In the conceptual system of ethical literary criticism, the existence of all literatures relies on what is called a text; it includes oral literature, a term that largely refers to literature disseminated orally. Before its dissemination, however, the text of oral literature, which can be properly termed as “brain text,” is stored in the human brain. By brain text, what is referred to is the textual form used for storytelling before writing symbols were created and used to record information; it has continued to exist even after the creation of such symbols. Other types of texts exist apart from brain text, such as written and electronic text; but brain text, in particular, consists of brain concepts, which, depending on its different sources, can be divided into picture concepts and abstract concepts. Brain concepts are tools for thinking that derive from understanding and applying brain concepts; in this sense, brain text is the carrier of thought. Once brain concepts stop being made, it means thinking has been completed. Thinking produces thoughts that can be stored in the brain in the form of brain text, which determines thinking and behavioral patterns that not only communicate and disseminate information but also guide a person’s ideas, thoughts, judgments, choices, actions, and emotions. To some degree, brain text affects a person’s lifestyle and ethical behaviors. In fact, brain text can control people’s thoughts and actions and most importantly, determine who they are.

The art of irony and the philosophy of happiness are seamlessly intertwined in Emma, constituting a profound response to Enlightenment modernity. Within the framework of the “fugue of happiness,” Jane Austen engages in a philosophical inquiry into the nature, meaning, forms, and pathways to happiness through literary narrative, revealing the rupture between cognitive and ethical dimensions of happiness under the symptoms of modernity. Addressing this rupture, Austen transforms irony into a poetic device to deconstruct instrumental rationality, vividly illustrating the inherent connection between responsibility and happiness, thereby achieving an aesthetic revision of Enlightenment value systems through narrative tension. Emma constructs a dialogic field with its high-frequency use of “happiness” lexemes and employs dual irony to dismantle the instrumental rationality-dominated notion of “earthly happiness.” The novel can be interpreted as a “reversed Cinderella story,” in which the ironic tone culminates in the moral imperative: humility is essential to attaining true happiness. In Austen’s era, the criteria for judging happiness lost their self-evident authority, and Emma reflects precisely this crisis of judgment.

Ethical Literary Criticism addresses important issues in literature by taking the literary text, which is a transformed and materialized version of the brain text, as the main object of criticism. The ethics of the literary text are shaped through the interplay of competing forces including the text, materialized from the author’s brain text, the ethical environment of the chronotope itself and the moral judgment of the reader. This article examines Alfred Tennyson’s patriotic war poetry to illustrate the formation pattern of the ethics of the literary text. Tennyson transformed his brain text and encoded his ethical stances on patriotism into the text of his war poems. Readers process and decode the ethical chronotopes of the text to make moral judgments and get moral enlightenment.

The AI-generated literature reconfigures numerous philosophical inquiries, related for example to authorship, subjectivity, the aesthetic experience of the text or the ethical perspectives of literature. This paper explores the convergence of literature and technology through the prism of 20th-century French poststructuralism and interrogates the ethical and aesthetic implications of AI-generated literature.

From Derrida’s grammatology to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic models of textuality, French thought has long questioned the centrality of the human subject in writing. These philosophical frameworks prove visionary today, as AI-generated texts further challenge the notion of the centrality of the author. If, as Derrida suggests, writing is always already inscribed within a system of différance from which the subject becomes absent in postmodernity, then the emergence of machine-generated literature may not mark a rupture but an intensification of the paradigmatic shift analyzed by post-structuralism.

From an ethical standpoint, this compels us to reassess the notion of responsibility and intention in the literary act: who is accountable for meaning, and what forms of agency are at play in literary texts devoid of lived experience? On the other hand, from an aesthetic point of view, these developments raise critical questions about originality, style, and the singularity of literary voice.

Positioning AI not merely as a tool but as a participant in the literary field, this paper interrogates AI-generated literature as a symptom of a broader de-centering of the human in the discursive order – a movement already anticipated by French post-structuralism.

Based upon the author’s recent article “War and Temporality: Walter Benjamin’s Redemptive Allegory and William Faulkner’s *A Fable*” (*Criticism* 2025), this presentation enlarges Benjamin’s Western examination of the creation of value in a world at war by understanding the dialectic of violence and redemption by comparing the Western worldview, shared by Faulkner and Benjamin, with the development of a cyclical dialectic of violence and redemption in Mo Yan’s Chinese novel *Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out*. Faulkner’s novel, focused on World War I in Europe, is a backwards looking account of violence and meaning in war-torn Europe. It presents itself as an elaborate allegory of Western redemption in the face of violence by tracing peace-loving soldiers, whose week-long behavior during World War I allegorically calls up Christ’s ministry and death. Such a narrative offers *retrospective* redemption as described by Benjamin in *The Origin of German Tragic Drama* and elsewhere throughout his work. In contrast to the retrospective redemption, Mo Yan pursues a *prospective* sense of redemption in *Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out* by tracing the various reincarnations of the novel’s protagonist, Ximen Nao, as a donkey, a cow, a pig, a dog, a monkey in turn, and finally in 2000 he is reborn as a baby with a very large head. These reincarnations allow Ximen Nao to grow more and more close to compassionate humanity, a condition he aspired to and partially achieved in his first lifetime before he was executed as an enemy of the people soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The clashing worldviews of Faulkner’s America and Mo Yan’s China is nicely achieved in both of these more-or-less historical novels and in their different narrative strategies. For Faulkner – as for Benjamin – history is swallowed up, so to speak, in allegory: allegorical meaning overwhelms historical facts. For Mo Yan, history is opened up in his multi-voice cyclical narrative – replete with mammalian and human voices – so that what is redeemed are not past events but future promises. This contrast gives rise to a sense of the ethics of fictional discourse: that is, the comparison of American and Chinese novels present two senses of ethics: that of a closed value-system and that of value as possibility.

Alan Ford is an Italian comic book series which has been published in newsstands since 1969. Its creators, writer Luciano Secchi (aka Bunker) and artist Roberto Raviola (aka Magnus), intended it to be a satire of James Bond, as its protagonists are a group of secret agents called "gruppo TNT" (TNT Group), operating from a third-rate flower shop in New York City. Though set in the United States, the comic quite evidently hints at the ills of Italian society, which may explain why it was not successful outside Italy (with the remarkable exception of Yugoslavia, where it became quite popular, being still published today in Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina).

