Humanities

16 pages, 1264 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Crowds of Feminists: The Hybrid Activist Poetics of “No Manifesto” and Jennif(f)er Tamayo’s YOU DA ONE

by Becca Klaver

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 153; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070153 - 18 Jul 2025

This essay examines two hybrid poetic texts that emerged from a period of feminist activism in U.S. and global poetry communities from 2014 to 2017: the collaboratively, anonymously authored “No Manifesto” (2015) and the radically revised second edition of the book of poetry [...] Read more.

This essay examines two hybrid poetic texts that emerged from a period of feminist activism in U.S. and global poetry communities from 2014 to 2017: the collaboratively, anonymously authored “No Manifesto” (2015) and the radically revised second edition of the book of poetry and visual art YOU DA ONE by Jennif(f)er Tamayo. “No Manifesto” and YOU DA ONE embrace the hybrid tactics of collectivity, incongruity, and nonresolution as ways of protesting sexism and sexual violence in poetry communities. Synthesizing theories of hybridity from poetry criticism as well as immigrant and borderlands studies, the essay defines hybridity as a literary representation of cultural positions forcefully imposed upon subjects. Born out of the domination of sexual and state violence, hybridity marks the wound that remakes the subject, who develops strategies for resistance. By refusing to play by the rules of poetic or social discourse—the logics of domination that would have them be singular, cohesive, and compliant—Tamayo and the authors of “No Manifesto” insist on alternative ways of performing activism, composing literature, and entering the public sphere. These socially engaged, hybrid poetic texts demonstrate the power of the collective to disrupt the social and literary status quo. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

17 pages, 218 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“None of the Living Was Closed from His Soul”: A Translation of, and Commentary on, Hölderlin’s Poem “To My Venerable Grandmother. On Her 72nd Birthday”

by Mark W. Roche

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 152; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070152 - 18 Jul 2025

Abstract

Amidst Hölderlin’s many well-known odes, elegies, and hymns, it is perhaps not surprising that Hölderlin’s occasional poem “To my Venerable Grandmother. On her 72nd Birthday” (Meiner verehrungswürdigen Grosmutter. Zu ihrem 72sten Geburtstag) has been translated into English only once and in an obscure [...] Read more.

Amidst Hölderlin’s many well-known odes, elegies, and hymns, it is perhaps not surprising that Hölderlin’s occasional poem “To my Venerable Grandmother. On her 72nd Birthday” (Meiner verehrungswürdigen Grosmutter. Zu ihrem 72sten Geburtstag) has been translated into English only once and in an obscure self-published edition. Yet the poem is rich in Hölderlin’s distinctive diction and syntax, it reveals much about Hölderlin’s aspirations for himself, and it contains one of his deepest sets of reflections on Christ. Still, the poem is often overlooked. But once one reflects on its content, with its multiple attempts to name Christ, including his friendship to the earth and his knowing no strangers, one can readily see why Pope Francis elevated this poem as one of his favorite literary works. This publication presents the first accessible translation of the poem (I), after which I offer some commentary on its form, individual lines, and the translation (II). I then turn to the period of his writing the poem (III). I conclude with a few additional thoughts on Hölderlin and religion (IV). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)

14 pages, 217 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Narration as Characterization in First-Person Realist Fiction: Complicating a Universally Acknowledged Truth

by James Phelan

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 151; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070151 - 16 Jul 2025

Abstract

I argue that the universally accepted assumption that in realist fiction a character narrator’s narration contributes to their characterization needs to be complicated. Working with a conception of narrative as rhetoric that highlights readerly interest in the author’s handling of the mimetic, thematic, [...] Read more.

