Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term ‘open access’ in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of ‘pay-to-say’ publishing. In this book, Martin Paul Eve…[Read more]

This comparative study in the evolution of subjectivity in European literature during the Renaissance ascribes it to the impact of the Reformation on the public representation of authorial identity, differing from Stephen Greenblatt’s later application of Foucault to six Tudor authors.

This article considers the performances of “animal drag” that appear across the affiliated US media projects of Jackass (the television program and film franchise) and Wildboyz (the television program). Drawing on transgender studies scholarship, as well as recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and environmental studies, Nicole Seymour arg…[Read more]

Wikis have become enormously attractive to Internet users because they are open-access web pages or networks of web pages that can be modified by any interested editors, making them perpetual works-in-progress that evolve and change at the behest of their contributors. Wikipedia, the limitless fountain of collected, and sometimes inaccurate,…[Read more]

“King Lear,” like all great tragedies, is surely designed to entertain and illuminate, not to depress an audience – as too many interpretations argue. Lear abdicates to ensure the future of Cordelia, from excessive love of virtue and justice, the violation of which initially drives him mad – with rage – but he progressively goes sane, learning t…[Read more]

This article reads the problem of trespass within William Shakespeare’s King Lear. I draw upon eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone’s notion of trespass, sixteenth-century jurist Jean Bodin’s notion of sovereignty, in order to understand the question of property rights that emerges in Lear’s abdication of his sovereignty.

With the discovery of the earliest known manuscript version of Et les chiens se taisaient, we learn that Césaire had started thinking about the theater earlier than had been assumed, and most important, that he had originally envisioned this work as a historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution. “Migrant Textuality” explores the several vers…[Read more]