This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

Tracing the collaboration between Dylan and Scorsese from the 1960s on to the Netflix original ‘The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese’ (2019), this article argues that the mutual respect of the two artists rests on a shared contestation of borders between fact and fiction. In the spirit of romanticism, both Dylan and…[Read more]

Despite a lack of a traditional cinema culture, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has recently witnessed an increase in film production. This rise can be attributed to a number of factors, not least of which, is the opening of movie theaters, the establishment of international film festivals and the arrival of film companies. These ventures have…[Read more]

Virginia Woolf is already recognized today as a major player in the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual powerhouse that influenced modern philosophy, politics, economics, aesthetics, biography, and literary criticism. Yet Woolf’s reputation as a fiction writer first and foremost has distracted critical attention from her thorough interrogation of w…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the developme…[Read more]

This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals should work to protect multiple runs of actual Victorian periodicals, which are potentially at risk in “collective collections” organized by academic libraries.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

This article argues that Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860) draws together ageing and decay through the poem’s formal wrinkling: moments where metrical disruption, folding, slackness, or concealment correspond to the insights derived from the perspective of great age — chiming the poet’s keynotes of disappointment, mourning, and loss. I turn to ‘Ulysses…[Read more]

The significance of old age in Kipling’s work has gone largely unacknowledged by critics who attend to the many youthful protagonists who sail, hunt, and explore their way across the plots of his fiction. This essay argues that the relationship between grandparent and grandchild in Kipling’s Kim serves as a representational strategy—at the level…[Read more]

The rapid onset of dementia after an illness, the development of gray hair after a traumatic loss, the sudden appearance of a wrinkle in the brow of a spurned lover. The realist novel uses these conventions to accelerate the process of aging into a descriptive moment, writing the passage of years on the body all at once. Aging, Duration, and the…[Read more]

In 1939, Keidrych Rhys charged that Dylan Thomas’ “Prologue to an Adventure” was reprinted “in Delta (Paris) without acknowledgement… without permission”; however, Ralph Maud contrarily argues “Durrell, as editor of Delta, asked Thomas for contributions and published something by him in all three issues” (123). Thomas’ letters support the latter…[Read more]

This syllabus for Major Authors: Anonymous serves as one of the capstone seminar options for our English Majors and Minors. In overhauling our curriculum to make the English BA represent more literature, we removed Single-Author-Named courses & replaced them with Major Authors. Each faculty who teach this course make an argument for the various…[Read more]

The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches…[Read more]

The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches…[Read more]

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]