After presenting an overview of scholarship on post-9/11 American poetry, my article focuses on a group of largely neglected post-9/11 poems, which deal with spectral consciousness and hallucinatory experiences. These poems not only challenge a number of traditional binaries like, ‘presence / absence’, ‘living /dead’, ‘synchronic / diachroni…[Read more]

This article examines how the Brothers Grimm are fictionalized in German and Anglo-American media. While some representations revere and romanticize the iconic brothers for preserving the fairy-tale tradition, other depictions challenge the conventional understanding of their work and cultural contribution. In these demythologizing depictions, the…[Read more]

Fairy tales are often described in proprietary terms. Because the myth of their origin among the anonymous folk is so strong, the general tendency in both popular and scholarly discourse is to conceive of fairy tales as either the common property of all humanity or the treasures of specific cultures, nations, or ethnic groups. Since the…[Read more]

Scholarship on the Sleeping Beauty tale has gone largely unappreciated. Underlying the story’s obvious themes and motifs—birth, death/sleep, rebirth—and complicating its gender dynamic is a preoccupation with orality and telling that gives the story a significant self-reflective dimension. This article examines how the tale reflects on story…[Read more]

Explores how children of war and adults reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. To that end, the article (1) considers the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establishes how the…[Read more]

The Grimms’ tale of “Brier Rose” (KHM 50) has self-reflexive characteristics of the Romantic literary fairy tale. In thematizing memory and alluding to the imagery used in the preface to the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, Wilhelm Grimm’s version of the story self-consciously reflects on its own origins and exhibits a self-awareness…[Read more]

This article focuses initially on a new strand of empirical research that deliberately utilizes folktales and fairy tales to make broader claims for the scientific method and to advocate for the application of evolutionary science to literature in general. After critiquing this work for is its unquestioning reliance on the problematic…[Read more]

A study of the use of proverbs in the film The Company of Wolves (dir. Neil Jordan; screenplay by Jordan and Angela Carter), based on Angela Carter’s adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood tales in her book The Bloody Chamber.

Imagine a humanities network with the sharing power of Academia.edu, the archival quality of an institutional repository, and a commitment to using and contributing to open source software. Now imagine that this network is not-for-profit. It doesn’t want to sell your data or generate profit from your intellectual property. That’s Humanities Com…[Read more]

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

The historical novel Waking the Dead is now available at ResearchGate. This data file (there are 20) introduces Jane Addams