The CounterText Interview: Judith Butler

CounterText Volume 3.2 (August 2017) is a special issue entitled The Poetic, and contains a contains a wide-ranging interview with Judith Butler conducted by Aaron Aquilina (Lancaster) and Kurt Borg (Staffordshire). The following remarks, taken from near the end of…

Gaelic Satire and 18th Century Highland History

The benefit of studying Gaelic poetry in conjunction with conventional documentary sources to obtain a fuller understanding of the past is illustrated in Ellen L. Beard’s article in Northern Scotland, Volume 8.1. She presents newly-compiled information and perspectives on two…

Baudelaire in strange places

What has a nineteenth-century French poet got to do with 1960s American electronica? The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) published his controversial verse poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, followed by his innovative prose poem works. His poetry has…

Ben Jonson’s Erotic Temporalities

By Amanda Henrichs I’ve always imagined Ben Jonson as the quintessential cranky old man, constantly complaining about the current state of things and longing for a return to the good old days, when everyone was virtuous and poetry was good…

Edward Thomas, courtesy Edward Thomas Fellowship

War Damage: Four Poets of the First World War

“what are the implications of [war damage] for our understanding of literary works which themselves engage with the theme of the damage inflicted by war?” Richard Price answers this as he considers how poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas…

Brendan Behan – A bit of a writer

Before his tragic death by self-destructive alcoholism at age 41, Brendan Behan was a celebrated Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both English and Irish. Fifty years since his death, a special issue of Irish…