“Why Can't I Have the Vote?”

The First World War came at a crucial time when British women's suffrage campaigns were gathering momentum throughout the country. The culmination of the movement during these years, in spite of various social and political differences, enhanced female solidarity and political consciousness to a considerable degree. Hectic political activism also witnessed a phenomenal rise and propagation of an exclusive and extraordinary women's culture. The onset of the Great War however, struck a fatal blow to such an unprecedented female camaraderie and political conviction. My proposed chapter traces and gathers evidences in women's verse written during this time period extending from the pre-war years of the suffrage movement to the early years of the post-war demobilisation correlating them with some of the major developments in women's socio-political history of the period.

The Digital Politics of Pain

After 9/11, the upsurge of the Internet and intensification of mass media has provided Afghans with access to a global information highway of new perspectives, narratives, ideas, and images. Global connectivity has likewise brought with it cultural challenges over meaning. Within these digital spaces, the politics of ideological warfare ensue for the battle of representation and signification, which are inevitably interlinked to questions of power and powerlessness. Within this digital space of ideological contestation, I explore the power of the Afghan Women's Writing Project and its ability to empower women to bear witness and share their geographies of pain. Moreover, I demonstrate how AWWP operates as a social media democratizing campaign meticulously employing Western feminist rhetoric to shape Afghan cultural and social systems and subvert opposing Islamic forces that attempt to undermine protections against women and principles of free market democracy.

Mustapha and Greville

Whilst Jonathan Burton—deactivating or mincing matters with Said's Orientalism—coined the word ‘trafficking' for the repercussions of Eastern/Islamic/Ottomanic characterization of Western authors, Linda McJannet, on the other hand—backing Said's Orientalism—went into Bakhtin's ‘heteroglossia', and stressed the polyphonic representation of dramatic works through the word ‘pragmatic ambivalence', a characterization of English authors toward the Islamic politics. Both Burton and McJannet touched pre-eminently on the Renaissance writers to define their literariness. The present chapter aims to shed light on the historical background and dramatic representation regarding Mustapha's tragic death through majoring Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy and producing a base for Machiavellian point of view. The study is based on a dramatic work of an English Renaissance playwright, Fulke Greville, who adapted Prince Mustapha's death for the stage.

Aziz Nesin's “An Ass the Prime Vezier” as a Mirror of Inequality

This paper's central concern is to study how and to what extent the language used by the representatives of different social groups in A. Nesin's story is not simply a mere means of communication but a system of existing conventions the nature of which has historically stemmed from the power relations and inequality in the life of the nation. A. Nesin's sensitivity about the highly distinctive styles applied by different characters prove the clearest cases of predictable correlations between features of language and social status of the language society members, which also updates the context, the organization of which depends not only on the character of interaction, but also on such components as who the communicants are, what social group members they represent, the circumstance they are communicating in, the objective of the discussion and other possible reasons which influence this or that model and manner of communication process.

“Power Is Only a Word”

This chapter aims to define and examine the role of language and political power as they appear in two of George Orwell's most influential works: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the essay “Politics and the English Language.” These complimentary, though at times seemingly contradictory, works build a philosophy of language which sees the spoken and written word used as weapons for an authoritarian regime. By comparing Orwell's essay and novel, as well as explaining their connection to the Whorfian theory of Linguistic Relativity, the author hopes to track the development of Nineteen Eighty-Four's Newspeak as the ultimate language of control in a fictionalized world which seemed all too possible to its author.

What Danger Can There Be in Being the Shadow of a Gunman in Dublin, at Easter, in 1916?

As the centenary of the events of the Rising that took place in Dublin in Easter week 1916 revolves around us, this article revisits the period, and its before and after, through the lens of three literary works – James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), Sean O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and W. B. Yeats' ‘Easter, 1916' (1916, pub. 1921) – employing theorisations of temporality set out in Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993), and a concentration on ideological messaging in the forms of hauntological ellipses and spectral insignias, to analyse the events and map their potentials, then, and their effects on the present day.

Communist Ideology and Its Impact on Albanian Literature

After the World War II, Albania fell under the totalitarian regime of Enver Hoxha. The impact of the communist dictatorship in Albania was not only political, but social and artistic as well. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the negative impact of communist ideology in Albanian literature. This study is compiled using descriptive-interpretative qualitative method. After analyzing and interpreting specific phenomena related to the development of Albanian literature, it is important to emphasize that the impact of the communist ideology should be considered as a strong shock, with evident consequences not only for the period 1945-1990, but also responsible for the state of literature today. Socialist realism method applied to literature almost killed the creativity and professionalism. The most important dimension of the literature conducted under the terror of the communist system, was the literature written in prison, which provides Albanian literature with the extraordinary dimension of human strength that exceeds the ferocity of every ideology and totalitarian system.

The Allegory of Holocaust

The current bloody conflict between Israelis and Palestine in Middle East has widely approached by social scientists and humanists as a moral campaign to impose the human dignity. Although in some respect, literature would play a leading role in narrowing both sides, the fact is that in digital times Holocaust is far from being a closed issue. As a platform towards victimization or political oppression, Holocaust still remains in the heart of West as well as the negative effects of depersonalizing subject identities. The nature of any genocide is associated to the power of Gods to select who lives or not, in the same way, Noah abode the decision of God to destroy a world which unfits with his desires. This chapter explores not only the ebbs and flows of Holocaust as a site of tourism and mediatized consumption, but as an allegory which reinforces the exclusionary logic of capitalism.

The Public Veil

As women take on increasingly prominent roles in politics, it is critical to understand the gendered nature of public voice within the ideological messaging process as well as its historical roots. This chapter contends that, in order to gain a legitimate voice in politics, a field that continues to be dominated by men, females must project a public yet carefully “veiled” image that is both “strong” and “feminine” in their writing and speaking. They must appear to be “strong women”. To create this image, they must balance male expectations of authoritative appearance with male expectations of appropriate femininity. Based on a comparative analysis of ancient Greek and Roman writers alongside modern female political voices, this chapter illustrates how women achieve this balance using four strategies in their written and spoken texts: conveying a constrained sexuality; using masculine metaphors; addressing feminine themes; and employing gender inversion. These strategies can be characterized as “gender bilinguality” and this bilinguality has been present since classical antiquity.

The Roots of Evilness and Biblical Literature

The revolt commanded by Lucifer in the heaven marked a start in the cosmology of Christianity. Although scholars agree the problem of evilness as one of the most vivid contradictions of Catholic Church, it is clear that God forgives its life. Unlike other traditions or mythologies where the Gods kill the dissidents or inflict unbearable torments, Judaism and Christianity continue the dialectic relations between goodness and evilness by the introduction of forgiveness. That way, these cosmologies neglect the possibility of dying, creating the desire to embrace the life. The riot of Lucifer exhibits our ancient panic to the offspring death.