bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘The Whole World is Unquiet’: Imperial Rivalry and Global Politics in the London Pupil Teachers’ Association Record
Authors: Sunderland Helen
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines what lower middle- and upper working-class girls aged fourteen to eighteen were taught about imperial politics via the magazine of the girls’ division of the London Pupil Teachers’ Association from 1896 to 1907. Scholarship on empire education in this period has focused overwhelmingly on the teaching of imperialist ideology, patriotism, and national identity. However, this case study of a neglected educational magazine suggests that adolescent girls could receive a more expansive instruction in global politics in the era of high imperialism. Through the Record, female trainee elementary teachers learned that Britain’s colonial interests were an integral part of a volatile geopolitical order structured by international conflict and imperial rivalry. The periodical’s idealisation of the geopolitically aware woman teacher also helps us consider what messages might reach working-class children at school.
‘Young Film Friends’: Gendering Children’s Film Culture in Interwar Film Periodicals
Authors: Stead Lisa
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores child-friendly film periodicals produced in interwar Britain, such as Boy’s Cinema and The Boys’ and Girls’ Cinema Clubs Annual. Unlike their adult-focused counterparts, which more explicitly addressed a female readership by modelling themselves on women’s magazines, children’s film periodicals sought to appeal to both sexes with gender specific annuals like Boy’s Cinema and Girl’s Cinema. In comparing archival examples of such materials drawn from centres like the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, the chapter illuminates some of the key distinctions in the way male and female children were addressed by film periodicals produced exclusively for them. It considers how young viewers were trained to read not only film narrative but film culture through a gendered lens by engaging with the multimedia format of the children’s film periodical.
Mid-Century Models: Postwar Girls’ Comics, Fashion, and Self-Fashioning
Authors: Carroll Jane Suzanne
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the treatment of clothing and fashion in two post-war comics for girls: Katy Keene Comics and Bunty. Clothing plays an important role in the narratives and stories in these comics and both comics include paper dolls. These paper dolls are playful paratexts that allow readers to engage critically and creatively with fashion. By examining a selection of issues of Katy from the 1950s and Bunty from the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter argues that these comics speak to young readers’ anxieties and fantasies about clothing and so help to enculture the post-war girl as an informed consumer of fashion.
‘A Power in the Home’: The Rise of the Teenage Girl Magazine and the Teen Girl Reader in Australia and the USA
Authors: Minton Kirra
Published: January 2025

Magazines targeted specifically at teenage girls emerged during the mid-1940s in the USA and in the early 1950s in Australia as a commercial response to a growing market. Taking a transnational approach, this chapter traces the emergence of teen girl magazines and the rise of the teen girl reader in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, in America’s Seventeen, and the Australian Women’s Weekly’s various teen segments, teenage girls were represented as consumers and future housewives. Even as rebellious working-class youth subcultures gained mainstream traction in the mid-1950s, teen girl magazines framed these to fit traditional middle-class values. Through a critical textual analysis, this chapter explores how the creators of Seventeen and the Weekly’s teen segments managed concerns of advertisers and parents, approached sensitive topics like sex and morality, and, increasingly, balanced traditional gender ideals with modern ideas about what was expected of women and girls. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, teen girl readers embraced their consumer identity. However, by drawing on a close examination of reader contributions—letters pages and guest articles—this chapter highlights how teen girls were also demanding a more nuanced and inclusive representation of themselves and the issues that affected them.
‘My Friend Really Loves History … Can She Look at that Really Old Jackie ?’ Contemporary Girls Encountering Historical Periodicals for Girls
Authors: Gibson Mel
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the use of British girls’ weekly periodical Jackie (DC Thomson 1964−93) in workshops run as part of Girl-Kind North East’s celebration of the United Nations International Day of the Girl. The workshops centred on the challenges girls and young women face today in finding accurate and appropriate information about health and relationships. This historical periodical was the focus of an object elicitation exercise with the young people and the adults accompanying them. Complete editions of Jackie were used, making materiality part of the experience. The problem page responses to readers’ letters by agony aunts ‘Cathy & Claire’ were central to discussion. Comparisons of contemporary experiences of advice seeking were made with those that took place when the periodical was published, along with other conversations about, for example, fashion. This intergenerational discussion established common ground as so many issues were shared.
Unwording Life: On Inheriting Late Modernism
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

