Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

Abstract and Keywords
Part of this chapter deals with Zhu Xi’s critique of Buddhism and Daoism: his distinction of the neo-Confucian concept of pattern-principle and virtuous governance from seemingly similar Buddhist and Daoist ideas, his concern with what he saw as both schools’ lack of social and political engagement and their rejection of eth…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]

This article reviews With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comic Books, edited by Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). The book covers a wide range of approaches, pedagogical techniques, and uses of comics and graphic novels, as well as making comics, in the…[Read more]

This critical edition of Hemingway’s 1924 version of in our time is the second of three volumes for each major state of the text. Few writers have shaped the style of twentieth century prose as did Hemingway, and it all began with the “vignettes” of in our time, which have been largely unavailable for scholars and entirely out of reach for…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]