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 bimonthly 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 32.4 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 5.9 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the first half of 2024).
- 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 (2023)
Latest Articles
Between Sensibility and History: The Count de Rethel (1779) by Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040101 - 26 Jul 2024
Abstract
The Count de Rethel: An Historical Novel (1779) can be ascribed to Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806) as a translation of Anecdotes de la cour de Philippe-Auguste (1733) by Marguerite de Lussan. The action is set at the court
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The Count de Rethel: An Historical Novel (1779) can be ascribed to Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806) as a translation of Anecdotes de la cour de Philippe-Auguste (1733) by Marguerite de Lussan. The action is set at the court of Philip II of France, known as Philip Augustus, at the time of the war with King Henry II and the Crusade with Richard I, known as the Lionheart. This inspired revival of fictionalised medieval history heralding romanticism in the age of sensibility refashions the codes of chivalry according to the aesthetics of the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay focuses on the interplay between fiction and history, between the present of writing and the rewriting of history through Cavendish’s translational prism, featuring the Middle Ages as a golden age of heroism and the Count de Rethel as a paragon of ancient virtue set against contemporary men of fashion.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Eighteenth-Century Novel and History)
Open AccessArticle
“Except for This Hysteria, She Is the Perfect Woman”: Women and Hysteria in An Inconvenient Wife
by
Nina Marie Voigt
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 100; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040100 - 25 Jul 2024
Abstract
Historical fiction can be understood as a hybrid space: it represents the past and simultaneously allows a consideration of the culture it is written in. Under the assumption that novels help address cultural shifts and attitudes, this paper aims to investigate how, why,
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Historical fiction can be understood as a hybrid space: it represents the past and simultaneously allows a consideration of the culture it is written in. Under the assumption that novels help address cultural shifts and attitudes, this paper aims to investigate how, why, and with what implications medical discourses surrounding women are depicted in fiction. This paper explores the manifold conceptualizations of hysteria in An Inconvenient Wife written by Megan Chance in 1998, arguing that the novel presents a complex view of discourses of medicalization. Its central claim is that the novel constructs hysteria not only as a tool of oppression but also as a tool with which to escape social constraints and patriarchal control. Through understanding historical fiction as not merely commenting on the past, but as addressing contemporary issues, the text adds to discussions centering on intersections of medicine and literature.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Medicine)
Open AccessArticle
“From Out the Portals of My Brain”: William Blake’s Partus Mentis and Imaginative Regeneration
by
Annalisa Volpone
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 99; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040099 - 23 Jul 2024
Abstract
Partus mentis (the parturition of the mind) brings together the following two significant aspects of Romantic culture and ideology: the exploration into human generation, and the process of how imagination forms an idea and makes the mind creatively productive. This article suggests that
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Partus mentis (the parturition of the mind) brings together the following two significant aspects of Romantic culture and ideology: the exploration into human generation, and the process of how imagination forms an idea and makes the mind creatively productive. This article suggests that analyzing William Blake’s portrayal of imagination through the partus mentis trope can enhance our comprehension of how he illustrates and employs this faculty in his works. In Blake’s partus mentis, the analogy between the brain and the womb is pivotal. The brain is seen as a host for ideas that are conceived through imagination, and once they are brought to life, they become art. This is a vital component of Blake’s cosmogony, tying into his personal reinterpretation of biblical Genesis and his concept of the Human Form Divine. It also includes his response to medical theories and practises regarding generation and life. This article pays close attention to the medico-cultural discourse that was contemporary to Blake, and its wide use of the ‘analogy’, which defined the episteme of the long eighteenth century. The analogy approach was later challenged by the ‘epistemology of the visual’, which emphasized the use of anatomical atlases, wax models, and dissections for direct experiential insights into bodily functions and processes, particularly of the brain and the womb. This article argues that Blake is able to transcend these two epistemologies while harnessing specific elements from each.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Medicine)
