Open research questions in Short Stories in Global Literature
30 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 4,086 Short Stories in Global Literature papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
This means that healers are not limited to addressing aches and pains, but also provide teachings and support to address what they understand to be the root of the disease itself. 28 At the same time, we believe that it is impor- tant to understand how Indigenous principles, as drawn from a small sample of stories from diverse communities and Nations, may provide a path for further research into how to promote safety in a decolonizing way.
Enduring colonial violence: Trauma, community and resistance in Katherena Vermette’s The Break · 2026 · DOIIn this spirit, I investigate plant life in The Beet Queen not only because the title of the book tellingly suggests the central role of plant life, but also because the novel’s recurrent images of plant life and their relationship to each character need to be examined thoroughly to appreciate how Indian the novel really is.
To the author's credit, Mackinnon demonstrates throughout that the "social value" (338) of the labor expended by Indigenous and Metis women in fur trade economies has been inadequately documented by contemporary historical actors and historians alike, due largely to the "unidentifiable monetary value" (338) of this labor.
Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed by Doris Jeanne Mackinnon · 2020 · DOIThese languages, I argue, extend an underexplored tradition of linguistic invention in black women’s literature, in which the imagining, coding, and naming of made-up languages are used to subvert discourses of sexuality, embodiment, and desire, and to make space for new forms of intimacy and erotic connection between black women.
“Put My Thang Down, Flip It and Reverse It”: Black Women’s Interstitial Languages of Body and Desire · 2017 · DOI” Tetrault also unearths documentation that Seneca Falls was so little known in its day that delegates to an 1853 women’s rights convention considered authoring a declaration of [End Page 242] rights.
The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 by Lisa Tetrault · 2016 · DOIAt this juncture, it is safe to say that her position in the Norwegian canon is secure, but there is still much that remains unexplored in her writing, even—as the following analysis will demonstrate—in her most widely known work, the novel Amtmandens Døttre (1855; The District Governor’s Daughters).
Little is known about her apart from her familial relations to three Connecticut clergymen: she was the granddaughter of the great Joseph Bellamy of nearby Bethlehem, the daughter of the celebrated Levi Hart of Preston, and, for the last three years of her life, the wife of an obscure Calvinist named Amos Chase.
This story takes place, not in the glitz and glamour of Europe with fast cars, great shopping and an avid and enthusiastic paparazzi, but rather in the desert of Central Australia where you need a good four-wheel drive to get home on the dusty roads, where shopping is limited to the basics at the local store, but where people are still avidly following the life and times of the ‘Princess of our hearts’.
Keeping up with Princess Diana in the Late 90s: A story of denied literacy in remote Central Australian Indigenous communities · 1970 · DOIThis is not a comfort exactly — Offred’s fate remains unknown, and whatever happened to her happened — but it is a formal acknowledgment that dystopias are historical formations with beginnings and ends, not eternal conditions.
Drawing on existential feminist thought, the paper argues that the female characters experience a profound sense of displacement, becoming existentialist exiles in their own worlds where freedom, selfhood and authentic existence remain elusive.
Emotional Exile and the Female Self: Existential Feminism in M. T. Vasudevan Nair’s Mist · 2026 · DOIIn all cases, moments of ‘hermeneutical enlightenment’ may pass after reflection on such mixed consequences and after further research on the social cat egories in question.
Scarce studies, however, have been devoted to the dislocation and uprootedness of female immigrants and to the nostalgic feelings they have experienced during their absorption into American reality.
Nostalgia and Creative Urge as Double-Edged Swords in the (Auto)Biographical Writings of Rose Gollup-Cohen · 2023 · DOIIn doing so, she reorients readers toward a critical examination of the role that both gender and race play in histories of mental and physical health—an aspect that is sorely understudied within most scholarship on yoga.
After escaping from a Georgia plantation through a literalized Underground Railroad, the adolescent female protagonist soon learns that freedom remains elusive in states further north, even those where slavery has been abolished.
Attempting to voice the unspeakable, painful history of infanticide in Haiti, the novel, though understudied, makes a significant literary contribution in contemporary historical fiction.
Although many iterations of the mammy in the last two centuries have received analytical attention, the construction of this figure as asexual or undesiring and undesirable remains to be interrogated.
In a time when worlds, communities and subjects are increasingly presented as ‘vulnerable’, much remains to be said about the distinctly feminine shapes of ‘vulnerability’; weakness, softness, permeability, a sense of being affected, imprinted upon, or entered and shattered.
