For decades, "That Evening Sun" has been repeatedly criticized, and the number of these criticisms is almost equal to that of Faulkner's representative longer novels like As I Lay Dying, The Sound of the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. In the long history of critical analysis, "That Evening Sun" has been discussed from various angles, but among countless approaches, Nancy's fear of being killed by her husband, Jesus, has become the main theme of many critics. The aim of this paper is to clarify the ambiguous nature of Nancy's fear and suggest an interpretation concerning the condition around her. To proceed with my interpretation, I will introduce one instructive paper on "That Evening Sun" by Seiji Sasaki, "Faulkner's Four Versions of 'That Evening Sun' -Focusing on Nancy's Fear" in African American Literature and Its Related Works (Nanun-Do). Sasaki's paper shows that Nancy's fear is that Jesus will attempt an abortion on her and she might die as a result, analyzing this short story's revisions and comparing some versions. His attention to the private attempt of abortion has given me an insight. In this paper, I will indicate another possible interpretation related to illegal abortion, drawing on historical studies on the subject and focusing on the years around 1900 (the time when 9-year-old Quentin witnesses a series of Nancy's eccentric behaviors). Keeping the abovementioned paper in mind, I will look into the possibility that Nancy attempts her own abortion by using illegal abortifacients. Several characters take her erratic behavior as the outcome of her heavy drinking of alcohol, but considering her condition, it is very natural that she should try some abortifacients or their substitutes to abort her own baby in a painless way before Jesus attempts the abortion by using a knife under his shirt or some other tool. At the time when abortion was illegal, black women who got pregnant against their will resorted to illegal drugs more frequently than white women, who could seek illegal abortion operations at least after they failed to get effective abortifacients. This reality of the times also supports the possibility of her attempting her abortion. Read in this light, episodes narrated by Quentin, other than the parts that directly refer to Nancy's doings and sayings, present the possible treatment of unwanted children, in other words, those whose parents attempted to abort but for some reason gave birth to. The descriptions of Jesus and Mr. Lovelady's daughter suggest that unwanted children are fostered out by their parents. If Nancy's baby is born, he or she might lead a life similar to Jesus and Mr. Lovelady's daughter, in short, might be taken to another place to live outside their parents' living quarters. Possibly Quentin's narration presents a child's fear of being fostered out by his or her parents. Considering these points, this paper suggests the possibility that "That Evening Sun" can be read as a story narrating a child's first fearful recognition that some parents secretly but willingly abort or foster out their unwanted children.

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Criticizing capitalism was one of Philip K. Dick's postmodern themes throughout his career. This brief paper aims to clarify how he embodies the dystopian contour of capitalism through disillusioning the complicated hallucinatory worlds in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (hereafter TSPE). The enigmatic plot of TSPE develops in modernity. Palmer Eldritch is attempting to deprive Leo Burelo of his interests in the enormous monopolistic enterprise that he runs. In a thoroughly stratified society, the characters act well in accordance with the logics and ethics of capitalism. The hallucinatory world induced by an illegal drug Can-D, sold by Leo, allows the "translated" users pleasure of consumption, which is certainly a utopia of capitalism that consists of a utopian vision of the better future. Another drug Chew-Z, supplied by Eldritch, seems to be anti-capitalistic as its illusion lets its users "reconstruct the past." However, Eldritch's ultimate goal is the profit from the illegal business. His scheme is rather deceitful and capitalistic in that he commercializes the anti-capitalism. These illusory effects cause epistemological complication. Can-D translates its users into a single personality, which makes the experience objective. However they are also aware that it is an illusion. The hallucinatory world is an objectively experienced reality as well as a realistic fiction. Chew-Z produces a more intricate situation since its illusion both intervenes in and correlates with the real world. The manifestation of Eldritch is particularly striking. When he appears in the real world, he overwrites the others with himself. Chew-Z wipes reality off the real world and simultaneously allows its illusion to be eroded by reality. These narrative frameworks indicate that Dick's focus lies in the disillusionment of utopian worlds. For the oppressed under the reign of capitalism, the most desperate moment occurs when they become aware that capitalism promises nothing but a utopia that will never be realized. The opposition of illusion and reality consists of another opposition of internal psyche and external body; though, as with the case of illusion and reality, these are certainly opposed and at the same time vaguely indistinguishable. One of the peaks of the narrative occurs when Barney Mayerson finds himself mutually translated with Eldritch and discovers there is another extraordinary creature inside Eldritch, since it does reveal that even the ruler of the illusory world embraces both the opposition and forcible unification of the internal and external. This complicated interweaving of illusion and reality blurs the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity. Cognitive reality turns into fantastic illusion and vice versa. This explains why most of the characters act deceptively as seen in the case of Mayerson, who needs to feign sickness in order to avoid being levied as colonist. Eldritch's mysterious personality is a synecdoche for the people living in a modern capitalistic society. The epistemological ambiguity is resonant with an analogy for an ontological quest for who they are. It is of much significance that the story begins with the epigraph of Bulero's speech, which chronologically should have come after the last chapter. TSPE starts and ends with his words. The plot proceeds toward the death of Eldritch, and the epigraph obviously indicates its realization. The killing of Eldritch by Bulero is certainly the end of the nightmare in some sense. But since Bulero forever remains a capitalist, the capitalistic society will last even after Eldritch dies. The extrication from the nightmarish world controlled by Eldritch ironically results in the prolongation of the capitalist regime. What Dick delineates in this complicated work is not simply a dystopian reality. Constructing a dystopia of everlasting disillusionment is the grand design of TSPE.

