Thomas Archambaud explores the life and reputation of writer, politician, clan champion and colonial agent James Macpherson.
Thomas Jefferson maintained a flock of geese to supply him with quills for his pens. The fastest speed for a professional business-letter-writer in 1834 was 30 words in 60 seconds, with the pen travelling 16.5 feet per minute. Jourdan Anderson,…
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…
Dear Bob, ‘Tis I, Would-Be, unicorn with panther’s breath. Are you aware, Bob, that Black Panthers are generally the melanistic color variant of either a leopard or jaguar? This may seem a petty inconsequential factoid but think of the poor…
Heidi Thomson’s essay in the April 2015 issue of Romanticism considers how Wordsworth’s poem, “Song for the Wandering Jew” resists classification, particularly given its inclusion in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Thomson argues that “the poem was a deflected…
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…
The Ben Jonson Journal is a biannual published in May and November of each year. Established in 1993, it is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of Ben Jonson and the culture in which his literary efforts thrived. The…
By Alison Morgan ‘A New National Anthem’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley is probably one of his least known poems. Written in 1820, in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, Shelley’s poem is a paean to the female queen Liberty rather…
Celebrity, publicity and authorship are common place in the 21st century and increasingly, authors are energetic in conveying their own celebrity rather than it simply being thrust upon them; it could be said there is an intimacy between authors and…