Gauhati University, Guwahati, India.
The present issue (vol. 4, no. 2) of the transcript: An e-Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies contains four articles and one book review. The subject-matters of the submissions range widely from a mid-20th-century canonical British literary text to the modern-day English interpretations of ancient fables, to postcolonial literatures in English, to an early-twenty-first-century British novel plus one review of a book on food cultures, a relatively non-literary subject. Radoje V. Šoškić’s article on “The Myth of Osiris in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the Inadequacy of Scientific Humanism” explores the author’s literary–cultural engagement with the Egyptian mythology and analyses the parallels drawn by him in the context of scientific humanism in the modern-day world. The interface between myth/fable and modern literature is found likewise in the article by Punitha Andrews & Dr. S.S. Thakur, entitled “Aesop’s The Fox and the Grapes: A Socio-Linguistic and Sociological Study of Its English Adaptations,” which draws attention to the sociological aspects of adaptation and the resultant transformations brought about in vocabulary, syntax, and narrative structures. Shaleen Kumar Singh’s article “Nature and Landscape in Derek Walcott’s Poetry” shifts attention to the Caribbean environment and explores the poet’s masterful representation of the region’s varied ecoscapes vis-à-vis the localised dynamics of nature–human interaction expressed through an analysis of his select poetical works. The fourth article, on “Terror Narratives in Contemporary Literature: Analyzing Complexity, Conflicting Ideas, Challenges, and Suggesting Future Directions in Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” by Soumaya Barki & Fatima Zahra Bessedik, adopts a transmodernist perspective for studying the interplay between the dominant neo-Orientalist and counter-narrative discourses in the context of the twenty-first-century situations of uncertainty, anxiety, trauma, and helplessness in the post-9/11 world. Finally, Gargee Gautam provides an interesting overview of the edited book on Food Cultures of India, published in 2024, which brings together a range of studied engagements and critical opinions on the varied disciplinary manifestations of Food Studies in the twenty-first century.
This issue marks the closure of my present assignment with the journal, as part of which I was engaged in guest-editing four issues through 2023 and 2024. Like the previous three issues, the authors this time were equally up to the task in terms of submitting well-researched articles and also responding with appreciable urgency and enthusiasm to the reviewers’ comments and observations. The anonymous reviewers too have done their best bit in enhancing the critical value of the submissions through their incisive feedback and constructive criticism. Due care has been taken, on the part of editors and reviewers alike, to ensure close adherence of the articles to the accepted standards of critical analysis and investigation. The authors deserve a special word of thanks for putting their best efforts in this direction. The CFP of the forthcoming issue (vol. 5, no. 1) is already out on the journal website https://thetranscript.in, along with the guidelines for the submission of articles and book reviews. Interested teachers and researchers may please go through the CFP and follow the given instructions carefully while making their submissions to the journal.
Bionote
Dr. Dhurjjati Sarma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, Gauhati University, Assam. His writings have been published under Orient BlackSwan, Springer Nature, Sahitya Akademi, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan, and in journals like Urdu Studies, GUINEIS Journal, Language and Language Teaching, Indian Literature, English Forum, Indica Today, Rupkatha Journal, Dibrugarh University Journal of English Studies (DUJES), Space and Culture India, and Margins: A Journal of Literature and Culture. He is presently working on a critical history of Assamese literature.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3808-0152
Open Access:
This article is distributed under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission.
For more information log on to https://thetranscript.in/
Conflict of Interest Declaration:
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest about the research, authorship, and publication of this article.
© Author