Humanities, Volume 13, Issue 2

Ford Madox Ford famously intended his First World War tetralogy Parade’s End to have “for its purpose the obviating of all future wars”. But why do we engage in war to begin with? Modernist literature provides some provocative expla...

This paper is an exploration of play in tourism. It is situated in an approach to play and toys informed by phenomenological perspectives and theoretical insights drawn from existential anthropology. It argues that tourism and play are intimately lin...

“Sounding Grief in Henry Dumas’s ‘Echo Tree’” engages Dumas’s experimental short story about two youths discussing how to speak to the dead while on a Southern hillside at dusk. This article studies how this short...

Dorsal Practices is a process-based, interdisciplinary artistic collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer–artist Emma Cocker. This research enquiry explores the notion of dorsality and the cultivation of a back-oriented aware...

Borders and frontiers are often problematized in Agnieszka Dale’s Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), where mental borders seem to be more divisive than spatial boundaries. Many of these narratives feature Polish immigrants in Britain wh...

This article investigates two recent novels that deal with environmental and pandemic disasters: Severance (2018) by Ling Ma and Under the Blue (2022) by Oana Aristide. The analysis is based on ecocritical and posthumanist perspectives and on a divis...

This article investigates Dante’s engagement with one of the key and most controversial academic questions of the late Middle Ages: the beatific vision after the general resurrection. This essay focuses on Paradiso 14, where the character of Ki...

With a focus on refugees’ written personal narratives on refugee NGO websites, this paper examines ongoing transculturalism in Britain and its interplay with globalization and current international migration. Conceiving such personal narratives...

At the turn of the twentieth century, British women were able to qualify as medical doctors and enter professional practice for the first time. However, they often remained excluded from the specialist journals which were crucial for knowledge exchan...

In keeping with the title we have chosen for this follow-up volume to the Special Issue “Ethics and Literary Practice I”, we frame our introduction and summary of the essays collected here with a brief archaeology of modern literary reali...

This article aims to provide the reader with a brief introduction to Mário Filho’s O negro no futebol brasileiro (The Black Man in Brazilian Soccer). While emphasizing the importance of this classic book, I will discuss a few of its cent...

The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford’s Parade’s End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominate...

Behn and Centlivre used their comedies about the rivalry between an elder and a younger brother concerning an inheritance to make a political statement. Primogeniture was customary in early-modern England, and if an estate was entailed (rather than h...

In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sparking a subgenre that situates itself within multiple genres. I draw from the rebellious nature of nineteenth-century proto-feminists who tried to reclaim the female monster as...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between antiracism and black self-defense. We draw a distinction between liberal and political black self-defense and argue that antiracism can at most sanction a juridical and individualistic notion of self-...

In this article, I question the logic informing paradigms of trauma that ontologize and essentialize events, such as the Holocaust and chattel slavery, making them unique, incomparable exceptions that encapsulate or inaugurate the violence of Western...

This paper discusses the secrecies of border spirits within 20th century Finnish belief narratives. The aim is to explore how and in which contexts the imaginary aspects of border spirit narratives link to the idea of the “power of storytelling...

This essay adopts a stylistic approach to delineate the various—and varying—pragmatic effects inherent in the use and interactions of pronouns in Ford’s war prose. Ford’s singular use of pronouns is shown to be instrumental in...

Countless polls, studies and surveys conducted prior to and following the 2016 UK Referendum on Membership of the European Union confirmed immigration to be the key emotive issue for not only the British electorate, but several Western European natio...

This paper analyzes Mia Couto’s short story “O dia em que explodiu Mabata-bata” [The day Mabata-bata exploded] and its adaptation by Sol de Carvalho’s film Mabata Bata. Through an analysis of both versions, this study aims to...

This essay takes the notion of “flesh” as the point of departure for exploring the viability and contemporary relevance of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “ontological psychoanalysis”. Primary interlocutors will be Oc...

In 1980, reports of deep-sea jellyfish blooms in Norwegian fjords led researchers to investigate the problem. The helmet jellyfish, Periphylla periphylla, has since migrated far north into Arctic waters. This paper examines what happened when the jel...

This article argues that biodiversity conservation is primarily a social and cultural issue and only secondarily a scientific one. It explains the proxy logic of narratives about endangered species, which typically serve as proxies for community iden...

Shakespeare’s Macbeth has traveled a long way from its original milieu. This paper takes three major 21st-century Indian adaptions of Macbeth as its primary texts. The city of Mumbai in the west in Maqbool, an imaginary coastal Bengal village i...

In his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Ocean Vuong attempts to reweave the historical threads that have been brutally severed by American imperialism, forced migration and the imperatives of assimilation, as a practice of survival...

“Listing the Body: Embodied Experience and Identity in Autobiographical Graphic Illness Narratives” examines the popular use of lists in autobiographical graphic illness narratives to determine how they are used to address the subject&rsq...

This paper examines Philip Huynh’s short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of aff...