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This article presents a geocritical interpretation (based on the methodological approach developed by Robert Tally) of two of Judith Hermann's short stories – 'Diesseits der Oder' and 'Osten'. Written almost twenty years apart, the first of these takes place amidst the Oderbruch, whilst the second comprises Hermann's only literary text about a journey to Ukraine. Drawing on interdisciplinary spatial research, I offer a close reading of both stories as they stage, in different ways, an affective experience of East European space. Moreover, I argue that through her critical investigation of the 'East' as an imagined and real space, Hermann emerges as a geocritic herself. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's notion of latency in post‐war culture, I contend that 'Diesseits der Oder' and 'Osten' are constituted as poetic texts that foreground disorientation through the mode of latency as a crucial phenomenological device. Once brought together into their historical and geopolitical contexts and explored through the aesthetic prism of representation of the 'East', Hermann's short stories are seen to advance a radical critique of perceptions of Eastern Europe in the German post‐war literary and geographic imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper explores Manto's selected short stories i.e. Toba Tek Singh, The Dog of Tetwal, Ten Rupees, Blouse, Khol Do, Licence, For Freedom, and Smell from thematic perspectives. Manto deftly presents the issues of his time through the sentiments and experiences of his characters. The psychological impact of the partition, people's attitude towards animals after partition whether they belong to which country, how the hunger of stomach compels females to sell their body for survival, adultery, extramarital affairs, morality influencing human relationships, hormonal changes during adolescent period resulting in emotional turmoil, communal riots resulting in bloodshed and loss of families, lust, fear, female victims' conditioning to surrender their body for survival to the lusty inhabitants, atrocities of the British on native Indians, freedom as a desired dream and female body as a sight for respite are some of the major concerns, Manto addresses in these texts. Thus, the writer unfolds the aftermaths of chaos, and unrest to the world while presenting the picture of society he lived in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Grace Jones," Irenosen Okojie's 2020 Caine-Prize-winning short story, received praise for playing with logic, time, place, and literary conventions, making the story challenging to understand. To help clarify this text, our essay examines "Grace Jones" through a transcultural lens, using Arianna Dagnino's genre characterization as the fusion of multiple cultural and literary traditions that reshape our "national collective imaginaries." Our readings utilize traditional African time concepts, contemporary clinical understandings of trauma, Ulrich Beck's risk society theory, planetary symbolism, Milton's Paradise Lost , and Christological imagery to elucidate the text. These interpretive modes enable us to read "Grace Jones" as a transcultural trauma text and leads us to suggest cultural cross-pollination reflects a feature of black diasporic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores affective narratives of migrants in a recent Brexit fiction in the context of feanxiety – a critical concept that brings together literary representations of fear and anxiety. The essay focuses on Agnieszka Dale's short stories collection Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), which represents the social and affective experiences of Eastern European migrants living in post-Brexit Britain. Written after the 2016 referendum, the collection engages with issues of belonging and (un)belonging, national attachments, and postcolonial relations in the United Kingdom. Reading three short stories from the collection, 'A Polish Joke', 'Fox Season', and 'A Happy Nation', this article investigates how through comedy, humour, and distanced attitude Dale's fiction fights detrimental prejudices about 'fearsome foreigners', reclaiming the lost agency of the migrants. This article argues that in Fox Season feanxiety operates as an aesthetic and an ethical mode but also as a political measure that operates within the modern power structures. Examining the experiences of migration through the lens of fear and anxiety not only enables a nuanced reading of the collection's outlook on negative emotions surging in the UK but also facilitates a furthering of feanxiety as a productive critical framework within the merit of affect studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines extraterrestrial intelligence in the short stories of Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin and their relation to the alien civilization in Liu's immensely successful REMEMBRANCE OF EARTH'S PAST trilogy. I will discuss the topic from three aspects: extraterrestrial intelligence's role as both metaphorical and literal mirrors in Liu's short stories; various alien worldviews and existential states that derive their conflicting diversity from the scientific and humanistic divide in the literary tradition of Chinese science fiction; aliens that represent either the scientistic outlook or the pitfalls of scientific and technological progress. While the values and outlooks of alien civilizations in REMEMBRANCE OF EARTH'S PAST trilogy are uniformly based on a reductive and unambiguous set of axioms, Liu's short stories argue for the multiplicity and relativism of existential values and purposes of life in the universe not only by portraying