Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata.” This article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the…[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]

Explores a particular passage of Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange,” illuminating how it shows the text draws our admiration for Alex.

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Explores how Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” reads exactly as the sort of clinging back to a projected mother-figure, after freedom began to spell feelings of abandonment that psychically were proving increasingly intolerable, that object relations therapists finds in patients. Delineates how much of the story amounts to a tussle between…[Read more]

Alfonso de Toledo (15th century) was, indeed, a curious guy. But he was doing something with his curiosity. He was researching and translating. He was focusing on particular themes and institutions, and giving a legal and juridical reading of them –he, as he confesses, has very little theology to forget, so even theological inventions are, for h…[Read more]

Analysis of how Jo creates her own femininity, apart from her mother’s, through effectively earning the trust and interest of increasingly impressive paternal imagos.

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

Graduate-level syllabus for a seminar in the Department of English. Neither “history of the book” nor “media studies,” this course sits somewhere in-between combining the ethos of a makerspace with the hands-on resources of a letterpress and book arts studio.

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_

Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across time and space, I developed two card games: Codex Conquest (http://codexconquest.lib.uiowa.edu/) and Mark (under development: h…[Read more]

Teaching Book History through Card Games: Codex Conquest and Mark
Amy Hildreth Chen, English and American Literature Librarian, University of Iowa
Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across t…[Read more]

This is the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh UP, October 2018), which argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much – if not more – than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced…[Read more]

Introduction to the new feminists modernisms in the inaugural issue of Feminist Modernist Studies.

In 1526, royal refiner and natural historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) praised the singular quality of the “muchos tesoros de oro labrado / en poder delos indios q̄ se hā cōquistado” (lxv, v). By 1535, however, he had to define what, exactly, he meant by gold: “No hablo aquí en el oro que se ha habido por rescates, o en la guerra, ni…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]