This, the first critical collection on Delarivier Manley, revisits the most heated discussions and adds new perspectives that will change the conversation on the foremost woman writer in the age of Queen Anne. This compilation demonstrates the wide range of thinking about Manley’s literary production and significance. While contributors r…[Read more]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

This article reads Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic theory and practice in the context of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s dismissals of his work in order to recover the paradoxical interplay between documentation and perceptual training central to debates about photography as a specifically modern medium during the 1920s. I argue that, rather than…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the…[Read more]

Giving voice to women who suffer the brunt of masculine anxieties, THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM privileges what I call “feminine anxieties” in its depiction of all the female characters, especially in the trinity of Mariam, Doris, and Salome. By depicting women who defy convention, the play stages women’s multiple perspectives on, reactions again…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s MACBETH interrogates the tyranny of absolute monarchical practices and divorces them from naturalized gender constructions by placing Lady Macbeth at the center of the play’s violence. I argue that she provides a parodic inversion of the ideal wife and and puts pressure on masculinist and violent structures of relations that depend…[Read more]

The “Urlo”. From the deconstructive rage/fury to the ‘yes’ assertion.
In this article we offer a series of tableaux belonging to contemporary Romance literatures written by women, through a focus on a common feature which is that of the “urlo” (scream). Based on a selection of works mainly Italian, but also taken from other literatures of the Rom…[Read more]

An essay written for “Neuroscience and Fiction,” a special issue of SubStance guest-edited by Pierre Casso-Nogues

Dickens, in his infatuation with the orphan, anticipates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which argues against interpreting everyone’s life experience in terms of the Oedipal conflict’s family drama.

The age of global Shakespeare has arrived. It is an age in which national and transnational performances become self-conscious of the contact zone they inhabit, where dramatic meanings are co-determined by linguistic cohesion and pluralism. If Jacque Derrida’s theory of translation makes all writing inherently multilingual, Shakespeare as…[Read more]

An Interview with Alexa Huang, George Washington University | The Blotted Line

“I am proud to have answered my calling to tell stories and to show others how to listen for silenced voices. Story-telling makes us human because it…[Read more]

Modern Chinese fiction dealing with cultural others can be taken as a lens through which to reread the cosmopolitan theory. At stake in the debate between communitarianism and liberalism are the viability of single cultural membership and its validity. Lao She’s Self-Sacrifice (1934) and Dr. Wen (1936-1937) question the viability of global c…[Read more]

In 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into t…[Read more]

At a time when Shakespeare is becoming increasingly globalized and diversified it is urgent more than ever to ask how this appropriated ‘Shakespeare’ constructs ethical value across cultural and other fault lines. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.