Humanities, Volume 14, Issue 2

In Marie-Elena John’s 2006 novel Unburnable, Lillian Baptiste returns to Dominica from the United States intending to confront the secrets and traumas of her maternal family line. The novel structures Lillian’s developing apprehension of...

At the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka (1883–1924), this paper explores the complexities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through the lens of Kafka’s literary and professional work, especially those relating to the dynamics of recogn...

Following the “intertextual turn” in adaptation studies, scholars of Shakespearean performance have embraced the interpretive possibilities offered by infidelity, focusing increasingly on the corrective potential of recent stagings and ad...

Since the 2022 death of Mahsa Jina Amini in custody of the Guidance Patrol or morality police in Tehran, Iran, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi can also function in the classroom as a comics touching point for human rights discourses around the world an...

This short concluding chapter reflects on the work of an ongoing collaborative academic project focused on the C18th home tour. Curious Travellers could be described as a ‘crucible’ project—a space in which different media, differen...

There is a longstanding connection between “curiosity”, “desire”, and “sexuality”. This connection can be found in texts as diverse as works of scripture like the Hebrew Bible and the Quran as well as in contempora...

This article proposes the Spanish Inquisition as a site of productive conflict between the polyvalent significations of curiosity in early modern Spain. On one hand, the Spanish Inquisition promoted curiosity through diligent inquiry, while on the ot...

In 1895, Ouida published a short story called ‘Toxin’ in the Illustrated London News which prompted an outraged response from the British medical establishment. In their words, this tale of an English surgeon who decides to murder his pat...

The final decades of the eighteenth century saw the significant expansion of botanical propagation and collections across the globe, both as an aesthetic corollary and to provide the underpinning resources for imperialism. The focus of this article i...

Are wartime dream diaries a testimony to violence and its impact on society and culture? Do dreams shape and respond to history and the collective remembrance of war? This article argues that wartime dream collections constitute a testimonial practic...

In European imaginings of the Islamic world, women incited intense curiosity and were often depicted by early modern writers as sexualized subjects and curious objects of male desire. However, this Orientalist fascination ignores the very curiosity o...

This pragmatic analysis of Richard III examines how conversational strategies, speech acts, and Gricean maxims reveal the true intentions and nature of Richard and other characters. While Shakespeare’s history plays are often explored through s...

When composer Jonathan Dove first read Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, he immediately saw its operatic potential. In a newspaper interview, he is quoted as saying that the novel ‘haunted me for years’. He was particularly affect...

The writings of Franz Kafka open, perhaps precisely because of their temporal distance to our present, a unique window onto the nexus of power, material, and the human that constitutes AI today. Anxiety and Unbehagen [discontent] are states of mind t...

This article is situated in the context of Victorian imaginations saturated with stories of crime and punishment and influenced by Romantic horror and terror aesthetics involving the sublime. The author delineates how the novel’s realism is aff...

This article argues that a focus on the day excursion as a particular form of journey, with its inherent limits in relation to scale, distance, and duration, enables us to bring recent critical thinking on microtravel as a form with “foundation...

Thinking about how animals are categorised in Mungo Park’s journey into the interior of Africa provides a deeper understanding of their significance in the early exploration experiences of Africa by Europeans during this era. As it stands, ther...

Differing English translations of Franz Kafka’s “Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People” have inspired diverse critical readings of the story. As a post-liminal text, a translation retrospectively highlights the ambiguity of the o...

This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse...

In the region of Northeast Asia, Korea has been identified as a nation that has a distinctive affinity for tigers. Koreans’ lives are deeply ingrained with emotions and thoughts related to tigers, even though they have completely disappeared fr...