Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle’s nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle” (“J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle”), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only…[Read more]

This chapter explores an early instance of the use of a course blog in an upper-level undergraduate literature course, including the challenges faced by both students and instructor.

This chapter explores the Infinite Summer reading project, in which a group of bloggers read and discussed David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in dialogue with one another and with a wide readership, arguing that such social reading projects present the potential for developing crucial kinds of ethical human connection (of which the novel depicts…[Read more]

This paper explores the literary potential of the personal blog, arguing that the form may usefully understood in relationship to the early novel. As it has been argued that the representations of individual characters in the early novel helped to bring the modern understanding of the individual into being, so this paper argues that the character…[Read more]

Critical credo: on the significance of openness in humanities scholarship.