This paper argues that the missing object, the titular moonstone, in Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel influences the characters and the circumstances, functioning as an overarching consciousness which I interpret as a Hegelian Consciousness. The loss of the diamond initiates the action of the novel; however, it is the overwhelming presence of the diamond inside the consciousness of the characters that causes their entanglement not only with one another but with the absent/present diamond as well. The diamond has a transformative effect on the characters, reaching deep down into their unconscious, and promoting self-discovery. Collins’s deployment of a series of symbolic triads, along with his combination of fragmented narratives, dismisses any attempt to assign a central position to any one character. In the absence of a center, and through the symbols of spirituality surrounding the diamond, oppositions are dissolved and the moonstone becomes the source of light that illuminates the problems concerning a sense of belonging, (im)perfection, marginalization, contradiction, and existence per se in a world that is divided more and more as individuality replaces collectivity in the name of modern progress. Collins posits a critical outlook towards this replacement.

 

 

October 2026: Seda Pekşen received her doctorate in English Literature from Middle East Technical University in 2008. She has been working as an instructor at Ankara University’s Department of English Language and Literature since 2010. Her fields of interest are Victorian fiction, contemporary fiction, science-fiction and fantasy literature, children’s literature, and literary theory.

In the spring of 1887, Chekhov embarked on a journey from Moscow, traversing the vast expanse of the southern Russian steppe with the intention of visiting his hometown Taganrog. Less than a year later, in February 1888, he completed his novella, Steppe: A Story of a Journey, widely regarded as transformative in his literary career. The present article delves into the innovative aspect of Chekhov’s novella by focusing on its pivotal moment of departure. Beside referring to the steppe journey that inspired the story, “departure” pertains to the literary departure of Steppe itself. Published a few decades after the introduction of trains in Russia and just before the advent of cinema, Chekhov’s Steppe, I argue, introduced an original literary “moving image.” By situating the emergence of this image in the broader context of the 19^th-century revolution of seeing, I trace the existential charge of this aesthetic moment, which cast time itself as the vital and pivotal hero of Chekhov’s prose.

 

October 2025: In the spring of 1887, Chekhov embarked on a journey from Moscow, traversing the vast expanse of the southern Russian steppe with the intention of visiting his hometown Taganrog. Less than a year later, in February 1888, he completed his novella, Steppe: A Story of a Journey, widely regarded as transformative in his literary career. The present article delves into the innovative aspect of Chekhov’s novella by focusing on its pivotal moment of departure. Beside referring to the steppe journey that inspired the story, “departure” pertains to the literary departure of Steppe itself. Published a few decades after the introduction of trains in Russia and just before the advent of cinema, Chekhov’s Steppe, I argue, introduced an original literary “moving image.” By situating the emergence of this image in the broader context of the 19^th-century revolution of seeing, I trace the existential charge of this aesthetic moment, which cast time itself as the vital and pivotal hero of Chekhov’s prose.

The essay points to an overlap between Metamorphosis and Kafka’s early unfinished story “Wedding Preparations in the Country”; it highlights the theme of the incomplete metamorphosis as underlying the protagonists’ predicament. The theme of the incomplete transformation is then traced in a number of Kafka’s short stories, revealing its importance in Kafka’s world-view.

Writing in the years before, during, and right after WWI, Christian Friedrich Weiser published scholarly and political-utopian works of planning for a German victory: Germany’s idealist philosophy, when realized as a political reality, would offer the world a beneficial alternative to the poverty of “Anglo-Saxon” pragmatism. To give imaginative shape to his plans, Weiser also wrote a novella, Die Hoffnung des Iren (1915). Translated into English as The Faith of an Irishman, it latches on to the Irish hatred of the English, the Irish for whom the “German Day” would also come as liberation. In his scholarly book, Shaftesbury und das deutsche Geistesleben (1916), Weiser represents Shaftesbury as inspiration for German idealism. The utopianism in his pamphlets and his fiction is informed by his experiences as a returning immigrant: he believes that ethnic Germans outside the Reich must take the lead in realizing the “German Day.”

 

October 2025: Rudolphus Teeuwen (PhD Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania) recently retired as professor of English at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he taught for nearly 30 years. He now lives in his native the Netherlands. He taught courses related to eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, aesthetics, the utopian imagination, and literary theory, and published on these matters in edited volumes and in journals such as Cultural Critique, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Theory, Culture & Society, Philosophy and Literature, and Symplokē. A special subject of interest to him has been Roland Barthes’s approach to life and letters, and the place of mysticism and utopian imagining in it. Questions of migration, exile, and nostalgia are also of prime interest to him. These elements— mysticism, utopianism, and migration — inform his contribution to Partial Answers as well. With Steffen Hantke he edited Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers and the Global Academic Proletariat (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

This article demonstrates how Samuel Beckett’s Endgame fleshes out the implausible entailments of a world premised on the emotivist understanding of the self –– on a noncognitivist conception of metaethical anti-realism, which is precisely the moral theory of meaning that Alasdair MacIntyre sets out to dismantle in After Virtue. I delineate an analogy between MacIntyre’s critique of post-Enlightenment conceptions of obligation and Beckett’s staging of moral incoherence and interpersonal manipulation parodied throughout Endgame.

 

October 2025: Dr. Paul Andrew Woolridge is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Qatar University. He specializes in the history of literary criticism and theory, with a particular emphasis on modernist periodicals in Anglo-American letters. Dr. Woolridge has held appointments at Northeastern University, New York University Shanghai, and Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist (UIC). He has published in a number of academic journals, including The Cambridge Quarterly and Journal of the History of Ideas. His research areas include topics in cultural criticism, transatlantic modernism, and the relationship between literature and philosophy.

This essay analyzes Anthony Burgess’s “answer to Orwell” in his 1962 dystopia The Wanting Seed. It claims that the cyclical dynamic of liberal, oppressive, and conservative phases that critics have traditionally taken to be Burgess’s anti-Orwellian philosophy of history is balanced in the novel by an alternative picture of perpetual war, which may even be seen as the beginning of the Orwellian end of history. The text overlays these two interpretations, and it is not possible decisively to favor one over the other. The protagonist’s final existentialist insight is that we must “try to live” whatever world and history it is we live in.

 

October 2025: Jan-Boje Frauen is an associate professor at Zhejiang International Studies University (ZISU), Hangzhou, PR China. Jan’s academic background is in English, American and German Studies and philosophy (Göttingen University & University of California Santa Cruz). His Ph.D. is in International Relations and he has successfully completed a postdoc in science philosophy (Xiamen University). Jan’s interests span a wide array of fields in his academic publications, ranging from abstract philosophical considerations about the nature and future of subjectivity in the physical world to practical politics and recent history. However, 20th-century dystopian fiction and the work of Anthony Burgess have been with him ever since he wrote his M.A. thesis on Burgess many years ago. He has published numerous articles on Orwell’s 1984.

This paper analyzes Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children within the framework of selected tenets of Karen Barad’s agential realism. With its focus on the inherent agency of matter and its uncanny creative power as well as intra-active entanglements among entities, Barad’s theory provides a context for a new reading of Rushdie’s magical realist novel. The project draws inspiration from quantum physics and points to the “spiritual” dimension of materiality while broadening the notion of agency to include all kinds of beings. Midnight’s Children exhibits a new materialist strand of the posthumanist perception of reality: the human body is depicted as embedded in intra-active connections with various kinds of entities, the human vs. animal opposition is questioned, and the non-human is appreciated. Most importantly, Rushdie accentuates the peculiar uncanny quality of matter. The paper argues that in Midnight’s Children human “magical” corporeality corresponds to the uncanny corporeality of the world.

 

October 2025: Malgorzata Kowalcze is an early-career researcher who holds a PhD in English literature and a Master’s degree in philosophy. Her principal research interests are in the fields of contemporary English literature, phenomenology, and posthumanism, with particular focus on New Materialisms. She is the author of William Golding's Images of Corporeality: Insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body (in Polish) as well as of a number of papers published in international journals. Her articles apply selected posthumanist theories and ecocriticism to the study of literature. She has guest-lectured about posthumanism in Spain, Italy, Romania, as well as Israel and Uzbekistan. In her current research project, she explores the connections between new materialism and the genre of magical realism. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies of the University of the National Education Commission, Krakow, Poland, where she teaches courses in the history of English literature and posthumanism.

Naipaul’s final two novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds, revisit the question of what it means to lead a valuable life with a greater patience than he previously displayed for the possibilities of worthwhile belonging. This essay offers a different way through which the complexity and irresolution of these under-discussed novels might be approached by placing them in dialogue with the philosophical discussion of modern identity. Building upon the work of Charles Taylor and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others, I argue that Naipaul’s late fiction reconsiders belonging and withdrawal as constituting a problematics of value. His late fiction takes seriously the difficulties of leading a life in relation to conflicting value systems, difficulties which are often overlooked in his own earlier writing and thinking.

October 2025: Leo Kadokura is a PhD candidate and modern literature tutor at the University of Oxford. His project examines the reciprocal relationship between literary innovation and changing constructions of English national identity across the 20^th century. He teaches 20^th-century English literature with an emphasis upon global and postcolonial approaches.

Book review

Book Review