Unlike Ian Fleming hero, who is equipped with hi-tech gadgets, drives luxury cars, and wears expensive designer clothes, Alan Ford, the main character of the series, is always short of cash, wears patched-up clothes and is definitely not a man of the world, even though he is modeled on a famous Irish actor, Peter O'Toole. All in all, he is an anti-hero, like the other members of the group, led by the cynical and dishonest Numero Uno (or Number One, a caricature of Bond's M).

This comic is a brilliant example of black satire, based on a successful cast of characters (also including two pets, Cirano, an Italian pointing dog, and Squitty, a hamster) and their interaction, which frequently entails cheating their colleagues, and featuring a collection of grotesque villains, which repeatedly appear in the stories. Alan Ford can be seen as mixing two different genres, inasmuch as it draws from the conventions of spy stories, but also adopts some of the protocols of superhero comics, such as recurring masked enemies like Superciuk or Il cospiratore. This allowed Magnus & Bunker to overturn the conventions associated to two modern embodiments of the hero, the secret agent and the masked vigilante (including their counterparts, i.e. supervillains), and subvert the traditional protocols of narratives that feature them.

This presentation traces the transpacific journey of Limin Chu, who would later be credited as the pioneer of American literature studies in Taiwan. Chu’s academic career started in the early Cold War. In 1958, he received his master’s degree in American literature from Duke University; in 1965, he obtained his doctorate in American literature from the same university. At Duke, Chu studied with Clarence Louis Frank Gohdes, a prominent scholar of American literature not only at Duke but also nationwide. After Chu completed his studies, he returned to Taiwan and assumed the chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University in 1966. Before long, in a series of curriculum reforms, Chu made “American Literature” into a required course. The changes brought by the reforms laid the foundation of Taiwan’s English studies for decades to come.

Notably, Chu’s studies at Duke were sponsored by the United States Information Service (USIS) and the Asia Foundation (TAF). This presentation highlights this aspect of the cultural Cold War while revealing other factors that might have affected Chu’s academic career and his devotion to the studies of American literature. These factors include the following: the cross-Taiwan Strait tension that prompted Chu to study abroad in the U.S., the U.S.-led cultural Cold War networks in East Asia that brought Chu to Duke, the racial segregation in the U.S. that might have influenced Chu’s research interests, and the ways in which Chu’s advisor, Gohdes, aspired to establish the status of American literature in the U.S. This presentation looks at these factors, illustrating the transpacific currents that allowed American literature to find a significant place in Taiwan.

In his introduction to Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada’s Cold War, Richard Cavell notes that “Considerable reticence prevails to this day in Canada about political aspects of cultural production generally, let alone with reference to an ‘event’ – the Cold War – which was fundamentally concerned with the politicization of the cultural life of the nation” (8). This apolitical conception of culture resonates in the way culture was used by Canadian authorities and elites during the Cold War as a way of controlling “national self-representation” (Cavell 7) with the overriding, if concealed, purpose of consolidating regulation of national security through social and creative control.

Consequently, Cold War Canadian culture became a statist project that sought to create narrowly proscribed discursive conditions for self-expression and self-monitoring that would allow English Canadians to see themselves as not-American, while at the same time as part of the broader anti-Communist Western security structure. The creation and consumption of national culture – or at least a narrow, Eurocentric menu of ‘high’ cultural forms – would allow the English Canadian subject to emerge as a part of a national whole, more easily controllable because grateful and proud of the culture produced by the ‘home team’, while also not feeling ‘colonized’ by American culture. Culture was thus aestheticized – an affair of affect, style, emotion, creativity, and entertainment, with the political sub-text repressed. In fact, the only culture for which the political was acknowledged was Soviet propaganda.

One effect of this insular, conservative statist cultural project was to render Canadian literature in East Asian contexts a niche subject. The Eurocentric, high culture biases of Canada’s Cold War cultural diplomacy meant that East Asia was not a priority, as such it was left largely to private or small-scale efforts by individuals with strong personal links to Asia. While the Canadian government did contribute to the establishment of a handful of Canadian literature scholarships and programs, ironically many of them were merged into North American or American-Canadian studies. Ultimately, Canada’s cultural development would be determined by Cold War geopolitical dynamics, a condition that has echoes in the present historical moment.

In Saito (2023), I focused on Stephen Spender and his criticism on Japanese atomic war poems during 1950's. A famous British poet and critic, Spender was editor-in-chief of Encounter, a magazine that was part of the Western Cold War cultural machinery. He read English translations of a few Japanese poems selected from Shinohai Shishu [The Ashes of Death Poems] (1954), a collection of poems edited and published to protest the American hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll. In 1957, Spender made a public lecture in Hiroshima city in which he criticized the journalistic tone of the occasional poems in Shinohai Shishu and he instead praised T. S. Eliot’s traditionalism in the third chapter of The Wasteland (1922) in which Eliot put together Edmund Spenser's gorgeous depiction of an Elizabethan wedding on the Thames side and his own depiction of the destituted intercourses between men and women on the bank of the same river in the early 20th century. Importantly, there have been some Japanese writers who tried to write back to Spender’s provocation. In this presentation, I would like to focus on Hiroko Takenishi’s novel, Kangen-sai [The Festival of Classical Court Music ] (1978). This novel depicts the changes in people and landscapes before and after the atomic bombing on Hiroshima from several different perspectives, but at the core of the work is a description of the Kangensai, the most elaborate festival held on the sacred island of Miyajima, commonly known as Itsukushima Shrine, located in far western side of Hiroshima prefecture; the ceremony was introduced by Heike warlord Taira-no-kiyomori in the 12th century. This work could be interpreted as a 20-year delayed response to Spender's traditionalism.

Even though the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CIA supported) affiliated periodicals in the West such as Encounter have been fairly well documented, CCF periodicals in Asia such as Jiyu (Japan), Sasanggye (South Korea), Free China (Taiwan), Solidarity (Philippines) and Horison (Indonesia) are waiting for further scholarly examinations. People working for these periodicals worked in close collaboration with each other. Hoki Ishihara (1924-2017) was the chief editor of Jiyu in Japan, and his Chronicle of the Intellectuals in postwar Japan (1984) is a rich record of the Cultural Cold War in Asia, as it records the activities of such renowned CCF-affiliated people as Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Sionil Jose, Chang Chun Ha. This presentation , after briefly summarizing Ishihara's (controversial) life and works, argues for the necessity of an Asian network of documenting and analyzing CCF affiliated periodicals in Asia, for the purpose of achieving a deeper understanding in literature and publication culture in Cultural Cold War in Asia.

Momoko Ishii (1907–2008) is widely recognized as a distinguished writer and translator of children's literature, including the Winnie-the-Pooh series. Following World War II, she played a crucial role in modernizing children's literature in Japan. She pioneered the establishment of Children’s Bunko (home libraries) to promote access to modern children's literature and cultivate reading habits among young readers. However, her work has not been sufficiently examined within the broader context of Cold War cultural dynamics.

This paper explores Ishii’s engagement with Cold War cultural networks by analyzing her efforts to institutionalize children's literature in postwar Japan. In 1952, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, she traveled across the United States to study library management, a trip facilitated by Japanese intellectual Shiho Sakanishi and numerous American librarians. Upon her return, Ishii co-founded the Home Library Research Group, which held regular meetings at the International House of Japan—an institution closely linked to the Rockefeller Foundation. Additionally, the group secured funding from the Asia Foundation to distribute basic book sets to newly established home libraries.

Through these initiatives, Ishii introduced innovative linguistic expressions for children’s literature, moving it away from its prewar function as a tool for moral instruction. Instead, she positioned children's books as a source of enjoyment in their own right. This shift aligned with the objectives of the Report of the United States Education Mission to Japan(1946, 1950), which sought to replace prewar moral education rooted in imperial ideology with postwar democratization efforts aimed at Japanese children. By situating Ishii’s contributions within these broader transnational frameworks, this study illuminates her role in shaping postwar Japanese children’s literature as part of Cold War cultural policy.

Tamizdat, or the practice of publishing banned works by Russian émigré or Soviet writers beyond the borders of the USSR, whether in the original form or translated into Western languages, has been identified as a significant phenomenon of the cultural Cold War. The dissemination of these literary works, particularly those that address contentious political or social issues, has been noted as a pivotal manifestation of the ideological and cultural tensions that characterized the geopolitical battle between the two superpowers and their allies in the late twentieth century. The most notable instance is Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, whose Italian translation was published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in Milan a year before the CIA-funded Russian original version was clandestinely provided to Soviet tourists at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The aim of this paper is to recontextualize the process of establishing Izdatel'stvo imeni Chekhova (the Chekhov Publishing House, CPH), a subsidiary of the East European Fund (formerly known as the Free Russia Fund) directed by George F. Kennan with the aid of the Ford Foundation, and its publishing venture in New York as an earlier example of tamizdat than the Zhivago affair. The CPH publications encompassed a broad spectrum of literary genres, ranging from fiction (novels, short stories, drama, and poetry) to non-fiction, from the classics of the 19th century like Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Tyutchev, or Nikolai Leskov, to the translations of the contemporary literary and political works by British and American authors, such as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918; Moya Antoniya, 1952) or Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (1948-53; Vtoraya Mirovaya Voyna, 1954). During the brief period spanning from 1952 to 1956, CPH released approximately 200 titles, including My (We, 1952), a novel by Evgeny Zamyatin first published in English by an American publisher in 1924, along with other unpublished texts by émigré writers whose works were no longer permissible for publication in the Soviet bloc due to their critical stance on the Kremlin. The CPH imprint and logo, which depict the Statue of Liberty emerging from a book, can be found in the bibliography of Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita (1955). A close examination of the publication history of three of Nabokov's Russian books — a novel, Dar (The Gift, 1952); an autobiography, Drugie berega (Other Shores, 1954); and a collection of short stories, Vesna v Fialte (Spring in Fialta, 1956) — illuminates his idiosyncratic position within the CPH's enterprise. This case study of Cold War publishing culture will demonstrate how geopolitical challenges played out in the search for a market for Russian émigré literature in the postwar American society.

British women’s narratives of their travels in Aisa are pivotal texts for understanding the complexities of colonial encounters in Asia and the formation of new world imagination from perspectives that come “from below”. Drawing on the scholarship of 20th century cosmopolitanism, this essay positions travelogues by Isabella Bird, Emily Kemp, and Dorothea Hosie as critical projects that navigate the tensions of imperialism and identity while challenging established racial and cultural ideologies about Aisa. Their narratives reflect a transformative vision of an ethical cosmopolitan community that emerges from the dynamic interactions between traveller and the travellee in the context of Asia’s colonial modernity. Their affective encounters with local populations not only transcend simplistic self/other binaries but also facilitate a humanizing dialogue that redefines traditional, imperialist, and often binary thinking. Engaging with contemporary scholarship on the conjunction of affect and decolonization in travel writing studies, this essay situates these women’s travellers’ genre-blending works within the broader context of the 20th century’s shifting world orders. By analysing the interplay between personal memory and collective histories, this essay illuminates how life writing and travel writing serve as vital sites for understanding the legacies of colonialism and the imaginative possibilities they present for rethinking identity and belonging in an already globalised world.

The paper aims to broaden our knowledge of physical encounters with India by investigating how representations of sound are intertwined with depictions of cultural others. In travel writing studies, visual impressions are often prioritised, despite the fact that sound and music are central to travellers’ experiences (Agnew 2012). This is evident when travellers encountered realities that were culturally and geographically foreign to them, as was the case with East-Central European travellers in Asia. Analysing efforts to reflect unfamiliar soundscapes in travel accounts give new insights into the nature of travel writing and intercultural encounters.

In the presentation, I will focus on travel accounts about India written in the period 1869-1914, when the opening of the Suez Canal allowed an increased number of travellers from East-Central Europe to visit India. In this period, we can talk about relatively fresh impressions. Drawing on Tim Youngs’ concept of sonic tenses – the production and detection of sounds linked with movements between time layers (Youngs 2020) – I will focus on “sonic intercultural encounters,” defined as descriptions of auditory experiences linked with cultural differences encountered by travellers.

Taking into account the importance of senses for imperial encounters (Rotter 2011) and a particular “in-between” position of Polish and Serbian travellers – who hailed from subjugated and relatively poor nations but in Asia often represented European empires and associated themselves with other Europeans (Huigen and Kołodziejczyk 2023) – scrutinising “sonic intercultural encounters” opens a new perspective on the cultural history of representations and theorising East-West encounters.

The primary sources comprise a collection of Serbian and Polish travel accounts written by Milorad Rajčević, Milan Jovanović, Božidar Karađorđević, and Adam Sierakowski, Karol Lanckoroński, Paweł Sapieha, Władysław Michał Zaleski, Ewa Dzieduszycka, Stanisław Bełza, Jadwiga Marcinowska. These sources are not available in English and so far have attracted little scholarly attention.

Quoted literature

Agnew, Vanessa. 2012. Hearing Things: Music and Sounds the Traveller Heard and Didn’t Hear on the Grand Tour. Cultural Studies Review 18 (3): 67–84.

Huigen, Siegfried, & Dorota Kołodziejczyk. 2023. East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Siegfried Huigen and Dorota Kołodziejczyk. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rotter, Andrew J. 2011. Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters. Diplomatic History 35 (1): 3–19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2010.00909.x.

Youngs, Tim. 2020. Hearing In Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (eds). The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, pp. 208–21. London - New York: Routledge.

This essay examines Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s narrative account of visits to Japan, Korea, and India in La vuelta al mundo de un novelista (The Trip around the World of a Novelist, 1923-24). It focuses not only on travel’s engagement with mobility and storytelling, but also with the cultural capital the traveler hopes to gain at home, and on the national stage. By referencing the colonial contexts on the Pacific and Blasco Ibáñez’s travels across East Asia, the essay aims at opening lines of interconnectivity, interdependency, and inter-relational flows to and from the Pacific on a more global scale. It contributes to the repositioning of Pacific discourses and their respective geopolitics while examining tropes of coloniality and uneven modernity that informs Blasco Ibáñez’s travel gaze. Coining the term “travel as technique” as a critical notion, it refers to the praxis of writing travel alongside history, a praxis through which Blasco Ibáñez documented global political turbulence of the 1920’s where he not only observed Korea under Japanese occupation but also visited India and Japan. Sparked by his visit and growing Hollywood fame, his novels were translated into Japanese and in 1924 alone two film adaptations of his work appeared in Japanese cinema.

Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (1970) disrupts traditional European depictions of Japan by resisting the imposition of coherence on its cultural forms. Barthes presents Japan as a fragmented semiotic landscape where meaning dissolves into suggestion—haiku, calligraphy, and the bento box function as signs that resist Western fixity (Demeulenaere, 2024). Rather than reflecting historical or ethnographic realities, Barthes’ portrayal constructs Japan as a space of absence, an intellectual counterpoint to Western meaning systems. By emptying Japan of assumed cultural legibility, Barthes challenges Orientalist binaries (Ikegami, 1991). However, his refusal to "fix" Japan risks rendering it a conceptual experiment detached from historical and cultural specificities.

In contrast, Ian Buruma’s A Japanese Mirror (1984) and Inventing Japan (2003) engage directly with Japan’s cultural and historical realities. Where Barthes dissolves Japan into signs, Buruma emphasizes Japan’s agency in shaping its identity, exploring how cultural symbols, media, and historical shifts mediate tensions between tradition and modernity. A Japanese Mirror examines how mythology, manga, cinema, and theater articulate social anxieties, while Inventing Japan traces Japan’s reinventions through the Meiji era, war, and occupation. By incorporating historical specificity and insider perspectives, Buruma avoids reductive generalizations, offering a more relational model of cross-cultural representation.

This paper argues that Barthes and Buruma represent distinct yet complementary modes of European textual engagement with Japan, marking a key moment in World Literature’s genealogy. Barthes dismantles the colonial impulse to "know" the Other by offering fragmentation and absence as tools to resist Western paradigms. However, the abstraction of Barthes’ Japan is counterbalanced by Buruma’s historically grounded narratives, which reflect Japan’s internal complexities. Together, they interrogate the possibilities and limitations of cross-cultural representation.

By juxtaposing Barthes’ semiotic approach with Buruma’s grounded narratives, this paper highlights shifting strategies of engagement in European travel writing. Barthes challenges traditional representations of Japan, opening space for alternative modes of encounter, while Buruma’s reflective approach balances critique with cultural nuance. These contrasting strategies reveal interpretive tensions between abstraction and specificity, reflecting a broader evolution toward more ethical modes of intercultural exchange. As European writers grapple with the partiality of cultural encounters, Barthes and Buruma exemplify the importance of embracing multiplicity and nuance in representing difference.

When a writer borrows some elements from a different language and culture, he not only uses those for his purpose but also appropriates and recontextualizes them to derive a new meaning. Appropriation and recontextualization of Eastern languages, cultures and religions by Western writers in the first half of the 20th century have been scarcely studied. Herman Hesse is one of those who borrowed several terms from the Sanskrit language, Indian history, and mythology in his texts. Going beyond the Orientalism of the 19th century, his textual encounter took inspiration from Buddhist and Indian religious philosophy and incorporated it in his thinking, critical towards Western / European Civilization. The ambiguity of Hesse’s position between European late colonialism and postcolonial debate avant la lettre visible in Aus Indien (1913) and above all in the short narrative Robert Agion (see Zilcosky 2014), inspired by his only trip to Southeast Asia, makes him an interesting case to be analyzed from a postcolonial theory approach. Engaging Ashcroft et al.’s model of appropriation (2002) and the concept of recontextualization, this study intends to analyze how Hesse has appropriated, recontextualized and even fictionalized Indian references in Siddhartha (1922), defined by the subtitle “Eine indische Dichtung” as ‘original’ Indian. It is important to note that several Sanskrit terms appear untranslated and glossed, suggesting that the narrative context preserves cultural immediacy and original meaning. Non-translation together with appropriation / recontextualization can be considered the nucleus of discursive strategies which are applied to articulate the creative persona of Siddhartha and his ‘original’ context. Strategies aim at inducing the intended European reader to individual mentality change. In this sense, this study considers the translations from German to English.

