Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

Published as part of the Theories and Methodologies section on Oceanic Studies.

Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]

Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]

The British and Canadian authors Lawrence Durrell and M. G. Vassanji do not, at first thought, call out for a comparative study. Neither are typically regarded in criticism through their origins or ethnicity. The focus instead goes to their characters and subject matter, their cosmopolitan experiences. Confusions surrounding both authors have…[Read more]

This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hoban’s philosophical perspectives and Mitchell’s inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchell’s metatex…[Read more]

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is a novel that can be situated, aesthetically, within the traditions of utopian fiction and the North American encyclopaedic, postmodern novel. It is also, however, a text that is exemplary of a type of didacticism that cloaks its mechanism behind an overloaded structure. One of the explicit targets of this didacticism is…[Read more]

Although, in some ways, Sarah Waters’s Affinity looks akin to historiographic metafiction, Marie-Luise Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurately dubbed “new(meta)realism”, a mode that demonstrates the xhausted potential of the form. This article suggests that genre play and a meta-generic mode, dubbed taxonomography, might…[Read more]

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences b…[Read more]

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences b…[Read more]

This comparative study in the evolution of subjectivity in European literature during the Renaissance ascribes it to the impact of the Reformation on the public representation of authorial identity, differing from Stephen Greenblatt’s later application of Foucault to six Tudor authors.

Ever since its introduction to China in the early twentieth century, spoken drama (huaju) has been at the forefront of social and political changes. Its realistic portrayal of life and use of spoken dialogue made it an ideal vehicle to promote social reforms and to serve politics. This study investigates the relationship between politics and…[Read more]

Worldviews in Literature: An Anthology responds to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova’s 2012 global initiatives for study of world literature for a “New Humanism” along with Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s directive for world literature “to discover what is universal across national literatures.” Worldviews includes fifteen authors fro…[Read more]

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover…[Read more]

A semiotic analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

The article enacts the essay as the mainstay of scholarly discourse in a knowledgeable community. It deals with (con)textualized readings of poetry (or literature) mainly through the medium of translation as an important intercultural phenomenon involving poetics, episteme, borders.

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

“King Lear,” like all great tragedies, is surely designed to entertain and illuminate, not to depress an audience – as too many interpretations argue. Lear abdicates to ensure the future of Cordelia, from excessive love of virtue and justice, the violation of which initially drives him mad – with rage – but he progressively goes sane, learning t…[Read more]

n his theoretical writings, as well as in the subtext of The Waste Land, Eliot expresses the idea of the organic nature of culture and its unity despite its regional diversity. This unity is represented by some formal features of The Waste Land, such as its rhythm and structure. However, cultural unity, at times also represented by the textual, is…[Read more]