This essay explores the covert censorship of Shakespeare production nudity by Western and Eastern theater and television companies. Using Ian McKellen’s 2007 RSC King Lear as its case study, the essay considers the economic and political pressures brought to bear on the RSC by those seeking to prevent the perceived corruption of young people, and…[Read more]

How will immersive virtual reality (VR) cognitively affect the audiences who interface with it to interpret Shakespeare performances? Current theories of performance and cognition are based on theatre and film audiences, but VR performances combine features of both media: a disembodied spectral presence, like a theatrical audience; and a flexible…[Read more]

English 412 is, in its official description, “A survey of drama from 1558 to 1603, including works by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.” In this version from 2017, students focused on six revenge tragedies, the blockbuster genre of the Elizabethan theatre: plays filled with bloody violence, elevated rhetoric, and ghosts imploring…[Read more]

“Passions, Emotions and Cognition in the Long Eighteenth-Century Literature in England”
4th issue of journal “English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts” (Flavio Gregori, ed.).

Contents:
Michael McKeon: “Aesthetic Cognition: Feeling the Emotions of Others”;
Margaret A. Doody: “The Actor, the Mirror, the Soul and the Sylph “…[Read more]

This essay argues that feminists can productively use theories of intermediality to consider postmodern representations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia fabricated by women (or by creators self-identified as female, in the case of online avatars), in order to explore the following questions: under what circumstances might we imagine femininity as…[Read more]

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

The belief that Francis Bacon was, from the start, a stalwart defender of royal absolutism has prevailed in scholarship despite occasional comments about Bacon’s pluralist or collaborative legal and political imagination. Building on recent revisionist work, this article questions the standard historiography. It argues that Bacon’s jur…[Read more]

How in at least one instance Adam, in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” relentlessly pursues his desires — ostensibly against God’s will; and certainly in face of Raphael’s increasing disquiet — without experiencing a fall.

This chapter examines narratives that reflect the impact of epistemologies of otherness upon our understanding of race. Race intersects with other social factors such as class, cultural citizenship, and gender. This chapter draws on case studies of artists in exile or diaspora who interrogate their own identities, because exile brings racial…[Read more]

This chapter examines narratives that reflect the impact of epistemologies of otherness upon our understanding of race. Race intersects with other social factors such as class, cultural citizenship, and gender. This chapter draws on case studies of artists in exile or diaspora who interrogate their own identities, because exile brings racial…[Read more]

Exploration of how Aphra Behn uses her textual creation “Oronnoko” to engage in a guiltless sexual affair that bypasses all societal and inner-psychic censors.

Using Philip Sidney’s understanding of perfect poesy to examine the poetic worth of More’s “Utopia.”

Review for The Seventeenth Century of Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, _The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Changed the World_ and Marco Barducci, _Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718_

Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

“‘Bruised with Adversity’: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors” examines the role of the body, and of the somatic mark in particular, in the social production of both individual subjects and racial groups. In The Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins experience the benefits as well as the pitfalls of mistaken identity, revealing the ease with which…[Read more]

“‘Bruised with Adversity’: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors” examines the role of the body, and of the somatic mark in particular, in the social production of both individual subjects and racial groups. In The Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins experience the benefits as well as the pitfalls of mistaken identity, revealing the ease with which…[Read more]

“‘Bruised with Adversity’: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors” examines the role of the body, and of the somatic mark in particular, in the social production of both individual subjects and racial groups. In The Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins experience the benefits as well as the pitfalls of mistaken identity, revealing the ease with which…[Read more]