Japanese culture has long fascinated European intellectuals, sparking a literary tradition of travel narratives that have tried to convey to a Western audience the most notable aspects of this Eastern civilization. Often presented as an exotic and spiritual land for its rigid societal structure, religious practices, and refined aesthetic sensibilities, Japan finds a more nuanced and critical representation in contemporary travel literature. Modern Italian authors of the past century have been attracted by the coexistence of ancient traditions and cutting-edge technology and have gained a literary and artistic insight into the layered Japanese world.

This paper focuses on how Italian travel writing from the second half of the 20th century has depicted Japan and its culture. It investigates works by seminal writers and intellectuals such as Italo Calvino, Goffredo Parise and Antonio Tabucchi, and shows how these authors - who did not have any professional knowledge of the country -, grapple with their own cultural biases while interpreting Japanese culture. The interplay between Italian and Japanese identities, seen through the lens of literary travel writing, fosters a valuable understanding of cultural exchange and offers insights into the subtle relationship between East and West.

My proposed paper addresses the work of the Hungarian woman writer Rózsa G. Hajnóczy (1892-1944), the author of Bengáli tűz (Fire of Bengal, tr. Eva Wimer and David Grant; Bangladesh: University Press, 1993), whose travelogue describes her experiences in India in the early 1930s, when she accompanied her husband the Hungarian Orientalist Gyula Germanus on his visiting professorship in India on Rabrindranath Tagore’s invitation. Rather than a journal intime of personal emotional reflections, the book uses a medley of travelogue and personal memoir while attempting to disseminate knowledge about India, which was a subcontinent largely unknown to the Hungarian reader. Fire of Bengal uses the unique perspective of a European (but non- British) female social observer, witnessing the domestic detail of cooking, housekeeping whilst also offering acute observations on social mores and personal emotional economies. Situating the text within the economy of Anglophone women’s writing about India, the paper will offer comparisons and will point out differences, and will call for a more nuanced understanding of the European representations of India in the interwar period. The paper will also foreground the work of current East Central European scholarship in uncovering representations in lesser-known languages and cultures.

This presentation will focus on the Japanese manga Bungo Stray Dogs and speculate on the possibilities of pilgrimages to sacred places based on this work. This work is an action manga in which the great writers of modern Japan are transformed into characters and fight each other using their unique supernatural abilities. In addition to dozens of Japanese literary masters and intellectuals, including Osamu Dazai, Atsushi Nakajima, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Akiko Yosano, and Kenji Miyazawa, it is a grandiose action manga involving foreign literary greats such as Montgomery, Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, and Poe. The main setting is contemporary Yokohama, and the biographical facts and works of the writers are accepted and reconstructed in the shaping of the characters and their different abilities.

What can be sanctified in this work as content when the findings of literary studies and the history of literature and culture are irradiated on it?　What kind of pilgrimage maps can be drawn from these sacred sites? 　We will develop a model of a pilgrimage map based on at least the following three perspectives.

(1) Maps based on individual writers (ex. Aomori and Tokyo based on Osamu Dazai, Morioka based on Kenji Miyazawa, Kyoto, Tokyo, Paris based on Akiko Yosano, etc.)

(2) Maps centered on individual episodes (ex.Yokohama City, the setting of the film)

(3) Maps based on the network of writers (ex.Poe and Edogawa Rampo, etc.)

Through such analysis, we will build a theory centered on the original work of literature and biographies of literary figures in the process of revitalizing the original work as content for pilgrimages to sacred places. In other words, it is a theoretical construction from the perspective of how the findings of literary research can be (and ideally should be) incorporated into regional development, cultural preservation, and tourism studies based on content tourism. By doing so, we would like to raise a question for dialogue between the two different research fields of tourism studies and literature in order to collaboratively preserve cultural resources and create culture.

This presentation explores the fascinating intersection of Chinese detective fiction and transnational tourism, examining how novels written in Chinese can catalyze cross-border travel and contribute to tourism development. By analyzing popular Chinese detective series and their impact on international readership, I investigate the phenomenon of literary tourism evolving into a broader form of contents tourism.

The study delves into the global appeal of Chinese detective novels and their translation into multiple languages, revealing how these works create compelling literary landscapes and fictional geographies that inspire real-world exploration. I examine the development of tourism products and experiences based on detective novel settings and plots, demonstrating how narrative spaces become tangible destinations for international travelers.

Additionally, this research considers the literary techniques and narrative strategies employed in Chinese detective novels that resonate with diverse cultural audiences. By exploring themes such as justice, morality, and the interplay between tradition and modernity, I uncover how these works engage readers across borders, fostering a shared imaginative space that transcends linguistic and cultural divides.

This presentation examines the transmedia storytelling and transnational dissemination of Korean webtoons, focusing on their growing role in fostering content tourism and cultural exchange. As a globally popular form of digital comics, webtoons have not only captivated audiences worldwide but also inspired tourism by creating immersive fictional worlds that fans seek to experience in real life.

The study explores how the unique narrative and visual qualities of Korean webtoons make them particularly suited for adaptation into various media formats, including television dramas, films, and games. These transmedia expansions amplify the global reach of webtoons while establishing recognizable settings, characters, and themes that spark international interest in Korean culture and destinations. For instance, locations featured in webtoon-based adaptations often become tourism hotspots, drawing fans eager to connect with the stories they love.

Additionally, the research delves into the transnational spread of webtoons through global platforms and partnerships, highlighting how this medium transcends cultural and linguistic barriers. By examining case studies where webtoons have directly influenced tourism—such as themed tours, exhibitions, and fan-driven pilgrimages—I reveal how these digital narratives transform into tangible travel experiences. This phenomenon reflects the broader potential of webtoons to act as cultural ambassadors, promoting Korea as a desirable destination while enabling fans to engage with its culture on a deeper level.

The objective of this closed group session is to address two key "border-crossing" phenomena that characterize 21st-century literature in the context of the advancing information age and media diversification: “transmediality” (adaptation across media) and “transnationalism” (consumption and adaptation across national borders). The session aims to construct an analytical framework to explore how these phenomena give rise to new forms of tourism.

