Humanities

This article considers Tom Hardy’s Taboo (2017) as an example of ‘Gothic historical television drama’, particularly in relation to ideas of the Regency Gothic romance. The central character, Hardy’s James Delaney, does suffer from what appear to be psychological hauntings, because he was responsible for the deaths of people being illegally traded as slaves by the British East India Company. However, more important to the conception of the ‘Gothic historical television drama’ is that the Gothic is used as a mode to indicate that the traumas presented are not just those of the individual characters portrayed, tucked safely away in the fictionalised past, but that they are wider social and cultural historic traumas which continue to be active in the present. This article argues that the use of the Gothic mode in the serial, exemplified by its themes, style, use of violence, and disruption of our expectations of historical dramas (particularly Regency dramas), works to indicate this continued resonance to the audience. Rather than just being the story of a haunted individual, it is the story of how we as a culture are still haunted by that imperial capitalist past, still suffering from its traumas.

In this study, Sabahattin Ali’s theatre play Esirler (2020) and Nihal Atsız’s novel Bozkurtların Ölümü (2010) are examined. The two works comparatively examine how the Chinese philosophical thought tradition is represented on the axes of wisdom, governance and death. The study brings together the approaches of comparative literature, imagology, philosophical hermeneutics and close reading. Thus, it discusses how the Chinese hetero-image and the Turkish self-image are constructed in the two texts. The figure of wisdom, wu-wei/inaction, symbolic governance, the perception of death as transformation, suggestive expression and the relationship between language/translation have been determined as the main categories of analysis. The findings show that Chinese thought is used more extensively in the play Esirler. Issues of wisdom, death and governance produce an ethical–political awakening and intellectual depth. In Bozkurtların Ölümü, however, Chinese thought is more limited. It becomes visible especially through the opposition established with the Chinese sage, language, intrigue and the Turkish warrior identity. Thus, a similar historical ground is reshaped through different ideological and aesthetic orientations. In this respect, the study opens an original field of discussion regarding the reception of Chinese thought in Turkish literature. As a result, the study reveals that China functions in Turkish literature not only as a historical rival or cultural other, but also as an intellectual field of contact.

This article reconsiders a recurrent interpretation of human–nature relations in premodern China: the claim that Chinese discourses emphasizing harmony or consonance with the natural world stood in fundamental tension with historical practices of agricultural and environmental transformation. I describe this interpretation as the “mismatch thesis” and trace its explicit formulation in Chinese environmental history and its more implicit presence in scholarship on early Chinese cosmology and religion. I argue that the thesis rests upon a deeper harmony/exploitation dichotomy in which harmony is associated with leaving nature substantially untouched, whereas cultivation, domestication, hydraulic intervention, and other forms of purposeful transformation are treated as evidence of exploitation. Drawing on William Cronon and Richard White, the article historicizes this opposition as a specifically modern formation indebted to Romantic aesthetics and later preservationist conceptions of wilderness. It then turns to neglected premodern Chinese materials concerned directly with environmental transformation, including traditions surrounding Yǔ the Great and agronomic works such as the Qímín Yàoshù, Sìshí Zuǎnyào, Wáng Zhēn Nóngshū, Biànmín Túzuǎn, Tiāngōng Kāiwù, and Qūtiánbiān. These sources articulate a different conceptual configuration in which human intervention may follow, assist, supplement, and bring to completion tendencies already operative within the natural world. The article thus proposes a preliminary conceptual rearrangement in the English-language reception of premodern Chinese environmental thought: harmony need not imply non-intervention, nor must environmental transformation necessarily be conceptualized as exploitation.