Chapter one focuses on Coetzee’s 1968 doctoral thesis on Beckett. This chapter explores how Coetzee inherits Beckett’s late-modernism in his own early writings, both critical and creative. The specific site of this inheritance is that of language scepticism, which unites Beckett’s pre-war interest in linguistic negativism with Coetzee’s post-war interest in stylistic analysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism. Coetzee discovers in Beckett’s writings an ‘anarchic life’ that resists quantitative and positivist delineation, and I explore this in reference to Beckett’s account of the ‘inhuman’. Contrary to a vitalist modernism, also explored here (which includes writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov), Beckett bequeaths a late-modernist scepticism which manifests in Coetzee’s early writing and forms the bedrock of what I term his later ‘philosophical turn’. From the beginning of his career, then, Coetzee’s writings are seen to be influenced not only by literary predecessors but by intellectual and philosophical debates. This is evidenced already in the literary thinking of the first novel, Dusklands, also explored here.
The Mattering of Life: Coetzee’s Apartheid Fictions
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses Coetzee’s early South African fictions, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life & Times of Michael K. By drawing on allusions to Beckett and Kafka, this chapter further substantiates how a late modernist critique of language informs Coetzee’s interrogation of the conditions of historical representation (namely, narrative storytelling). The chapter emphasizes how the otherness at stake in Coetzee’s early novels (historical, racial, gendered) is never simply presented as such, as singular or absolute. This disturbs a tendency in the criticism that subordinates politics to ethics in readings of Coetzee’s literary responses to Apartheid South Africa. Instead, a materialist logic of embeddedness displaces that of embodiment and accounts for Coetzee’s politics of the ‘non-position’. As embodied or animal life begins to emerge as a central theme, foreshadowing the writings on animal life in the 1990s explored in the next chapter, Coetzee’s early fictions implicitly critique sovereign violence but also refuse any clear viewpoint outside the realm of complicity. This chapter also explores an unpublished 1973 manuscript for a novel entitled ‘The Burning of the Books’, showing how the work anticipates the later writings on censorship, confession and how, through the dramatization of speech acts (such as Lucy Lurie’s silence in Disgrace), Coetzee stages a politics of life.
Literature and the Right to Life: Sacrificial Forms in Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores how Coetzee’s late modernism resists both a liberal humanist logic of recuperation and a poststructuralist ethics of alterity, focusing on the key later works Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). This chapter offers an original appraisal of these works in reference to their literary forbears, Beckett and Kafka, but also the Romantic Poets – Wordsworth especially – and Costello’s privileged canon of animal writers, including D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes, in Coetzee’s eponymous novel. By situating death at the heart of life, emphasising finitude and contingency in both material and existential terms, Coetzee’s works circumvent any absolute concept or value of life. Both texts thereby challenge the representational logic of a politics of sacrifice, seen as intrinsic to both religious or quasi-religious approaches to otherness as well liberal discourses of rights, suggesting a continuity between Coetzee’s earlier critique of colonialism and the challenge these novels present to Enlightenment reasoning. This chapter offers an original appraisal of these works in reference the idea of an aesthetic ‘heart speech’; a discursive strategy that pervades Coetzee’s middle and late period and suggests a mode of embodied and finite life beyond the realm of rational or human-centred comprehension.
Biologico-literary Experiments: The Life of Writing and the Writing of Life
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

The chapter discusses Coetzee’s later works by substantiating the philosophical turn marked by his writing on secular confession. The link between Coetzee’s interest in life writing and secular confession, and his earlier engagements with colonial biopower and animals, is related to how he configures the resources of literary writing as a mode of address that positions life beyond both the liberal discourse of sovereign selfhood but also religious discourses of salvation and sacrifice. By exploring questions of the writer’s life across the fictionalised memoirs (the life-writing trilogy, Scenes from Provincial Life), and of an author’s life in Age of Iron, Master of Petersburg and the ‘bio-logical literary experiment[s]’ of the Australian fictions (Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year), this chapter sets the scene for contextualising Coetzee’s post-South African period as one still deeply marked by his investments in a late modernist inheritance. The metafictional strategies of these works, rather than evading lived reality, are in fact integral to Coetzee’s poetics of embeddedness. I explore this embeddedness by focusing on affect (notably ‘shame’), and I show how affective life is linked to the way these works expose truth as always subject to temporal and affective states of being that are inherently fallible, embedded and finite.
Infinite Finitude: Crypto-allegory, Cosmopolitanism and the Postsecular in Coetzee’s Jesus Fictions
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

The final chapter considers global framing of Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy - The Childhood of Jesus, Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus -, further exploring how embodied and finite life is situated beyond the bounds of calculative rationality. I frame these late works as crypto-allegories, a mode of writing that hovers between the referential and non-referential. This chapter focuses on the key context of German idealism behind the scenes of aesthetic education in the trilogy. In so doing, the chapter seeks to displace postsecular readings of the works by revealing instead how Coetzee’s career long interrogation of post-Enlightenment subjectivity ultimately culminates in the demarcation of an agonistic, rather than liberal, model of literary cosmopolitanism. This framework offers something new to the discussion of Coetzee’s relation to the Global South, to questions of migration and transnationalism, and clarifies the specifically literary status of his works’ politics.
Conclusion: Literary Agonism in the Contemporary
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

