This chapter examines how twentieth century Iranian readers situated Jane Eyre within the classical genre of romance literature (adabiyāt-i ʿāshiqāna), originating from the tradition of love narratives in verse (ʿishq-nāma) pioneered by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami Ganjevi. While romance is only one among several of the original Jane…[Read more]

This issue of the PJES brings five new papers: E. M. Forster’s Last Love by Peter J Conradi Redeeming Time: Henry V’s Transition from ‘Comedian’ to King by David Livingstone Escaping the Women’s Sphere by Jana Valová Principles of Mood Selection in Psalm 20: A Diachronic Study on Psalm Translations from Old to Late Modern English by Kinga Lis…[Read more]

Issue of the PJES dedicated to old age in literature CONTENTS From the Editor Ageing into Old Age: Literary Conclusions and New Beginnings Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań Ann Radcliffe’s Ruminations on the Ageing Body in The Romance of the Forest (1791) Roslyn Joy Irving, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Univ…[Read more]

Line breaks are arguably the defining feature of poetry, in the absence of which a text becomes prose. Consequently, the translation of line breaks is a decisive issue for every poetry translator. Classical and modern literary theorists have argued that the potential for enjambment, which we understand as the effect that makes line breaks possible…[Read more]

With the climate of Brexit, xenophobia and white supremacy on the rise, health and safety of Black and Global Majority people under threat during the spread of Covid in the UK and elsewhere, a discussion of colonialism, migration, borders, and equality – in the classrooms and outside – is more pertinent than ever. Situating the ongoing Dec…[Read more]

La théorie du chaos n’est pas aussi complexe qu’on le prétend souvent Comme l’observe Robert Juliano, le principe sous-jacent est que “dans le caractère aléatoire apparent des systèmes complexes chaotiques, il existe des modèles sous-jacents, des interconnexions, des boucles de rétroaction constantes, la répétition, l’auto-similarité , fractales…[Read more]

Chaos theory is not as complex as it si often made out to be As Robert Juliano observes, the underlying principle is that “within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.”

“Chaos has been for…[Read more]

In 1894, Lord Alfred Douglas referred to homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name”, a phrase that describes the unmentionable nature of homosexuality in a period of time when sodomy was illegal. Even in the 21st century, there continues to be something unspeakable and forbidden about homosexuality. This paper equates the uns…[Read more]

The focus of this study is on the influence of urban ‘woods’ on people’s quality of life in disadvantaged neighbourhoods investigated via the lens of architecture in a Sub-Saharan metropolis. The new intra-Covid Urban Agenda acknowledges that current urban and state-wide resilience management plans, policies, and practices of neighbourhood are…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article… One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focussed interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and…[Read more]

This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains…[Read more]

Essay on Daud Kamal’s Ghalib translations.

This paper delineates the conceptual variations between the notions ‘fashion’, ‘dress’ and ‘costume’ in English-language texts on women’s garment histories using relevant examples from interwar Romanian periodicals. The aim is to offer a more precise formulation, as these three terms have largely been used interchangeably. This paper is built on a…[Read more]

Satire, Humor, and Environmental Crises explores how satire and humor can be employed to address and mitigate ecological crises at individual and collective levels.

Besides scientific and technological endeavors, solutions to ecological crises must entail social and communicative reform to persuade citizens, corporations, organizations, and…[Read more]

Satire, Humor, and Environmental Crises explores how satire and humor can be employed to address and mitigate ecological crises at individual and collective levels.

Besides scientific and technological endeavors, solutions to ecological crises must entail social and communicative reform to persuade citizens, corporations, organizations, and…[Read more]

This working paper presents a full and annotated translation of two titles by 19th-century Ottoman author-cum-statesman Ziya Pasha: (1) a newspaper article written in exile, modern in terms of format and reformist in terms of tenor and providing an staunch and iconoclastic critique of Ottoman language and literature, and (2) the versified preface…[Read more]

The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed…[Read more]

Syllabus for English 2Z03: Nature, Literature, Culture: An Introduction to the Environmental Humanities at McMaster University in the 2022 winter semester. This course used a form of contract grading, and this document includes the Contract Grading FAQ provided to students ahead of/during the course.

A discussion of majāz or allegory that is commonly ascribed to the 15th-century Ottoman polygraph Mollā Lüṭfī and that builds on the works of al-Sakkākī and al-Qazwīnī.
The author gives two alternative overarching classifications: a linguistic vs. cognitive allegory classification, and a metaphor vs. hypallage classification that is supplemen…[Read more]

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that…[Read more]