This essay calls for a reflection on the links between literature, activism, and social change in the Hispanic Caribbean, privileging certain interventions led by women, who have contributed to the defense of better living conditions and a more equitable social pact. Taking into account the diversity and mobility that characterizes the Caribbean…[Read more]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]

This essay argues that despite its significance within the history of bibliotherapy, Samuel McChord Crothers’s 1916 essay “A Literary Clinic” – in which the term “bibliotherapy” was coined – is a stranger point of origin than proponents have realized, one with implications for conceptualizing reading and its reparative uses more broadly.

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the “fugitive” is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the…[Read more]

What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the “fugitive” is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the…[Read more]

Uniting literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and a deeply archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court freshly examines how literature reflects and constructs the dynamics of emotional life in the Renaissance courtly sphere. Spanning the 16th century — with chapters on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

The STC Macbeth’s setting and predominantly multiethnic cast brought to mind Orson Welles’s landmark 1936 Macbeth which was set in Haiti and featured an all-black cast. In both cases, the ethnicity and race of the cast matched that of the characters and cultures in the adaptation’s respective universe. Tommy’s production engaged in two models…[Read more]

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]

This Blog covers a new approach to culture via literary analysis. The hypothesis is that distance from dirt is a key aspect of culture that cuts across ideologies. To begin this work, we will use Big Data to study (content analysis) themes and characters in US novels from the 19th C. to the 21st C. Theory for this analysis will be Joel Kovel’s…[Read more]

By reading each of the novels of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre as ‘a travel story’, just as we read Balzac’s Père Goriot, it becomes necessary to read them as ‘a spatial practice’, a narrative that locates itself in and responds to a specific space. The specific geography of Kate O’Brien’s Parisian novels of development, Without My Cloak (1931), The…[Read more]

Critically surveys the long premodern history of race and racism, colonization and imperialism, and globalism, across c. 1000-1500 CE.

The Jewish ‘question’ is treated in the Recherche by way of the Dreyfus Affaire, which is not spoken of but scattered in the discourses of different characters. Definitions, opinions, even facts are, therefore, spread in the ubiquity of social instability, so that it is impossible for the reader to identify any of Proust’s ideologies.In our paper…[Read more]