• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

The Persistence of Victorian Middle Class Fictions

by Albert Pionke The US has just emerged from a mid-term election cycle. In the UK, calls for a general election grow ever louder. Politicians, pundits, and pollsters alike cite the discontent of the middle class with, depending upon one’s ideological predilections,…

Reading Joyce

2022 marks a hundred years since Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in full. What better time to think about reading Joyce? A hundred years of readers and readings! Of course, that’s not the whole picture. Ulysses is also…

Why You Should Read Allan Ramsay’s ‘The Gentle Shepherd’

What Scottish play, published in 1725, reached over 100 printings by 1800, was called ‘the noblest pastoral’ by Robert Burns, inspired more than forty paintings, more than ‘from the entire works of Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, or Fielding’ (R. Altick, Paintings from Books), and was performed by amateur companies throughout Scotland as late as the end of the 19th century?