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…

A Study in Four Colours: The Case of the Chameleon Detective

By Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko Sherlock Holmes, “the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV” (Guinness World Records News), is skilled at disguising himself and adjusting to different circumstances and yet remaining himself. Few literary characters lose so little in…

Invisible Tweets? Ben Jonson and Social Networking

By Kelly Stage In 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman found themselves in prison because parts of their play Eastward Ho (written also with James Marston) had offended King James’s Scottish favourite, Sir James Murray. Jonson and Chapman took to…

Kinds of Insight

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 Pleasures of Literary Communication

By Roger D. Sell Literary activity can be studied as one among other kinds of human communication. Such an approach strongly endorses the insistence of present-day historicist scholars on the precise contexts, not least the precise political contexts, within which…