Search
Search Results
-
Ruritania by the Sea : Detection by the Seaside in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Have His Carcase
Views:440Seaside resorts frequently served as locations of murder mysteries in Golden Age detection fiction, since these destinations could provide a diverse clientele, confined to manageably small groups essential to classic detective stories. The fictional seaside town of Wilvercombe serves as the location of Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel Have His Carcase (1932), in which Lord Peter Wimsey and detective-story writer Harriet Vane investigate the case of a man found dead on the beach. The location of the body turns out to be a source of confusion: while the detectives expect a traditional locked-room mystery to unfold (albeit in an open-air setting), the death cannot be resolved until the detectives realize that they are working in the wrong genre: instead of a clue-puzzle mystery, they are trapped in a Ruritanian romance, with outlandish tales of intrigue, unlikely members of the Russian aristocracy, and exaggerated and oppressive performances of heterosexual romance. (BH)
-
“Holding so Much of the Mind of Ireland” and Writing Modernist Drama: Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
Views:323Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
-
The Post-millennial British Novel
Views:164Book review:
Bentley, Nick, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson, eds. The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. The Decades Series 4. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 297 pages. ISBN 9781441112156. Pbk. £85.
-
A Novel Inquiry into a Strategic Aspect of Irish Women’s Theatre across a Century
Views:272Book review:
Hill, Shonagh. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 257 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-48533-3. Hb. ₤75.
-
The Birth of Imperial Race Medicine
Views:189Book review:
Seth, Suman. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 2018. 324 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-41830-0. Pbk. £29.99.
-
The Architecture of the Self
Views:123Book review:
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xiii + 246 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-53681-5. Hb. $90.
-
“The Third Image”: Ekphrasis and Memory in Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell
Views:146In his collection of prose-poems, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell, Charles Simic evokes the American artist’s aesthetic practice as a form of meditation on the heterosemiotic nature of the artistic imagination. Cornell’s art, often described as “visual poetry,” becomes for Simic a pretext for exploring the multimodal and interconnected spaces of the verbal and the visual. Simic describes his creative rereading of Cornell’s work as “the third image” in which art historical discourse and ekphrasis are reinvented and transformed into a new poetic rhythm. The poet’s engagement with Cornell is also of an intensely personal character: the encounter with the artist’s work enables Simic to revisit his own past, that is, that of a lonely Manhattan flaneur whose imagination is haunted by traumatic childhood memories from war-torn Serbia. With the aid of Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the gaze and the screen, the article examines the ways in which Simic’s texts and visual intertexts probe generic boundaries and discursive identifications, showcasing the significance, function, and creative value of cross-influence between heterogeneous discourses and media. As shown, Simic’s concept of “the third image,” which finds its inspiration in the tension between containment and freedom in Cornell’s shadow boxes, offers readers a rich and personal insight into the complex interplay between discursivity, visuality, figurality, as well as personal and collective memory. (PA)
-
Mapping the Potentials of Monster Studies
Views:315Book review:
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Monster Theory Reader. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ix + 560 pages + 33 b&w photos. ISBN 978-1-5179-0525-5. $35.00. Pbk.
-
All the World’s a Monster
Views:293Book review:
Nirta, Caterina and Andrea Pavoni, eds. Monstrous Ontologies: Politics Ethics Materiality. Series in Philosophy. Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2022. xxxiv + 220 pages. ISBN 978-1-64889-307-0. Pbk. $51.00.
-
Collage Was Never Gone
Views:151Book review:
Drąg, Wojciech. Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis. New York and London: Routledge, 2019. 216 pages. ISBN 9780367437428. Hb. £120.00.
