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This article examines how one of modern Japanese literature's inaugural texts envisions Japan's geographical self-image. The focus here is on Ukishiro monogatari (Floating Castle) by Meiji statesman Yano Ryūkei (1851–1931). Ukishiro monogatari tells the story of an adventure undertaken by Japanese men with a shared political objective who are diversely skilled in areas such as military expertise, medicine, geography, and technology. They are so dissatisfied with the delay in Japan's territorial expansion that in 1878 they travel to Southeast Asia as the first step in an ambitious attempt to establish Japanese territory in central Africa. By exploring why and how the crew of the Ukishiro heads to Africa, this article argues that the Ukishiro crew's plans take shape in relation to their drive to eschew Japan's status as an island nation (deislandization) and establish Japan as a continent (pseudocontinent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of homosocial communities in Love Story Magazine's fiction and editorial departments, focusing on the 30 March 1935 issue. The magazine's stories highlight the importance of female homosocial relationships in securing an appropriate romantic partner, emphasizing the qualities of an "ideal woman" for marriage. The editorial departments fostered a community among readers to help them navigate their own relationships, with advice columns addressing readers' romantic dilemmas and facilitating communication between same-sex readers. The magazine's structure and content reflect a consistent narrative that negotiates and upholds gender roles within a framework of homosociality, providing insight into how readers engaged with the idealized romance plots presented in the magazine. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses Florence Converse's novel "Long Will: A Romance" (1903), which brings to life fourteenth-century English poets Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain poet. The novel is structured around Langland's influence on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, with a focus on Langland's daughter Calote. Converse's work explores the relationships between the poets, their literary contributions, and their interactions with historical events, offering a unique perspective on Ricardian poetry. The novel anticipates later scholarly discussions on the four poets, providing a detailed and independent-minded portrayal of vernacular verse culture in late fourteenth-century England. [Extracted from the article]

The Editors' Note in Early American Literature reflects on the challenges and lessons learned in running the journal, highlighting the complexities of early American studies. The note discusses the importance of respecting Indigenous languages by not italicizing them in the text, as well as reevaluating traditional practices of authorship attribution. The editors aim to make the journal more inclusive and relevant by engaging in conversations about representation and diversity in early American literature. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, I discuss the myriad ways that gender roles are interrogated within The Left hand of Darkness and "When It Changed." I first examine gender as science in §1, outlining the ways Le Guin and Russ consider and critique essentialist perspectives holding that gender roles are 'natural' phenomena driven by rigid biological differences between men and women. Then, in §2, I explore gender as fiction, analyzing how each text presents gender roles as discursively constructed and malleable. In §3, I explicate these observations within a hybrid conceptualization of gender as science fiction and argue that this suitably describes the gender portrayals Le Guin and Russ make in their texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractMany Filipina care workers are subrogated to the position of mothers in the more affluent states of Asia. As a consequence, they oftentimes play as the unofficial teachers of the children. In this article, I analyse the process of global subrogation, which often end in what I call an inverted odyssey of the Filipina domestic helper. Using the concept of invertedness in commodity fetishism, this article reads Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister as an inverted odyssey which views the migration of Filipina care workers as an adventure but without the heroic homecoming. The novel represents the adventure as a dialectic of systems of carelessness and selfcare that is symbolically resolved within the narrative through the recurring image of the ‘woman in the box’. Thus, the article argues that unlike Odysseus’ triumphant nostos (homecoming), the heroine of this inverted odyssey falls victim to her own erotic drives, drowns in a far-flung kingdom, returns home in a box, and drowns again in the hands of thieves. The novel weaves a counter-narrative on the Filipina care worker that challenges prevailing Philippine state discourses on its overseas work force, thereby problematizing both the limitations of the heroine’s selfcare and the systemic carelessness of the states that make the subrogation possible. Ultimately, the inverted Odyssey as symbolized by the novel’s central image of ‘the woman in the box’ shatters appearances and unveils the tragic position of the unrecognized ‘teachers’ in the global feminization and commodification of care work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the variation and reconstruction of Chinese translations of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" from 1872 to 1948. The translations underwent changes to make the story more familiar and understandable to Chinese readers, including renaming, converting measurements, and altering the concept of time. The translators also incorporated traditional Chinese literary devices and techniques to make the text more appealing to the local audience. The article highlights the significance of variation and reconstruction in cross-cultural mediation and the impact of cultural and socio-political factors on literary translation. [Extracted from the article]