diversity, but by juxtaposing opposites, a bolishing binaries, and questioning absolute positions. I argue that Liu's short stories concerning extraterrestrial intelligence convey a message about the plurality and relativism of worldviews and existential values through embracing the coexistence of the antithetical stances of humanism and science, disputing the absolute positions of anthropocentrism and scientism, and dissolving the binary of the human self and the nonhuman other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is dedicated to analyzing proverbs in the select short stories. Proverb Stories of Many Lands by Lucile Berk was selected for this purpose. Analytical method has been followed. The analytical model includes specific steps, identifying the proverb stated in short stories and describing the context in which the proverbs are used. Thus, the contextualization of proverbs is pointed out by commenting on them. The next step comments on the core elements of the proverb. Whether the elements in the proverbs relate to mythological, cultural, traditional, environmental, or religious aspects is stated. The final step states proverbs’ implications through short stories. The advice stated through the stories and proverbs is interpreted at the end of the explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article at hand aims to investigate how Indian identity disintegrates due to White acculturation. Rather than concentrating on a positive construction of Indianness as a result of White culture, the emphasis will be on the dissolution and oppression of Indian values. Most often, the process of successfully containing values from two or more groups, in particular Indian and American ways of living, has been the central issue in scholarly works. However, there seems to be a lack of insight in the field of investigating the breakdown of Indianness. Through the use of Devon A. Mihesuah's adapted four life stages, it is the purpose of this paper to analyze Zitkala-Sa's short story "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" (1921). The following consequences of cultural imposition will also be explored, as they are crucial for understanding the themes of identity conflicts and resolutions prevalent in her autobiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on ethnic minority literature has primarily focused on "ground-level" analysis, namely close reading of literary texts by authors registered as members of one of the ethnic minorities officially recognized by the PRC. In this paper, instead, I consider the "external" framings assigned by publishers to a case study: "The Gray Robe," a short story by the Hui Muslim author Shi Shuqing. Publishers have framed this story as "ethnic literature" but also as "regional," "Chinese," and "Chinese Muslim" literature. These competing framings, I claim, are not simple promotional devices. Rather, they highlight the latent discourses that posit a civilized literary center versus an unrefined literary periphery. Investigating how publishers package literary works for readers' consumption enables an understanding of the tacit power dynamics within the modern literary field of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines a craft-focused approach with a stylistics perspective to consider the ways in which flash fiction may be said to operate as a unique literary form. In the opening section flash fiction is defined in relation to what are usually seen as its two closest literary companions: prose poetry and the short story. This is followed by an introduction to the linguistic phenomenon known as deixis, and to related concepts from the field of Narratology. These ideas are subsequently illustrated and explored through the close analysis of several short texts and used to uncover what might be considered the defining features of the form. The earlier taxonomic approach of William Nelles is also evaluated in the light of more recent creative practice. The article concludes by arguing that the mobilisation of a story world is a necessary requirement for a text to be classified as flash fiction, by highlighting the importance of deft manipulation of deictic elements, and finally by suggesting that the unique communicative context evoked by flash fiction has significant implications for its interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many readers of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's short stories and novels in English may not have read her creative work in the Irish language. In this short essay I aim to make more readers aware of her contribution to literature in Irish and of where her work is situated within the overall range of modern literature in Irish. 'Éilís na Gaeilge' is a somewhat different writer than her English language doppelganger. Her Irish language novels, for example, are predominantly works of popular fiction such as murder mysteries. Much of her work in Irish is aimed at – or at least accessible to – a young adult readership and deals directly and indirectly with social issues that affect their lives. She is an exceptional writer who had already developed a national and international reputation writing in English before devoting much of her writing life to work in Irish. This essay aims to cast some light on the range and quality of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's creative work in Irish and to encourage those who can to engage with that work as well as with her more widely known stories in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's short story 'The Coast of Wales' (2015), which describes a widow's visit to her husband's grave in a cemetery near Dublin. Although taking the reader to the dark recesses of grief, the