This article offers a close reading of W.B. Yeats’s Easter, 1916 (Online Appendix 1), arguing that the poem not only commemorates the Easter Rising of 1916 but stages a process of identity revaluation through which ordinary, unevenly regarded individuals are transformed into figures of collective renown. It approaches this process through identity group theory, a framework that understands identity groups as organised through shared narratives, regulatory mechanisms and economies in which finite resources – including time, energy, reciprocal resources and renown – are allocated and exchanged. Read through this lens, the refrain: ‘All changed, changed utterly:’ (l. 15) ‘A terrible beauty is born.’ (l. 16) signals not only a political rupture but a reordering of symbolic value. Beginning from a social world of ‘polite meaningless words’ (l. 8), the poem traces how sacrifice, naming, commemoration and poetic inscription revalue individuals and incorporate them into a shared symbolic order without entirely erasing Yeats’s prior judgements of them. The article argues that Yeats’s characteristic ambivalence is therefore structurally significant: the poem simultaneously performs and interrogates the conversion of mortal sacrifice into enduring collective value. Identity group theory consequently illuminates how Easter, 1916 operates not merely as a representation of collective memory but as an active mechanism in the formation, regulation and contestation of collective identity. Contribution: Building on critical accounts of Yeats’s ambivalence, the article clarifies how this tension operates as the conversion of mortal expenditure into enduring value. Easter, 1916 thus emerges as a meditation on how collective identity is formed, stabilised and contested through memory and poetic form.
Imposed naming, un-naming, misnaming and renaming are central instruments that structure and reproduce racial domination. Focusing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, this article reads both novels as archives in which enslaved people enter narrative and record only as partial traces, reduced to initials, diminutives, role-labels or an owner’s name, thereby disrupting kinship ties and genealogical continuity through ordinary modes of reference and enumeration. Naming and its variants thus function as a documentary procedure: a quotidian classificatory logic whose categories stabilise identity in institutional form and codify persons as property. Departing from readings that tend to treat naming primarily as metaphor or as an index of character psychology, the analysis draws on onomastics, literary theory and historically grounded scholarship on enslaved-naming practices to show how both novels portray naming as a site of agency and counter-archival record-making. This article examines struggles over identity and memory waged at the level of naming itself, in which epistemic control is naturalised and resistance assumes legible form. Contribution: This article shows how fiction can represent naming as a documentary procedure by which slavery produces legibility, property relations and archival traceability, and it investigates counter-naming as a fragile mode of memory, kinship, identity and resistance.
Similes have been widely studied in stylistics and literary studies, yet the place of similes in classical rhetoric is contested, and their role in shaping an IsiXhosa literary voice remains under-researched. This study examines similes in Ncedile Saule’s Ukhozi Olumaphiko [The Great Eagle] (1996), an award-winning IsiXhosa thriller from South Africa’s early democratic era, noted for its thematic complexity, stylistic density and rarity in IsiXhosa prose fiction. It addresses three questions: (1) How do similes contribute to the authorial stylistic voice in Ukhozi Olumaphiko? (2) How do they support the psychological and expressive portrayal of characters, especially Mfazwe? (3) How do they index and articulate cultural and individual identity? The study employs a literary-stylistic framework, especially expressive and psychological stylistics, integrated with critical discourse analysis (CDA), combining CDA with a descriptive quantitative analysis of 52 purposively selected similes from the 131 found in the novel. Contribution: The findings show that similes operate as central stylistic and discursive resources rather than decorative ornaments. They intensify narrative meaning, affect and cultural resonance; construct a distinctive authorial voice through vivid imagery, culturally grounded analogies and recurrent expressive patterns; mediate the representation of Mfazwe’s psychological states, heightening emotional complexity and reader empathy; and signal cultural and individual identity by drawing on indigenous knowledge, lived experience and situated social realities. Similes thus shape the novel’s stylistic architecture, influencing narrative progression, characterisation and meaning in IsiXhosa fiction, reinforcing themes and authorial intention, enhancing reader engagement and consolidating Saule’s literary identity.
This article examines the evolution of female characters in Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns and Child of War (written under his pen name Ben Chirasha). Across these texts, the narrative trajectory shifts from the constraints of deeply patriarchal societies towards the assertion of conspicuous matriarchal agency. The diminishing hold of patriarchal stereotypes in these works functions as a literary protest against the subjugation, precarity, marginalisation and violence experienced by women. Through close reading, the study traces the gradual evolution of female characters whose transformations dismantle entrenched patriarchal structures designed to restrict women’s growth. In moments of awakening, some characters actively rebel against their husbands, whom they come to identify as agents of oppression. Such acts of resistance reposition women in the social hierarchy, enhancing their visibility and disrupting the traditional patterns embedded within patriarchal cultures. The analysis reveals that equitable access to education emerges as a decisive catalyst in the emancipation of women from subordination. Education not only equips women with the tools to challenge toxic, men-dominated relationships but also exposes the structural disadvantages inherent in accepting such conditions. Without this enlightenment, an uneducated woman may misinterpret her suffering as an inherent element of womanhood. Contribution: This article shows how education and empowerment are narratively produced in Chinodya’s fiction as motifs that shape character development and thematic resolution. Through close reading, it demonstrates how the evolving representation of female agency not only reconfigures patriarchal paradigms within Zimbabwean war narratives, but also gestures toward the narrative possibilities through which such agency becomes thinkable.
