This article assesses the longstanding myths and debates surrounding the supposed African ancestry of German Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven. It argues that the “blackwashing” of Beethoven against all historical likelihood is a failed attempt at historical revisionism—while endeavoring to claim Beethoven’s genius as a testament to black…[Read more]

This paper discusses the relationships made between ghost figures and their living relatives within Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In this paper I argue that a specific female identity and agency is represented in these texts through figurative language and symbolization of…[Read more]

English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of…[Read more]

A review of Daniel Hack’s work on the intersections of African American and Victorian literatures.

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremaci…[Read more]

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremaci…[Read more]

Abstract: This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and peda…[Read more]

This essay demonstrates how Lynch Law suspended normative criminal law and undermined constitutional amendments made after the US Civil War. Focusing on the period between Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, the essay argues that “outlawry” provides the necessary juridical concept for understanding how a tradition of popular sovereignty wor…[Read more]

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

In the next seven minutes, I would like to convince you that real formalism and real historicism really are, or really should be, one and the same critical practice. Our idea of what counts as knowledge about early English literature will be enriched by integrating formalist and historicist methods. Those of us who work on prosody and poetics are…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Review Essay on Black Women and 19th-century American Print Culture

This article focuses on William Wells Brown’s 1854 history of the Haitian Revolution.

This article reads the printing and commentary on Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” in Frederick Douglass’ Paper as an act and theorization of translation.

This article explores the coverage of the 1848 uprisings in Europe by the North Star, a black newspaper edited by Frederick Douglass.

This forum contribution focuses on the racial politics of digitization.

This forum contribution reads Harriet Jacobs’s use of print as a model for contemporary scholarship.