The late 1930s, the setting of Between the Acts, was a chaotic period, and at the same time saw the rapid growth of the mass media and the popular book market. The propagandistic public voices about the war and Fascism through the mass media, and the immense volubility and vulgarity of popular books intensified Woolf's concern about the problem of people's passive and uncritical thinking. And in times of crisis, she hoped that the public would be able to think critically without falling into delusion. Thus Woolf sought the form and the content to stimulate the reader's perceptivity and to challenge them to think. And as an artist, Woolf tried to resist grim realities between the wars by an intellectual writing, opposing political participation.
In Between the Acts, Woolf presents the problems issued from the mass media and commodity-driven books and seeks the possibilities to overcome them. Woolf seeks these possibilities by representing the process of the expansion of Isa's imagination and La Trope's parodic pageant-play. In addition, Woolf tries to represent her vision by formal experiments in the novel. Between the Acts is an experimental novel where a number of genres come together. The novel is composed of dialogue, poetry, play, and prose. This layered text challenges her own readers to strive to understand the true meaning of the text. Woolf provides the reader like the audience of the pageant-play with chances to pause, think and feel through the layered style and words which rouse “the imagination, the memory, the eye, and the ear” as she says in “Craftsmanship.” Woolf also shows interruption, shock and silence as main sources of occasion for a critical thinking that induces a change of consciousness for both the audience and the reader. Woolf's assertion of mental fighting is to think against the current and to explore new possibilities against chaotic reality. Like Woolf's declaration that “thinking is my fighting,” to write Between the Acts is her intellectual fighting. And she requires the reader to join in her intellectual fighting.

Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark is a set of stories dealing with a boy and his family living in a Catholic community in Derry, Northern Ireland. In the stories, the boy is the narrator, following and uncovering the traces of his family's secrets, which cannot be understood or fully explained. In the lives of his family, both public and private histories are linked. The stories of this family, who sacrificed their lives while keeping their secrets, reflect the realities of society in Northern Ireland since the 1920s.
Reading in the Dark uses folklore as a device with which to reveal the indescribably painful truths of the narrator's family. The oral and folkloric modes that are the features of a native, precolonial discourse are one of the vital narrative tools used by the nationalist community to resist the iniquities of its social and political subordination. Deane has the narrator, who has not directly experienced the tragic event, find and match the missing pieces of his family's oppressed secrets. Deane arranges the episodes in such a way that each story can interact with the others and reveal hidden stories. Therefore, the various folklores in this work are not separate, broken pieces, but rather parts of a complete mosaic. In other words, they are “Code Stories” that reveal indescribable traumas.

This study explores the representation of sex, gender and queer in adolescent literature focusing on two stories, Annie on My Mind and Boy Meets Boy. These novels deal with teens who fall in love and realize their sexual orientation and sexual identity.
Adults usually emphasize childhood innocence and purity. The innocent and pure child is related to romantic, ideal and fragile image which has been constructed by adults' desire to put them in their grasp. Unlike children, young adults are aware of their growing power and knowledge, with which they want to overcome the obstacles established by society and adults. Adults consider sexuality as a source of power, so they attempt to erase adolescent sexuality, especially homosexuality.
In Annie on My Mind, Liza and Annie fall in love when they meet in the museum. Liza tries to ignore her love desperately, feels guilty and uncomfortable, but at last, accepts her sexual orientation and her sexual identity as a lesbian against adults' oppression. Boy Meets Boy deals with a utopian town where gay, lesbian, and transgendered students are accepted without any prejudice. The boundaries of traditional gender are dissolved here. These two young adult fictions show not the negative aspects of homosexuality but the “small victory” and “possibility” that can be the foundation of new gay young adult novels.

