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This article examines three Shakespearean adaptations from the BabyLit series—Romeo & Juliet: A Counting Primer, Macbeth: A Potions Primer, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Fairies Primer—to explore how the primer genre enables...

What happens when Shakespeare’s Juliet does not die, but returns from the crypt as a starving corpse? The article examines Jacopo Angelini and Chiara Iacobelli’s Italian graphic novel Giulietta Zombie (2023) as a YA appropriation of...

This article examines Chunfeng Yang’s 1981 Chinese picture book adaptation of William Shakespeare and George Wilkins’ Pericles, Prince of Tyre, as an early post-Cultural Revolution reimagining of the Shakespeare canon for young adult read...

This paper explores Mark Twain’s engagement with political philosophy and does so by tending to the political dimensions of one of Twain’s shorter and under-appreciated books, Pudd’nhead Wilson. Twain indicates the literary and poli...

In the Introduction to Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction (2018), Andrew James Hartley recalls that when we rewrite Shakespeare, we rewrite ourselves. This article focuses on some deconstructive theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by...

This essay reinterprets William Faulkner’s Light in August through the ethical problem of civil religion, understood as the use of shared narratives that bind communities but may also legitimate exclusion and violence. Focusing on the Reverend...

This article introduces the “ornamental myth” as a narrative-formal heuristic for analyzing how the “successful immigrant” story is structured, aestheticized, and consumed in contemporary Asian American women’s memoir. T...

This article rereads Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 film The Bad Sleep Well as a modern Hamlet that relocates Shakespeare’s crisis of action from dynastic succession to postwar bureaucratic and corporate modernity. It shifts attention away from pl...

Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear focuses on how the titular character is driven by repressed desires, fears, and internal conflicts. He believes that the audience grasps this emotional complexity by projecting their unc...

This essay argues that Herman Melville’s Billy Budd should be read as a work of political philosophy whose central concern is Captain Vere’s “capital dilemma”: the conflict between natural justice and the obligations of politi...

Fortinbras’ words at the curtain suggest that if the time had been less out of joint and the state less rotten, Hamlet might have grown into commanding authority. Defining what is potentially regal about Hamlet helps characterize Shakespeare&rs...

Since the 17th century, when illustrations began to appear in children’s schoolbooks, the role of illustrations has undergone a development in concept. It has shifted from a narrow view of illustrations demonstrating the text, as well as lighte...

This article proposes reading Don Quixote as a work of, rather than a supplement to, political theory. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s accounts of narrative configuration and narrative identity, I develop a concept called ‘narrative politi...

During the era of imperialism, official direct-rule policies throughout the French Empire deemed existing peoples, cultures, and religions as inferior when compared to France. However, colonial officials in French-Laos governed differently. France&rs...

This comparative study examines the erosion of ethical certainty under conditions of extreme scarcity and institutional collapse. Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), and José Saramago&rs...

This study turns to W.E.B. Du Bois’ late-career works of fiction for insights about the importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), especially Black public Land-Grant universities in promoting racial justice in the Unite...

This article argues that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest can be read as a “Tocquevillian” novel, showing that its depiction of late 20th century American life is a profound exploration of the democratic soul. By analyzing the c...

This article offers a novel reading of Gulliver’s Travels that argues Jonathan Swift’s analysis of religion and politics is more daring and philosophically profound than is generally recognized. Focusing on Lilliput in Part I, I show that...

This article examines the ethics and affective complexities of care in Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil and Other Stories, arguing that the collection foregrounds the imaginative, relational, and often troubling demands of caretaking within a...

This article examines how the memory of the 1947 Partition persists in contemporary Hindi fiction through a close reading of two short stories by Jyoti Chawla. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and engaging with trauma theory,...

This article examines the representation of mental illness, emergency treatment, and recovery, in Ned Vizzini’s 2006 Young Adult novel, It’s kind of a funny story. Existing criticism has predominantly pursued what we term “diagnosti...

In Literature and Revolution, a classic of literary criticism and literary theory, Leon Trotsky gave attention to the work of several outstanding women writers. This article examines his critical treatment of these Russian women poets and their work....

In his poem The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare uses ekphrasis—the virtuosic description of a piece of art such as a painting, tapestry, or tableau—to critique the Roman ideal of female virtue. After her husband’s description of her be...

In our current moment, sport and romance are uniting in the creation of YA sports fiction titles that are flooding the market and enjoying widespread popularity. Despite this exciting intersection between sport and romance in the world of fiction for...

Taylor Swift’s songwriting is frequently analyzed through the lens of confessional songwriting, blurring the boundaries between factual and fictional storytelling. This article proposes understanding her work as transmedia meta-autobiographies,...

