Imagining beyond extinctathon: indigenous knowledge, survival, speculation - Margaret Atwood's and Ann Patchett's eco-Gothic

Both Margaret Atwood and Ann Patchett engage with issues concerning indigenous knowledge, biodiversity and survival. Margaret Atwood constructs a form of wilderness Gothic in Surfacing (1972) and Survival (1972), while in her darker eco-Gothic texts, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Year of the Flood, 2009; MaddAddam, 2013), she focuses on survival post holocaust. In her work she is influenced by indigenous knowledge and the awareness of imminent disaster should people fall out of harmony with nature, a threat enacted in these Canadian eco-Gothic dystopian fictions. This threat of extinction, of natural disaster based on arrogantly, deliberately or accidentally ignoring the importance of ecological diversity and of balance, of contestation, different voices and ways of being informs much of Atwood's work throughout her writing career and her everyday life. It is also of interest to many other women writers, including Ann Patchett from the US (State of Wonder, 2011), Alexis Wright from Australia (The Swan Book, 2013), Patricia Grace from New Zealand, (Baby No-Eyes, 1998), and Nalo Hopkinson from Jamaica/Toronto ("A Habit of Waste", 2001), each of whom engages with forms of indigenous knowledge, and recognizes the importance of diversity, exploring threats to survival and suggesting ways forward, and several of whom (including Patchett) evidence Atwood's influence on a younger generation of women writers. I should like to link Atwood's work to that of Ann Patchett, specifically her novel State of Wonder, which problematizes the involvement of non-indigenous people with the tribal behaviours, beliefs, and richness of the forest and jungle worlds in which they live in a balanced harmony

Houses of Death: Ruth Rendell's Domestic Gothic and the Emptying Out of Romance

A blackened, burned dress hangs limply in an upstairs wardrobe in a dusty, deserted house in the Fens in Ruth Rendell's The Brimstone Wedding (1996). This dress, like the airless, loveless, and love-lost houses in both The Brimstone Wedding and The Secret House of Death (1968) serves as a reminder of false romantic promises, the emptying out of desire into the mundane, the dangers and betrayals both of passion and of the everyday domestic. This is Rendell's domestic Gothic at its best. In both Rendell and her alias Barbara Vine's more psychological thrillers, the twin comforts of romance and a safe home and family give way to disturbance, discomfort, disease, and disruption. Romance is treacherous and betrayed. However passionate, stolen, turbulent, and filled with promise, it slips away at a single deceptive act or through the repetitive, mundane everyday. Its worst outcomes are cruelty following the end of love or the equally destructive, mind-numbingly banal winding down into lovelessness. Clandestine love nests are cleared out and shuttered up; suburban family life is devalued. Each is prone to absences, deceit, and death. Much of Rendell's domestic Gothic has echoes of Daphne du Maurier's earlier influential genre-shifting romantic crime Gothic Rebecca (1938), and this novel's haunting of our reading of Rendell's texts underpins the discussion of The Brimstone Wedding and The Secret House of Death. Both use strategies of women's crime entwined with romantic domestic Gothic to undermine thoroughly investment in romantic love, domestic bliss, and the security of the family home

Pasajes: la obra de autoras sudasiáticas en Gran Bretaña

Resumen Como Tania, el rebelde y afortunado personaje femenino que sitúa e Londres Meera Syal en Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), las escritoras asiáticas que publican en Gran Bretaña negocian ese pasaje tan difícil y a la par tan diverso entre múltiples identidades, historias y formas de expresión

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and Hoteliers’ Relationships: Do Social and Cognitive Relationships Matter?

This study aims to discover if social relationship as measured by shared value, duration and non-economic satisfaction and cognitive relationship as measured by task performance and economic satisfaction affect OTAs-hoteliers’ relationship, which is measured through trust and commitment. Data was collected from hotels’ operation managers, senior managers, financial executives, business owners, and partners through online surveys. A total of 208 usable questionnaires were returned from 577, resulting in a response rate of 36.04 per cent. The hypotheses were tested using SEM and mediation effects were tested and translated using Hair et al. (2014) nested structural model concept.  The results indicate partial mediation for cognitive domain - relationship commitment and full mediation for social domain - relationship commitment affects. Trust forms as the mediating variable

The effect of personality, emotional intelligence and social network characteristics on sales performance: The mediating roles of market intelligence use, adaptive selling behaviour and improvisation

Today’s account management is complex. The market is extremely competitive, technology is making alternatives and low-distribution methods possible, product lifecycles are accelerating, and customers are becoming less loyal and more sophisticated while at the same time, becoming more demanding. A key challenge facing firms is to determine how to deploy highly effective account managers in order to perform in this complex environment. In this dissertation, I tested whether account manager (1) personality traits, (2) social network characteristics, and (3) emotional intelligence affected their sales performance. I then tested whether these three independent variables affected sales performance through various mediating variables including: (1) market intelligence use, (2) improvisation, and (3) adaptive selling behaviour. Finally, I tested the model by comparing between the Muslim and non-Muslim account managers due to the understanding that Islamic values influence the personality and behaviour of its followers. The research setting involved Muslim and non-Muslim account managers in Malaysia who managed sales of financial products such as shares, bonds, unit trusts, foreign exchange, and futures markets. A combination of mail and in-person survey was used to collect the data. A pilot test was conducted prior to final survey administration. Eighteen randomly selected account managers participated in the pilot test. Results and observations from the pilot test were used to finalise the survey. The finalised questionnaire was sent to 2,122 account managers drawn randomly from the 29 registered finance companies, stock brokers, and banks in Malaysia. Four hundred ninety four usable questionnaires were returned yielding a 23.3 percent response rate. Of the 494 replies, 280 were from Muslim account managers while the remaining 214 were from non-Muslim account managers. Data was analysed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The Goodness of Fit Index GFI, Comparative Fit Index CFI, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation RMSEA were used as model fitness indicators. The missing data was analysed using Maximum Likelihood (ML). Overall, the results of the data illustrated strong support for the conceptual model. Market intelligence use and improvisation was found to mediate the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable. More specifically, market intelligence use and improvisation were observed to mediate the relationship between openness to experience and sales performance, conscientiousness and sales performance, and network size and sales performance. Adaptive selling behaviour was found to mediate the relationship between emotional intelligence and sales performance. Finally, no significant statistical differences were observed between Muslim and non-Muslim managers. The results of this study contribute to sales management literature by understanding the role of mediators in the personality trait-sales performance relationship, social network characteristics-sales performance relationship, and emotional intelligence-sales performance relationship. Consequently, these findings indicate several managerial implications for recruitment, training, work practices, internal and relationship marketing, and policies at the workplace