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The Pharmakon of Shame
Read more: The Pharmakon of ShameSéan Kennedy and Joseph Valente, editors of Irish Shame, explore the intricate relationship between empathy and shame in this blog.

Why You Should Read Allan Ramsay’s ‘The Gentle Shepherd’
What Scottish play, published in 1725, reached over 100 printings by 1800, was called ‘the noblest pastoral’ by Robert Burns, inspired more than forty paintings, more than ‘from the entire works of Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, or Fielding’ (R. Altick, Paintings from Books), and was performed by amateur companies throughout Scotland as late as the end of the 19th century?

Shakespeare Virtual Issue
To celebrate the birth month of William Shakespeare, we have curated a special Shakespeare Virtual Issue comprising seven articles and six chapters from across our books and journals, dedicated to the Bard, his work and reception across the humanities! All…

Q+A with the Author of The Secret Architecture of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
by Steven Monte Tell us a bit about your book… The book is essentially about two things: reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets as an intricately organized collection and situating it within the literary marketplace of Elizabethan England, in which poets were fiercely…

Six Romantic Objects: Occasional Poems and Everyday Things
By Christopher Stokes Skylarks, clouds, roses, rivers. What one of my undergraduate students once memorably termed the ‘flowers and s**t’ sense of Romanticism. It’s true that Romantic poetry has a narrow circuit of classic reference points, but one way to…

The Holocaust and Climate Change: Shakespeare’s King Lear and Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep
by Dr Richard Ashby Dr Richard Ashby analyses the 2010 Dennis Kelly play The Gods Weep, showing that playwright Dennis Kelly appropriates King Lear to interrogate the relationship between the Holocaust and climate change. Near the end of the 2010…

A Cannibal Poet In King James’ Court
By Brett Andrew Jones It wasn’t every day that accusations of cannibalism flew around the early Jacobean court. That’s (one reason) why I found the revised version of Mucedorus so interesting. It hardly compares well to what we consider the…

Q&A with the editors of Reverberations of Revolution: Transnational Perspectives, 1770-1850
by Elizabeth Amann & Michael Boyden 1. How did this book come about? Michael: This collected volume came out of a research network on revolutionary cultures involving the universities of Ghent, Göttingen, Groningen, and Uppsala. From the beginning, our aim was…

Walter Scott’s Seven Deadly Tales
by Daniel Cook Still revered as one of the world’s great historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott kept coming back to the supernatural, the eerie, and the macabre. Some of the novels even include extractable tales of terror: ‘The Fortunes of…

Theologies of Reading
By Laura McCormick Kilbride, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, and Simone Kotva Is reading a theological activity? This is a question which only invites further questions. How a person responds to it will reveal as much about their presuppositions and their training…