Submissions are now invited for the Paragraph 2016 Essay Prize competition, in which the prize will be awarded for the best article addressing the theme: ‘Mourning’. In line with the journal’s leading role in investigating critical theory across a wide…
By Kelly Stage In 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman found themselves in prison because parts of their play Eastward Ho (written also with James Marston) had offended King James’s Scottish favourite, Sir James Murray. Jonson and Chapman took to…
By Amanda Henrichs I’ve always imagined Ben Jonson as the quintessential cranky old man, constantly complaining about the current state of things and longing for a return to the good old days, when everyone was virtuous and poetry was good…
By Kate McLoughlin This article arose from a paper I gave at the conference on the Long Modernist Novel at Birkbeck, University of London, in April 2014, organised by Scott McCracken and Jo Winning, the editors of this volume of…
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…