This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]

As Seyed-Gohrab rightly mentions in the introduction to this volume, “poets and writers are so essential in the turbulent history of twentieth-century Iran that any history of modern Iran neglecting the role of literature … would be seriously incomplete” (14). This volume, focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, provides a his…[Read more]

Through offering an ethnography of a group of educated, middle-class women who “had been attending weekly Qur’an and classical poetry classes for years” (xii), the volume shows that poetry and prayer are companions in the cultural history of Iran. It attempts to answer the question, “What does this companionship mean for forms of religio…[Read more]

As Seyed-Gohrab rightly mentions in the introduction to this volume, “poets and writers are so essential in the turbulent history of twentieth-century Iran that any history of modern Iran neglecting the role of literature … would be seriously incomplete” (14). This volume, focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, provides a his…[Read more]

Building on the author’s PhD thesis on “the British cultural and imaginative engagements with Persia in the nineteenth century” (vi), the volume charts “the diversity of perceptions associated with Persia in Victorian literary culture” (2). It focuses on poetry as the medium through which to survey the Victorian conception of Persia. It consists…[Read more]

This essay traces the development of the right-hand inscription (zuoyouming 座右銘) from its birth in the second century CE through its culmination as a complex literary subgenre in the tenth. Over the course of these eight centuries, right-hand inscriptions were used by some of the most prominent poets of their respective eras, including Cui Yuan…[Read more]

This essay traces the development of the right-hand inscription (zuoyouming 座右銘) from its birth in the second century CE through its culmination as a complex literary subgenre in the tenth. Over the course of these eight centuries, right-hand inscriptions were used by some of the most prominent poets of their respective eras, including Cui Yuan…[Read more]

This essay suggests that with the increasing prominence of “historical poetics” as a set of social collectives, methodologies, and debates (especially about literary analysis), now seems to be an ideal time to assess its history and consider its future. The first part of the essay offers a genealogy of historical poetics, accounting for some of…[Read more]

There seems to be a continuum between Fernando Pessoa’s metadrama of heteronyms and his strict-sense plays, but this is more hypothesis than theory, because Pessoa’s dramas—notwithstanding the editions of Teatro Estático (2017) and Fausto (2018)—are still largely unknown. Written between 1903–1908, the tragedy of Marino is the earliest of Pessoa’…[Read more]

Tsao, Hung-ping 曹 恆 平 (2021). Evolutionary Mathematics and Art for Bilingual Poems. In: “Evolutionary Progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)”, Wang, Lawrence K. 王 抗 曝 and Tsao, Hung-ping 曹 恆 平 (editors). Volume 3, Number 3, March 2021; 43 pages. Lenox Institute Press, Newtonville, NY, 12128-0405, USA.…[Read more]

Israeli officials have long denied that rape was used as an instrument of war against Palestinians. Most of the files relating to the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948 and its aftermath remain sealed in Israeli archives and have been reclassified as top secret. Palestinian oral narratives have long been considered a poor…[Read more]

Special issue of Humanities exploring expressions and registrations of environmental culture and the eco-critical imagination in 21st century Scottish literature and culture. Open access.