Journal Description
Literature
Literature
is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on literature and cultural studies published quarterly online by MDPI.
- Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
- Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision is provided to authors approximately 63.8 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 6.3 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the second half of 2023).
- Recognition of Reviewers: APC discount vouchers, optional signed peer review, and reviewer names published annually in the journal.
Latest Articles
The “Yao” in Li Bai’s Poetry and Its Emotional Implications
Literature 2024, 4(2), 75-86; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature4020006 - 30 Apr 2024
Abstract
In Li Bai’s poems, the term yao or medicine is frequently employed as an idea-image. The meaning of yao can be further divided into four distinct types, each corresponding to its functions in different contexts. It represents the elixir found on Penglai Island,
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In Li Bai’s poems, the term yao or medicine is frequently employed as an idea-image. The meaning of yao can be further divided into four distinct types, each corresponding to its functions in different contexts. It represents the elixir found on Penglai Island, having the power to elevate a person to immortality; the elixir stolen from the Queen Mother of the West by Heng’E; the immortal herbs pounded by the Jade Rabbit; and the medicine used for treating diseases. In addition, Li Bai’s poems also contain elixir liquid (danye 丹液), potable gold (jinye 金液), and other substances referred to as yao. Unlike specific terms like “cinnabar,” these names are more general in nature. The medicines, their names, and the general terms in poems carry different emotional implications, e.g., his admiration for immortality, and a means to criticize his own time, to express his aspirations and lamentation over the passage of time. The “Yao” also serves as a symbol of healing and nourishment, especially in the context of friendship. All these points deserve to be meticulously explored.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Death, Dying, Family and Friendship in Tang Literature)
Open AccessArticle
Ruby Rich’s Dream Library: Feminist Memory-Keeping as an Archive of Affective Mnemonic Practices
by
Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
Literature 2024, 4(2), 62-74; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature4020005 - 30 Apr 2024
Abstract
In the so-called West, feminist activists and scholars have long been traumatised by the erasure of their histories via dominant patriarchal narratives, which has served as an impediment to the intergenerational transmission of feminist knowledge. Recently, while acknowledging the very real and ongoing
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In the so-called West, feminist activists and scholars have long been traumatised by the erasure of their histories via dominant patriarchal narratives, which has served as an impediment to the intergenerational transmission of feminist knowledge. Recently, while acknowledging the very real and ongoing impact of this historical omission, some feminists have issued a call to turn away from a narrative of women’s history as ‘serial forgetting’ and towards an acknowledgement of the affirmative capacity of feminist remembering. At the same time, memory theorist Ann Rigney has advocated for a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies, away from what she perceives to be the field’s gravitation towards trauma and instead towards an analysis of life’s positive legacies. In this article, I combine both approaches to investigate one feminist memory-keeper’s archive, analysing what it reveals about ‘the mechanisms by which positive attachments are transmitted across space and time’. Throughout her life, little-known ‘between-the-waves’ Australian feminist Ruby Rich (1888–1988) performed multiple intersecting activist activities. While she created feminist memories through her work for various political organisations, she also collected, stored and transmitted feminist memories through her campaign for a dedicated space for women’s collections in the National Library of Australia. Propelled by fear of loss and inspired by hope for remembering, Rich constructed a brand of archival activism that was both educational and emotional. In this paper, I examine the strategies Rich employed to try to realise her dream of effecting intellectual and affective bonds between future feminists and their predecessors.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Memory and Women’s Studies: Between Trauma and Positivity)
Open AccessArticle
Συνουσία in Late Antique Neoplatonic Schools: A Concept between Social History, History of Education and History of Philosophy