Open AccessArticle
The Enduring Shadow of “Maternal Emptiness”: From Hitchcock’s Distorted Mother Image to Contemporary Cinema’s Maternal Representations
by
Kexin Lyu, Zhenyu Cheng and Dongkwon Seong
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 98; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040098 - 22 Jul 2024
Abstract
Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, is renowned for his unique cinematic style and profound insights into the complexity of human nature. Among the various female characters in his films, the mother figure holds a particularly significant place. This article proposes the concept
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Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, is renowned for his unique cinematic style and profound insights into the complexity of human nature. Among the various female characters in his films, the mother figure holds a particularly significant place. This article proposes the concept of “maternal emptiness” to describe the predicament of the mother figures in Hitchcock’s films, where they are often depicted as distorted, dark, and somewhat lacking in maternal essence. Drawing on psychoanalytic and feminist film theories, especially the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Laura Mulvey, this study aims to deconstruct Hitchcockian “maternal emptiness” and explore its deep-rooted causes. Through a systematic examination of the mother figures in Hitchcock’s filmography, this article identifies the following three main categories: the mother roles of blonde women, the mother roles of female protagonists, and the mother roles of male protagonists. Close textual analysis reveals that these mother figures, despite their apparent diversity, share a common plight—a deviation from the maternal essence of love, care, and nourishment. This “maternal emptiness” is further traced back to Hitchcock’s childhood traumas, the patriarchal ideology in the cultural context, and the changing status of motherhood in modern society. By engaging critically with existing Hitchcock scholarship, including the works of Tania Modleski, Paul Gordon, and Slavoj Žižek, this study situates the concept of “maternal emptiness” within the broader discussions of motherhood in cinema. It explores how Hitchcock’s representation of mothers both reflects and challenges contemporary understandings of maternity. Furthermore, this study examines the enduring influence of Hitchcock’s maternal representations on contemporary cinema, analyzing films such as Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” (2017) and Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” (2018) to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of “maternal emptiness” in modern film discourse. The study concludes by considering the legacy of Hitchcock’s maternal representations in contemporary cinema, demonstrating the ongoing relevance of the concept of “maternal emptiness” in film analysis and its potential for reimagining maternal subjectivity in cinematic representation.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Film, Television, and Media Studies in the Humanities)
Open AccessArticle
From Agni to Agency: Sita’s Liberation in Arni and Chitrakar’s Graphic Retelling of the Ramayana
by
Dhruvee Sinha and Zeeshan Ali
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 97; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040097 - 22 Jul 2024
Abstract
The traditional interpretations of the Ramayana have been critiqued for preserving and promoting patriarchal gender structures by emphasising masculine heroism and often portraying female characters as unidimensional symbols of selflessness, purity, and honour. This paper analyses how Samhita Arni and Chitrakar’s graphic novel
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The traditional interpretations of the Ramayana have been critiqued for preserving and promoting patriarchal gender structures by emphasising masculine heroism and often portraying female characters as unidimensional symbols of selflessness, purity, and honour. This paper analyses how Samhita Arni and Chitrakar’s graphic novel Sita’s Ramayana offers a retelling that foregrounds Sita’s perspective to question and reinterpret the social constructs. By analysing the text through a feminist literary lens, this paper examines how the novel adapts the traditional narrative to provide centre stage to Sita’s various encounters with instances of oppression. The findings reveal how Arni’s retelling employs unique aesthetics that combine texts and Chitrakar’s patua art illustrations to question the traditional male-centred versions, making this novel a part of a broader structure of feminist reinterpretations that aim to highlight female agency in cultural canons. This paper examines Sita’s stance against societal expectations for women, such as self-sacrifice, while also tracking her personal growth, which is symbolically represented by her reunion with Mother Earth. The novel contributes to the ongoing tradition of literary revisionism by offering a nuanced critique of the patriarchal foundations within classical myths. This is underscored by the novel’s reinterpretation of the epic in a way that points out the plasticity of the Ramayana, which can be reshaped to support more progressive views, encouraging discourse on existing gender norms present in contemporary societies.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