This study examines the hypothetical issue of the impact of ancient Egyptian beliefs on Africa as a whole. Several focal points are explored. These include (1). The situation of the discipline of folklore within allied academic specializations. (2)....

In this article I interrogate how the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist aligns with as well as problematizes racial capitalism. The optic of racial capitalism enables me to trace the film’s articulation of race relations within the US and the p...

Time travel in science fiction, a subgenre distinct yet often overlapping with alternative history, often explores historical contingency through counterfactual scenarios to produce alternative histories. Yet some works deliberately negate this poten...

This paper examines how Dushyant Kumar’s collection, sāye meṅ dhūp (lit. Sunlight in the Shadows), reinvented the classical ġhazal genre as a vernacular weapon of anti-authoritarian dissent—not by abandoning ambiguity...

Over the past century, literary theory has branched out in several directions. Diverse schools of literary thought, such as Semiotics, New Criticism, Intentionalism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction, have passionately plowed new ground within the ac...

Peter S. Beagle’s decision to feminize the formerly masculine figure of the unicorn in his influential 1968 fantasy novel The Last Unicorn represents a key moment in the evolution of this now ubiquitous image, one embraced today as a symbol of...

This essay examines how contemporary Anglophone Chinese women writers rewrite the imagery of Chinese snake women through speculative retellings that foreground sisterhood, queer desire, and diasporic identity. Drawing on queer diaspora studies and fe...

We present a psycholinguistic test battery designed to examine the cognitive and affective processes involved in reading Polish poetry. This toolkit combines reader profiling (vocabulary, memory and reading proficiency) with tasks that assess the inf...

To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. This essay primarily focuses on satire. I first give a brief overview of key ideas from the last several decades on genre theory, particularly prose essays...

My sinuous life as a humanist traversing disciplinary, periodic, geographical, and national borders has yielded palpable wonders, the most wonderful being the opportunity to live and connect many lives. I was made bilingual, bicultural, and cosmopoli...

Ease of cognitive processing is an important predictor of aesthetic liking. However, many acclaimed artworks are fairly complex and require substantial cognitive effort. Are they aesthetically liked despite or because of this increased cognitive chal...

For this article, we reviewed and synthesized narratological theories on reliability and unreliability and used them as the basis for an exploratory study, examining how real readers respond to a literary short story that contains several unreliable...

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) evoke the act of listening to music as a way to dismantle stereotypical representations of urban resistance and to paint a diverse picture of how...

This case study examines the reproductive choices of republican couple Eliza Sharples (1803–1852) and Richard Carlile (1790–1843) and the conflicted political and personal trajectories of those choices. This includes examination of his in...

The theoretical question of what makes texts “literary” has a long tradition in literary studies. At the level of concrete individual encounters/transactions between readers and texts, literariness has been shown to reflect how actual rea...

In her aim to establish education as a scientifically grounded discipline—conceived as “an experimental science” in her non-fictional treatise Practical Education (1798)—Maria Edgeworth pioneered the integration of literary at...

This article investigates the role of space in the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides, focusing on The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002) through the lens of spatial theory. Drawing on key thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward S...

When scholars view characters in King Lear through a Machiavellian lens, they read Edmund, Goneril, and Regan as stock Machiavels. In contrast, they often perceive Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar as selfless, apolitical characters. This essay argues that t...

This article re-examines Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks” (1956) and “Instructions for John Howell” (1963) through the lens of reader-response theory, hermeneutics, and cognitive narratology. Traditionally v...

In the analysis of isiXhosa literary texts, the role of stylistic sentences in enhancing the meanings and reinforcement of themes and their impact in foregrounding the textual features has been largely ignored and under researched. This study is inte...

T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has long been examined through the lenses of modernist alienation and psychological paralysis. While previous scholarship has emphasized the poem’s existential themes and innovative form,...

This essay defies the literary ghettoization of Asian-authored narratives and interrogates the space delineated as mainstream American feminist literature by placing Ng’s Everything in dialogue with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Kingsto...

Book covers are often the first component seen before a reader engages with a book’s contents; therefore, careful consideration is given to the text and image features that constitute their design. This study investigates the effects of the pre...

Autofiction often interweaves the (phenomenologically) real and the unreal. It is definitionally in some way about the author as a real-life person but also frequently features elements that are impossible by real-life standards, or at least seem hig...

Recent cognitive literary studies of fiction have begun to reveal patterns in the ways authors engage readers’ bodily and environmentally grounded imaginations. This study brings fiction writers’ craft knowledge into conversation with neu...