English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of…[Read more]

Abstract: This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and peda…[Read more]

In a book review of Story of O, part of which appeared on the cover of early paperback editions, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that its publication in 1965 marked “the end of any coherent restrictive application of the concept of pornography to books.” This essay explores the implications of that significant shift in censorship policy for lib…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the sexy librarian stereotype emerged at the end of the twentieth century from the confluence between sexual liberation, free speech movements and print pornography. It focuses on a series of librarian themed pornographic paperbacks published in the 1970s and 1980s by Greenleaf Classics. These stories, although flimsy…[Read more]

The essay takes a fresh look at Eliot’s ‘water-dripping song’ in The Waste Land. It seems impossible for the ornithologically minded Eliot not to have known that the hermit thrush’s song does not sound like dripping water. In fact, nowhere in ornithological writing — and certainly not in his source, Chapman’s Handbook of North American Birds —…[Read more]

Syllabus for ENGL 758D, The Speculative Situation, graduate seminar in the University of Maryland English department, Fall 2017.

After presenting an overview of scholarship on post-9/11 American poetry, my article focuses on a group of largely neglected post-9/11 poems, which deal with spectral consciousness and hallucinatory experiences. In exploring this issue, I have tried to establish a relationship between trauma-related intrusive memories and hallucination on the…[Read more]

Sin duda tomando como base el que la condición del libro como elemento de transmisión de un contenido posee en sí misma “un interés conceptual o intelectual” (Reyes Gómez 39), los estudios de bibliografía material han empezado a desplazar un tanto, en términos científicos, a los de bibliografía erudita, tanto en su más clásico perfil, el de…[Read more]

Sin duda tomando como base el que la condición del libro como elemento de transmisión de un contenido posee en sí misma “un interés conceptual o intelectual” (Reyes Gómez 39), los estudios de bibliografía material han empezado a desplazar un tanto, en términos científicos, a los de bibliografía erudita, tanto en su más clásico perfil, el de…[Read more]

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

La presente comunicación pretende glosar algunos pequeños detalles biográficos de Luis Crespí de Valldaura, noble valenciano, hijo homónimo del II señor de Sumacàrcer, que fue uno de los primeros profesores del incipiente Studi General valenciano y rector del mismo entre los años 1506 y 1507. Además de esta presencia destacada en el ámbito u…[Read more]

In the next seven minutes, I would like to convince you that real formalism and real historicism really are, or really should be, one and the same critical practice. Our idea of what counts as knowledge about early English literature will be enriched by integrating formalist and historicist methods. Those of us who work on prosody and poetics are…[Read more]