What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the…[Read more]

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]

This chapter, “Owning Chinese Shakespeares,” pursues the critical concept of localization and critiques the fidelity-derived discourse about cultural ownership. How were Chinese Shakespeares used as a kind of staged utopia of modernity?

Underlying this study are three related lines of inquiry united by what might be called locality criticism, t…[Read more]

Named the Writer of the Millennium, Shakespeare has come full circle and become a cliché, embraced by marketers and contested by intellectuals. Similar narratives about China’s rise in global stature have been told with equal gusto, championed and denounced in turn by optimists and critics. If Shakespeare now has worldwide currency, how is the se…[Read more]

Thanks to Karl Marx’s references in his political treatises, Shakespeare held a significant place in a number of communist and other left-authoritarian countries, including China and the USSR. And although there were themes in Shakespeare that turned out to be inconvenient for communist ideology, other Shakespearean plays were put into service. I…[Read more]

A Companion to World Literature. John Wiley and Sons, 2020. Available in Wiley Online Library, https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118635193

George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (published 1595) was performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. Initially, the play has been dismissed by several critics as a vulgar and cheap entertainment without much value. Yet, the metadramatic techniques employed in the play sheds light to how humour could be effectively triggered in the respective per…[Read more]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]

Apocalyptic themes handled by Spanish directors of the current century, including Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, David and Álex Pastor, Álex de la Iglesia, Juan Antonio Bayona, Jorge Torregrossa, and Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas, and F. Javier Gutiérrez.

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]

Bryony Lavery is an important figure in British feminist drama. She has been noted by critics for her unconventional theatrical methods and themes. Her Frozen (1998) is an anti-paedophiliac play that deals with a psychiatrist who tries to investigate the motives of a paedophile. Investigations into the past of the sexual predator blur the lines…[Read more]

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]

The 1960s and the 1970s witnessed the transition in British sports from amateurism to
professionalism. Thereafter, sportspersons have obtained material opportunities with
sponsorships and attracted entrepreneurs. However, since sponsors in this new era have
been using sportspersons to manipulate consumer behaviour, the vested interests…[Read more]

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of
financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees
further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal…[Read more]

This critical edition of Hemingway’s 1924 version of in our time is the second of three volumes for each major state of the text. Few writers have shaped the style of twentieth century prose as did Hemingway, and it all began with the “vignettes” of in our time, which have been largely unavailable for scholars and entirely out of reach for…[Read more]

This is the peer-reviewed submission version of the essay, which focuses on the role that digital communication platforms can play in teaching and engaging with Wallace’s work.

Despite a strong pedigree of textual scholarship in literary studies, the study of contemporary literature often eschews such methods on the grounds that there is an insufficient archive to fully comprehend the production of just-published work. In this article I argue for a turn to textual scholarship in the field of contemporary literary studies…[Read more]

Introduction to Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States (Oxford UP, 2019).

If your library doesn’t already own a copy, please consider submitting a purchase request.

Full citation: Travis M. Foster, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

This article conducts the first in-depth political-aesthetic analysis of Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli’s Abortion Eve. In this article we argue that Abortion Eve uses its visual form in a way that cuts between the contexts of later forms of graphic medicine and feminist comix, and in so doing contributed to a political culture of feminist i…[Read more]