This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

In the fall of 2019 I taught my eighteenth-century novel course as an exercise in slow reading, taking a tactic I had used before: putting a canonical work of fiction into the context of the other voices in the literary marketplace, and the circumstances of its making. For such a course, Tristram Shandy is an ideal central text. It was published…[Read more]

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

This article reviews four crucial moments of the editorial life of Guaman Poma de Ayala’s “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno” [New Chronicle and Good Government], a 1189-page history of Peru before, during, and after the Spanish conquest. The chronicle includes 399 ink drawings made by the author. The essay also addresses unanswered questions…[Read more]

Invited contribution to the book-catalog “Libros y autores del virreinato del Perú (1542-1824)” [Books and authors of the Viceroyalty of Peru] that accompanies the one-year exhibit (same title as the book) at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid (Spain). The exhibit can be visited from September 2021-September 2022. This chapter addresses the…[Read more]

Building on existing film and urban histories, this innovative volume examines Spanish cinema through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, the built environment, visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age. Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film brings together the scholarship of an…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a discipline, a pedagogical tool, and a set of working practices by bringing together a diverse group of renowned specialists to examine how the field has grown out of and radically reconsidered some of the basic premises of British Cultural Studies since…[Read more]

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

Building on the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay develops a queer naturalist account of film form centered on the ontogenetic dimensions of Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac (2013).

Building on the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay develops a queer naturalist account of film form centered on the ontogenetic dimensions of Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac (2013).

If we affirmatively answer Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw’s invitation to think beyond the ‘fetishization of the modern city’ as the pinnacle of human-centered progress and achievement in order to consider the urban as both a process of transformed nature and the metabolic and social transformation of nature through human labor, the city becom…[Read more]

This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]

This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]

Since the Intifada of 2000, living conditions in the Gaza Strip have progressively deteriorated, and when Hamas came to power in 2006–07, a complete blockade was enforced on the inhabitants by Egypt and Israel. In addition, five full-scale wars have been
waged on the Strip. Despite these conditions, Gazans remain resilient, as evidenced by s…[Read more]

ABSTRACT
The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries.…[Read more]

This essay discusses pedagogical approaches to teaching Austen’s Persuasion as a novel situated at the intersection of literature and philosophy. It focuses on how Persuasion takes up, talks back to, and helps illuminate classic philosophical questions about personhood, sociality, ethics, consciousness, and the space of inner life. It discusses c…[Read more]