In the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and be…[Read more]

It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]

“Shamanistic Shakespeare: Korea’s Colonization of Hamlet” offers a timely reminder about the dangers of imposing a reformulated national myth on international Shakespeare productions. Focusing on a London performance of Korea’s Yohangza Theatre Company’s shamanized Hamlet, this case study invites far broader consideration of the readability of glo…[Read more]

Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a philosophical investment in literature’s reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes. Social recuperation of disabled…[Read more]

Global studies enable us to examine deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare. This chapter focuses on the modern period and introduces readers to a number of key concepts in Shakespeare and global studies, namely censorship and redaction, genre, gender, race, and politics of reception. Performing Shakespeare not only creates channels between…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

In conjunction with the Popular Culture Association (PCA) holding their 2021 conference in Boston, contributors and attendees of the New England Graphic Medicine (NEGM) Virtual Summit are proposing a slate of programming that now is welcoming additional participants.

Review of The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, by Xiaofei Tian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018)

Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) is one of the most significant texts in the history of the freedom of the press, and yet the pamphlet’s clandestine printers have successfully eluded identification for over 375 years. By examining distinctive and dam-aged type pieces from 100 pamphlets from the 1640s, this article att…[Read more]

In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

A challenge for Graphic Medicine is its being juxtaposed alongside biomedical and scientific fields of work that operate largely in the realm of statistics and quantifiable analytics. Often, the scholarship in Graphic Medicine comes without numbers. It is anecdotal, experiential, aesthetic/literary, or theoretical, customarily, and only…[Read more]

The theme of waiting permeates two poems by the late Syrian poet Nizār Qabbānī. The verse in both poems ‘Waiting for Godot’, and ‘A television interview with an Arab Godot’, describes an arduous wait, at once distressing and unpredictable. In the first poem, the poet urges Godot to arrive, as the savior who will appear in the form of the Messia…[Read more]

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the…[Read more]

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]

This chapter, “Owning Chinese Shakespeares,” pursues the critical concept of localization and critiques the fidelity-derived discourse about cultural ownership. How were Chinese Shakespeares used as a kind of staged utopia of modernity?

Underlying this study are three related lines of inquiry united by what might be called locality criticism, t…[Read more]

Named the Writer of the Millennium, Shakespeare has come full circle and become a cliché, embraced by marketers and contested by intellectuals. Similar narratives about China’s rise in global stature have been told with equal gusto, championed and denounced in turn by optimists and critics. If Shakespeare now has worldwide currency, how is the se…[Read more]