-
The lost story of the Shetland Female Emigration Fund
Read more: The lost story of the Shetland Female Emigration FundVéronique Molinari explores how four people united forces to help young Shetlanders emigrate to Australia
Shakespeare’s Metadrama and the Informer
By Bill Angus If you have ever wondered what was really going on in the secret overhearing and tacit observations, the metadramatic inner-plays and devices which Shakespeare constantly revisits, you may have been told that he was ‘playing with the…
St. William of Stratford?
By Sean McEvoy William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago. We know he departed this life on 23 April 1616 because the parish register at Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon records the fact. But we don’t have the same proof that…
Shakespeare’s Questions
By Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne What is it about Shakespeare’s writing that makes it endure? Why do his plays and poems continue to entertain, engage, and instruct more than 400 years on? I think it might have something to do with…
Nineteen things you never knew about nineteenth century American letters
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,…
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…
Letters from Beyond: Sir Politic Would-Be Emails the author
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…
Wordsworth’s ‘Song for the Wandering Jew’ as a Poem for Coleridge
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…
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…