I argue that the universally accepted assumption that in realist fiction a character narrator’s narration contributes to their characterization needs to be complicated. Working with a conception of narrative as rhetoric that highlights readerly interest in the author’s handling of the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components of narrative, I suggest that the question about narration as characterization is one about the relation between the mimetic (character as possible person) and synthetic (character as invented construct) components. In addition, understanding the mimetic-synthetic relation requires attention to issues at the macro and micro levels of such narratives. At the macro level, I note the importance of (1) the tacit knowledge, shared by both authors and audiences, of the fictionality of character narration, which means authors write and readers read with an interest in its payoffs; and of (2) the recognition that character narration functions simultaneously along two tracks of communication: that between the character narrator and their narratee, and that between the author and their audience. These macro level matters then provide a frame within which authors and readers understand what happens at the micro level. At that level, I identify seven features of a character’s telling that have the potential to be used for characterization—voice, occasion, un/reliability, authority, self-consciousness, narrative control, and aesthetics. I also note that these features have their counterparts in the author’s telling. Finally, I propose that characterization via narration results from the interaction between the salient features of the character’s telling and their counterparts in the author’s telling. I develop these points through the analysis of four diverse case studies: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Nadine Gordimer’s “Homage,” and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Interpretation of Fictional Characters in Literary Texts: History of Literary Criticism, Philosophy and Formal Ontologies)

15 pages, 232 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Movement and the Watery Imaginary in the Contemporary North American Feminist Poetic

by Tess Marie Patalano

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 150; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070150 - 16 Jul 2025

Abstract

What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is–like water–to embrace movement in all its forms. We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on earth and yet few scholars give prolonged attention to how we are to sustainably move our [...] Read more.

What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is–like water–to embrace movement in all its forms. We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on earth and yet few scholars give prolonged attention to how we are to sustainably move our human inheritances forward on this increasingly uninhabitable planet. Reflecting on the work of transnational poets, specifically South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon translated through Korean American poet Don Mee Choi and Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, we are reminded of the myriad ways in which humans can move and survive in a foreign yet familiar world. This paper finds its support in the confluence of transnational contemporary feminist poetics, formalism, environmentalism, and posthumanism. Through the use of various critical discourses, this paper considers how movement and its hybrid capacities offer a new understanding of contemporary North American poetics. In this sense, a poem should be viewed as a dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

16 pages, 494 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Kaddish and Other Millin Setimin: Esoteric Languages in Jewish–American Narratives

by Ofra Amihay

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 149; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070149 - 15 Jul 2025

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing so, the creators of these works evoke the Lurianic [...] Read more.

In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing so, the creators of these works evoke the Lurianic notion of millin setimin or “secreted words”—utterances that transcend the communicative function of everyday speech and partake in some profound revelations. I hope to show that from Allen Ginsberg, through Tony Kushner, to the Coen Brothers and beyond, Jewish–American creators have been evoking Jewish tongues both as symbols of a lost past and as millin setimin that aspire to restore the connection to that past, within the Jewish–American community and beyond. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Comparative Jewish Literatures)

14 pages, 238 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Magic at the Crossroads: Moral Dissonance and Repair in the Wizarding World

by Ulugbek Ochilov

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 148; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070148 - 14 Jul 2025

Abstract

The Harry Potter fandom community around the world prefers a universe of wizards and witches that includes all people, but also has concerns about the author’s perspective regarding gender identity. This disjunction paralyzes the cultural reader with moral confusion, which is a danger [...] Read more.

The Harry Potter fandom community around the world prefers a universe of wizards and witches that includes all people, but also has concerns about the author’s perspective regarding gender identity. This disjunction paralyzes the cultural reader with moral confusion, which is a danger to their emotional investment in the text. Although scholars have analyzed this phenomenon using fragmented prisms, such as social media activism, cognitive engagement, translation, pedagogy, and fan creativity, there is no unifying model that can be used to understand why reading pleasure endures. This article aims to fill this gap by examining these strands of research in a divergent manner, adopting a convergent mixed-methods study approach. Based on neurocognitive (EEG) values, cross-cultural focus groups, social media analysis, and corpus linguistics, we outline the terrain of reader coping mechanisms. We identify separate fan fractions and examine the corresponding practices. The results are summarized by proposing a model called the MDRL (Moral dissonance repair loop) which is a theoretical model that shows how translation smoothing, pedagogical reframing and fan-based re-moralization interact with one another in creating a system that enables the reader to be collectively able to obtain their relations with the text back to a manageable point and continue being engaged. This model makes a theoretical contribution to new areas in the study of fans, moral psychology, and cognitive literature. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue World Mythology and Its Connection to Nature and/or Ecocriticism)

10 pages, 200 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“I Have All the Time in the World”: Bernadette Mayer’s Being in Time

by Amy Moorman Robbins

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 147; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070147 - 11 Jul 2025

Abstract

This essay argues that several of Bernadette Mayer’s major works foreground and develop experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time that governs daily material existence. Basing my argument on a framework for [...] Read more.

