Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Merchants – Fiction”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming professional marketing practices as well as marketing education. This paper employs the science fiction novel “The Space Merchants” by Pohl and Kornbluth as a metaphorical framework for critically examining AI integration in marketing curricula. The authors review existing literature examining the impacts of AI on marketing practices and education. Furthermore, they establish a qualitative methodology analyzing a real-world case study, current applications of AI in marketing education, and discuss ethical frameworks surrounding the use of AI. Utilizing “The Space Merchants” satirical portrayal of consumerism, they reflect on AI’s potential to commodify marketing education, homogenize student thought, and undermine educational integrity. Also examined are AI’s capabilities to enhance personalization, engagement, and teaching efficiency. Ultimately, the paper argues for educators’ indispensable role in ethically leveraging AI to enrich the student experience. The unique fictional lens highlights the need to balance advancement and responsibility in AI-enabled marketing education. This comprehensive ethical analysis aims to significantly advance the discourse on AI's evolving function in shaping the next generation of marketing professionals. Furthermore, by adopting a transdisciplinary approach through the integration of science fiction and ethical critique, the paper seeks to catalyze broader transdisciplinary conversations between the technical and social sciences on the impacts of emerging technologies like AI on education.

Siberian merchants as a special social and cultural phenomenon that played a role in the formation of the cultural landscape of the region was reflected in several works of the Russian literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. An important place among them belongs to the stories and essays of the Siberian writer Nikolay Naumov created in the 1870s–1880s and included in the pantheon of populist fiction. These works can be attributed to the texts of “local consciousness”, and they were quite actively studied in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. At the same time, the image of Siberian merchants in Naumov’s works that addresses the problem of regional identity in the context of national identity remained practically unexplored. Important factors in the study of this image in the works of the writer-official Naumov are the interaction of his literary and official activities; the ideology of Siberian regionalism, whose member he was a that time; and the ideology of populism, which also had a strong influence on him. Accordingly, the aim of the article is to analyze the features of the depiction of Siberian merchants in Naumov’s works of the 1870s–1880s as an implication of the archetype, the national type of a merchant in Siberian plots. The analysis carried out in the context of the mutual influence of the various social fields occupied by the writer demonstrates the dominance of the pragmatic possibilities of Naumov’s works over the literary ones. Focused on creating a “reality effect”, all the stories are characterized by essay beginning, abundant use of facts, real events, specific details of everyday life. However, with all his efforts to focus his gaze on the material and its reliability, Naumov certainly and quite clearly communicates his ideological conception to the reader. As a rule, the presented image of the Siberian merchant class is completed and consistent, and therefore rather superficial and schematic, extremely typified. Moreover, the image of the Siberian merchant miroed (lit. “world eater”; exploiter) is part of the collective image of the miroed, which also includes kulaks and officials. The influence of the field of public service can be traced both in the subject matter of the works and in their poetics. In particular, they contain an autobiographical image of the hero-narrator (official), and they are also characterized by clearly defined temporal and spatial boundaries, which strengthens the essay element. Telling the reader about the ethnography and geography of Siberia, the writer (through the hero-narrator) draws attention to its “natural” merits, on the one hand, and persistently voices the idea, which performs a cycle-forming function, that Siberia’s natural well-being and harmony is violated by human intervention often coming to Siberia from outside, on the other. Accordingly, Naumov sees the common role of officials and writers in the development of Siberia as the protection of Siberia from predatory exploitation, which is not typical for the region, and from the destruction of lasting values.

Abstract Through six centuries of commercial activity, cultural identification, wartime pillage, and scholarly scrutiny, the Sanguo zhi pinghua 三國志平話 (Plain Tale on The Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms), a work of popular historical fiction, survived to be reprinted for scholarly study around 1930. But this title and others from an original 1320s series continue to exist only because of a shared dedication to the study of books and through the collaboration of generations of Chinese, Japanese, and probably Korean merchants, teachers, editors, scholars, and bibliographers. This essay traces the tortuous path followed by this thin book through time, wars, and personal passions to reveal the generosity of scholars in making this title and its historical significance known today. As with cultural matters at other times and places, this path was regularly overshadowed by political and commercial interests.

In the past, Westerlauwers Friesland was already inhabited by a multilingual population, including speakers of local Frisian and non-Frisian vernaculars, the Dutch standard language and etnolects of foreign origin like those of German harvesters and Jewish merchants.In the past, Westerlauwers Friesland was already inhabited by a multilingual population, including speakers of local Frisian and non-Frisian vernaculars, the Dutch standard language and etnolects of foreign origin like those of German harvesters and Jewish merchants. Frisian literature reflects this multilingual situation to some extent. The details of it have yet to be studied in a systematic way, however. This case-study exemplifies how Jews were characterized in Frisian literature, especially drama. It turns out that the stereotypical Jewish character is presented as speaking a variety of artificial and real languages. This study sheds some light on the question of how literature relates to reality, prejudice and language. It is argued that Frisian literature and multilingualism interconnect, the former existing in a multilingual reality, the latter being creatively manipulated by literary fiction.

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building.

In 1907, writer and Oxford graduate Lionel Portmanbegan his novelThe Progress of Hugh Rendal: A 'Varsity Storywith an impassioned attack on the university system of fees and credit. “An unrighteous anomaly it seems that on entering Oxford University the first thing you have to do is to pay money,” Portman protests,Once entered, apparently, you may owe it to the limit of your taste. The shops smile “Credit;” the streets sing of it, the breezes whisper “Put it down”; the whole spirit of the place assumes it as a matter of course; and that so sweet a symphony should begin on so harsh a chord appears an outrage unpardonable. But so in the wisdom of most colleges it is ordained. Thirty pounds, “caution money,” must be paid to the Bursar before he will write your name in his book of the Elect. And till this is paid, be your other debts what they may, you cannot owe to College or University. (1)Upon enrolling in Oxford, the novel's earnest freshman hero Hugh is immediately subjected to a “baptism of debt,” and, by the end of his first year, he agonizes over the £58 in bills he owes to his grocer and other merchants (2, 102). Portman suggests that young undergraduates from families of modest means were ill-equipped to negotiate the consumer temptations that characterized the university experience and often met with painful – even disastrous – financial consequences. “What undergraduate,” the novelist asks his readers, “finding himself for the first time in the sublime position of having unlimited credit if very limited cash gives a thought to that distant but inevitable sunset, when he is informed that ‘The accounts of Mr. ––– have been placed in our hands for collection,’ etc., etc.?” (30).

Abstract “The Ghost in the Account Book” claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic and, by extension, questions the English novel's complicity in propagating faith in that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire such as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations, surfaces to the diegetic level and becomes available for critical scrutiny in high modernist novels such as Heart of Darkness or Absalom, Absalom! Drawing from writings by Max Weber (on guarantees of calculability) and Mary Poovey (on the accuracy effect), this essay attends to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve's recasting of Sutpen's life as a debtor's farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad bluntly equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a stable fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the invention of newer forms and figures with which to express the new imperial (and later, postcolonial) world order.

The article highlights the ways of resolving family conflicts nobles and peasants in the first third of the XIX century in the Russian Empire, against the background of the ongoing systematization of legislation. Based on examination of the letters and memoirs of the nobles and peasants we highlighted the methods, which are actually used to solve family conflicts. I conclude that nobles and peasants rarely used help of the state in resolving family conflicts. The sphere of family relations was sacred for these estates; therefore, they did not rope the authorities into family conflicts. I have identified the following ways to resolve family conflicts: duel; marriage, often in the form of a secret wedding; going to the monastery and punishing the unfaithful wife; different approaches to raising children by peasants and nobles. The author of the article pays attention to passivity of the peasants in resolving their family conflicts. The results of the study allow exploring the alternative ways of resolving family conflicts based on representatives of other classes of Russian society in the first third of the 19th century (clergy, merchants, philistines, foreigners) as well, using wider range of sources (journalism, normative acts, fiction, paperwork). This analysis contributes to the discussion about the limits of the government intervention into family affairs. The author of the article redlines that people did not trust the law and resorted to the personally legitimate sources of dealing with family conflicts. This conclusion presents a new perspective in the discussion of legal nihilism and real application of the law in life

Not only is the workplace a significant site of the social construction of feminine and masculine identities but in an increasing range of service sector occupations, a gendered bodily performance is a significant part of selling a product. In this paper, we draw on Butler's notion of gender identity as a regulatory fiction to investigate the consequences of the specificity of embodiment and gendered performances. Drawing on three case studies in the City of London, we explore the differential fictions constructed by men and women engaged in interactive service work in a professional capacity in merchant banks. We examine the ways in which women are embodied and/or represented as ‘woman’ in the workplace, comparing women's sense of themselves and their everyday workplace experiences with those of men doing the same job. Our aim is to establish whether the necessity of selling oneself as part of the product in such service sector employment challenges the idealisation of male workers as disembodied rational subjects, while not necessarily disrupting the inferior position of embodied women.