The conclusion closes the book by framing the literary agonism of Coetzee’s works in reference to his comments on heroic resistance, literary autonomy and the non-position of the artist. I close with an account of the concept of freedom in Coetzee’s works as exemplary of the above.
The Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran, 1639-1683
Authors: Güngörürler Selim
Published: January 2025

This book explores the diplomacy and political affairs between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran from 1639 to 1682, a period marked by the Peace of Zuhab (a.k.a. Kasr-ı Şirin), which established a stable yet tense detente between the two monarchies. It examines how the two powers navigated the challenges of maintaining peace, particularly through diplomatic exchanges, border management, and regional conflicts. The work emphasizes the hierarchical nature of the relations, with both parties officially acknowledging Ottoman superiority over the Safavids. Central to the analysis is the idea that the peace required active maintenance through a network of ambassadors, envoys, and border governors. The book also delves into the complexities of frontier zones, where local conflicts often tested the broader diplomatic efforts of both monarchies. Key moments, such as disputes over Baghdad, Armenian highlands, Azerbaijan, and the Persian Gulf, are analyzed to highlight how regional power dynamics shaped broader Ottoman–Safavid interactions. The Safavids sought to preserve peace with the Ottomans, making significant concessions. The study draws on a wide range of archival materials to provide a detailed account of this relatively understudied period. It contributes to the broader historiography of Middle Eastern diplomacy by filling in a historiographical gap regarding Ottoman–Safavid relations post-1639. The book ultimately reveals that peace in the region was as fragile and complex as the political maneuvers that upheld it.
1660–1682: The Persian Gulf
Authors: Güngörürler Selim
Published: January 2025

Chapter 4 explores the period from 1660 to 1682, focusing on the southern frontier between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran, particularly southern Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The chapter highlights three major uprisings in Basra during the 1660s, each supported by Iranian manpower, prompting multiple Ottoman military campaigns to regain control. The Ottomans eventually reannexed Basra as a province, solidifying their dominance over this borderland. Diplomatic communications, including letters between the Ottoman and Safavid grand viziers, aimed to prevent further escalations, though regional tensions remained high. The chapter illustrates how military campaigns and diplomatic letters were both critical tools for managing the delicate balance of power in the Persian Gulf and southern frontier.
Introduction: The Restless Social Vision of Jesmyn Ward
Authors: Harrison Sheri-Marie , Keeble Arin , Torres-Quevedo Maria Elena
Published: January 2025

