Thoughts

Semi-colonial Marginalisation Narratives in Scottish Language Planning and Literature

Lauren Rebecca Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0700

Scotland’s coloniality remains a topic of scholarly debate. I advocate a semi-colonial approach to Scotland in the context of its institutional, literary and linguistic output prior and immediately following the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence (indyref). This heuristic can unpick narratives of marginality surrounding the country’s responses to devolved powers and the legacy of its involvement with empire. Firstly, language practice, policies, and planning in Scotland (Scots and Gaelic) are complicated yet accommodated by their marginalised semi-colonial status. Secondly, select examples from the contemporary Scottish literary canon are examined considering postcolonial and semi-colonial critique amidst wider debates of coloniality and cultural marginalisation. This offers a useful corrective to postcolonialism being seen as a form of subtle cultural resistance in Scotland’s case.

Weeds in the EcoGothic Gardens in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Transfer” and Walter de la Mare’s “The Tree”

Nida Tiranasawasdi — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0700

Images of monstrous, carnivorous plants have often dominated Gothic fiction that explores the precarious relationship between humans and nature. Very few works have created horror from plants in their normalcy. Among these are Blackwood’s “The Transfer” (1912) and de la Mare’s “The Tree” (1922). The two short stories neither present weird species nor animate plants to appear like monsters that capture, kill and devour humans. Instead, they portray plants that naturally grow and die but also have a strong tendency to thrive by drawing lives from other organisms. Relying on ecocritical concepts of inter-relatedness and trans-corporeality, this paper examines such a property of plants found in representations of weeds in the gardens of Blackwood’s and de la Mare’s stories. While the garden is a space where humans cultivate and tend flowers and other kinds of plant, the tenacious and indelible weeds in the gardens in both stories show that humans are merely a component of and subject to their environmental surroundings. As bodies can decompose and lives can be transferred to circumjacent entities, weeds represent the power of nature that proves unrelenting and ecologically fitter to survive than humans.

Post-Truth and Poetic Knowing

Pushpraj Singh, Ekta Rana — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0700

This paper defines “epistemic resistance” as the active contestation of narratives that shape or distort knowledge—especially relevant in today’s “post-truth” era, where emotions and ideologies often override facts. Focusing on Kabir and Walt Whitman—two poets separated by time, culture, and cosmology—the study employs thematic narrative analysis, supported by NVivo coding of fifty curated excerpts. Drawing on narrative theory, historiography, and deconstruction, it reveals how both poets deploy metaphoric, subversive, and inclusive narrative strategies to contest dominant ideologies. Twenty-one thematic codes, derived inductively and deductively, highlight shared emphases on embodied knowledge, spiritual universality, and pluralist identity. Rather than treating literature as passive cultural expression, the study frames poetic storytelling as a mode of epistemological agency—capable of resisting erasure and reimagining collective belonging. The paper shows that Kabir’s paradoxical verses disrupt simplistic binaries—an approach that exposes the false oppositions found in contemporary political and media discourse. Likewise, Whitman’s inclusive poetic catalogs serve as a model for pluralistic engagement, offering strategies for community-building that resist the fragmentation of the post-truth age, both in civic life and on social media platforms. These findings affirm the relevance of literary epistemology in a fragmented information landscape, illustrating that storytelling serves not only expressive but also structural and ethical roles in the struggle for meaning and truth.

“Je Reviens”—Returning to Jane Eyre in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

Proud Sethabutr — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0700

This paper takes as its starting point the body of feminist criticism that treats Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as merely a recapitulation of Jane Eyre, often dismissively, as evidenced in du Maurier scholar Nina Auerbach’s uncharacteristically scathing indictment of the novel, and proposes instead to read it as a narratological continuation or expansion of Jane’s epilogue. Through a close reading of the way that the novel disrupts boundaries between self and other, human and nature, beauty and the sublime, feminine and monstrous, and the domestic order itself, the paper argues that Rebecca is a site in which a certain narrative excess in the earlier novel makes an uncanny reappearance. This approach yields an analysis that highlights how the novel exposes the violence inherent in Jane Eyre’s Gothic romance narrative, wherein a woman's security within the domestic order comes at the expense of another.