Although T. S. Arthur'S extraordinary literary presence and popularity were acknowledged during the antebellum period, studies of both the American Renaissance and domestic fiction have failed to provide anything more than a passing reference to his fiction. Arthur's meager current reputation has been defined by a single work, the sensationalist temperance novel, Ten Nights in a Bar-room, And What I Saw There (1854). More generally, cultural historians have labeled Arthur as one of the “fictional eulogists of the self-made man” and a purveyor of the “rags to riches” myth. However, the magazine fiction that Arthur regularly produced for Godey's Lady's Book in the 1840s had nothing to do with either temperance or the myth of autonomous individualism. Instead, his tales focused on the relationship between behavior in the home and in the marketplace. Writing in the aftermath of the devastating Panic of 1837, Arthur sought to identify the causes of domestic disorder and economic failure. Significantly, his narratives of personal accountability asserted that failure and disorder were the inevitable results of deviations from emerging gender norms. The prospective urban merchant and domestic women who appeared prominently in his magazine fiction must learn that the management of troublesome bodies is the key to economic and domestic stability.

George Lillo's play the london merchant (1731), one of the most popular tragedies of the eighteenth century, makes the case for the respectability of men who have accumulated wealth through work. Lillo takes every opportunity to display the honor of a London merchant named Thorowgood. In the opening scene, the merchant describes how he persuaded his international colleagues to withhold a loan from Spain, leaving that country unable to attack the English fleet. Thorowgood's action, from which the merchant makes no profit, is unrelated to the plot and serves only to establish his character and patriotism. In another demonstration of his honorable nature, Thorowgood insists that his daughter should marry the man she loves without regard to his fortune or status.

Yu Hua is one of the most illustrious avant-garde and post-modernist writers in contemporary China, whose chefs-d’oeuvre can be exemplified by a 1995 novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Notwithstanding widespread accolades, Yu Hua’s fiction is excoriated by his peer Han Han for resembling works translated from Western literature. In this research, I scrutinise the language deployed in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant under the framework postulated by Yu Kwang-chung. I propound that the language in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant bears similitude to Westernised/Europeanised Chinese, in that it involves conspicuous light verbs, nominalisation, bei passivisation, subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, plural forms, as well as premodifiers and particles, a considerable proportion of which are redundant and impinged upon by the English language.

The article analyses the popular novel Sannikov’s land (published in 1926) by the famous Russian and Soviet geologist Vladimir A. Obruchev (1863–1956) and asks how scientific discourse on the one hand and literary, fictional discourse on the other interact in this text that tells the story of the discovery of an Arctic island that a Russian merchant had asserted to have seen, but the existence of which never could be affirmed. Basing his novel exclusively on wellfounded scientific (geological as well as anthropological) hypotheses, Obruchev polemizes with a whole range of pretexts from J. Verne to K. Hloucha. Unfolding the story of the Russian expedition, Obruchev pursues the aim (1) to deconstruct the utopian myth of a paradise on earth beyond the Arctic ice in its countless varieties; (2) to show that ancient myths—like the myth of the existence of warm islands in the Arctic—are a form of protoscientific insight that should be taken seriously by modern science and transformed into scientific knowledge; and (3) to suggest that the Arctic islands—really existing, supposed to exist or be doomed—from a geological point of view belong to the Siberian mainland and therefore to Russian/Soviet territory.

Eighteenth-century satirical artist William Hogarth figures centrally in Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s ekphrastic postcolonial fiction. In particular, Dabydeen’s novels A Harlot’s Progress and Johnson’s Dictionary invoke plate 2 of Hogarth’s 1732 series A Harlot’s Progress, which depicts the encounter of a cuckolded Jewish merchant, his mistress, and a turbaned slave boy.In this article, I argue that Dabydeen’s strategy of introducing visual intertexts into his fiction encourages a comparative reading of the representational regimes that historically have shaped popular perceptions of blacks and Jews. Situating Dabydeen’s Hogarth novels as part of a larger tradition in postwar Caribbean writing of advancing an identificatory reading of Jewishness, I examine how Dabydeen’s novels illustrate the need to broaden discussions of the relationship between postcolonial and Jewish studies beyond the question of Holocaust memory.

This paper seeks to introduce new data into the discussion of William Shakespeare’s portrayal of Jewish people through intertextual and close reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, sections from the Geneva Bible, and primary documents discussing Anglo-Jewish life in the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare’s relationship to and purported views of Jewish people have been scrutinized for centuries. However, almost all conclusions put forth by scholars about Shakespeare’s ties to Elizabethan Jewish communities and anti-Semitism have been drawn from one work, The Merchant of Venice. Merchant contains Shakespeare’s only explicitly Jewish characters, Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, although she happily converts to Christianity. In this paper, I propose that Shakespeare has an implicitly Jewish character lurking in The Tempest: Caliban, the play’s main antagonist, a native to the island on which the play is set, and Prospero and Miranda’s slave. I will support the interpretation of Caliban as a Jewish-coded figure through cross-reading The Tempest with The Merchant of Venice, sections of the Geneva Bible, and non-fiction testimonials from English residents during and before the Elizabethan era. Using both these plays alongside other scholarly and historical texts, I will bring cultural and historical context to these portrayals in order to explore a deeper understanding of the complicated and nuanced depictions of Jewish people in Shakespeare’s work.

The social reality of the merchant community of King’s Lynn played an integral role in the formation of Margery Kempe’s self-image throughout her life. In her young-formative years, Lynn’s merchant elite imparted personal, commercial, ethical, and religious values. As the daughter of John Brunham, one of the most influential members of Lynn’s elite, the merchant community also provided Margery with status, security, comfort, and self-worth. Even in her later years as Margery formulated her holy self-image as she questioned, and eventually rejected, the role imposed on her by Lynn’s merchant culture as the daughter of Brunham and wife of John Kempe, she continued to identify herself through that culture. When asked by the mayor of Leicester in 1416 or 1417 to identify herself, Margery confidently replied, “Sir, I am of Lynn of Norfolk, a good man’s daughter of the same Lynn, who had been mayor five time of that worshipful borough and alderman also many years, and I have a good man, also a burgess of the said town, Lynn, as my husband.”

إن الوظيفة الأكثر أهمية للغة هي وظيفتها التواصلية لأنها تستخدم لنقل الأفكار والمشاعر والمواقف وما إلى ذلك ، ومع ذلك ، فإن لها أيضًا وظائف أخرى مثل وظيفتها التعبيرية حيث يتم استخدامها لإنتاج خطاب أدبي. الخطاب الأدبي هو نوع من استخدام اللغة حيث يمكن استخدام هذه النظريات البراغماتية لفعل الكلام والتضمين لتحليل الخطاب الأدبي للخيال. يعتبر الخيال الأدبي نوعًا من الخطاب يتميز بخطابه متعدد الطبقات نظرًا لوجود مستويين مختلفين ، وإن كانا مترابطين ، من التفاعل ؛ حيث تتفاعل مجموعات مختلفة من المحاورين مع بعضهم البعض.تتضمن الطبقة الأولى التفاعلات التي تحدث بين الشخصيات في الخطاب الروائي ، بينما يتضمن المستوى الآخر التفاعل الذي يشارك فيه كل من الكاتب المسرحي والقراء. هذان المستويان مترابطان حيث أن التفاعل بين الكاتب المسرحي والقارئ يسترشد بالتفاعل بين الشخصيات داخل الخطاب الأدبي.يمكن أن يكون لنظرية فعل الكلام بعض التأثير على التفسير الأدبي للخيال حيث يمكن تطبيقها على الخطاب ذي المستوى المزدوج في الخطاب التخيلي. يمكن أيضًا تطبيق نظرية المعنى والتضمين على هذا النوع من الخطاب لإلقاء الضوء على الطريقة التي يمكن بها لقراء الخيال استرجاع المعنى والوصول إليه. تستكشف الورقة كيف يمكن استخدام النظريات البراغماتية لفعل الكلام والمعنى في التفسير الأدبي للرواية باستخدام مقتطفات من كتاب شكسبير تاجر البندقية كبيانات للتحليل.

Abstract In a scene near the beginning of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a maid child stands as silent witness to a conversation between a wife and a monk within the garden of a wealthy French merchant. By using her as an observer to the scene in the garden, Chaucer, perhaps for the first time in English literature, employs the gaze of a child to highlight the narrative of experience. In this article I explore the maid child as a sign of Chaucer’s experiments with perspective. Since Chaucer probably first wrote the Shipman’s Tale with the Wife of Bath as narrator, the maid child looks forward to the old hag in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In placing or keeping her in the tale, Chaucer anticipates modernist experiments with perception, looking forward to Henry James, whose What Maisie Knew describes the gaze of another child upon the unsavory bartering of an adult world.

