Although the scale and variety of Conrad’s authorship are colossal, no author is perhaps more closely linked to a single text than Conrad is to Heart of Darkness. Critics equate Conrad with its main narrator, the arch-Englishman Marlow. But Conrad is the immigrant in the Western canon. Conrad, whom we are used to reading as […]
Read MoreHenry James has long been recognized as one of the most important theorists of the novel. His extensive reflections on fiction, together with his overriding concern with questions of ethics, explains why his work is of such of importance to contemporary novelists, such as Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, and Ali Smith. But no critic has […]
Read MoreThe 1890s were not very far in the rearview mirror when Holbrook Jackson published The Eighteen-Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1913), the first of many early twentieth-century attempts to capture the spirit of the nineteenth century’s tumultuous final decade. Unlike later works that often conflated decadence […]
Read MoreWhen Shakespeare Survey began publishing its annual yearbook of criticism, interpretation, and performance in 1948, computer technology was in flux. Transistors were the new invention (1947). The first commercial digital computers, the Z4, were produced in 1950; Grace Hopper, the First Lady of Software, wrote the first computer language in 1953; and the integrated circuit […]
Read MoreWhen Russian forces invaded Ukraine in March 2022, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was repeatedly used by theatre makers, scholars, and political leaders to express the existential threat faced by Ukrainians and to provoke debate about Western involvement in the crisis. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed, in an address to the British parliament on 8 March, that ‘the question for us […]
Read MoreSince the first uses of the term in the 1970s, the graphic novel has been a concept in constant debate and evolution, capturing the new developments and mutations of comics across the last decades, alongside the concerns and enthusiasms such changes generate. At times blindly embraced, at other times vehemently rejected, the term has now […]
Read MoreWomen and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century unpacks the complex relationships of women with medieval literary culture across the longue durée, exploring scribes and book production, patronage, authorship, ownership and reception, women’s education, literacy, learning and knowledge, as well as women as readers and women as subjects. The […]
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