Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, an approach that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. Formalist materialism illuminates a new direction for formalists by connecting…[Read more]

Italy was Muriel Spark’s elective country of residence for 40 years, the first decade of which, from 1967, when she settled in Rome, till the end of the 70s, represented one of the most contradictory and yet intellectually fertile periods of Italian modern history. Notwithstanding such long-lasting and meaningful bond, explicitly represented in a…[Read more]

This article is a slightly revised version of a plenary panel address presented at the ‘Passages’ Symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris on the 12th of June 2019, in honor of the centenary of the birth of the American poet Robert Duncan. The article traces some of the mutual interest and influence between the poets Robert Duncan and Hilda Doolittle…[Read more]

This article is a slightly revised version of a plenary panel address presented at the ‘Passages’ Symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris on the 12th of June 2019, in honor of the centenary of the birth of the American poet Robert Duncan. The article traces some of the mutual interest and influence between the poets Robert Duncan and Hilda Doolittle…[Read more]

In 1970, a television-show dance contest in a small California town ended abruptly when the studio was briefly plunged into darkness because of an apparent power failure. The media coverage of the event eventually helped uncover criminal activity at the studio; over the course of this reporting, the narrative was accompanied by select genres of…[Read more]

In this paper we examine the representation of crafts in video games, particularly in “crafting systems” – collections of mechanics that are described as crafting within a game’s narrative. Real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as repro…[Read more]

Direct and indirect women’s access to the expression of their ideas and wishes on ink and paper has significantly contributed to the construction of the Latin American colonial archive. Nevertheless, this contribution to the area of Latin American women’s studies still remains little known and understudied. The colonial tradition of women’s autho…[Read more]

Often described as an open-air prison, the citizens of the Gaza Strip have long resisted a subaltern existence. Conditions in Gaza, and specifically since the Second Intifada of 2000, have increasingly worsened. With the advent of Hamas in 2006-2007, a complete blockade was imposed on the Strip. A deafening silence by the world has resulted in…[Read more]

Often described as an open-air prison, the citizens of the Gaza Strip have long resisted a subaltern existence. Conditions in Gaza, and specifically since the Second Intifada of 2000, have increasingly worsened. With the advent of Hamas in 2006-2007, a complete blockade was imposed on the Strip. A deafening silence by the world has resulted in…[Read more]

This article appeared in the journal American Studies, 32.1 (Spring 1991): 85-100. The article examines a poetics of the mathematically sublime as it relates to the design and play of the American game of baseball. There is some commentary on literature and cultural sudies as well as the history and rules of baseball. There is no DOI for the…[Read more]

This commemorative and retrospective memoir examines events fifty years ago in the interests of tracking and placing the editorial ideals and dynamics of the journal “Works & Days”, founded in 1978 and published through 2019. The author was one of the original co-founders of the journal, as well as a contributor and member of the editorial board…[Read more]

This article is a sustained profile and study of prominent Northern Irish poet Sinead Morrissey’s complete run of work from the 1990s through 2018. The article examines closely the developing course of her poetry as well as the developing itinerary of her poetics, especially in the light of her transatlantic poetics as well as local and…[Read more]

It is well known that the literary history of Latin America and its canon has been/is written by a patriarchal Eurocentric society that controls what constitutes national literature. It is also established that (colonial/contemporary) Latin American subjects in the periphery of the urban republic of letters are not included due to their gender…[Read more]

New directions of research in colonial women’s studies on gender roles, periphery and margins, and discursive practices that expand the notion of “literary text” (Adorno 177), indicate that the textual corpus of colonial women’s writings continues to increase. This emergent group of texts reveals patterns of rhetorical strategies and recurre…[Read more]