x

Literature

Fifteen Eighty Four

Menu

Number of articles per page:

  • 2 Feb 2026
    Douglas Clark

    A World of Wills in Shakespeare and Beyond

    It’s another dull, grey Tuesday morning. A colleague asks you how you are. Reflecting on the seemingly endless flow of tedious meetings in the day ahead, you reply that you’re “losing the will the live”. Your co-worker chuckles and walks back to wherever they need to be. I think most people understand the context of […]

    Read More
  • 29 Jan 2026
    Joep Leerssen

    Nationalism, Charisma, Narcissism

    In the classic film Casablanca, the Frenchwoman Yvonne, one of the regulars of Rick’s Café, joins the other refugees assembled there to sing the Marseillaise, boldly defying the Nazi officers present. She concludes her national anthem with a shouted “Vive la France!”, tears streaming down her face. We now know that the tears were not […]

    Read More
  • 14 Jan 2026
    Sarah Coogan

    What Is Nostalgi Good For?: Choosing a Homeland in the British and Irish Modernist Epic

    Nostalgia has become a defining emotion of twenty-first-century Western culture. From endless film franchise reboots, to the Eras Tour, to the 1980s world of Stranger Things, our media seems perpetually transfixed by the past. Nostalgia—the bittersweet yearning for an absent home—has a remarkable power to enchant us, for good or ill. It can, in the […]

    Read More
  • 14 Jan 2026
    Kent Lehnhof

    Shakespeare and the Vibrating Throat of Flesh

    A lot of ethical programs are predicated on ideas of sameness and reciprocity. These programs urge us to imagine other people as similar to ourselves and to treat them accordingly. This is the essence of the biblical teaching to ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ and is the gist of the so-called Golden Rule: ‘Do unto […]

    Read More
  • 5 Jan 2026
    Raymond Malewitz

    Can Animals be Public Enemies?

    “Your cattle are public enemies now,” a state veterinary scientist tells Homer Bannon, an aging cattle rancher in Larry McMurtry’s 1961 novel Horsemen, Pass By, shortly before he compels Homer to drive his livestock into a large pit to be slaughtered and buried. This haunting scene in the novel (and in its film adaptation, Hud) […]

    Read More
  • 23 Dec 2025
    E. K. Myerson

    The Desire for Syria in Medieval England

    On Friday 9 June 1458, a pirate ship swerved and fired on two Bristolian trading boats as they passed the coast of Malta, on their return from the Levant. I found the event transcribed in a legal document. I could see the inky vessels with their lost signatures, the Katherine Sturmy and the Marie, trapped […]

    Read More
  • 18 Dec 2025
    Clare Siviter

    How do you solve a problem like Napoleon?

    Napoleon Bonaparte: Corsican, illustrious general, First Consul, Emperor of the French, exile, prisoner. It’s quite a CV. He was also a PR expert ahead of his time, and one of his chosen media for this was the theatre. Theatre had the potential to reach thousands of spectators and, when it was reported in the press, […]

    Read More
  • 26 Nov 2025
    Sebastian Sobecki

    Unveiling the Premodern World through the Lens of Global Travel Writing

    What did it mean to travel in the premodern world – long before passports, maps, or reliable roads? Countless surviving yet often overlooked accounts open a window onto a time when people from Asia, Africa, and Europe journeyed immense distances on foot, by caravan, or across unpredictable seas. Their stories reveal not only the physical […]

    Read More

Number of articles per page:

Authors in Literature