Q&A with Patrick O’Connor
Q. Tell us a bit about your book A. Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned is really a book about the importance of philosophy for literature. In it, I look at how one writer uses philosophy to…
Poetry and the Dream of a Gift without Return
"The gift—what we call “the gift” and “giving”—appears to have at least two distinct functions, and one would be hard pressed to decide between them."
Arthur Conan Doyle: Writing the Life
by Douglas Kerr There are dozens of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and one of the most popular storytellers in English. But his own account of his life, Memories and Adventures, published in 1924, is…
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…
Richly Varied Dishes: James Hogg and Scottish Periodicals
by Graham Tulloch When Judy King and I were invited to edit James Hogg’s contributions to Scottish periodicals for the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of the Works of James Hogg we were of course delighted to have the chance to do…
The Burns Supper: A New Field of Study
By Dr Paul Malgrati Over the past 220 years, the Burns Supper has become the quintessential festival of Scottish culture, identity, and gastronomy. Who would have thought, back in 1801 as nine admirers of Robert Burns held a private memorial…
An extract from “Wasted Innocence: Children and Childhood in Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber”
by Xiaofei Shi and Labao Wang Does Chinese children’s literature have a prehistory? While it is presumptuous to date the history of Chinese children’s literature all the way back to the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420) when the tale ‘Li Ji’…
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…