De Larrabeiti’s Borribles children’s/young adult fantasy trilogy was written and published between 1976 and 1986, a period of huge political, social and economic change in the UK. Set in London, it tells the story of Borribles, a group of children who have had a ‘bad start’ in life and become Borrible; ‘wild’ children with pointed ears who can nev…[Read more]

This paper seeks to examine whether daemons (which take the shape of animals) and familiar animals indicate the social class of characters in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. Both series of books for young people were started at a time when neo-liberal politics were at the forefront of government, both in the late years of John Major’s C…[Read more]

This paper discusses approaches to pedagogy outlined in three series of books for children and young adults. By the end of the presentation, I hope to have outlined what the education systems in these novels says about the culture and society presented in these books. The books are: JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Jonathan Stroud’s Bar…[Read more]

Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between
masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable
political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the
idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the S…[Read more]

This draft handout accompanied in-class discussion and instruction. There are two key objectives: 1) to model the practices of critical note taking, including close reading, connection making, and question asking; and 2) to document the first assigned reading from Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit. This handout covers the first three c…[Read more]

The chapter deals with Peter Weiss’s translation of a short story by Swedish author Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) and intertextual dynamics in Peter Weiss’s early prose work.

The article proposes a new multimodal approach to literary multilingualism, with special attention devoted to how readers with different language skills partake in making literary multilingualism happen. It presents a critical assessment of previous scholarship on literary multilingualism, which we claim is characterized by monolingual assumptions…[Read more]

Depuis 1912, innombrables textes – romans, radio shows, bandes dessinées, séries de télévision, films – ont produit et articulé représentations de l’Afrique dans histoires dont le protagoniste est Tarzan, créé par l’étasunien Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). En prenant le nom « Afrique » comme référence, les textes qui orbitent et habitent…[Read more]

Legion, one of the most recent iterations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) on television, takes an unconventional road to remediating the 1960s as a cultural period.

This CSTOnline blog post takes a look at the current resurgence of science fiction on television, and discusses these recent trends along the example of The Expanse, an adaptation of the successful space opera penned by scifi author James S. A. Corey.

Marietta Shaginian’s Soviet production novel, Hydrocentral (Gidrotsentral’), represents a case of canonical limbo. Without exception, the novel is listed as a Soviet literary classic in reference works and compendia of Russian literature since the time of its publication in 1931 up to the present day, and yet is not considered an official exe…[Read more]

Com base na hipótese de que a emergência histórica dos cinemas africanos e sua contemporaneidade são indissociáveis de uma reivindicação do direito de olhar, de narrar e de imaginar o mundo, este artigo busca estabelecer um quadro conceitual para uma história das formas de imaginação do comum nos cinemas africanos. Nessa história ainda a escrever…[Read more]

The central topic of João Botelho’s “Um adeus português” (1986), is memory in 1980s Portuguese society. The film alternates scenes from 1973, during the colonial war in Africa, with scenes set in 1985, in rural and urban areas of Portugal. In the present essay, I argue that the film enacts the need for a conversation among the Portuguese by opti…[Read more]

A brief account of a translation experiment of the Scottish poet, historian, and fraud John Pinkerton presented in the context of the reception of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski and his poetry in 18th century Scotland.

A brief account of a translation experiment of the Scottish poet, historian, and fraud John Pinkerton presented in the context of the reception of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski and his poetry in 18th century Scotland.

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)