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Open AccessArticle
Chinggis Khan, Women, and the West: Literary and Cinematic Remakes of the Secret History of the Mongols
by
Benedetta De Bonis
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 96; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040096 - 18 Jul 2024
Abstract
The name of Chinggis Khan and the women who contributed to the rise of his empire have long been associated with barbarism in the West. However, the rediscovery of the Secret History of the Mongols, a medieval Mongolian epic chronicle, in 1866,
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The name of Chinggis Khan and the women who contributed to the rise of his empire have long been associated with barbarism in the West. However, the rediscovery of the Secret History of the Mongols, a medieval Mongolian epic chronicle, in 1866, and its numerous translations circulating since the mid-20th century has led Western scholars to a total revaluation of these figures. This paper analyses the representation of Chinggis Khan and his queens in the literary and cinematic adaptations of the Secret History of the Mongols produced in Europe and the United States, specifically in English, French, and Italian. It critically engages with E. W. Said’s works, and with postcolonial and gender studies. The article argues that the portrayal of the Mongols has become increasingly positive in 20th and 21st century remakes of the epic chronicle, highlighting how the West reconsiders its relationship with cultural and gender otherness in an era marked by decolonisation and feminist claims.
Full article
Open AccessArticle
Heavens of Knowledge: The Order of Sciences in Dante’s Convivio
by
Anna Pegoretti
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 95; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040095 - 17 Jul 2024
Abstract
The essay focuses on Dante’s divisio scientiae presented in the second book of his Convivio. As a first step, it offers a fresh reading of Dante’s description of knowledge and the cosmos, emphasizing its deeply visual nature. The article then presents an
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The essay focuses on Dante’s divisio scientiae presented in the second book of his Convivio. As a first step, it offers a fresh reading of Dante’s description of knowledge and the cosmos, emphasizing its deeply visual nature. The article then presents an overview of the Medieval tradition of the divisio scientiae, culminating with divisions that are geographically and chronologically close to Dante’s Florence. In relation to Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica and Tresor, new evidence is provided to elucidate his peculiar division of logic. Ultimately, Dante’s divisio and its objectives are reassessed in light of their historical background, underscoring their cosmological and totalizing scope. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the findings consider cognitive practices, such as diagrams, and examine a wide array of sources within their historical and institutional context, highlighting their transmission and dissemination.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue “In terra per le vostre scole” (Par. XXIX, 70): Dante’s Paradiso and the Medieval Academic World)
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Open AccessArticle
The Lady on the Sofa: Revisiting Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Illness
by
Isadora Quirarte-Ruvalcaba
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040094 - 17 Jul 2024
Abstract
If there is one poet who has been widely represented under a legendary light, it is Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), mostly through the figure of a secluded invalid. Barrett Browning’s illness and death have been romanticised ever since her own time, with multiple
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If there is one poet who has been widely represented under a legendary light, it is Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), mostly through the figure of a secluded invalid. Barrett Browning’s illness and death have been romanticised ever since her own time, with multiple rumours and theories mostly focusing on the fact that her illness was ‘miraculously dispelled’ by ‘love’ and only reappeared gradually to take the poet’s life. This article proposes yet another and quite different diagnosis for Barrett Browning’s illness, theorising on the possibility that Barrett Browning’s ailment was a pulmonary congenital malformation, which remained misdiagnosed due to the lack of medical technology at the time. Several of the diagnoses given to Barrett Browning by her medical practitioners, contemporary and posthumous biographers and other scholars are presented and compared, alongside my own hypothesis. In addition, Barrett Browning’s arguable morphine dependency is reassessed in order to explore its impact on her illness, with the possibility that it exacerbated or even caused some of her symptoms. This reassessment also explores the role that morphine played in Barrett Browning’s death, suggesting an accidental overdose possibly overlooked by Robert Browning.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Medicine)