by
Marco Alviz Fernández and David Hernández de la Fuente
Literature 2024, 4(1), 45-61; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature4010004 - 21 Feb 2024
Abstract
It is well studied that some Pythagorean principles lied at the foundations of the Late Antique Neoplatonic School. The main reason for that conclusion to be drawn is the two biographies of the Samian sage written by the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyry of Tyre
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It is well studied that some Pythagorean principles lied at the foundations of the Late Antique Neoplatonic School. The main reason for that conclusion to be drawn is the two biographies of the Samian sage written by the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyry of Tyre and Iamblichus of Chalcis. Accordingly, the archetypical image of Pythagoras became a major ideal for which every pagan philosopher aimed in Late Antiquity. Henceforth, masters and their disciple circles comprised a micro-society which can reasonably be analyzed as a whole. Suffice it to say that they were small and cohesive charismatic communities whose isolation from the outside world aroused a living harmony from which emerged long-standing emotional bonds. Consequently, the Pythagorically rooted κοινός βίος (Iambl. Vit. Pyth. 6.29: τὸ λεγόμενον κοινοβίους) can easily be ascertained in the biographical literature around the philosophical schools from Plotinus to Damascius (cf. Porph. Vit. Plot. 18.6-14; Procl. In Resp. passim). It is a way of life in common which was also known at the old Athenian Academy (according to Plato’s only explicit reference to Pythagoras (Resp. 600a-b: Πυθαγόρειον τρόπον τοῦ βίου) and has sometimes been defined even as “coenobitic”, in analogy with other contemporary phenomena. But from our point of view, it can be better understood through an analysis of the concept of συνουσία—that is, the meetings of philosophers with their companions (ἑταῖροι) in a specific place which turned into a sort of spiritual household. With this contribution, we aim at focusing on the redefinition of the Neoplatonic συνουσίαι as a legacy of the Platonic notion of συνουσία, stemming from Pythagorean κοινόβιοι. To sum up, we will revise this issue and the state of the art, with the redefinition of Late Antique συνουσία as a terminus technicus in the biographic literature around the Neoplatonic Schools, aiming at opening new paths for the understanding of the Pythagorean–Platonic heritage in Late Antiquity.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Greek Literature and Society in Late Antiquity)
Open AccessArticle
A Discussion on Life Consciousness in Du Fu’s Poems
by
Shuchu Liu
Literature 2024, 4(1), 31-44; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature4010003 - 17 Jan 2024
Abstract
Respecting life and protecting life are the core values of Chinese culture. As the greatest poet nurtured by Chinese culture, Du Fu showed a distinct consciousness of life in his poems. With the passage of time and the changes in his physical body,
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Respecting life and protecting life are the core values of Chinese culture. As the greatest poet nurtured by Chinese culture, Du Fu showed a distinct consciousness of life in his poems. With the passage of time and the changes in his physical body, Du Fu became sensitively aware of the existence of life. Government service was the main way to realize the value of life for scholars of Tang, and this way was frustrated by reality for a long time, particularly for the poet Du Fu, who faced the crisis of settling his life. Although Du Fu wanted to find a place to settle his life in the other dimensions of the human world, in the real and imaginary drunken world and the natural world, he could not overcome the frustration concerning the relationship between the ruler and the minister, and he often felt the pain of nowhere to settle his life and the insignificance of life when its meaning becomes absent.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Death, Dying, Family and Friendship in Tang Literature)
Open AccessEditorial
Introduction: Fairy Tales and Other Horrors
by
Laura Tosi and Alessandro Cabiati
Literature 2024, 4(1), 22-30; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature4010002 - 25 Dec 2023
Abstract
In a Christmas 2017 interview with the British magazine Fortean Times, the celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as ‘a horror story’, before affirming that ‘horror
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In a Christmas 2017 interview with the British magazine Fortean Times, the celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as ‘a horror story’, before affirming that ‘horror and the fairy tale walk hand in hand’ (del Toro 2017, p [...]
