In this presentation I read Rumer Godden’s novel The River (1946) as a diasporic coming-of-age novel whose female adolescent protagonist carries out an implicit critique of (post-)imperial Englishness, and its racially supremacist and masculist underpinnings, while attempting to find a place in the world as member of the ruling Anglo-Indian, middle-class elite that rules India right before its independence. Drawing on the English author’s childhood memories from her life in the Narayanganj area, now in Bangladesh, around the second world war (often read as privileged and idyllic), the novel, as I claim, disturbs the spatial paradigm of enclosure that structures (post-) imperial Britain’s self-understanding at the time of decolonisation. This is a point in history when the nation begins to close itself off from the (colonial) world and its brutal (colonialist) past in an attempt to protect itself from cultural and racial contamination, and to maintain its image of greatness as a way of compensating for the loss of its world status in the postwar reformulation of Western hegemony and planetary colonial relations. As I argue, the novel carries out its critique by representationally casting Harriet’s, its young protagonist’s, close relationship with the vegetal and floral life of the family garden, with which she identifies, as an act of exposure that opens up the protected, fenced off, space of the Anglo-Indian household to the disruptive unpredictability associated with the (more-than-human or culturally different) outside. For the garden in Godden’s text is a porous and ambivalent space of learning and self-realisation for its adolescent narrator; it is also a space of entanglement (of human, plant and animal life) and intermixture (of English and indigenous world views on nature, life and death); and a space of (phyto-)writing that causes Harriet’s world “to tilt” and change its orientation; it offers an upside-down perspective on lived experience, social relations and cross-cultural, cross-species contact and, in embracing, what Luce Irigaray regards as the indeterminacy, plasticity and openness of plant life to other life forms, it holds the promise of “trans-human” (to use Michael Marder’s term), cross-cultural symbiosis. My reading of Godden’s critical take on (post)colonial Britain is indebted to the plant philosophies of Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, to new insights coming out of the emerging field of postcolonial environmental studies, to thinking around planetary cohabitation (for example, Achilles Mbembe’s “earthly community” and Gayiatri Spivak concept of “planetarity”), phenomenological theories of space and embodied existence, and debates related to new materialism.

The aim of this paper is comparing the textual construction of intergenerational dynamics in two postcolonial coming-of-age novels, Reef by Romesh Gunesekera (1994) and O Último Olhar de Manú Miranda [The Last Look of Manú Miranda] by Orlando da Costa (2000). Set in Sri Lanka on the brink of civil war, Reef is a work halfway between a coming-of-age novel and a memoir. The novel is the first-person account by Triton, a Sri Lankan cook who emigrated to the UK, recalling memories of his adolescence spent working in the manor house of a marine biologist, who becomes his friend and a spiritual master. On the other hand, O Último Olhar de Manú Miranda is a novel, narrated from a third-person perspective, that reconstructs the childhood and late adolescence of a Goan Catholic during the last decades of the Portuguese colonial rule. As an orphan, Manú Miranda grows up surrounded by uncles and friends, although it is an older man from outside the family circle, the owner of a fraternity house for young students, that becomes his mentor and a father-like figure. One of the goals of this work is analyzing the friendship between these characters in the light of the impact that colonial education had on the paternal figures in question. In these works, youth is not represented as a time of lightness and joy, but rather as a time of restlessness due to the atmosphere of civil war in the country and the uncertainty about the future of younger generations. The values behind the informal education received by the two young men from their mentors will be explored, which can be interpreted as a reflection of the two authors on the permeation of the colonial mentality in post-imperial societies. In addition to the formal aspects that characterize the two works and frame them within the genre of the coming-of-age novel, we will finally discuss the narrative strategies that the writers implement to represent the idea of a world in decay, be it the Portuguese colonial world or the vulnerable society of post-colonial Sri Lanka.

Incorporating Rosemary Radford Ruether's ecofeminist theology and related theories, this paper attempts to conduct an interpretation of Jack London's short story "The Seed of McCoy" from the "South Sea Tales" series by integrating gender, ecology, and religion through a close reading of the text. It is argued that feminine qualities are doubly dominated by traditional maritime narratives and the language of naval conventions, being forced into an object position. The plot of novel conquest is presented through the confrontation and clash of binary gender energies. Ultimately, it is through the Mystical-Savior-McCoy, who embodies androgyny with female power in a subject position, that the characters emerge from the Dilemma and achieve Salvation. However, the underlying Blue Gender Dilemma in the novel is not alleviated; on the contrary, such metaphors in the novel lay bare Jack London's contradictory feminist perspective.

结合萝斯玛丽·R·鲁塞尔生态女性主义神学思想及相关理论，本文试图在文本细读基础上，综合性别、生态、宗教三个维度，对杰克·伦敦“南海小说”系列中的短篇故事《麦考伊的种子》进行解读：女性特质在传统海洋叙事和航海惯习语言中受到双重辖制，被迫居于客体位置；航海征服的故事情节却以两性能量的对峙与交锋呈现；最终，依靠“雌雄同体”且女性力量居于主体的“神秘救主”麦考伊，众人方走出“困境”，获得拯救；但小说中潜在的“蓝色性别困境”并未得到缓解，相反，此类小说隐喻使得杰克·伦敦矛盾的女性观念暴露无遗。