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“You Two Are the Bad Guys!” Intergenerational Equity, Ecophobia, and Ecocentric Card Games in Disney’s Strange World (2022)
Franz Kafka, Roberto Bolaño, and the “Artificial Intelligence” of Posthumous Authorship
Sacrificial Love (Of Cyborgs, Saviors, and Driller, a Real Robot Killer) in the Comics Descender and Ascender
‘Enter Kent, Gloster, and Bastard’: Beginning King Lear and the Choice of the Audience

Journal Description

Humanities

Humanities is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on the meaning of cultural expression and perceptions as seen through different interpretative lenses. Humanities is published monthly online by MDPI.

Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
High Visibility: indexed within Scopus, ESCI (Web of Science), ERIH Plus, and other databases.
Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision is provided to authors approximately 33.7 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 4.9 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the first half of 2025).
Recognition of Reviewers: reviewers who provide timely, thorough peer-review reports receive vouchers entitling them to a discount on the APC of their next publication in any MDPI journal, in appreciation of the work done.

Impact Factor: 0.3 (2024)

Imprint Information Journal Flyer Open Access ISSN: 2076-0787

Latest Articles

16 pages, 2159 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Towards a Poetics of Interruption: The Influence of North American Mixed-Genre Poetries on Recent Irish Poetry

by Julie Morrissy

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 142; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070142 - 4 Jul 2025

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 article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies [...] Read more.

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 article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies in a number of exemplary texts, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson, and Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip in the North American context and ISDAL by Susannah Dickey, The Sun is Open by Gail McConnell, and MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello, among others. This comparative approach encompasses close readings and analysis of particular compositional approaches evident in both national contexts, in addition to the use of archival sources, news-reporting, and aesthetic strategies of interruption. The article suggests that “a poetics of material interruption” is at play in poetries on both sides of the Atlantic, gesturing towards marginalising forces of gender and colonisation, thus linking to themes prevalent in the above poetries in both Irish and North American contexts. The author poses a “poetics of material interruption” in the aesthetics and composition of the above mixed-genre poetries, perhaps arising from their interactions with the material conditions to which they respond. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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20 pages, 596 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thus Spoke… Friedrich Nietzsche on the Sophists

by Laura Viidebaum

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 141; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070141 - 4 Jul 2025

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 was intimately familiar, being one of [...] Read more.

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 was intimately familiar, being one of the most impressive ‘products’ of its development. Nietzsche was a thinker who in many ways turned the prevalent opinions about Greeks and contemporaries upside down, challenging his predecessors and successors with provocative readings of some of the most cherished philosophies in Western culture. This essay examines Nietzsche’s treatment of sophists—an important group of intellectuals whose reception had suffered greatly under the devastating judgement of Plato and Aristotle. While recent scholarship frequently regards sophists as philosophers, Nietzsche’s contemporaries were generally extremely dismissive of this group and regarded them in negative light as illegitimate thinkers and opponents to their contemporary ‘true’ philosophers (i.e., Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). This paper traces two different moments in Nietzsche’s philosophical output that exhibit closer engagement with the sophists: the ‘early’ Nietzsche regards sophists as innovators in language and style, the ‘late’ Nietzsche sees them as countercultural revolutionaries. Despite the fact that in both stages, sophists are introduced as champions for ideas that are central to Nietzsche’s own philosophical preoccupations (the development of language, the overthrowing of values), his treatment of this group of intellectuals appears at first sight superficial and surprisingly unenthusiastic. The paper will examine our existing sources on Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists and will suggest, ultimately, that his engagement with them was probably far more complex and multilayered than has been thus far assumed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ancient Greek Sophistry and Its Legacy)

12 pages, 211 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hybridity in Joshua Whitehead’s Full Metal Indigiqueer

by Heather Milne

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070140 - 4 Jul 2025

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 hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through [...] Read more.

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 hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through his engagement with posthuman and Indigenous futurism and through his development of Zoa, the hybridized trickster figure who combines the technological and the biological, who features so prominently throughout the collection. Indigiqueerness emerges in these poems as a hybrid identity positioned not only to survive but to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

13 pages, 208 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Against Erasure: Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead

by Jeannine Marie Pitas

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070139 - 3 Jul 2025

“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 immigrants journeying north and [...] Read more.

