The STC Macbeth’s setting and predominantly multiethnic cast brought to mind Orson Welles’s landmark 1936 Macbeth which was set in Haiti and featured an all-black cast. In both cases, the ethnicity and race of the cast matched that of the characters and cultures in the adaptation’s respective universe. Tommy’s production engaged in two models…[Read more]

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Blog, 28 March 2018. A Q&A about the essay “JavaScript Affogato: Programming a Culture of Improvised Expertise,” published in Configurations 26.1 (2018): 47–72, DOI: 10.1353/con.2018.0002.

An analysis of ten studies in Victorian literature and medicine examines the changes in the interdisciplinary field since G. S. Rousseau published an influential article on the topic in 1981.

In a time when the anxiety about Elizabeth I’s heir to the throne was ripe, and illegal to discuss, Shakespeare focuses on the issue of succession in King John, and shows the parallels to his own age, while using Hubert as a metaphor for the difficult position of Shakespeare’s contemporary citizens of England as they anticipate the naming of…[Read more]

Whatever your theory and whatever your fandom, you don’t have to abandon it to do affect theory. This is because affect theory isn’t about telling you which side to pick in an agonistic contest; it’s about finding out what a body can do as it moves with other bodies in entangled states, whether or not we notice them. Affect theory offers more…[Read more]

Abstract: This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel _Quartet_. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic…[Read more]

In recent years, the practices of symptomatic reading have been called into question by scholars such as Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Cathy N. Davidson, David Theo Goldberg, Rita Felski and Bruno Latour. It is claimed that such reading has become either formulaic or politically inefficacious. This article argues, against such thinking, that Emily…[Read more]

The late Elizabethan Period was marked by socio-economic discontent. Amid this,
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) featured a prominent debate: whether or not
tyrannicide could solve problems. Around 1599, Essex formulated a like-minded
political revolution only to dismiss it until 1601. Yet, as providentialist and
republican debates failed t…[Read more]

Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s field-defining article, “The New Modernist Studies,” turns ten in 2018. Despite the fact that the article takes up new media as a key topic-and although it was published just after ground-breaking work in the “visual turn” of literary studies by Mary Lou Emery (Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature,…[Read more]

Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s field-defining article, “The New Modernist Studies,” turns ten in 2018. Despite the fact that the article takes up new media as a key topic-and although it was published just after ground-breaking work in the “visual turn” of literary studies by Mary Lou Emery (Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature,…[Read more]

This essay argues that humanist reading practices, methods of analysis, and aesthetics transformed traditional morality drama in the 1560s and 1570s in a way that accounts for the form’s resurgence. The essay looks closely at Ulpian Fulwell’s “Like Will to Like” (1568), William Wager’s “The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art” (1569) and…[Read more]

To move global Shakespeare studies beyond the more limiting scope of nation-state and cultural profiling, I would like to propose we consider a number of critical concepts as methodology. These concepts critique the limitations of cartographic imagination, and connect the performance site to spaces of knowledge production: (1) the site of…[Read more]

The article focuses on the adaptation strategies used by Lope de Vega in his play El Gran Duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido (1617). This tragedy, built on material acquired from travelogues, represents the first depiction of the Russian Time of Troubles in fiction. In it, one can follow Lope de Vega’s shift from preserving the factual d…[Read more]