Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press

The Poisonous Flowers of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra: Part Three

By Jemma Stewart Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series. Rose Roses…have ever reigned as queens of flowers.[i] The rose bloomed in Ancient Egypt, as Jack Goody attests: Above all there was the hundred-petalled rose, which became…

The Poisonous Flowers of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra: Part One

By Jemma Stewart H. Rider Haggard’s Gothic Garden In the Gothic Studies articles ‘Blooming Marvel’ and ‘She shook her heavy tresses’, I assess the ways in which floral symbolism (or floriography) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s…

Jean-François Lyotard: A Sceptic for Our Times

I first encountered Jean-François Lyotard's work in the mid-1980s, after the publication of the English translation of his book The Postmodern Condition. It was a text that created quite a stir in the English-speaking academic world, drawing a lot of both praise and criticism. I was one of those to be critical, as in the first thing I ever wrote about Lyotard, a journal article for Radical Philosophy, where I argued there was a nihilistic quality to his thought.