author infuses her characteristic humour in her narrator-protagonist, to the point that this becomes a story of hope and renewal as much as of pain and mourning. This essay will focus on the performativity and ritualisation of grief and on how the social conventions around death intersect with the personal experience of mourning. Understanding bereavement as both an individual and a collective process, rather than as a medical condition, I focus on the story's inscription of colour, elements of the animal and natural world, and landscape to generate a glimpse of healing within the experience of emotional distress. Working within a Medical Humanities framework, the analysis is necessarily interdisciplinary, making use of literary criticism, memoir, medical, and psychological literature alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the way in which gothic topoi intertwine with the background of folk and fairy tales in Ní Dhuibhne's fiction, in terms of characters, setting, motifs, situations and atmosphere. Recognising the presence of gothic tropes can highlight the dynamic intersections of genres, and sharpen the reading of Ní Dhuibhne's short stories. In her very personal and unique approach to fiction, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne intertextually reworks traditional stories and juxtaposes them to their modern counterparts, thus expanding a sort of 'palimpsestic memory' that Maria Tatar identifies in the continuous rewriting of fairy tales. And the fairy tale's instability as a genre has its counterpart in the gothic, a restless form and an unstable genre, whose influence can be seen in many of Ní Dhuibhne's narrative and stylistic strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate contemporary Spanish-American science- fiction short stories, focusing on the emblematic case of the Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero. She is part of a national context that is very prolific in this literary genre, which has been stimulating new studies, symposiums and specialized journals. Her themes, style and language will be investigated through the study of the short stories "Regreso" and "Pasó como un espíritu", in order to explore the dystopian universe created by the author. Combining Andean cultural heritage and dystopic projection, she manages to outline the current political and sociological context in Bolivia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the usefulness of new formalist terminology for the study of integrated short fiction volumes. It adopts a case-study design: I take Janice Galloway's short story composite Jellyfish ([2015] 2019) as an example because the author experiments with new ways of writing, arranging and presenting short fiction in this volume. I explore how Caroline Levine's broad understanding of two forms (networks and rhythms) and their affordances can be brought together with different positions in short story criticism. Particular consideration shall be given to Rolf Lundén's conceptualization of the characteristic tension between the short story composite as a whole and its component parts. In short, the article analyses the complex networks and rhythms which give structure to Jellyfish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthony Burgess's short story 'The Endless Voyager' takes the reader on a whirlwind journey around the world. However, like the story's main character, Norbert Paxton, the reader never seems to arrive anywhere. This postmodern short story flips the legend of the Flying Dutchman on its head, encouraging the reader to test the limits of their understanding of nationalism and citizenship and contemplate this work of fiction in a metatextual way. The present study will begin with a discussion of Burgess's understanding of the purpose of art, followed by an analysis of the story, focusing on intertextual and intermedial references. Finally, the impact these references may have on reader reception will be examined, which will ultimately lead to a consideration of the story's brevity and of the question of freedom for the characters, the author and the story's readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores what might be revealed by a reading of D. H. Lawrence's earliest short story collection from our present perspective of the Anthropocene. What signs might there be of his later expression of his anxieties about human relationship with the cosmos? Is his later articulation of the tensions that are the source of those anxieties to be found in his earliest short fiction? How successful is his earliest mode of the short story in raising questions that might trouble his readers today? Do stories written by Lawrence around the First World War offer any clues to the causes of our present environmental crisis? How does the relationship between nature and gender that would guide an ecofeminist reading contribute to and problematize all these foregoing questions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Raftland' floats at the spot between short story and prose poem, blurring and bridging the two to encompass an evocative work that addresses and explores plastic pollution in the world's oceans as well as the far-reaching costs of rising and heating waters. It is a work of assemblages, a poetic piecemeal raft of the comings and goings of a newly flooded society whose degradation of language and livelihoods traces its way back to our current wanton anthropocentrism and consumer capitalism. A dystopic, speculative tale centring on a community forced to inhabit ever-moving raftworlds and continually prove their worth, it is a work that stresses humanity's catastrophic engagements with the ocean in an effort to prompt renewed vigour towards