This introduction begins with a close reading of Ward’s 2020 Vanity Fair essay ‘On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by a Pandemic’, to highlight the qualities that make Ward’s voice and work so compelling and important. We characterise this voice as restless and searching, pointing out that while there are clearly features that bind her novels, memoir, and essays together, their very different genre codings and stylistic features distinguish each of these writings. We discuss the key social, political and cultural contexts and contemporary theoretical paradigms related to Ward’s writing and conclude with some commentary on Men We Reaped and Sing, Unburied, Sing, that draws these together before finally outlining the book’s chapters.
Bois Sauvage as Biotope in the Novels of Jesmyn Ward
Authors: McMahon Wendy
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the depiction of place in Ward’s first three novels, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), Salvage the Bones (2011), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). It reads her depiction of the landscape and environment of the three novels as a biotope – a place where people, animals, and the natural world exist together creating ‘life worlds’ (Kolen, 2015). Ward depicts Mississippi as a historical landscape where the natural world and human experience, past and present, are powerfully imbricated: rivers, bayous, storms, dirt, trees—the environment of Bois Sauvage—is more than just setting. Rather, the human inhabitants are part of the ecology of this place and there is no easy separation of nature and culture / history. The history of the place is written into the land; the land is written into the history and people of this place. As Ward herself has noted, ‘I believe place determines nearly everything about a writer and about a character’ (2014).
Determination in the Wake of Dispossession: Jesmyn Ward’s Literary Depiction of Black Resistance to Outmigration
Authors: Brown Donald
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the ways Jesmyn Ward uses her home region of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to craft Southern Black literature that centres on the history of Black people who made strategic decisions not to leave the region. In all her novels set in Bois Sauvage, as well as her memoir, she discusses Black Southerners’ assertion of the right to stay home amid white supremacist attempts at forced removal. I argue that her intimate descriptions of the Southern landscape, coupled with her characters’ belief in its liberatory potential, is a rewriting of the ‘long civil rights movement’, as Jacquelyn Dowd calls it. Ward’s fictional world flips the Great Migration narrative on its head and suggests that the act of staying put was just as courageous—and perhaps even more progressive—than leaving for the warmth of other suns.
Local and Global Scales of Racial Neoliberalism in Where the Line Bleeds
Authors: Bone Martyn
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues that Ward’s understudied debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), tracks its Black southern characters’ confrontation with what Rob,ert Bullard calls ‘economic blackmail’. Teenage twins Joshua and Christophe face few options in a deindustrialized, neoliberal economy dominated by low-paid service jobs. Their only other ‘choice’ (a loaded keyword in neoliberal discourse) is to deal drugs to friends and neighbours. While Where the Line Bleeds takes place on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, it dramatizes the impact of what Michelle Alexander describes as a ‘new global economy’ in which blue-collar Blacks are ‘deemed disposable’ (2010). Furthermore, Joshua and Christophe experience what Rob Nixon calls ‘the plight of the stationary displaced’: abandonment by ‘neoliberal ideology’ operating at global scales, eerily experienced as being ‘out of place in place’ at the local scale of their own hometown (2011). Ward’s novel further dramatizes racialized disposability through its depiction of the twins’ addict father Sandman. Sandman’s repeated association with waste vividly captures how working-class Blacks are rendered, as Ward puts it in Men We Reaped, ‘virtually worthless in the southern coastal economy’.
Salvaging Vulnerabilities: Climate Crisis and Marginalised Bodies in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
Authors: Van Dyk Leah
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the interconnections and importance of the natural and the personal through the bodies and experiences of the Batiste family in Salvage the Bones, particularly through the vulnerabilities of Ward’s protagonist, Esch. It draws on environmental theories of embodiment and marginalization by focusing on the dynamics of family and kinship relations, gendered labour and violence, class barriers and racialized economic inequality within the novel, while also examining the disproportionate effect of the climate crisis and environmental degradation on marginalized bodies. Esch’s experience is deeply tied to the land, with her understanding of selfhood growing out of the place and space which she inhabits. The literal sturm und drang (‘storm and stress’) within the novel asks us to consider the multi-layering of vulnerabilities experienced by those in the Gulf Coast, particularly nuancing the experiences of Esch as a young, disenfranchised, pregnant Black woman. Through discussions of motherhood, unconventional kinship relations, and storms, this chapter argues that, though often absent in the discussion of environmental literature, Salvage the Bones is a critical text for our understanding of contemporary Black experience in and alongside the environment, recognizing the specific and urgent interconnections of identity and place for Black bodies.
‘We are left to seed another year’: Nature and Neglect in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
Authors: Anderson Devon
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers Jesmyn Ward’s use of nature imagery in Salvage the Bones to call attention to the slower violences that undergird (un)natural disasters. The novel is set mostly in the days before Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in southern Mississippi, and as the storm builds, the markers of poverty, race-based inequality, and systemic neglect accrue, and these structural inequities interweave with and intensify the danger of the storm. Against the sudden violence of the hurricane, Ward depicts a natural environment suffused with ‘slow violence’, Rob Nixon’s term for the accumulation of negative impacts that industrial development and socioeconomic disparities under global capitalism have wrought upon the nonhuman world. Amid her descriptions of the flourishing plants and animals in the novel’s rural setting, Ward makes visible the lasting effects of extractive capitalism, segregation, poverty, and neglect on the nonhuman world. Ward thus engages with an ambivalence that typifies many Black writers’ relationships to nature, which can be a source of beauty and refuge as well as a dangerous site of violence. Ward preserves this ambivalence by making nature’s generative powers contingent upon the systemic violences that condition and contextualise her characters’ lives. Ultimately, she forestalls a redemptive reading of the nonhuman world by depicting an (un)natural environment that is as much a testament to a long history of social disenfranchisement and slow violence as it is a site community, love, and survival.
‘Something to save’: Rewriting Black Teenage Motherhood in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
Authors: Margiotta Chiara
Published: January 2025

Sinéad Moynihan persuasively reads Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, as an example of ‘literary recycling,’ showing how Ward engages in a ‘politically engaged model of rewriting’. While Moynihan focuses on Ward’s relationship to the white canon, this chapter considers the ways in which her writing addresses a lineage of Black literary foremothers and how, through this model of recycling, she reinvigorates the enduring trope of young motherhood. Salvage the Bones’ protagonist, Esch, recalls a long line of fictional pregnant Black girls in novels where recurring themes of troubled pregnancy and motherhood provide a fertile vein for the exploration of bodily and racial abjection. This chapter argues that Ward ‘recycles’ this motif: where it has been traditionally marred by tragedy, Ward’s writing resists the narrative of Black teenage motherhood as necessarily destructive. By refusing to dismiss Black teenage mothers as ‘waste’, she offers the potential of ‘a redemptive horizon’. A key aspect of Ward’s rewriting is her depiction of Black men who support Esch’s demands for agency. By considering her work through the lens of abject theory, alongside contemporary criticism on race and class, this chapter position’s Ward’s writing as a vital addition to this lineage of Black women’s writing.
Being Touched by Cloth: Imprints on Community, Body and Self
Authors: Petch Melanie
Published: January 2025

