• Profile half-length photograph of a man facing to the left wearing a dark jacket and tie, holding a cigarette in his hand, with a white handkerchief in his jacket breast pocket. The man has a prominent straight nose, slicked back hair and his tie forms a slight arch from the knot. In the background, on the left side of the image, there is another half-length frontal portrait of a man. He has white hair, also wears a jacket and tie, is looking to the right, and is smiling.

Event of Style in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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…

Neo-Victorian Masculinities

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…

Call for Papers: Oxford Literary Review – Overpopulation

Global ‘overpopulation’, considered the central environmental issue in the 1970s, became an almost taboo topic in the twenty-first century, often dismissed as drawing attention  away from  international capitalism as the primary cause of poverty and environmental  destruction and at worst catering to forms…

EUP_CounterText

Postcolonial Springs – a special issue of CounterText

“In its breadth of contributions by scholars and writers with a distinguished background in their respective fields, Postcolonial Springs will serve as an informed platform for debate across scholarly, political, cultural, and activist fronts. These urgencies – foremost amongst them the realities…

Morris, Aeneids manuscript, p. 238 ( Aeneid 9.1-5) TAL 24 (2015)

William Morris’ Synthetic Aeneids

Jack Mitchell (Dalhousie University) addresses William Morris’ Aeneid translation of 1875 and explains in his article, William Morris’ Synthetic Aeneids: Virgil as Physical Object that “a key theme of Morris’ overall artistic creed, namely the need to make ideas concrete…

Guest Blog – Beckett’s odd things

“What’s wrong with that bed, Joe?” — Samuel Beckett, Eh Joe (1965) There is something conspicuously odd about many of the everyday objects depicted in Samuel Beckett’s work. Items that are typically associated with the mundane, that usually sink into…

War and Christmas

Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus! [Merry Christmas!] is a picturebook written by two Latvian refugees while displaced during the Second World War. The book, with its vibrant pictures and personal representation of the exile experience challenges existing children’s narratives of Christmas, war and…