Four Irish Persephones

By Virginie Trachsler The young Persephone is gathering flowers in a meadow when her uncle Hades, god of the underworld, rises through a crack in the earth and abducts her on his golden chariot. Her mother Ceres wanders the earth…

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…