This article analyzes the connections between Lorde’s representations of blindness in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and its connection to lesbian sexuality.

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]

Early works of dramatic criticism seeking to draw parallels between ritual and drama in Africa concentrated on examining the dramatic characteristics of ritual to see how drama evolved from ritual. However, a closer application of the theories of Girard, Schechner, Smith, Hubert Mauss and Turner reveal new perspectives on the interaction between…[Read more]

Young Adult dark romance is often more questioning than its adult counterpart; different, less constraining commercial imperatives are perhaps at work, or readers’ expectations less fixed. This chapter will show how, woven into a sensitive coming-of-age narrative of first love and familial problems, Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver trilogy performs a f…[Read more]

Vampire literature since Le Fanu at least has been conspicuously about ‘Otherness’, that crucial term of identity politics, and has thus rendered itself most obligingly to interpretation in terms of those politics—at least, since the rise of that paradigm in cultural analysis, it has been available to be read that way. Appearing deceptively human…[Read more]

This article argues that King Learn can help re-shape ecocriticism. The play’s focus on human dis-harmony with the nonhuman environment resonates with the “post-equilibrium shift” in ecological thinking. The play’s emphasis on the way natural systems such as the weather disrupt human meaning-making generates an alternative to dualistic notions of…[Read more]

Desde el período del Dadá se han ido borrando los límites entre las formas artísticas y sus soportes, entre las estéticas de uso y las estéticas formales, entre los espacios altos y bajos de producción cultural, y también, entre la percepción de centros y periferias que parecen haberse astillado y reproducido a la interioridad de espacios hasta ha…[Read more]

An examination of spatial themes in the emerging genre of environmental fiction. Originally presented as a talk at the Futures of American Literature event at Uppsala University (Sweden).

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

Gregory Crewdson’s cinematic, tableaux photographs often depict an anonymous, banal, and tension-filled life in suburban and rural communities. Working as a self-described American realist and strongly influenced by a tradition of American vernacular artists, including work by Arbus, Eggleson, Friedlander, and Hopper, Crewdson actively seeks to c…[Read more]

Gregory Crewdson’s cinematic, tableaux photographs often depict an anonymous, banal, and tension-filled life in suburban and rural communities. Working as a self-described American realist and strongly influenced by a tradition of American vernacular artists, including work by Arbus, Eggleson, Friedlander, and Hopper, Crewdson actively seeks to c…[Read more]

Mourning becomes Shakespeare, perhaps; celebration too. Romeo and Juliet (1597) and Othello (1604) are tragedies of sweeping passion and rash action where love falters and lovers fall. In her 1988 play entitled Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Ann-Marie MacDonald parodies the two Shakespearean texts and visits the intersections between…[Read more]

This essay examines the activity of women in the Russian organized right between 1905 and 1917. It is particularly concerned with the scale of the female membership of the right-wing movement, and their connection to philanthropic and political roles. It examines the backgrounds of the women who joined the movement, the type of the activities that…[Read more]