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Charlie Wales, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "Babylon Revisited," struggles with his past debts and moral troubles. During the economic bubble of the 1920s, Charlie and his wife led decadent, extravagant lifestyles. By the end of the decade, however, the bubble burst and their lives changed. The alcohol debilitated Charlie, and his wife passed away as a result of heart trouble. There are many things in Charlie's past that he must come to terms with. Although we see the different reasons for the difficulties Charlie faces in each stage of his reconciling process, the story continuously deals with the difficult relationship between the protagonist and his past problems. There are similarities between Fitzgerald's own life and the plot of "Babylon Revisited." In "Author's House," which was part of the trio of autobiographical pieces he wrote for Esquire, Fitzgerald reveals ambivalent feelings toward dead people; he both feared them and longed for them. Because of his strong relationships with the departed, Fitzgerald seemed to always feel their presence around him. Interestingly, the narrator of "Author's House" explains to us why he became a writer: his older sisters died before he was born, and this loss compelled him to become a novelist. These aspects of "Author's House" are clearly linked to Fitzgerald's own relationship with the dead and their influence upon him. This paper offers a new perspective on Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited" by identifying how the protagonist and Fitzgerald mourn the dead. Here, we can observe various similarities between the two. One similarity is that both have ambiguous feelings about the dead. Although they both need to mourn the dead, they cannot do so because they have no access to the departed. As "Author's House" shows, Fitzgerald knew he had to assume the task of mourning his sisters from his mother. However, he could not do so because when he took over the task, the sisters and mother were already dead. As a result, his mourning could not reach the dead and therefore had to be suspended. However, because Fitzgerald and Charlie Wales suspend the dead in an ambiguous state, the departed are never completely dead. As a result, the dead frequently burst into the world of the living and torment them. The protagonist's old friends-referred to as "ghosts out of the past" (622) - disturb his plans to restore his life. Moreover, his dead wife causes him to fail to get his daughter back. Living with the dead - this was the destiny of both Charlie and Fitzgerald himself.

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Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West has been highly evaluated as a counter-history of the borderland, or as an epic novel. A number of critics, however, have pointed out its lack of ethical substance due to its abundant descriptions of violence, blood, and death. This essay examines the thematics of violence, and reinterprets BM as a work of fiction that explores the whereabouts and possibility of ethics in the postmodern and in the posthuman. The kid's characterization as a mother-killer is associated with the violence of American historiography, reflecting the rhetoric of America's expansion as biological development. It, in turn, defies the conventions of the Western-Bildungsroman genre: the building of American character through frontier experiences. Thus, BM foregrounds ontological problems of human existence and free will in the apocalyptic borderland. The desert in BM functions as a topos in which the judge practices his hyper-rational, hyper-nihilistic violence, which relativizes every system of values to the single purpose of life: "war," that is, "the truest form of divination." The kid, the judge's biggest rival, rejects being a subject of the "war," and, as a result, is cannibalized by the judge himself (not as a sacrifice for the common good or belief). His death, however, is presented as the unrepresentable, which demonstrates that this death itself is not usurped by the judge, who attempts to be the suzerain of the earth. The biggest dilemma the story presents is the kid's rejection of opportunities to kill the judge by exercising his own violent nature. This, paradoxically, leads to the possibility of a counter-ethics that continues to reject the judge's philosophy of violence. The counter-ethics (in the posthuman), in this sense, might be represented as one always already in a germinal stage, as shown in the epilogue.

