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Techno-Cognitivism: Reimagining Literature in the Age of Language Models
Read more: Techno-Cognitivism: Reimagining Literature in the Age of Language ModelsMaciej Kurzynski discusses how embracing new language models can revolutionise literary studies.

The Lost Splendour of Ghazni: Rediscovering an Islamic Capital in Medieval Afghanistan
By Viola Allegranzi Located in present-day Afghanistan, Ghazni was once a prosperous commercial and cultural centre at the crossroads of Iranian, Central Asian and Indian regions. Under the rule of the Ghaznavid dynasty (r. 977-1186), the city was home to…

Shakespeare in the North: Nation, Race and Haircuts
by Adam Hansen I got a post-‘lockdown #3’ haircut in my Tyneside town recently, to my relief, and everyone else’s. (You know things are getting desperate when 90% of what anyone sees onscreen in a Zoom call is not your…

Cultural Cooperation and Intellectual Freedom in “These Anxious and Baffling Times”
By Marek Sroka Seventy-five years ago, Winston Churchill, in what was to become one of the most famous orations of the Cold War, declared that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has…

Ludovic McLellan Mann: Glasgow’s original media influencer
By Kenny Brophy Decades before Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter, to be an influencer involved analogue methods, persistence, and very, very hard work. Research over the last few years into the eccentric Glasgow-based amateur archaeologist, antiquarian and insurance broker, Ludovic…

How did the Festival industry repurpose Edinburgh’s public policy making?
By Cliff Hague COVID-19 brought Edinburgh’s tourism boom to a screeching halt, and wiped out the city’s main festivals in 2020. At the time of writing, the prospects for 2021 look uncertain, with speculation that many people will be anxious…

Divine Hiddenness in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces
By Derek King C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is a brilliant piece of fiction but also a mediation on an old problem called the problem of divine hiddenness. The problem of divine hiddenness refers to a lack in…

The Appeal of the Fantastic and the Improbable in Late Eighteenth Century Children’s Literature: Part Three
By Maryam Khorasani and Hossein Nazari Read part 2 of the blog series. Maria Edgeworth’s Lucky Orphans As the century moved forward, the belief in the rags-to-riches narratives gradually started to give way to the significance of retaining social hierarchies,…

The Appeal of the Fantastic and the Improbable in Late Eighteenth Century Children’s Literature: Part Two
By Maryam Khorasani and Hossein Nazari Read part 1 of this blog series. Much Ado about Witchcraft in The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes Often cited as the earliest example of a children’s novel, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes[i],…

The Appeal of the Fantastic and the Improbable in Late Eighteenth Century Children’s Literature: Part One
By Maryam Khorasani and Hossein Nazari Taking into account their concern about the moralistic upbringing of the children of a book-buying middle class, it should come as no surprise that the ‘irrational’ components of fairy stories were frowned upon by…