Ahad Mehrvand

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University

Richard Wright's second edition of his collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's Children (1940), entails both hidden and open forms of defiance against Jim Crowism and Uncle Tomism. In the opening essay of this collection, namely, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” Wright enlists nine lessons of his nonviolent activities t...

Using Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” and Fanon’s “Colonized Intellectual”, we contend that Borges’s essay “The Nothingness of Personality” can be deemed postcolonial. Our study turns to the postcolonial world of Latin America, with a special focus on Buenos Aires, addressing the alienation, hybridity, “two-ness”, and the othered state of Borges a...

Conrad’s acclaimed works from his middle period have been thoroughly studied from several perspectives including postcolonialism whereas the novels from his early period were overlooked due to their so-called“uneven” quality. The most notable works among Conrad’s early novels are hisLingard Trilogy- three of his early novels which are based on the...

Few critics have gone beyond more general discussions of race and racism to discuss the impact of Jim Crowism on Richard Wright’s works. This paper examines the impact that Jim Crow laws and practices had on Wright’s life and the way he responded to them in his literature by drawing upon Henry Louis Mencken’s writing style of using the “words as a...

As a contemporary fiction writer, Bizhan Najdi is less appreciated despite the fact that his short stories are of significant depth and deserve close examination. Through the poetic language, “A Plant in Quarantine” creates a situation which provides a fertile ground to inspect the relation between past and present. A deep analysis of this relation...

Until a few years ago, Turkey was usually seen as irrelevant to colonial studies owing to its non-colonial status. More recently, however, there has been a more flexible approach to considering the possibility of studying modern Turkey under the heading of postcolonial studies. By acknowledging the socio-political similarities between Turkey and co...

This present article aims at examining a narratological study of the inner plot of selected stories of Masnavi-Ma’navi –namely, “The Parrot and the Merchant”, “The Snake and the Snake-Catcher”, and “Students and their Teacher”- on the basis of Aristotle’s theories as discussed in his seminal work Poetics. Introducing Aristotle as the founder of nar...

The present paper aims at proving that Parvin E’tesami has been, consciously or unconsciously, under the profound influence of both ancient Persian and Western literatures in composing her poems. The overseas effect is mainly due to her translations of Western works and her intimate familiarity with Western literature. So far research into Parvin’s...

This article examines Richard Wright's (1940) Native Son, as one of the most effective works in modern African American literary history, in the light of Jean Paul Sartre's conception of transcendence. This article draws upon Sartre's existential views on the concept of transcendence in The Transcendence of the Ego (1936/1960) and The Emotions: Out...

Narratology is one of the theories that study the narrative and narrative structure to reveal some deeper and hidden aspects of ancient and contemporary texts. Research into the narratological study of ancient Persian stories, particularly tales of Rumi's Masnavi-Ma'navi, is limited primarily to theories of Twentieth Century narratologists such as...

In the fifteen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America, countless literary and artistic works have responded to the incident. This paper examines Amiri Baraka's literary response to this violent event through his most famous poem entitled "Somebody blew up America," which defies American orthodox responses to the attacks. The mainstream r...

In this paper, using Aristotle's theories on tragedy, we will clarify the significance of "discovery" and "reversal" in Parvin's three poems entitled "Gereh Goshay", "Do Mahzar", and "Goftar va Kerdar". Parvin Etesami, as one of the greatest Iranian poets, is mainly known for her depiction of social problems in her poetry, but one of the most impor...

This study aims to show how Emily Brontë’s opposing attitude to civilization in Wuthering Heights reveals to a certain degree her unconscious opposition to authority and accordingly her obsession with the notion of a world in which the father figure is finally slain. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiogra...

Western Imperialism always depicted a biased image of the colonized nations . Therefore , portraying th e reality of Africa to restore the lost dignity of the natives is one of the aims of postcolonial literature . Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an attempt in this regard . Employing postcolonial narratology , the present study examines the relation...

Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total explanation, make the need for this research timely. This article...

As a contemporary fiction writer, Bizhan Najdi is less appreciated despite the fact that his short stories are of significant depth and deserve close examination. Through the poetic language, “A Plant in Quarantine” creates a situation which provides a fertile ground to inspect the relation between past and present. A deep analysis of this relation...

The current research examines the role of Postcolonial and Decolonization Theories in the study of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, which has always been interpreted through feminism. Application of Postcolonial theories to this work is controversial; since neither the subject of the play, nor the setting, nor the characters can be regarded as an instance...

In his first novel Lawd Today!, Richard Wright focused on the way his fictional characters responded W.E.B. Dubios's concept "double consciousness". Du Bois uses this concept to describe the experience of being alienated from the self or having two halves of a self each at war with the other, which was a common feeling during the period. Wright lai...

Richard Wright's introductory essay to his collection of short stories Uncle Tom's Children describes hidden forms of resistance against Jim Crowism and Uncle Tomism. The essay entitled The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch relates Wright's daily confrontations with Jim Crowism with a particular emphasis on his evasive actions,...

Native Son (1940) introduces Bigger Thomas as an African American character whose meaningless life suddenly gets meaning after accidentally murdering Mary Dalton, a white wealthy lady, in Chicago. Indeed, Bigger feels that the murder has opened a new world of many possibilities for him; having broken Jim Crow conventions, and for the moment having...

During the Great Depression in America, Jim Crow laws and customs were intensified and came to affect African Americans in almost all facets of their lives. This thesis argues that Richard Wright’s early fictional works—Lawd Today! (1965), Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son (1940)—portray the new violent measures adopted by whites, but they...