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
Open AccessArticle
The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais
by
Ryan Atticus Doherty
Literature 2024, 4(1), 1-21; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature4010001 - 22 Dec 2023
Abstract
At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific
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At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
Open AccessArticle
Taoist Death Care in Medieval China—An Examination of Wu Tong’s (吳通) Epitaph
by
Lianlong Wang
Literature 2023, 3(4), 473-481; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3040032 - 28 Nov 2023
Abstract
Survival and death are the two most important things in life. The ancient Chinese people attached great importance to death, so the funeral ceremonies were very complete. Since its inception, Taoism has actively participated in funeral activities, so the combination of epitaphs and
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Survival and death are the two most important things in life. The ancient Chinese people attached great importance to death, so the funeral ceremonies were very complete. Since its inception, Taoism has actively participated in funeral activities, so the combination of epitaphs and tomb inscriptions has a historical origin. The establishment of a unified dynasty in the Sui Dynasty provided an opportunity for the integration and development of Taoism in the north and south. The Mao Shanzong (茅山宗) in the southern region began to spread to the north, gradually integrating Lou Guan Dao (樓觀道) and becoming the mainstream of Northern Taoism. The epitaph of Wu Tong in the Sui Dynasty is engraved with rich Taoist symbols, and the epitaph text adopts the language content of “Zhen Gao” (真誥), which is a typical representative of the integration of Northern and Southern Taoism and reflects Taoism’s concern for death.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Death, Dying, Family and Friendship in Tang Literature)
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Open AccessArticle
Fairy Tale Sources and Rural Settings in Dario Argento’s Supernatural Horror
by
Peter Vorissis
Literature 2023, 3(4), 457-472; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3040031 - 28 Nov 2023
Abstract
This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in
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This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in urban environments, in rural spaces (forests, fields, mountains) where the supernatural elements of their stories blossom. Suspiria represents a primarily aesthetic exploration of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary horror, while Phenomena uses these two modes to examine the conflict between the rational and irrational, the natural and the supernatural. Dark Glasses initially appears to be one of his more traditional gialli, but it abandons these tropes with a simplified plot evoking the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”; this shift is accomplished by moving the action of the film out of Rome and into the dark forests of the countryside. Dark Glasses, I argue, therefore represents a self-conscious move to unite in a single film the two major strands of Argento’s filmography and to expose some fundamental elements of his general cinematic approach—namely, the unique capacity of stylized aesthetics and irrational elements to convey the experience of very real, human terror and evil.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
Open AccessArticle
Capitalism, Ecosocialism and Reparative Readers in Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest
by
Sneharika Roy
Literature 2023, 3(4), 446-456; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3040030 - 12 Nov 2023
Abstract
Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam War, which ravaged human and nonhuman lifeworlds. Le Guin offers two competing discursive systems through which to interpret human and nonhuman alterity—Terran industrial capitalism, grounded in physical
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Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam War, which ravaged human and nonhuman lifeworlds. Le Guin offers two competing discursive systems through which to interpret human and nonhuman alterity—Terran industrial capitalism, grounded in physical and symbolic violence, and Athshean ecosocialism, rooted in an ethics of non-violence and forest-centred nominalism. Le Guin appears to suggest that both “readings” of Athshea are locked in an intractable, adversarial logic, typical of the “paranoid” reading practices that Eve Sedgwick would theorise twenty-five years later. In its sensitivity to the spectrum of negative affect covering anticipatory anxiety about forestalling pain, symmetrical suspicion, and fear of humiliation, the novella offers an uncanny prefiguration of paranoid practices. Le Guin suggests that the way out of the paranoid clash of civilisations can be found in two “reparative” reading stances—Selver’s reinterpretation and rearrangement of components of the oppressor’s culture into new, unexpected wholes (hermeneutic reassemblage) and the alien observers’ valorisation of disinterested curiosity over action as a categorical imperative (cerebral equivocity). Le Guin thus seems to offer a reparative poetics avant la lettre.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue American Sci-Fi)
Open AccessArticle
Gothic Fairy-Tale Feminism: The Rise of Eyre/‘Error’
by
Aileen Miyuki Farrar
Literature 2023, 3(4), 430-445; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3040029 - 31 Oct 2023
Abstract