This chapter locates Jesmyn Ward’s writing within a global narrative of cloth and clothing. Taking material deprivation as its focus, it will consider how concepts of community, body, and self are affected by the experience of interacting with cloth in Salvage the Bones (2011) and Men We Reaped (2013). It considers how ownership of the body, or the ‘community body’ can be understood through the act of borrowing clothing. While sharing clothing is sometimes seen as a necessity for Ward’s characters, it is far from the innocent act of ‘handing down’ or ‘handing across’. It then turns to the eerily un-seductive concept of gaping cloth and how this leaves the body open to exposure, desensitisation and loss of anonymity. It argues that the threat of bodies spilling out of cloth, and paradoxically, being constricted by it, show how clothing rubs uncomfortably with the surface of the skin. Bodily excretions, soils and stains provide the focus for the final section of the chapter where considerations are given to expressions of class, status and power. Ultimately, this chapter shows how cloth is inherently readable and allows for the expression of a tangible language to capture the experience of material deprivation for Ward and her characters.
‘Life had promised me something when I was younger’: Biopolitics and the Rags to Riches Narrative in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped
Authors: Torres-Quevedo Maria Elena
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped within a tradition of American life writing. It argues that Ward’s memoir subverts the generic convention of a sovereign subject, replacing this with a posthumanist biopolitical subject. Reading Ward’s memoir in this light, it shows how this text subverts the prevalent ideological underpinnings of mainstream autobiography, in particular the narrative of upward mobility, and questions the ways this genre conceptualises and reifies ‘the good life’ and neoliberal subjects within the American imagination. Rags-to-riches narratives, the trope of the self-made sovereign subject, and the upward mobility trajectory in American literature and culture are forms of cruel optimism because they offer an object that is almost impossible to attain for working class subjects. Ward’s text shows that communities like hers are not just excluded from but are a by-product of the American dream. Men We Reaped, this chapter argues, exposes the idea of meritocracy as a form of cruel optimism, which entraps marginalised subjects through notions of hard work or political reform and obscures the oppressive foundations of American society.
Releasing the Heavy Repercussions of Black Death in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped
Authors: Hale Candice N.
Published: January 2025

This chapter places Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped into critical conversation with Kiese Laymon’s, Heavy – two memoirs that it reads in relation to notions of Black death. With a voice like rage, Ward bears witness to the Black death, trauma, and grief that many Black Southerners experience under the scourge of white supremacy. In Men We Reaped, she chronicles the death and injustices of five Black men, including her brother, during a 5-year span. This chapter reads this text in order to show how we can begin to release the heavy repercussions of Black death and injustice in our communities by embracing male vulnerability and fighting against Black fatigue. I extend this discussion by coupling Ward’s memoir with fellow Mississippian Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Mary-Francis Winter’s Black Fatigue. Reading these works in conversation enables a stronger analysis of the potent critique of systemic racism, and transformative healing offered by Men We Reaped.
Ghosts in Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
Authors: Lloyd Christopher
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the corporeal legacies of Jesmyn Ward’s third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Like her other writings, it reaches into US (southern) history and memory to lay bare the legacies of racial violence that still striate the nation’s landscape. Through multiple first-person narratives, Ward follows Jojo, his sister Kayla, and mother Leonie as they drive to Parchman prison to pick up Leonie’s boyfriend. This journey through the delta landscape is also a journey into the region and nation’s past. The entangling of the prison and the plantation haunt the novel, and the ghosts of Parchman linger both literally and metaphorically. This chapter argues that Sing, Unburied, Sing illuminates the historical injuries and injustices done to Black lives in the region and nation’s past, which are made manifest in representations of embodiment. If the ghost, as Avery Gordon argues, is an index for the past’s presence—a way of seeing how that which is invisible actually structures social life—then the ghosts of Parchman prison reveal much about race in contemporary America. Depicting how Blackness is haunted both by captivity and the possibilities of fugitivity, Ward’s novel traces a memorative line through the heart of Mississippi and the nation.
Female Genitalia Onstage in Aristophanes
Authors: Richlin Amy
Published: January 2025

In his revolutionary study of obscene language in Attic comedy, Jeffrey Henderson argues that ‘the female genitals were, in fact, considered especially attractive by the Greeks.’ That the female genitals were at least generally considered both funny and stage-able is indicated by the recurrence of jokes, language, staging and probably costume from Sophron in Sicily to Aristophanes in Athens to Herodas in Alexandria to Plautus in central Italy – that is, among four places, three dramatic genres and two languages. A survey of evidence will be followed by remarks on Henderson’s unusual vision.
Political Ambition and Poetry in Aristophanes’ Birds and Plato’s Aristophanes
Authors: Jeng I-Kai
Published: January 2025