-
The Weird Impossibility of Story
Views:419What do we read in horror stories? To answer such an elusive question, research both historic and theoretical in nature is necessary. A comparison of proto-horror fiction by highly canonized nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American authors (Poe, Bierce, James, Harvey, and Gilman) as well as Lovecraftian poetics reveals the presence of a theoretical thread that sutures these seemingly disparate literatures together. Classic American short stories show a strikingly similar memetic conformation to weird fiction when examined from the framework offered by Sigmund Freud’s seminal essay “Das Unheimliche” [The Uncanny] (1919). Identifying the memetic transmutations that the uncanny goes through in various close readings offers a taxonomy of six tropes—allegorizations of singularities, doubles, and triads—that are already implicit in the Freudian text. Such categorization applied to the weird genre unravels poetics that, as the article argues, stem from an innately subversive impulse in American literature. (PH)
-
Narrating Motherhood: The Power of Storytelling
Views:341Book review:
Martin, BettyAnn, and Michelann Parr, eds. Writing Mothers: Narrative Acts of Care, Redemption, and Transformation. Bradford, ON: Demeter P, 2020. 258 pages. ISBN 978-1-77258-223-9. Pbk. $34.95.
-
Decolonizing the Second World
Views:126Book review:
Tlostanova, Madina. Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xi + 224 pages. ISBN 978-3-319-48444-0. Hb. €88.39.
-
The Range of Intertextual Resonances
Views:107Book review:
Glazzard, Andrew. Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2016. 234 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-55916-6. Hb. $95.00.
-
The Curious Case of the British Avant-Garde
Views:124Book review:
Mitchell, Kaye, and Nonia Williams, eds. British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 272 pages. ISBN 978147443619 9. Hb. £80.00.
-
Afroeuropean Studies in Perspective
Views:133Book review:
Beezmohun, Sharmilla, ed. Continental Shifts, Shifts in Perception: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. 190 pages. ISBN 9781443888240. Hb. £41.99.
-
Disruptive Domesticity in Shakespearean Drama
Views:211Book review:
Whipday, Emma. Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 262 pages. ISBN 9781108474030. Pbk. £29.99
-
Dermot Healy, Resourceful Playwright
Views:131Book review:
Hopper, Keith, and Neil Murphy, eds. Dermot Healy: The Collected Plays. Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive P, 2016. xxxiii + 583 pages. ISBN 978-1-56478-930-3. Pbk. $21.00/£15.00.
-
Can Female Resistance Emerge from Vulnerability?
Views:172Book review:
Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. x + 336. ISBN 978-0-8223-6290-6. Pbk. $26.95.
-
Her Dark Materials: What Makes the Fantastic Dark
Views:201Book review:
Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. New York UP, 2020. 240 pages. ISBN 9781479806072. Pbk. $16.95.
-
The Rhetoric of Sublime Astonishment in the Burkean and Blakean Readings of Milton
Views:190Although the Lockean clear and distinct ideas greatly influenced Burke in his writing on the sublime, Milton’s impact is emphatically displayed in the dark and obscure rhetoric of the work. Despite the fact that Burke’s text abounds in classical quotations, it is Milton’s “strong expressions” that overpower the argument. William Blake also borrows a lot from Milton, but he radically rejects Burke’s ideas. Through the revelatory power of his visionary sublime, Blake overtly criticizes Locke’s shallow empiricism and Burke’s obscure rhetoric, arguing against a simple disparity of light/clarity versus darkness/obscurity. This essay explores the Burkean and the Blakean readings of the Miltonic sublime side by side, analyzing the Miltonic quotations in Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry parallel with the verbal and visual references in Blake’s Milton, and highlighting the differences in their views. (ÉA)
-
“If I Should Die”: Attitudes to the Dead Hero in British Poetry of the Great War
Views:144When we read the poems of the Great War today, we interpret them both as historical documents and as works of art. World War I poetry wished to open the readers’ eyes to the horror that they were unable to imagine in the home country. As a consequence, the representation of the victim position proved to be particularly important both in populist texts (such as John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”) and in poems undermining the conventional idea of heroism (such as those by Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden). Furthermore, a comparison between two poems about war heroes, Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” and Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” demonstrates the difference between war poetry and modernist literature. Yeats views and considers the problem of the dead hero from a distance, whereas Brooke represents his own situation from within. Both texts (although very different both in character and in artistic value) contribute to our better understanding of the war experience. (IDR)
-
The Formations of Masculinities
Views:124Book review:
Horlacher, Stefan, ed. Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice. DQR Studies in Literature 58. Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015. viii + 318 pages. ISBN 978-90-04-29899-6. Hb. $106.