This paper aims to expound the thematic, structural, and narratological significances of mirror images in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). Suggested by the recurrent mirror metaphors in the narrative is a world in which heterogeneous and often contrasting elements mirror one another within and across boundaries, invalidating the rationality of epistemological categorization evinced in the protagonist's quest for self-construction. Indeed, the protagonist's experience throughout the narrative can be characterized by repeated variations on a theme of castration. Such repeated frustrations entrap the invisible man in the structure of mise en abyme and debunks the supposed progression in the narrative proper, a problem further brought into recognition by the political structure of modern America that keeps its black population 'running in the loop.' It is after his literal plunge into the subterranean abyss that the invisible man through his self-reflection comes to terms with the reflective chaos of his identity and the reality. As a narrator, he elicits a creative possibility from his experience of this reflective chaos to construct his own discursive mirror on which are reflected the images of multiplicitous entities that compose America. Thus does the narrator transform what has previously imprisoned him into a modus operandi for liberating the consciousness not only himself, but also his race, the social minorities, and the nation transposed onto his reflective and reflecting narrative.

This paper studies the way an autobiographical graphic novel is realized within the context of historical events. As a sub-form of comics, the birth of the graphic novel marks a specific form of storytelling. Maus's use of visual images to serve narration in a book-length form is a unique approach to a seismic historical event such as the Holocaust. Complicated narrative structure and multiple temporal layers make Maus a (auto) biography deviant from the common pattern of autobiographies. The relationship of father and son plays a decisive role in leading the narratives. The father tells a story in a told-to story setting, while the son tries to keep his father from digressing from war narrative.
As a Holocaust survivor's son, the author traces back to his origin, trying to visualize and create his father's war experiences. The book intends to make a biographical sketch of the father and to record the son's own understanding of his father's story. The father tries to influence his son with his testimony, but their turbulent relationship intrudes into the story and undermines the father's authenticity.
Maus turns to the medium which calls for “viewing” as well as “reading” the story. The troubled relationship of the father and the son is dramatized visually and verbally. We can see how this story is told to the son and how this book is created by the artist-son. Readers also can see how the artist is burdened with his father's legacy through the use of graphic image. As the father has been bound in Auschwitz, there could be no other place for his son to go for his origin. Maus ends with the father's death. This marks a formal ending of the father's biography and also of an autobiographical search of the son inseparable from the Holocaust.

Phong Nguyen's The Adventures of Joe Harper revisits America in the Reconstruction era through the eponymous narrator-protagonist, who is a marginal character from Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. One of the most recent spin-offs of Huckleberry Finn, it is an interesting Asian American project to appropriate Twain's American epic while refusing to be reduced to and defined by the author's racial identity. Nguyen overlays the saga of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer with an Asian American presence and experiences but his investment in Asian American experiences is not only on account of his identity as Asian American but also by virtue of his inheritance of Twain's literary legacy. The significance of Joe Harper is both in its association with Huckleberry Finn and in its inheritance and development of Twain's literary legacy overall, including an interrogation of the Chinese question and the dismantling of Chinese stereotypes in American literature.
Introducing a memorable Asian American character, Lee, and embedding his history in Twainesque postbellum America, Nguyen considers the theme of racialized mobility, Asian American similarity, and the desexualization of Asian masculinity. The characterizations of Joe and Lee are to be compared with Twain's famous characters, and the larger context of American literature is also to be brought to bear on the consideration of Lee and Joe's journey and their interracial homosocial bond. Joe Harper features interesting twists of Twain's plots and characters, showing the ways in which Nguyen inherits and revises Twain's original tale, by way of the contemporary American imagination.

The ending of “Araby” has come to epitomize the notion of the Joycean epiphany, a sudden revelation about a deeper social reality sparked by a seemingly trivial everyday experience. This article challenges such pervasive assumptions about the story's epiphanic narrative structure in order to explore a far more troubling representation of Irish masculinity. Rather than marking a diachronic progression in perspectives from a young boy to a mature narrator, the story's plot structure depicts a synchronic viewpoint which imagines the two halves of the boy-narrator as inseparable: the adult narrator never progresses beyond boyhood and the young boy exhibits an unnerving precocity. Embodying a subordinated form of masculinity, the boy-narrator finds himself futilely struggling to assert his manliness in the face of an English masculine ideology associated with the late-nineteenth-century social purity movement. This results in the frustration of Irish masculine desires and the depiction of a hysterical Irish masculine body incapable of asserting autonomy and self-control. The story's ending does not imagine an epiphanic transition from a naïve boy to a mature narrator so much as it depicts the hysterical frustrations of a boy-narrator unable to establish authority over his own body and narrative.