In the early 1970s I was lucky enough to run across the writing of Alice Munro—it grabbed me from the opening line of the first story I ever read (“Material” [1973]: “I don’t keep up with Hugo’s writing”) and I haven’t waivered since. Just then I was about to begin graduate school and Munro’s “Material”… Read More »
“But hasn’t everything been digitized by now?” I’m often asked this question when I address non-academic audiences, who—given Jane Austen’s worldwide popularity—make up a significant portion of my readership, one that I value greatly. Everyone knows about Google Books, and many people are conversant with databases of historical newspapers and periodicals, as well as… Read More »
This interdisciplinary study traces the imaginative and narrative projections of Victorian women’s dress from the nineteenth century to the present day. The first full-length study to examine the remediation of Victorian clothes in the neo-Victorian novel, it investigates and attends to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian dress in the contemporary cultural… Read More »
The radical politician, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, who had visited Japan in 1875, was perhaps the first person to draw a comparison between that country and Carroll’s fantasies. Concluding an article in The Fortnightly Review the following year, he declared that Japan’s ‘rural districts form, with Through-the- Looking-Glass-Country and Wonderland, the three kingdoms of merry… Read More »
What is Fantastika? Fantastika is a word to describe fiction that deals in fantastical and speculative imaginings of all kinds. As an umbrella term used by critics and writers, Fantastika incorporates children’s and young adult literatures, as well as a range of genres and subgenres that cluster, like interconnected constellations, around the triple suns of… Read More »
Simon Bacon on Female Identity in Purgatorial Worlds Female Identity in Purgatorial Worlds was inspired by the film Silent Hill (2006). It’s one of those cinematic adaptations that differs dramatically from its source material yet manages to create a believable and engaging film that is much better than it has any right to be. It… Read More »
I first encountered the poetry of Emily Dickinson at Smith College as a foreign student in the newly created Diploma in American Studies program in 1962. At the time I was intrigued by the complexities of her language. After my graduation in 1963, I spent the summer as a live-in curator at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum… Read More »
Humanism is back! This resurgence of humanism is a multilayered phenomenon. Pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty have developed a particularly stimulating understanding of humanism. At the center of a pragmatist version of humanism is the suggestion that there is no nonhuman authority whose commands human beings have to obey and… Read More »
Max Stirner produced only a single book in his lifetime. Since the publication of this book, The Ego and its Own, in 1844, he has been portrayed as a founding figure in every radically dangerous ideology to haunt the modern mind. As a principal influence in the history of egoism—a branch of radical philosophy that… Read More »
Guest post by Jason Olsen When I was developing as a creative writer, I was always interested in writing in as many genres as I could. The thing is, I never thought of those genres as being anything but independent of each other. When I took a undergraduate fiction writing class, I not only didn’t… Read More »