Specifically, the session will first review the existing frameworks of literary tourism research and their limitations. Following this, four scholars—two men and two women from both Korea and Japan, ensuring a balance in both nationality and gender—will examine the characteristics of recent literary works in terms of transmediality (e.g., adaptations into manga, anime, video games, TV dramas) and transnationality, through several concrete case studies.

The case studies to be discussed include: the new literary pilgrimage phenomenon inspired by the Japanese manga and anime Bungo Stray Dogs; the transnational development and tourism surrounding Chinese detective novels; the transmedia and transnational expansion of the Three Kingdoms as classical literature and its related tourism; and the transmedia and transnational spread of Korean webtoons.

The session will then analyze how such border-crossing phenomena are triggering interactive tourism experiences and clarify the characteristics of these interactions.

It will argue that traditional approaches to literary tourism studies are insufficient to fully capture these phenomena and that the framework of contents tourism, which has recently gained attention in tourism studies, offers a more effective analytical tool.

Through this session, we aim to demonstrate the potential for literature studies to transcend disciplinary boundaries and explore new applied research fields.

This presentation first outlines and introduces the fundamental theories of Contents Tourism, which have been increasingly discussed internationally since the 2010s. Subsequently, attention is directed to the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo Yanyi) to examine how the work has been adapted and received across various media formats within the East Asian region. Particular focus is placed on case studies in Japan, spanning from the Edo period to the present day. Specific media examined include novels, games, manga, puppet theater, and kabuki.

Additionally, the analysis considers how these adapted works have contributed to the formation of new Contents Tourism destinations, such as Kobe City, which has utilized Romance of the Three Kingdoms in local revitalization efforts due to its association with Mitsuteru Yokoyama, the manga adaptation’s author, and Iida City, which features a puppet museum dedicated to Kihachiro Kawamoto, who created puppets for NHK’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms puppet theater series.

Building on this exploration, a hypothetical content creation model is proposed to explain the mechanism by which literary adaptations generate Contents Tourism. This discussion aims to highlight the contributions of Contents Tourism theories to literary studies while also identifying potential challenges inherent in their application.

In a century that claims to have defeated distance, cultural distances are growing. More than a question of technology or cartography, bridging them requires an effort of the temporal imagination. Building on Pheng Cheah’s (2016: 8) understanding of worlding as a “process of temporalization,” this paper argues that biofiction, whose insight into the past is doubled by a capacity to straddle temporal regimes and play with narrative conventions, provides unique tools for a layered perception of the world in time, irreducible to a one-world narrative but also dislodged from solipsistic nationalist fantasies or methodologies. Parallel to what Wai Chee Dimock (2006: 163), called the “non-standard mapping” of space, biofiction offers a “non-standard mapping” of time, reflecting rich interiorities through poetic licence or artifice. My two examples, Anchee Min’s "Pearl of China" (2010), a biofiction of Sinophile Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, curiously “the only American author to make it into [Auerbach’s] Mimesis,” (de Graef 2015: 313), and Caryl Phillips’s "A View of the Empire at Sunset" (2018), a fictionalization of episodes from the life of Caribbean author Jean Rhys, each layer the temporalities and rhythms of two different cultures. Propelling each transnational narrative is the figure of the outsider female writer, whose rebellious response to being brought up in an alleged periphery and being instructed to aspire to an Anglophone centre unsettles the location of home and the meaning of exile. By staging Rhys’s return to her native Dominica in her mid-forties and Buck’s reconstruction of a Chinese garden on American soil as a consolation for not being allowed entry into Maoist China, the two novels unfold the promise of a feminine remapping of history, which departs from conventional biographical time and reintroduces the worlding temporality of storytelling, for which there is “no one way of comprehending truth” (Min 2010: 151). Though Phillips and Min share some aspects of their background with their protagonists, they are both aware of the contextual differences and of their subjects' biases (Phillips, in Tunca & Ledent 2020: 465, Min, in Lackey 2019: 146), which inform the artifices they use to represent the enmeshed cultural temporalities inhabited by the now canonized female outsiders. While Min's model is the Chinese parable with its plot twists, reshaping history as myth, Phillips opts for a more realist framing of flashbacks, inspired by Rhys's early novels, which he favours (Phillips, in Clingman 2017: 594). Though different, the two strategies converge in their resistance to a closed and univocal notion of history and in their ability to mold Life Writing into the protean forms of fiction, creating new possibilities for the cross-temporal mapping of cultures.

This paper examines the intersection between biofiction and the proletarian novel in Fernando Alegría's "Como un árbol rojo" (1968), a revised edition of the author's earlier work about the life of Luis Emilio Recabarren, pioneering union leader and founder of Chile’s Communist Party. It also aims to contribute to the renewed historical inquiry on Recabarren’s figure after the 100th anniversary of his death, which was recently commemorated in December 2024.

Utilizing Barbara Foley's criteria, Lorenzo Turrent Rozas' views, and Alegría's own reflections on revolutionary literature, this study argues that the book adheres to the tradition of the proletarian novel while also maintaining its place as biofiction. It further delves into the challenges posed by Georg Lukacs' Marxist critique of the biographical novel and its potential conflict with the proletarian novel's inherent political discourse. Additionally, the article analyses contemporary approaches to biofiction as a viable path to reconcile the content of proletarian content with the biographical format.

The paper also discusses the novel's reception and effectiveness as a revolutionary tool, concluding that although "Como un árbol rojo" faces certain structural limitations, the biographical format can still serve as an efficient vehicle for proletarian literature when executed with greater narrative flexibility.

The literary genre biofiction is becoming more intriguing through its potential: Authors can use the story of famous people to create a new story that is not entirely based on a biographical truth. Readers can broaden their imagination through interesting stories about well-known personalities standing between fiction and reality.

Therese Fowler describes Zelda's life in the biographical novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013). Even though people initially perceived her as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz. She was a passionate woman who tried to be a painter and a writer.

The friendship and literary rivalry between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway made them famous ‘frenemies’. Paula McLain wrote The Paris Wife (2011), a historical fiction focused on the marriage and divorce of Hemingway and his first wife. The novel became a New York Times bestseller and describes how the relationship between Hemingway and Richardson fades.

