This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

The partition of British India into two sovereign independent nations of India and Pakistan in 1947 was one of the most defining moments of the socio-political course of the sub-continent. The fight for independence from colonial rule and the rise of nationalism rooted in the religious discourse of two prominent religious communities- Hindus and…[Read more]

Despite a lack of a traditional cinema culture, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has recently witnessed an increase in film production. This rise can be attributed to a number of factors, not least of which, is the opening of movie theaters, the establishment of international film festivals and the arrival of film companies. These ventures have…[Read more]

This chapter presents a discussion of a literary genre called puthis, a premodern tradition of religious stories and plays in what is now Bangladesh, as an example of vernacular cosmopolitanism in an Asian context. The language of this genre, called Dubasha, is a “mixed language mode” (Seely 2008) characterized by the replacement of Sanskrit voc…[Read more]

Transatlantic literary exchange depended, during the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, on the ocean liner. Books and periodicals were exported via sea routes, lent among passengers or through ships’ libraries, and even bought and sold on board. The High Seas Bookshops, established on some Anchor Line vessels in the 1920s, strikingly demonstrate the…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, nearly all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

As I have done in connection with another tale about vengeance Edgar Allan Poe published two and a half years earlier, “The Cask of Amontillado,” in what follows I offer a generalized biographical interpretation of the 1849 story “Hop-Frog,” linking it to Poe’s February 1845 essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” and his September 184…[Read more]

Virginia Woolf is already recognized today as a major player in the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual powerhouse that influenced modern philosophy, politics, economics, aesthetics, biography, and literary criticism. Yet Woolf’s reputation as a fiction writer first and foremost has distracted critical attention from her thorough interrogation of w…[Read more]

Virginia Woolf is already recognized today as a major player in the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual powerhouse that influenced modern philosophy, politics, economics, aesthetics, biography, and literary criticism. Yet Woolf’s reputation as a fiction writer first and foremost has distracted critical attention from her thorough interrogation of w…[Read more]

“People acquire phobias,” evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson observed, to “abrupt and intractable aversions, to the objects and circumstances that threaten humanity in natural environments” (The Diversity of Life 351). This often overlooked observation, conceptualized by an evolu­tionary biologist whose canon launched the Western corpus of…[Read more]