Abstract Published in 1958, The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance is one of the earliest linguistic speculations in the science fiction genre. Directly inspired by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it describes a complex, linguistic engineering experiment set up to transform the essentially peaceful nature of the inhabitants of the planet Pao, so that they might stand up to invaders from another planet. It does so through the creation and implementation of three new languages, as opposed to the one they already speak, to create a merchant class, technical class, and warrior class. While Vance’s extrapolation is excessively schematic, and certainly leans heavily on a concept of linguistic relativism that now sounds rather dated, other science fiction writers have explored in different ways the idea that language influences thought and perception of the world, beginning with Babel 17 by Samuel Delany, and Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (on which the film The Arrival by Denis Villeneuve is based). But of particular importance here is Mother Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. Her novel is set in a dystopian, patriarchal future, where a group of linguists creates an artificial language, the Làadan, to better express women’s perception of life and as an act of resistance to the dominant male-centred culture, thus anticipating many themes in today’s debate on language and gender.

What are positive externalities, and what role does someone have to provide a person, not with what they want, but what they need? In this work of philosophical short fiction set in the Middle Ages, a traveling wise man and his apprentice come to town. The local townspeople pay what they can in exchange for the knowledge the learned man can provide. Why won’t my crops grow? Why are my teeth falling out? Why is my steel too brittle? Finally, a merchant comes to the man and offers him huge sum of money and a veiling threat so that he will provide “advice” to his daughter not to marry a lowly guardsman. The traveling advisor refuses to give this advice, while explain to his assistant that the best advice is sometimes it is best to give your customer what they need, not what they want.Note: this story is a part of our legacy-of-excellence program. It was first published in the November 2020 issue of After Dinner Conversation.

AbstractThe law of the collegium of ivory and citrus-wood merchants is best known for its suspected prohibition against outsiders or non-practitioners. The present study argues that the regulation in question actually prohibits curatores from enrolling outsiders—the text curiously labels such an offense ‘fraud’. Rather than banning outsiders altogether, the law provides that only quinquennales shall have the authority to admit non-practitioners. It is still a rather unusual law, and since it conveys the impression that this collegium is wildly popular even among non-practitioners, and headed by quinquennales who excel in the virtue of orderliness, its audience and function are both scrutinized here.

In 1770, Antoine-Louis Séguier, the avocat général (king's advocate) of the Parlement of Paris, defended Jean-Baptiste Dubarle, a Parisian wine merchant, against charges of theft, seduction, kidnapping, and adultery initiated by a carpenter, Eustache Chefdeville. For all of the offenses, Chefdeville demanded monetary reparation.The case, summarized in a mémoire, connects the history of family law in France under the ancien régime to the skillful use of lawyerly forensics. But it also relates to literary portrayals of social scapegraces who betray the esteemed values of friendship and gratitude: in fact, this member of Paris's menu peuple emerges from the pages of the case abstract as a dissembling traitor. Séguier's legal brief, viewed as a work of fiction, projects Chefdeville as an ungrateful betrayer who feigns comradery. In Séguier's telling, this disfigured pariah, albeit socially inferior, takes his place next to the deceptive worldlings described in many eighteenth-century novels. Like them, he violates the sacred laws of sincerity, turning himself into a moral pervert. Séguier's mémoire is rich precisely because it demonstrates how a skilled lawyer attempting to win his case adopts the form of a story characterized by all the literary qualities of the day—love, friendship, avarice, and betrayal. It illustrates a classic legal approach and also reads like a novel from beginning to end.

Abstract This article analyzes the instrumentalization of “China” in contacts between the Ming and Qing dynasties and Siam-Ayutthaya. It focuses both on the state-to-state relations and those between various members of the Siamese and the imperial societies. “China” and “Chinese-ness” stood for forms of ascribed identity within the Sinocentric world, for a form of social distinction, and for one of many identities assumed in the games of political loyalty. For the Ming and Qing empires, inclusion of a foreign land within “China” was conducted through the ritual and administrative fictions that situated Ayutthaya within a hierarchy vis-à-vis the imperial capital. Beyond the state's discourses, participation in a vaguely defined Chinese culture were means of building social networks within the merchant and official communities in Ayutthaya. For the junkmen that connected Ayutthaya and South China, multiple Chinese identities were instrumentalized and inflected according to the needs and necessities of the moment.

This essay advances ameliorationism as a keyword and diagnostic concept for reappraising eighteenth-century anti-slavery writing and political thought; it also considers the implications of eighteenth-century abolitionism for contemporary abolitionist theory and practice. I argue that Anglophone Atlantic writing on the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation slavery is overwhelmingly oriented by a reformist perspective that aims to soften, economize, and refine the practice of slave-based agricultural production in order to stave off demographic and environmental catastrophe. By way of a brief consideration of merchant and philosopher Thomas Tryon, I meditate on how this reformist line of thinking puts forward potent critiques of slavery that nonetheless reinscribe the plantation as a necessary form of social organization. This reformist trap confronts contemporary organizers and theorists of abolition, and scholars of the long eighteenth century might contribute to the struggle to abolish police forces and prisons by critically dismantling fictions about the recuperability of carceral systems.

Nicolai Leykin’s tetralogy is devoted to the Russian merchant Ivanov’s family. One of the parts of this fiction cycle was a book “Visiting the Turks” (1897), telling the story of the journey of the main characters to Constantinople through Belgrade and Sofia. The image of the city in this text reflects the general poetics of the humorous and satiric cycle in the genre of geographic novel of adventures. The focus is not on the “objective” image of the cities visited by the Ivanovs, but on the features of their perception and the “Russian” lifestyle. The Ivanovs’ outlook is characterized by aggressive national identity. They approach everything “foreign” with special “Russian” criteria. The book “Visiting the Turks” (as well as the other parts of the cycle) narrates about various “fiascoes”. Due to their low intellectual and educational level, ignorance and stable “national” stereotypes, the characters are unable to adapt to other cultures. The visited foreign cities, including those inhabited by Slavs, are perceived by the Ivanovs as uncomfortable, “alien.” That is why Ivanovs long for home. The ideal “final destination” of a foreign tour, paradoxically, turns out to be Russia. Acquaintance with other countries does not actually enrich travelers culturally. The travelogue, as a matter of fact, turns into a figment.

Vision: Director’s Cut (2017) is a short comic series about Vision, a lonely robot Avenger superhero who builds his own robotic family out of his desire for love and happiness. The story focuses on the Vision family as they struggle to lead a ‘normal’ suburban life under Vision’s tutelage. As beings of artificial intelligence (AI), they are subject to social ostracism and abuse by a neighbourhood that refuses to accept them as part of the human community. In doing so, Director’s Cut enters into the long-standing literary debate about humanness versus monstrousness, what it means to be a human, and who gets to dictate the definition. The storyline is a contemporary science-fiction rendition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which dramatises the dangers of trying to artificially create a human life. Both texts are in agreement that once these beings are created, because they are sentient and self-aware, then they ought to be treated with dignity, respect and equality. Director’s Cut is additionally comparable to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in exploring the act of vengeance by the traumatised outsider, and how said acts ironically prove their humanness because revenge is a motive inimitable by any other life form.

Беспилотное торговое судно (БЭС) уже не кажется выдумкой фантастов - оно уже практически часть нашей реальности. Технические разработки ведутся повсеместно – остается лишь доказать безопасность концепции БЭС. Аспект безопасности безэкипажного судна является активно исследуемой проблемой – но она до сих пор не решена на сегодняшний день. Причиной является отсутствие статистической информации о реальных условиях эксплуатации и конструкции беспилотных судов, которые еще находятся в стадии разработок. В попытке преодолеть этот пробел необходимо провести анализ рисков, связанных с эксплуатацией беспилотных судов, где все соответствующие опасности и последствия должны быть систематически и количественно оценены. В данной работе представлены результаты первого этапа такого анализа, а именно анализа опасностей, связанных с эксплуатацией беспилотных судов. Перечень опасностей охватывает различные аспекты беспилотного судоходства, возникающие как на этапе проектирования, так и на этапе эксплуатации судна. Впоследствии эти опасности и связанные с ними последствия организуются случайным образом, что требует разработки структуры модели риска. The unmanned merchant ship (UES) no longer seems to be a fiction of science fiction-it is already practically part of our reality. Technical developments are being conducted everywhere – it remains only to prove the safety of the BES concept. The safety aspect of an unmanned vessel is an actively researched problem – but it is still not solved to date. The reason is the lack of statistical information about the actual operating conditions and design of unmanned vessels, which are still under development. In an attempt to bridge this gap, a risk analysis of the operation of unmanned vessels should be conducted, where all relevant hazards and consequences should be systematically and quantified. This paper presents the results of the first stage of such analysis, namely, the analysis of the dangers associated with the operation of unmanned vessels. The list of hazards covers various aspects of unmanned navigation that arise both at the design stage and during the operation of the vessel. Subsequently, these hazards and their associated consequences are organized randomly, which requires the development of a risk model structure.

