Humanities, Volume 11, Issue 5

This article builds on scholarship that understands climate change not only as a geophysical phenomenon, but also as a complex idea. It argues for a historicised analysis of what it terms “climate pessimism”: the belief that catastrophic...

In 2021, the unexpurgated second novel of American author Richard Wright was at last unearthed from the depths of the archive. In a vivid demonstration of the affective capacity of written sound, The Man Who Lived Underground tells the story of a man...

This study investigates the ability of science fiction to address issues that emerge in public health. The issues that form the focus of this paper include the spread of misinformation and disinformation, dependence on technology, and competent publi...

This essay “Pirate Assemblage” explores two related questions. The first is how we read and appreciate the literary form of pirate literature such as Alexander Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678) and Charles Johnson’s tw...

In the course of the twentieth century, the glorified image of Viking Age Scandinavia exerted an increasing attraction on intellectuals and nation builders in remote parts of Europe, especially those which self-identified as peripheral, marginalized,...

Lorenz Graham wrote two children’s books about the (in)famous abolitionist, John Brown—a picture book, John Brown’s Raid: A Picture History of the Attack on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (1972) and a biography for young adults, Joh...

Thomas Walton (known as Purser) and Clinton Atkinson (known as Clinton) were hanged for piracy in 1583. This article examines a range of texts relating to Purser and Clinton, including court depositions, plays and ballads, to consider the ways in whi...

The defining life experience of the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) was domestic trauma, both externally- and self-inflicted. Born at the end of the first World War amid an economic depression, Ditlevsen grew up in a hardscrabble worki...

Without visual cues, modern viewers may not discern the ways that All’s Well That Ends Well brings together the bodies of horses and humans, asking viewers to consider the physical dependence and sometimes overlapping medical conditions the two...

Fanfiction as a cultural practice has rapidly evolved in recent years, from a community-based form of social interaction to a globally recognised form of narrative world-building [...]

This article discusses a picture book, The Beautifull [sic] Cassandra, that was published by Juvenilia Press in 2021. The text was written by Jane Austen, most probably in 1788, and was edited and illustrated by Juliet McMaster some 200 years later....

Popular advertising of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s depicting single women presents an especially useful reference point for Lorine Niedecker’s poems. Attendant to the development of romantic and social promises extended by these ads is the woef...

This essay focuses on Lola Ridge’s long poem “The Ghetto” in relation to the gendered imagery and visual construction of the modern laborer emerging across early twentieth-century print media. Perpetuating gendered notions of the mo...

Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson are two canonical writers participating in a ‘literary slipstream’ through their ventures into science fiction, creating crossover texts that confuse the boundaries between the literary and the popul...

This article looks at the ways jazz legend John Coltrane was a muse for many Black Arts era poets and proceeds to discuss how Michael Harper rendered Coltrane in his work, focusing on editorial changes between the 1970 and 2000 versions of Michael Ha...

Transhistorical accounts of fanfiction often refer to the Brontës’ juvenilia, but such references are largely cursory even as they make a claim about the siblings’ Angria and Gondal writings that needs more careful consideration. Thi...

In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s architectural designs: both artists, inspired by Surrealist poetics, sought to build visionary structures that took shape...

This essay will focus on the central position that Jane Austen holds in the growing culture of memes in the Social Web and examine how these present-day cameo artefacts are both transforming the way Austen is perceived and appropriated today, and exp...

This essay looks at ongoing efforts to revitalize arts and culture among the Yezidi and broader Iraqi Kurdish communities. The Yezidi are survivors of the 2014 genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State (ISIS, also known by its Arabic acronym Da&rsquo...

Divi Britannici (1675) is a major restoration history that deserves to be more widely known. The work’s author, Sir Winston Churchill (1620–1688), is certainly less well-known than his celebrated descendant of the same name. Seldom mentio...

For a long time now, Old Norse literature has often been colonized and misappropriated by modern right-wing political groups for their own ideology, symbolism, and public appearance. A critical reading of Icelandic sagas, however, easily demonstrates...

The violence in Béroul’s Tristran has discomforted many readers and even a few scholars. However, by examining the psychological motivations behind these graphic scenes, important structural elements are revealed. Mark and Iseut have fan...

Scandinavian Studies today are divided into (at least) three areas, which should ideally also be represented by their own chairs at the universities, if one wants to cover the subject as broadly as possible. Likewise, the four languages, Danish, Icel...

In contrast to the writing practices of many modern languages, Japanese routinely employs four denotative systems that operate in conjunction, but which are actively recognized as distinct from one another: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and the Roman al...

There is no category of thought more deliberately or explicitly relegated to a subordinate role in Plato’s dialogues than Sophists and sophistry. It is due to Plato’s influence that terms “sophist” and “sophistry”...

Children occupy a peripheral position in the novels of Jane Austen, with the result that they have received little critical attention. This article proposes that, despite their marginal status, children play a significant role in Austen’s work...

In February 2016, co-hosts Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring launched their comedy podcast The Baby-Sitters Club Club. The “joke” at the center of the podcast was, of course, that two adult, cishet, white men were exhaustively recapping...