Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a discipline, a pedagogical tool, and a set of working practices by bringing together a diverse group of renowned specialists to examine how the field has grown out of and radically reconsidered some of the basic premises of British Cultural Studies since…[Read more]

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

From the introduction:
“This volume brings to light a series of studies inspired by the conference, ‘Wine, Women and Song,’ that took place at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 2001. The conference provided a forum for topics in medieval Iberian literature and its legacy in the Spanish Colonial tradition. One of our…[Read more]

From the introduction:
“This volume brings to light a series of studies inspired by the conference, ‘Wine, Women and Song,’ that took place at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 2001. The conference provided a forum for topics in medieval Iberian literature and its legacy in the Spanish Colonial tradition. One of our…[Read more]

This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]

Since the Intifada of 2000, living conditions in the Gaza Strip have progressively deteriorated, and when Hamas came to power in 2006–07, a complete blockade was enforced on the inhabitants by Egypt and Israel. In addition, five full-scale wars have been
waged on the Strip. Despite these conditions, Gazans remain resilient, as evidenced by s…[Read more]

The Mocedades de Rodrigo is an epic poem in Castilian that narrates the fictional deeds of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the young Cid. The prose narrative of his youth first appears in 1295. The unique version in verse is preserved on a much later manuscript (ca. 1400). The poem includes the early history of the families of the poem’s two main pr…[Read more]

The Mocedades de Rodrigo is an epic poem in Castilian that narrates the fictional deeds of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the young Cid. The prose narrative of his youth first appears in 1295. The unique version in verse is preserved on a much later manuscript (ca. 1400). The poem includes the early history of the families of the poem’s two main pr…[Read more]

The Mocedades de Rodrigo is an epic poem in Castilian that narrates the fictional deeds of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the young Cid. The prose narrative of his youth first appears in 1295. The unique version in verse is preserved in a much later manuscript (ca. 1400). The poem includes the early history of the families of the poem’s two main pr…[Read more]

The Mocedades de Rodrigo is an epic poem in Castilian that narrates the fictional deeds of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the young Cid. The prose narrative of his youth first appears in 1295. The unique version in verse is preserved in a much later manuscript (ca. 1400). The poem includes the early history of the families of the poem’s two main pr…[Read more]

This essay discusses pedagogical approaches to teaching Austen’s Persuasion as a novel situated at the intersection of literature and philosophy. It focuses on how Persuasion takes up, talks back to, and helps illuminate classic philosophical questions about personhood, sociality, ethics, consciousness, and the space of inner life. It discusses c…[Read more]

This is the pre-publication version of my edition of the selected fables of Robert Henryson. It is now published in an online supplement to The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1: The Medieval Period. Ed. Joseph Black, et al. 3rd edition. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2015; revised and expanded, 2018.…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel’s performative theory of lyric…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of “Euphuism” in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while…[Read more]