The article is devoted to "The Troubled Seas" (1863) by A. F. Pisemsky, a work that shocked his contemporaries by violating the boundaries of the fictional and the reliable. The changing description of St. Petersburg fi res of 1862 in different editions of the novel shows that Pisemsky strove to create a work based on the topical journalism of his time, without departing from documentary accuracy. Even though critics and numerous readers disapproved of Pisemsky’s strategy, it ranks as a significant episode in the history of the Russian novel.

Given the centrality of Shakespeare to the Western canon and, more specifically, to the idea of a national English literary tradition, and given that Shylock is one of his most (in)famous creations, it is hardly surprising that he has proved irresistible to a number of Anglo-Jewish authors. Attempts to rehabilitate Shylock and/or to reimagine his fate are not a recent phenomenon. In the post-war era, however, the task of revisiting Shakespeare’s play took on a new urgency, particularly for Jewish writers. In this essay I look at the ways in which three contemporary British Jewish authors—Arnold Wesker, Howard Jacobson and Clive Sinclair—have revisited The Merchant of Venice, focusing on the figure of Shylock as an exemplar of what Bryan Cheyette has described as “the protean instability of ‘the Jew’ as a signifier”. Wesker, Jacobson and Sinclair approach Shakespeare’s play and its most memorable character in very different ways but they share a sense that Shylock symbolically transgresses boundaries of time and space—history and geography—and is a mercurial, paradoxical figure: villain and (anti-)hero; victim and perpetrator; scapegoat and scourge. Wesker’s play is more didactic than the fiction of Jacobson and Sinclair but ultimately his Shylock eludes the historicist parameters that he attempts to impose on him, while the Shylocks of Shylock is My Name and Shylock Must Die transcend their literary-historical origins, becoming slippery, self-reflexive, protean figures who talk back to Shakespeare, while at the same time speaking to the concerns of contemporary culture.

In 1893 Aleko Konstantinov undertook a momentous journey to the Chicago World's Fair. Mary Neuburger explores the broader implications of this journey and its consequences for the Bulgarian encounter with the west and modernity, drawing special attention to the issue of smell. As chronicled in To Chicago and Back, written after his return, Konstantinov discovers both the New World and the quintessence of his own nation on the famous Midway Plaisance, where he meets the prototype for Bulgaria's greatest literary anti-hero—the indomitable Baĭ Gano. In Baĭ Gano—a fictional travelogue about a Bulgarian in Europe—as in To Chicago and Back, Konstantinov explores the theme of Bulgarian backwardness vis-à-vis a more developed (albeit imperfect) Europe and United States. As Baĭ Gano, a bumbling and stinky rose oil merchant, travels throughout “civilized“ Europe, olfactory contrasts and ironies emerge, highlighting the role of smell in evolving Bulgarian (and European) notions of modernity and “otherness.“

Abstract: Financial discourse is applicable to many aspects of lived experience, as Geoffrey chaucer demonstrates in his ventriloquizing of a female cloth merchant, the Wife of Bath. As chaucer's Alisoun boldly states in her Prologue ( c . 1437), 'wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle'. For Alisoun, and by implication for chaucer's contemporary society, the knowledge that everything and everyone has a value to be exploited, is key. commercial discourse is central to Alisoun's portrayal in her Prologue and to the exchange of knowledge and marriage in her Tale . Business practice and phrasing are crucial to Alisoun's understanding of life and unite her roles as a medieval woman: spiritual, marital, sexual, and economic. By examining Margery Kempe's Boke (1436–38) and a range of the fifteenth-century Paston women's papers alongside The Wife of Bath's Prologue , this essay demonstrates that this was not just the case for chaucer's fictional Alisoun, but for a variety of women from the medieval English mercantile élite themselves.

Abstract Labībah Hāšim (1880–1947), a Lebanese-born intellectual and writer, moved to Egypt at the very beginning of the twentieth century and took part in the literary life of Cairene circles, frequenting prominent intellectuals such as the lexicographer Ibrāhīm al-Yāziǧī (1847–1906). She is generally quoted as the founder of the periodical Fatāt al-šarq (Eastern Young Woman, 1906), and subsequently of the first Arab periodical in Latin America (Šarq wa-Ġarb, East and West) during her four-year experience in Chile. Her juvenile novel Qalb al-raǧul (Man’s Heart), published in 1904, is set during and after the social events that shook Lebanon in 1860. The story initially is based on the traditional topos of a contrasted, romantic love and then evolves into an original narrative, characterised by the acute observation of social reality. I highlight here how Hāšim’s narrative embodies a formal and substantial shifting from a romantic and pastoral narrative to a more realistic model. In particular, issues as love, friendship and the quest for self-realisation are vividly discussed throughout the novel, through dialogic and realistic scenes from the daily life of the merchant class.

Scheherazade’s art of storytelling is the main vehicle for the fictional worldmaking in The Thousand and One Nights. The overall structure of the folktale narrative depends on the tales she recounts to King Shahriyar, and it is through these tales that she finally is able to change his mind. The richness of the narrative qualities, properties, and techniques in The Thousand and One Nights has attracted narrative scholars and narratologists for a long time. Besides applying the frame narrative as a basic narrative technique for storytelling practices, Scheherazade’s tales include many other narrative aspects, including narrativity-affecting features. Narrativity generally refers to the qualities and features that cause a narrative to be accepted or evaluated as a (prototype) narrative. This paper argues that Scheherazade’s first tale for the king Shahryar, “The Tale of the Merchant and the Ifrit,” includes some narrativity-affecting features which have the potential to inspire its narratee’s, Shahryar’s, emotional and cognitive responses, and hence facilitate his transportation into the storyworld. By capturing his interest with her art of storytelling, Scheherazade is able to avert the king’s heinous crime against herself.

Abstract Jianghu (rivers and lakes) refers to the imagined spatial arena in Chinese literature and culture that is parallel to, or sometimes in a tangential relationship with, mainstream society. Inhabited by merchants, craftsmen, beggars and vagabonds, and later bandits, outlaws and gangsters, the jianghu space constitutes an interesting “field” (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term) that produces alternative subjectivities in traditional Chinese culture. In most representations, jianghu is primarily a homosocial world of men, which honors masculine moral codes. By tracing changes of jianghu spaces over time, this paper attempts to set the spatial politics of masculinity in Chinese culture in a historical context. It unravels its dynamic interrelations with the tropes of class and nation, from the hosting of outlaws in the traditional masterpiece Shuihu zhuan (Water margin) to the resurgence of jianghu images and imaginaries as a symbol of Chineseness in post-socialist film and television. It argues that the widely referenced relationship between civil (wen) and martial (wu ) values in imperial China describes only gentry-class masculinities. By contrast, jianghu spaces lie at the margins of society and so invite an alternative conceptualization of lower-class masculinities. In contemporary China, jianghu has come to symbolize a new mode of Chinese masculinity in the global age. It can refer not only to fictional spaces in the martial arts genre, but also to social spaces that cement the “Chinese-style” relationships and networks needed for success in the reform market.

This essay identifies the theatre box where the novelist, Jane Austen (1775–1817), sat in 1814 to watch Edmund Kean in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Drury Lane Box Book enables calendar analysis of box occupancy with names, titles and, occasionally, addresses. Critical practice has tended to treat audiences as undifferentiated groups. Assemblage theory makes it possible to conceptualise individuals in audiences as equivalent to audiences in their entirety. Sitting in the same box as Austen was Lady Cecil Copley (1770–1819), the divorced 1st Marchioness of Abercorn. Amongst the other boxes were parties formed by wives of army and naval personnel and a British consul to Brazil. A few boxes away sat Jane Akers, née Ramsay (1772–1842), the wife of a St Kitts slave owner. Akers later claimed compensation under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. That weekend Austen had with her the manuscript of Mansfield Park (1814), a novel recognised as a critique of a fictional parkland estate sustained by slavery. Given the steep cultural differentials evident in this single box tier, it is argued theatrical performance, even in Kean’s re-evaluation of Shylock, may have been only tangential in altering the behaviour of that night’s audience.