This essay argues that several of Bernadette Mayer’s major works foreground and develop experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time that governs daily material existence. Basing my argument on a framework for subjective time developed in the field of linguistics, I show how Mayer’s play with duration, temporal recursiveness, and moments of stopped time in works including Memory, Midwinter Day, Works and Days, and Milkweed Smithereens function as subversions of the normative material every day, and I argue that throughout her work Mayer is preoccupied with not merely representing time, its content, and its passage, but rather with gaining mastery over objective time and subverting its authority altogether. This essay joins the scant research on time and temporality in Mayer’s work and offers an invitation to further study of subjective time as a mode of resistance in contemporary poetry. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

16 pages, 185 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Music Next Door

by John H. Marks

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 146; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070146 - 10 Jul 2025

Abstract

Ninety-five-year-old Doris Held, a great niece of Sigmund Freud, has been convening the Shakespeare Reading Group in Northampton, Massachusetts, my hometown, since she moved here in 2016. In the following essay, which is a personal response to my experience of this group of [...] Read more.

Ninety-five-year-old Doris Held, a great niece of Sigmund Freud, has been convening the Shakespeare Reading Group in Northampton, Massachusetts, my hometown, since she moved here in 2016. In the following essay, which is a personal response to my experience of this group of Shakespearean readers, to Doris Held, and to the work of Shakespeare in general, I attempt to chart the full impact of the Bard’s work on my life and on the world around me. I am neither a scholar nor a historian. In a true sense, I am a bystander Shakespearean, who has received deep reward and benefit from the experience, but it is Doris Held and her group who opened my eyes to the precise nature of this unexamined reward. Doris brought the spirit of the group from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had been a dues-paying member for decades of something called the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association, which itself dates to 1880. My wife Debra and I attended the first meeting in Northampton more than a decade ago, and we have been receiving emails from Doris four times a year ever since. While these communications often induce guilt, they invariably lead to pleasures that I would never want to relinquish. That is a complicated dynamic in my routine, and I try to grapple with its ebb and flow in the pages that follow. Each time I get one, I have a version of the same conversation in my head. Is Doris still doing this? Haven’t they done all the plays by now? All things considered, wouldn’t they—and I—rather be home watching a true crime documentary about Gaby Petito on Netflix? What the hell is William Shakespeare to me anyway? At this point, if I’m honest, Shakespeare is Doris. The experience with this group led me in two directions. One took me back to my now long-ago history with Shakespeare’s work as an actor in college. The other took me via historical research into the prehistory of Doris Held’s previous Shakespeare group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two paths gave me a deeper grasp of the influence of his work across the world and on my own life. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Shakespearean Performance: Contemporary Approaches, Findings, and Practices)

17 pages, 1063 KiB

Open AccessArticle

In More Than Words: Ecopoetic Hybrids with Visual and Musical Arts

by Lynn Keller

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 145; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070145 - 8 Jul 2025

Abstract

While poetry has long relied on musical and visual elements for its communicative power, numerous contemporary poets are drawing so dramatically on the resources of the visual arts and on elements of musical scoring that their poems become inter-arts hybrids. The interdisciplinary character [...] Read more.

While poetry has long relied on musical and visual elements for its communicative power, numerous contemporary poets are drawing so dramatically on the resources of the visual arts and on elements of musical scoring that their poems become inter-arts hybrids. The interdisciplinary character of environmental writing and its attachment to material conditions of planetary life particularly invite the use of visual and/or audio technologies as documentation or as prompts toward multisensory attention that may shift readers’ perceptions of the more-than-human world. This essay examines four recent works of ecopoetry from the US to explore some of the diverse ways in which, by integrating into volumes of poetry their own visual and musical art, poets are expanding the environmental imagination and enhancing their environmental messaging. The visual and musical elements, I argue, offer fresh perceptual lenses that help break down cognitive habits bolstering separations of Western humans from more-than-human realms or dampening awareness of social and cultural norms that foster environmental degradation and violations of environmental justice. The multi-modal works discussed are Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, Danielle Vogel’s Edges & Fray, and Jonathan Skinner’s “Blackbird Stanzas.” Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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10 pages, 199 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“Guys Don’t Get Periods”: Menstrunormativity in Just Ash

by Parvathy Das and Reju George Mathew

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 144; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070144 - 8 Jul 2025

Abstract

Certain bodily functions are generally associated with distinct sexes and genders. When it comes to intersex individuals, the gendering of certain bodily functions as male or female plays a key role in determining their sexed corporeality and self-determination of gender. The article elucidates [...] Read more.

