Abstrast

This article explores the development of comparative research in Uzbek literary studies, focusing on its historical evolution and the contributions of key scholars. Initiated in the latter half of the 20th century, comparative research has advanced significantly, incorporating the works of prominent Uzbek authors in a global literary context. The study highlights Navoi's "Khamsa," literary relations between Uzbek and world literature, and significant figures such as Abdullah Qahhor and Jack London. It examines genre-specific studies, such as autobiographical confessions, through a comparative analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Leo Tolstoy, revealing universal themes of morality, self-reflection, and cultural values. The article underscores the significance of comparative literature as a method to deepen understanding of national and global literary heritage.

Angela Carter is famous for her subversive writings, her exuberant allusiveness to fairy tales and Gothic tales, and above all, her dazzling postmodernist techniques in bringing everything together. Incorporating Gothic and postmodernist techniques, Carter’s fairy-tale writings demonstrate her unparalleled originality and wide-ranging literary influences. While postmodern Gothic characterizes Carter’s generic style, fairy tale constitutes the structural principle.

Noticeably, Carter’s postmodern Gothic fairy tales are permeated with Oriental elements and references. Based on close reading and contextualization, this thesis sets to extract the “Orient” from Carter’s postmodern Gothic fairy tales, probing into its formation and interpreting its significance. On the one hand, as a literary element, the Orient is historically interwoven with the Gothic literary tradition in presenting Western imagination of the other. On the other hand, with the rise of postmodernism and critique of Orientalism, this “Orient” constructed by Eurocentrism was and is still under deconstruction. Given that Carter is highly conscious of both critical theories and her own creative writings, her (re)presentation of the Orient comes not as a mimicry of tradition, but a deliberate divergence from the traditional orientalist discourse which allows further critical reflection of it.

In order to address the issue in a more specific context, this thesis also looks into Carter’s individual perspective with special attention to her experience in Japan and the self-professed political commitment of her writings, aiming to qualify Carter’s (re)representation of the Orient and her conscious engagement with orientalist discourse by writing back in a subversive way. The Orient is aesthetically significant to Carter’s postmodern Gothic style, and most importantly, it is politically relevant to Carter’s “decolonialising” project and “demythologising business”.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, an English-language travelogue about China's food, cities, and customs and culture published by British author Fuchsia Dunlop in 2008, has sparked a strong reaction overseas, and is of great significance to the international dissemination of Chinese culture, especially Chinese secular culture. Currently, domestic and international research on the book focuses on translation studies and cross-cultural communication paths, and little has been done on its study of Chinese secular culture writing. However, it is precisely Chinese secular culture that has triggered Fuchsia, as a cultural "other", to open up multiple reflections on cross-cultural identity, thus promoting the deeper dissemination of Chinese secular culture. This paper takes the Chinese secular culture writing in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper as the object of study, summarizes the contents and characteristics of Chinese secular culture writing, and then explores the significance of Chinese secular culture for the overseas dissemination of Chinese culture as well as cross-cultural identity under the wave of globalization. The paper is divided into three parts: introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction introduces the object and background of the study, the current status of research at home and abroad, as well as the research methodology and significance. The main text consists of three chapters: Chapter 1 first clarifies the content and value of Chinese secular culture, and elaborates on the practical possibilities of Chinese secular culture for the overseas dissemination of Chinese culture; Chapter 2 summarizes the Chinese secular culture written in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, which includes dietary culture, urban culture, and rural customs, and analyses what kind of cross-cultural reflections these secular cultures have triggered in the author; and Chapter 3 goes on to explore the characteristics and cultural significance of Chinese popular culture in cross-cultural communication. At the level of value identity, Fuchsia's attitude towards Chinese secular culture, including food culture, has changed from "shock" to "recognition"; at the level of cross-cultural identity, Fuchsia has pursued and rebuilt her self-worth in the process of learning Chinese culture, and completed a journey of cultural roots in the perspective of globalization, and confirmed her own cultural identity in the context of globalization, and re-recognized herself. In terms of cross-cultural identity, Fuchsia traces and rebuilds her self-worth in the process of learning Chinese culture, completes a cultural root-searching journey under the perspective of globalization, and confirms her own cultural identity in the context of globalization to know herself again. The conclusion summarizes the whole study and draws conclusions. This paper argues that the writing of Chinese secular culture in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper highlights the unique value of secular culture in Sino-foreign cultural exchanges, such as its popularity, acceptability, wide dissemination, and two-way interaction, in order to stimulate the thinking and transformation of the cultural identity of the "other", to make the Chinese culture deeply involved in the identity thinking under the tide of globalization, to promote the deep-level dissemination of Chinese culture, and at the same time, to confirm her own cultural identity in the context of globalization, and to re-know herself. This will enable Chinese culture to be deeply involved in the identity thinking under the wave of globalization, promote the deep-level dissemination of Chinese culture, and at the same time enable Chinese readers to re-examine their own cultural traditions in a roundabout way from an external perspective. This is of great academic value and practical significance for exploring the choice of content and the tendency of the path of Chinese culture spreading overseas.

