Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) is one of the most significant texts in the history of the freedom of the press, and yet the pamphlet’s clandestine printers have successfully eluded identification for over 375 years. By examining distinctive and dam-aged type pieces from 100 pamphlets from the 1640s, this article att…[Read more]

The theme of waiting permeates two poems by the late Syrian poet Nizār Qabbānī. The verse in both poems ‘Waiting for Godot’, and ‘A television interview with an Arab Godot’, describes an arduous wait, at once distressing and unpredictable. In the first poem, the poet urges Godot to arrive, as the savior who will appear in the form of the Messia…[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]

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]

This chapter, “Owning Chinese Shakespeares,” pursues the critical concept of localization and critiques the fidelity-derived discourse about cultural ownership. How were Chinese Shakespeares used as a kind of staged utopia of modernity?

Underlying this study are three related lines of inquiry united by what might be called locality criticism, t…[Read more]

Named the Writer of the Millennium, Shakespeare has come full circle and become a cliché, embraced by marketers and contested by intellectuals. Similar narratives about China’s rise in global stature have been told with equal gusto, championed and denounced in turn by optimists and critics. If Shakespeare now has worldwide currency, how is the se…[Read more]

Thanks to Karl Marx’s references in his political treatises, Shakespeare held a significant place in a number of communist and other left-authoritarian countries, including China and the USSR. And although there were themes in Shakespeare that turned out to be inconvenient for communist ideology, other Shakespearean plays were put into service. I…[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]

George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (published 1595) was performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. Initially, the play has been dismissed by several critics as a vulgar and cheap entertainment without much value. Yet, the metadramatic techniques employed in the play sheds light to how humour could be effectively triggered in the respective per…[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]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]

This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu…[Read more]

Abstract and Keywords
Part of this chapter deals with Zhu Xi’s critique of Buddhism and Daoism: his distinction of the neo-Confucian concept of pattern-principle and virtuous governance from seemingly similar Buddhist and Daoist ideas, his concern with what he saw as both schools’ lack of social and political engagement and their rejection of eth…[Read more]

Bryony Lavery is an important figure in British feminist drama. She has been noted by critics for her unconventional theatrical methods and themes. Her Frozen (1998) is an anti-paedophiliac play that deals with a psychiatrist who tries to investigate the motives of a paedophile. Investigations into the past of the sexual predator blur the lines…[Read more]

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]

The 1960s and the 1970s witnessed the transition in British sports from amateurism to
professionalism. Thereafter, sportspersons have obtained material opportunities with
sponsorships and attracted entrepreneurs. However, since sponsors in this new era have
been using sportspersons to manipulate consumer behaviour, the vested interests…[Read more]

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of
financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees
further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal…[Read more]