Certain bodily functions are generally associated with distinct sexes and genders. When it comes to intersex individuals, the gendering of certain bodily functions as male or female plays a key role in determining their sexed corporeality and self-determination of gender. The article elucidates how the protagonist Ash in Just Ash (2021) by Sol Santana is oppressed under notions of menstrunormativity due to his menstruating body. It explains how the gendering of a bodily function like menstruation as feminine plays a significant role in the medical interventions on intersex individuals and how the same norms affect intersex individuals’ own perceptions of themselves. Ash, who identifies himself as a boy, is bullied by his peers at school, and his parents impose the female sex and feminine gender identity on him because of his menstruating corporeality, all leading to Ash’s own negative perception of his body. The article also highlights the importance of degendering menstruation to include sex- and gender-diverse individuals. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Bridging Gaps in Critical Queer Genealogies: Transformative Emergent Scholarship in Queer Studies)

19 pages, 1814 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Theorizing Graphic Embodiments: A Feminist Perspective

by Lisa DeTora and Jeannie Ludlow

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 143; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070143 - 7 Jul 2025

Abstract

In response to the increasing politicization and polarization of discourses around gender, sexuality, and the body, feminist theorists like Judith Butler call for feminism to strive toward flexibility and responsivity. This essay lays out some of the theoretical considerations that inform studies of [...] Read more.

In response to the increasing politicization and polarization of discourses around gender, sexuality, and the body, feminist theorists like Judith Butler call for feminism to strive toward flexibility and responsivity. This essay lays out some of the theoretical considerations that inform studies of graphic embodiment—or studies of embodiment in graphic narratives—both generally and within feminist studies, then examines several graphic texts by Tillie Walden and Élodie Durand that exemplify feminist theories of embodiment, with particular attention to the creative co-construction of embodied narratives. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feminism and Comics Studies)

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16 pages, 2159 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Towards a Poetics of Interruption: The Influence of North American Mixed-Genre Poetries on Recent Irish Poetry

by Julie Morrissy

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 142; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070142 - 4 Jul 2025

Abstract

This article demonstrates the enabling influence of mixed-genre (or hybrid) poetries by North American women on recent poetry by Irish women poets, specifically in the past decade. Using a compositional/practice-based framework of interruption, the article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies [...] Read more.

This article demonstrates the enabling influence of mixed-genre (or hybrid) poetries by North American women on recent poetry by Irish women poets, specifically in the past decade. Using a compositional/practice-based framework of interruption, the article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies in a number of exemplary texts, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson, and Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip in the North American context and ISDAL by Susannah Dickey, The Sun is Open by Gail McConnell, and MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello, among others. This comparative approach encompasses close readings and analysis of particular compositional approaches evident in both national contexts, in addition to the use of archival sources, news-reporting, and aesthetic strategies of interruption. The article suggests that “a poetics of material interruption” is at play in poetries on both sides of the Atlantic, gesturing towards marginalising forces of gender and colonisation, thus linking to themes prevalent in the above poetries in both Irish and North American contexts. The author poses a “poetics of material interruption” in the aesthetics and composition of the above mixed-genre poetries, perhaps arising from their interactions with the material conditions to which they respond. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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20 pages, 786 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thus Spoke… Friedrich Nietzsche on the Sophists

by Laura Viidebaum

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 141; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070141 - 4 Jul 2025

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche can be an awkward topic for classicists and ancient philosophers, especially since an important part of his heavily critical philosophy begins as a reaction to, and critique of, his contemporary classical scholarship with which he was intimately familiar, being one of [...] Read more.

