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ABSTRACTS Against Nuclear Violence and Termination Discourse: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Anti-Cold War Ceremony (pp. 5-13) ABSTRACT: Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko has potently addressed nuclear violence and termination discourse to fight against Cold War ideology. In her novel Ceremony, through solemn yet profound realism, Silko elaborates on how nuclear violence and the Cold War victimize Native Americans. The work probes into wartime trauma, reflects on environmental pollution, and reveals the homecoming dilemma Native American veterans are faced with. Encoding her humanistic concern between the lines, Silko contemplates through this novel the existential condition of human beings in a nuclear-shadowed contemporary world. Keywords: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Cold War, nuclear violence, termination discourse Author: Li Xuemei <[email protected]> is a Ph.D. candidate at Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China (200083) and an associate professor at School of English Studies, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, Dalian, China (116044). She specializes in American literature. An Ethical Reading of Identity Development in The Gravedigger’s Daughter (pp. 14-19) ABSTRACT: In light of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, this essay attempts at an ethical reading of identity development in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Gravedigger’s Daughter. In this novel, the protagonist Rebecca’s evolution, from a prisoner to a puppet and then to a self-made woman, forms a contrast to her father Jacob’s regressive change from a father/husband to a puppet and then to a prisoner. Their opposite transformations show that with its multilayered performance the development of ethical identity is a one-way path. The novel not only illustrates Plato’s theory, but also reveals the author’s idea that human beings are ethical beings. It is the ethical resolution of clashes of wills that determines the value of a human being as a subject in the world. Keywords: Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, ethical identity, Allegory of the Cave Author: Zhu Li <[email protected]> is an associate professor of English at College of Foreign Languages, Anhui Polytechnic University, Wuhu, China (241000), specializing in British and American literature. Staging the Cultural Other in Contemporary American Drama (pp. 20-26) ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the cultural diversity of contemporary American drama through the concept of the “other”. Focusing on dramatic representation of the otherness of ethnic minorities and vulnerable groups, it addresses hotly debated issues such as multiculturalism to probe into the possibility of dialogue, tolerance, and understanding among different cultures in the United States today. Through dramatic language and stage performance, it argues, contemporary American drama displays a spectrum of cultural otherness by voicing the concerns of various sub-cultural groups, thereby contributing to the shaping of American national consciousness. Keywords: contemporary American drama, multiculturalism, the other, stage performance Author: Wu Wenquan <[email protected]> is a professor of English at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Nantong, China (226019). His academic interest is in British and American drama. Identity and Representation: Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus (pp. 27-32) ABSTRACT: Art Spiegelman, an American Jewish cartoonist, writer, and the special Pulitzer Prize winner, in his masterpiece Maus skillfully applies the artistic technique of representation, using images of the cat, the mouse and the pig to represent respectively the German Nazis, the Jews and the ethnic Poles during the Second World War, reconstructing their identity and vividly depicting their characteristics. This essay explores how the author, by adopting the images of the animals, avoids the negative influences of the former Survivor identity and manages to redefine the identity of the Jews as well as the German Nazis and the ethnic Poles, so as to reveal the artistic and thought provoking features and values of Maus. Keywords: identity, representation, redefinition, Holocaust, survivor Author: Yan Shuying <[email protected]> is a lecturer at School of Foreign Studies, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China (100081). Her research interests are British and American literature and cross-cultural communication. The “Pulitzer Drama Formula” and Its Revelation (pp. 33-38) ABSTRACT: The evaluation criteria of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama have continuously been subjected to heated debates in the United States. When David Savran, a renowned scholar in American drama and two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, lectured in China in 2014, he described the “Pulitzer Drama Formula” as composed of three criteria, receptively concerning the play, the playwright and the evaluating mechanism. This paper tests Savran’s “Pulitzer Drama Formula” with contemporary American plays, reaching the conclusion that the Formula has functioned in the selection of Pulitzer Prize winners since 2000. This study also intends to shed some new light on the future of drama prizes in China. Keywords: Pulitzer Prize in Drama, Pulitzer Drama Formula, American drama since 2000 Author: Xu Shiyan <[email protected]> is an associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China (210097). She specializes in British and American literature and translation studies. Eating and Power in Angela Carter’s Novels (pp. 39-46) ABSTRACT: Angela Carter regards eating as a symbolic act that connotes patriarchal society’s power mechanism and its body politics inflicted on women. As a silent means of expression, therefore, eating signifies mostly in its symbolic rather than biological nature, with foods and drinks functioning as sites of power struggle. The present study investigates the working mechanism of gender and power in Carter’s novels through the prism of eating. By analyzing how Carter represents eating in relation to power in the different stages of her writing career, this paper traces the transformation of her feminist thought. Keywords: Angela Carter, eating, power Authors: Zheng Baiqing <[email protected]> is an associate professor at School of International Studies, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China (100029), specializing in British literature. Zhang Zhongzai <[email protected]> is a professor at School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China (100089), specializing in British literature and western literary theory. Iris Murdoch in the Context of Postmodern Narrative (pp. 47-54) ABSTRACT: As one of the most prominent contemporary British writers, Iris Murdoch is known for her experimental works. However, a close reading reveals that most of her experimental devices contain severe criticism or subversion of the contemporary literary trends. Seemingly, Murdoch’s literary ideal and moral philosophy are not quite in tune with her time. The interesting fact is that while she obviously questions the concepts of metafiction and other generalizing theories, there are quite a few devices in her works that may well be described as postmodern, such as playfulness, parody and irony. In many of her works there is a prevailing sense of unreliability of so-called facts, transient awareness of knowledge and illusive ultimate truth. Indeed, she is a vanguard of her time. Keywords: Iris Murdoch, postmodernism, narrative, ethics Author: Ma Huiqin <[email protected]> is an associate professor at School of International Studies, University of International Business and Economy, Beijing, China (100029), specializing in British and American literature. Trauma and Self-healing: Ted Hughes’s War Poems and Elegies (pp. 55-61) ABSTRACT: Ted Hughes, the late English poet laureate, has recently secured his place in the pantheon of healing poets. Critics rightly believe that Hughes wrote poetry to remedy social ailments and to heal his readers, but very little attention has been paid to the way that Hughes was attempting to relieve the pain from his own life through writing. He composed poems out of personal trauma and, by means of narrating the trauma, managed to cure himself. Thus he wrote war poems to overcome memories about the First and Second World Wars, and elegies to recover from his traumatic marriage and love. Hughes’s art of poetry therefore serves as a type of self-healing. Keywords: Ted Hughes, trauma, war poem, elegy, self-healing Author: Liu Guoqing <[email protected]> is a professor at School of Foreign Studies, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China (130024). His main research area is contemporary British literature and American literature. The Limit of Body Signification: A. S. Byatt and Contemporary Critical Discourses on Body (pp. 62-71) ABSTRACT: In much of her writing, A. S. Byatt has taken a cautious stand on the literary and political signification of body in contemporary critical discourse. In Babel Tower, she questions the language of violence in the Theatre of Cruelty which tramples on the dignity and inherent value of the human body. In “The Chinese Lobster”, she reveals the fatal consequences that a feminist obsession with the oppressed female body has inflicted upon women’s aesthetic imagination and self-perception. In “Raw Material”, she suggests an alternative for women to write themselves beyond écriture feminine, deriving both language and the writing subject from the body. Reflecting upon the extent to which body has been signified to