Open AccessArticle
‘Frail Warrior’: Stevenson as Manly Invalid at Saranac Lake
by
Christy Rieger
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040093 - 17 Jul 2024
Abstract
Although “frail warrior” appears a contradiction in terms, the epithet captures how Robert Louis Stevenson’s admirers sought to reconcile a late-nineteenth-century ideal of physical manliness with the reality of the adventure writer’s debilitating illness. This construction of the writer’s public image is evident
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Although “frail warrior” appears a contradiction in terms, the epithet captures how Robert Louis Stevenson’s admirers sought to reconcile a late-nineteenth-century ideal of physical manliness with the reality of the adventure writer’s debilitating illness. This construction of the writer’s public image is evident in accounts of his stay at the Saranac Lake, NY, tuberculosis sanatorium during the frigid winter of 1887–1888. The institution’s distinctive wilderness setting for medical treatment enabled a heroic model of disabled masculinity, one that is framed by American national identity. This archetype informs the author’s posthumous reputation and shows how gender and nationality shape metaphoric thinking about illness and authorship.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Medicine)
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Open AccessArticle
“The Horror of It Made Me Mad”: Hysterical Narration in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897)
by
Ariel Fried
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040092 - 15 Jul 2024
Abstract
This article analyzes the hysterical narration styles of two major characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) to reveal the ways late-Victorian discourses attempted (and often failed) to distance particular social anxieties from their modern origins. Attending to previous literary criticism regarding socially
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This article analyzes the hysterical narration styles of two major characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) to reveal the ways late-Victorian discourses attempted (and often failed) to distance particular social anxieties from their modern origins. Attending to previous literary criticism regarding socially Othered groups of this period—racialized foreigners, New Women, and the urban poor—as well as (pseudo)scientific studies from the 1870s–80s, this reading notes the ways that Victorian cultural biases surrounding race, gender, and class could be projected onto Gothicized, Orientalized figures in literary texts. Pairing a postcolonial examination of the novel’s spatial and temporal elements with a psychoanalytic reading of this text, I argue that the slowing pace in Robert Holt’s narrative and the compulsive repetition of Marjorie Lindon’s both reflect the novel’s disruption of space and time and structurally parallel the symptoms of a “hallucinatory hysterical attack,” as conceived by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Together, these hysterical narratives reveal the failure of particular cultural and scientific discourses to completely bury Victorian anxieties about modernity into different, explicitly Othered spaces and times by collapsing both space and time in the narration of psychic trauma.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)
Open AccessArticle
Digital Blackface: Adultification of Black Children in Memes and Children’s Books
by
Christian Farrior and Neal A. Lester
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040091 - 11 Jul 2024
Abstract
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The adultification of Black children is a form of anti-Blackness that brings Black children into adult situations. The adultification of Black children can be rooted in early 20th-century children’s books with minstrel imagery showing Black children in perilous situations for adult entertainment and
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The adultification of Black children is a form of anti-Blackness that brings Black children into adult situations. The adultification of Black children can be rooted in early 20th-century children’s books with minstrel imagery showing Black children in perilous situations for adult entertainment and for white children’s learning. This essay puts “digital blackface”—the online cross-racial memes using Black children’s reactions, emotions, and stereotypes as cross-racial humor—in conversation with historical children’s books featuring Black children. Linking digital representations and misrepresentations to children’s picture books demonstrates how Black children in both formats and social spheres are thrust into adult politics at their expense. Adultifying Black children across time in children’s books with minstrel imagery and digital blackface shows how Black children have never been exempt from the anti-Blackness and systemic white supremacy erroneously believed to be an adult issue.
