2025-12-29
Isabel González-Díaz
This article explores the mixed and distressing feelings represented in Kacen Callender’s 2020 young adult novel Felix ever after , drawing on affect theories to highlight the potential that resignifying negative feelings can have for transgender youth. Along with reflecting on the transformative force of assertively managing bad feelings like anger or fear, the article analyses how the novel underscores the empowering effects that finding resilient care webs can have for young transgender individuals, particularly when confronting transphobia and questioning their identity.
2025-12-29
Alejandro Sánchez Cabrera
This article introduces neoaustenism as a metamodern-feminist sensibility rooted in Jane Austen’s fiction and paradigmatically articulated today through Taylor Swift’s songwriting. While other metamodern-rooted discourses such as neoromanticism revive a largely male genealogy of longing and melancholy, neoaustenism retrieves a specifically feminine grammar of irony, self-reflexivity, and relational ethics. Grounded in affect theory and the ethics of care, the concept reframes vulnerability as a shared resource that turns personal wounds into collective agency. The article first situates neoaustenism within metamodern oscillation and the affective turn. It then traces a gendered genealogy of sentiment from Austen’s heroines to Swift’s layered lyrical voices, showing through close reading how Swift’s songwriting translates Austenian irony and care into pop rituals that foster horizontal communities through reflective nostalgia, audience co-authorship, and embodied practices. Finally, this article argues that neoaustenism holds potential beyond Swift and offers a critical horizon for (re)imagining feminine identity and resilience in neoliberal culture, thus inviting further interdisciplinary inquiry.
2025-12-29
Jorge Diego Sánchez
This article studies Indian writing in the English language published in English newspapers (Indian, Bangladeshi, British, US) during the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak in India (March 22–May 25, 2020). The selected authors include Arundhati Roy, Tishani Doshi, Anuradha Roy, and Prayaag Akbar, to illustrate the transnational consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak in different areas of India and analyse the narratology of resilience to articulate ethical knowledge against regional, national, and international stereotypes. I propose the concept transformative hope as an oppositional complaint (Bargués et al., 2024; Braithwaite, 2004; Giroux, 2004) against political and representational systems of domain articulated against the capitalist politics of who can afford to survive. This study shows a possible subversive resilience (Bracke, 2016; Darías-Beautell, 2020; Fraile-Marcos, 2020a; O’Brien, 2015) that, together with writing and reading, can implement alliance, rather than affiliation, and praises an ethical and transformative hope that dissents against the resilient appropriation of neoliberalism to benefit from tragedies like Covid-19.
2025-12-29
Ana Mª Fraile-Marcos
Taking as a starting point the idea that literature can function as an epistemological medium in its capacity as a testing ground where experiments in the good life can be imagined, aesthetically realized, and critically interrogated, this article turns to speculative fiction as a genre suitable for the exploration of cognitive frameworks that may lead to hopeful futurities amidst the ground-shifting transformations of the Anthropocene, supporting not only the continuity of life, but also the good life. It examines the representation of the ethics of care at the Anthropocene’s tipping point in recent speculative fiction from Turtle Island/Canada, namely, Métis Cherie Dimaline’s young adult novel The marrow thieves (2017) and its sequel, Hunting by stars (2021), and settler Canadian Rebecca Campbell’s short story cycle, Arboreality (2022). It argues that they critique the modernist nature/culture divide underpinning the disasters of the Anthropocene while reworking the notion of the good life from alternative Indigenous and new materialist relational approaches.