“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 immigrants journeying north and a subtle yet bold revision of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, with some words from the Friar’s 1552 text replaced by other words that reflect the realities of twenty-first century immigrants traveling north. Interspersed with de la Casas’s texts are persona poems in which we are invited to listen to the ghosts of immigrants who have suffered tragic deaths. This essay explores the ways that, crossing borders between time and space while drawing strength from his Christian faith, Rodrigo resists the erasure of Indigenous peoples, honors their journeys, and invites readers into solidarity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

14 pages, 232 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Jericho’s Daughters: Feminist Historiography and Class Resistance in Pip Williams’ The Bookbinder of Jericho

by Irina Rabinovich

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070138 - 2 Jul 2025

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 Jones—a working-class young woman employed in the Oxford [...] Read more.

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 Jones—a working-class young woman employed in the Oxford University Press bindery—the study explores how women’s intellectual ambitions were constrained by economic hardship, institutional gatekeeping, and patriarchal social norms. By integrating close literary analysis with historical research on women bookbinders, educational reform, and the impact of World War I, the paper reveals how the novel functions as both a narrative of personal development and a broader critique of systemic exclusion. Drawing on the genre of the female Bildungsroman, the article argues that Peggy’s journey—from bindery worker to aspiring scholar—mirrors the real struggles of working-class women who sought education and recognition in a male-dominated society. It also highlights the significance of female solidarity, especially among those who served as volunteers, caregivers, and community organizers during wartime. Through the symbolic geography of Oxford and its working-class district of Jericho, the novel foregrounds the spatial and social divides that shaped women’s lives and labor. Ultimately, this study shows how The Bookbinder of Jericho offers not only a fictional portrait of one woman’s aspirations but also a feminist intervention that recovers and reinterprets the overlooked histories of British women workers. The novel becomes a literary space for reclaiming agency, articulating resistance, and criticizing the gendered boundaries of knowledge, work, and belonging. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Cultural Studies & Critical Theory in the Humanities)

12 pages, 241 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Rebeldes con Pausa: Teresa de Jesús, Cervantes, Fray Luis, and the Curious Path to Holiness

by Ana Laguna

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 137; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070137 - 1 Jul 2025

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 curiosity in her writings suggests [...] Read more.

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 curiosity in her writings suggests a strategic redeployment—one that fosters attentiveness and subtly renegotiates ecclesiastical authority as she actively advances reform within the Carmelite order. Through life-writing and scriptural exegesis, Teresa cultivates a disciplined appetite for knowledge: an appetite that outwardly conforms to, yet quietly subverts, doctrinal anxieties surrounding women’s intellectual desires. Her use of curiosidad moves fluidly between sacred and secular registers—sometimes connoting superficial fascination, at other times signaling a deeper, interior restlessness. Resisting reductive interpretation, Teresa reveals a sophisticated and self-aware engagement with a disposition both morally ambiguous and intellectually generative. The same culture that once feared her intellect would ultimately aestheticize it. After her death, Teresa’s relics were fragmented and displayed in Philip II’s Wunderkammer, transforming her once-condemned curiosidad into curiositas, an imperial collectible. Reading Teresa alongside her posthumous interpreters—Fray Luis de León and Miguel de Cervantes—this essay explores how her radical epistemological ambition reverberated through Spanish intellectual culture. Spanning this cultural arc—from sin to spectacle, from forbidden desire to sanctified display—Teresa emerges as a masterful theorist and activist reformer of spiritual authority. In these expansive roles, she reveals the immense and often contradictory power that curiosity wielded in the early modern world. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Curiosity and Modernity in Early Modern Spain)

6 pages, 161 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Introduction: Ford Madox Ford’s War Writing

by Sara Haslam, Fiona Houston and Nur Karatas

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 136; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070136 - 25 Jun 2025

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 [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ford Madox Ford's War Writing)

15 pages, 238 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Postmemory Interpretations of Second World War Love Affairs in Twenty-First-Century Norwegian Literature

by Unni Langås

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 135; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070135 - 24 Jun 2025

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 this article, I discuss four [...] Read more.

