Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in…[Read more]

This paper examines Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (2007) in the context of Holocaust literature and historiography. It begins with an introduction to the genre of Holocaust literature and the problematic nature of ‘survivor’ testimony. Michaels’ work is then contextualized within this body of literature. The essay goes on to examine the means t…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article:

Born in 1976 in Bermuda, Jon McGregor grew up in Norfolk and currently lives in Nottingham in the UK. McGregor came to literary prominence with the publication of his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury, 2002). The novel was an immediate success and at just…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article: In a recent discussion of modernism, Peter Osborne argues that the terms “modern,” “modernity,” and “modernization” need to be understood through their shared philosophical status as temporal constructions. The emergence of the modern within Western philosophy is predicated on a subjec…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the concept of utopia was blighted with the stigma of Stalinist totalitarianism. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s despotism at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 195…[Read more]

“Choosing Africa: The Importance of Naming in Beloved and The Poisonwood Bible.” CLA Journal 55.4 (June 2012): 352-369.

This dissertation examines post-Holocaust, Jewish American novelists that utilize messianism in their narratives to negotiate ambivalence about Zionism. Studying novels from the mid-1980’s to 2013, I look at the triangular relationship between Jewish American identification, the Holocaust, and Israel, to explore major topics in contemporary J…[Read more]

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]

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.”

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]