Calling for a historiographical shift in literary criticism, this essay stresses the expansionist vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, approaches its literature as a corpus of representation for imperial subjectivities, and thereby supplements the critique of the narrative of literary modernity identified with the orientalist E. J. W.…[Read more]

Calling for a historiographical shift in literary criticism, this essay stresses the expansionist vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, approaches its literature as a corpus of representation for imperial subjectivities, and thereby supplements the critique of the narrative of literary modernity identified with the orientalist E. J. W.…[Read more]

Anthropomorphism, which combines two Greek words, anthropos and morphe, meaning “human” and “form’ respectively, is a term that reflects our attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals and objects, bestowing upon them agency (Taylor 2011: 266). In this respect, we elevate the status of the non-human animal, moving it from being a…[Read more]

Alfonso X was king of “Castilla, León, Sevilla, Córdoba, Murcia, Jaén, and el Algarbe.” As evidenced by his title, he came to have possession of various kingdoms in Iberia. He was born in Toledo in 1221 and died in Seville in 1284, at 63 years of age. He is called the Learned King because he was an author, poet, musician, and historian, and becaus…[Read more]

Alfonso X was king of “Castilla, León, Sevilla, Córdoba, Murcia, Jaén, and el Algarbe.” As evidenced by his title, he came to have possession of various kingdoms in Iberia. He was born in Toledo in 1221 and died in Seville in 1284, at 63 years of age. He is called the Learned King because he was an author, poet, musician, and historian, and becaus…[Read more]

Núñez-Muley abstract

The Edict of 1567, or Anti-Morisco Edict, was promulgated by Spanish King Philip II on January 1, after being approved in Madrid on November 17, 1566. Its purpose was to eliminate specific Morisco customs, such as their language, dress, and dances. Núñez Muley’s Petition is an attempt to persuade Christian authorities to de…[Read more]

Video recording of Alexa Alice Joubin’s plenary is available on YouTube, https://youtu.be/8P5nNv86goQ There are certainly non-binary actors on stage, but are there Shakespearean characters who can be read as trans? The answer is yes. To ask whether there are transgender characters is to ask questions about the performance of gender roles. We are…[Read more]

This volume focuses on Pericles, Prince of Tyre, whose narrative of refugee suffering, familial loss, emotional distancing, people-trafficking, and eventual, joyous recovery speaks strikingly to our historical moment. The play’s internationalist reach, its images of cross-cultural relations, and its Eastern Mediterranean setting also promote a r…[Read more]

Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police procedural is, as its title suggests, intensely interested in the socioeconomic valences of spatial relationships, literalized in Yokohama’s affluent hills and its low-lying slums. The central conflict between inhabitants of these two spaces articulates this local topography into a global framework, in which con…[Read more]

The story of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is adapted and revised by James Ijames in his play Fat Ham, which ran from 12 May to 31 July 2022 at The Public Theater, coproduced by the National Black Theatre. Ijames’s play, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama, plays with and departs from the plot of Hamlet to explore Black manhood, the fam…[Read more]

This is a revised 2023 version of a course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018. It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

“The essays in this volume attend to both of these possible relations to the infrastructures of inscription. They explore not only how white supremacist histories and infrastructures have limited and foreclosed black expression but also how black expression has extended, recoded, and transformed some of these very structures, affording new possibilities.”

A book’s a book, and numbers are numbers, right? Well, maybe. For the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Counting (in) Early Modern Drama,” I proposed to give myself the task of understanding and then communicating the technological underpinnings of a digital facsimile. One specific question I wanted to address, with the help of…[Read more]

A book’s a book, and numbers are numbers, right? Well, maybe. For the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Counting (in) Early Modern Drama,” I proposed to give myself the task of understanding and then communicating the technological underpinnings of a digital facsimile. One specific question I wanted to address, with the help of…[Read more]