What would a feminist history of printing look like if it’s not focused on recovering the history of women printing? Delivered as the 2018 APHA Lieberman Lecture and forthcoming from the APHA journal, Printing History.

_Little Women_ is a work composed piecemeal and narrated in more than one generic mode. Alcott’s complete financial dependence on what she could earn from her writing, her ambivalence toward conventional narratives for women, and, most importantly, her alternating submission to and rebellion against the demands (real and imagined) of her readers…[Read more]

The adaptations of King George VI’s and Stephen Hawking’s life stories show their uneasy relationship to the “troubled-white-male-genius” genre and to the vocal embodiment of their subjects who lose and gain a voice through therapy, technology, and their will to live a full life. The films carefully skirt the edges of public disgust and pity of…[Read more]

This chapter theorizes global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. Bringing the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, this chapter argues that acts of appropriation carry with them strong ethical implications. A crucial, ethical component of…[Read more]

The New English Dictionary was originally distinguished from an encyclopedia in reach and function by its proponent Richard Chenevix Trench and its principal editor James A. H. Murray as differing in responsibilities: a dictionary described the meanings of words, an encyclopedia described the nature of things. The distinction had philosophical and…[Read more]

Table of contents.

This article traces the breadfruit tree’s strange career as an eighteenth-century superfood, its journey from the Pacific world to the Caribbean islands, and the rhetorical practices, epistemological slippages, and linguistic permutations that undergirded these developments. Comparing indigenous, Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and US-American d…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

Three faculty members from UMass Boston’s English Department—a team responsible for the department’s M.A. course on the Teaching of Literature and for the training of novice teachers of literature—examine the complex process of reading texts that they teach as if they are encountering them as their students do, for the first time. Accepting the p…[Read more]

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows h…[Read more]