Friedrich Nietzsche can be an awkward topic for classicists and ancient philosophers, especially since an important part of his heavily critical philosophy begins as a reaction to, and critique of, his contemporary classical scholarship with which he was intimately familiar, being one of the most impressive ‘products’ of its development. Nietzsche was a thinker who in many ways turned the prevalent opinions about Greeks and contemporaries upside down, challenging his predecessors and successors with provocative readings of some of the most cherished philosophies in Western culture. This essay examines Nietzsche’s treatment of sophists—an important group of intellectuals whose reception had suffered greatly under the devastating judgement of Plato and Aristotle. While recent scholarship frequently regards sophists as philosophers, Nietzsche’s contemporaries were generally extremely dismissive of this group and regarded them in negative light as illegitimate thinkers and opponents to their contemporary ‘true’ philosophers (i.e., Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). This paper traces two different moments in Nietzsche’s philosophical output that exhibit closer engagement with the sophists: the ‘early’ Nietzsche regards sophists as innovators in language and style, the ‘late’ Nietzsche sees them as countercultural revolutionaries. Despite the fact that in both stages, sophists are introduced as champions for ideas that are central to Nietzsche’s own philosophical preoccupations (the development of language, the overthrowing of values), his treatment of this group of intellectuals appears at first sight superficial and surprisingly unenthusiastic. The paper will examine our existing sources on Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists and will suggest, ultimately, that his engagement with them was probably far more complex and multilayered than has been thus far assumed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ancient Greek Sophistry and Its Legacy)

12 pages, 211 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hybridity in Joshua Whitehead’s Full Metal Indigiqueer

by Heather Milne

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070140 - 4 Jul 2025

Abstract

This essay reads Oji-Cree poet Joshua Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer in relation to hybridity. Whitehead’s poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with existing critical discussions of hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through [...] Read more.

This essay reads Oji-Cree poet Joshua Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer in relation to hybridity. Whitehead’s poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with existing critical discussions of hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through his engagement with posthuman and Indigenous futurism and through his development of Zoa, the hybridized trickster figure who combines the technological and the biological, who features so prominently throughout the collection. Indigiqueerness emerges in these poems as a hybrid identity positioned not only to survive but to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

13 pages, 208 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Against Erasure: Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead

by Jeannine Marie Pitas

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070139 - 3 Jul 2025

Abstract

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American immigrants journeying north and [...] Read more.

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American immigrants journeying north and a subtle yet bold revision of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, with some words from the Friar’s 1552 text replaced by other words that reflect the realities of twenty-first century immigrants traveling north. Interspersed with de la Casas’s texts are persona poems in which we are invited to listen to the ghosts of immigrants who have suffered tragic deaths. This essay explores the ways that, crossing borders between time and space while drawing strength from his Christian faith, Rodrigo resists the erasure of Indigenous peoples, honors their journeys, and invites readers into solidarity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

14 pages, 232 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Jericho’s Daughters: Feminist Historiography and Class Resistance in Pip Williams’ The Bookbinder of Jericho

by Irina Rabinovich

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070138 - 2 Jul 2025

Abstract

This article examines the intersecting forces of gender, class, and education in early twentieth-century Britain through a feminist reading of Pip Williams’ historical novel The Bookbinder of Jericho. Centering on the fictional character Peggy Jones—a working-class young woman employed in the Oxford [...] Read more.

This article examines the intersecting forces of gender, class, and education in early twentieth-century Britain through a feminist reading of Pip Williams’ historical novel The Bookbinder of Jericho. Centering on the fictional character Peggy Jones—a working-class young woman employed in the Oxford University Press bindery—the study explores how women’s intellectual ambitions were constrained by economic hardship, institutional gatekeeping, and patriarchal social norms. By integrating close literary analysis with historical research on women bookbinders, educational reform, and the impact of World War I, the paper reveals how the novel functions as both a narrative of personal development and a broader critique of systemic exclusion. Drawing on the genre of the female Bildungsroman, the article argues that Peggy’s journey—from bindery worker to aspiring scholar—mirrors the real struggles of working-class women who sought education and recognition in a male-dominated society. It also highlights the significance of female solidarity, especially among those who served as volunteers, caregivers, and community organizers during wartime. Through the symbolic geography of Oxford and its working-class district of Jericho, the novel foregrounds the spatial and social divides that shaped women’s lives and labor. Ultimately, this study shows how The Bookbinder of Jericho offers not only a fictional portrait of one woman’s aspirations but also a feminist intervention that recovers and reinterprets the overlooked histories of British women workers. The novel becomes a literary space for reclaiming agency, articulating resistance, and criticizing the gendered boundaries of knowledge, work, and belonging. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Cultural Studies & Critical Theory in the Humanities)