The article is devoted to the study of genre specificity, means of artistic modeling of the image of the main character, and the problemthematic section of Yu. Shcherbak's "The Time" trilogy as important poetic features of the contemporary antiutopia. The analysis was carried out using general scientific (analysis, synthesis, description) and special literary methods (biographical, genetic, imagological and hermeneutic). The research emphasizes the antiutopian dominant of "The Time" trilogy, which is combined with certain features of a political novel, cautionary novel, fiction (elements of science fiction), adventure novel, detective story, etc. It was found out that in his antiutopias Yu. Shcherbak creates his own model of the character of the future, whose leadership qualities, life experience and orientation to traditional Ukrainian values enabled spiritual renewal, contributed to finding one's place in the world and helped to become a winner in the eternal conflict "man-system". It was determined that the problem-thematic level of the novels is understood through the disclosure of the inner world of the main character with the help of monologues, dialogues, reflections, etc. In the trilogy, the "eternal" philosophical and topical problems of today are actualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theatre can be a powerful tool for exploring social justice issues, but it can also reproduce whiteness, ableism, and other systemic oppressions. As theatre educators--constrained by many competing demands on our time, resources, and energy--we want to know: how can we leverage our teaching artistry to authentically explore social justice issues with the young people and adults in our communities? Speaking from our experiences at a nonprofit theatre in a majoritywhite, upper-middle-class community, we offer creative drama as a model for integrating this kind of social justice education into youth musical theatre production camps. We explore the tools that creative drama offers for supporting youth and teaching artists in exploring issues related to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility; understanding our relationships with oppressive systems; and taking action to transform them. Then, we demonstrate how this can look in practice. We outline a process through which we developed two creative drama adventures and share stories of how these dramas unfolded. Finally, we surface some lingering tensions about our and our students' identities and how they inform our ongoing work. In sharing these stories and tensions, we invite you to consider how creative drama might support you and your communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on analyzing William Goldman's multifaceted career, encompassing his contributions to crime fiction, speculative fiction, and adventure fiction, while also exploring the themes and influences present in his work. It discusses Goldman's varied literary and cinematic output, highlighting potential areas for further research and critical examination.

Bonnie Effros's book, "Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa," provides a detailed history of French colonial obsession with Roman remains in Algeria and Tunisia. Effros explores the careers and writings of French officer-archaeologists, the violence and displacement caused by their excavations, and their influence on the development of archaeology in France. The book highlights how the search for historical justification was integral to the colonial project and examines the multivalent discourse on the classical past, which held different meanings for various groups, including foreign legionnaires, political prisoners, and North Africans themselves. Effros also acknowledges the complexity and nuance of the colonial situation, with evidence suggesting a range of choices, negotiations, and resistance exhibited by both Europeans and North Africans. [Extracted from the article]

Jarret Keene's novel "Hammer of the Dogs" follows the protagonist Lash in a postapocalyptic Las Vegas, where technology, religion, and capitalism intersect. The story explores themes of survival, secularism, and the human experience in a world ravaged by cataclysmic events. Through a blend of popular culture references and complex character dynamics, Keene presents a nuanced vision of a society in transition, striving to create something new and unforeseen. Las Vegas itself serves as a backdrop for this exploration, offering a space for restoration and the possibility of a freer future. [Extracted from the article]

Despite paying concerted attention to evolutionary mechanisms, literary scholars have rarely focused on forms of "directed evolution" like orthogenesis (evolution along a linear track) and phylogeronty—the parallel between the lifespan of an animal group and the lifespan of an aging individual—analogical concepts reflecting a paleontological manifestation of a wider interest in human decadence. This essay analyzes how these concepts are explored in three areas: popular adventure fiction, social reform novels by Marie Stopes and H. G. Wells, and writings by paleontologists. Across these texts, the essay argues that directed evolution offered a recognizable trajectory with which to render the complexity and strangeness of prehistoric and modern life alike into a familiar linear shape by reading certain extinct animals as moral exemplars of evolutionary failure. While reformers hoped that humans could escape the orthogenetic grooves confining nonhuman animals to extinction, this optimism was shadowed both with fears that humans might inevitably face decadence and with a sense that survival meant mediocrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the distinctive publishing history of William Williams's Robinsonade novel Mr. Penrose as a prompt to challenge