The concept of “corpse” as “thing” is essential in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. The corpses in these narratives act as both “ontological objects,” each with its distinct trajectory and nature, and “agentic objects,” which actively intervene in the course of the story. This paper analyzes Poe’s three short stories---“Ligeia” (1838), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845) ---each representing his Gothic, detective, and science fiction genres. The focus is on the notion of “thingness,” referring to the ontology and agency of the corpses within these texts. This analysis provides a fresh interpretation through the lens of thing narrative, particularly utilizing object-oriented narratology. From the Gothic corpse entwined between life and death, which are both real and surreal in “Ligeia,” to the suspenseful corpse that displays phenomena and obscures the truth in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and then to the science fiction corpse able to communicate across time and space in “Some Words with a Mummy,” the corpses in these three works demonstrate how the “corpse” as a “thing” gets entangled with spirit and competes with “the will”, how it constructs and deconstructs the “truth” each individual has discovered, or how it fuses technology and humanity together to create a new form of being. Through imaginative exploration in his different types of stories, Poe highlights the diverse aspects of corpses’ agency and “lures” readers to reflect on their profound ontological nature, which Graham Harman has termed “withdrawn” real objects. Poe’s exploration of “thingness” in these narratives sets the stage for his later prose poem, “Eureka,” allowing him to express the inexplicable and engage with what Quentin Meillassoux calls “The Great Outdoors.” The thing narrative surrounding corpses also aids Poe in pioneering, developing, and enriching various short story genres. More importantly, Poe uses corpses to depict “life,” which, in his view, encompasses not just human existence but also the life of nonhuman objects. He portrays these objects as “animate,” “sentient,” and “intelligent,” suggesting that they are always wielding thing power by the force of attraction and repulsion. For Poe, there is no fundamental ontological difference between humans and nonhuman objects, and the agency of things enables them to have power and affect other things in their own ways. Thus, humans and human life cannot be considered the focal point of the universe, and “life” takes many forms among all things. The three short stories mark different stages of Poe’s exploration of corporeal existence and demonstrate how the author articulates life through death, as noted by Gaston Bachelard, culminating in his ultimate reconciliation with mortality.

This article analyzes the narrative of nonhuman elements in the American cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson, and its Chinese counterpart, Waste Tide (2013), by Chen Qiufan, in the context of world literature, aiming to explore the way they configure the connections and networks of the world system. It argues that, similar to the role of literary forms and contents in Franco Moretti’s research and artificial sites in David Damrosch’s world literature theory, the artificial humans in both novels are narrated as a centre of calculation which connects different classes, cultures, and domains both inside and outside their home countries, forming a network resembling the star-shaped typology. Meanwhile, the technical products in these narratives act as conduits for transporting the presence of the ancient, distant and current systems in the world into one another, showcasing a mesh global network that directly connects individual sites and domains in different countries and cultures. These agencies of nonhuman narrative in the East and West not only reveals a new episteme to reassemble the connections between the literary, social, cultural and economic structures in both developed and developing countries, but also help address the recent concerns of multiculturalism by breaking down cultural boundaries and incorporating nonhuman objects as part of the material basis of the “form” of different cultures.

The mimetic turn in posthuman studies has gradually developed into what can be termed mimetic posthumanism. The mimetic paradigm not only provides theoretical support for the loosening of human boundaries within the posthuman framework, but also facilitates the construction of desires under the imagination of the posthuman. If we recognize transhuman medical technologies’ shaping of human desires in the pursuit of human enhancement, what standard should we adopt? How can we prevent this process from aligning with capitalism to reshape social structures that treat ordinary people as sacrificial victims? This paper navigates between the two foundational pillars of instinct views and the mimetic paradigm in the archetypal writing of desire. It explores two works that rewrite the mythological themes of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: the modern novella “The Beast in the Jungle” and the contemporary science fiction film The Beast. These three works reflect the dynamic relationship between instinct and mimesis in the formation of desire, oscillating between the binary framework of gender and the distinction between “human” and “beast” (non-human). In pre-modern theological societies, heterosexual desire was primarily presented as an inescapable, instinctual fate, with mimesis hovering as a potentiality in the background. In modern humanist societies, social constructions of heterosexual desire heavily rely on mimesis, though the instinct persists, albeit faintly. In posthuman, technologically integrated societies, mimesis serves as a paradigm for creating “transhumans” in the realm of life sciences, where purified emotional desires are manufactured, driving out instinct, yet failing to fully fulfill the promise of “human enhancement.”

