This essay explores Dante Alighieri’s notion of projectile motion in relation to spiritual fulfillment in the first canto of Paradiso. The notion of impetus, or projectile motion, stood at the confluence of Greek philosophical rationality (mediated by a substantial Arabic corpus) and Christian thought, and it provides a unique window through…[Read more]

This chapter examines the plight of Fra’ Alberigo in light of philosophical questions of personal identity and embodiment. I argue that Fra’ Alberigo’s individuality and his punishment in Tolomea provides insight into Dante’s unique interpretation of the complex relationship between body and spirit and the issue of material continuity in the…[Read more]

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

Bios and recent work of the participants for the 2022 MLA Roundtable “Recreations of Literature and Theatre in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality” scheduled to take place on January 6, 2022.

How might we de-colonize hegemonic knowledge production about East Asia and its relationship with the West? This interview with Alexa Alice Joubin draws on new perspectives on cultural exchange in her book, Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021), which promotes treatment of Asian performing arts as original epistemologies rather…[Read more]

Analyzing trans narratives about the early moderns through the lenses of affective labor and social reparation, this chapter reclaims as trans the Shakespeare films that have been misinterpreted as homosexual. In doing so, this chapter builds a longer, more intersectional history of gendered embodiment. Reparative trans performances—works in w…[Read more]

“‘Shakespeare in Prison’: A South African Social Justice Alternative” interrogates the validity of certain ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives. In so doing, it engages in ongoing criticism of arts outreach projects and their effectiveness, while highlighting the role of anti-mass-incarceration activists who denounce such well-meaning efforts as…[Read more]

“‘Shakespeare in Prison’: A South African Social Justice Alternative” interrogates the validity of certain ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives. In so doing, it engages in ongoing criticism of arts outreach projects and their effectiveness, while highlighting the role of anti-mass-incarceration activists who denounce such well-meaning efforts as…[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]

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]