Is trauma a private or public experience? How do larger moments of historical, national, and imperial upheaval reverberate on the level of the individual? How readily do we forget a violent past, despite the traces that wash up on the textual margins? In this project I move against the critical current that posits Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) ...

This essay is an analysis of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s artistic works through the lens of his empirical, but often very pedagogical works. In many ways, his later texts, namely “The Philosophy of Composition” and “Eureka” serve as a guideline upon which to evaluate Poe’s poems. This essay explores the degree to which the “rules” postulated in both ...

This paper explores the connections and dissensions between two fields of thought, which scholars rarely discuss alongside each other: Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity. Through interweaving Baldwin’s late nonfiction and interviews with these two fields, I ask theorists of Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity questions concerning their understandings ...

This essay investigates a sea voyage in Book II of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to which scholars have seldom paid much attention. I argue that the aquatic life forms the Knight of Temperance encounters on his journey shows Spenser’s investment in natural history, a leading force in the scientific culture of his day. By deploying original research, ...

Historically, people have used legends across cultures as a means of transmitting moral values and socializing the young while providing a source of entertainment and education to their listeners. Contemporary versions of legends have the ability to provide insight to the underlying worldviews, which are shaped by the cultural context within a ...

In this essay, I close read chosen lines in the Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf to demonstrate how Old English formulaic expression and hyperbole are used to delineate territory between the hero Beowulf and the King Hrothgar. I argue that hyperbole grants all known territory to Beowulf, and as a result this weakens the Old English formulaic expression ...

Landscape portrayals—literary, visual, or otherwise—serve as recognizable features at the core of American Western iconography and aesthetics. Renderings of landscape point to an implicit gaze appraising the land—a gaze which often communicates its idealization, condemnation, or contemplation of the American West through physical and metaphorical ...