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 this article, I discuss four postmemory literary works that address this issue: Edvard Hoem’s novel Mors og fars historie (The Story of My Mother and Father, 2005), Lene Ask’s graphic novel Hitler, Jesus og farfar (Hitler, Jesus, and Grandfather, 2006), Randi Crott and Lillian Crott Berthung’s autobiography Ikke si det til noen! (Don’t tell anyone!, 2013), and Atle Næss’s novel Blindgjengere (Duds, 2019). I explore how the narratives create a living connection between then and now and how they deal with unresolved questions and knowledge gaps. Furthermore, I discuss common themes such as the fate and identity of war children, national responsibilities versus individual choice, and norms connected to gender and sexuality. I argue that these postmemory interpretations of wartime love affairs not only aim to retell the past but to investigate the normative frameworks within which these relationships took place. My contention is that the postmemory gaze pays primary attention to the power of cultural constructions—of nationality, identity, and gender—as well as their context-related historical changes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Memories of World War II in Norwegian Fiction and Life Writing)

25 pages, 595 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Two Poles of the Romantic Paradigm: A Philosophical and Poetic Journey from “Faris” to “Merani”

by Gül Mükerrem Öztürk

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 134; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060134 - 19 Jun 2025

Romantic poetry is known to have engendered a potent discursive space in 19th-century Europe, wherein national aspirations, personal tragedies, and mythic narratives coalesced. This study examines the recurring images of the “galloping horse” and the “self-sacrificing cavalryman” in 19th-century Romantic poetry in the [...] Read more.

Romantic poetry is known to have engendered a potent discursive space in 19th-century Europe, wherein national aspirations, personal tragedies, and mythic narratives coalesced. This study examines the recurring images of the “galloping horse” and the “self-sacrificing cavalryman” in 19th-century Romantic poetry in the context of a common poetic myth shaped around the themes of national identity, spiritual transcendence, and historical destiny. The present study focuses on Adam Mickiewicz’s “Faris” and Nikoloz Baratashvili’s “Merani”, employing a comparative literary and philosophical approach to analyze these two works. This study reveals that “Faris” presents a messianic call around the ideal of freedom of the Polish nation, while “Merani” is structured as an individual tragedy and inner journey. Both poems are positioned within a broader poetic paradigm that can be called the “Faris” Cycle, and they can be compared thematically and imaginatively with the works of Goethe, Petőfi, Sully Prudhomme, and Vazha-Pshavela. This study explores the aesthetic and intellectual dimensions of intercultural interaction by analyzing the poetic transitions between the two poles of the Romantic paradigm: collective hope and individual melancholy, action, and inner intuition. By tracing the interplay between national poetics and universal archetypes, this manuscript investigates how such interaction facilitates the symbolic transformation of historical traumas. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)

16 pages, 262 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Way Poets Read Now

by Elizabeth Sarah Coles

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 133; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060133 - 19 Jun 2025

The way literature scholars read now has been under scrutiny for over a decade. The same long decade has seen an explosion in experimental literatures that make reading in the literary-critical sense a matter for poets: a poet’s hybrid, whose disturbance of [...] Read more.

The way literature scholars read now has been under scrutiny for over a decade. The same long decade has seen an explosion in experimental literatures that make reading in the literary-critical sense a matter for poets: a poet’s hybrid, whose disturbance of genre is claimed by publishers as the writing’s main attraction. This paper explores the disturbance of literary criticism in the work of contemporary North American poets, Maureen N. McLane and Lisa Robertson. Asking how these poets read now, the paper argues that an exchange of powers between analysis and performance reorients criticism toward a hybrid ‘dramatic’ mode, activist in its sensibilities and committed to a redistribution of agencies by style and form. Far from deepening the divide between creative and academic criticism, these poets model the significance of composition, prosody, and voice for critical writing of all kinds. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

17 pages, 244 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Who Is Mrs. McNab? A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to This Narrative Agent and Narrative Device in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

by Giuseppina Balossi

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 132; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060132 - 18 Jun 2025

In this article, I investigate the ontological status of the minor working-class character Mrs. McNab, the cleaner in “Time Passes", the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s tripartite novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf regarded this section as the connecting block between the two [...] Read more.

In this article, I investigate the ontological status of the minor working-class character Mrs. McNab, the cleaner in “Time Passes", the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s tripartite novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf regarded this section as the connecting block between the two outer blocks, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”, in which she aimed to depict an empty house, devoid of human presence, and to highlight the passage of time. This section has often been analysed by literary-stylistic criticism as if written from a non-anthropocentric worldview. However, the presence of a lower-class cleaner and the absence of the upper middle-class characters who predominate in the other two blocks has also raised much debate in the literary arena. Literary critics agree that this character is given a narrative voice, but how this voice functions, and whether this character is granted narrative agency in terms of the class issues and social relations in the period of transition between Victorian England and the early twentieth-century, is an issue which still remains open. Drawing upon cognitive stylistics, I suggest reading this character both as a category-based and person-based character, and as a narrative device. First, I carry out the analysis of the repetitive she-clusters and their semantic prosodies; then, through samples of the section “Time Passes", I analyse how viewpoint blending between narrator/author and character concur to grant narrative agency to Mrs. McNab and to what extent such agency may be limited by our perception of her through the social schemata of a servant, or whether such a perception may undergo a process of schema refreshment. Last, I suggest that this character may also be viewed as a narrative agent by means of which the reader can activate mental processes of TIME and SPACE blending between the three different blocks of the novel. This blending process allows for the completion of the narrative design of the novel: the journey to the lighthouse. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Interpretation of Fictional Characters in Literary Texts: History of Literary Criticism, Philosophy and Formal Ontologies)