The ways Gothic fairy tales and fairy-tale feminism interact are not always clear. An undercurrent of feminist studies of fairy tales is fueled by the 1970s Lurie-Lieberman debate, which focused on the question of whether fairy tales liberate or repress women. Meanwhile, critics
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The ways Gothic fairy tales and fairy-tale feminism interact are not always clear. An undercurrent of feminist studies of fairy tales is fueled by the 1970s Lurie-Lieberman debate, which focused on the question of whether fairy tales liberate or repress women. Meanwhile, critics such as Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Lucie Armitt have offered studies of the interplay between Gothic horror and fairy tales. However, these studies have limits, often emphasizing the violence, self-mutilation, and cannibalism of women, like those in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s versions of “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. This paper argues that “Rapunzel” (1812) is key for understanding the Gothic and feminist discourses of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Firstly, this paper argues that a self-reflexive and self-productive relationship between subjectivity and desire shapes and disrupts the Gothic, fairy-tale, and feminist discourses of Jane Eyre, resulting in a specular feminine-I that has inspired pluralistic readings of the text. Secondly, an analysis of the Rapunzelian metaphors of ‘wicked’ hunger and ideological towers unmasks the double consciousness that not only fetters feminine subjectivity but delimits the domestic structures of marriage and home. Multiplying the ways nineteenth-century Gothicism, fairy tales, and feminism may interact, Brontë’s specular study of feminine desire makes way for a productive and agential feminine speaking-I.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
Open AccessArticle
All the Better to Eat You with: Sexuality, Violence, and Disgust in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Adaptations
by
Nicola Welsh-Burke
Literature 2023, 3(4), 416-429; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3040028 - 30 Oct 2023
Abstract
In this paper I explore how fears of incorporation, sexual violence, permeability and ‘leakiness’ and metaphorical and literal villains are negotiated within the contemporary fairy tale retelling tradition. Through the close reading and comparative analysis of two twenty-first century Young Adult (YA) retellings
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In this paper I explore how fears of incorporation, sexual violence, permeability and ‘leakiness’ and metaphorical and literal villains are negotiated within the contemporary fairy tale retelling tradition. Through the close reading and comparative analysis of two twenty-first century Young Adult (YA) retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ from the 2010s (Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce and Elana K. Arnold’s Red Hood), I argue that this representation and negotiation of sexual, violent, and gustatory appetites is made possible due to the intersection of the fairy tale, horror, and YA genres, creating a unique space in which the lycanthropic and human figures are sources of dread and intrigue and the terrifying and absurd. In doing so, I argue that this contemporary tradition continues the well-established narrative of the fairy tale as a site of simultaneous high dramatics and interrogation of the everyday.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
Open AccessArticle
Interactivity and Influence: A Research on the Relationship between Epitaph (muzhi 墓志) and Mourning Poetry for Deceased Wives in Ancient China
by
Qiong Yang
Literature 2023, 3(4), 402-415; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3040027 - 30 Sep 2023
Abstract
Epitaph and poetry are two different literary genres in ancient China. However, when they collectively address the theme of “mourning the deceased”, they demonstrate an evident phenomenon of permeation and interaction. Pan Yue, as the pioneer of mourning poetry, his personal expressions as
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Epitaph and poetry are two different literary genres in ancient China. However, when they collectively address the theme of “mourning the deceased”, they demonstrate an evident phenomenon of permeation and interaction. Pan Yue, as the pioneer of mourning poetry, his personal expressions as well as the scenes and objects in his mourning poems have become fixed imageries of mourning, which have been applied to the epitaphs written by later literati for their deceased wives, enhancing the mourning attributes of these inscriptions. Some renowned poets such as Wei Yingwu 韦应物 (737–791) from the Tang 唐 Dynasty (618–907), and Li Mengyang 李梦阳 (1473–1530), from the Ming 明 Dynasty (1368–1644) would personally write tomb inscriptions while creating mourning poems for their deceased wives. Reading these two kinds of texts from the same author side by side not only deepens our understanding of both types of text, but also helps to examine the intertextual interactions between these two literary forms.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Death, Dying, Family and Friendship in Tang Literature)
Open AccessArticle
As in Forests, So in Verse: Clearings and the Poetics of Lack in Finnish Forest Poetry
by
Karoliina Lummaa
Literature 2023, 3(4), 385-401; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3040026 - 27 Sep 2023
Abstract
Forests and forestry have been recurrent topics in Finnish environmental poetry since the 1970s, reflecting the importance of the cultural meanings of forests and forest-related livelihoods in Finland. Despite the recent forest boom in Finnish contemporary art and literature, contemporary sylvan poetics in
