-
“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)
Latest Articles
Rebeldes con Pausa: Teresa de Jesús, Cervantes, Fray Luis, and the Curious Path to Holiness
Humanities 2025, 14(7), 137; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070137 (registering DOI) - 1 Jul 2025
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure A1
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
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
Abstract
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)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
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
Abstract
►▼
Show Figures
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

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
Unbearable Birth: Natality in Louise Glück’s Averno
by
Reena Sastri
Humanities 2025, 14(6), 122; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060122 - 9 Jun 2025
Abstract
This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion
[...] Read more.
This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion for wonder at the unlikely chance of having been born, and the contingency and possibility for beginning something new associated with natality by Hannah Arendt and others. In Glück’s work, the theme of natality comes across in poems concerning pregnancy, birth, infants, children, and mothers. Several of her poems feature a hybrid identification as child and as mother, a hybridity that enables the apprehension of natality and that leads to a mode of poetic speech that originates in, and is imbricated with, listening as an alternative to knowing. This essay examines some of Glück’s earlier poetry in these terms before turning to her 2006 volume Averno, which retells the myth of Persephone. Undeniably preoccupied with death, Averno is, I argue, equally concerned with birth, mindful that human finitude itself is double or hybrid. Although many poems cast Demeter as a smothering, possessive mother, Averno, at key moments, takes into account a mother’s perspective as well as a child’s. This hybrid identification gives rise to the emergence of an unexpected lyric voice that both listens and sings.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)
Open AccessArticle
Curious Knowledge: Diego Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana as a Cabinet of Curiosity
by
Julia Domínguez
Humanities 2025, 14(6), 121; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060121 - 4 Jun 2025
Abstract
This essay examines Diego Valadés, a Franciscan missionary, as a Renaissance “curioso” whose life and work were driven by insatiable inquisitiveness and a desire to acquire knowledge. Through his Rhetorica Christiana, Valadés, much like collectors of cabinets of curiosities and Wunderkammer, celebrated
[...] Read more.
This essay examines Diego Valadés, a Franciscan missionary, as a Renaissance “curioso” whose life and work were driven by insatiable inquisitiveness and a desire to acquire knowledge. Through his Rhetorica Christiana, Valadés, much like collectors of cabinets of curiosities and Wunderkammer, celebrated the richness of indigenous cultures in New Spain. Following the Renaissance ethos of curiosity-driven exploration that fostered a global pursuit of knowledge, Valadés’ work functions as a textual cabinet of curiosity, reflecting his experiences in New Spain and incorporating indigenous flora, fauna, and cultural elements unfamiliar to European readers. His text, originally intended to be titled Suma de todas las ciencias, embodies a new and modern knowledge system that is encyclopedic and proto-scientific in nature. However, Valadés’ intellectual pursuits were constrained by the conservative court of Philip II, where intellectual freedom often faced scrutiny. His work bridges the Renaissance’s intellectual curiosity with mnemonic practices, illustrating how collecting and memory techniques were intertwined in expanding the global understanding of the natural world.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Curiosity and Modernity in Early Modern Spain)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
When Nature Speaks: Sacred Landscapes and Living Elements in Greco-Roman Myth
by
Marianna Olivadese
Humanities 2025, 14(6), 120; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060120 - 4 Jun 2025
Abstract
This article explores Greco-Roman mythology through the lens of ecocriticism, focusing on how sacred landscapes and natural elements were imagined as animate, divine, and morally instructive forces. In ancient Mediterranean cultures, nature was not merely a passive setting for human action but a
[...] Read more.