18 pages, 293 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Interpreting Beatrice: The Critical Reception of the Character in the Last Twenty-Five Years

by Heloísa Abreu de Lima

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 131; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060131 - 17 Jun 2025

A central figure in Dante’s oeuvre, Beatrice, has been the subject of diverse interpretations and enduring critical debate across centuries. This study presents a comprehensive bibliographic review of Beatrice’s reception over the last twenty-five years, mapping the principal interpretive trends and methodological approaches [...] Read more.

A central figure in Dante’s oeuvre, Beatrice, has been the subject of diverse interpretations and enduring critical debate across centuries. This study presents a comprehensive bibliographic review of Beatrice’s reception over the last twenty-five years, mapping the principal interpretive trends and methodological approaches that have shaped contemporary scholarship. The analysis organizes these contributions into five key thematic areas: 1. investigations into Beatrice’s historical and allegorical significance; 2. readings informed by a biblical perspective; 3. analyses exploring the relationship between Beatrice and Dante’s conception of love; 4. examinations of her literary meaning, often through metatextual and intertextual perspectives; and 5. gender-based inquiries that situate Beatrice within broader discourses on femininity and medieval representation. Additionally, the paper considers alternative interpretations beyond these dominant categories. Finally, the study identifies points of convergence and divergence between critical approaches to Beatrice and those applied to another emblematic female figure, Fiammetta, offering a comparative perspective on their scholarly reception. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Interpretation of Fictional Characters in Literary Texts: History of Literary Criticism, Philosophy and Formal Ontologies)

14 pages, 1304 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Idea of Notational Ekphrasis in Words and Music

by Thomas Gurke

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 130; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060130 - 17 Jun 2025

This chapter will focus on the presence of musical notation in literary texts, their aesthetic, (inter-)medial presence and potentialities, in paradigmatic Modern short stories such as Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows” (1915), Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet” (1921) and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Music” (1932). [...] Read more.

This chapter will focus on the presence of musical notation in literary texts, their aesthetic, (inter-)medial presence and potentialities, in paradigmatic Modern short stories such as Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows” (1915), Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet” (1921) and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Music” (1932). What these stories share is a perception of music as sonorous moving forms, symbolic imagery or seemingly ‘dancing’ musical notation on the page. In introducing the term notational ekphrasis, I wish to differentiate these phenomena as overt and covert for the larger theory of intermediality. In doing so, I will show how these narratives negotiate musical notation, writing and iconicity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)

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16 pages, 257 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Ethics of Social Life in Sidonie de la Houssaye’s Louisiana Tales

by Christine A. Jones

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 129; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060129 - 13 Jun 2025

Creole writer Sidonie de la Houssaye (1820–1894) registered the threat of anglophone dominance after the Civil War on behalf of a host of characters drawn from the geographies and ideologies in and around her home in Louisiana. Her little-known literary tales depict the [...] Read more.

Creole writer Sidonie de la Houssaye (1820–1894) registered the threat of anglophone dominance after the Civil War on behalf of a host of characters drawn from the geographies and ideologies in and around her home in Louisiana. Her little-known literary tales depict the period as a cultural and linguistic border zone. In addition to the texture of Louisiana French and Creole heritage, the tales depict the vexed social dynamics of prejudice and fragility. In the context of this special issue on good and evil, the poorly known children’s tales offer insight into these pernicious tensions that persisted under the surface of moral victory after the Civil War. La Houssaye’s lessons for children take up the moral panic of a Louisiana reckoning with its legacies of racial violence and cultural erasure. This article argues that morality in these tales takes shape in interpersonal practices that can be learned to heal social ills. What I have called La Houssaye’s “ethics of social life” relies on education rather than condemnation to redefine human bonds. If a broader lesson emerges from the stories taken together, it suggests that structural change is slow to heal cultural wounds. We must ourselves be the agents of a healthier community. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Depiction of Good and Evil in Fairytales)

14 pages, 256 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Floating Texts: Listening Practices in the Accounts of Foreign River Expeditions in Brazil

by Fernando G. Cespedes

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 128; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060128 - 11 Jun 2025

Western written travel narratives are a byproduct of the privileging of vision as the primary means of knowledge production, an epistemology often imposed on indigenous peoples through colonial practices. In contrast, indigenous cultures in Brazil have long relied on listening as a central [...] Read more.