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Forests and forestry have been recurrent topics in Finnish environmental poetry since the 1970s, reflecting the importance of the cultural meanings of forests and forest-related livelihoods in Finland. Despite the recent forest boom in Finnish contemporary art and literature, contemporary sylvan poetics in Finnish poetry has remained an understudied topic. Moreover, the wider ecocritical discussions on the artistic and poetic dimensions of forest management and economy are still scarce, at least in the Nordic cultural context. To ignite these discussions, this study examines the meanings of forest clearings in contemporary Finnish poetry. Theoretically, this study draws from ecocriticism, with a particular emphasis on ecopoetics. By focusing on typography, rhetorics and thematics, this article shows how forest poems written by Jouni Tossavainen, Janette Hannukainen and Mikael Brygger combine technical forestry terminology with affective language and visual means to express anthropogenic changes in forests, resulting in a specific expressive style conceptualised as the poetics of lack. This poetics consists of ideas and rhetorical and typographical elements that together denote and express a variety of experiences, emotions and thoughts regarding a lack of trees, as well as a lack of natural organisation in forest growth.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Literature, Climate Crises, and Pandemics)
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The Last Entrustment: Funeral Concepts and Arrangements of for the Afterlife in the Tang Dynasty
by
Guodong Meng
Literature 2023, 3(3), 376-384; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3030025 - 19 Sep 2023
Abstract
Arrangements for the afterlife were important matters to the Tang 唐 (618–907) people. The newly unearthed epitaphs of the Tang Dynasty contain a large number of dialogues and words of the deceased before their death, as well as their instructions concerning the arrangements
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Arrangements for the afterlife were important matters to the Tang 唐 (618–907) people. The newly unearthed epitaphs of the Tang Dynasty contain a large number of dialogues and words of the deceased before their death, as well as their instructions concerning the arrangements for funerals and the inheritance of family traditions. These instructions not only reflect Tang funeral concepts and the importance of arrangements for the afterlife, but they also allow us to perceive the characters and personalities of the deceased, which are valuable new materials for the study of ancient Chinese biographical literature.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Death, Dying, Family and Friendship in Tang Literature)
Open AccessArticle
Serving the Dead as Serving the Living: Examining the Concept of Burial and Life Consciousness in Medieval China
by
Wei Wang
Literature 2023, 3(3), 357-375; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3030024 - 18 Sep 2023
Abstract
In the minds of ancient people, tombs and burials were where the lives of this world ended and another type of life began. By incorporating the concepts of life found in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and the widespread belief in ghosts and immortals, burial
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In the minds of ancient people, tombs and burials were where the lives of this world ended and another type of life began. By incorporating the concepts of life found in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and the widespread belief in ghosts and immortals, burial ceremonies evolved during the Wei and Jin 魏晋 dynasties (220–420) into an integrated and unified notion of burial. The funeral ritual’s imaginative and fanciful depictions of the hereafter express sentimental devotion to life and contemplation of death. The burial ceremony and tomb architecture change in accordance with how the concepts of sacrifice and ghosts develop. The features of people’s belief in ghosts and immortality are reflected in particular burial practices. The popularity of necromancy burials and ghost marriages during the Middle Ages (third to sixth centuries) bring to light the binary antagonism between the soul and the body in burial, as well as the emphasis on spiritual freedom and physical immortality in the life philosophy.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Death, Dying, Family and Friendship in Tang Literature)
Open AccessArticle
Facing Your Fears: Navigating Social Anxieties and Difference in Contemporary Fairy Tales
by
Dorothea Trotter
Literature 2023, 3(3), 342-356; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3030023 - 04 Sep 2023
Abstract
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations
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In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations often return to the darker and more horrific elements of the source texts; this includes body horror and an emphasis on physiological differences. This article employs structural, cultural, and folkloric interpretive lenses for the analysis of three contemporary, audio-visual fairy tales to discuss the way contemporary fairy tales include disability and difference as social constructs that are shaped by cultural attitudes and anxieties. The stories’ plots are driven by the protagonists’ “otherness”, and these texts feature transformations that provide clues to understanding current standards of beauty and normality. I argue that newer adaptations place an emphasis on finding resolutions to difference that challenge the traditional idea that if one has a face or body that strays from the standard of the norm, one must die, relegate oneself to the margins, or join others like oneself.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
