This essay calls for a reflection on the links between literature, activism, and social change in the Hispanic Caribbean, privileging certain interventions led by women, who have contributed to the defense of better living conditions and a more equitable social pact. Taking into account the diversity and mobility that characterizes the Caribbean…[Read more]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]

This article focuses on three post-9/11 meta-poems – “My Wife Says Don’t Write About September 11th” by Ryan G. Van Cleave, “How to Write A Poem After September 11th” by Nikki Moustaki and “To the Words” by W. S. Merwin – to demonstrate the point that the current scholarly understanding of post-9/11 aesthetics as something functioning like…[Read more]

Despite their commitment to Ezra Pound’s commandment to “make it new!:” modernist authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder referred to Jane Austen surprisingly often in their public and private writings. Although they excoriated her sexual inexperience and limited…[Read more]

By reading each of the novels of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre as ‘a travel story’, just as we read Balzac’s Père Goriot, it becomes necessary to read them as ‘a spatial practice’, a narrative that locates itself in and responds to a specific space. The specific geography of Kate O’Brien’s Parisian novels of development, Without My Cloak (1931), The…[Read more]

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

The twenty-first century has seen a transformation of twentieth-century narrative and historical discourse. On the one hand, the Cold War national fantasy of mutually assured destruction has multiplied, producing a diverse array of apocalyptic visions. On the other, there has been an increasing sobriety about human finitude, especially considered…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

This New Rheto rical Continuum Chart for Fiction shows a spectral range between individual (New Critical, structuralist, formalist) approach to group-based (socio-rhetorical) approach to fiction in the 21st Century.

In a time when the anxiety about Elizabeth I’s heir to the throne was ripe, and illegal to discuss, Shakespeare focuses on the issue of succession in King John, and shows the parallels to his own age, while using Hubert as a metaphor for the difficult position of Shakespeare’s contemporary citizens of England as they anticipate the naming of…[Read more]

The Stars our Destination is a story of overcoming anxieties and biases from war, as well as other growing up issues in a steel mill town. Over time, the three main characters gradually converge. Two women have nightmares involving the past and the old Prof. Daniel Blei lives off and on in a flood of troubling recollections. The conclusion will…[Read more]

The Stars our Destination is a story of overcoming anxieties and biases from war, as well as other growing up issues in a steel mill town. Over time, the three main characters gradually converge. Two women have nightmares involving the past and the old Prof. Daniel Blei lives off and on in a flood of troubling recollections. The conclusion will…[Read more]