The aim of this comparative analysis between those two biographical novels, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and The Paris Wife, is to expose if there are gender-specific characteristics: Are Fowler and McLain, both women, focused more on emphasizing forgotten women’s life stories or are they rather neutral in the storytelling process? Is it a way of ‘female writing’ in the stories of unique but somehow invisible women by their husbands’ side? And how different or similar are the stories of people who lived in the same era in both novels?

Jean Echenoz’s biofiction Ravel (2006) profoundly illustrates the deep interplay between literature and music. The novel focuses on the final decade of Maurice Ravel’s life, with the creation and first performance of Boléro at its core. By employing the musical qualities of repetition and difference, Echenoz constructs a unique narrative rhythm and multi-dimensional portrayal of Ravel’s character.

The fiction’s depiction of the musical structure of Boléro is both meticulous and insightful. This composition centers on a single rhythmic pattern and two alternating melodic themes, brought to life through an ever-evolving orchestration that defines its innovative musical language. Echenoz seamlessly integrates these structural characteristics into the novel, creating a text that harmonizes rhythm and narrative complexity.

The repetition and difference of rhythm in the fiction are reflected in the dynamic interaction between historical events and fictional imagination. Ravel’s creative process, his American tour, and the gradual decline of his health serve as the rhythmic foundation of the narrative, with their repetition emphasizing historical authenticity. However, Echenoz enhances these historical events with imaginative details, imbuing each retelling with novelty and exceeding the boundaries of traditional biography.

Similarly, the repetition and difference of melody are expressed through two alternating portrayals of Ravel. In Boléro, the alternation of bright and dark melodic themes injects emotional tension into the music. In the fiction, Ravel’s brilliance and struggles alternate to construct a conflicted and multi-faceted character. On one hand, he is a celebrated composer of immense talent and public acclaim; on the other, he endures insomnia, neurological decline, and profound solitude. Each iteration of these character traits is deepened emotionally: the tension between his success on tour and discomfort with public exposure, the burst of creative inspiration contrasted with the uncertainty of the creative process, and the intensifying suffering of his final years as he grapples with the inevitability of death. These evolving emotional layers mirror the “repetition and difference” of the novel’s melodic structure, adding richness and complexity to Ravel’s characterization.

By merging the rhythmic, melodic, and orchestral techniques of Boléro with the interplay of historical and fictional elements, Echenoz endows Ravel with an innovative narrative aesthetic. The fiction is not only a literary reimagining of Ravel’s life but also an experimental exploration of the possibilities between literature and music, reality and imagination.

It is no exaggeration to say that SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku (Ryōma Goes His Way), presented in Japanese as『竜馬がゆく』, caused a social phenomenon in Japan. SHIBA Ryōtarō (1923−96) is a Japanese writer very well-known for his historical novels and essays. Unfortunately, most of his works were not translated into English or any other languages, and thus, he is not widely known outside Japan.

SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku is one of his most popular novels in Japan. Generally, this novel has been read as a historical novel, but it can also be regarded as a biofiction because it centers around SAKAMOTO Ryōma (1836−1867), written down in Japanese as 坂本龍馬, a samurai who lived near the end of the Edo period. It is said that SAKAMOTO Ryōma successfully negotiated the so-called “Satcho Alliance” (i.e., united the two most powerful rival domains, Satsuma and Choshu, to work against the Edo Shogunate) and made happen the “Meiji Restoration” (i.e., a political event that restored practical imperial rule and started the Meiji period in 1868).

What is notable about SAKAMOTO Ryōma is that he became widely recognized and gained popularity after the publication of SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku, first serialized in the daily newspaper Sankei Shimbun from 1962 to 1966, and later published in book form in 1974. TV dramas adapted from this novel were broadcast in 1965 and 1968, attracting a large audience. Most recently, a manga with the same title began serialization in the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun in 2022. Nowadays, SAKAMOTO Ryōma has many enthusiastic fans and is often listed as the first or second most favorite historical figure in Japan.

However, a couple of years ago, news about SAKAMOTO Ryōma made a big uproar in Japan: his name is to be removed from the Japanese history textbooks used at high schools. This is mainly because, from the perspective of historical science, the achievements attributed to SAKAMOTO Ryōma are considered inaccurate or, at the very least, unprovable by evidence. This suggests that Ryōma（竜馬）, the fictional character created by SHIBA Ryōtarō, has surpassed Ryōma（龍馬）, the actual historical person, and the image of the former has come to be regarded as more “real.” It is interesting that SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku, a biofiction, triggered this social phenomenon in Japan.

In this paper, I will elucidate the points briefly outlined above—in short, the impact SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku—and consider how strongly biofiction can influence the establishment of the image of an actual historical person and transform people’s perception of him or her.

My contribution will deal with Konrad Bayer’s text Der Kopf des Vitus Bering ("Vitus Bering’s Head") from 1963 as a special example of biofiction that is set within the specific context of post-war avantgarde experimental poetics.

Bayer, one of the most important authors of the avantgardist "Vienna Group", allegedly sets out to (re-)narrate the biography of a historical seafarer and discoverer who, while not as famous as the likes of Columbus or James Cook, led two large Russian expeditions and had the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Bering Island named after himself.

However, what Bayer actually offers is a provocative dismantling and fictionalization of Bering’s actual life-story and a subversive and provocative deconstruction of the classical narrative scheme of a ‘heroic biography’. This deconstruction happens on the level of 'discours' as well as 'histoire': First of all, the text does not present a coherent 'grand récit' of Bering’s life and achievements, but follows a rather complex montage technique that combines fragmentary narrative episodes from Bering’s life with excerpts from a variety of sources that only deal vaguely, if at all, with the protagonist’s concrete biography.

One common denominator of these fragments which I’m going to highlight in my contribution is the idea that Bering’s creativity, and perhaps creativity in general, has to be understood as a product of chance and happenstance instead of individual ‘genius’: The protagonist’s actions are shown as driven by heteronomous circumstances which he can’t (and is not even willing to) control. With regard to the undeniable colonial context of Bering’s story (and the ‘exploration paradigm’ in general), Bayer’s text can be seen as both trivializing as well as at least implicitly criticizing it. Last but not least, I am going to discuss the ways in which "Der Kopf des Vitus Bering" explores the general question as to whether any narrated biography is, in fact, (bio-)fiction.