This essay examines the kaleidoscopic and abridged perspectives on three early modern principalities (Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania), whose lands are now part of modern-day Romania. I examine travelogues and geography texts describing these Eastern European territories written by Marco Polo (1579), Abraham Ortelius (1601; 1608), Nicolas de Nicolay (1585), Johannes Boemus (1611), Pierre d’Avity (1615), Francisco Guicciardini (1595), George Abbot (1599), Uberto Foglietta (1600), William Biddulph (1609), Richard Hakluyt (1599-1600), Fynes Moryson (1617), and Sir Henry Blount (1636), published in England in the period 1579-1636. The essay also offers brief incursions into the representations of these geographic spaces in a number of Shakespearean plays, such as The Merchant of Venice and Othello, as well as in Pericles, Prince of Tyre by Shakespeare and Wilkins. I argue that these Eastern European locations configure an erratic spatiality that conflates ancient place names with early modern ones, as they reconstruct a space-time continuum that is neither real nor totally imaginary. These territories represent real-and-fictional locations, shaping an ever-changing world of spatial networks reconstructed out of fragments of cultural geographic and ethnographic data. The travel and geographic narratives are marked by a particular kind of literariness, suggesting dissension, confusion, and political uncertainty to the early modern English imagination.

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic of COVID- 19, Amitav Ghosh in his latest non-fiction text The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), traces the contemporary planetary crisis back to a historical event popularly known as the Dutch Massacre that occurred in 1621. This massacre resulted in the ruthless exploitation of humans and the natural world by Western imperialism. Ghosh observes that the Banda islands were rich sources of nutmegs and this is the reason why Bandalese was attacked by European settlers to own nutmeg plantations. Dutch officials viewed that there could be no trade without war. The remaining Bandalese who survived the massacre went towards the forests to hide and started living with the spirits of woods, animals, and nature. For Bandalese, nature, as Carolyn Merchant claims, was a mother. The trade and business that the European settlers started along with the genocide of Bandalese continued in different forms and prepared a ground for the ecological crisis. The current predicament is the outcome of a mechanical view of the world in which nature is viewed as a resource for humans to exploit for their purposes. Drawing on the concepts of ecological theorists, this paper claims that the entire relationship of humans to non-human kind such as rivers, mountains, woods, animals, and the spirits of land should be based on reciprocity, ethics, and egalitarian concepts. The transfer of nutmeg from the original islands to the economic centers reveals a wider colonial mindset that justifies the exploitation of the entire ecology, which continues to lead to geopolitics, and functions as a source of planetary crisis. As the paper is qualitative, the ecocritical perspective has been applied to the primary text to conclude that the environmental crisis, seen or unseen, is rooted in colonial practices and capitalism.

IN FEBRUARY 1788 EDMUND BURKE OPENED the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the East India Company's first Governor-General, for the crimes that his administration had committed in India with a four-day-long speech before the House of Lords, and London's fashionable society bought tickets as if attending theater. Referred to as ''the greatest public sensation of the seventeen-eighties, ''the impeachment brought more attention than any other contemporary event to the complicated relationships of the British nation-state and its young empire in India and, more broadly, of the principles of civil society and the early modern history of imperialism. Burke's Indian speeches constitute a much longer and more intense engagement with the fundamental question that he believed the French Revolution also posed: would the modern civil society that the late eighteenth century was clearly in the process of shaping subordinate the private interests of commerce to the public virtues of landed wealth, thereby preserving national progress, or would it subordinate property to the unchecked power of capitalism, thereby making the merchant's private ethic the basis of the nation's public life and precipitating national degeneration? While the Reflections on the Revolution in France claim that the civil self is the product of national traditions, Burke's speeches and writings on British India suggest that the civil self is in fact merely a performance that masks degeneracy. Indeed, Burke's performance in the impeachment, with its own exaggerated theatricality, represented the very basis of civil society, sympathy, in terms of a set of unmistakably legible signs. Burke assumed the role of a character easily recognizable to his fashionable audience, the male protagonist of sentimental fiction, unable to control his emotions in the face of women's suffering. His very theatricality suggested that the basis of civil society lies neither in reason nor in historical development, but rather in social mimicry, giving the lie to his own theory of civil progress.

Shakuntala is one of the most acclaimed women characters of Indian Literature. For the first time Shakuntala’s character originated in The Mahabharata. Since then she has been represented in various texts in various languages of India. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the representation of Shakuntala by the authors from ancient times to the present. For this purpose ancient work Abhijnana Shakuntalam by Kalidasa and the modern work Shakuntala: The Play of Memory by Namita Gokhale are studied. In Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam Shakuntala is the real daughter of Sage Vishvamitra and nymph Menka. However, she is adopted and brought up by Sage Kanva and his wife Gautmi. She is a rustic girl, brought up in a hermitage. With the progress of the play, she is married to King Dushyanta who forgets her because of a curse. Later, she was adopted by sage Kashyapa and his wife Aditi. She gives birth to a brave child Bharat and finally reunites with her husband. Shakuntala: The Play of Memory by Namita Gokhale was Published in 2005 and it is a challenging work of Indian English fiction. Like the remakes of films there may be re-invention and re-interpretation of old myths embodied in literary works. In her masterpiece Shakuntala, Namita Gokhale has portrayed the story of a woman named after the heroine of Kalidasa’s classic drama Abhijnana Shakuntalam. In contrast to her legendary namesake, she is bold, spirited and imaginative. Right from her childhood she is conscious of the discrimination towards female. In her marriage with a mahasamant, Srijan, she feels suffocated by social customs. Hungry for experience she deserts home to travel with a Greek horse merchant, Nearchus. Together they travel far and wide and surrender to unbridled pleasures. Shakuntala assumes the identity of Yaduri: the ‘fallen woman.’ But she forsakes this life as well to meet her salvation in her death at Kashi.

This article turns to the episode of the rescue of Peter I by a local peasant Antip Panov during a storm on the White Sea in June 1694 and covers its reflection in the historical memory of Russian society. This incident is confirmed by several written sources, the most valuable being the story of the Arkhangelsk merchant M.A. Mamonov retold by I.I. Golikov, which contains information about the conflict between the tsar and Panov. Until the mid-19th century, all Peter the Great’s biographers mentioned his rescue in a storm in 1694, but kept silent about the conflict. N.G. Ustryalov rejected I.I. Golikov’s information about Panov, who “boldly shouted at the terrible tsar”, considering it an “invention”. At the same time, a complex of historical legends about Panov had been formed, recorded by S.V. Maksimov in 1855. In fact, Antip Panov became one of the central figures in the historical memory of the Pomors about Peter I and his era. The 19th-century legends contain fictional details and migratory subjects. By the early 20th century, Panov had been viewed by society as both a real historical character and a folk hero. This happened because Panov was mentioned in written historical sources as well as in oral history, which after several generations was transformed into historical legends. These folk traditions have influenced regional historical descriptions as well as Russian historiography. Using the legend about the rescue of Peter I by Antip Panov as an example, the article concludes that collective historical memory is formed on the basis of oral history, which is eventually converted into historical legends, which, in turn, affect both regional historical descriptions and national historiography

Portuguese perceptions of nature in the new worlds they encountered in Southeast Asia from the turn of the sixteenth century were a complex amalgam of inherited frameworks and the forging of a new gaze or vision. Grand claims that the Portuguese discoveries amount to the “construction of space” and the “invention of humanity” have been trumpeted, but are too overblown. From another perspective, Portuguese scholars have recently engaged in a philosophical debate around experiencialismo—the distinction between “scientific experience” and the supposedly pre- or non-scientific “lived” experience of the senses (experiência vivencial), suggesting that the Portuguese Discoveries fall at a critical juncture between these two hermeneutic paradigms. But what did this amount to in concrete terms?I would prefer to turn to other scholars like the Belgian historian Albert Deman, who has stipulated that the perception of Indian nature in the European imaginary, was locked in three unchanging tropes that even first-hand experience could not easily undo. These tropes were exuberance, superabundance and luxury, and go right back to the first encounters between East and West in antiquity, notably Alexander the Great's adventures of the fourth century B.C., which impressed upon Westerners the East's “superior forms of life” and what Pliny, for example, dutifully acknowledged as “the wonder of the victorious expedition of Alexander the Great, when that part of the world was first revealed.” Why wonder, and what does Deman allude to when he writes of “superior forms of life”? The common impression was that everything grew more forcefully, and in greater profusion in the East. There were, for example, two flowerings a year of some plants; the colours and tastes were stronger; the smells were beguiling. What the Portuguese noted as “the fumos da India” merely drew on biblical reference in the Book of Proverbs to the “spicy breezes of the East”. From these basic conceptions had sprung compilations of all the fabulous stories of the East, texts such as those produced by Ktesias the Knidian and Megasthenes whose ideas were passed down through Pliny into the genre of the marvellous, or mirabilia, fanciful speculations and fables developed along the lines of half-truths reported by returning merchants and travellers, and sometimes fictions spread by Arab middlemen keen to retain their long-standing monopoly of purveyance to Christian consumers.

