Thomas Hardy’s last novel Jude the Obscure (1895) is centred on its working-class
protagonist Jude Fawley’s efforts first to become a scholar, then his experiences of
resisting the orthodoxies of his society and lastly defying Christianity as a restrictive
social force on the individuals. This paper aims to discuss Jude’s liminal character…[Read more]

Darko Suvin claims that science fiction is fundamentally concerned with “cognitive estrangement,” or the presence of some element in the story that transforms how its readers understand their world. In fact, much of the developments in science, economics, and politics in the nineteenth century were also concerned with the new worlds revealed by…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

This article explores how librarians have responded to publishers’ control
over book prices in two different, yet related, historical periods. It historicizes the net price
system, a book-price control system in the early twentieth century, within debates by librarians
about library book buying and price negotiation practices. Turning to s…[Read more]

Giorgio Agamben defines the sacred man or Homo Sacer as one who is not worthy of sacrifice. Having lost all rights, the person is reduced to the non-human. In modern times, banishment or banning by the law occurs when a state of exception is sanctioned by a totalitarian supremacy that suspends judicial power. The state of exception does not lie…[Read more]

In the article, we trace some aspects of development of eventivity and narrativity in Medieval and early Modern Era travel literature. Dissecting episodes of Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), A Travel of Anonimous Citizen of Suzdal to The Council of Florence (15th century), Russian Primary Chronicle (12th century), and…[Read more]

This article investigates Henry James’s digital afterlives by analyzing popular James-themed images and articles that have been shared on the Internet since 2000. Adapting Richard Dawkins’s theory of virality and Michael Anesko’s concept of James’s cultural capital, this article engages with viral content published on websites such as Bustle,…[Read more]

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

Objective: Using the MLA International Bibliography, students will develop a presentation that demonstrates their understanding of how scholarship on a single work of literature changes over time.

This essay demonstrates how Lynch Law suspended normative criminal law and undermined constitutional amendments made after the US Civil War. Focusing on the period between Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, the essay argues that “outlawry” provides the necessary juridical concept for understanding how a tradition of popular sovereignty wor…[Read more]

Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic h…[Read more]