The adaptations of King George VI’s and Stephen Hawking’s life stories show their uneasy relationship to the “troubled-white-male-genius” genre and to the vocal embodiment of their subjects who lose and gain a voice through therapy, technology, and their will to live a full life. The films carefully skirt the edges of public disgust and pity of…[Read more]

The Egyptian Surrealist Art et Liberté group was recuperated in two exhibitions beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2018. The larger exhibition by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath emphasizes the group’s internationalism and the complexity of its engagement with various forms of Surrealism, including André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s 1938 manif…[Read more]

This chapter theorizes global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. Bringing the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, this chapter argues that acts of appropriation carry with them strong ethical implications. A crucial, ethical component of…[Read more]

The New English Dictionary was originally distinguished from an encyclopedia in reach and function by its proponent Richard Chenevix Trench and its principal editor James A. H. Murray as differing in responsibilities: a dictionary described the meanings of words, an encyclopedia described the nature of things. The distinction had philosophical and…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

The historical relationship between the Catalan and Occitan languages had a definitive impact on the linguistic identity of the powerful Crown of Aragon and the emergent Spanish Empire. Drawing upon a wealth of historical documents, linguistic treatises and literary texts, this book offers fresh insights into the political and cultural forces that…[Read more]

The historical relationship between the Catalan and Occitan languages had a definitive impact on the linguistic identity of the powerful Crown of Aragon and the emergent Spanish Empire. Drawing upon a wealth of historical documents, linguistic treatises and literary texts, this book offers fresh insights into the political and cultural forces that…[Read more]

La relación histórica entre las lenguas catalana y occitana tuvo un impacto decisivo en la formación de la identidad lingüística de la Corona de Aragón y, más tarde, en la del Imperio Español. Basándose en una gran variedad de documentos históricos, tratados lingüísticos y textos literarios, y mediante un análisis textual innovador, el presente…[Read more]

La relación histórica entre las lenguas catalana y occitana tuvo un impacto decisivo en la formación de la identidad lingüística de la Corona de Aragón y, más tarde, en la del Imperio Español. Basándose en una gran variedad de documentos históricos, tratados lingüísticos y textos literarios, y mediante un análisis textual innovador, el presente…[Read more]

Wacks, David A. “Romance of Evast and Blaquerna by Ramón Llull (Review).” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, vol. 47, no. 1, 2018, pp. 122–24. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cor.2018.0022.

The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned.…[Read more]

Book review of Emily Colbert Carins, Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 189 pp

Much scholarship on The Picture of Dorian Gray has focused on its possible textual sources and its place in literary traditions. This article demonstrates that by contextualizing the novel in the history of art and the tradition of British portraiture, we are able to answer significant yet overlooked questions such as why Wilde chose “picture” rat…[Read more]

The convivencia between the followers of the different religions of the Mediterranean persisted despite the fraught politics of Christianity and Islam. Despite the long arm of the Inquisition the protagonists in the plays of Cervantes and Lope struggle to maintain fraternal ties.