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![](https://pub.mdpi-res.com/humanities/humanities-13-00091/article_deploy/html/images/humanities-13-00091-g001-550.jpg?1721273426)
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Open AccessArticle
The “I” as Implicated Subject: Performative Confession in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart
by
Jihie Moon
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 90; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040090 - 3 Jul 2024
Abstract
Confessional forms of autobiographical writing have predominated in post-apartheid South African literary studies. This paper discusses Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, published in 1990 during drastic social and political changes in South Africa’s transition to democracy. It was one of the first
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Confessional forms of autobiographical writing have predominated in post-apartheid South African literary studies. This paper discusses Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, published in 1990 during drastic social and political changes in South Africa’s transition to democracy. It was one of the first and most prominent examples of this genre. Focusing on Malan’s perspective as a white Afrikaner and an “implicated subject”, this study explored how his confessional account grappled with the existential dilemma of post-apartheid Afrikaner identity. Malan simultaneously affirmed his Afrikaner identity to confront his implication in apartheid and sought to establish a legitimate place for this identity within the new multicultural society. Through a close reading of Malan’s strategic performance, this paper argues that his work offers a means of reimagining the collective self in a new community and understanding historical injustices from a multidimensional perspective. Ultimately, My Traitor’s Heart contributes to the post-apartheid project of envisioning a more inclusive psychological and topographical construction of individual and collective identity, with the implicated subject as its centre.
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(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
Open AccessArticle
Bio-Medical Discourse and Oriental Metanarratives on Pandemics in the Islamicate World from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
by
Suhail Ahmad, Robert E. Bjork, Mohammed Almahfali, Abdel-Fattah M. Adel and Mashhoor Abdu Al-Moghales
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030089 - 17 Jun 2024
Abstract
This paper examines the writings of European travelers, chaplains, and resident doctors on pandemics in the Mediterranean regions from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Using French comparative literary theory, the article highlights how Muslim communities in Egypt, Turkey, Aleppo, and Mecca were
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This paper examines the writings of European travelers, chaplains, and resident doctors on pandemics in the Mediterranean regions from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Using French comparative literary theory, the article highlights how Muslim communities in Egypt, Turkey, Aleppo, and Mecca were stereotyped based on their belief in predestination, their failure to avoid contamination, and their lack of social distancing during plague outbreaks. This paper argues that travelers were influenced by Renaissance humanism, Ars Apodemia, religious discourses, and texts, such as plague tracts, model town concepts, the book of orders, and tales, and that they essentialized Mediterranean Islamicate societies by depicting contamination motifs supposedly shaped by the absence of contagion theory in prophetic medicines. Regarding plague science, this paper concludes that Christian and Muslim intellectuals had similar approaches until the Black Death and that Arabs were eclectic since the Abbasid period. This paper further maintains that the travelers’ approaches fostered chauvinism and the cultural hegemony of the West over the Orient since the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, driven by eschatology, conversion, and power structure narratives.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue World Literature in the Times of Pandemics and Plagues)
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Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels
by
Sofia Cavalcanti
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030088 - 10 Jun 2024
Abstract
The topographical turn in literary and cultural studies has shed new light on the deeply symbolic significance of the natural and urban places where stories unfold. This focus on spatiality is particularly evident in the South Asian literature by contemporary women writers, where
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The topographical turn in literary and cultural studies has shed new light on the deeply symbolic significance of the natural and urban places where stories unfold. This focus on spatiality is particularly evident in the South Asian literature by contemporary women writers, where locations acquire a personality and significantly contribute to the shaping of gender identities. Although most of these narratives portray female protagonists who develop strategies of resistance and sisterhood within traditional domestic spaces, the widely praised transnational novels Brick Lane and The Mistress of Spices show that women can also achieve independence and self-realization in the bustling urban environment. Drawing on cultural geography as well as gender and social studies, this essay argues that the global dimension of the city offers diasporic women the opportunity to forge new empowered selves in the above-mentioned books. First, the article maintains that London and Oakland, CA, where the main characters live, exert a centripetal force on women, thus triggering change and mobility, both in physical and psychical terms. Second, it claims that the two cities are gendered “heterotopias”, i.e., heterogeneous spaces where border-crossing women, like those featured in the two novels at hand, can overcome alienation and develop creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. In conclusion, urban spaces serve as “safe houses” for immigrant women, where they can cure their emotional and physical diseases and become figures of adaptive hybridity.