This paper examines modernity through Tash Aw’s portrayal of intra-Asian migrant subject-making, where diaspora is reconstructed within the evolving narrative of neoliberal urbanity. By centering Malaysian migrants as neo-urban dwellers in Shanghai, Five Star Billionaire deconstructs diasporic paradigms, foregrounding urban nostalgia as the emotional labor of navigating the simultaneity of Asian modernity and late capitalism. Through the layering of uneven temporalities onto Shanghai’s urban fabric, the novel envisions a diasporic futurity—where homecoming is both desired and deferred, modernity is continually disarticulated and rearticulated through nostalgia. Aw’s deconstruction thus reframes diaspora within a broader Global South affiliation, mapping Shanghai’s precarious position in the world-system.

Aw visualizes how late capitalism “lives” in Shanghai by paralleling his five characters’ fragmented and classed socio-economic conditions. By embedding their nostalgia within Shanghai’s materiality, Aw reconstructs diasporic longing as a force complicit in exclusionary urban belonging. Rather than enabling resistance, nostalgia turns inward, becoming self-referential or melancholic mourning. For Justin, nostalgia is narcissistic yet politically precarious—it distances him from his family’s “across Asia” real estate expansions but remains entangled in class hierarchies. His aestheticized vision of longtang and slums romanticizes spaces of historical erasure and labor exploitation, reinforcing urban nostalgia’s complicity in producing “old Shanghai” as a commodified, exoticized spectacle. Meanwhile, Phoebe’s performative cosmopolitanism and Yinghui’s entrepreneurial feminism exemplify neoliberalism’s absorption of nostalgia, where longing and belonging is reframed into narratives of self-reinvention and elite mobility. When situated within Shanghai’s materiality, nostalgia’s fragility is weaponized—reinforcing elitism, regionalism, and a cosmopolitanism that is paradoxically inclusive and exclusionary.

The characters’ nostalgia thus illuminates the city’s historical negotiations, where past, present, and future are relentlessly rehearsed and reproduced in unresolved tension. Aw’s narrative of “reinvention of the self” parallels the city’s continuous reinvention of modernity. Through this dialogue, Aw captures Shanghai’s urbanity—a resilient living force that nostalgically longs for its cosmopolitan glamour of the 1930s while simultaneously navigating semi-colonial remnants, socialist experiments, condensed modernization, and neoliberal accelerations. By situating Shanghai within a glocalized framework while downplaying its national identity, Aw suggests the potential for an urban identity that transcends temporal zones and national boundaries. Yet, the unresolved trajectories of his characters reflect his ambivalence toward Shanghai’s metropolitan future.

Drawing on WReC, Jameson, Benjamin, and Boym, this paper challenges the unhistorical “achieved” Western modernity by presenting geopolitical variants born in the hyper-localities of Asia. By interrogating diaspora and metropolis “simultaneous” with Asian modernity, this paper examines the full “worlding” of capital as positioned within “world-literature.” Situating Shanghai within a comparative lens, this study traces the localized expressions of modernity across East and West, considering their distinct cultural histories, modernization trajectories, ideological constructs, and neoliberal conditioning.

Literary critics have not often shown interest in Rabindranath Tagore’s views on Buddhism. This has resulted in his most outstanding Buddhist drama not being fully explored. Chandalika differs greatly from the other Buddhist dramas in the world in the depth of its Buddhist view. 　

Tagore’s Chandalika is based on “Sardulkarna-Abadan,” which focuses on an orthodox Buddhist concept of the ascetic path to self-emancipation. Tagore changes the focus and dramatizes a Bodhisattva path which prioritizes the liberation of all sentient beings without seeking self-emancipation.

In “Sardulkarna Abadan” Prakriti who is fascinated by Ananda’s beauty asks her mother to use her magical power to allure him. Thanks to Buddha’s help, Ananda goes back to his temple. In Tagore’s story Ananda comes back to Prakriti for her emancipation.

Ananda says to her, “Give me water” which suggests his respect for an outcaste girl, who belongs to the most dehumanized caste. His words cause Prakriti’s awakening. They also arouse in her a burning longing for him. Prakriti wants to make an offer of worship for him, but he does not come. Under her mother’s magic spell, Ananda is forced to turn toward her. Using magical power is like churning mud, but Prakriti believes that mud can never be purified without churning it. This mud signifies the walls of categorization and segmentation. Tagore describes Ananda’s anger as well as suffering and conflict because his anger should destroy the mud walls which distinguish self from others, the fetter of sacred and secular dualism so that the falsehood of Prakriti’s birth will be shattered.

Ananda’s calling makes her believe that she has boundless pure water within her. When the handful of water she gave to him mingles with his holy vow it becomes one fathomless boundless sea, which washes away her fate as a Chandalini, a curse worse than the gallows. She believes that her mortal pain is the gift she offers for Ananda’s vow. Anand suffers from intense fire, but he has to incorporate her sufferings for her emancipation.

In the end he comes to her, his body bearing the load of the soul’s defeat. Ananda was dragged down to her earth, but she believes that without his fall and defeat she can never be raised. He can never be freed when she is not. Ananda’s passage to the Bodhisattva is interrelated with Prakriti’s emancipation.

Ananda’s coming to her creates Prakriti’s new life as well as his release from the mud wall of segregation. Ananda’s love awakens Prakriti’s revelation and her self-abandoning worship for Ananda, which helps Ananda break the fetters of his ascetic approach and take a step toward a bodhisattva’s enlightenment.