The Danza general de la muerte (Dance of Death) (late 14th-century) is a rhymed dialogue in Castilian in which death personified greets one victim after another. It is the earliest of 3 extant Castilian versions of the Dance of Death, which was popular across Europe in the Middle Ages. The Dance of Death gives expression to the premodern view t…[Read more]

From its linguistic origins as a Biblical land of great wealth across the sea, to its more recent nostalgic imaginary as a lost Golden Age of Mediterranean Jewish culture, Sefarad has been as much an idea as a physical place, a lens through which Iberian Jews have interpreted their world, first in al-Andalus, then in Christian Iberia, and later in…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

Review of Katherine R. Larson, The Matter of Song in Early England. Abstract: Katherine R. Larson’s The Matter of Song in Early England is an exceptional study. It offers the perspective not just of an academic—Larson is professor of English at the University of Toronto—but also that of a performer, as Larson is an ac- complished singer. In this…[Read more]

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]

From the introduction:
“This volume brings to light a series of studies inspired by the conference, ‘Wine, Women and Song,’ that took place at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 2001. The conference provided a forum for topics in medieval Iberian literature and its legacy in the Spanish Colonial tradition. One of our…[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]

The Mocedades de Rodrigo is an epic poem in Castilian that narrates the fictional deeds of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the young Cid. The prose narrative of his youth first appears in 1295. The unique version in verse is preserved on a much later manuscript (ca. 1400). The poem includes the early history of the families of the poem’s two main pr…[Read more]

The Mocedades de Rodrigo is an epic poem in Castilian that narrates the fictional deeds of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the young Cid. The prose narrative of his youth first appears in 1295. The unique version in verse is preserved in a much later manuscript (ca. 1400). The poem includes the early history of the families of the poem’s two main pr…[Read more]

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have
typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of
the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French
and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on
a newspaper art…[Read more]

Published in New Orleans in 1845 by a group of free men of color, Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes is now commonly recognized as the first collection of African American poetry. As a testament to and expression of the intellectual prowess of New Orleans’s francophone free Black community, Les Cenelles deserves to be read as a formally int…[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 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]

Keats’s poetic thoughts on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism’s most incisive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. This essay is about the ways Keats’s verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons with an imaginative range. Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has “no i…[Read more]

The tunefulness of Proust and Senancour. From the silence of mountains to the silence of music

For Proust, great books are the “children of silence” (CSB, p. 309), and his novel endeavors to express what could not, in principle, be formulated: nature, sensations, in brief the physical and psychic existence as a whole. In his vision, lan…[Read more]

Este ensayo propone una lectura de Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) del poeta, historiador y eclesiástico Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola (1562-1631) como un gabinete de curiosidades textual lleno de narraciones y objetos maravillosos. El autor emplea sus propias ideas sobre la escritura de la historia para crear una crónica de conquista co…[Read more]