The diverse fields of business, management and marketing have long explored the concept of the ‘prosumer’ – the producer-consumer who not only consumes those products produced by industry, but also has some hand in their creation. But while the term itself is often credited to futurist Alvin Toffler , the concept he describes (and that which Ritzer et al. adapt) is a central concern of science fiction, which has much to offer our understanding of modern-day prosumption and is not limited by the language and limitations of purely scientific academic discourse. Indeed, one of the most important voices in this area is author and editor Frederik Pohl, with his co-authored novel The Space Merchants and short stories including ‘The Midas Plague’ and ‘The Man Who Ate the World’. In each of these works, Pohl seeks to satirise the mindless robot-like behaviour of human beings, while also posing a word of warning for the social, economic and ecological impact mass-prosumption. This is a particularly relevant message given the rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’ – the real world manifestation of the dystopias that Pohl and his contemporaries describe. In this paper, I argue that science fiction isn’t just a useful tool for social theorists, but rather, a vital resource, as it provides a speculative framework through which to interrogate the potential impacts and implications of new technology, and the links between production and consumption, technology and work. Furthermore, it provides the means through which to imagine possible futures and the lasting impacts of consumption that go beyond describing the world as it is, and move into the realms of what the world may become.

The Merchant of Venice includes two characters of color: one in the list of roles—the Prince of Morocco—and one unseen and mentioned only in passing during the action—the Moorish woman made pregnant by Lancelet. Of all the adaptations of Merchant in fiction and drama, Morocco appears in only two. Likewise, the pregnant Moor. Furthermore, Portia is seldom a significant character in these adaptations, even though she is the largest role in the play. This paper explores Portia’s portrayal in adaptation in relation to race and nation. It considers Grace Tiffany’s novel, The Turquoise Ring (2005), as a rare example of how Portia’s problematic relationship with race has been interrogated in fiction and argues that a lack of desire to confront Portia’s racism is a major contributory factor to her apparent “unadaptability.”

