The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

This course, under the broad heading of literature and science, takes on the subject of climate change fiction (cli-fi). It was first taught at Antioch College in winter of 2017. The course included field trips to the OSU climate research center, a local nature preserve, and the College’s farm.

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960). These poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in c…[Read more]

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960). These poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in c…[Read more]

Since the early twentieth century, translators and critics of classical Chinese poetry have tended to focus on imagery and suggestion, balking at rhythm. It is commonly assumed that modern English and classical Chinese are too different, phonemically, for any of the aural qualities of one to translate into the other. My essay aims to overcome…[Read more]

Since the early twentieth century, translators and critics of classical Chinese poetry have tended to focus on imagery and suggestion, balking at rhythm. It is commonly assumed that modern English and classical Chinese are too different, phonemically, for any of the aural qualities of one to translate into the other. My essay aims to overcome…[Read more]

This is a translation of one of the most influential poetic series of the late-ninth century, the twenty-four “Mountain-Dwelling Poems” written by the Buddhist monk Guanxiu (832–913). Focusing on the speaker’s use of imagery and allusion, the translations are accompanied by annotations which clarify obscure or difficult passages. An introdu…[Read more]

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960). These poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in c…[Read more]

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]

My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism.

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

The manuscript now called the Salisbury Breviary (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294) contains the only extant illustrated cycle of of the Life of St Edith of Wilton; the fifteen miniatures accompany the readings for the feast of St Edith. These images emphasize the connections among Edith’s holiness, royal genealogy, and…[Read more]

The performances of Christ in the text of The Dream of the Rood construct a masculinity for Christ that is majestic, martial, and specifically heterosexual and that relies on a fragile opposition with a femininity defined as dominated Other in the figure of the Cross. His particularly constructed masculinity, explored rather than merely assumed or…[Read more]

An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]

Abstract: This short edition makes available for the first time three Middle English verse prayers to Christ from the Mohun Hours, a fourteenth-century Book of Hours held by the Boston Public Library (MS 124). Late medieval Books of Hours have received substantial recent critical attention as expressions of devotional literacy practiced mainly by…[Read more]

Historical source study of the last text in the composite manuscript Lon- don, BL Cotton Faustina B.iii can shed light on the transmission and use of chronicle texts and their translations in late medieval England. The author of the Middle English verse Life of St. Æthelthryth used John Trevisa’s English translation of Ranulf Higden’s Poly…[Read more]