This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

Explores select works of Matthew Arnold, as well as Robert Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos” and Edward Fitzgerald’s “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” for evidence that societal growth during the late 19th-century was done not entirely in hopes of leaving previous authorities behind, of accepting and dealing with felt feelings of being abandoned for…[Read more]

Explores Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” as a space-world where anxious Victorians might place the perhaps exciting but also anxiety-producing New to subsume its affect of disequilibrium within the sturdy, assured and predictable.

Routledge is doing a series of literature companions. I have been requested to build a proposal for a Literature and Social Class companion text. You are most welcome to pass on this CFP to colleagues. Please see details in attached file. Questions?
Many thanks,
Gloria McMillan, Editor
Email for ideas, communications, and drafts
glomc@dakotacom.net

Explores how “Ode to a Grecian Urn” reads as a discovery of the discovery for the poet of the importance of an object, not primarily as something he might master, but something he submits to. Story of the withdrawal of status, and re-projection of “art,” status, onto an object, after brief experience of the effects of being abandoned its authority.

Exploration of how Samuel T. Coleridge creates an un-bullied self, a self that pretends it was never bullied, incrementally through his poetry.

This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

Exploration of how “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s means to distinguish herself from those who are truly guilty of abandoning parental mores… ancestors, parents, themselves. An argument is made that the reason for the text is as provision for the author to temporarily relieve herself of guilt.

Exploration of how Mary Shelley uses her textual creation “Frankenstein” to engage with crippling feelings of growth panic that arose out of her recent adult self-actualization.

Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

In the 16th century most of Russia is still a terra incognita with a highly dubious and mostly mythologized geography, anthropology, and sociology. In this article we look at some texts of the Early Modern period – Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), Peter Mundy’s Travel Writings of 1640–1641, and The Voiages and Trave…[Read more]