Sebastian Cody explores the challenges of ballet historiography, emphasising the need for rigorous scholarship amidst widespread inaccuracies
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Lisa Hopkins Having an associative mind is often a source of shame, but it does occasionally have benefits. Two separate moments of mental abstraction came together to help me think about the fourth acts of Shakespearean tragedies. Watching King…
An interview between 2015 Man Booker Prize finalist Tom McCarthy and the editors of CounterText: Ivan Callus and James Corby. Ivan Callus: … this brings us to the idea of ‘anthropology of the present’, something that Satin Island is very…
By John Stephens, General Editor In its first eight years of publication, International Research in Children’s Literature (IRCL) has established the benchmark for how criticism in children’s literature can blend some of the most innovative literary and cultural theories with…