vergilian quotations, this essay argues that Servius’s commentary to the Aeneid represents one of the major sources that might have led Dante to construe pagan deities as rhetorical personifications.

Existentialist thought has influenced arts and literature movements in Turkey starting from the early Cold War years. The Second New movement in Turkish poetry was able to distinguish itself as a literary movement by focusing on the constrained individual who lost their voice and autonomy in the repressive and polarized conditions of the Cold War. Sezai Karakoç (b. 1933) is a prominent Turkish and conservative-Muslim intellectual, and a poet of the Second New whose work shows the effects of existentialist philosophy and he uses existential notions to formulate a doctrine. With this doctrine and his unique perspective of what this article construes to be a part of the Islamic existentialism, Karakoç remains a pivotal figure in explaining existentialism’s influence in Turkish literature and politics from a religious standpoint. Although affected by the existentialist thought, Karakoç refuses Sartrean atheism or Camusian absurdism to understand the laws of existence, and ties both nature’s and human’s reason of existence to Allah with a fundamental belief maintains that everything is linked to Him. In doing so, he uses the notion of death as a transcendental experience for the human beings, which enriches life with an experiment that exceeds the boundaries of the physical rules.

The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional world, studying name given by authors to their romance heroes -gay and straight—as well as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668 straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. Given that gay romance is a fast-growing sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and shape perceptions within straight and queer societies.

A common thread that runs in the work of the current generation of African science fiction and fantasy writers is the need to utilize “specificity” in their plot and setting. This chapter discusses the existence of “Africanfuturism” in modern African fiction, based on examples from specific novels and stories by African writers that are arguably examples of science fiction or fantasy, to argue that “Africanfuturism” does exist and is identifiable in works of fiction by first-generation African fiction writers and the succeeding generations that follow their trail. The Concubine possesses every charm one might find in a narrative that could easily pass as science fiction and fantasy fiction projecting the features of African futurism. Africanfuturism in fiction is real and exists in the novels written by renowned African fiction writers as well as those written by current authors specializing in the science fiction genre.

The plays of Shakespeare's second tetralogy "Richard II", "Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2" and "Henry V" - are performed more frequently than any of the other history plays, and their three kings, thanks to Shakespeare, are among the most renowned in English history. "Theater and World" examines the theoretical and interpretive problems posed by the four plays. As he probes the complex relationships between drama and history, Jonathan Hart places his work in a wide critical context, from early Shakespearean critics to deconstructionalists and new historicists.

Certain critics have posited a correlation between the environmental threats posed by humans and the decline of the Irish language (Denvir 2018; Ó Laoire 2018). In his dual-language book An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht/ Irish and Ecology (2019), Michael Cronin contends that the language issue is fundamentally an ecological one. In considering the Gaeltacht as a fragile ecosystem, heightened by the precarity of Irish as a community language, this essay explores how contemporary Gaeltacht poets engage with the climate crisis at local and global levels. Taking the decline of the corncrake as its starting point, this chapter will discuss works by Pádhraic Ó Finneadha, Jackie Mac Donncha, Máire Dinny Wren, Proinsias Mac a’Bhaird, Bríd Ní Mhóráin, and Simon Ó Faoláin.