This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

The late Elizabethan Period was marked by socio-economic discontent. Amid this,
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) featured a prominent debate: whether or not
tyrannicide could solve problems. Around 1599, Essex formulated a like-minded
political revolution only to dismiss it until 1601. Yet, as providentialist and
republican debates failed t…[Read more]

This essay argues that humanist reading practices, methods of analysis, and aesthetics transformed traditional morality drama in the 1560s and 1570s in a way that accounts for the form’s resurgence. The essay looks closely at Ulpian Fulwell’s “Like Will to Like” (1568), William Wager’s “The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art” (1569) and…[Read more]

To move global Shakespeare studies beyond the more limiting scope of nation-state and cultural profiling, I would like to propose we consider a number of critical concepts as methodology. These concepts critique the limitations of cartographic imagination, and connect the performance site to spaces of knowledge production: (1) the site of…[Read more]

In his eighteenth-century Memoirs, criminal Stephen Burroughs tells of his campaign to establish a library in Bridgehampton, New York. When the town elders discover the plan, they insist upon reviewing Burroughs’s choices. Undercurrents of other debates spill over into what would otherwise merely be some quibbling over book selections. In a series…[Read more]

This article explores editorial practice in the British and North American periodicals between c.1800 and c.1850. The article uses a Transatlantic studies approach.

This sample chapter is a pre-copy edited version, in accordance with copyright and open access regulations.

ABSTRACT OF SCOTT, BYRON AND THE POETICS OF CULTURAL ENCOUNTER:
Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott’s and Byron’s poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people…[Read more]

This sample chapter is a pre-copy edited version, in accordance with copyright and open access regulations.

ABSTRACT OF SCOTT, BYRON AND THE POETICS OF CULTURAL ENCOUNTER:
Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott’s and Byron’s poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people…[Read more]

The article focuses on the adaptation strategies used by Lope de Vega in his play El Gran Duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido (1617). This tragedy, built on material acquired from travelogues, represents the first depiction of the Russian Time of Troubles in fiction. In it, one can follow Lope de Vega’s shift from preserving the factual d…[Read more]

In this essay I argue that the portrait of Arruntius as a passive Stoic is injudicious, and then I develop a new reading of Jonson’s depiction of Arruntius based on the textual evidence from both the quarto and folio editions of the play. The essay proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I question the commonly held view regarding A…[Read more]

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

Why We Read Fiction focuses on one of the most exciting areas of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s…[Read more]

Preview of “Introduction” to The Yearbook of English Studies 47 (2017), Walter Scott: New Interpretations.

Just over half a century ago, Marxist critic Georg Lukács proposed that Walter Scott — writing more than a century earlier — was responsible for a new kind of historical narrative: readers, by identifying with everyday kinds of fict…[Read more]

Preview of “Introduction” to The Yearbook of English Studies 47 (2017), Walter Scott: New Interpretations.

Just over half a century ago, Marxist critic Georg Lukács proposed that Walter Scott — writing more than a century earlier — was responsible for a new kind of historical narrative: readers, by identifying with everyday kinds of fict…[Read more]