‘Dirt’ and ‘Trash’ in Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_:
Update on the rhetoric of social stratification in R&J…

Gloria McMillan June 21, 2018

Shakespeare in early modern period of English culture demonstrates how modern exogamy (voluntarily marrying outside your group) rattles the social stratification structure in modern western societi…[Read more]

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many tribes and subcultures of Britain’s teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of the most important contemporary British wri…[Read more]

This article revisits the under-appreciated connection between John Dunton and Daniel Defoe in the context of their epistolary periodicals, the Athenian Mercury and the Review. While the wide-scale use of reader letters in early periodicals has been acknowledged if not fully appreciated in contemporary scholarship, each author devoted copious…[Read more]

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

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.

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Blog, 28 March 2018. A Q&A about the essay “JavaScript Affogato: Programming a Culture of Improvised Expertise,” published in Configurations 26.1 (2018): 47–72, DOI: 10.1353/con.2018.0002.

An analysis of ten studies in Victorian literature and medicine examines the changes in the interdisciplinary field since G. S. Rousseau published an influential article on the topic in 1981.

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This New Rheto rical Continuum Chart for Fiction shows a spectral range between individual (New Critical, structuralist, formalist) approach to group-based (socio-rhetorical) approach to fiction in the 21st Century.

A Robert Brownian Dramatic Dialogue

Course syllabus for Eng 260: Introduction to Women Writers focused on the theme of food fiction. Taught at Central Oregon Community College as a general education course. We are on the quarter system which limits the number of readings. The course will require that students complete a collaborative digital project.

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, during the Renaissance period, inevitably entailed the repudiation of the animal and the beginning of the great human-animal divide. What was seen, at the time, as the rebirth of man, was also the birth of a rampant anthropocentrism which, until the recent…[Read more]