“Here there be Dragons”

The line “Enge anpaðas uncuð gelad” [narrow path, unknown way] appears twice in the Old English corpus: once in the Old English Exodus (a tale from Old Testament narrative poetry that tells us a story of the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians) and once in Beowulf (an epic story of masculine bravado, intense alienation and Otherness, and time past…[Read more]

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain’s location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world’s holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography,…[Read more]

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art…[Read more]

Bound with Beowulf, the Old English Wonders of the East, a catalogue of marvelous beings, describes the very creatures it depicts as ungefrægelicu (unheard of, inconceivable). Insistently, these representations, both visual and textual, provoke questions about the nature and possibility of representation itself. In doing so, they also destabilize…[Read more]

University courses on monsters are becoming widespread as many disciplines use monsters to think about what it means to be human. To date no source collection on the literature of the monstrous exists, and this volume offers the key primary readings on monsters from ancient times to the present day. Each work is preceded by a critical…[Read more]

BEACHES GIVE AND TAKE, bringing unexpected surprises to society, and pulling essentials away from it. The ocean offers monsters— whales and whirlpools—but when a massive creature is pushed into human proximity by the ocean’s wide shoulders, the waves deposit and erode human assumptions about itself and its environment: words, sounds, breath, water…[Read more]

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship seeks scholarly submissions on the technical, theoretical, cultural, and historical aspects of comics studies that gives vitality to the form and challenges readers’ assumptions about it. This document is the full call for papers published on 30th October 2019 on the journal web site.

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]

Introduction to four poems written by Langston Hughes during the Spanish Civil War, published in the Little-Known Documents section of PMLA.

The introduction alongside the text of the four poems can be found on the PMLA’s site: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.562.

Syllabus for a course focusing on graphic novels and visual narratives regarding the dictatorial periods in Spain and Argentina. This course had a strong focus on visual literacy and developing the student’s abilities for academic writing.

This undergraduate seminar on author Margaret Atwood fulfills the Major Author course at Stevenson University. Students will read A Trio of Tall Tales and The Year of the Flood, as well as both read and watch The Handmaid’s Tale. The course assignments include live-tweeting, creating a webtext, and an intertextual analysis essay.

This section of 494 provides students with an introduction to the reading, history, and making of comics and graphic novels. Comics have often been associated with popular culture, pulp fiction, and ephemerality. Yet comics merge image and text to create a unique form of sequential art that is becoming ever more visible and influential in our…[Read more]

Because it is all too easy to (accidentally) make assumptions about what first-year students know about language, in 2019-2020 my lit and comp type courses will begin with a segment on language, before moving on to sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Our exploration of language will start by jumping into a story, to help us identify the 8 parts…[Read more]