This paper argues that Aristophanes' Birds sheds light on the character of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. Cloudcuckooland aims for maximal harmony between law and natural desires, and imagines political ambition resulting in justice and glory to the city. However, maximal harmony is not perfect harmony, and the darker aspects of Cloudcuckooland suggest that while Aristophanes judged this utopian city positively, the city should only be realized as comic fantasy. Its staging might be intended as a way to release that restless urge for political glory. In turn, I show that Aristophanes' teaching about eros in Plato's Symposium is better read as a creative response to Birds. Not only are certain puzzling remarks in the Symposium better understood with Birds in mind, but also, even the Platonic Aristophanes' non-political and private ideal of everlasting love is likely intended to be an alternative way of curbing political ambition rooted in our nature.
The Body’s Borders: Violation and the Visual in the Carmina Priapea
Authors: Travillian Tyler T.
Published: January 2025

Roman masculinity is often figured as an aggressive and violent sexuality in which the vir forcibly imposes his sexual, political, and social will upon women, slaves and men of lower classes (homines). The figure of Priapus is likewise often taken as documentary evidence for this mode of Roman masculinity, particularly in the collection of poems termed the Carmina Priapea. In the usual reading, Priapus is a stand-in for the master of the house (dominus), who can legally violate any intruders on his property – symbolizing Roman ideals of boundaries, borders, violation, and social and personal integrity. Intimately caught up in these boundaries – especially the body’s – is the gaze, an object of special anxiety among the Roman elite. The gaze can alternately affirm and violate, indicating submission or dominance. This paper argues that the Carmina Priapea uses the ambivalence of the gaze to allow vir, homo, woman and slave each to identify as reader, and to destabilize and re-evaluate the very masculinity that it at first appears to reinforce.
What Are the Goals of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura?
Authors: O’Hara James J.
Published: January 2025

This paper will explore arguments in favor of an unpopular position: that in its original context Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura may have been seen as, and may have been meant as, a virtuoso versification of a way of looking at the world in which the art and skill and pleasure of the poetry matter more than the content. Although Lucretius seems sincerely obsessed with the goal of convincing his reader to adopt Epicureanism, several arguments and pieces of evidence point in another direction: 1) Sedley’s demonstration that Lucretius followed only one text, Epicurus’s On Nature, making him more like Hellenistic practitioners of ‘literary’ didactic; 2) Lucretius’s ignoring of most philosophical developments after Epicurus; 3) the problem of how readers of the first real didactic since the fifth century would know how to handle it (their horizon of expectations); 4) Cicero’s claim that Aratus and Nicander knew nothing about their subjects but wrote ‘excellent, nicely ornamented verses’ about them; 4) Philodemus’s claim that poetry teaches nothing useful, but involves ‘the portrayal (or imitation) of language which teaches useful things’; and 5) Horace's description of how he came to write satire, which is basically that there was an opening in satire.
Not So Funny After All: On Deconstructing (and Reconstructing) the Text of Petronius
Authors: Bodel John
Published: January 2025

In 1971 Helmut van Thiel published a short monograph in which he proposed that the text of Petronius, as we have it, presents parts of the narrative out of order and therefore needs to be restored to its original form. This chapter explores the consequences of following Van Thiel’s prescriptions for our appreciation of the Quartilla episode, a badly damaged and curiously repetitive section of narrative (16–25) in which a priestess of Priapus exacts punishment for an unwitting transgression from the narrator and his companions. Consideration of the setting and mise en scene points to an extended parodic imitation of a two-stage initiation into a mystery cult rather than to any deep textual corruption.
William Hazlitt and Celebrity Culture: Periodical Portraits in an Age of Public Intimacy
Authors: Haffenden Chris
Published: January 2025

This chapter uses innovations of print portraiture as a lens to examine William Hazlitt’s complex relationship with modern celebrity. While considerable attention has been focused on his role as a theorist of fame, a lot less has been written about his role as a producer of celebrity culture. By situating the portraits in The Spirit of the Age (1825) within the media and material context of celebrity, this chapter highlights how Hazlitt generated intimacy effects that were central to literary culture in the 1820s. The first part of the chapter explores the new conditions of publicity produced by media proliferation in the Romantic period as a frame for understanding Hazlitt’s response to celebrity culture, while the second part turns to a closer examination of the representational strategies of his print portrait gallery. In showing how an apparent critic of celebrity could still engage in its practices, this chapter suggests just how pervasive celebrity culture had become by the 1820s.
Periodical as Memorial: Remembering Felicia Hemans in The New Monthly Magazine , 1835
Authors: Howard Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

This essay interrogates the “elegiac chain” of Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning within the pages of the New Monthly Magazine to recuperate their extended graveside conversation as a public mourning in print. Reading Hemans’s “The Grave of a Poetess” (1827), Landon’s “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans,” (1835), and Barrett Browning’s “Stanzas to Mrs. Landon” (1835) within their original periodical context demonstrates how they were juxtaposed with other elegies, Hemans’s and Landon’s other lyrics, and genres like obituaries and death notices. Excerpting Landon’s and Barrett Browning’s rejoinders as isolated, private exchanges divorces their elegies from the New Monthly Magazine’s larger rhetorical goals. Most significantly, this chapter argues that these elegies contribute to a larger project in volumes 43 to 45 of the New Monthly Magazine (1835) to remember Felicia Hemans, so that the bound periodical becomes a composite memorial. Thematically bound, these elegies are also emphatically bound to the volumes of the New Monthly Magazine.
Fauna, Flora and Illustrated Verse in Mary Howitt’s Environmental Children’s Poetry
Authors: Hughes Linda K.
Published: January 2025

