King Lear and Cordelia, by Benjamin West (1793) / Folger Shakespeare Library, Wikimedia Commons Considering how the Fool and Poor Tom, two characters in King Lear who stand outside the social order, enhance the play’s investigation of madness, civilisation and humanity. By Dr. Gillian Woods / 03.15.2016 Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Theatre and Drama Birkbeck University of London[…]
Taming of the Shrew, 1809, by Washington Allston / Philadelphia Museum of Art, Public Domain In Shakespeare’s times, personalities were categorised according to four temperaments. The choleric temperament was hot-tempered and active, as Nelly Ekström describes. By Nelly Ekström / 12.11.2016 Visitor Experience Assistant Wellcome Trust William Shakespeare’s plays provide examples of all four temperaments, but it’s[…]
Profile of William Shakespeare, c.1793 / Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons Blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile: the body’s four humours were believed to control your personality in Shakespeare’s day and influenced the way the Bard created some of his most famous characters. By Nelly Ekström / 12.11.2016 Visitor Experience Assistant Wellcome Trust Shakespeare’s writing is one[…]
Portrait of Margaret Cavendish in the frontispiece to her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). The image is also used as frontispiece to some editions of The Blazing World / Wikimedia Commons Considered by many one of the founding texts of the science fiction genre, The Blazing World — via a dizzy mix of animal-human hybrids, Immaterial Spirits, and burning foes —[…]
Bronze statue of Geoffrey Chaucer The world about which Chaucer wrote was a very different world from that which produced Beowulf. Edited by Matthew A. McIntosh / 10.27.2018 Public Historian Brewminate Editor-in-Chief The world about which Chaucer wrote was a very different world from that which produced Beowulf. Developments in language, new structures in society, and changes[…]
British Library, Public Domain Examining how drug literature—writing on drugs by drug users—has consistently resorted to Gothic conventions, images and atmospheres for 200 years. By Dr. Jayson Althofer (left) and Dr. Brian Musgrove (right) / 09.04.2018 Abstract This article examines how drug literature—writing on drugs by drug users—has consistently resorted to Gothic conventions, images and[…]
Creative Commons “Some ethical vision of the world, an ethical concept of what human life and human beings are…To be aware of the ethics in one’s own work, to own it, is political.” By Nayereh Doosti / 04.30.2017 Aleksandar Hemon is the author of the novel The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National[…]
Júlia Lopes de Almeida was a founding member in the creation of the Brazilian Academy of Letters but was left out because she was a woman. | Image: National Library Foundation. Public Archives. She helped create the Brazilian Academy of Letters—only to be excluded by the institution for being a woman. By Fabíola Hauch / 10.12.2018 Júlia[…]
Linguistic dating is in close agreement with historians’ and classicists’ beliefs derived from historical and archaeological sources. By (left-to-right) Dr. Eric Lewin Altschuler, Dr. Andreea S Calude, Dr. Andrew Meade, and Dr. Mark Pagel / 02.18.2013 Altschuler: Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, University Hospital[…]
Mandeville’s Travels was, for more than two centuries after its appearance in c.1356, of enormous influence and popularity in many fields of European culture. This paper discusses first its unprecedented generic eclecticism and its casting into the form of a first person narrative, and then proceeds to explore concepts of space and how a journey[…]
Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr Ralph David Abernathy, their families, and others leading the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. It is not often that a neighborhood squabble is remembered as a world-historical event. By Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick / 08.22.2018 Humanities Editor Los Angeles Review of Books It is not often that a neighbourhood squabble[…]
The second nun from Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The Second Nun, her prologue, and her tale might be the quietest pilgrim and narrative in the Canterbury Tales. By Dr. Candace Barrington Professor of English Central Connecticut State University Introduction The Second Nun, her prologue, and her tale might be the quietest[…]
The Man of Law’s Tale might seem an unlikely specimen for examining the development of race in the Middle Ages. Not so fast. By Dr. Cord J. Whitaker / 09.2017 Assistant Professor of English Wellesley College Introduction The Man of Law The Man of Law’s Tale might seem an unlikely specimen for examining the development[…]
Simon Armitage explores Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and reflects on how he approached his own translation of the poem. By Simon Armitage / 01.31.2018 Poet and Playwright We know next to nothing about the author of the poem which has come to be called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was probably[…]
Puzzling out the meaning of monsters in Beowulf, comparing the hero with Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. By Dr. Victoria Symons / 01.31.2018 Honorary Lecturer in Literature University College London It’s no overstatement to say that Beowulf is – today – one of the most important surviving works of medieval literature. It is by[…]