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(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
Open AccessArticle
The Paradox of Chivalric Madness: Ariosto’s and Cervantes’s Madness Representations’ Impact on Disability Representation
by
Nicholas L. Johnson
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 87; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030087 - 7 Jun 2024
Abstract
This study investigates the connection between madness and critiques of the chivalric romance genre in two late Renaissance works, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. The satire of chivalric romance in these works of fiction
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This study investigates the connection between madness and critiques of the chivalric romance genre in two late Renaissance works, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. The satire of chivalric romance in these works of fiction caution against nascent modes of thinking in imperial societies for the implementation of chivalric ideas to inspire and promote imperial conquests in Latin America through juxtaposition with the Muslim and Moorish conquest in the Maghreb and through metaphorical island governance. In order to make such critiques, these novels implement the madness of their parodic knights to disguise their critiques. This practice establishes a precedent which later literature can employ to make sociocultural critique covertly, to the detriment of disability representations as literary devices or metaphors.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)
Open AccessArticle
The First World War and Ford Madox Ford’s Short Stories, 1914–1920
by
Andrew Frayn
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030086 - 4 Jun 2024
Abstract
This article analyses together, for the first time, Ford Madox Ford’s short stories about the First World War. A surprisingly unfamiliar form for Ford, who valued allusion, subtlety, and omission as narrative devices, we see in these stories his first attempts to parse
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This article analyses together, for the first time, Ford Madox Ford’s short stories about the First World War. A surprisingly unfamiliar form for Ford, who valued allusion, subtlety, and omission as narrative devices, we see in these stories his first attempts to parse his experience of wartime and, subsequently, military service. It is also an aspect of Ford’s writing which has received little previous critical comment. The wartime and post-war short stories are approached chronologically: ‘The Scaremonger: A Tale of the War Times’ (1914), ‘Fun!—It’s Heaven’ (1915), ‘Pink Flannel’ (1919), ‘The Colonel’s Shoes’ (1920), ‘Enigma’ ([1920–1922] 1999), and ‘The Miracle’ (1928). The contemporary debates in which Ford intervened are highlighted by returning to their original periodical publications, and extensive reference to a range of his non-fictional periodical contributions establishes new connections among his wartime writing. Here I bring together for the first time these short stories, arguing that Ford’s refracting of the war through the lens of his impressionism is distinctive as an early response to war, trauma, and neurosis and is vital to the genesis of his later successes in prose, notably the Parade’s End novel tetralogy (1924–1928).
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ford Madox Ford's War Writing)
Open AccessArticle
“Dantes Dicit.” Notes on Dante as Auctoritas in the Medieval Academic Community
by
Paolo Rosso
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 85; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030085 - 3 Jun 2024
Abstract
Dante’s articulate and sometimes critical attitude towards the academic community is evident in several of his works, specifically in Paradiso. To understand the actual extent of this ‘anti-academic’ attitude, this study considers the magistri of the higher schools and the holders of
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Dante’s articulate and sometimes critical attitude towards the academic community is evident in several of his works, specifically in Paradiso. To understand the actual extent of this ‘anti-academic’ attitude, this study considers the magistri of the higher schools and the holders of university chairs to observe their position regarding the Commedia. The study aims to ascertain whether the poem was regarded as a teaching text in the 14th and 15th centuries, and particularly whether it was referred to in the textual hermeneutics practiced in lectio. The analysis examined the utilization of the Commedia within schools and universities as an authoritative text in the commentary on the canon of the auctores maiores. The inclusion of Dante’s glosses in various manuscripts recalled to provide erudite data, lexical interpretations, exempla, and sententiae, reflects the progressive integration of the poem within the academic community. This integration signifies its acknowledgment among the auctores employed in exegetical practices, a phenomenon observed across various geographical regions as evidenced by the analyzed manuscripts.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue “In terra per le vostre scole” (Par. XXIX, 70): Dante’s Paradiso and the Medieval Academic World)
