2019 March - 60 articles
This essay identifies and examines a narrative structure—here called the sterility plot—that is shown to recur in British mid-19th century psychiatric texts and imaginative literature engaging mental science. Treating physicians Bucknill...
As Paul Fussell has shown, the First World War was a watershed moment for 20th century British history and culture. While the role of the 36th (Ulster) Division in the Battle of the Somme has become a part of unionist iconography in what is now North...
‘My Country; A Work in Progress’ written and arranged by the poet Carol Ann Duffy is a verbatim play that uses interviews conducted with people from various regions in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland to explore the causes o...
Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was frequently troubled by poor health, and her mid-life episode of life-threatening illness (1870–1872) when she suffered from Graves’ disease provides an illuminating case study of the...
General George Armstrong Custer remains one of the most iconic and mythologized figures in the history of the American West. His infamous defeat at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn largely defines his legacy; historical scholarship and popular r...
This article reviews the complications in understanding some of the conflicting tenets of American working-class ethos, especially as it unfolds in the college classroom. It asserts that the working class values modesty, straightforwardness, and hard...
A seemingly inescapable feature of war is the demonization of the enemy, who becomes somehow less human and more deserving of death in times of military strife, which unsurprisingly helps to justify the violence against them. This article looks at th...
Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to t...
This paper offers a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s first four novels, The Wind From Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966) that centers on their portrayal of environmental transformation. Drawi...
This article offers an ecocritical analysis of Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) and Ewan Morrison’s Tales from the Mall (2012). Through a combination of the world-ecology paradigm, feminist approaches, and queer theory, I argue that these t...
Today, Sweden enjoys a positive international reputation for its commitment to human rights issues, for instance, in relation to the recent migrant crisis. Abuses committed by the Swedish state against certain ethnic groups within the country are les...
“We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be very strange sit-coms too, like the inside of our heads.”—J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors. Ballard’s prediction about the possibility of projecti...
In the Netherlands and Flanders, more or less a fifth of all children’s books are translations. The decision of what gets translated and funded is, for the most part, informed by adults’ decisions. This paper offers a first step towards a...
Patrick O’Brian inspired this work, with his 1934 book of chronicles “Beasts Royal,” where he gives a voice to animals. Therein, among other animals, we find Skogula, a young sperm whale journeying with his family group across the S...
Digital humanities has a Shakespeare problem; or, to frame it more broadly, a canon problem. This essay begins by demonstrating why we need to consider Shakespeare’s position in the digital landscape, recognizing that Shakespeare’s promin...
‘@Shakespeare: Trying to keep incognito with #WSCongress16 in town. If a scholar sees me I just say, “Hullo, lovely to meet you. I’m Peter Holland”/@TwasFletcher: Tell them you’re Me!’ (1 August 2016). This article...
This article examines the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) recent focus on digital ‘innovation’ by analysing the relationship between their emerging digital-focused business practices and digital performance practice for The Tempes...
Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), prolific writers from the seventeenth century, came of age in one of the most difficult times in British history. Blair Worden, an eminent historian, writes, “The polit...
In this article we focus on the analysis of a 2014 Austrian–French documentary We come as friends (110 min), written, directed, and produced by Hubert Sauper. We come as friends is a documentary about a corporate, polycentric, contemporary colo...
This essay maps out a constellation of early modern English feminine gatekeeper tropes that represent female sexual consent and imagine a gendered Cartesian dualism. This trope’s inherent mind–body divide grants the female subject’s...
Situating close readings of Nina Bouraoui’s latest novel Standard (2014) within the context of a critique of neoliberalism and of the ongoing geopolitical uprisings in the Arab world, this essay presents the novel as a fine literary and affecti...
This article excavates the ethos surrounding hip hop, starting from the proposition that hip hop represents a distinct yet pervasive expression of contemporary black subjectivity, which crystalized in 1970s New York City and has since proliferated in...
The paper aims to discuss the multifaceted links between the marine environment of the Gulf of Finland and the representations of the large complex of cultural heritage related to the city of St. Petersburg. The paper is based on a spatial imaginary...
Analyzing Burdekin’s Swastika Night Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale the article aims to examine the relations between space, gender-based violence, and patriarchy in women’s writing. H...
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has been notorious since its first publication in 1948, but rarely, if ever, has it been read in light of its immediate historical context. This essay draws on literature, philosophy, and anthropology from the period t...
