Sebastian Cody explores the challenges of ballet historiography, emphasising the need for rigorous scholarship amidst widespread inaccuracies
By Mario Aquilina What is happening to ‘literature’ in the digital age? Is it surviving, changing, under threat? How are we to think of works that are ‘born digital’ and hence shaped by modalities and affordances that are either absent…
By Enda Duffy Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara Fredric Jameson may be the world’s most distinguished literary and cultural theorist living today. His influence since the 1980s on materialist, cultural and literary criticism, from the U.S. to China, has…
By Lynne Pearce Quite apart from its utility as a means of transport – or, indeed, its significance as a status-symbol – the twentieth-automobile has provided drivers and passengers with a personalised refuge and thought-space in which to touch base…
By Lynne Pearce Both in the news and among those academics whose work is concerned with transport futures there appears to be a widespread assumption that driverless cars are both inevitable and desirable. While there is, as yet, no coherent…
“Issue 9.1 marks my final issue as Editor of IRCL, and so it is an apt occasion to reflect on some of the challenges that face an international journal. When IRCL was officially launched at the 18th Biennial IRSCL Congress…
By David Barnes With President Obama’s intervention in the British EU Referendum debate still fresh in the mind, it’s worth reflecting on the importance of the transatlantic axis for culture and history. For the Exit camp Obama’s intervention proved the…
By Andy Mousley I sometimes wonder which of Shakespeare’s characters most closely resembles Shakespeare himself: ambitious Macbeth? brooding Hamlet? the simultaneously romantic and anti-romantic Rosalind? It’s idle speculation, of course. Less idle (because the evidence is before us) is to…
By Bill Angus If you have ever wondered what was really going on in the secret overhearing and tacit observations, the metadramatic inner-plays and devices which Shakespeare constantly revisits, you may have been told that he was ‘playing with the…
By Sean McEvoy William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago. We know he departed this life on 23 April 1616 because the parish register at Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon records the fact. But we don’t have the same proof that…