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,…
By Ivan Callus Recent work across literary theory has placed questions of scale in the foreground of critical debate. What is it that’s at stake? Cast your mind back to your childhood engagement with scales of the world, in play.…
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…
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…
Global ‘overpopulation’, considered the central environmental issue in the 1970s, became an almost taboo topic in the twenty-first century, often dismissed as drawing attention away from international capitalism as the primary cause of poverty and environmental destruction and at worst catering to forms…
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…
“In its breadth of contributions by scholars and writers with a distinguished background in their respective fields, Postcolonial Springs will serve as an informed platform for debate across scholarly, political, cultural, and activist fronts. These urgencies – foremost amongst them the realities…