A central element of the core folk horror texts (The Wicker Man (1973), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Witchfinder General (1968)) is the idea of rural communities as retaining pre-Christian practices and beliefs. When uncovered by a modern outsider who is returning to the countryside, these revelations disrupt their world view. Folk horror texts d…[Read more]

Addressing Walt Whitman’s reception in Iran, the present essay focuses on the front cover of a book-length translation of Whitman into Persian to study how Whitman’s image is visually translated for an Iranian audience. Among literary discourses of contemporary Iran, the one that associates poetry with mysticism plays the most significant role in…[Read more]

Since his first works came to critical attention, Ernest Hemingway has occupied a space in the critical and cultural imagination as a definitively ‘masculine’ writer. His novels and stories focus on male narrators in difficult or extreme situations involving war, violence, and the natural world, and his critical heritage has focused on these ele…[Read more]

This paper is a critical examination of two antithetical theories on the role of authorial intention in the criticism and interpretation of literature: the New Critics’ “intentional fallacy” and E. D. Hirsch’s historicist objectivism. A third way is put forward: a regulative objectivism which emerges as a a result of critical debate.

This paper considers the ways in which the television ghost story serves to support understanding and interpretations of history, and particularly an understanding of causality. As Helen Wheatley has identified, the typical detailed period settings of the television Gothic operate as a form of ‘dark heritage’ drama, where, instead of the att…[Read more]

The ghost story typically presents an interaction of the past with the present, often in the form of ‘stone tape’ type repeats of an event from the past. The 2016 BBC series The Living and the Dead went beyond this to show the merging of multiple time streams, so people made choices in the ‘present’ because of influences from past and future,…[Read more]

The ghost story typically presents an interaction of the past with the present, often in the form of ‘stone tape’ type repeats of an event from the past. The 2016 BBC series The Living and the Dead went beyond this to show the merging of multiple time streams, so people made choices in the ‘present’ because of influences from past and future,…[Read more]

The link between asimovian universe and Sherlock Holmes

The late Victorian era was imbued with progressive scientific reform and palpable anxiety regarding the future of the British empire. These two topics may seem distinct, but they find mutual expression in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, in which the soulless Count travels from Transylvania (literally, “beyond the forest”) and invades Engla…[Read more]

gender & Judaism in A Serious Man [Coen Bros, 2009], An American Dream [Norman Mailer, 1965] and the Pericope Adulterae.

This article focuses on three post-9/11 meta-poems – “My Wife Says Don’t Write About September 11th” by Ryan G. Van Cleave, “How to Write A Poem After September 11th” by Nikki Moustaki and “To the Words” by W. S. Merwin – to demonstrate the point that the current scholarly understanding of post-9/11 aesthetics as something functioning like…[Read more]

Though many studies of contemporary Buddhist literature exist, such studies often limit their purview to canonised, ‘high-brow’ authors. In this article, I read Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Japanese Corpse, a detective novel, for how it portrays Zen Buddhism. I show that The Japanese Corpse portrays Zen as non-dualist and amoral: good and bad a…[Read more]

‘Narrative Theory’ is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. The fourth section deals with the modes of narrative, “showing” and “telling”, as theorized by Henry James and other theorists of the dramatic aesthetics in narrative. Outline: 1. Two concepts of narrative distance. 2. The theory of the novel before…[Read more]

Call for Papers

The literary relation between Parvin E’tesami and Walt Whitman remains a largely unexplored field. This article analyzes the connection between “God’s Weaver” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to shed light on Parvin’s creative reception of Whitman. Creating a mixed-breed spider, combining characteristics from both
Whitman’s insect and the Persi…[Read more]

The gothic literature is not necessarily the antagonist in the history of the Enlightenment values.

This paper offers a metafictional reading of William Faulkner’s novel AS I LAY DYING (1930), a reading which goes beyond the usual mimetic interpretation of this novel as an exploration of the characters’ psychology. Faulkner’s writing also explores and allegorizes itself, through the creation of paradoxical narrative forms which carry out an…[Read more]