In early Western political cartoons, China is often depicted as an evil and ugly dragon threatening Western civilization. Such a negative image is rewritten in contemporary graphic novels among which The Night Eaters deserves special attention. The Night Eaters is a graphic novel horror trilogy by the extraordinary collaboration of Eisner Award-winning and bestselling author Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda. It depicts the life of a Chinese American family in the United States. In the book, the stereotypical image of China as the demonic dragon is subverted cleverly. Instead of reconfirming the positive connotations of the dragon in Chinese culture, such as divinity, power, prosperity, and good fortune, which would have been another form of simplification of the image, Liu and Takeda complicate the dragon image and deconstruct the dichotomous conceptions of the dragon through its innovative narrative and art form. This article attempts to address the three key methods employed to this end. First, though the story is inserted with flashbacks about the mother’s past, her real identity is kept initially as a secret and only gradually revealed to be a demon eater in Book 1. Yet the reader does not know that she is not only a demon eater but also a dragon until the end of Book 2, which may evoke different emotional reactions from readers of Eastern and Western cultural backgrounds and change their previous cognitive frames in various ways. Second, this information gap and the consequent narrative surprise are accentuated by the visual depiction of the mother as a normal human being who is both terrifying and awkwardly adorable. The reader is only told but not shown what the mother is, which differs from the outright visual depiction of the dragon in early Western political cartoons. Third, the tension that exists between the Western and the Chinese images of the dragon is also embodied in the book’s visual style which is both poetic and horrifying, beautiful and disturbing. Via the detailed reading of the book’s content, narrative discourse, medium specificity, as well as cultural contexts, the article hopes to not only show the intricate relationship between nonhuman narratives and racial narratives, but also shed light on how the graphic novel in general contributes to the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective images of certain groups or communities.

In Chapter 17 of James Joyce's Ulysses, there is a multitude of list fragments. For a long time, these list fragments concerning things were dismissed as inexplicable digressions or unnecessary descriptions. However, with "Turn to Things" influencing the domain of narratology, the focus of literary narratological research has undergone a shift over the past decade. Things, once relegated to the silent background in traditional narratology, have now moved to the forefront, and the theoretical paradigm of Thing Narrative gradually took shape. When the ontological meaning of things is increasingly emphasized, the thing narrative revolution may offer us a new interpretive framework for understanding of the unique literary form of the list in Ulysses. In what sense does the use of lists in literature, as a representational medium, allow readers to transcend the cage of representation and confront things directly? This paper focuses on the intersection of list writing and Thing Narrative and analyzes several list passages in Joyce's Ulysses, examining how Joyce's list writing becomes a field for the self-manifestation of things and how it evokes reader’s mental experiences to perceive "thing-in-itself".

In the narrative of Chapter 17, the progression of Stephen and Bloom's actions is initially sustained and subtly advanced through the Q&A format. However, Joyce frequently interrupts this flow by inserting extensive lists of things into the text. These lengthy, exhaustive lists disrupt the ongoing human narrative, creating a stark visual contrast and imposing obstacles to the reading process. Readers are compelled to shift their attention away from the plot centered on the two protagonists, Bloom and Stephen, and instead focus on a world dominated by the overwhelming presence of things in the lists. Among these, the list of everyday things exposes the weird thingness through defamiliarizing the details of things; the list of natural things, with its chaos and disorder, escapes the constraints of Western rationalism; Bloom's associative list of celestial bodies and ancient fossils shows us "the Great Outdoors"; and the list of wedding gifts on the mantelpiece, which exchange gazes with Bloom, excavates the complex emotions he has long suppressed through a bidirectional interaction, subverting traditional subject-object relationships. In summary, as a high-density assemblage of things, these lists, through Joyce's experimental writing, offer readers a literary opportunity to glimpse the thingsness and demonstrate a heterogeneous power capable of destroying anthropocentric narratives and re-examining the essence of things.

