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 course, taught at Texas A&M University in Spring 2018, reads the entirety of the Norton anthology and enfolds readings of the Modernist Journals Project and scholarship by Morrisson, Esty, McKible and Churchill, Patterson, Ramazani, Jay, Berman, Chlak, Friedman, and Kalliney.

The Manifesto of Modern Digital Humanities is an avant-garde statement regarding digital methodologies used by scholars of modernist literature and culture. Its experimental format uses handwritten HTML to mimic the typographical qualities of modernist literary manifestoes.

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]

Abstract:
This article explores Robert Louis Stevenson’s use of costume as a device for exploring Scotland’s fetishization of it’s literary and cultural history. In Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, the mythologizing of James Durie as the eponymous Master depends upon a series of dramatic costume changes. Durie confounds attempts to consign…[Read more]

This chapter explores how a culture of transatlantic environmental journalism emerged during the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century. How did interest in science, travel and exploration during those years shape the ways in which North American and British magazines represented the natural environment? To what extent did articles in…[Read more]

Feminist resistance has been crucial for Argentina’s recovery from the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Alicia Partnoy was “disappeared” into one of hundreds of torture centers sardonically called “Little Schools.” After her release and exile to the United States, she published her poetic testimony, The Little School, with Cleis Press in 1986.…[Read more]

This essay investigates Walter Scott’s writing, across several genres, as a contribution to an environmental historiography of Scotland. One of the main research questions is whether that writing provides any evidence for an early land ethic that anticipates Aldo Leopold’s twentieth-century use of that term. Scott’s response to aesthetic…[Read more]

Darko Suvin claims that science fiction is fundamentally concerned with “cognitive estrangement,” or the presence of some element in the story that transforms how its readers understand their world. In fact, much of the developments in science, economics, and politics in the nineteenth century were also concerned with the new worlds revealed by…[Read more]

Darko Suvin claims that science fiction is fundamentally concerned with “cognitive estrangement,” or the presence of some element in the story that transforms how its readers understand their world. In fact, much of the developments in science, economics, and politics in the nineteenth century were also concerned with the new worlds revealed by…[Read more]

Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]

Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]

An introductory survey of climate fiction (a.k.a. “cli-fi”) in English. Written with an international readership in mind.

This article investigates Henry James’s digital afterlives by analyzing popular James-themed images and articles that have been shared on the Internet since 2000. Adapting Richard Dawkins’s theory of virality and Michael Anesko’s concept of James’s cultural capital, this article engages with viral content published on websites such as Bustle,…[Read more]

This essay is part of a collection of open access articles on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The articles are written for first-time readers of Chaucer and are designed to supplement the teaching of the Canterbury Tales, particularly in university classrooms.

My contribution is focused on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, providing an…[Read more]

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

This presentation will introduce the HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences) initiative, which aims to develop and support a values-based framework of indicators for excellence for the humanities and social science in academia and, by extension, academic libraries. This value-based evaluation paradigm uses metrics only…[Read more]