Koray Melikoglu – författare

This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative mode in postcolonial British fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist novels: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight`s Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor`s The Great Indian Novel (1989), Ben Okri`s The Famished Road (1991), and Syl Cheney-Coker`s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990). The main focus of attention lies on the ways in which the novelists in question have exploited the potentials of magical realism to represent their hybrid cultural and national identities. To provide the necessary historical context for the discussion, the author first traces the development of magical realism from its origins in European Painting to its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and explores the contested definitions of magical realism and the critical questions surrounding them. He then proceeds to analyze the relationship between the paradigmatic turn that took place in postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the literary expression of Third World countries.

This collection of new essays brings together scholarly examinations of a writer who—despite the prestige that the Nobel Prize has earned him—remains controversial with respect to his place in the literary tradition of his home country. This is in part because the positioning of Turkey itself in relation to the cultural divide between East and West has been the subject of a debate going back to the beginnings of the modern Turkish state and earlier. The present essays, written mostly by literary scholars, range widely across Pamuk’s novelistic oeuvre, dealing with how the writer, often adding an allegorical level to the personages depicted in his experimental narratives, portrays tensions such as those between Western secularism and traditional Islam and different conceptions of national identity.

This monograph seeks to reconstruct the culture of the pioneer woman as presented in O. E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, and Willa Cather's My Antonia. Essentially, the textual analyses show the pioneer woman's evolving and dynamic reaction to both felicitous space and the open spaces of the western frontier as she progresses from completely loathing to totally embracing vast spaces. The texts discussed demonstrate the genesis and growth of the modern American, independent woman who successfully negotiated the volatile topics of gender and space.

The essays in this revised and expanded volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalizing tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder that is under examination.

This essay collection addresses African writing ranging from transcriptions of ancient (Khoikhoi/San) folktales to some of the classic texts of the African English canon as well as more recent writing about urgent contemporary social and gender issues. As the title indicates, Annie Gagiano is fascinated by the way these texts engage with the forces that damage and threaten life and quality of life in various African contexts. She pays tribute – by means of carefully argued analyses – to the authors’ political courage and social concern and to their subtle delineations of African characters’ experiences. Central to her focus is the verbal artistry of these authors’ memorable and complex representations. Her collection as a whole insists on the philosophical and aesthetic importance of African texts of the kind discussed here – to the global reading public as much as to the "real world" of their original contexts.