Evoking the creative messiness of an artist’s palette, this Theory Palette depicts nine theoretical concerns as intersecting, blendable paint colors: author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception. Just as painters in the same school, theorists blend colors to create their own compositions, s…[Read more]

An essay on autobiography in pop songs by women: http://www.theavidlistener.com/2014/12/singing-about-yourself-autobiography-in-pop-music.html

Research on global Shakespeare has focused on the ways in which the plays have been adapted for indigenous languages and customs. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which non-British directors have treated the Elizabethan drama. Yet there are a number of works that create direct musical dialogues between Elizabethan drama, history, and…[Read more]

Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between
masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable
political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the
idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the S…[Read more]

As part of my research, I argue that one important way the definition of a feminist borderland develops in these narratives is from a female character’s knowledge of and interpretation of her physical presence within the borderlands. By applying Linda Martín Alcoff’s theories of gender “positionality” and “self-embodiment” from her text Visible…[Read more]

A B ST R A C T
Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (USA, 1984) and Gus Van Sant’s Milk (USA,
2008), the two major films that narrate the life and tragically dramatic death of gay
politician and activist Harvey Milk (1930–1978), are widely recognized as part of
the queer cinematic canon but are less often categorized as Jewish films. While…[Read more]

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

In a book review of Story of O, part of which appeared on the cover of early paperback editions, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that its publication in 1965 marked “the end of any coherent restrictive application of the concept of pornography to books.” This essay explores the implications of that significant shift in censorship policy for lib…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the sexy librarian stereotype emerged at the end of the twentieth century from the confluence between sexual liberation, free speech movements and print pornography. It focuses on a series of librarian themed pornographic paperbacks published in the 1970s and 1980s by Greenleaf Classics. These stories, although flimsy…[Read more]

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]