greater awareness and respectful ontologies to both the planet and its greatest life-giving substance. It is a warning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'TreeLand', a neglected pier attraction in northern England, has become home to some of the country's last remaining trees. On a day trip with her children, Ama's encounter with the verdant forest prompts her to question the stories she has always been told about trees being a threat. In this alternate near future, technological solutionism, the drive for development and resistance to lifestyle change has enabled the spread of carbon capture technology and the demonization and widespread replacement of real trees. The roots of this fictional societal response are shown to go back through generations and are perhaps not as far removed from today's England – where ancient woodlands are under threat and plastic lawns proliferate – as we might want to believe. The accompanying poetics, 'Some notes on losing trees', explores how stories can shape our understanding of, and interactions with, the natural world. The author reflects on how their imaginative world in childhood was forested through fiction when many native woodlands and trees had already been destroyed. Together, the story and poetics, invite consideration of how we respond as individuals, and as a society, when loss of nature is raw and immediate, when it is remote in time or space, or when it is just another part of the barely noticed everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conversation between acclaimed American short story writer and novelist Diane Cook and writer A. J. Ashworth, focusing in particular on the ecological elements in Cook's writing in her debut collection Man V. Nature. Cook also discusses the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic in her fiction, writing about aftermaths, her own experiences with nature and the environment, as well as some of her influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial begins by briefly mapping the rise of environmental science fiction in recent years and noticing that short fiction studies are yet to fully embrace ecocriticism as an angle from which to study the short story form. After remarking that the Special Section of this volume of Short Fiction in Theory & Practice intends to contribute to both of these projects, the editorial provides a brief summary of the articles, stories and interview included in the section. The editorial ends with brief descriptions of the articles and book reviews included in the General Section of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1980s to the 2000s, contemporary world fiction gained increasing prominence through the maximalist form of the postcolonial novel. More recently, short story collections with postcolonial themes, realist styles and minimalist constraints have gained in prominence, even as patterns of migration entangle the categories of local and global. This article focuses on two recent and acclaimed books, How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So, in order to argue that these reflexive, humorous and polyvocal collections provide new and generative iterations of contemporary global fiction through the form of the short story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genre of romance has until fairly recently predominantly depicted white protagonists and presented readers with limited representations of ethnic and racial diversity. This paper provides an overview of the ever-increasing number of Black British authors who are currently addressing this significant gap in the British publishing industry and analyse Bolu Babalola's debut Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold (2020) as a case in point. Love in Colour is a collection of short stories which questions the universality of western tales of love and celebrates Black love and heritage. My contention is that Babalola's collection, for its innovative elements, not only evinces that contemporary Black British women's writing, characterized by aesthetic and formal innovations, continues to "test simple generic categories", but, in its celebration of the transformative power of love, also demonstrates that Black love matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alice Munro is a chronicler of women's lives in her contextual time and space, although her subtle and incisive psychological insight and understanding of womanhood render certain aspects of her characters' nature universal. Her short fiction describes and gives voice to a range of female identities and realities, often outlining sexual pleasure and desire with a sincerity and ingenuousness atypical for her time. This paper explores four Munro stories – "Memorial" (1974), "Accident" (1982), "Nettles" (2001), and "Trespasses" (2004) – included in her middle collections, which combine the female experience of an adulterous sexual act with a child's traffic-related death, focusing on the voice and sexual role of the protagonists to establish coherent links with the seemingly disengaged fatal accidents. My reading and interpretation of the stories attempt to signify the connection between the two themes in the author's corpus which, I argue, stems from her personal biography. The literary analysis is built on previous literature on the author and short story theory, and ultimately aims to understand, support, and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are at a point in literary studies where the meridian has begun to insistently make its presence felt. But at the same time, we are approaching the field through a miscegenated lens. This essay is about mixtures and the blurring of chronologies these effect in the realm