conventional assumptions about the temporal logic of textual recovery. Scholars typically make a case for the value of forgotten or neglected texts by emphasizing forms of "creative anachronism" in which an author is said to be ahead of their time in ways only recognizable by posterity. Mr. Penrose , written in America in 1776, published in a heavily redacted version in Britain in 1815, and finally published in full in 1969, offers a means of apprehending the far less familiar dynamics of "pathetic anachronism," wherein a text repeatedly fails to connect with the successive historical moments of its appearance and remains uncanonized. This stalled trajectory of Williams's novel helps to illuminate the limitations of conventional discourses of textual recovery by tracing them back to tropes of the "found manuscript" and transatlantic shifts in genre popularity in the eighteenth century, as well as Romantic theories of temporal disjunction and the emergence of the historical novel in the nineteenth century and models of textual editing and debates over "the first American novel" in the twentieth century. These three versions of Williams's novel... help us to see how various intellectual, aesthetic, generic, and material factors can mitigate against a text fitting into the mechanisms critics typically deploy to advance the positive qualities of anachronism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Lydia Syson's Mr Peacock's Possessions as a neo-Victorian Robinsonade. In order to assess the contemporary pertinence of the format, I organize my discussion around the notion of un/settlement, a concept which applies to both the frustrated process of colonial domestication of the island depicted in the novel and to the author's project of writing back to the narrative and ideological codes of the Victorian Robinsonade. The term "un/settlement" is also useful to explore the novel's engagement with the violent colonial history of the region, which resurfaces in the present forcing the characters (and the author) to recover and narrate those stories and thus settle their debt with that past. The article starts by contextualizing Syson's novel in relation to a long tradition of castaway narratives, and then moves on to discuss the novel in the light of neo-Victorian and postcolonial preoccupations with the possibilities and limitations of historical revision and reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to present the basic context of literary research on popular literature in Slovakia, following studies by Věra Brožová (2008) and Jiří Hrabal (2022), looking specifically at the forms of 19th century Robinsonades, including Czech Robinsonades reprinted in Slovakia from the late 18th century through the 19th century. With the exception of a single edition of Pavel Šulc's adaptation, we know of no adaptations of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in the Czech context to have been published in Slovak editions; this is surprising considering the popularity of the theme and rich history of Czech adaptations, and we believe that further investigation is required. This study therefore distinguishes between the 'Robinsonade' and 'folk Robinsonade', with respect to the different motivations for adapting Defoe's work in the context of Slovakian popular literature: that is, between the Robinsonade as a line started by the Czech translation of J. Campe's German adaptation Robinson der Jüngere (and subsequent adaptations by V. Kramerius's and others; the 'Czech Story' follows, for example, the aforementioned study by Hrabal), and various other works that draw instead on the success of Defoe's novel to create adventure stories based on the Robinson theme. The heroes of these stories -- Berthold, Ildegert, Spelhofen, and Engelbrecht -- are known from both Czech and Slovak editions. The results of this comparison, together with an examination of the factors that may have caused these changes at all investigated levels, are formulated as manifestations of specific forms of inter-literary reception, namely 'retellings' with omission and expansion (Robinson der Jüngere), and -- as examples of the 'folk Robinsonade' -- adaptation (Berthold), plagiarism (Ildegert), interliterary allusion (Spelhofen), and allusion (Engelbrecht). Changes in form are found to be directly proportional to the degree of application of the poetics of popular literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanesques is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Romanesques is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Romanesques is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Romanesques is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Chilena de Antropologia is the property of Universidad de Chile and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article investigates the politics of travel by focusing on the composite and overarching genre of adventure within Indian children's literature. Conventionally seen as a boyhood genre, adventure fiction is characterized by home-away-home pattern, where the movement away from home takes the male protagonist away from accustomed safety toward unusual sights, challenges, and experiences. However, using the lens of feminist narratology, this article looks at how Indian texts with feminist orientation in Gujarati and English languages subvert the notion of travel. They do so by replacing the idea of quest with enjoyment, reversing the quest objective, undoing the female/passive plot position, re-defining obstacles as aids, and undoing the gendered opposition between quester and quest object positions. The conclusions advocate harnessing the potential of children's literature as a resource to inculcate newer ways of traveling and un-gendering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the absurdly demonstrated actions and events of Dastan narratives, there is a dialectical relationship between reality and imagination or between history and fantasy. The ongoing