This article explores Greco-Roman mythology through the lens of ecocriticism, focusing on how sacred landscapes and natural elements were imagined as animate, divine, and morally instructive forces. In ancient Mediterranean cultures, nature was not merely a passive setting for human action but a dynamic presence—rivers that judged, groves that punished, and mountains that sheltered or revealed. Texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Georgics, and Homer’s epics present nature as both sacred and sentient, often intervening in human affairs through transformation, vengeance, or protection. Forests, springs, and coastlines functioned as thresholds between human and divine, civilization and wilderness, mortal and eternal. By analyzing these representations, this article reveals a rich tradition in which nature teaches, punishes, guides, and transforms, long before ecological consciousness became a formalized discipline. Drawing connections between classical literary landscapes and contemporary environmental concerns, the article argues that myth can inform today’s ecological imagination, offering an alternative to extractive, anthropocentric paradigms. Recovering the reverence and narrative agency once granted to nature in classical thought may help us rethink our ethical relationship with the environment in the age of climate crisis.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue World Mythology and Its Connection to Nature and/or Ecocriticism)
Open AccessEditorial
Notes Towards a Phenomenological Anthropology of Travel and Tourism
by
Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts
Humanities 2025, 14(6), 119; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060119 - 4 Jun 2025
Abstract
This paper is an introduction to the Humanities Special Issue on ‘The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism’. It is made up of four sections, the first two of which provide the main focus of discussion. We start by considering the idea of travel
[...] Read more.
This paper is an introduction to the Humanities Special Issue on ‘The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism’. It is made up of four sections, the first two of which provide the main focus of discussion. We start by considering the idea of travel ‘in comfort’, which, as we show, has been historically bound up with cultures of the mobile virtual gaze. Comfort, by this reckoning, reflects a phenomenological disposition whereby the act of gazing at an object of spectacle is understood not in purely visual terms but as a spatial and somatic prefiguring of that object as an object of spectacle. A phenomenology of comfort, we argue, steers consideration towards the way forms of travel or tourism practice reflect embodied or disembodied modes of engagement with the world. This line of enquiry brings with it the need for more fine-grained analyses of questions of experience, which is picked up and developed in the second section. Here, we examine some of the important and foundational work that has helped push forward scholarship oriented towards the development of a phenomenological anthropology of travel and tourism experiences. Accordingly, a key aim of this paper, and of the Special Issue it provides the introduction to, is to push further and more resolutely towards these ends. The third section is an overview of the nine Special Issue contributions. The paper ends with Kay Ryan’s short poem, ‘The Niagara River’, a quietly foreboding meditation on the hazards of travelling in too much comfort and of reducing the world to little more than ‘changing scenes along the shore’, all the while remaining blind to what awaits downstream.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
Antigone’s Claim: Hölderlin’s (and Hegel’s) Insights into a Legal and Genealogical Conundrum of the Tragedy
by
Kathrin Holzermayr L. Rosenfield
Humanities 2025, 14(6), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060118 - 3 Jun 2025
Abstract
This approach to Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ famous play modulates in significant ways the usual readings in which Antigone has become, over the centuries, an example of an early claim for natural law. Hölderlin’s insights inaugurate a new and innovative view that significantly
[...] Read more.
This approach to Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ famous play modulates in significant ways the usual readings in which Antigone has become, over the centuries, an example of an early claim for natural law. Hölderlin’s insights inaugurate a new and innovative view that significantly affects this understanding. His version points to the authentically Greek legal aspect of Antigone’s position as an epicler daughter, claiming her dynastic prerogative to take over the palace and her father’s legacy. Hölderlin’s clues guide us to a reading that restores the tragic dilemma beyond the black-and-white Christian polarization of saintly Antigone and evil Creon and enhances both the heroine’s and Creon’s ambiguities in this rich and ironic text.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
Highly Accessed Articles
Latest Books
E-Mail Alert
News
Topics
Topic in
Businesses, Economies, Humanities, Land, Sustainability, Tourism and Hospitality, Urban Science
Human–Environmental Relations: Ecotourism and Sustainability
Topic Editors: Tamara Gajić, Minja Bolesnikov, Aleksandar ErcegDeadline: 15 July 2026

Conferences
Special Issues
Special Issue in
Humanities
Bridging Gaps in Critical Queer Genealogies: Transformative Emergent Scholarship in Queer Studies
Guest Editors: Justin Sprague, Liam Oliver LairDeadline: 15 July 2025
Special Issue in
Humanities
Economic Criticism in Literature and Culture
Guest Editor: Gayle RogersDeadline: 31 July 2025
Special Issue in
Humanities
Imagining the Law: American Literature and Justice
Guest Editor: Richard SchurDeadline: 1 August 2025
Special Issue in
Humanities
Nineteenth-Century Gothic Spiritualisms: Looking Under the Table
Guest Editors: S. Brooke Cameron, Rachel M. FriarsDeadline: 15 August 2025