Oglala Lakota ethos manifests a pre-Socratic/Heideggerian variant of ethos: ethos as “haunt”. Within this alternative to the Aristotelian ethos-as-character, Oglala ethos marks out the “dwelling place” of the Oglala Lakota peo...
After centuries of denial, suppression and marginalization, the contributions of Afro-Hispanics/Latinos to the arts, culture, and the Spanish spoken in the Americas is gradually gaining recognition as Afro-descendants pursue their quest for visibilit...
This study investigates the use of and attitudes towards, Spanish in the multilingual Republic of Equatorial Guinea, the only African country with Spanish as an official language. The Spanish dialect of Equatorial Guinea is an understudied area, alth...
Like many of her contemporaries, Margaret Fuller had great hopes for the West. The Western lands, open for America’s future, held the promise of what America could become. In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller sketches what she hopes America will beco...
This paper discusses the study of Chartist and working-class literatures, noting that the pronounced development of aesthetic criticism in these areas uncomfortably corresponds with the rejection of “aesthetics” in other fields. Chartist,...
Some World War I poems show an enemy soldier up close. This choice usually proves very effective for expressing the general irony of war, to be sure. However, I submit that showing interaction with the enemy also allows the speaker space to wrestle w...
Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of t...
In Tropic of Orange (1997), Karen Tei Yamashita builds an expansive narrative on the premise that the Tropic of Cancer shifts mysteriously from its actual latitude, barely north of Mazatlán, México, to that of L.A.’s latitude: fro...
This article analyzes portrayals of paramilitary fighters in Irish literature from the Troubles (1968–1998). While the conflict between Protestant loyalists and Catholic nationalists has provoked many literary responses, most focus on noncombat...
This essay explores the concept of enemy in Emilio Lussu’s WWI memoir Un anno sull’Altipiano (A Soldier on the Southern Front, 1938). The memoir portrays the conflict on the oft-forgotten Alpine Front, where Italian and Austro-Hungarian a...
The aim of this article was to reflect on how settings are used as narrative practices in the work of Renata Viganò, one of the most famous Italian female writers. Drawing upon Well’s concept of geo parler femme, this article examined th...
In the common imagination, home denotes the physical space where human beings find protection, intimacy, and bliss. Home is a place of affection and warmth. This article proposes to analyze the perception of the place called home within Christie&rsqu...
The Egyptian government displaced all Nubian villages to build the High Dam. New generations of Egyptian Nubians still identify as displaced and live in a nostalgic virtual space that carries a rendition of a paradise-like old Nubia. I investigate th...
This article builds upon the scholarship of Alina Helg and other historians working on questions of racial identity in Colombia, and the Caribbean section of that country more specifically. Colombia is unique in that its identity is indigenous, Afric...
Svalbard’s cultural heritage sites are important remnants of an international history in the High North. Cultural heritage in the Arctic is being impacted by climate and environmental change as well as increased human activity. Tourism is a pot...
The poetry of Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has received a considerable number of critical responses, among which spatial analysis occupies a minor position, although her texts explore complex relationships between subject and context. Drawing from...
With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist traditi...
This paper investigates the circulation of ideas regarding the city among selected countries in Latin America. It discusses convergences between academic and scientific institutions and investigative weakness in partnerships between Brazil, Argentina...
In today’s “liquid” society, boundaries and limits are shifting or disorienting: belonging to no place, not knowing where ‘home’ is, underlines the sense of uncertainty and in-betweenness experienced by people. This cont...
The following article discusses Gabriel García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Specifically, this article will discuss the parallel ways that two novels critique the nature of postcoloni...
Following the recent call to ‘put the ocean’s agitation and historicity back onto our mental maps and into the study of literature’ (Yaeger 2010), this article addresses the histories and cultures of marine energy extraction in mode...
The gradual consciousness of the scientific and economic riches of marine life is rooted in the legacy of some pillars of scientific production and dissemination in institutions such as natural history museums, aquariums, and maritime stations. Nowad...
This article focuses on Richard Ford’s short story “Calling,” collected in the volume entitled A Multitude of Sins (2001). It consists of the detailed recalling by a first-person narrator, from the vantage point of adulthood, of a d...
Research on the coast has highlighted the role of mass tourism as a driver of littoral urbanization. This article emphasizes the role of public policy by focusing on Languedoc-Roussillon in Mediterranean France. This littoral was the target of a stat...
Animals, writes Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘exist in a state of perpetual vanishing’: they haunt human concerns, but rarely appear as themselves. This is especially notable in contemporary Scottish fiction. While other national literatures ofte...
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