Describes and provides examples of modules and assignments for a sophomore Brit Lit survey and an upper-division poetics class that responded to student demands for a more racially diverse canon. Includes a brief discussion of Lucius Henry Holsey, enslaved worker on the UGA campus, who claimed to have learned to read from Milton’s Paradise Lost…[Read more]

Fall 2021, fully online, asynchronous course: Critical making is a practice of making as scholarship, grounded in the humanities, that interweaves design, function, and theory towards born-digital scholarly practice. Engaging in scholarly communication through digital platforms demands attention to code, software, and hardware. This course…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

Get tips on using the MLA International Bibliography to teach scholarly concepts and analytical skills.

For more than a hundred years the Modern Language Association, creator of the MLA International Bibliography, has worked to strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature. As part of that mission, the MLA has developed an online…[Read more]

The MLA International Bibliography is an essential tool for research in all aspects of modern languages and literature, but did you know that the MLAIB can be brought into the classroom and used as an effective teaching tool as well? Learn how the most powerful research tool in the humanities is being used in the virtual classroom to engage…[Read more]

Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth…[Read more]

This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel’s performative theory of lyric…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of the academic study of Victorian masculinity. It argues that the pioneering work of feminist and sexuality studies scholars in Victorian studies during the 1970s and 1980s made it possible to discuss manhood critically as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It then presents a reading of major works on…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of “Euphuism” in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while…[Read more]

Although Mary Wollstonecraft’s analysis of masculine sexuality and sensibility in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1797) mostly concerns the ways in which the oppression of women results in the unnatural encouragement and consequent perversion of male sexual desire, I believe that these two texts…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]

Gender roles in Shakespeare’s plays take on new meanings when they are embodied by Asian actors. Learning more about Asian approaches to performance not only enriches our worldview but also makes Asian cultures less abstract and Asian people more relatable as fellow human beings. Reflecting the idea that strength and empowerment can take many f…[Read more]

Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late twentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia. There are five striking themes surrounding cultural, racial, and gender dynamics. Gender…[Read more]

Jesús Aguado’s recent book, Carta al padre (2016), deals openly with both physical and emotional trauma suffered at the hands of toxic masculinity. The poetic voice vindicates his younger self, abused by the father, through the written word that transfers power to the weak and disenfranchised. Lacanian naming and patriarchal structures (family,…[Read more]

Libertarias (1996) and Land and Freedom (1995) explore the complex situation
of women militia during the Spanish Civil War. A queer reading of the female
body in these films highlights wartime female masculinity (Halberstam) and
female solidarity. In renegotiating worn expectations of sexuality and gender,
the films question and ultimately…[Read more]

Libertarias (1996) and Land and Freedom (1995) explore the complex situation
of women militia during the Spanish Civil War. A queer reading of the female
body in these films highlights wartime female masculinity (Halberstam) and
female solidarity. In renegotiating worn expectations of sexuality and gender,
the films question and ultimately…[Read more]