In his essay “In the Laboratory of the Novel” (1963), literary critic Peter Brooks provides a compelling account of the return of experimental realism as metafiction in the French Nouveau-Roman movement of the 1960s, recalling late nineteenth- and early twentieth century debates on the possible scientific function of literature, particularly concerning writers like Émile Zola and Samuel Butler, for whom the novel would quite literally figure as a laboratory space, fit for substantial experimentation. Brooks highlights a notable remark made by nouveau-novelist Michel Butor (1926-2002), who argues that the novel “the ideal place to study how reality appears to us or can appear to us; this is why the novel is the laboratory of narrative” (transl. mine). What seemingly distinguishes Butor’s approach from Zola’s, is that the author’s rendering and writing of the novel as a laboratory, fit for scientific experiments which could reveal hidden truths and shed light on reality anew, itself becomes the new novel’s problematized subject. If Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series (1871-1893) and Butler’s semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh (1903) both employ the novel as a framework through which to incorporate as well as incite verifiable lived experience, Butor’s last novel Degrés (1960) instead questions the extent to which these scientific attempts at life-writing are viable. In Degrés, Butor narrates the attempt of schoolmaster Pierre Vernier to write an absolutely truthful novel about the life of the lycée where he teaches. As the blurb of the English translation reads, for Vernier “the study of reality is the study of things as they are: the surface of objects, the observable behavior of people, words that one hears.” Such an undertaking soon proves more complex than anticipated: realizing that he occupies a privileged position which might influence his observations, Vernier decides to incorporate the notes of his nephew and student Pierre. Failure and triumph paradoxically ensue; the “novel scientist” of Butor’s meta-narrative is at once recognized and ridiculed. Interested in the convergence of experimental aspiration and literary technique, this paper introduces the notion of the “novel laboratory” in the context of Biofiction, in an attempt to explore the possibilities and problems that scientific experimentation poses when considered in or employed as literary form. Taking Butor’s novel as a case-study to think through, this paper grapples with ethical and epistemological complications that emerge when flesh is made word.

This paper reexamines the translation of Lord Byron as a rebel hero and poetic model of British Romanticism in ‘May Fourth’ China, foregrounding its intricate engagement with the evolving trajectory of Chinese literary modernity. In doing so, it proposes a framework grounded in Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory, Lefevere’s notion of rewriting, and theoretical conceptualisations of literary modernity. With a particular focus on the 1924 special issues of Short Story Monthly and Morning News Supplement, this study explores the poetic and sociocultural constraints that shaped the translation of Byron’s poetry in the era characterised by the rise of vernacular language, the prosperity of modern free verse, and the integration of Western mode of expression into Chinese literary repertoire. The descriptive and historical analysis not only unveils the critical role of translation in both reflecting and contributing to the transformation of Chinese poetry from a ‘stagnant’ old genre to a ‘living’ new one but, more significantly, suggests that the newness of the modern cannot be framed as a clear-cut rupture with the past but rather involves a set of fierce and intricate confrontations and collaborations between the traditional and the modern, as well as the indigenous and the foreign.

The study explores the transformation of The Book of Songs (Shijing) from a Confucian classic with political and educational functions to a literary work within the framework of modern literary history during the Republican era in China. Historically regarded as a cornerstone of Confucian teachings, Shijing was subjected to reinterpretation and reevaluation during the New Culture Movement. The background of this transformation lies in the emergence of the Doubting Antiquity School, which critiqued traditional interpretations and sought to restore the original essence of classical texts. Against this backdrop, the study examines how modern scholars detached Shijing from its traditional exegetical constraints, redefining it as a collection of poetic works with inherent literary value.

The significance of this research lies in its attempt to position Shijing within the broader academic and cultural shifts in early 20th-century China, reflecting the evolution of modern literary and scholarly paradigms. This study is structured around four analytical dimensions. First, it investigates the critique of traditional Confucian interpretations and the subsequent efforts to liberate Shijing from its role as a tool for political indoctrination. Second, it explores the reinterpretation of Shijing through the lens of folklore studies, identifying its elements as folk songs and cultural expressions representative of communal life. Third, it analyzes the integration of lyrical aesthetics into the evaluation of Shijing, highlighting how its emotive and expressive qualities, particularly in love poetry, resonated with the emerging concept of individualism in Republican-era literary thought. Finally, the study situates Shijing as the foundational text in Chinese poetic tradition, emphasizing its profound influence on the thematic and stylistic evolution of Chinese literature.

This research contributes to a nuanced understanding of Shijing by elucidating its transition into the literary canon through its incorporation into modern literary history. By aligning Shijing with contemporary scholarly approaches, such as folklore studies and the reevaluation of lyrical values, Republican-era scholars established it as a timeless literary work distinct from its Confucian legacy. The findings underscore the role of Shijing not only as a source of ancient poetic traditions but also as a crucial reference point in the formation of modern Chinese literary identity, demonstrating its enduring relevance in literary and academic discourse.

City has a pivotal place in the Indian writings in English. In some poetry, it is in the core of its construct. Reversely, the city itself is reconstructed. As India is developing, cities are growing, expanding rapidly providing impetus to the thought and expression into poetry. In this context, there is a need to study the pattern of growth in terms of life in city and the cities themselves as depicted in some Indian poetry. Hence, the poems of Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Keki N. Daruwalla, and Jayanta Mahapatra are open for survey. They have located their poetry in different of India. Ezekiel’s poetry delves into the city of Bombay to address the angst of life in an urban setting. The poetry of Kolatkar addresses the complexities of urban life humorously. Likewise, Daruwalla’s poetry revolves around the cities of Northern India through which he goes deeper into the human lives to bring the reality out. The poetry of Mahapatra portrays the cities in Eastern part of India through which he addresses his own identity issues. Moreover, they are all modern Indian poets in every aspect, though modernity in them is not without certain variation. However, the discussion in this paper is primarily to trace the pattern of growth that is evident in their poetry in terms of cities in India and to address the consequent effect of such growth on the individual as well as the society.