Humanities, Volume 14, Issue 7

The polyvalent nature of water is one often explored in fiction by Caribbean writers, and this paper will consider the ways that the representations of mermaids act as an extension of this exploration. Mermaids are central to a number of folk traditi...

This essay examines two hybrid poetic texts that emerged from a period of feminist activism in U.S. and global poetry communities from 2014 to 2017: the collaboratively, anonymously authored “No Manifesto” (2015) and the radically revised...

Amidst Hölderlin’s many well-known odes, elegies, and hymns, it is perhaps not surprising that Hölderlin’s occasional poem “To my Venerable Grandmother. On her 72nd Birthday” (Meiner verehrungswürdigen Grosmutte...

I argue that the universally accepted assumption that in realist fiction a character narrator’s narration contributes to their characterization needs to be complicated. Working with a conception of narrative as rhetoric that highlights readerly...

What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is–like water–to embrace movement in all its forms. We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on earth and yet few scholars give prolonged attention to how we are to sust...

In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing s...

The Harry Potter fandom community around the world prefers a universe of wizards and witches that includes all people, but also has concerns about the author’s perspective regarding gender identity. This disjunction paralyzes the cultural reade...

This essay argues that several of Bernadette Mayer’s major works foreground and develop experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time that governs daily material existen...

Ninety-five-year-old Doris Held, a great niece of Sigmund Freud, has been convening the Shakespeare Reading Group in Northampton, Massachusetts, my hometown, since she moved here in 2016. In the following essay, which is a personal response to my exp...

While poetry has long relied on musical and visual elements for its communicative power, numerous contemporary poets are drawing so dramatically on the resources of the visual arts and on elements of musical scoring that their poems become inter-arts...

Certain bodily functions are generally associated with distinct sexes and genders. When it comes to intersex individuals, the gendering of certain bodily functions as male or female plays a key role in determining their sexed corporeality and self-de...

In response to the increasing politicization and polarization of discourses around gender, sexuality, and the body, feminist theorists like Judith Butler call for feminism to strive toward flexibility and responsivity. This essay lays out some of the...

This article demonstrates the enabling influence of mixed-genre (or hybrid) poetries by North American women on recent poetry by Irish women poets, specifically in the past decade. Using a compositional/practice-based framework of interruption, the a...

Friedrich Nietzsche can be an awkward topic for classicists and ancient philosophers, especially since an important part of his heavily critical philosophy begins as a reaction to, and critique of, his contemporary classical scholarship with which he...

This essay reads Oji-Cree poet Joshua Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer in relation to hybridity. Whitehead’s poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with existing critical discussions of hybridi...

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American im...

This article examines the intersecting forces of gender, class, and education in early twentieth-century Britain through a feminist reading of Pip Williams’ historical novel The Bookbinder of Jericho. Centering on the fictional character Peggy...

Early modern theologians often cast female curiosity as both a moral flaw and an epistemic transgression. Aware of this suspicion, Teresa of Ávila professed to have renounced such dangerous impulses in her youth. Yet the persistent presence of...

Ford Madox Ford’s ground-breaking novel, Some Do Not…, one of the earliest fictional attempts at charting the cataclysmic impact of the First World War, was published in 1924 [...]

Love and intimate relations between German men and Norwegian women were a widespread phenomenon during WWII. Like in many other European countries, these women were stigmatized and humiliated both by the authorities and by the civilian population. In...