As the first biography in English of Alessandro de’ Medici, this important book raises questions about how historical narratives are constructed and how race has evolved into a critical, if contested, category.

The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, during the Renaissance period, inevitably entailed the repudiation of the animal and the beginning of the great human-animal divide. What was seen, at the time, as the rebirth of man, was also the birth of a rampant anthropocentrism which, until the recent…[Read more]

An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

In the natural order of language development orality precedes literary production, but elements of the oral tradition do often appear in literature. In this presentation I will look at orality in some Judeo-Spanish and Spanglish texts to see how the study of these two lects together may better inform the translator. Though both are lects of…[Read more]

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077873

The Manifesto of Modern Digital Humanities is an avant-garde statement regarding digital methodologies used by scholars of modernist literature and culture. Its experimental format uses handwritten HTML to mimic the typographical qualities of modernist literary manifestoes.

Why We Read Fiction focuses on one of the most exciting areas of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s…[Read more]

In 1941, Orhan Veli Kanik, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Oktay Rifat Horozcu, published a poetic manifesto, called Garip (or Strange), that heralded a new period in modern Turkish poetry, known as “The Garip Movement.” In the manifesto, Kanik, Anday, and Rifat declared a total aesthetic break from the conventions of the classical Ottoman poetry, and cha…[Read more]

Thomas Hardy’s last novel Jude the Obscure (1895) is centred on its working-class
protagonist Jude Fawley’s efforts first to become a scholar, then his experiences of
resisting the orthodoxies of his society and lastly defying Christianity as a restrictive
social force on the individuals. This paper aims to discuss Jude’s liminal character…[Read more]

Early works of dramatic criticism seeking to draw parallels between ritual and drama in Africa concentrated on examining the dramatic characteristics of ritual to see how drama evolved from ritual. However, a closer application of the theories of Girard, Schechner, Smith, Hubert Mauss and Turner reveal new perspectives on the interaction between…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

This article assesses the longstanding myths and debates surrounding the supposed African ancestry of German Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven. It argues that the “blackwashing” of Beethoven against all historical likelihood is a failed attempt at historical revisionism—while endeavoring to claim Beethoven’s genius as a testament to black…[Read more]