Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

In 1994, artistic freedom pertaining inter alia to literature was enshrined in the South African Constitution. Clearly, the establishment of this right was long overdue compared to other nations within the Commonwealth. Indeed, the legal framework and practices regarding the regulation of literature that were introduced following the nation’s t…[Read more]

This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]

I think the thing that must seem most curious about this adventure to slay a dragon and reclaim a homeland and its treasure, is how the hell could adding a burglar be adding the decisive factor? What’s the trick? For there must be one, since the dragon has only gotten larger and more deadly as the years have gone by. Peter Jackson changes…[Read more]

Since the Intifada of 2000, living conditions in the Gaza Strip have progressively deteriorated, and when Hamas came to power in 2006–07, a complete blockade was enforced on the inhabitants by Egypt and Israel. In addition, five full-scale wars have been
waged on the Strip. Despite these conditions, Gazans remain resilient, as evidenced by s…[Read more]

Since the Intifada of 2000, living conditions in the Gaza Strip have progressively deteriorated, and when Hamas came to power in 2006–07, a complete blockade was enforced on the inhabitants by Egypt and Israel. In addition, five full-scale wars have been
waged on the Strip. Despite these conditions, Gazans remain resilient, as evidenced by s…[Read more]

ABSTRACT
The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries.…[Read more]

In this article, I argue that that a close examination of the most sexually explicit scenes in the anonymous gay pornographic novel Teleny (1893) reveals that they do not anticipate the bourgeois, individualistic liberal gay subject described by Michel Foucault, but are instead more closely related to the cosmic horrors found in the genre of weird…[Read more]

Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth…[Read more]

This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel’s performative theory of lyric…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of the academic study of Victorian masculinity. It argues that the pioneering work of feminist and sexuality studies scholars in Victorian studies during the 1970s and 1980s made it possible to discuss manhood critically as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It then presents a reading of major works on…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of “Euphuism” in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]

Osmanlı emperyalizminden ve kolonyalizminden bahsedebilmek için postkolonyal teorinin analitik ufkunu ve kelime dağarcığını esnetmek ve belki de yeniden gözden geçirmek gereklidir. Bu yazının akademik ve politik meramı işte budur Daha açık bir deyişle, Abdülhak Hâmid Tarhan örneğiyle önümüzde beliren Osmanlı hayal(et)ini postkolonyal teoriyle k…[Read more]

Over the past year, artists, doctors, medical professionals, and international agencies such as the World Health Organisation have been using comics to communicate the risks of the SARS-CoV2 virus. The visual economy and a near-universal language of lines, balloons, and panels in comics makes them well suited to disseminate epidemic-related…[Read more]