Between 1694 and 1757, there were at least five adaptations of Behn’s “The History of the Nun; or The Fair Vow Breaker”. Modern critics have focused on Thomas Southerne’s play, “The Fatal Marriage: or, the Innocent Adultery” (1694), David Garrick’s 1757 revision of Southerne’s play into the tragedy, “Isabella: or, the Fatal Marriage,” and Jane…[Read more]

Most critics of contemporary literature have reached a consensus that what was once called “postmodernism” is over and that its signature modes—metafiction and irony—are on the wane. This is not the case, however, with videogames. In recent years, a number of self-reflexive games have appeared, exemplified by Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (…[Read more]

This paper argues that there is a need to look beyond what is merely “homeward” in the work of Thomas Wolfe. I take up Wai Chee Dimock’s expansive conception of American literature as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures,” demonstrating how Thomas…[Read more]

An overview of Zhang Jiucheng’s 張九成 (1092-1159) thought on mind-cultivation and Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 critique of Zhang and other Buddho-Confucians of the early Southern Song dynasty (1126-1279).

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]

n his address at the Madrid Peace Conference, the Head of the Palestinian Delegation, Dr Haidar Abdul-Shafi challenged the persistent myth that has defined Palestinian existence for at least a century by saying: “For too long the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced […] we have been victimized by the myth of ‘a land without a peopl…[Read more]

In this brief paper, I first introduce Gwendolyn Brook’s “The Anniad,” a 43-stanza ballad at the center of her 1949 Pulitzer-prize winning collection, Annie Allen. Next, I make a case that “The Anniad” is informed by a medievalism combining Brooks’ girlhood reading and the physical environment of Bronzeville, her Chicago neighborhood. Finally, I…[Read more]

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

The June 1888 issue of the Phonographic World magazine presented John Pynchon, an ancestor of Thomas, as “The First American Shorthand Reporter”. While most biographical criticism to date of Thomas Pynchon has focused on the cameo appearance of a thinly veiled William Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, we here set out further historical infor…[Read more]

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