Keats’s poetic thoughts on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism’s most incisive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. This essay is about the ways Keats’s verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons with an imaginative range. Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has “no i…[Read more]

It is well known that Walter Scott adapted the forms of sentimental fiction for his initial trilogy of novels on Scottish manners and that he drew on philosophical theories of sympathy when conceiving of his characters and placing them in historical relation to one another and to his readership. Scott’s adaptations of sentimentalism and of…[Read more]

Abstracts for the Two-Panel Series “More Is More: Rules and Riddles of Nineteenth-Century Vielschreiberei.” MLA Annual Convention, Washington, D.C., January 6–9, 2022.

*Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies,* Edited by Cristina León Alfar and Emily G. Sherwood, Routledge 2021, The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions. “Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne tells the story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and her ongoing di…[Read more]

Special issue of Humanities exploring expressions and registrations of environmental culture and the eco-critical imagination in 21st century Scottish literature and culture. Open access.

A syllabus for a 300-level (3rd year) English literature course taught at the University of Victoria’s English department

In Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country, the protagonist Shimamura refers to an “old book” which gave him in-depth knowledge about the region known in Japan as the “Snow Country”. The name of the book is not disclosed by Kawabata, but it is now known that the “old book” is Hokuetsu Seppu (first published in 1837), written by Su…[Read more]

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

It is well known that the literary history of Latin America and its canon has been/is written by a patriarchal Eurocentric society that controls what constitutes national literature. It is also established that (colonial/contemporary) Latin American subjects in the periphery of the urban republic of letters are not included due to their gender…[Read more]

New directions of research in colonial women’s studies on gender roles, periphery and margins, and discursive practices that expand the notion of “literary text” (Adorno 177), indicate that the textual corpus of colonial women’s writings continues to increase. This emergent group of texts reveals patterns of rhetorical strategies and recurre…[Read more]

In the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and be…[Read more]

It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bo…[Read more]

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spr…[Read more]

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.