As Seyed-Gohrab rightly mentions in the introduction to this volume, “poets and writers are so essential in the turbulent history of twentieth-century Iran that any history of modern Iran neglecting the role of literature … would be seriously incomplete” (14). This volume, focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, provides a his…[Read more]

Through offering an ethnography of a group of educated, middle-class women who “had been attending weekly Qur’an and classical poetry classes for years” (xii), the volume shows that poetry and prayer are companions in the cultural history of Iran. It attempts to answer the question, “What does this companionship mean for forms of religio…[Read more]

As Seyed-Gohrab rightly mentions in the introduction to this volume, “poets and writers are so essential in the turbulent history of twentieth-century Iran that any history of modern Iran neglecting the role of literature … would be seriously incomplete” (14). This volume, focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, provides a his…[Read more]

Building on the author’s PhD thesis on “the British cultural and imaginative engagements with Persia in the nineteenth century” (vi), the volume charts “the diversity of perceptions associated with Persia in Victorian literary culture” (2). It focuses on poetry as the medium through which to survey the Victorian conception of Persia. It consists…[Read more]

The neolithic figurines of North – and North-East Europe, belonging to Pitted Ware culture and Pit-Comb Ware culture, are a desideratum to research. These pretty creations, often sculptures of human and animals such as bears, moose, seals, wild-horse, domestic animals and fantastic four-limped beings are spatially distributed over the Baltic R…[Read more]

The depth and significance of the shifts associated with the post-work society has pro-voked a newfound interest in the role of imagination in political thinking, made explicit by many authors who turned to the literary genre of utopian and sci-fi writing to sketch possible scenarios of the near future. This paper turns to another mode of…[Read more]

In this article, I argue that that a close examination of the most sexually explicit scenes in the anonymous gay pornographic novel Teleny (1893) reveals that they do not anticipate the bourgeois, individualistic liberal gay subject described by Michel Foucault, but are instead more closely related to the cosmic horrors found in the genre of weird…[Read more]

Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth…[Read more]

This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel’s performative theory of lyric…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of the academic study of Victorian masculinity. It argues that the pioneering work of feminist and sexuality studies scholars in Victorian studies during the 1970s and 1980s made it possible to discuss manhood critically as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It then presents a reading of major works on…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of “Euphuism” in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while…[Read more]

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have
typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of
the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French
and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on
a newspaper art…[Read more]

Published in New Orleans in 1845 by a group of free men of color, Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes is now commonly recognized as the first collection of African American poetry. As a testament to and expression of the intellectual prowess of New Orleans’s francophone free Black community, Les Cenelles deserves to be read as a formally int…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

I argue that an indirect and imaginative route through subversive humor offers a means to
raise consciousness about covert oppression and the mechanisms underlying it, reveal the errors
of those with power who complacently sustain systematic oppression, and even open those people
up to changing their minds. Subversive humor confronts serious…[Read more]

Some of Dave Chappelle’s uses of storytelling about seemingly mundane events, like his experiences with his “white friend Chip” and the police, are examples of what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “Positive Propaganda.” This is in contrast to “Demagoguery,” the sort of propaganda described by Jason Stanley that obstructs empathic recognition of others, and u…[Read more]

Keats’s poetic thoughts on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism’s most incisive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. This essay is about the ways Keats’s verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons with an imaginative range. Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has “no i…[Read more]

The writings of Arthur Hugh Clough display a sustained interest in the relations between an individual, his or her generation, and the processes of historical change that distinguish and demarcate one generation from another. As someone who spent much of his life as a student and teacher, Clough was self-consciously aware of his location within an…[Read more]

This paper discusses the effect of social media on the occurrence of ‘Arab Spring’. In the
Arab world no country could claim to be truly democratic and most were autocratic coupled
with desertification (68.4 per cent of the total land area), phenomenal rise in population and
scarcity of water. Moreover, about 60 per cent of the population is…[Read more]

This research work is an investigation into the reception of anti-smoking advertisements
that make use of “fear appeals”. The objective of the research is to bring audience
perceptions, interpretations and making sense processes of such advertising campaigns to
the limelight. Instead of measuring effects or effectiveness of anti-smoking mes…[Read more]