This essay considers the shortfalls of globalizing tendencies in nineteenth-century
literary studies with a focus on the Ottoman Turkish articulation of romanticism, i.e.,
hayaliyyun. Retrieving a historically and geographically hybrid genealogy of romanticism
through the Ottoman Turkish context, my discussion situates romantic imaginary…[Read more]

Registered in Romantic depictions of imperial ruins is the endurance of empire in its immateriality: the imageries of empire’s ruination announce a future where imperial sovereignty maintains its presence spectrally. Using Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, and recruiting further insight from political theory, this essay argues that emp…[Read more]

This chapter looks at the evolving Gothic of the Vampire role playing games created by Mark Rein-Hagen et al. It offers a brief explanation of role-playing games for the uninitiated, defining their textuality in Bakhtinian terms – as chronotopes. It will lay out the relationship that role playing enjoys with the Gothic, drawing on Spooner’s pos…[Read more]

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

From living dolls to spirits wandering in search of solace or vengeance, the ghostly youth is one of the most enduring phenomena of supernatural fiction, its roots stretching back into the realms of folklore and superstition. In this spine-tingling new collection Jen Baker gathers a selection of the most chilling hauntings and encounters with…[Read more]

In the mid nineteenthcentury, a subgenre of ghost stories emerged that had roots in a hybrid tradition of institutional religious doctrine and oral folkloric expressions of anxiety over the fate of the child’s soul in the afterlife. Given the persistently high infant mortality rates and increased public awareness of child abuse across the c…[Read more]

in Vision, Contestation and Deception: Interrogating Gender and the Supernatural in Victorian Shorter Fiction, ed. Oindrila Ghosh (Avenel Press, 2021), pp.51-58