This paper explores the manifestation of trauma in superhero comics following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. These texts are considered from the perspectives of clinical psychology and Silverman’s concept of historical trauma. The paper first examines the genre as a whole, followed by an exploration of elements c…[Read more]

In my paper ‘Postmodern Chinoiserie in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese’ (2014, Literature Compass 11 (1): 1–14), I propose that existing scholarship on the portrayal of Asians and Asian Americans in American comics has largely focused upon racist newspaper cartoons from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and modern Asian-A…[Read more]

This article is a review of the Haan-Lewalski OUP edition of Milton’s shorter. The book, I argue, is inexcusably difficult to use, and suggests that perhaps the time has come to replace long, very expensive tomes with digital editions.

This article is a review of the Haan-Lewalski OUP edition of Milton’s shorter. The book, I argue, is inexcusably difficult to use, and suggests that perhaps the time has come to replace long, very expensive tomes with digital editions.

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

This comparative study in the evolution of subjectivity in European literature during the Renaissance ascribes it to the impact of the Reformation on the public representation of authorial identity, differing from Stephen Greenblatt’s later application of Foucault to six Tudor authors.

“King Lear,” like all great tragedies, is surely designed to entertain and illuminate, not to depress an audience – as too many interpretations argue. Lear abdicates to ensure the future of Cordelia, from excessive love of virtue and justice, the violation of which initially drives him mad – with rage – but he progressively goes sane, learning t…[Read more]

This article reads the problem of trespass within William Shakespeare’s King Lear. I draw upon eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone’s notion of trespass, sixteenth-century jurist Jean Bodin’s notion of sovereignty, in order to understand the question of property rights that emerges in Lear’s abdication of his sovereignty.

With the discovery of the earliest known manuscript version of Et les chiens se taisaient, we learn that Césaire had started thinking about the theater earlier than had been assumed, and most important, that he had originally envisioned this work as a historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution. “Migrant Textuality” explores the several vers…[Read more]

Prepared in partial completion for the Master’s degree in American Studies at UMass Boston. Abstract: Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero…[Read more]