Humanities, Volume 9, Issue 4

Prevailing scholarship on pastoral literature often overlooks its political and radical dimensions, relegating the form to particular manifestations of the pastoral in Elizabethan England. World literature, however, exhibits a wider range of the past...

To explore Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s rise from obscure rural Haiti to become the nation’s first democratically elected president—by a landslide—is to enter into a world and a swirl of events that reads like surreal fiction or m...

Recent portrayals of ancient Egypt in popular culture have renewed attention concerning the historical accuracy of how race and racism appear in representations of antiquity. Historians of the antiquity have robustly dismissed racist claims of whitew...

North American larping (live-action roleplaying) is a collaborative performance that encourages critical and creative engagement with cooperative, improvisational narratives. Nevertheless, larping often relies on problematic engagements with race and...

In this article, I draw on William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands to think about what François Laruelle has termed a “generic humanity.” This generic humanity broadens and expands our ethical obligations towards those who ha...

Ecocritical scholarship has always had pedagogical ambitions. It is commonly assumed that education based on ecocritical readings of literature will change the attitudes and actions of pupils and students and thus contribute to forming environmentall...

Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s exquisite exploration of citizenship and displacement across two millennia draws on sources from ancient Greece and Rome as well as modern empires, including the U.S., and proposes two creative heuristic devices—t...

Taking a cue from Hirt’s paper, this contribution is mainly focused on contemporary juridical debate on the movement of people, and the legal status of foreigners in the Nation-State and the implications in terms of legal guarantees, of the con...

In literary narratives by Nava Semel (1954–2017) and Etgar Keret (b. 1967), both Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, readers encounter the kinds of searching questions about inheriting the burden of traumatic inheritance, witnessing, and p...

Enduring legacies of racial violence signal the need to reconcile with the past. This paper comparatively explores various speculative works that either reinforce a paradigm of White innocence that serves to deny such legacies or center critical dial...

“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We are en...

Located at the territorial border of powerful states in the world, Okinawa has been a politically contested place because of the long and disproportionate hosting of the US military installations in Japan. Historically, the effects of military occupa...

This paper discusses how local-level food systems, social remediation and environmental restoration can be linked to increase stability and build resilience inside extremely vulnerable communities. Specifically, it details how food culture entwines w...

This article aims to uncover the tensions and connections between Lisa Appignanesi’s autobiographical work Losing the Dead (1999) and her novel The Memory Man (2004) and to point out that, in spite of belonging to different genres, they share s...

Christine Montalbetti’s 2009 novel, Journée américaine, depicts a road trip, as Donovan travels from Oklahoma to visit his college friend, Tom Lee, who lives on a ranch in Colorado. While the road trip provides a basic structure f...

In this article, I argue that William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch engages in a “perverse aesthetics” that is analogous to Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology. The novel’s main themes of consumption and control ar...

“Banned Books Behind Bars” is a social justice project that aims to shed light on the complex problem of information access in prison and to explore potential prototypes for possible solutions to some of these obstacles, in particular acc...

Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is widely said to have been rejected by W. H. Smith, but there is no doubt that this did not happen. The letter sent to Wilde by the publisher strongly indicates that W. H. Smith contemplated remo...

This article examines two neo-Victorian novels by American writers—Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood (2000)—which “write back” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case ...

This article seeks to examine how the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali explores and rethinks ideas of “home” and travel in his poetry. Ali’s poetry is a layered affective terrain in which his complex, entangled emotions surrou...

At the advent of the Anthropocene, life is being pushed to its limits the world over; we are currently living through the Sixth Mass Extinction to occur since multicellular life first emerged on the planet 570 million years ago. Evolutionary biologis...

Live action role players make the imaginative worlds of tabletop games manifest through collaborative storytelling and embodied play. Escaping the everyday, these communities could radically reimagine culture and challenge oppressive ideologies. Inst...

Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions...

In recent years, scholars in broadly considered posthumanities have attempted to reconceptualize politics in order to better account for the role of nonhuman entities in political processes. In this context, the article instantiates a dialogue betwee...

Building on Patrick Brantlinger’s description of imperial Gothic fiction as “that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements”, this article compares the narrative formula of adventure fiction to two tales of haunting produced in...

There are available by now many arguments concerning the intrinsic and endemic value of the humanities, and both from a medievalist and a modernist perspective. Similarly, there continue to be many critics who would not mind the elimination of the hu...

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha, one of the most translated works of literature, has seen over twenty different English translations in the 406 years since its first translation. Some translators remain more faithful than others....

The Atlantic maritime winds and waves, as natural forces, shaped the physiography of Sines, a peculiar rocky cliff cape at the western Portuguese coast, as well as cultural processes have shaped its spatial arrangement since ancient times. Despite it...

Set in Germany during the denazification processes following World War Two, Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides (1995 play, 2001 film) pits German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler against a relatively uncultured American interrogator, Steve Arnold,...

While the Beats can be seen as critical actors in the environmental humanities, their works should be seen over the longue durée. They are not only an origin, but are also recipients, of an environmentally aware tradition. With Geoffrey Chauce...

This article analyses the ways in which British Jewish writing has responded to the watershed events of 2016: the vote to leave the EU in the United Kingdom, and the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA. It argues that such a response dem...

Proceeding from Australia’s specific situation as a settler colony, this article discusses how the ambivalences and fissures of settler subjectivity shape processes of homemaking. Settler homemaking depends on the disturbance of Indigenous Aust...