Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of William Faulkner And Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, By Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, Pp. Xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (Hardback), Isbn: 9780367501327., Marietta Kosma

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Book review of William Faulkner and Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, by Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, pp. xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780367501327.

Identity In The 21st Century Nigerian Fiction: A Case Study Of Blackass By Igoni A. Barrett., Ogochukwu B. Ossai

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This paper attempts to examine the allegorical narrative strategies and politics of identity—race, and gender, using postcolonial and racial frameworks. The novel, Blackass written by a Nigerian writer is a 21st century fierce comic satirical adaptation of Metamorphosis, a novella by Franz Kafka. The intricacies and culture within a society and ethnicity in a nation such as patriarchy are explored through the language, characters, and development of the plot in Nigerian literature. For this essay, I enter into the discourse of race by analyzing the social and cultural phenomena that occur throughout the structure of the fictional work.

“An Eternity Or Two Later”: Family Of Choice In Elaine Castillo’S America Is Not The Heart, Caroliena E. Cabada

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Many of the challenges faced by environmental activists are issues of scale. How can vital changes be enacted and sustained over the necessarily long time scales of environmental restoration? Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018) illuminates a possible avenue for activists engaged in environmental justice work. Parts of the book contains extensive flashbacks to Hero’s, the protagonist’s, time as part of a cadre of the New People’s Army in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. Though the NPA is not strictly an environmental activist group, the organization takes their cues from queer ecofeminist frameworks and the intersections between …

Teaching Activism: The Feminist Pedagogical Possibilities Of Why We Fly, Miranda M. Findlay

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Young adult fiction possesses the pedagogical power to educate young readers about activism, and more recently, authors of the genre have answered the call from young aspiring activists to deliver narratives that are reflective of and relevant to their own lives and communities. Published in October of 2021, the novel Why We Fly illustrates the complexities of participating in social justice activism while also providing entertaining and inspiring characters. In honor of Colin Kaepernick, authors Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal craft the fictional hero Cody Knight who encourages the text’s young protagonists to look at the world around them to …

A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …

The Souls Of Black Women: Reimagining Futurities Beyond The Veil, Kevin A. Blanks

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Now more than ever, communities of color are rendered more vulnerable to state violence and unjust policing; and a global pandemic has exacerbated the ways that the marginalized, the poor, and the disabled are devastated more disproportionately into precarious spaces. Thus, this anti-black world isn’t sustainable for us, and futurity has always felt elusive and just out of reach for marginalized bodies. This world-making project seeks to reimagine an alternative world, an otherwise, an elsewhere where life can be breathed back into our bodies, where we can be whole and free. Through an examination of DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk …

Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that …

World, Worlds, Worlding: A Review Of Pheng Cheah's What Is A World? On Postcolonial Literature As World Literature, Chris Hall

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Review of Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Presents an overview of Cheah's argument regarding normativity and temporality in worlds and worlding, a summary of chapters, and an assessment of the book's contribution to philosophy, world literature, and postcolonial studies.

Decorating The Performative Body In Tender Is The Night, Alyssa Q. Johnson

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

In Tender Is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald uses clothing and fashion to heighten the sense of time period as well as to enhance the ways in which the world, on both sides of the Atlantic, was changing. However, changes on the surface frequently do not reveal a change in underlying motivations for dress. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald uses clothing in symbolic ways that allow characters to perform roles to achieve their goals. Through the ways bodies are shaped in the novel, Fitzgerald reveals that clothing, shopping, and perfectly bronzed skin have the power to make great economic …

Epic On An American Scale: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Tiffany M. Messick

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

I am pleased to submit an original research article entitled “Epic on an American Scale: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio” for consideration for publication in Beyond the Margins. In this article I examine the link between ancient Greek epic and American Midwestern Agrarianism. Specifically, I examine how Greek and Roman epic influenced Modernism as evidenced in one of the earliest Modernist works, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I find that Anderson employs many epic elements to convey the link between the two empires and emphasize the epic nature of the collapse of American Agrarianism.

I believe my article would be a …

Going Slumming In Mexico: Rereading Primitivism In Katherine Anne Porter’S Flowering Judas And Other Stories, Annika M. Schadewaldt

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in-Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in Mexico crucially shaped her artistic vision, there is less agreement on the specificities of her image of …

Sexual And Erotic Transgression Through Aesthetic History: A Study Of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ronny F. Ford

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This article examines the relationship between Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetic writing and history, especially in regards to how he explores sexual transgressions. The article begins with how aestheticism works in tangent with history to further these transgressions within a historical context and especially within the realm of Victorian Christianity. Next, Swinburne’s medieval aesthetics in “The Leper” will be analyzed in regards specifically necrophilia and the taking care of a leper, and how the writing of this poem was both a condemnation of Christianity and an accidental upholding of it. The violent homoeroticism and monstrous femininity of “Anactoria” are also looked …

A “Defect Of Justice”: Congregationalism, The Calvinist Problem, And The Unitarian Solution In Sylvester Judd's Margaret, Benjamin M. Woods

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This article contributes to a small body of criticism concerning Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret. Largely described as a “Transcendentalist” novel that critiques the Calvinist theology prevalent in late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century New England village society, I argue for an interpretation of the novel that is concerned the interaction between Calvinism and the Congregationalist model of social and religious organization over time. Rather than just exposing the negative social ramifications Calvinist doctrines like total depravity can have on New England society, I assert that the novel exposes the limitations in Puritan Congregationalist ideals espoused by early figures such as John Winthrop …

Their Eyes Were Watching A Goddess: Zora Neale Hurston's Vodou Subtext, Laura R. Sheffler

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Written in Haiti but set in Florida, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God makes rich use of Haitian religious traditions to empower African American women. Vodou, the religion of the slaves, was both a religious act and a political one in Haiti. African slaves continued to find power in the evocation of their gods to defy the colonial powers. Hurston taps into the subverted powers of the Vodou pantheon and rituals to speak to her American audience, linking the physical rebellions of the earthly world with the spiritual world. One voice of Hurston's double narrative speaks to …