When it is spoken of at all, Emerson’s “Monadnoc” is described as a solicitation of natural sublimity. But a close rhetorical analysis of the poem reveals greater ambivalence about this sublimity than is apparent—linking it to later American philosophic poems by Frost, Stevens, Ammons, and Kinnell that at once solicit and question natural plenitu…[Read more]

Have cognitive scientists misread autism? What happens if, instead of simply accepting such research, literary critics turned to the actual prose and poetry written by autistic authors, such as Tito Mukhopadhyay and Donna Williams? Literary theory may never be the same once it comes to terms with neurodiversity.

Editor’s Introduction to Panic Spring. First published in 1937, two years after Durrell took up residence on the Greek island Kerkyra, Panic Spring broke with the realist tradition in 1930s novels and shows the young author’s first attempts to extend High Modernist innovations in rural and personal landscapes. Cubist, surrealist, and imagist…[Read more]

Editor’s Introduction to Pied Piper of Lovers. Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published in 1935, shortly after he left England to live abroad until his death in 1990. As an autobiographical Künstlerroman, it traces Walsh Clifton’s Anglo-Indian childhood and his struggles to negotiate a life between “mother” India and “father”…[Read more]

Beginning with the renowned “Words to Intellectuals” (1961) delivered by Fidel Castro in the José Martí National Library and the creation of a state network of libraries, the library in Cuba was transformed into a cultural sphere saturated with ideological ambiguity. On the one hand, the library embodied the symbolic axis of the literacy campa…[Read more]

This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

In this article I examine the way Collins, in her young adult novel Mockingjay, connects historical context of an urban firebombing like those frequently seen during World War II, with the fictional presentation of a firebombing reminiscent of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to present the horrors of war to a new generation. I then show how she m…[Read more]

This conference paper was an invited plenary lecture for the 11th annual meeting of ICEG in January 2014. It builds upon numerous articles, essays and books the author has published on the grammar, epistemology and socio-historical aspects of metaphor and metaphorical discourse. This paper provides a model for understanding metaphor as a needed…[Read more]

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

Book review of Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, £60. Pp 165; 978-1-107-07605-1.)

Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]

Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]