Critical Survey

This article argues that Tayeb Salih, in his most famous novel, tackles Shakespeare's best-known play in the Arabic world, Othello, but not in the usual fashion. Instead of adapting the protagonist, Salih ventriloquises him to force a fresh understanding of Othello by Western readers, thus challenging what was at the time of his novel's publication a largely nineteenth-century reading of Othello. At the same time, Salih creates a hybridised protagonist of his own, one who comes to understand that he is neither Sudanese nor English. This reading thus sheds light on both Shakespeare's play and Salih's novel, arguing that the novel allows us to understand the play contextually rather than anachronistically. Fundamentally, Salih destabilises Arab notions of identity, arguing that the world has become ‘all mixed up’ and needs to move beyond essentialist identities.

The grotesque and satire are common methods of expressing the comic in European and African American literature. This study identifies the distinctive features of the grotesque and satire in European and African American literature. Günter Grass in The Tin Drum, The Wide Field, The Rat, The Dog Years and Under Local Narcosis uses the grotesque as a primary means of representing the political and historical state of Germany. In Sula, Toni Morrison takes the reader into the opposite space. She blatantly exposes racism and the problems of African Americans, denouncing inequality and lack of freedom. These results allow us to comprehend and critically engage with the ways that these kinds of communication confront social reality and challenge societal norms by looking at the sociolinguistic dynamics of the grotesque and satire in German and African American literature.

This article re-evaluates the merits of Shakespeare's Sonnet 145 and explores its critical legacy over the past half-century. While the sonnet has typically been seen as inferior due to its use of tetrameter rather than pentameter, one article from 1971 made a case for it being the first poem Shakespeare ever wrote. Rather than prompt critical debate, the theory presented in the article gained nearly universal acceptance and has been amplified ever since. The problem I identify is that the theory itself has been adopted without due scrutiny, and that when we approach Sonnet 145 from the standpoint that it is neither inferior nor juvenilia, we can then see how the supposed aberrations are potentially deliberate choices made by Shakespeare to underscore the poem's content.

Deleuze and Guattari's becoming is a dynamic alliance with beings. It is not a monad but creative involution. The incorporeal becoming deterritorialises the beings and roams nomadically between them. It has no subject or object, nor does it have centre or periphery; it is a becoming-in-itself. This article analyses the differences between Nietzsche's becoming and that of Deleuze and Guattari. It also summarises the three attributes of a becoming, which is solipsistic, revolutionary and always in-between. Julian Barnes's novel Love, etc exclusively utilises monologues as the narrative device which, along with its minimal personae, penetrating conflict and unsettling ending, prompts a becoming-Greek tragedy similar to Antigone. The becoming-Greek tragedy is not a simple average of the two beings; rather, it is a heterogeneous, molecular interbeing.

The modern reputation of Andrew Marvell has developed from studies of his status as a metaphysical poet of time and scale, to more historicist investigations of his political engagements and a nascent liberal subjectivity. There are remaining questions about the precise ideas of futurity in his lyric poetry. This article identifies three themes in particular: the figure of the child as part of a discourse of heredity, the figure of the landscape in a process of change, notably in ‘Upon Appleton House’, and the singularly charismatic figure of Oliver Cromwell, especially in ‘An Horatian Ode’. It concludes by considering other potential notions of futurity as suggested through ecocriticism.

Full of men and women in love, Shakespeare's comedies have triggered abundant discussions of the dramatist's treatment of romantic relationships, which, however, nearly ignore the importance of language use. This pragmatic reading of Shakespearean comedies undertakes to explore the speech act of promising of characters in love. By incorporating quantitative data and qualitative insights, the research outlines the attributes and distribution of promising in four comedies, compares gender differences in the use of promising, and scrutinises the change of promising during the shift in love dynamics. In doing so, we anticipate providing a fresh interpretation of speech acts and Shakespeare's dramas.

This article attempts to trace the themes of alterity and tragicality in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. We offer a parallel study of the two works with an emphasis on the (anti)heroes’ struggles with time and the other human as metaphors of ‘alterity’. We present a thematic reading and argue that as Macbeth is preoccupied with his imaginatively fabricated future (time) and tries to execute anyone (the other) who jeopardises the totality of that ideal space, Gatsby is also preoccupied with his past (time) and tries to retrieve Daisy (the other). Tragedy, we discuss, is basically the ultimate result of these struggles. We suggest that Fitzgerald's work generally shares the similar theme of alterity with Shakespeare's Macbeth and somehow modernises the similar tragicality we witness in the latter.

Grouped together with modernism's most eminent authors, D. H. Lawrence has been appreciated for his idiosyncratic response to his time and literary modernism. A good deal of critical attention has been given to his contribution to modernist fiction and, in this context, the present article focuses on some crucial aspects of Lawrence's modernism not hitherto addressed in his short story ‘Samson and Delilah’ (1917), in England, My England (1922). By reading ‘Samson and Delilah’ through the lens of modernist mythopoeia, this article aims to highlight Lawrence's reformulation of the biblical story as a way to come to terms with gendered war in national and personal spheres.