Building on eighteenth-century philosophical traditions, Victorian aesthetics were often posed as an antidote to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic demands of the marketplace, and in most cultures undergoing modernization the Beautiful has often functioned in opposition to the forces of power and…[Read more]

Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
• What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India,
Australasia, the USA?
• What is the role of English language in relation to other global
and local languages?
• What is the role of decolonising efforts?
• How do our respective state apparatuses affect…[Read more]

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

Der Beitrag widmet sich dem satirischen Humor Jean Pauls als schwarzem Humor skizzenhaft ausgehend von der Fundierung des ästhetischen Humors in der Weltverachtung (§ 33 der “Vorschule der Ästhetik”). In einer Lektüreminiatur zur späten menippeischen Satire “Des Geburthelfers Walther Vierneissel Nachtgedanken über seine verlornen Fötus…[Read more]

McDonagh is arguably one of the most celebrated yet most controversial of contemporary Anglo-Irish playwrights. His plays have received mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike, mostly for featuring graphic violence and obscene dialogues. Even though comedy is mostly seen as an inferior genre compared to tragedy, McDonagh, among many…[Read more]

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

The prominent Russian writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was known mainly for his work on the Soviet prison camps. In many of his fictional and non-fiction works, however, Solzhenitsyn dealt with the subject of Germany. This article analyses Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of Germany in the works August 1914, The Gulag A…[Read more]

This is a book review that evaluates the Spanish-language edition of the letters written by the Mexican poet Helena Paz Garro to the German writer Ernst Jünger, which were originally written in French. The reviewer had access to the original letters in the German Literature Archive in Germany and she compares the original texts with the…[Read more]

This document is a basic guide for graduate students who need to work in archives or other special libraries. The guide includes items to bring or have on hand as well as steps for planning your visit and organizing your notes.

This document is a basic guide for graduate students who need to work in archives or other special libraries. The guide includes items to bring or have on hand as well as steps for planning your visit and organizing your notes.

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]