12 pages, 241 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Rebeldes con Pausa: Teresa de Jesús, Cervantes, Fray Luis, and the Curious Path to Holiness

by Ana Laguna

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 137; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070137 - 1 Jul 2025

Abstract

Early modern theologians often cast female curiosity as both a moral flaw and an epistemic transgression. Aware of this suspicion, Teresa of Ávila professed to have renounced such dangerous impulses in her youth. Yet the persistent presence of curiosity in her writings suggests [...] Read more.

Early modern theologians often cast female curiosity as both a moral flaw and an epistemic transgression. Aware of this suspicion, Teresa of Ávila professed to have renounced such dangerous impulses in her youth. Yet the persistent presence of curiosity in her writings suggests a strategic redeployment—one that fosters attentiveness and subtly renegotiates ecclesiastical authority as she actively advances reform within the Carmelite order. Through life-writing and scriptural exegesis, Teresa cultivates a disciplined appetite for knowledge: an appetite that outwardly conforms to, yet quietly subverts, doctrinal anxieties surrounding women’s intellectual desires. Her use of curiosidad moves fluidly between sacred and secular registers—sometimes connoting superficial fascination, at other times signaling a deeper, interior restlessness. Resisting reductive interpretation, Teresa reveals a sophisticated and self-aware engagement with a disposition both morally ambiguous and intellectually generative. The same culture that once feared her intellect would ultimately aestheticize it. After her death, Teresa’s relics were fragmented and displayed in Philip II’s Wunderkammer, transforming her once-condemned curiosidad into curiositas, an imperial collectible. Reading Teresa alongside her posthumous interpreters—Fray Luis de León and Miguel de Cervantes—this essay explores how her radical epistemological ambition reverberated through Spanish intellectual culture. Spanning this cultural arc—from sin to spectacle, from forbidden desire to sanctified display—Teresa emerges as a masterful theorist and activist reformer of spiritual authority. In these expansive roles, she reveals the immense and often contradictory power that curiosity wielded in the early modern world. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Curiosity and Modernity in Early Modern Spain)

6 pages, 161 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Introduction: Ford Madox Ford’s War Writing

by Sara Haslam, Fiona Houston and Nur Karatas

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 136; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070136 - 25 Jun 2025

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford’s ground-breaking novel, Some Do Not…, one of the earliest fictional attempts at charting the cataclysmic impact of the First World War, was published in 1924 [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ford Madox Ford's War Writing)

15 pages, 238 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Postmemory Interpretations of Second World War Love Affairs in Twenty-First-Century Norwegian Literature

by Unni Langås

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 135; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070135 - 24 Jun 2025

Abstract

Love and intimate relations between German men and Norwegian women were a widespread phenomenon during WWII. Like in many other European countries, these women were stigmatized and humiliated both by the authorities and by the civilian population. In this article, I discuss four [...] Read more.

Love and intimate relations between German men and Norwegian women were a widespread phenomenon during WWII. Like in many other European countries, these women were stigmatized and humiliated both by the authorities and by the civilian population. In this article, I discuss four postmemory literary works that address this issue: Edvard Hoem’s novel Mors og fars historie (The Story of My Mother and Father, 2005), Lene Ask’s graphic novel Hitler, Jesus og farfar (Hitler, Jesus, and Grandfather, 2006), Randi Crott and Lillian Crott Berthung’s autobiography Ikke si det til noen! (Don’t tell anyone!, 2013), and Atle Næss’s novel Blindgjengere (Duds, 2019). I explore how the narratives create a living connection between then and now and how they deal with unresolved questions and knowledge gaps. Furthermore, I discuss common themes such as the fate and identity of war children, national responsibilities versus individual choice, and norms connected to gender and sexuality. I argue that these postmemory interpretations of wartime love affairs not only aim to retell the past but to investigate the normative frameworks within which these relationships took place. My contention is that the postmemory gaze pays primary attention to the power of cultural constructions—of nationality, identity, and gender—as well as their context-related historical changes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Memories of World War II in Norwegian Fiction and Life Writing)

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