Watercolour portrait by William Buckler of Robert Hunt, 1842 — Wellcome Library, Creative Commons In 1848, the mineralogist, pioneer of photography, and amateur poet Robert Hunt published The Poetry of Science, a hugely ambitious work that aimed to offer a survey of scientific knowledge while also communicating the metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic aspects of science to the[…]
Photo via AAIHS Examining the significant contributions of women and the dynamics of gender at the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. By Merve Fejzulah PhD Candidate in Historical Studies University of Cambridge The First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held from September 19-22, 1956 at the Sorbonne in Paris, was[…]
Image by Michelle Gia, Flickr, Creative Commons The active properties of sharing – what it means to be bound to others through the common experience of a textual/dramatic artifact. By Dr. Holly Crocker Professor of English University of South Carolina Until very recently, I have avoided writing about Hamlet. With the occasional exception, I have also avoided[…]
By Dr. Tracy Sharpley-Whiting Gertrude Conaway Distinguished Vanderbilt Professor of Humanities (AADS and French) Vanderbilt University In his exquisitely written biography of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad details the poet’s wanderlust, from his travels with his father to Mexico to his hopscotching across the globe on the S. S. Malone and McKeesport freighters, visiting African and European port cities in[…]
Pitti Immagine Filati Thing theory does its best work by acknowledging the incapacity to attribute meaning to the object world where it has also attributed mystery. By Dr. John Plotz Professor of English Brandeis University So, funny story about the paper you are about to read: funny from an audience perspective, anyway. It began by asking[…]
Don DeLillo, New York City, 1990s How do the literary, visual, and plastic arts fashion questions about the object world and our relation to it? By Dr. Bill Brown / 01.01.2016 Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture University of Chicago n the opening pages of Falling Man, an unidentified consciousness struggles to apprehend the[…]
Creative Commons Photo The tenacity of the Commune’s second life does not simply attest to its continuing usefulness in American culture for making sense of revolutions past and future: it also crucially reverses the assumption that transnational circuits of memory—that memory without borders, as it were—are uniquely or definitively a product of our own hyper-mediated historical moment.[…]
Ammonite fossil / Photo by Becks, Wikimedia Commons Nineteenth-century England saw a major revolution in the scientific understanding of the natural world. By Olivia Rosane / 05.17.2018 Nineteenth-century England saw a major revolution in the scientific understanding of the natural world. Charles Lyell’s 1830s Principles of Geology explained how landscapes were shaped and reshaped by daily processes like[…]
Achilles at the Court of King Lycomedes. The sarcophagus had been sawed up to four plates which were installed into the facade of villa Borghese. The plates had been moved to the Louvre where the sarcophagus was reconstituted in integrity. / Photo by Ilya Shurigen, Louvre Museum, Paris As strong (or beautiful) and brave as they[…]
Henry Morton Stanley as pictured in the frontispiece to Volume 1 of his In Darkest Africa (1890) – Internet Archive After returning from his disastrous mission to central Africa to rescue a German colonial governor, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley was eager to distract from accusations of brutality with his ‘discovery’ of African pygmies. Brian Murray explores how[…]
All rhetorical techniques are designed to enhance one of the three pillars of communication: ethos, logos and pathos. Benson Kua We all use rhetorical structures. But, unless we’re skilled in their use, as politicians and advertisers clearly are, we don’t necessarily grasp their full manipulative power. By Dr. Joan Leach / 02.02.2016 Professor and Director, International Programs Australian National[…]
Literary translation has occurred for centuries (the Bible is a prime example). And with Nobel Prize winners like French author Patrick Modiano, it’s unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Wikimedia Commons Some may figure that literary translators are a dying breed, like quill pen makers, and assume that computers will eventually take over the job. Don’t hold[…]
Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, inspired by Dante Alighieri’s vision of heaven and hell. Wikimedia The gates to hell in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy tell us to “abandon all hope, yet who enter here”. Despite its unfunny premise, ‘La Commedia’ ends well, with its protagonist Dante reaching heaven. By Dr. Frances Di Lauro / 10.01.2017 Senior Lecturer Chair, The Department[…]
Georg Trakl in 1910 – Wikimedia Commons To mark the 100th anniversary of the death by cocaine overdose of Austrian lyric poet Georg Trakl, Richard Millington explores the role the drug played in Trakl’s life and works. By Dr. Richard Millington Senior Lecturer in German Victoria University of Wellington This article, Wild Heart Turning White: Austrian[…]
“A Group of Carnations”, a plate from Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1807) — Internet Archive Bridal beds, blushing captives, and swollen trunks – Carl Linnaeus’ taxonomy of plants heralded a whole new era in 18th-century Europe of plants being spoken of in sexualised terms. Martin Kemp explores* how this association between the floral and erotic reached its[…]