This article demonstrates that an unrecognized source for Pynchon’s construction of his account of the sixteenth-century revolt in the Low Countries is Adrien de Meeüs’s Histoire Belgique (1928), which was published in an English translation as the History of the Belgians in 1962.

The article analyses the significance of the Crying of Lot 49’s allusion to King Charles I’s beading in the episode that relates Tristero’s ambushing of the Torre and Tassis coach on which Diocletian Blobb is travelling and his being spared so that he can bring news of the Tristero to England.

At the start of Shakespeare’s play, Othello and Iago exchange the symbolic positions that the audience expects them to hold, implying that cultural otherness is not the same thing as racial otherness. The implication is confirmed by Renaissance medical thought, oddly because of the connection that was made between culture and what we would call…[Read more]

The article argues that the epistemological maneuvers that allow Arabella to see the world in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote are the same as those of the realistic characters and that Arabella’s cure is achieved because Arabella, uncharacteristically, agrees to be convinced by a fallacious argument.

In Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” the act of writing takes the place of the romance being written about. It is by way of the writing process that the romantic other replaces God as the object of devotion. Eloisa’s writing would thus seem to function as Derrida argues writing functions in western philosophy in that it articulates one a…[Read more]