Between 1694 and 1757, there were at least five adaptations of Behn’s “The History of the Nun; or The Fair Vow Breaker”. Modern critics have focused on Thomas Southerne’s play, “The Fatal Marriage: or, the Innocent Adultery” (1694), David Garrick’s 1757 revision of Southerne’s play into the tragedy, “Isabella: or, the Fatal Marriage,” and Jane…[Read more]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

Anxieties abound regarding the ostensible obsolescence of the book. Exploring whether the book is in fact becoming obsolete — and what it might mean if it were — requires thinking distinctly about the specific material form of the book (the codex) and about the content that it has long carried. If the form were to change — becoming digital, for i…[Read more]

This paper argues that there is a need to look beyond what is merely “homeward” in the work of Thomas Wolfe. I take up Wai Chee Dimock’s expansive conception of American literature as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures,” demonstrating how Thomas…[Read more]

In this article I offer a reading of Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s novel Andymon (1982) in order to show how science fiction was able to function as critique in the German Democratic Republic. Andymon, a popular novel in a popular genre, establishes an extended analogy between spatial closure and temporal foreclosure to challenge the re…[Read more]

This article reads Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic theory and practice in the context of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s dismissals of his work in order to recover the paradoxical interplay between documentation and perceptual training central to debates about photography as a specifically modern medium during the 1920s. I argue that, rather than…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

Giving voice to women who suffer the brunt of masculine anxieties, THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM privileges what I call “feminine anxieties” in its depiction of all the female characters, especially in the trinity of Mariam, Doris, and Salome. By depicting women who defy convention, the play stages women’s multiple perspectives on, reactions again…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s MACBETH interrogates the tyranny of absolute monarchical practices and divorces them from naturalized gender constructions by placing Lady Macbeth at the center of the play’s violence. I argue that she provides a parodic inversion of the ideal wife and and puts pressure on masculinist and violent structures of relations that depend…[Read more]

The “Urlo”. From the deconstructive rage/fury to the ‘yes’ assertion.
In this article we offer a series of tableaux belonging to contemporary Romance literatures written by women, through a focus on a common feature which is that of the “urlo” (scream). Based on a selection of works mainly Italian, but also taken from other literatures of the Rom…[Read more]

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies