While scholars have long considered John Keats’s Ode to Psyche a document of secularization, the poem’s precise relationship to the secular needs further attention. This essay engages with recent critiques of secularism, by Gil Anidjar and others, which challenge readings of Keats that make secularism or “toleration” a hallmark of his radical…[Read more]

When James Macpherson turned to the popular poetry of ancient Scotland, he found in it what philosophers now call folk psychology: a commonsense theory about how minds work. Yet because his poems were largely forgeries, Macpherson winds up importing more recent physiology into his portrayal of ancient, pagan materialism. As a result, the poems’ v…[Read more]

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (published 1595) was performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. Initially, the play has been dismissed by several critics as a vulgar and cheap entertainment without much value. Yet, the metadramatic techniques employed in the play sheds light to how humour could be effectively triggered in the respective per…[Read more]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]

Online at: https://screen-queens.com/2020/04/14/listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/

Online at: https://screen-queens.com/2020/04/14/listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/

A write-up of my contribution to a roundtable panel that took place at King’s College London on 26th September 2019 to celebrate the English translation of Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs. The speakers were Ros Murray (KCL), Jenny Chamarette (QMUL), Albertine Fox (Bristol), Frances Morgan (author of the Afterword, My Mother Laughs), Sarah Shi…[Read more]

Apocalyptic themes handled by Spanish directors of the current century, including Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, David and Álex Pastor, Álex de la Iglesia, Juan Antonio Bayona, Jorge Torregrossa, and Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas, and F. Javier Gutiérrez.

Bryony Lavery is an important figure in British feminist drama. She has been noted by critics for her unconventional theatrical methods and themes. Her Frozen (1998) is an anti-paedophiliac play that deals with a psychiatrist who tries to investigate the motives of a paedophile. Investigations into the past of the sexual predator blur the lines…[Read more]

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]

The 1960s and the 1970s witnessed the transition in British sports from amateurism to
professionalism. Thereafter, sportspersons have obtained material opportunities with
sponsorships and attracted entrepreneurs. However, since sponsors in this new era have
been using sportspersons to manipulate consumer behaviour, the vested interests…[Read more]

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of
financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees
further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal…[Read more]