conflict between the enigmatic and mythical characters of Hoshruba and the historically real figures creates a compelling narrative in Dastan. This epic story depicts the adventures of Amir Hamza and his commanders across various locations of Indo-Islamic civilization. Amir Hamza and his allies wage war against the entirely fictional characters of Hoshruba, a realm filled with powerful magic and mesmerizing enchantments. As a result, the dynamic relationship between these opposing forces leads to a series of exciting actions and events. Amid the brutal battles, there is also a captivating love story between the brave heroes of Amir Hamza's camp and the alluring princesses of Hoshruba. These romances are fostered through seduction, cunning tricks, and clever traps. The research aims to examine how the interplay of imagination contributes to the Hoshruba narrative discourse and influences the course of events in the overall structure of Dastan, Hoshruba, the Land and Tilism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a forgotten nineteenth-century boys' adventure novel, Peter the Whaler (1851), written by William Henry Giles Kingston. After briefly introducing the author and his changing fortune, the article focuses on two specific aspects of Peter the Whaler, namely, its generic complexity and its thought-provoking representation of Inuit characters. A first aspect taken into account is the remarkable generic hybridity of Kingston's novel, which sheds light on the complex narrative experimentation conducted by Victorian writers and, especially, on their development and commercialisation of popular forms, such as the juvenile adventure novel. Besides merging realism with romance, Kingston makes an interesting use of gothic paraphernalia, and he combines elements of adventure fiction with a religious discourse that marks the distinction of his whole oeuvre. Worthy of attention are also the novel's pictures of Inuit people and culture. These pictures contrast with the racial assumptions endorsed by Victorian anthropologists and writers, including Charles Dickens, who famously disparaged Inuit testimonies in his 1854 articles to defend John Franklin and his men from allegations of cannibalism. The comparison between Kingston and Dickens offered in the article confirms the innovativeness of the ethnocultural encounters narrated in Peter the Whaler, suggesting further reasons why this novel deserves to be rediscovered and reinterpreted in our age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study focuses on the changes that took place between the magazine and the book editions of Václav Kubec's novel. For the book edition, the author updated and significantly changed the text in line with the new political situation in 1938. This textual strategy disrupts the commonly established understanding of popular literature, whereby a certain textual apathy on the part of the authors is highlighted as one of the typical elements. This study points to the transformations in the text as well as to the transformations in the genre segment typical of the period (adventure novels in an aviation setting). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of South African Journal of Cultural History is the property of South African Society for Cultural History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper seeks to study select adventures of Feluda (Pradosh C. Mitter), Satyajit Ray's private detective created in 1965. For over two centuries, since the 1890 s, the popular literature of Bengal (India) has been featuring detectives in the detective story called "Goenda Kahini" in Bangla. An acclaimed Bengali litterateur and one of the world's greatest filmmakers, Ray penned 35 adventures on his detective between 1965 and 1990. Initially created for a children's magazine "Sandesh," these adventures along with the magazine's transformation gradually followed a more serious tone. Written in postcolonial India, the time frame of the stories is the 1960s and the 70 s. The texts that this paper proposes to study reflect the social milieu in the aftermath of India's independence – the latent conflicts dealing with stark reality embedded in the narratives that apparently appear innocently fictitious to the readers now. The paper attempts to study beyond the Whodunit crime-inquest-discovery pattern. It looks into aspects of the adventures that go beyond the genre of detective fiction per se. The stories are not merely about crime and criminals; they are excellent travelogues, adventure stories, a source of interesting information about a diverse range of things – history, places, nature, literature, society and culture. The paper argues that these adventures of crime draw to a large extent from the realm of truth – social stigmas and the dark underworld of dons, narcotic mafias and smugglers of the times. Further, the stories based on the actual crises of the fast-fading old-world gentility of the educated Bengali middle-class of the 1960s and the 70 s; the picture of old Calcutta, make the crime narratives of Feluda, an overwhelming metamorphic presentation of fact to fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dystopian character of Joca Reiners Terron's A morte e o meteoro (2019) is indissociable from its critique of colonialism. But while the novel makes frequent references to the violent methods of exploitation that characterized American colonization, it mostly relies on allusions to different literary traditions--including gothic fiction, the adventure novel, and science fiction--in its depiction of colonialism. The dialogue with Heart of Darkness plays a significant role in A morte e o meteoro, which to a large extent is a critical rereading of Conrad's novella. This article examines how this appropriation of textual and cultural paradigms shapes the dystopian outlook of the novel, while also offering alternatives to the hopelessness that defines its fictional world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]