To move global Shakespeare studies beyond the more limiting scope of nation-state and cultural profiling, I would like to propose we consider a number of critical concepts as methodology. These concepts critique the limitations of cartographic imagination, and connect the performance site to spaces of knowledge production: (1) the site of…[Read more]

A focus on Launcelot Gobbo as middleman and unfaithful servant enables an expanded reading of discourses of economics in The Merchant of Venice. In addition to the mercantile modes of Antonio and Shylock, the play also includes a transactional perspective in Launcelot as well as Portia’s fantasy of cornucopia. The chapter is part of Linda…[Read more]

In the late sixteenth century, the common law experienced a phenomenal growth, both in the number of practitioners and jurisdictional power. A comparison of popular and professional literature on legal administration or judicature reveals the complex and ambivalent cultural response to the “rise” of the common law. Despite the usual praise for the…[Read more]

How does our daily mindreading—that is, our attribution and misattribution of mental states (such as thoughts, feelings, and intentions) to ourselves and others—differ from the mindreading we engage in when we read fiction? I have argued elsewhere (e.g., “Secret Life of Fiction,” PMLA, 2015) that drama, novels, and narrative poetry play and exp…[Read more]

This essay draws on cognitive literary theory to offer new ways of reading Cao Xueqin’s classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) aka The Story of the Stone.

Literature in Singapore is written in the country’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. Since 1999, with the state’s implementation of the Renaissance City Plan to revitalize arts and culture in Singapore, there have been various initiatives to increase the visibility of contemporary Singaporean writing both within the cou…[Read more]

Literature in Singapore is written in the country’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. Since 1999, with the state’s implementation of the Renaissance City Plan to revitalize arts and culture in Singapore, there have been various initiatives to increase the visibility of contemporary Singaporean writing both within the cou…[Read more]

This article argues that King Learn can help re-shape ecocriticism. The play’s focus on human dis-harmony with the nonhuman environment resonates with the “post-equilibrium shift” in ecological thinking. The play’s emphasis on the way natural systems such as the weather disrupt human meaning-making generates an alternative to dualistic notions of…[Read more]

This article argues that King Learn can help re-shape ecocriticism. The play’s focus on human dis-harmony with the nonhuman environment resonates with the “post-equilibrium shift” in ecological thinking. The play’s emphasis on the way natural systems such as the weather disrupt human meaning-making generates an alternative to dualistic notions of…[Read more]

The Shakespeare User explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume demonstrate that users’ critical and creative uses of the dramatist’s works position contemporary issues of rac…[Read more]

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers,…[Read more]

Shakespeare is a local force to be reckoned with in the global marketplace and in digital and analog archives of collective memory. With the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 2014 and quatercentenary in 2016, there are several high-profile instances of global Shakespeare being tapped for its market value. The exchange value of…[Read more]

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]

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.