Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]

Describes and provides examples of modules and assignments for a sophomore Brit Lit survey and an upper-division poetics class that responded to student demands for a more racially diverse canon. Includes a brief discussion of Lucius Henry Holsey, enslaved worker on the UGA campus, who claimed to have learned to read from Milton’s Paradise Lost…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

Get tips on using the MLA International Bibliography to teach scholarly concepts and analytical skills.

For more than a hundred years the Modern Language Association, creator of the MLA International Bibliography, has worked to strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature. As part of that mission, the MLA has developed an online…[Read more]

The MLA International Bibliography is an essential tool for research in all aspects of modern languages and literature, but did you know that the MLAIB can be brought into the classroom and used as an effective teaching tool as well? Learn how the most powerful research tool in the humanities is being used in the virtual classroom to engage…[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]

This essay traces the development of the right-hand inscription (zuoyouming 座右銘) from its birth in the second century CE through its culmination as a complex literary subgenre in the tenth. Over the course of these eight centuries, right-hand inscriptions were used by some of the most prominent poets of their respective eras, including Cui Yuan…[Read more]

This essay suggests that with the increasing prominence of “historical poetics” as a set of social collectives, methodologies, and debates (especially about literary analysis), now seems to be an ideal time to assess its history and consider its future. The first part of the essay offers a genealogy of historical poetics, accounting for some of…[Read more]

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafés, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on S…[Read more]

Osmanlı emperyalizminden ve kolonyalizminden bahsedebilmek için postkolonyal teorinin analitik ufkunu ve kelime dağarcığını esnetmek ve belki de yeniden gözden geçirmek gereklidir. Bu yazının akademik ve politik meramı işte budur Daha açık bir deyişle, Abdülhak Hâmid Tarhan örneğiyle önümüzde beliren Osmanlı hayal(et)ini postkolonyal teoriyle k…[Read more]

In this paper, in a panel co-sponsored by the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, I summarize some of the structural and practical problems that challenge contingent scholars when they try to publish their work in scholarly journals. I share the record of the online, multimedia,…[Read more]

It is well known that Walter Scott adapted the forms of sentimental fiction for his initial trilogy of novels on Scottish manners and that he drew on philosophical theories of sympathy when conceiving of his characters and placing them in historical relation to one another and to his readership. Scott’s adaptations of sentimentalism and of…[Read more]

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its c…[Read more]