-
‘Beware of the ninnies!’ – Thoughts on ballet history
Read more: ‘Beware of the ninnies!’ – Thoughts on ballet historySebastian Cody explores the challenges of ballet historiography, emphasising the need for rigorous scholarship amidst widespread inaccuracies
A perfect epitome: David Randall pens a sonnet for each of his new books
By David Randall The Concept of Conversation In Roman days the leisured noble’s speech Was conversation, sermo, where all spoke To seek out truth, with each persuading each To maintain chat by wooing phrase and joke. This style of speech…
The happiness of being sad
Blogging From Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016
Since 2005, blogging has become a significant trend amid Egyptian young people. Among the many blog entries published online every day, some stand out for their innovative literary features and original contents. So far, a number of bloggers, such as…
Top 5 Representations of the Weather in Shakespeare’s plays
By Sophie Chiari In Romeo and Juliet, the lovers are plagued by the dog days that overdetermine the climate of the play and turn heat into hate. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s sources all set the story in a cold winter which put forward…
Frederick Douglass and Ten Scottish Worthies
Recent research has suggested that Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. The former slave who became a leading intellectual and civil rights campaigner of his age, was captured on camera more times than George…
Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity
By Chris Coffman The Parisian salon hosted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas was unique among queer modernist spaces. Unlike Natalie Barney’s salon emphasizing women, femininity, and Sapphic identity or the cosmopolitan Paris of queer outcasts surveyed in ‘John’…
A Q&A with Nataša Kovačević, author of Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe
Tell us a bit about Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe The book analyses cultural narratives of migration – literature, film, and performance art – which highlight European Union’s neocolonial practices in relation to European history,…
Proletarian Modernism
By Nick Hubble Modernism raises questions. On one level, it expresses the personal questions about subjectivity that writers such as Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf sought to answer in a world turned upside down by the discovery of…
Living Modernly’s Living Quickly: A Note on Travelling Light
By Emily Ridge He who travels light is in a fair way to travel happily. But the happy state is not compassed without effort. There must first be wisdom in selecting the absolutely necessary, determination in discarding all else, and…