In recent years, Anne Askew has attained something of celebrity status among scholars of Tudor women’s writing and, more generally, of Tudor Reformation history. In the course of privileging Askew’s examinations above those of other female defendants (such as Elizabeth Young), scholars sometimes equate Askew’s rhetorical expertise with legal exper…[Read more]

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many tribes and subcultures of Britain’s teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of the most important contemporary British wri…[Read more]

A reading of Beowulf that theorizes Heorot as a cultural reliquary, in so doing troubling the more standard readings of this poem as a series of episodes and digressions, in favor of focusing more on the as-yet inadequately examined queer temporalities of human experiences in the world that are embedded within the feast hall and the poem that contains it.

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

In a time when the anxiety about Elizabeth I’s heir to the throne was ripe, and illegal to discuss, Shakespeare focuses on the issue of succession in King John, and shows the parallels to his own age, while using Hubert as a metaphor for the difficult position of Shakespeare’s contemporary citizens of England as they anticipate the naming of…[Read more]

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constru…[Read more]

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constru…[Read more]

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constru…[Read more]

(Ver 2.1.) To be printed in Queens on Stage. Female Sovereignty, Power, and Sexuality in Early Modern English Theatre ed. Bianca Del Villano e Tommaso Continisio (Rome: Aracne). – comments welcome!

Part of the Introduction in lieu of an abstract:
Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated novel A Single Man portrays a gay man as an ordinary human being. For its time, the novel’s depiction of homosexuality as a legitimate minoritarian identity, rather than individual pathology, was a radical political gesture. Given this context, literary critics…[Read more]

Abstract: This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel _Quartet_. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic…[Read more]

I review Quaintance’s study of homosocial culture in Renaissance Venice. I analyze the issues of gender, sexual violence, and humor discussed in the book.