In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

Review of The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, by Xiaofei Tian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018)

Review of The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, by Xiaofei Tian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018)

In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

At the heart of Gérard Gavarry’s writing are the questions of what power language holds, and what remains beyond the reach of expression. The two translations included here, excerpts from Allada (P.O.L, 1993) and Expérience d’Edward Lee, Versailles (P.O.L, 2009), share little with each other in terms of setting or structure, but explore simil…[Read more]

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]

In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban…[Read more]

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spr…[Read more]

While scholars have long considered John Keats’s Ode to Psyche a document of secularization, the poem’s precise relationship to the secular needs further attention. This essay engages with recent critiques of secularism, by Gil Anidjar and others, which challenge readings of Keats that make secularism or “toleration” a hallmark of his radical…[Read more]

When James Macpherson turned to the popular poetry of ancient Scotland, he found in it what philosophers now call folk psychology: a commonsense theory about how minds work. Yet because his poems were largely forgeries, Macpherson winds up importing more recent physiology into his portrayal of ancient, pagan materialism. As a result, the poems’ v…[Read more]

When we think we know Fernando Pessoa, a new surprise arises: this time, one related to the genesis of Mensagem, the most established and celebrated book of the Pessoan canon. That book, published in 1934 with a title only finalized at the time of the typographical proofs, was initially called Portugal—an inscription dating from 1910, when P…[Read more]

Writing a factual or fictional dream is a difficult task as its ›otherness‹ will challenge all of our accustomed modes of narration. So the existence of established cultural and textual patterns is a welcome help. This collection of essays describes these patterns, their historical and individual modifications and their relation to the dre…[Read more]

From 1756 until his death in the early 1790s, Primus Fowle, an enslaved African American, performed typographical and press work involved the in the publication of The New-Hampshire Gazette and other materials printed at the press owned by Daniel Fowle. With the archive of print Primus Fowle created as its object of study, this essay historicizes…[Read more]

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

از رویکردهای تازه در حوزۀ نقد ادبی رویکرد بوم­نقد است که به بررسی رابطۀ میان انسان و طبیعت در ادبیات می­ پردازد. هرچند تعداد قابل توجهی از آثار نظری و کاربردی در حوزۀ بوم‌نقد منتشر شده ­است، اما تاکنون توجه چندانی به پژوهش بوم­نقد تطبیقی نشده­ است. پژوهش پیش­رو تلاشی است برای گشودن باب چنین پژوهش ­هایی به زبان فارسی در فضای دانشگاهی ایران. شا…[Read more]

Global Indigeneity
Considers theoretical and political questions raised by the model of “trans-indigeneity” paying attention to indigenous mythologies, histories of settler colonialism, and questions of comparison, translation, resistance, language, and appropriation. 300-word abstract and short bio.
Deadline for submissions: Friday, 20 Mar…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]