The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

Using REED London as a case study of how we, as pre-modern performance and theatre historians, are using digital methods to aggregate its materials, access and analyze a remarkably broad array of archival documents, and amplify their importance to a broader spectrum of humanities scholars and potential collaborators than we cannot have been able…[Read more]

Coloniality is a complex heritage encapsulating complex cultural challenges confronting the performance artist. Nigerian musical production appears to have been operating in a world without borders since the advent of colonialism. There have been non-indigenous forms brought into the cultural landscape which have challenged the performers. The…[Read more]

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

This article examines how the Brothers Grimm are fictionalized in German and Anglo-American media. While some representations revere and romanticize the iconic brothers for preserving the fairy-tale tradition, other depictions challenge the conventional understanding of their work and cultural contribution. In these demythologizing depictions, the…[Read more]

Fairy tales are often described in proprietary terms. Because the myth of their origin among the anonymous folk is so strong, the general tendency in both popular and scholarly discourse is to conceive of fairy tales as either the common property of all humanity or the treasures of specific cultures, nations, or ethnic groups. Since the…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

Scholarship on the Sleeping Beauty tale has gone largely unappreciated. Underlying the story’s obvious themes and motifs—birth, death/sleep, rebirth—and complicating its gender dynamic is a preoccupation with orality and telling that gives the story a significant self-reflective dimension. This article examines how the tale reflects on story…[Read more]

Scholarship on the Sleeping Beauty tale has gone largely unappreciated. Underlying the story’s obvious themes and motifs—birth, death/sleep, rebirth—and complicating its gender dynamic is a preoccupation with orality and telling that gives the story a significant self-reflective dimension. This article examines how the tale reflects on story…[Read more]

Explores how children of war and adults reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. To that end, the article (1) considers the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establishes how the…[Read more]

Explores how children of war and adults reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. To that end, the article (1) considers the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establishes how the…[Read more]

The Grimms’ tale of “Brier Rose” (KHM 50) has self-reflexive characteristics of the Romantic literary fairy tale. In thematizing memory and alluding to the imagery used in the preface to the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, Wilhelm Grimm’s version of the story self-consciously reflects on its own origins and exhibits a self-awareness…[Read more]

This article focuses initially on a new strand of empirical research that deliberately utilizes folktales and fairy tales to make broader claims for the scientific method and to advocate for the application of evolutionary science to literature in general. After critiquing this work for is its unquestioning reliance on the problematic…[Read more]

A study of the use of proverbs in the film The Company of Wolves (dir. Neil Jordan; screenplay by Jordan and Angela Carter), based on Angela Carter’s adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood tales in her book The Bloody Chamber.

This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of t…[Read more]

This essay considers Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison’s other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with…[Read more]

Shakespearean tragedies and comedies have been adapted to the silver screen in India, Malaysia, Tibet, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? Why are particular strategies used or themes emphasized? How are pre-linguistic structures of spectacle and…[Read more]

There are three main East Asian approaches to interpreting Ophelia. The first is informed by the fascination with and reaction against the Victorian pictorialization of Ophelia, especially John Everett Millais’s famous Ophelia (1851), that emphasized, as Kimberly Rhodes describes, her “pathos, innocence, and beauty rather than the unseemly det…[Read more]