IntroductionOver three days in November 2017, 400 people gathered for a conference at the Sam’s Town Hotel and Gambling Hall in Las Vegas, Nevada. The majority of attendees were fiction authors but the conference program looked like no ordinary writer’s festival; there were no in-conversation interviews with celebrity authors, no panels on the politics of the book industry and no books launched or promoted. Instead, this was a gathering called 20Books2017, a self-publishing conference about the business of fiction ebooks and there was expertise in the room.Among those attending, 50 reportedly earned over $100,000 US per annum, with four said to be earning in excess of $1,000,000 US year. Yet none of these authors are household names. Their work is not adapted to film or television. Their books cannot be found on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores. For the most part, these authors go unrepresented by the publishing industry and literary agencies, and further to which, only a fraction have ever actively pursued traditional publishing. Instead, they write for and sell into a commercial fiction market dominated by a single retailer and publisher: online retailer Amazon.While the online ebook market can be dynamic and lucrative, it can also be chaotic. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—an industry almost stoically adherent to various gatekeeping processes: an influential agent-class, formalized education pathways, geographic demarcations of curatorial power (see Thompson)—the nascent ebook market is unmapped and still somewhat ungoverned. As will be discussed below, even the markets directly engineered by Amazon are subject to rapid change and upheaval. It can be a space with shifting boundaries and thus, for many in the traditional industry both Amazon and self-publishing come to represent a type of encroaching northern dread.In the eyes of the traditional industry, digital self-publishing certainly conforms to the barbarous north of European literary metaphor: Orwell’s ‘real ugliness of industrialism’ (94) governed by the abject lawlessness of David Peace’s Yorkshire noir (Fowler). But for adherents within the day-to-day of self-publishing, this unruly space also provides the frontiers and gold-rushes of American West mythology.What remains uncertain is the future of both the traditional and the self-publishing sectors and the degree to which they will eventually merge, overlap and/or co-exist. So-called ‘hybrid-authors’ (those self-publishing and involved in traditional publication) are becoming increasingly common—especially in genre fiction—but the disruption brought about by self-publishing and ebooks appears far from complete.To the contrary, the Amazon-led ebook iteration of this market is relatively new. While self-publishing and independent publishing have long histories as modes of production, Amazon launched both its Kindle e-reader device and its marketplace Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) a little over a decade ago. In the years subsequent, the integration of KDP within the Amazon retail environment dramatically altered the digital self-publishing landscape, effectively paving the way for competing platforms (Kobo, Nook, iBooks, GooglePlay) and today’s vibrant—and, at times, crassly commercial—self-published fiction communities.As a result, the self-publishing market has experienced rapid growth: self-publishers now collectively hold the largest share of fiction sales within Amazon’s ebook categories, as much as 35% of the total market (Howey). Contrary to popular belief they do not reside entirely at the bottom of Amazon’s expansive catalogue either: at the time of writing, 11 of Amazon’s Top 50 Bestsellers were self-published and the median estimated monthly revenue generated by these ‘indie’ books was $43,000 USD / month (per author) on the American site alone (KindleSpy).This international publishing market now proffers authors running the gamut of commercial uptake, from millionaire successes like romance writer H.M. Ward and thriller author Mark Dawson, through to the 19% of self-published authors who listed their annual royalty income as $0 per annum (Weinberg). Their overall market share remains small—as little as 1.8% of trade publishing in the US as a whole (McIlroy 4)—but the high end of this lucrative slice is particularly dynamic: science fiction author Michael Anderle (and 20Books2017 keynote) is on-track to become a seven-figure author in his second year of publishing (based on Amazon sales ranking data), thriller author Mark Dawson has sold over 300,000 copies of his self-published Milton series in 3 years (McGregor), and a slew of similar authors have recently attained New York Times and US Today bestseller status.To date, there is not a broad range of scholarship investigating the operational logics of self-published fiction. Timothy Laquintano’s recent Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (2016) is a notable exception, drawing self-publishing into historical debates surrounding intellectual property, the future of the book and digital abundance. The more empirical portions of Mass Authorship—taken from activity between 2011 to 2015—directly informs this research and his chapter on Amazon (Chapter 4) could be read as a more macro companion to my findings below; taken together and compared they illustrate just how fast-moving the market is. Nick Levey’s work on ‘post-press’ literature and its inherent risks (and discourses of cultural capitol) also informs my thesis here.In addition to which, there is scholarship centred on publishing more generally that also touches on self-published writers as a category of practitioner (see Baverstock and Steinitz, Haughland, Thomlinson and Bélanger). Most of this later work focuses almost entirely on the finished product, usually situating self-publishing as directly oppositional to traditional publishing, and thus subordinating it.In this paper, I hope to outline how the self-publishers I’ve observed have enacted various tactical approaches that specifically strive to tame their chaotic marketplace, and to indicate—through one case study (Amazon exclusivity)—a site of production and resistance where they have occasionally succeeded. Their approach is one that values information sharing and an open-source approach to book-selling and writing craft, ideologies drawn more from the tech / start-up world than commercial book industry described by Thompson (10). It is a space deeply informed by the virtual nature of its major platforms and as such, I argue its relation to the world of traditional publishing—and its representation within the traditional book industry—are tenuous, despite the central role of authorship and books.Making the Virtual Self-Publishing SceneWithin the study of popular music, the use of Barry Shank and Will Straw’s ‘scene’ concept has been an essential tool for uncovering and mapping independent/DIY creative practice. The term scene, defined by Straw as cultural space, is primarily interested in how cultural phenomena articulates or announces itself. A step beyond community, scene theorists are less concerned with examining an evolving history of practice (deemed essentialist) than they are concerned with focusing on the “making and remaking of alliances” as the crucial process whereby communal culture is formed, expressed and distributed (370).A scene’s spatial dimension—often categorized as local, translocal or virtual (see Bennett and Peterson)—demands attention be paid to hybridization, as a diversity of actors approach the same terrain from differing vantage points, with distinct motivations. As a research tool, scene can map action as the material existence of ideology. Thus, its particular usefulness is its ability to draw findings from diverse communities of practice.Drawing methodologies and approaches from Bourdieu’s field theory—a particularly resonant lens for examining cultural work—and de Certeau’s philosophies of space and circumstantial moves (“failed and successful attempts at redirection within a given terrain,” 375), scene focuses on articulation, the process whereby individual and communal activity becomes an observable or relatable or recordable phenomena.Within my previous work (see Bennett and Rogers, Rogers), I’ve used scene to map a variety of independent music-making practices and can see clear resemblances between independent music-making and the growing assemblage of writers within ebook self-publishing. The democratizing impulses espoused by self-publishers (the removal of gatekeepers as married to visions of a fiction/labour meritocracy) marry up quite neatly with the heady mix of separatism and entrepreneurialism inherent in Australian underground music.Self-publishers are typically older and typically more upfront about profit, but the communal interaction—the trade and gifting of support, resources and information—looks decidedly similar. Instead, the self-publishers appear different in one key regard: their scene-making is virtual in ways that far outstrip empirical examples drawn from popular music. 20Books2017 is only one of two conferences for this community thus far and represents one of the few occasions in which the community has met in any sort of organized way offline. For the most part, and in the day-to-day, self-publishing is a virtual scene.At present, the virtual space of self-published fiction is centralized around two digital platforms. Firstly, there is the online message board, of which two specific online destinations are key: the first is Kboards, a PHP-coded forum “devoted to all things Kindle” (Kboards) but including a huge author sub-board of self-published writers. The archive of this board amounts to almost two million posts spanning back to 2009. The second message board site is a collection of Facebook groups, of which the 10,000-strong membership of 20BooksTo50K is the most dominant; it is the originating home of 20Books2017.The other platform constituting the virtual scene of self-publishing is that of podcasting. While there are a number of high-profile static websites and blogs related to self-publishing (and an emerging community of vloggers), these pale in breadth and interaction when compared to podcasts such as The Creative Penn, The Self-Publishing Podcast, The Sell More Books Show, Rocking Self-Publishing (now defunct but archived) and The Self-Publishing Formula podcast. Statistical information on the distribution of these podcasts is unavailable but the circulation and online discussion of their content and the interrelation between the different shows and their hosts and guests all point to their currency within the scene.In short, if one is to learn about the business and craft production modes of self-publishing, one tends to discover and interact with one of these two platforms. The consensus best practice espoused on these boards and podcasts is the data set in which the remainder of this paper draws findings. I have spent the last two years embedded in these communities but for the purposes of this paper I will be drawing data exclusively from the public-facing Kboards, namely because it is the oldest, most established site, but also because all of the issues and discussion presented within this data have been cross-referenced across the different podcasts and boards. In fact, for a long period Kboards was so central to the scene that itself was often the topic of conversation elsewhere.Sticking in the Algorithm: The Best Practice of Fiction Self-PublishingSelf-publishing is a virtual scene because its “constellation of divergent interests and forces” (Shank, Preface, x) occur almost entirely online. This is not just a case of discussion, collaboration and discovery occurring online—as with the virtual layer of local and translocal music scenes—rather, the self-publishing community produces into the online space, almost exclusively. Its venues and distribution pathways are online and while its production mechanisms (writing) are still physical, there is an almost instantaneous and continuous interface with the online. These writers type and, increasingly dictate, their work into the virtual cloud, have it edited there (via in-text annotation) and from there the work is often designed, formatted, published, sold, marketed, reviewed and discussed online.In addition to which, a significant portion of these writers produce collaborative works, co-writing novels and co-editing them via cooperative apps. Teams of beta-readers (often fans) work on manuscripts pre-launch. Covers, blurbs, log lines, ad copy and novel openings are tested and reconfigured via crowd-sourced opinion. Seen here, the writing of the self-publishing scene is often explicitly commercial. But more to the fact, it never denies its direct co-relation with the mandates of online publishing. It is not traditional writing (it moves beyond authorship) and viewing these writers as emerging or unpublished or indeed, using the existing vernacular of literary writing practices, often fails to capture what it is they do.As the self-publishers write for the online space, Amazon forms a huge part of their thinking and working. The site sits at the heart of the practices under consideration here. Many of the authors drawn into this research are ‘wide’ in their online retail distribution, meaning they have books placed with Amazon’s online retail competitors. Yet the decision to go ‘wide’ or stay exclusive to Amazon — and the volume of discussion around this choice — is illustrative of how dominant the company remains in the scene. In fact, the example of Amazon exclusivity provides a valuable case-study.For self-publishers, Amazon exclusivity brings two stated and tangible benefits. The first relates to revenue diversification within Amazon, with exclusivity delivering an additional revenue stream in the form of Kindle Unlimited royalties. Kindle Unlimited (KU) is a subscription service for ebooks. Consumers pay a flat monthly fee ($13.99 AUD) for unlimited access to over a million Kindle titles. For a 300-page book, a full read-through of a novel under KU pays roughly the same royalty to authors as the sale of a $2.99 ebook, but only to Amazon-exclusive authors. If an exclusive book is particularly well suited to the KU audience, this can present authors with a very serious return.The second benefit of Amazon exclusivity is access to internal site merchandising; namely ‘Free Days’ where the book is given away (and can chart on the various ‘Top 100 Free’ leaderboards) and ‘Countdown Deals’ where a decreasing discount is staggered across a period (thus creating a type of scarcity).These two perks can prove particularly lucrative to individual authors. On Kboards, user Annie Jocoby (also writing as Rachel Sinclair) details her experiences with exclusivity:I have a legal thriller series that is all-in with KU [Kindle Unlimited], and I can honestly say that KU has been fantastic for visibility for that particular series. I put the books into KU in the first part of August, and I watched my rankings rise like crazy after I did that. They've stuck, too. If I weren't in KU, I doubt that they would still be sticking as well as they have. (anniejocoby)This is fairly typical of the positive responses to exclusivity, yet it incorporates a number of the more opaque benefits entangled with going exclusive to Amazon.First, there is ‘visibility.’ In self-publishing terms, ‘visibility’ refers almost exclusively to chart positions within Amazon. The myriad of charts — and how they function — is beyond the scope of this paper but they absolutely indicate — often dictate — the discoverability of a book online. These charts are the ‘front windows’ of Amazon, to use an analogy to brick-and-mortar bookstores. Books that chart well are actively being bought by customers and they are very often those benefiting from Amazon’s powerful recommendation algorithm, something that expands beyond the site into the company’s expansive customer email list. This brings us to the second point Jocoby mentions, the ‘sticking’ within the charts.There is a widely held belief that once a good book (read: free of errors, broadly entertaining, on genre) finds its way into the Amazon recommendation algorithm, it can remain there for long periods of time leading to a building success as sales beget sales, further boosting the book’s chart performance and reviews. There is also the belief among some authors that Kindle Unlimited books are actively favoured by this algorithm. The high-selling Amanda M. Lee noted a direct correlation:Rank is affected when people borrow your book [under KU]. Page reads don't play into it all. (Amanda M. Lee)Within the same thread, USA Today bestseller Annie Bellet elaborated:We tested this a bunch when KU 2.0 hit. A page read does zip for rank. A borrow, even with no pages read, is what prompts the rank change. Borrows are weighted exactly like sales from what we could tell, it doesn't matter if nobody opens the book ever. All borrows now are ghost borrows, of course, since we can't see them anymore, so it might look like pages are coming in and your rank is changing, but what is probably happening is someone borrowed your book around the same time, causing the rank jump. (Annie B)Whether this advantage is built into the algorithm in a (likely) attempt to favour exclusive authors, or by nature of KU books presenting at a lower price point, is unknown but there is anecdotal evidence that once a KU book gains traction, it can ‘stick’ within the charts for longer periods of time compared to non-exclusive titles.At the entrepreneurial end of the fiction self-publishing scene, Amazon is positioned at the very centre. To go wide—to follow vectors through the scene adjacent to Amazon — is to go around the commercial centre and its profits. Yet no one in this community remains unaffected by the strategic position of this site and the market it has either created or captured. Amazon’s institutional practices can be adopted by competitors (Kobo Plus is a version of KU) and the multitude of tactics authors use to promote their work all, in one shape or another, lead back to ‘circumstantial moves’ learned from Amazon or services that are aimed at promoting work sold there. Further to which, the sense of instability and risk engendered by such a dominant market player is felt everywhere.Some Closing Ideas on the Ideology of Self-PublishingSelf-publishing fiction remains tactical in the de Certeau sense of the term. It is responsive and ever-shifting, with a touch of communal complicity and what he calls la perruque (‘the wig’), a shorthand for resistance that presents itself as submission (25). The entrepreneurialism of self-published fiction trades off this sense of the tactical.Within the scene, Amazon bestseller charts aren’t as much markers of prestige as systems to be hacked. The choice between ‘wide’ and exclusive is only ever short-term; it is carefully scrutinised and the trade-offs and opportunities are monitored week-to-week and debated constantly online. Over time, the self-publishing scene has become expert at decoding Amazon’s monolithic Terms of Service, ever eager to find both advantage and risk as they attempt to lever the affordances of digital publishing against their own desire for profit and expression.This sense of mischief and slippage forms a big part of what self-publishing is. In contrast to traditional publishing—with its long lead times and physical real estate—self-publishing can’t help but appear fragile, wild and coarse. There is no other comparison possible.To survive in self-publishing is to survive outside the established book industry and to thrive within a new and far more uncertain market/space, one almost entirely without a mapped topology. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—very much a legacy, a “relatively stable” population group (Straw 373)—self-publishing cannot escape its otherness, not in the short term. Both its spatial coordinates and its pathways remain too fast-evolving in comparison to the referent of traditional publishing. In the short-to-medium term, I imagine it will remain at some cultural remove from traditional publishing, be it perceived as a threatening northern force or a speculative west.To see self-publishing in the present, I encourage scholars to step away from traditional publishing industry protocols and frameworks, to strive to see this new arena as the self-published authors themselves understand it (what Muggleton has referred to a “indigenous meaning” 13).Straw and Shank’s scene concept provides one possible conceptual framework for this shift in understanding as scene’s reliance on spatial considerations harbours an often underemphazised asset: it is a theory of orientation. At heart, it draws as much from de Certeau as Bourdieu and as such, the scene presented in this work is never complete or fixed. It is de Certeau’s city “shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” (93). These scenes—be they musicians or authors—are only ever glimpsed and from a vantage point of close proximity. In short, it is one way out of the essentialisms that currently shroud self-published fiction as a craft, business and community of authors. The cultural space of self-publishing, to return Straw’s scene definition, is one that mirrors its own porous, online infrastructure, its own predominance in virtuality. Its pathways are coded together inside fast-moving media companies and these pathways are increasingly entwined within algorithmic processes of curation that promise meritocratization and disintermediation yet delivery systems that can be learned and manipulated.The agility to publish within these systems is the true skill-set required to self-publish fiction online. It traverses specific platforms and short-term eras. It is the core attribute of success in the scene. Everything else is secondary, including the content of the books produced. It is not the case that these books are of lesser literary quality or that their ever-growing abundance is threatening—this is the counter-argument so often presented by the traditional book industry—but more so that without entrepreneurial agility, the quality of the ebook goes undetermined as it sinks lower and lower into a distribution system that is so open it appears endless.ReferencesAmanda M. Lee. “Re: KU Page Reads and Rank.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,232945.msg3245005.html#msg3245005>.Annie B [Annie Bellet]. “Re: KU Page Reads and Rank.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,232945.msg3245068.html#msg3245068>.Anniejocoby [Annie Jocoby]. “Re: Tell Me Why You're WIDE or KU ONLY.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,242514.msg3558176.html#msg3558176>.Baverstock, Alison, and Jackie Steinitz. “Why Are the Self-Publishers?” Learned Publishing 26 (2013): 211-223.Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson, eds. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.———, and Ian Rogers. Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge, 1984.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.Haugland, Ann. “Opening the Gates: Print On-Demand Publishing as Cultural Production” Publishing Research Quarterly 22.3 (2006): 3-16.Howey, Hugh. “October 2016 Author Earnings Report: A Turning of the Tide.” Author Earnings. 12 Oct. 2016 <http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2016/>.Kboards. About Kboards.com. 2017. 4 Oct. 2017 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,242026.0.html>.KindleSpy. 2017. Chrome plug-in.Laquintano, Timothy. Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing. 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Chan, Arlene. Righting Canada’s Wrongs: The Chinese Head Tax and Anti-Chinese Immigration Policies in the Twentieth Century. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 2014. Print.This is a non-fiction book about the history of Chinese immigration and settlement in Canada. It takes the reader through a very long historical period that starts from the time the Chinese first stepped foot in Canada in the eighteenth century, through struggling under racial discrimination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to attaining redress and public apology as captured in the title “Righting Canada’s Wrongs”.The title suggests a very serious topic that may not appeal to some readers looking to read for pleasure. However, this is an excellent resource for students doing a school or family genealogy project, or for those with an inquisitive mind. Once the book is opened, the photographs will definitely catch the attention and spark the interest of the reader. The author has skillfully used over 200 rare archival and modern day photographs and real-life audio accounts to make this book into an educational and thought-provoking audio-visual historical document. The only drawback is that the reader has to go back and forth between reading the book and going online to listen to the audio. While the book gives a good account of Chinese Canadian history, it missed the struggles and successes of the Prairie Chinese whose experiences are well-captured in the rich collection of rare archival materials housed in the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library of the University of Alberta, the Glenbow Museum, and the Edmonton Archives.The first chapter introduces the reader to the story by providing a brief historical background. Young readers may not be familiar with the two Opium Wars, British Columbia joining the Canadian Confederation, the First and Second World Wars, and the Chinese head tax redress campaign. Therefore, it will be very helpful if these events can all be put into historical perspectives by specifying the year of occurrence. The back of the book contains valuable references, such as: a “Timeline” diagram, a Glossary, a list of suggested reading, a list of visual credits, and an index to aid the readers. The “Timeline” diagram effectively chronicles significant historical events relevant to the story being told. However, it is inaccurate to say that Hong Kong becomes a British Colony in 1898. Hong Kong is a general name to mean the Island of Hong Kong and its surrounding islets, the Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories. Historically, Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in 1842, the Kowloon Peninsula ceded in 1860, and the New Territories leased for 99 years from 1898 to 1997. A similar inaccuracy is in the caption for a photograph on page 52 taken in Kowloon. At that point in history, it was a British Colony and not a part of China. This book is more suitable for young readers of grade five and above. They will get more out of reading this book if they are guided by parents or teachers who can help them better understand and appreciate the complex issues and historical occurrences. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Helen Kwan Yee CheungHelen Kwan Yee Cheung has a B.Soc.Sc. from the University of Hong Kong and an MA from the University of Alberta. She has a diverse background of business, social work, psychology, personnel, and intergovernmental relations, having worked in the provincial and federal public service for twenty-five years. She has curated an exhibition “Painted Faces on the Prairies” for the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library of the University of Alberta in 2014 and currently working on a second project about Chinese merchants in the Canadian West as the Library’s guest curator.