Open AccessArticle
Ford Madox Ford’s Unusual War: Ongoing Worry and Modernity
by
Nur Karatas
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 84; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030084 - 3 Jun 2024
Abstract
In Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford approaches the experience of trauma in an unusual way—it is no longer just past experiences, but the expectancy of dismal events that become as traumatic. Ford chooses worry for such rendering. In order to make the
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In Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford approaches the experience of trauma in an unusual way—it is no longer just past experiences, but the expectancy of dismal events that become as traumatic. Ford chooses worry for such rendering. In order to make the correlation between suffering and sensibility, he places worry in the lives of his characters, which reflects on Ford’s own life. This discussion will introduce the idea that worry is going to be a major component of Ford’s psychologising of war. I explore this worry-driven sensibility and the ways it is reflected, especially in the characters’ obsession with the anticipation of death and face-forward mourning. Within this loss-filled atmosphere, worry over being killed dominates the narrative and continually feeds the sentiment of mournfulness. The Great War transforms into a Greater War, seeping into the societal realm, where it amplifies the private emotional battles of the characters, centred around worry. Consequently, the narrative highlights the coexistence of these personal and public conflicts, ultimately resulting in both physical and psychological losses throughout the story.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ford Madox Ford's War Writing)
Open AccessArticle
Decolonial Embodiments: Materiality, Disability, and Black Being in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso
by
Daniel F. Silva
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 83; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030083 - 30 May 2024
Abstract
Grounded in, and in dialogue with, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso of 2018, this paper interrogates a particular time and place of coloniality and racial capital’s reproduction of Black fungibility in late twentieth-century Portugal, after formal decolonization in Africa
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Grounded in, and in dialogue with, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso of 2018, this paper interrogates a particular time and place of coloniality and racial capital’s reproduction of Black fungibility in late twentieth-century Portugal, after formal decolonization in Africa and in the wake of Black migratory waves from the post/neo-colony (Angola in this case) to the former metropolis. Almeida’s novel provides a literary intervention in grappling with the economic and institutional reinvention of anti-Blackness in Europe after settler colonialism, while also imagining and inscribing modes of Black being within and beyond the materialities of white supremacy. Towards this end and against the racial, gendered, and ableist logics of capital, the Black body in Almeida’s novel becomes a site through which the relationships between humans and matter as well as mind and body are decolonially revised.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Decolonization in Lusophone Literature)
Open AccessArticle
Illusory Arguments by Artificial Agents: Pernicious Legacy of the Sophists
by
Micah H. Clark and Selmer Bringsjord
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 82; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030082 - 29 May 2024
Abstract
To diagnose someone’s reasoning today as “sophistry” is to say that this reasoning is at once persuasive (at least to a significant degree) and logically invalid. We begin by explaining that, despite some recent scholarly arguments to the contrary, the understanding of ‘sophistry’
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To diagnose someone’s reasoning today as “sophistry” is to say that this reasoning is at once persuasive (at least to a significant degree) and logically invalid. We begin by explaining that, despite some recent scholarly arguments to the contrary, the understanding of ‘sophistry’ and ‘sophistic’ underlying such a lay diagnosis is in fact firmly in line with the hallmarks of reasoning proffered by the ancient sophists themselves. Next, we supply a rigorous but readable definition of what constitutes sophistic reasoning (=sophistry). We then discuss “artificial” sophistry: the articulation of sophistic reasoning facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI) and promulgated in our increasingly digital world. Next, we present, economically, a particular kind of artificial sophistry, one embodied by an artificial agent: the lying machine. Afterward, we respond to some anticipated objections. We end with a few speculative thoughts about the limits (or lack thereof) of artificial sophistry, and what may be a rather dark future.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ancient Greek Sophistry and Its Legacy)
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