Mary Howitt an important new media innovator from the 1820s to the 1840s, both in her material forms and in her content, especially with respect to her ecopoetry in Sketches of Natural History, a multimodal volume for children published in 1834. Among her other achievements, Mary Howitt co-authored poems with her husband William Howitt that challenged definitions of the Romantic poet-creator and wrote an innovative autobiography of childhood (My Own Story, 1844). A decade earlier, Howitt published a ground-breaking children’s poetry volume entitled Sketches of Natural History (1834), an early example of environmental writing. Pairing animal and plant illustrations with poetry, Sketches of Natural History anticipated ecopoetics today in representing fauna, flora, and humans as co-equal earthly inhabitants, even in “The Water-Rat.” This volume’s illustrated verse, crucial to teaching natural history and inspiring interest, clearly built upon Howitt’s own experience as a prolific contributor to illustrated literary annuals in the 1820s and ’30s. The combination of poetry and wood-cut illustration in Sketches produced a new kind of children’s literature focused on cultivating joy rather than on inculcating religious dogma.
A Familiar Transition: Dinah Mulock Craik’s Early Career in Periodicals, 1841–45
Authors: Goodwyn Helena
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the necessarily idiosyncratic strategies many women writers used to find their place in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. When Dinah Maria Mulock entered the field of writing as a teenager in the 1840s, she was by no means unusual in her precocity. The explosion of periodical culture created abundant opportunities for those seeking a writing career. Between 1841 and 1845, Mulock chiefly published poems but also stories in translation in Chambers’s Journal, the New Monthly Belle Assemblée, and Dublin University Magazine. As she grew in confidence, Mulock began to experiment: in one striking early example, she wrote a series of six poems with different national themes intended for musical accompaniment, collectively entitled “Songs for Stray Airs.” These poems ranged in their focus from an Irish melody and a Venetian boat song to a Scottish shepherd’s ballad. At this time, Mulock was also publishing translations. These early encounters with foreign-language texts, nations, and cultures enabled her to carve a distinctive, respected position for herself in an already crowded competitive arena. Her innovations are part of a larger story of radical change in literary culture, which led to the rise of sentimental poetry and diverse other genres.
Paratextual Navigation: Positions of Witnessing in The Anti-Slavery Reporter
Authors: Huggins Sofia Prado
Published: January 2025

This chapter uses Edward Soja’s concept of thirdspace, which understands lived space as real-and-imagined, to analyse how the British Anti-Slavery Society’s most influential periodical, the Anti-Slavery Reporter , used self-referential footnotes to position white British readers at the centre of the anti-slavery saga. Paratextual elements provided readers with a map for navigating the thirdspace of a page before focusing on the specific uses of self-referential footnotes in the periodical. Understood geographically, paratextual actants transported evidence from the colonies to Britain, where readers could appropriate it and transform themselves from passive recipients to witnesses whose testimony condemned slavery in the court of public opinion. In the early 1830s, British readers engaged with the Reporter as a navigational tool, one that helped them position themselves in relation to the critical political issues of the day while simultaneously shaping their beliefs about Britain’s place in the emerging world order. Although this repositioning of British supporters at the centre of the anti-slavery movement did provide momentum to efforts to abolish colonial slavery, it closed the emotional gap between Britain and the colonies by erasing the importance of colonial anti-slavery activists.
Between the Houses: Woolf and the Property Market
Authors: Bowlby Rachel
Published: January 2025

