Donald Adamson and Robert Yates on the revolutionary 'Moat Pit' of Sir George Bruce, and the global significance it brought to industry in Culross
By Roger D. Sell Literary activity can be studied as one among other kinds of human communication. Such an approach strongly endorses the insistence of present-day historicist scholars on the precise contexts, not least the precise political contexts, within which…
By Lisa Hopkins Having an associative mind is often a source of shame, but it does occasionally have benefits. Two separate moments of mental abstraction came together to help me think about the fourth acts of Shakespearean tragedies. Watching King…
An interview between 2015 Man Booker Prize finalist Tom McCarthy and the editors of CounterText: Ivan Callus and James Corby. Ivan Callus: … this brings us to the idea of ‘anthropology of the present’, something that Satin Island is very…
The second issue of CounterText, ‘Toward Countertextuality’, is out later this month. CounterText was launched this year with the stated aim of exploring ‘the charged evolutions and radical transformations of the literary today’. It asks questions about perceptions of a…
CounterText Call for Papers Special Issue: Explorations in Electronic Literature Edited by Mario Aquilina and Ivan Callus An entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications. – Jacques Derrida, The…
Although he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘publicly pronounced racist and imperialist attitudes have’, as Harish Trivedi observes, ‘damned him as an artist for many readers’. However, in his 1901 novel, Kim, Kipling offers a…
By John Stephens, General Editor In its first eight years of publication, International Research in Children’s Literature (IRCL) has established the benchmark for how criticism in children’s literature can blend some of the most innovative literary and cultural theories with…
The concept of the ‘event’ has accumulated around it a somewhat varied stream of interventions in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. In The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) I tried to think of the event in relation…
There is a shortage of men in neo-Victorianism. Or that, at least, is how it would appear to look at many critical works on neo-Victorianism at the present time. Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Luminaries (2013), with…