Western written travel narratives are a byproduct of the privileging of vision as the primary means of knowledge production, an epistemology often imposed on indigenous peoples through colonial practices. In contrast, indigenous cultures in Brazil have long relied on listening as a central way of engaging with their environment. In the present essay, I examine how listening practices appear in the written accounts produced by members of three foreign river expeditions in Brazil from the 16th to the 20th century. I analyzed travel accounts from Gaspar de Carvajal’s Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento del Famoso Río Grande (XVI century), Hercules Florence’s Voyage Fluvial du Tieté à l’Amazone (XIX), and Theodore Roosevelt’s In the Jungles of Brazil (XX). To explore what these travelers might have heard, I also collaborated with a sound designer to create a soundscape using actual recordings of local fauna and indigenous chants and music. The results show a variety of listening modes put into practice such as conquest-driven, scientific observation, contemplation, and hunting-focused and aesthetic appreciation. These narratives illustrate how European epistemologies reinforced Western dominance by shaping both colonial encounters and scientific approaches to Brazilian wilderness exploration. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Sound)

16 pages, 1049 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ritual and Assemblage: Reading Hybrid Elegy Through Changing American Death Practices

by Anastasia Nikolis

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060127 - 11 Jun 2025

In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and [...] Read more.

In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and other genres. This is most notable in the ever-increasing interest in the lyric essay but also in the constant revision of contemporary elegy as anti-elegy. In Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani defines anti-elegy in terms of its refusal of consolation and instead its seeking of more melancholic mourning. Subsequently, as noted by Bardazzi, Binetti, and Culler, “Elegy remains a poetic genre and yet, it has also developed a ‘mode of discourse’ that moves beyond its literary borders and finds its expressions in entangled intra-actions between the most diverse range of elegiac objects”. In the early 21st century, hybrid elegy represents the collision of two major changes in American culture: the changing nature of American death rituals and the increasingly intermedial literary landscape. Drawing on examples from Nox by Anne Carson and Ghost Of by Diane Khoi Nguyen, an elegiac version of the hyper-personalized American death ritual is inscribed in assemblages of images and text on the page. When read as a personalized American death ritual, the hybrid elegy materializes its own tradition and poetics, which are expressed in the poetic constraints of assemblage and recognizable in their reliance on elegiac repetition. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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16 pages, 266 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Myth of Mosca: Instances of Antirealism in Eugenio Montale’s «Xenia»

by Marco Tirrito

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 126; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060126 - 10 Jun 2025

The objective of this essay is to demonstrate the fictional nature of the character Mosca in Xenia I and Xenia II, the first two sections of Eugenio Montale’s collection Satura (1971), and to illustrate the strategies through which the author makes this [...] Read more.

The objective of this essay is to demonstrate the fictional nature of the character Mosca in Xenia I and Xenia II, the first two sections of Eugenio Montale’s collection Satura (1971), and to illustrate the strategies through which the author makes this possible. Although Mosca is inspired by the historical figure of Drusilla Tanzi, the poet employs a series of macrotextual, thematic, linguistic, and rhetorical devices to elevate the female figure to that of a poetic character. The study briefly addresses these various devices and seeks to refute the hypothesis of a diary-like memorial structure in Xenia, advocating instead for a “narrative–novelistic” structure, which leverages the typical mechanisms of narrative fiction. The contribution demonstrates how the combination of these strategies significantly influences the character of Mosca, ultimately leading to her absorption within the fictional world of narrative poetry. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Interpretation of Fictional Characters in Literary Texts: History of Literary Criticism, Philosophy and Formal Ontologies)

27 pages, 316 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hearing Written Magic in Harry Potter Films: Insights into Power and Truth in the Scoring for In-World Written Words

by Jamie Lynn Webster

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 125; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060125 - 10 Jun 2025

This paper explores how sound design in the Harry Potter film series shapes the symbolic significance of written words within the magical world. Sound mediates between language and meaning; while characters gain knowledge by reading and seeing, viewers are guided emotionally and thematically [...] Read more.