Near the beginning of Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts, cars drive past a pretty old house in the Sussex countryside. ‘[P]eople said to each other: “I wonder if that’ll ever come into the market?”’ This is what is starting to happen to houses in the mid-twentieth century: far from being fixed in their one location, they enter a space called the market. Motoring past, what people see is not a house and a history, so much as a future prospect of purchase, with all that that entails. They see a dream house: a fantasy and an investment. In keeping with the suggestions of the Between the Acts vignette, this chapter approaches the topic of Woolf and capitalism through her views of residential property: the bought and the sold, the lived in and left, the rented and rented out. Houses are perfect manifestations of the symbolic force of capitalism as invisible organiser and transformer of cultural perceptions. They are still the same buildings to be lived in and occupied; as such, they stay where they are, in one place. At the same time, they move into another zone; they ‘come into’ a market which is no longer the weekly local event for the buying and selling of produce and livestock, but rather the name for the governing economic system shaping every human transaction and situation (making exceptions of those that it doesn’t).
‘It’s rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am.’ Woolf’s Working Women Writers
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the depiction of working woman writers in Woolf’s early oeuvre. Her short fictions ‘[The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn]’ (composed August 1906) and ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (composed 1909) depict several such characters, and in these early and little-examined pieces – unpublished in Woolf’s lifetime – we detect Woolf testing out her developing sense of herself as a working woman writer. Elements of each figure also appear in Woolf’s most fully-developed female professional writer, Miss Allan in The Voyage Out (1915), whose description of herself as so ‘ordinary’ as to be ‘distinguished’ encapsulates much of the tension that Woolf detects within the figure of the working woman writer. Emerging from the author’s ongoing research on Woolf’s short fiction, this chapter draws on recent scholarship on Woolf’s attachment to her own ‘amateurism’ as a writer, and the associated sense that women’s writing domesticates, or reveals the domesticity inherent in, the profession of writing. The young Woolf appears both attracted to and – it is clear from these early texts – repelled by the ordinariness of the women writers she depicts. We thus find in this nexus of characters a novel route into exploring Woolf’s evolving feminist critique of capitalist structures which reward the distinguished individual, while silently relying on the ordinary multitude.
Virginia Woolf: A Sound Investment
Authors: Silver Brenda R.
Published: January 2025

On April 12, 1937 Virginia Woolf became a star. The occasion: her appearance on the cover of Time magazine; the impetus: the publication of her new novel, The Years. For the anonymous writer of the article, celebrating Virginia Woolf was tantamount to putting money in the bank. Looking back to the extraordinary success of Gone With the Wind the year before, he notes that among "literary brokers" the "opinion is that Margaret Mitchell was a grand wildcat stock but Virginia Woolf a sound investment." Eighty-five years later Virginia Woolf's star power is still at work in both our material and cultural economy, manifested by the numerous new editions of Mrs. Dalloway that have appeared since the novel was released from copyright in the US in 2021. Not surprisingly, one of these has an introduction by Michael Cunningham, whose prize-winning novel The Hours, made into an Oscar winning film, guaranteed his edition both attention and sales. Based on the assumption that The Hours can be understood as a form of fan fiction and read through the lens of fan theory, this chapter looks back to the original moment when Cunningham first capitalized on Woolf's value before recontextualizing the phenomenon within Mrs. Dalloway's current moment of fame. Virginia Woolf, it is clear, is still a sound investment, accruing for those who can claim ownership of her stock both economic and cultural capital. Given her worth, the struggles over who "owns" Virginia Woolf and her texts becomes a more than academic argument.
Scrapbooking the Present Day: The Three Guineas Scrapbooks
Authors: Tyson Helen
Published: January 2025

In three large scrapbooks now held in the University of Sussex Special Collections, Virginia Woolf amassed newspaper clippings, photographs, quotations, and other ephemera, testimonials of everyday life lived under a patriarchal capitalist system. These scrapbooks formed the basis of her 1938 polemic Three Guineas. What can we learn from these scrapbooks today, and how might they speak to our own late capitalist moment? This chapter draws on the author’s work with undergraduate students at the University of Sussex, compiling scrapbooks of the modern world using newspaper clippings, twitter feeds, and Instagram stories, to see what these tell us about the relationship between gender and politics in the present day. The chapter explores what this method of scrapbooking tells us about Woolf’s research methods, as well as about the relationship between Woolf’s 1930s and the present day.
Death on the Books
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

Starting with the premise that Critical Legal Studies (CLS) died, this chapter examines where this death is recorded and remembered in legal theory and jurisprudence books. The analysis shows a lack of engagement with the CLS outside of more critical works.
Theoretical Ghosts and Spectres
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

Finding scant mention of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) death, this chapter creates an argument for why this death is vital to understanding CLS. Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, Hamlet, and A Christmas Carol, a way to conceptualise the death of CLS is presented. Under the name “passive haunting”, the relationship between US-CLS and its posthumous counterpart (PCLS) is discussed.
The Haunting of Critical Legal Studies
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

The effect of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) death can be seen through the regressive and constricted works that come after the death, those categorised as Posthumous-Critical Legal Studies (PCLS). To highlight this difference, two articles are analysed. This analysis draws from cultural theory focusing on film and theatre to understand the ways in which the articles may be read.
Navigating US-CLS
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

This chapter addresses the criticisms and critiques of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) in two broad categories: legal liberalism and critical critiques. Analysis highlights issues with CLS while highlighting the more engaged nature of critique by those more broadly critical of hegemonic law. Specific focus is given to analysis from Critical Race Theory and critique of CLS by Patricia Williams.
American Gods
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

To take seriously the critiques of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), this chapter discusses the common analogies associated with CLS before delving into the background of those prominent in the movement. The personal histories of key Crits are explored, adding to the intellectual history of the movement.