of literary studies. Both modernism and new modernist studies draw on the stimulus provided by intermixtures. One glance at our recent compendium of terms: creolity, métissage, planetarity, is a marked indicator of the direction in which modernist studies is currently headed, as much beholden to intermixtures as modernism was. I am going to approach these questions by taking as my pivot Jean Rhys's short story – and the title itself is deviously indicative of an intervention into all the theorizations referred to – "Mixing Cocktails". The question I intend to ask via foregrounding the liquid principle that Rhys's story deploys is whether in the quest to meridiniaze, if one could call it that, literary studies today, especially modernist literary studies, we are in fact letting the headiness of discovery blur meridians, even as we aim to bring them into focus. Dwelling on the admixtures, montages, blurring frames and colorisms in Rhys's fiction, I will argue that the intermixed futures that were being shaped by the global crossings of the empire are encountered in all the bleakness of an incomplete, forever deferred birthing in the writer's fiction. Drawing on the trope of the cocktail as both suggestive of a voluptuous dispersion and yet a shaping of all the elements into a finished product in the final analysis, this essay will dwell on how intermixtures are not always a palatable draught in Rhys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1947, even as India began, in Nehru's famous words, a "tryst with destiny", the nation found itself overtaken by the cataclysmic event of partition. Partition of India was an event of tremendous social, political, religious, and ethical disruption with its accompanying acts of violence, horror, and savagery. Amidst that violence, a writer who dared to narrate stories of this overpowering insanity was the celebrated Saadat Hasan Manto. That he could write with adequate detachment, fairly and poignantly, and capture the passions in reasonable language, without taking sides and without getting trapped within the communal logic, is indeed, as unbelievable as was the terrible reality of the world around. Keeping his focus on the predicament of ordinary people caught in the chaos, Manto lays bare the sheer ugliness and bestiality lying dormant within the human psyche. His raw portrayals have kept the cries of victims and the mindlessness of it all alive through time. The paper takes account of five of Manto's short stories to examine how the narrative of disruption continues to overpower years after it actually happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have read Edgar Allan Poe as uniquely enmeshed in an interdisciplinary and intermediary web connecting the visual and practical arts. Poe's prose is intrinsically multimodal and multisensory, a transgression of disciplinary boundaries that leads to a horrific affect. This article examines three of Poe's short stories with attention to the figure of the artist, architect, and author within his fiction, arguing that these characters can be read as exemplars of Poe's aesthetic philosophy laid out in "The Philosophy of Composition." Poe pushes and explores the limits of disciplinary boundaries by showing the various conjunctions and conflations inherent to artistic practice. In his stories, Poe explores what distinguishes literature from other creative endeavors. It is his fascination with the porous nature of artistic boundaries that drives both the form and content of his tales—and it is this very liminality, this porousness, that makes them truly the harbingers of horror as a genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that McGahern embodies a tension between nostalgia and anti-nostalgia through the silence of characters of a postmemory generation. Although McGahern neither pushes the limit of his works to the realm of political emancipation, nor pursues therapeutic working-through of trauma, he is an artist whose quest for postmemorial dynamics functions both anti-nostalgically as a traumatic symptom of the authoritative post-independence state, and nostalgically as an aesthetic strategy to reinvent the past. First, he describes silence as generational, representing both the space for a tentative truce between the generations and the means by which the postmemory generation can establish its critical identity. Second, McGahern's silence enables his postmemory-generation characters to reinvent the past. On the one hand, the silence reveals intragenerational memory war among members of the later generation as they form different versions of the past. On the other, the silence serves as a creative space for reflective nostalgia to reimagine, and cope with, the trauma of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While combining fiction writing and artistic processes in my creative practice PhD project (2020), I worked with several fairy tales. My short story "The Three Dresses" is written from the point of view of dresses made from snow, darkness, and mirrors. As a first-person narrative, the reader embodies each dress in turn throughout the story, which alludes to "Cinderella" traditions from subtypes ATU510A and ATU501B. The main point of differentiation is in the agency of the dresses as speaking objects and their ability to reveal the relationship between the seamstress who made them and the persecuted young woman who wears them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When there is a stringent demand for a viable reconstruction of the traditional socio-political structure, especially amid the paucity of "reliable" historical records from the pre-colonial era, the native population's recurrent anxieties of losing indigenous cultural