Wiley: Literature Compass: Table of Contents

Nino Haratischwili's The Eighth Life: Language, Nation, and the World

Ana Kvirikashvili — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:10:32 -0700

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes Nino Haratischwili's international bestseller Das achte Leben (für Brilka) (2014), translated into English as The Eighth Life (2019). Living and working in Germany while writing in German as well, Hartischwili has played a key role in the recent internationalization of Georgian culture. With Georgian literature invited as the guest of honor at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair, Hartischwili served as a spokesperson. However, this gesture directly contradicted Georgia's cultural branding, which relied on the uniqueness of the Georgian language. As such, this paper explores why Haratischwili was deemed the most suitable writer to showcase Georgia's culture to the world. The paper reflects upon the combination of local, national, and global elements in The Eighth Life, a novel that has found massive success in translation, including in Georgia. Telling the story of six generations of women in a Georgian family, while capturing Georgian history along with global twentieth-century events, several concerns typical of the so-called global novel permeate the text—whether one understands the global novel as a poetic form or as a material process of circulation. Significantly, however, the nation is not absent from the equation: a quest for identity and anxieties about what it means to be Georgian infuse the novel. The novel appears to take the form of National Allegory while seeking out belonging at a larger scale. Meanwhile, ambivalent feelings concerning the Georgian language permeate the discourse of those agents involved in the novel's circulation.

Transplanting Resistance: How the French Résistance Shaped Postwar Japanese Literary Debates

Akito Sakasai — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:08:02 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article traces the emergence and development of debates on “resistance” in Japanese literary discourse from the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat in 1945 to the conclusion and implementation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In the turbulent postwar literary scene, writers and critics vigorously pursued questions of wartime responsibility, repeatedly emphasizing the alleged absence of resistance within Japanese literature during the war. In response to this perceived historical “blank,” French Résistance literature was introduced as an exemplary model, and an idealized notion of resistance—understood as a collective, national movement—was conceptually transplanted into the Japanese context. By examining how this transplanted model came to structure postwar discussions of resistance, this article argues that the framework itself imposed significant limitations on what could be seen and articulated. Precisely because resistance was imagined primarily in national terms, it became closely aligned with emerging postwar visions of the nation-state, while the legacies of empire and colonial domination were rendered largely invisible. Through a close analysis of postwar criticism, literary debates, and key texts, this article critically reassesses both the possibilities and the blind spots of postwar Japanese resistance discourse.

Transatlantic Austen: Slavery and the British Navy in Persuasion

Donghee Om — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Jane Austen's Persuasion critiques the British Navy's problematic history of involvement in Atlantic slavery following the passage of the 1807 Slave Trade Act. Drawing on new historical evidence, the essay suggests that Captain Frederick Wentworth, Persuasion's male hero, can be understood as implicated in the Atlantic slave trade's economic networks, thereby linking his naval success to the wider ethical framework of the imperial economy. The novel's critical assessment of the British Navy's ties to Atlantic slavery gestures toward an acknowledgment of history—a step Austen may have viewed as a prerequisite for progress, while still allowing for her familial ties to the navy and her personal sympathy for the service.

Eighteenth‐Century British Literature and Hostile Feelings

Thomas Leonard‐Roy — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:38:14 -0700

ABSTRACT

This is a state-of-the-field essay on scholarship on hostile feelings in eighteenth-century British literature. While it is impossible to say whether eighteenth-century Britain was especially hostile, feelings such as hatred, contempt, and resentment energized the print market and attracted significant philosophical and religious discussion in the period. Literary studies of hate have appeared sporadically since the mid twentieth century, most notably D. W. Harding's seminal essay on Austen, “Regulated Hatred” (1940), but in the past 25 years literary scholars have given increasing attention to hostile feelings, broadly understood, in reaction to influential scholarship on eighteenth-century discourses of politeness, sympathy, and sensibility. The essay begins with a discussion of the history of emotions, by now a large and complex field. It then describes the ongoing turn against politeness in historical and literary studies, and reviews scholarship on hostilities in eighteenth-century satire and novels.

“The Difference” of Objects “Is Spreading”: A Non‐Anthropocentric Reading of Tender Buttons

Joon Ho Hwang — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the nonreferentiality of both language and the object in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons through an analysis of “Book.,” a section of the chapter “Objects.” While the inaccessibility of Tender Buttons is well known due to Stein's linguistic experimentalism, the objects presented as section titles also challenge conventional perceptions of the “object” by encompassing non-material and living entities. These title-objects remain largely obscure, as they are partially described but simultaneously left largely undescribed throughout the text. At the same time, other objects continue to appear with a similar kind of inaccessibility, and consequently the text remains elusive despite the scholarly attention it has received since its publication in 1914. Tender Buttons thus suggests that language cannot be entirely controlled, nor can objects be fully possessed from an anthropocentric perspective. In this regard, a recognition of strangeness when encountering objects in the text may be viewed as a step toward perceiving a lesser-known aspect of reality in which, to modify Stein's manifesto, “[t]he difference” of objects “is spreading.”

Issue Information

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:32:22 -0700

No abstract is available for this article.

Rewriting History in Two Tongues: Shih‐I Hsiung's The Bridge of Heaven (1943) and Tianqiao (1960)

Yue Kong — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:26:21 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Shih-I Hsiung's The Bridge of Heaven (1943) and Tianqiao (1960) together constitute a bilingual continuum of historical rewriting through which diasporic Chinese modernism binds diplomatic mediation to historiographic reclamation across imperial and Sinophone contexts. Written in wartime London, The Bridge of Heaven enacts diplomatic mediation by securing China's cultural visibility within an imperial regime of legibility shaped by Allied wartime discourse. Its narrative architecture and paratextual design reframe late-Qing reform and revolution as a process of historical agency rather than a static cultural spectacle, converting externally imposed legibility into narrative control. Seventeen years later, Tianqiao, produced in colonial Hong Kong under the conditions of serial publication and a historically attentive readership, realises historiographic reclamation by reorienting the same historical materials toward Sinophone readers shaped by migration and colonial pedagogy. The Chinese version expands revolutionary narration, restores provincial specificity, and incorporates archival materials accumulated over decades within a reconfigured horizon of address. Read together, the two versions articulate bilingual resistance as a historically situated textual practice that links diplomatic mediation to historiographic reclamation across languages. The article thus advances historical rewriting as an alternative axis of modernist innovation beyond canonical paradigms of formal rupture.