While Kurdish classical poetry has a long history of many centuries, the modern Kurdish narrative discourse, that is, the Kurdish novel and short story, rises in the early decades of the twentieth century. Reviewing the life of some of the most influential Kurdish poets shows that they usually crossed the borders between the different parts of Kurdistan within the frame of the Ottoman and Iranian empires. These poets mainly served the Kurdish ethnic awareness and literary heritage. Having been deprived of a Kurdish nation-state, modern Kurdish narrative discourse encounters a dilemma as far as the national setting of its narratives is considered. Contrary to the earlier Kurdish poets who could wander to different parts of Kurdistan, the modern Kurdish novelists provide their imaginary characters with such an opportunity of crossing the strictly defined national borders of the modern nation-states in which the Kurds live. These characters, suffering from the lack of a defined national identity and a state of their own, challenge the borders between various parts of Kurdistan by crossing them. The wandering feature of the classical poets and the imaginary communities of the Kurdish novelists are among the distinguishing characteristics of the Kurdish literature in the past and the modern era.

This essay follows scenes of threatened sexual violence in three canonical novels by women, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Willa Cather’s My Àntonia (1918), and Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). By focusing on these scenes in isolation, I draw out their affective descriptions and resist the resolution of plot in an attempt to evince modern literature’s capacity to represent violence against women and to rupture the normalization of rape culture. In these scenes, Wharton, Cather, and Hurston use narrative innovation to dramatize these threats: Wharton using long, elliptical sentences to signal both Lily’s fear and her denial; Cather placing Jim Burden in the victim’s place, thereby reminding us not only of the vulnerability of women but also of the sexual abuse of boys by older men; Hurston using animal possession as a figure for Tea Cake’s increasingly jealous and violent attitude.

This chapter examines the evocation of New Amsterdam within contemporary novels of New York. You would think that, considering its humble, yet extraordinary beginnings as New Amsterdam, New York’s earliest history as a multicultural, multilingual Dutch settlement might have generated its own literature. However, this origin point is largely absent within American literary history. By assessing how New York’s Dutch origins have been featured in contemporary literature, this chapter examines Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Teju Cole’s Open City and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. These novels are examined for how New Amsterdam is set as the scene for New York’s present and its future.