heritage, and instances of its xenophobic politics, become visible in an unprecedented form. In this context, the discursive void between the dominant state-power and "excluded" subjects usually engenders counter-cultural values of endowed "subaltern counterpublics". Though these alternative public spheres are formed to uphold neglected discourses, often, a few 'dissident' voices reside within them to challenge the unanimity of such groups, towards more progressive ends. These apparent "nonconforming" discourses within the subaltern groups strive to foreground humanitarian principles by giving voice to alternative ideologies, and sometimes, for these propositions, are accused of lacking moral legitimacy towards the subaltern counterpublics themselves. Accentuating this vital site within the marginal yet homogenized discourse, the present paper attempts to foreground the question of moral legitimacy and its critical linkages with participatory parity of the subaltern counterpublics in the context of the British colonial era in Meghalaya. It further seeks to unpack how subaltern politics itself is manipulated by anti-egalitarian ethos within the subaltern counterpublics, in response to the colonial rule. In order to understand the inclusive approach of the "nonconformist" subaltern within the subaltern colonial subjects, who sometimes appear to challenge and rethink the very basic tenets of subaltern counterpolitics, and their negotiations of the varied legacies of the Raj, this study endeavours to analyze select short stories by Janice Pariat, the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award-winning writer from Meghalaya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An excerpt from the article "Via Lactea" by Hannah Feustle in the Minnesota Review is presented, focusing on the protagonist's struggles with social expectations, sisterhood dynamics, and the complexities of navigating adolescence, particularly surrounding events like prom.

The translation is necessary for developing knowledge and ideas, but it also makes the people understand the language and culture of other people or countries. However, equivalence is essential during translation, especially when the translator wants to translate idiomatic expressions in the best possible way. Therefore, it is necessary to follow up on some strategies during the translation process. The research work is carried out under the qualitative method with textual analysis techniques as significant. Mona Baker's model for idiomatic expression is explored with the help of different examples from collected data. The primary purpose of this study is to find out which types of strategies are being followed by the translator during the translation process. During research translation by paraphrasing, translation by similar meaning and similar form, translation by similar meaning and dissimilar form is found while translation by omission were missing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, the novella appears to occupy a clear formal niche. However, novellas have posed problems for even the most basic taxonomies of literary criticism and publishing. Though the novella is defined by its length, length alone has never been sufficient to determine whether a text counts as a novella. Though the novella is a global form, shared among many national literary cultures, its transnational history is muddled by terminological inconsistency. This article sets out to understand the novella as a slippery form, one that slides through the institutional machinery that administers literary production. It centers its investigation on the United States during a period in global cultural history when the literary field was slowly coming into existence. In this environment, a group of long short stories or short novels—Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave—revealed the incoherence of "literature" as it gradually assumed its modern form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'In the Nightmare Country' offers a detailed analysis of John Metcalfe's short story, 'The Bad Lands' (1920), arguing that it represents an amalgam of Gothic and modernist devices and preoccupations that has significant implications for the development of twentieth-century British Gothic writing. The article considers how Metcalfe's story was shaped by Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence on one hand and Freudian psychoanalysis and wartime experiences on the other. It also examines the important role played by the anthologist, Dorothy L. Sayers, in the popularisation of emerging forms of psychological gothic during the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A notable framed literature review accentuates that there is a deficit in the scholarly examination of isiXhosa short stories. Such dearth can be pinned on the agnostic inclination in respect of South African literary criticism -- isiXhosa literature included. The fundamental aim of this article is to make a systemic and meticulous examination of one selected isiXhosa short story hinging on dominant patterns such as negative peer pressure and poor parental guidance, among other distinguishable matters. Critical theory is used as a foundational base structure alongside qualitative research methodology for a continued and maintained reading of the short story in a bid to develop a noticeable pattern that will contest the conundrum. The results underline that young people and parents as well as the general society have a solitary responsibility to operate in a synergetic relationship to address some of the problems that continue to sabotage the future of many young men and women. The closing remarks suggest that more scholarly discourse in