• Watercolour landscape showing a coastline with building and mine shafts dotted along the shore. In the background there are fields leading to hills.

Utopia: A round-table discussion

Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’, a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. The term was first published in 1516, and became the short title of his book about an…

Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos”, Pedagogy and Poetics

‘The Cantos and Pedagogy Forum’ in Volume 12 Issue 3 of Modernist Cultures consists of a research-length article by my colleague, Joshua Kotin, and myself, as well as responses by Charles Altieri, Alan Golding, Marjorie Perloff, and Michael Coyle and Steven…

6 Books for TV Lovers

By Jennifer J. Smith It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is so much great television. From limited streaming series to mainstays of broadcast networks, great storytelling is happening on the small screen. Episodic television tells big stories in…

The Rosetta Stone

By Jesse Schotter For the hordes of selfie-snapping tourists at the British Museum, one objects attracts more attention than any other: the Rosetta Stone.  Such fascination with the Stone and its hieroglyphs dates back centuries.  From the classical era through the…

Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions

A special issue of journal, Paragraph, guest edited by Elissa Marder, creatively re-imagines Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking 1977 volume of Yale French Studies (Nos 55/56), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, in which Felman opened up the question of…

Children’s Gothic Fiction – Top 10 Must Reads

By Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley While researching my forthcoming book, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic, I have read a lot of scary stories written for children and young adults. Although the Gothic has always been part of children’s literature, it has exploded in…