In the first episode of Hannibal (2013-15), FBI profiler Will Graham is called to examine a body impaled on antlers in the middle of a field – presumably the work of the so-called Minnesota Shrike. Graham quickly determines that, while this crime superficially resembles that of other Shrike victims, its difference is such that this ‘field kab…[Read more]

This is no longer just kids on an adventure. Yates’s transtextual citations here imbue J.K. Rowling’s coming-of-age tale with a truly apocalyptic foreboding — one that exceeds the ostensible youth orientation of the Harry Potter films.

Writing of cultural studies in 1986, Tania Modleski observed that female scholars, “denied access to pleasure, while simultaneously being scapegoated for seeming to represent it,” have no recourse within a critical framework but to accept an “adversarial position” towards popular culture. In the same way, when fangirls’ emotions are the thing tha…[Read more]

Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950) rewrites post-Second World War crises of displacement, child combat, and state re-integration through the genre of the domestic melodrama. Adolescent protagonists Barbary and Raoul move from France to London at the end of the war as both combatants and refugees, having spent the conflict aiding the R…[Read more]

This article approaches the problem of reconstructing the culturally situated audience experience of radio programming through the example of Louis MacNeice’s wartime radio broadcasts, notably “Alexander Nevsky” and “Christopher Columbus”. The article draws on audience research reports, internal correspondence, and close analysis of the broadcasts…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of the history of radio studies as it intersects with twentieth-century literary studies, and outlines recent research trends in the field. Beginning with the earliest theorists and practitioners of radio (including Hilda Matheson, Rudolf Arnheim, and Lance Sieveking), the article considers how mid-twentieth…[Read more]

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue black and “coloured” lives, while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-whit…[Read more]

This course is intended to give students a broad introduction to (primarily) British modernist fiction in the context of the new media ecology of the early twentieth century. Other media (radio, film), genres (drama), and national traditions (Irish, American, German, Soviet) make appearances.