respect of isiXhosa short stories ought to be advanced. The article makes a notable contribution in that it catalyzes the theoretical and intellectual development of the isiXhosa language and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L'articolo intende presentare uno studio dettagliato dell'ordine degli elementi della frase in Le menzogne della notte (1988) di Gesualdo Bufalino (1920–96). Il presente contributo disamina le modalità e le finalità che la sintassi marcata esplica all'interno del progetto romanzesco, che è caratterizzato da sperimentazione del complesso congegno narrativo e linguistico. Adottando un taglio storico-linguistico, si esaminano la posposizione del soggetto al verbo (soggetto rematico e soggetto tematico parentetico), la dislocazione a sinistra e il tema sospeso. Mediante analisi qualitative di selezionati campioni testuali, si mostrano tre funzioni-chiave della sintassi marcata utili per l'interpretazione del romanzo: i colpi di scena del novellare; la caratterizzazione degli eroi romantici e della loro lingua; la tecnica del ritratto e il tono favoloso. Lo studio rivela che l'uso della sintassi marcata è volto alla creazione di un'epopea leggendaria e favolosa, i cui eroi hanno tratti romantici e melodrammatici. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hassan Blasim's short stories, featured in his 2009 collection The Madman of Freedom Square, present the horrors – both spectacular and mundane – of the refugee experience. Blasim's writing, by turns surreal and grotesquely intimate, evokes familiar themes of the Gothic, and his stories are rife with haunted protagonists and monstrous entities. Focusing on three short stories – "The Reality and the Record", "The Truck to Berlin", and "Ali's Bag" – this article critically considers how Blasim utilizes a Gothic aesthetic in his writing to represent and critique the unspeakable violence that is experienced by Iraqi refugees. Working at the intersection of literary refugee studies, abject theory, and the Gothic, this article argues that Blasim's fiction closes the distance between his readers and the figure of the refugee, challenging the expectations of his largely metropolitan, European readers who may otherwise seek authenticity, look for allegory, and anticipate abject spectacle amongst his works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Love was one of Félix Grande's major concerns during more than three decades of his career, from the short story «Música para mi hijo» (1963) to Sobre el amor y la separación (1996). The aim of this article is to analyze the love theme both in the poems Las Rubáiyátas de Horacio Martín and in the short narrative of the author that was published in books, magazines, and newspapers. For this, the articulation of the relationships between those involved in the love plot and the ideas about love expressed by characters and narrators are examined. It is concluded that love is part of Grande's poetic universe and that is why it appears in different stages and styles of the author: from his stories a theory emerges that becomes more conscious and explicit, until it turns into a quasi-religious system that tries to explain the power of love over individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines the impact of using short stories from English as original material to develop reading skills: an experimental study conducted among EFL students at the secondary level in Rahim Yar Khan region. The main objectives of the study were to assess whether English as a foreign language learners can develop reading skills using short stories. The research is then limited to the study of EFL learners of secondary level in public schools in Rahim Yar Khan. The study will use the Pretest-Posttest Equivalent-Group Design. The short story program is expected to have a positive effect on reading comprehension. Secondary level public schools of Rahim Yar Khan were selected through an appropriate selection process. The accessible population consisted of total 80 students. 80 students were selected by simple random sampling. The results of reading comprehension tests clearly showed that the use of short stories in the development of reading skills has a strong positive effect on student achievement and is more interesting learning material for students than those in their textbooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manto's short story "Allah Ditta" is of great significance in terms of psychology. The psychology of the Electra complex is depicted in this myth. This story also reveals that the girl feels jealousy and rivalry not only with her mother but with any woman who she fears will share her father's love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harekrishna Deka is a popular Assamese poet, who is born in the year 1943. He is not only a poet but also a story writer. Deka is one of the Assam's contemporary writer whose work is excellent in multiple dimension. He has a different style of writing which placed him a bright star in assamese literature. In this paper priorly discussing about the writing style of Harekrishna Deka in his story specially consider two noted creation "Bandiyar" and "Gua Madrid".Harekrishna Deka has written these two stories with beautiful and powerful dialogue presentation. And style of conversation is also remarkable. He has given living form to the description and character of the story with his own style of language. The style of language of Harekrishna Deka has been attempt to be discuss in this research article. This article is emphasis on linguistic analysis of his writing style. The article covers various aspects regarding his two short stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]