Rhodes, Morgan. Falling Kingdoms. New York: Penguin Group, 2012. Print.This young adult fantasy novel tells the story of three different fictional kingdoms: the prosperous Auranos, the impoverished Paelsia, and the oppressed Limeros. The book opens with a short prologue where two witches steal a baby girl, who is prophesied to become a powerful sorceress.Sixteen years later, the story continues with Princess Cleo of Auranos, who is out with some friends and Lord Aron, whom she hates but may one day be her betrothed. They visit a wine merchant in Paelsia, as the country is known for its wonderful wine. After tasting a sample, Aron uses his position to bully the wine merchant into letting him buy many cases of wine for only a fraction of their cost. When the merchant’s two sons, Tomas and Jonas, interrupt the trade, they become insulted and start a fight with Aron, who pulls a dagger and kills Tomas. The incident serves as a catalyst for war between all three kingdoms.The novel follows four different storylines. One is the story of Princess Cleo, who feels incredibly guilty about the death of Tomas. She discovers love and loss, and is kidnapped by the neighbouring kingdoms, who wish to use her to make the King of Auranos give up his realm. Another major storyline is that of Jonas, who seeks revenge for his brother’s death. He aligns himself with the Chief of Paelsia, and helps instigate a rebellion with the help of the Kingdom of Limeros, in order to conquer Auranos. The last two storylines deal with the royalty of Limeros. Prince Magnus, who grew up under the abuse of his tyrannical father, struggles to live up to the king’s expectation as heir, and also to protect his younger sister Lucia. Even more torturous for Magnus are his strong, romantic feelings towards Lucia. The last storyline is that of Lucia, who is in fact the baby stolen years ago, raised as a princess in Limeros. At age sixteen, her powers manifest, and she learns to control them, and she seeks to protect her brother at all costs. Her father wishes to use her powers to his advantage during the war on Auranos. All four of these stories converge by the end of the book.Falling Kingdoms takes a serious look at politics, and the effects of economic discrepancy between social classes. The book ends on a cliffhanger. It is the first in a series, the second of which is called Rebel Spring. This series explores not only the repercussions of the war between kingdoms, but the place of magic in this fictional world.As the book alternates between the four different viewpoints, and each of these viewpoints engage multiple characters, the story is complex, and might be hard for some to follow. The novel also deals with heavy themes, including war, revenge, death, incest, abuse, and sex.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Colette LeungColette Leung is a graduate student at the University of Alberta, working in the fields of Library and Information science and Humanities Computing who loves reading, cats, and tea. Her research interests focus around how digital tools can be used to explore fields such as literature, language, and history in new and innovative ways.

This article explores the idea of movement, namely oscillation, in Tashan Mehta’s The Liar’s Weave (2017). I trace this idea through an oscillation of locations (as “real” and “unreal”), of language (as familiar terms and as invented terms), and of free will (against a fixed destiny). Specifically, I explore how Zahan Merchant, the novel’s protagonist, is intricately engaged with all three manifestations of oscillation. With his unique ability to verbally lie new realities into existence, Zahan is able to move between the real and unreal, the known and the unknown, as well as act as an agent of free will within a system that precludes such agency. There is an overarching interest in the novel’s employment of the speculative genre — primarily articulated through Zahan’s ability to lie new realities into being and through the wild forest of Vidroha — although the focus of this article is not on arguing a specific case for the novel as speculative fiction. Instead, through a close reading of the text and with a focus on the idea of oscillation, I argue that the novel negotiates familiar as well as unfamiliar literary ground in relation to Indian writing in English and in turn, relates to the Indian post-millennial contemporary.