This article investigates humorous representations of marriage in digital comics, standup comedy and short films created by Emirati artists and content creators who primarily rely on social media as their most effective form of distribution. Studied against theories of humor in the Western and the Arabic traditions, selected examples demonstrate…[Read more]

This article proposes to establish a
sub-category called “docupoetry” to
classify the documentary films by
Emirati poet and filmmaker Nujoom
Alghanem. Detailed analysis of two
selected films, Sharp Tools (2017) and
Nearby Sky (2014), illustrates the
unique composition, cinematography,
and use of poetic devices, such
as rhythm, sym…[Read more]

This article proposes to establish a
sub-category called “docupoetry” to
classify the documentary films by
Emirati poet and filmmaker Nujoom
Alghanem. Detailed analysis of two
selected films, Sharp Tools (2017) and
Nearby Sky (2014), illustrates the
unique composition, cinematography,
and use of poetic devices, such
as rhythm, sym…[Read more]

Comfort and domestic space are complex narratives that can help draw our attention to everything from urban planning, everyday objects, and new technologies to class conflict, racial and ethnic segregation, and the gendering of domestic labour. Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain delves into the history of ideas surrounding the modern home.…[Read more]

This essay reads H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) in the context of “wooshing” London—I take the word from the story—to see how the unsettling effect of this rapid urban mobility translates into the generic form of the novel. At the turn of the twentieth century, London was wooshing—that is to say, people and things in the city were moving by b…[Read more]

Dracula first appears in front of the British public in England not as a gentleman but in the form of “an immense dog.” This article reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the context of human-animal encounters happening on the streets of London when the fear of rabid dogs swept the city. Victorian urban projects aimed at building an urban struc…[Read more]

Dracula first appears in front of the British public in England not as a gentleman but in the form of “an immense dog.” This article reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the context of human-animal encounters happening on the streets of London when the fear of rabid dogs swept the city. Victorian urban projects aimed at building an urban struc…[Read more]

This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond…[Read more]

This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond…[Read more]

The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language…[Read more]

This essay situates queer negativity within the modernist tradition. In The Well-Beloved (1897), Thomas Hardy satirizes the then-popular notion of racial memory for its racist, colonialist implications, inaugurating the modernist critique of romantic love as complicit with the self-delusions of the liberal-humanist subject. Despite the view shared…[Read more]

Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the…[Read more]

Building on eighteenth-century philosophical traditions, Victorian aesthetics were often posed as an antidote to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic demands of the marketplace, and in most cultures undergoing modernization the Beautiful has often functioned in opposition to the forces of power and…[Read more]

Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
• What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India,
Australasia, the USA?
• What is the role of English language in relation to other global
and local languages?
• What is the role of decolonising efforts?
• How do our respective state apparatuses affect…[Read more]

This essay considers the shortfalls of globalizing tendencies in nineteenth-century
literary studies with a focus on the Ottoman Turkish articulation of romanticism, i.e.,
hayaliyyun. Retrieving a historically and geographically hybrid genealogy of romanticism
through the Ottoman Turkish context, my discussion situates romantic imaginary…[Read more]