Hugh M. Richmond, “Renaissance Landscapes,” Mouton, 1973; De Gruyter 2019.

This study explores some of the significant points in the evolution of a literary pattern, a recognizable topic or motif which captures attention through the poet’s mastery of language, which records the nuances of human awareness of each period. The author coins this…[Read more]

A series of derivative verses from the late-third century has pride of place in one of the foundational collections of Chinese poetry. These verses, “Filling out the Missing Odes” by Shu Xi, can be found at the beginning of the lyric-poetry (shi 詩) section of the Wenxuan. This essay seeks to understand why such blatantly imitative pieces may have…[Read more]

On 12 July 1776, Captain James Cook and his crew left England in search of the famed
Northwest Passage. Spanish, French, and Russian explorers before him had set out to
find this Arctic waterway, which was thought to link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
and promised to open up a new, more direct trading route with Asia. After seven
months…[Read more]

My Ph.D. examination bibliography in the fields of Contemporary Southern Literature and Contemporary Book History and Print Culture

Black artists have created, modified, or otherwise treated the book as an object of aesthetic expression since at least the nineteenth century. African American artists’ production and circulation of friendship albums and scrapbooks, democratic multiples and artist publishing, accordion folds, enclosures, and fine printing editions, all work to…[Read more]

English 412 is, in its official description, “A survey of drama from 1558 to 1603, including works by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.” In this version from 2017, students focused on six revenge tragedies, the blockbuster genre of the Elizabethan theatre: plays filled with bloody violence, elevated rhetoric, and ghosts imploring…[Read more]

“Passions, Emotions and Cognition in the Long Eighteenth-Century Literature in England”
4th issue of journal “English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts” (Flavio Gregori, ed.).

Contents:
Michael McKeon: “Aesthetic Cognition: Feeling the Emotions of Others”;
Margaret A. Doody: “The Actor, the Mirror, the Soul and the Sylph “…[Read more]

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

This is the Introduction to my new book, _Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History_.

In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata.” This article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the…[Read more]

The belief that Francis Bacon was, from the start, a stalwart defender of royal absolutism has prevailed in scholarship despite occasional comments about Bacon’s pluralist or collaborative legal and political imagination. Building on recent revisionist work, this article questions the standard historiography. It argues that Bacon’s jur…[Read more]

Short essay exploring how Plato, in “the Republic,” argues that the only ones who can ensure poets see Justice, “see the light,” are philosophers.

Exploration of why Socrates “follows” his god, Apollo, in “the Apology.” Three possibilities are considered: compelled to; trying to enable goodness; self-interest.

How in at least one instance Adam, in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” relentlessly pursues his desires — ostensibly against God’s will; and certainly in face of Raphael’s increasing disquiet — without experiencing a fall.

This chapter examines narratives that reflect the impact of epistemologies of otherness upon our understanding of race. Race intersects with other social factors such as class, cultural citizenship, and gender. This chapter draws on case studies of artists in exile or diaspora who interrogate their own identities, because exile brings racial…[Read more]

Exploration of how Aphra Behn uses her textual creation “Oronnoko” to engage in a guiltless sexual affair that bypasses all societal and inner-psychic censors.

Using Philip Sidney’s understanding of perfect poesy to examine the poetic worth of More’s “Utopia.”