This paper explores how sound design in the Harry Potter film series shapes the symbolic significance of written words within the magical world. Sound mediates between language and meaning; while characters gain knowledge by reading and seeing, viewers are guided emotionally and thematically by how these written texts are framed through sound. For example, Harry’s magical identity is signalled to viewers through the score long before he fully understands himself—first through music when he speaks to a snake, then more explicitly when he receives his letter from Hogwarts. Throughout the series, characters engage with a wide array of written media—textbooks, letters, newspapers, diaries, maps, and inscriptions—that gradually shift in narrative function, from static props to dynamic, multi-sensory agents of transformation. Using a close analysis of selected scenes to examine layers of utterances, diegetic sounds, underscore, and sound design, this study draws on metaphor theory and adaptation theory to examine how sound design gives writing a metaphorical voice, sometimes framing it as character, landscape, or moral authority. As the series progresses, becoming more autonomous from the literary source, written words take on greater symbolic significance, and sound increasingly determines which texts are granted narrative power, whose voices are trusted, and how viewers interpret truth and agency across media. Ultimately, written words in the films are animated through sound into agents of growth, memory, resistance, and transformation. Thus, the audio-visual treatment of written magic reveals not just what is written, but what matters. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)

21 pages, 1162 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Eco-Rebels in Contemporary Ukrainian Children’s Literature as a Tool for Forming Readers’ Eco-Activity

by Tetiana Kachak and Tetyana Blyznyuk

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 124; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060124 - 10 Jun 2025

The issue of environmental protection and nature conservation has gained global importance, and its solution requires not only scientific and technological efforts but also the education of an environmentally conscious and active young generation. Children’s literature serves as an effective means for this [...] Read more.

The issue of environmental protection and nature conservation has gained global importance, and its solution requires not only scientific and technological efforts but also the education of an environmentally conscious and active young generation. Children’s literature serves as an effective means for this task. The article analyzes the eco-pedagogical potential of contemporary Ukrainian children’s literature through the prism of young eco-rebels. These characters inspire readers with their emotional power, eco-centric worldview, and bold resistance to environmental injustice. They contribute to the formation of ecological values in readers through emotional impact. Based on the ecocritical interpretation and typological comparison of Ghosts of Black Oak Wood by Bachynskyi and Taming of Kychera by Polyanko, we observe that the components of representation of the ecological topic are problematic eco-situation; behavior models, young eco-rebels’ actions and deeds; and eco-initiatives. The article further presents the results of ecocritical dialogues on environmental topics with 26 readers aged 14–15 (Ukraine). The methodology included interactive tools (e.g., Padlet) and surveys, which revealed that literary engagement promoted critical thinking, empathy, and personal eco-involvement. The findings confirm that children’s literature, when integrated with dialogic and participatory teaching methods, can serve as a powerful tool for shaping environmental literacy and civic responsibility in youth. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eco-Rebels with a Cause: Representations and Explorations of Politics and Activism in Children's and YA Literature)

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28 pages, 1735 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Scholarly Paradox Affecting the Two Evies: Librarianship, ‘Harmful’ Books, and ‘Perfection’ in Memes from The Mummy (1999) Media

by Rachel L. Carazo

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 123; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060123 - 9 Jun 2025

Meme studies that evaluate specific media characters are growing in popularity, and with the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Mummy (1999) in 2024, the scholarly gap involving memes related to The Mummy narratives became apparent. This article, therefore, focuses on memes depicting the character [...] Read more.

Meme studies that evaluate specific media characters are growing in popularity, and with the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Mummy (1999) in 2024, the scholarly gap involving memes related to The Mummy narratives became apparent. This article, therefore, focuses on memes depicting the character of Evelyn “Evie” Carnahan, who has been played by Rachel Weisz and Maria Bello. Through the analysis, which takes librarianship and gender perspectives due to Evie’s character, four meme categories emerge: (1) general librarian stereotypes, (2) the ‘dangerous/harmful book’ trope, (3) gender issues, and (4) the choosing of the ’real’ (better) Evie. This study finds that the professional and personal issues experienced by Evie in the films—and in the memes—are the same ones that remain problematic for women, librarians, and female librarians in the contemporary world. Moreover, rather than trying to choose between Evies, it is more useful to interpret Weisz’s and Bello’s renderings as critical parts of a whole—a complete woman, librarian, scholar, and adventurer—especially since both iterations of the character face stereotypes involving gender, maternal status, and career aspects. Full article

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