This article examines the role of nonhuman narrative in world literature through the kalpavigyan (Indian science fiction/fantasy) of Satyajit Ray. While Ray is internationally recognized for the humanist ethos of his films, his literary oeuvre – particularly his kalpavigyan short stories –foregrounds encounters between human and nonhuman entities, including super-abled animals, extraterrestrial beings, and artificial intelligence. These narratives engage with global traditions of nonhuman storytelling, from indigenous cosmologies and magical realism to contemporary posthumanist fiction, offering a distinct postcolonial perspective on interspecies relations. Ray’s fiction does not, however, fully embrace the posthumanist decentering of the human; rather, posthuman themes coexist in these stories with an appeal to human ethics and indigenous mythological references that situate them in the humanist cultural discourse of world literature. I will argue, therefore, that Ray’s position regarding interspecies relations can be described as a proto-posthuman cosmopolitanism.

Situating kalpavigyan within world literature, this article examines Ray’s work alongside broader traditions of nonhuman representation. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of “minor science,” Isabel Stengers’ concept of “cosmopolitics,” and Judith Butler’s notion of precarity, I explore how Ray’s narratives engage with interspecies ethics, revisionary fantasies premised on the theory of evolution, and postcolonial critiques of Western epistemology. Stories such as Khagam and Mr. Shasmal’s Final Night feature spectral animals that trouble anthropocentric distinctions between human and nonhuman deaths, echoing animist traditions and global eco-fictional critiques of speciesism. Meanwhile, Ray’s Professor Shonku stories – populated by sentient machines, prehistoric creatures, and enigmatic nonhuman intelligences – resonate with transnational science fiction narratives that problematize the constructed boundaries between species and technologies.

By examining Ray’s engagement with nonhuman agency within the kalpavigyan tradition, this article theorizes the zoöpolitical nuances of his proto-posthuman cosmopolitanism. His speculative fiction neither fully dissolves human-nonhuman distinctions nor reaffirms human exceptionalism but instead constructs a framework in which ethical proximity to nonhuman others reshapes both scientific inquiry and moral consciousness. In doing so, Ray’s narratives contribute to a broader literary discourse on nonhuman storytelling, demonstrating how speculative fiction from a postcolonial context offers alternative epistemologies of interspecies relations and challenges the hegemony of Eurocentric and anthropocentric knowledge in world literature.

“The Ghost Bride” is a translated work by Zhou Shoujuan, which was first published in the 18th issue of Saturday Magazine on 3 October 1914, with a note next to the title of the translation, “By James Hogg, England”, and was later included in the European and American Famous Writers' Short Stories Series. “The Ghost Bride” was originally written as James Hogg's short story “The Mysterious Bride”. Hogg's original was a gothic-inspired tale of vengeance by a mysterious, nonhuman bride, which ends with an assertion of intent: “The wicked people of the great muckle village have got a lesson on divine justice written to them in lines of blood.” While Zhou Shoujuan's translation of this nonhuman narrative text has made many changes, such as changing the narrative perspective, simplifying many gothic elements in the original (deleting the prophetic omens of others, the mysterious bride's appearances in reality and dreams, etc.), mistranslating the key information, and altering the main theme of the story ...... It makes the translation similar to the traditional Chinese novels of the mystery and the supernatural. This paper attempts to clarify the background of the translation of “The Ghost Bride”, comparing the original text of James Hogg's “The Mysterious Bride” with Zhou Shoujuan's translation of “The Ghost Bride”, and by comprehensively examining the biography of the writer written by the translator, other translations of the same period of time, and other related materials, in order to investigate Zhou's changes to the original style and genre, and to examine how Zhou Shoujuan's translation produced “The Ghost Bride”, a translation work which synthesises the Western Gothic style and the Chinese ghost and spirit genre. Combined with the cultural environment and the translator's own factors, this paper further discusses the acceptance and creative adaptation of western nonhuman narration by translators represented by Zhou Shoujuan in the early period of the Republic of China, and probes into the academic circle's understanding of the meaning of nonhuman narratives in this period.