“I Did Not Learn Their Name”: Female Characters in the Short Fiction of Ralph Ellison Keith Byerman (bio) Discussion of the status of women in Ralph Ellison’s fiction has been limited to the representations in Invisible Man.
]" a previously under-recognized "propelling force in [the] narrative[s]" (144) of these, and likely other Old Icelandic works as well.
The Foster Mother's Language: Anti-representation, Pseudo-feminization, and Other Consequences of a Mistake of Gender Charm in <i>Heiðarvíga saga</i> · 2011 · DOI2 Little is known of the specificity of the Mohawk woman’s unrest, or of the particulars of her life, as she is referred to only as “the mother.
I had not understood at the time how much had to be cleared away of false sentiment and distorted values, let alone the necessity of discovery of some real and significant vision.
Add to this the resonance in Lives of Girls and Women and As I Lay Dying between two mothers named Addie and two daughters named Del(l), as well as a focus in both novels on the relationship between maternity and language, and one wonders why they have not been compared more often.
The Two Addies: Maternity and Language in William Faulkner's<i>As I Lay Dying</i>and Alice Munro's<i>Lives of Girls and Women</i> · 2006 · DOI) This compelling public biography reminds us how African American politics was not merely a contest between men over self-help versus civil rights, nor was women's activism limited to the maternalist nonpartisanship of some white women.
Much of the strongest work in contemporary literary criticism has grown from the recognition that the categories of class and gender alone are insufficient tools for theorizing social oppression.
Working toward "Unity in Diversity": Rape and the Reconciliation of Color and Comrade in Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth · 2000The fiction of the late 1920s and early 1930s in Australia seems to exhibit an expansion of concern with abortion and reproductive misadventure that warrants investigation.
'Me Operation:' Abortion and Class in Australian Women's Novels, 1920s-1950 · 1996
Most-cited papers in Short Stories in Global Literature
- The Colonial/Modern [Cis]Gender System and Trans World Traveling · Hypatia · 2020 · 49 citations
- Still, Nothing: Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility · Feminist Review · 2018 · 42 citations
- "My Mother Was Much of a Woman": Black Women, Work, and the Family under Slavery · Feminist Studies · 1982 · 40 citations
- A New Genealogy of “Intelligent Rage,” or Other Ways to Think about White Women in Feminism · Signs · 2021 · 36 citations
- Femmebodiment: Notes on queer feminine shapes of vulnerability · Feminist Theory · 2016 · 36 citations
- Searching for Full Vision: Writing Representations of African American Adolescent Girls · Research in the Teaching of English · 2015 · 35 citations
- (In)-justice: An exploration of the dehumanization, victimization, criminalization, and over-incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada · Punishment & Society · 2021 · 32 citations
- Freedom Dreaming in a Broken World: The Black Radical Imagination in Black Girls’ Science Fiction Stories · Research in the Teaching of English · 2021 · 32 citations
- Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief · Wicazo Sa Review · 2009 · 31 citations
- Found poetry – Finding home: A qualitative study of homeless immigrant women · Journal of Poetry Therapy · 2012 · 28 citations
Most recent work
- Abolition Feminist Storytelling as Methodology: Lessons Within the Stories We (Re)Tell About Punishment and Violence · Feminist Criminology · 2026
- Five Generations, One Household: An African American Autoethnography of Family Systems, Identity, and Intergenerational Resilience · Journal of Family Theory & Review · 2026
- Relational Time, Female Transgenerational Bonds and Herstory in Linda Grant’s <i>The Story of the Forest</i> (2023) · Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction · 2026
- CHARACTERIZATION AND CHARACTER DESCRIPTION IN THE NOVELLAS 'FLOATING BRIDGE', 'NETTLES', AND 'WHAT IS REMEMBERED' · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Regenerating Indigenous Identity: A Reading of In Search of April Raintree · SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH · 2026
- Resistance, conquered identity and the struggle for self-reinvention: A psychoanalysis of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street · African Research Reports · 2026
- Hermeneutical Rebellion as Lordean Self-Care: Resisting Identity Harm Through and Against Breast Cancer Survivor Narratives · Hypatia · 2026
- Gothic Feminism in Angela Carter's Short Stories · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- On Love and Trouble in Zora Neale Hurston’s Urban Stories · Studia Philologica · 2026
- Sociodrama for Our Time. By Rosalie Minkin. Selfpublished, 2013. · The Journal of Psychodrama Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy · 2026
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