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]

What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the “fugitive” is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the…[Read more]

Uniting literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and a deeply archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court freshly examines how literature reflects and constructs the dynamics of emotional life in the Renaissance courtly sphere. Spanning the 16th century — with chapters on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey…[Read more]

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

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

The STC Macbeth’s setting and predominantly multiethnic cast brought to mind Orson Welles’s landmark 1936 Macbeth which was set in Haiti and featured an all-black cast. In both cases, the ethnicity and race of the cast matched that of the characters and cultures in the adaptation’s respective universe. Tommy’s production engaged in two models…[Read more]

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]

This Blog covers a new approach to culture via literary analysis. The hypothesis is that distance from dirt is a key aspect of culture that cuts across ideologies. To begin this work, we will use Big Data to study (content analysis) themes and characters in US novels from the 19th C. to the 21st C. Theory for this analysis will be Joel Kovel’s…[Read more]

The Jewish ‘question’ is treated in the Recherche by way of the Dreyfus Affaire, which is not spoken of but scattered in the discourses of different characters. Definitions, opinions, even facts are, therefore, spread in the ubiquity of social instability, so that it is impossible for the reader to identify any of Proust’s ideologies.In our paper…[Read more]

This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetorics, engage in responsible and responsive cultural rhetorics conversations, and generate productive openings for future inquiry and practice. First, the authors open by paying homage to scholarship and programs that have made cultural rhetorics a…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

This essay surveys Thoreau’s antislavery writings from across his career and demonstrates the ecological concerns central to Thoreau’s abolitionist commitment.

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.