Open AccessArticle
The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”
by
Carolin Jesussek
Literature 2023, 3(3), 327-341; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3030022 - 30 Aug 2023
Abstract
This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado
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This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)
Open AccessArticle
Media as Metaphor: Realism in Meiji Print Narratives and Visual Cultures
by
Jonathan E. Abel
Literature 2023, 3(3), 313-326; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3030021 - 15 Aug 2023
Abstract
This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s
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This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s famed early work of realism “Dancing Girl” (Maihime) as translating the effects of the panorama hall into literature. By the end of his career, Mori Ōgai’s narrator of Wild Geese (Gan) compares his own storytelling to stereoscopy. These two different visual medial affordances suggest two different techniques. However, I argue that it is in a third visual medium (one that draws on the marketing of panorama and the visual techniques of stereography) that we may find a metaphor suggesting a continuity between these two modes of realism, between Ōgai’s early career and his later opus, between Maeda’s medial understanding and Ōgai’s own. This third metaphor for understanding Ōgai’s narration implies his mode of narration is never flat, always polyphonous, and advertising one aesthetic on the surface while providing another within. In the end, this view suggests a modernist realism that understood and expressed its own limitations and was, therefore, all the more realistic.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))
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Open AccessArticle
Greek Literature and Christian Doctrine in Early Christianity: A Difficult Co-Existence
by
Roberta Franchi
Literature 2023, 3(3), 296-312; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3030020 - 05 Jul 2023
Abstract
This paper traces the complex relationship between classical literature and Christian doctrine in the first four centuries. In the earliest period of Christianity, we can identify two attitudes of Christians towards Greek literature: the hostile attitude shown by Tatian, Theophilus, and Tertullian, and
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This paper traces the complex relationship between classical literature and Christian doctrine in the first four centuries. In the earliest period of Christianity, we can identify two attitudes of Christians towards Greek literature: the hostile attitude shown by Tatian, Theophilus, and Tertullian, and the openness to Greek culture and philosophy demonstrated by Justin the Martyr, Athenagoras of Athens, and Minucius Felix. A notable change happened in the Alexandrian milieu when Clement of Alexandria and Origen started considering Greek classics the embodiment of an authentic Christian spirit. In keeping with Origen, Basil of Caesarea realized a good synthesis between Greek thought and Christian faith. Noting germs of divine revelation in ancient Greek thought, Christian authors took the tools of Greco-Roman criticism and ancient philosophy to develop their doctrine.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Greek Literature and Society in Late Antiquity)
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Open AccessArticle
A Virtual You: Reading Kurahashi Yumiko’s Kurai Tabi through Virtuality
by
Jason M. Beckman
Literature 2023, 3(3), 278-295; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/literature3030019 - 25 Jun 2023
Abstract
Within literary criticism, the second-person narrative is frequently read within the conventions of the modern realistic novel, tackling the narratee/protagonist as a narratological problem. Such an approach, however, overlooks a core component of what second-person fiction aims to do: that is, draw the
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Within literary criticism, the second-person narrative is frequently read within the conventions of the modern realistic novel, tackling the narratee/protagonist as a narratological problem. Such an approach, however, overlooks a core component of what second-person fiction aims to do: that is, draw the reader into the narrative and experience the world of the text firsthand. Seeking instead to theorize the ways in which second-person narratives involve the reader in the text and invite the act of perspective-taking, I turn to virtual reality, which is deeply invested in the cognitive mechanisms through which a sense of presence is produced and in questions of how the mediated experience of virtual reality can influence human thought and behavior. Examining Kurahashi Yumiko’s Kurai Tabi (1961), one of the earliest examples of the literary form in Japanese literature, I consider how the reader can experience presence during moments in the text, and how the text drives the reader’s identification with the “you” who is the target of the narration. Analyzing the second-person narrative as a virtuality provides a new avenue for understanding the reader’s cognitive engagement and experience of second-person fiction.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))
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