This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bha…[Read more]

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

In his 1843 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens used the pastoral mode to deliver a strong message about labor. To communicate this message, he employed the mode’s many traits, including its retreat into and return from the rural landscape and its focus on the country worker, traditionally the shepherd. This essay follows the novel’s pastoral ret…[Read more]

In his 1843 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens used the pastoral mode to deliver a strong message about labor. To communicate this message, he employed the mode’s many traits, including its retreat into and return from the rural landscape and its focus on the country worker, traditionally the shepherd. This essay follows the novel’s pastoral ret…[Read more]

In his 1843 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens used the pastoral mode to deliver a strong message about labor. To communicate this message, he employed the mode’s many traits, including its retreat into and return from the rural landscape and its focus on the country worker, traditionally the shepherd. This essay follows the novel’s pastoral ret…[Read more]

In both her epic poem The Spanish Gypsy and her final novel Daniel Deronda, Eliot drew upon kabbalistic concepts of the heavens through the characters of Jewish mystics. In the later novel, Eliot moved the mystic, Mordecai, from the narrative’s periphery to its center. This change, symbolically equated within the novel to a shift from…[Read more]

In both her epic poem The Spanish Gypsy and her final novel Daniel Deronda, Eliot drew upon kabbalistic concepts of the heavens through the characters of Jewish mystics. In the later novel, Eliot moved the mystic, Mordecai, from the narrative’s periphery to its center. This change, symbolically equated within the novel to a shift from…[Read more]

In both her epic poem The Spanish Gypsy and her final novel Daniel Deronda, Eliot drew upon kabbalistic concepts of the heavens through the characters of Jewish mystics. In the later novel, Eliot moved the mystic, Mordecai, from the narrative’s periphery to its center. This change, symbolically equated within the novel to a shift from…[Read more]

Entry for the special Keywords issue of the Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture.

This paper examines the voluminous “poetry talks” (shihua) written by Southern Society (Nanshe) members and focuses on two tendencies in these discourses: The general cult of sentimentality and the narrative strategy on women’s poetry. These poetic discourses succeeded the language of traditional literary criticism, but also exhibited ideals of th…[Read more]

This paper examines the birth of classicist poetry by paying attention to the Southern Society’s (Nanshe) diachronic succession of the late Qing Poetic Revolution. It provides a careful analysis on the novelty of Huang Zunxian’s poetry and shows how the Southern Society transformed Huang’s Europeanized innovation into something that was roote…[Read more]

Seminar paper for ‘Translating the Nonhuman’, organised by Liam Lewis (University of Warwick) and Haylie Swenson (The George Washington University)

Seminar Abstract — This seminar invites participants to consider the connections created by translations of the nonhuman into human languages. To what extent is language the domain of the human,…[Read more]

Focusing on the impulsive act, this essay analyzes the relationship between the temporality of decision making and the determination of social context in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), The Woodlanders (1887), and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). While critics often note the entrapment of Hardy’s characters in contexts such as social class…[Read more]

This article argues that the language used to describe financial speculation in the nineteenth century overlapped with the moral charge of novelistic temporality: the repeated injunction against “getting rich quick” was countered by the way suspense encouraged racing or skipping through a novel to reach the end. Charles Dickens’s novel Littl…[Read more]

This article argues that George Eliot’s Romola (1862-63) theorizes large-scale sympathy as a way of ethically engaging large groups of individuals outside one’s immediate social ambit. Yet the failed attempts of characters like Savonarola and Tito to imagine the experiences of unknown others suggests that large-scale sympathy estranges the sym…[Read more]

This article argues that old men and aging raised a central problem for Charles Dickens’s literary project: the novel’s difficulty of representing temporal continuity over long spans of time. For the old man, the meaningful plots of the nineteenth century—such as the bildungsroman or the marriage plot—are behind him. By examining three of Dic…[Read more]

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853)—both the fictional place and the novel—cannibalizes the temporalities of other literary genres, such as the story and the newspaper, as a way of preserving a way of life under the double threat of patriarchy and modernization. I use the concatenation of temporalities in Cranford to bring…[Read more]

This article positions agency as a necessarily lacunal aspect of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. By allowing the theatricality of doubling and metaphor to overdetermine Mustafa’s narrative, the novel implicitly challenges both the substitution of symbol for material experience and the rational logic of causation. The disruptive pot…[Read more]

This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]