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Spenser narrates Arthur's story in The Faerie Queene, but unlike the contemporary standardized tragic version, it is a happy variant, focusing on Arthur's quest for his beloved Faerie Queene. He will surely find her when the promised "just time" fulfills; however, he is still on his way even in the final reference to his quest in Book VI. As the story goes on, a similar pattern of Arthur's diversion from and resumption of the quest recurrently appears, and the passage of time comes to be felt more and more faintly. Accordingly, readers feel that Arthur's quest is slow in progress, though it is still halfway through Spenser's original plan. The slow progress makes it unpredictable when "the just time" expires, increasing the reader's anxiety in the foretold catastrophic war between Gloriana and the "Paynim king" (The Faerie Queene, hereafter omitted in parentheses, I.xi.7.4). This war can signify an apocalyptic war between the Christian British and the Antichrist's camp. The 39 Articles (1562) allowed the Queen to "restraine with the ciuill sword, the stubborne and euyll doers" (Article 37). Mercilla's "sword" (V.ix.30.6) and Gloriana's "soueraine powre" (II.ii.40.4) foreground this prerogative of the Queen. The prayer for Gloriana's long reign (II.x.76.9) stands for the desperate contemporary wish that the "halcyon days" under Elizabeth's reign could be maintained long. In The Faerie Queene the prayer is granted as long as Arthur is travelling, for, at least until they do meet, Gloriana rules, and hinders the breaking out of the catastrophic war in Faerylond, that is, Britain, represented allegorically. The poet intentionally prolongs the happy variant of Arthur's story. His slow progress is a metaphor of the contemporary apocalyptic anxiety characterized by mixed fear and hope, which was felt ever more intensely with the aging of the Virgin Queen. The advent of the "just time" is ever protracted in The Faerie Queene.

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Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (hereafter Elegy) has been labeled one of the most distinguished examples of the poetry of the graveyard-school. Gray, however, in the process of revising the Elegy, removed the word "night" from his early draft of "Stanzas," thereby expanding the limitations of the graveyard trope. This paper explores the effect of this obliteration of "night" by discussing two aspects of the Elegy: first, the connotations of the grave, and second, the elegy as a poetic genre. "A Night-Piece on Death," composed by Thomas Parnell, is considered the font of the graveyard school. In it, the grave and night are the locus of the poet's meditations; this ethos is completely characteristic of the school. While Parnell's graveyard in the night evokes the ethical principle of memento mori, Gray's vividly epitomizes the "memory" of the dead. During the projection of the memory from the inscribed epitaph on the gravestone, the interlocutor to whom the Elegy is addressed changes: while the initial stanzas of the poem address the unknown rural dead, the latter ones are aimed at the poet himself. This abrupt shift in the addressee caused by Gray's revision - more precisely his obliteration of the night - alters the conventional aesthetics of the school. There is a transition from moral and theological meditation on the solitude of the graveyard at night to sentimental meditation on the poet's own epitaph, which will be read by passers-by. Gray's revision, remodeling an elegy into an epitaph, succeeds in depicting the elegist's imagined natural scenery as educed from his self-reflective vision. The epitaph, located within Gray's poetic landscape, can be regarded as a monument to the poet and to his development of a new elegiac mode.

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The garden connects man and nature, family and friends, different classes and different climates. Coleridge's garden at Nether Stowey was a space for cultivating friendship. John Claudius Loudon claimed that gardening practice would "[bring] the rich more into contact with the poor." David Lester Richardson hoped the taste for flower-gardens would be shared between his "brother exiles" and "Native friends" in Calcutta. Wordsworth's gardens connected a far wider range of people, disseminating his ideas and sensibilities among the visitors and cultivating the taste for his poetry. Rydal Mount Garden became a hub of intellectual community, attracting men and women of letters. It also attracted literary tourists, including foreigners (especially Americans) and working classes; while more than 400 neighbours, including children, were invited there to celebrate the poet's 74th birthday. Rydal Mount garden was in a way an egalitarian or "pantisocratic" space, where one could observe a kind of "levelling" inclusivity. After Wordsworth's death, the garden continued to ensure the spiritual bond between the deceased poet and his admirers, and Dove Cottage garden further extended the poet-reader community towards the turn of the century. In 1925 when a Japanese Wordsworthian Ichinosuke Takagi visited Dove Cottage, he felt a shared sensibility in finding striking similarities between the garden there and those in Japan. That Takagi found in the poet's garden not "Englishness" but something that appeals to Japanese sensibilities probably reflects how Wordsworth's poetry had by then obtained global appeal. This essay considers how Wordsworth's gardens mediated between the poet and his readers across temporal, social and cultural differences, building an actual and imaginary literary community, and building his world-wide reputation.

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This paper examines the intertextual relationship between Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998) and Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). In particular, it focuses on how Cunningham queers the notion of motherhood by rewriting Mrs. Dalloway against the grain of the heteronormative notions of reproductivity. As a gay writer, Cunningham challenges the orthodox notion of motherhood as a privilege and/or obligation of heterosexual women. In addition, by depicting queer mothers, Cunningham redefines his own relationship with his literary mother, Virginia Woolf. He resurrects the myth of the Great Mother to subvert its influence. The paper concludes that queer mothers in The Hours represent Cunningham's desire to overcome the maternal discourse defined by sexuality and sex.

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