Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects…[Read more]

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the illustration sequences of the four magnificent Gospel books made for Judith of Flanders within the context of the political chaos in pre-Conquest England. These deluxe display books indicate one of the ways that literacy and literary patronage provided cultural legitimacy and social status for secular women in the late…[Read more]

In late 1991, an editor at the Sunday New York Times Book Review asked me to write a feature article about that uniquely American genre, the Indian captivity narrative. When the editor called, I was dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. I accepted the Times assignment in hopes that writing this article might prove a…[Read more]

The 28th bibliography for 560 volumes added to Washington University Libraries’ Contemporary German Literature Collection. All published in 2014, these acquisitions include novels, poetry, short story collections, essays, autobiographical works, and literary and cultural periodicals mainly from publishers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. A…[Read more]

The 29th bibliography for 585 volumes added to Washington University Libraries’ Contemporary German Literature Collection located on level B of Olin Library. All published in 2015, these acquisitions include novels, poetry, short story collections, essays, autobiographical works, and literary and cultural periodicals from publishers in Germany,…[Read more]

Aggregate larp rules are a type of code that runs on humans. Code can be thought of as a linguistic form that is both declarative and imperative; it is both truth and command (Buswell 2009). In aggregate larp, elements of the game’s
diegesis are rendered codic, or playable, allowing players a degree of autonomy from game staff. Through the m…[Read more]

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]