Emily Vasiliauskas, “Mortal Knowledge: Akrasia in English Renaissance Tragedy,” in Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 221-38 An essay on “a strange passage in the history of evil.” “Is it possible to perform an action in the full knowledge that it would be wrong… Continue reading »
Bethany Hicok, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil (University of Virginia Press 2016) When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951 at the age of forty, she had not planned to stay, but her love affair with the Brazilian aristocrat Lota de Macedo Soares and with… Continue reading »
by Gage McWeeny In most accounts, literature of the nineteenth century compulsively tells the story of the individual and interiority. But amidst the newly dense social landscapes of modernity, with London as the first city of one million inhabitants, this literature also sought to represent those unknown and unmet:… Continue reading »
by Christian Thorne In this wide-ranging, ambitious, and engaging study, Christian Thorne confronts the history and enduring legacy of anti-foundationalist thought. Anti-foundationalism—the skeptical line of thought that contends our beliefs cannot be authoritatively grounded and that most of what passes for knowledge is a sham—has become one of the dominant positions… Continue reading »
By Kathryn Kent Making Girls into Women offers an account of the historical emergence of “the lesbian” by looking at late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women’s writing. Kathryn R. Kent proposes that modern lesbian identity in the United States has its roots not just, or even primarily, in sexology and medical literature,… Continue reading »
By Christopher Pye In The Vanishing Christopher Pye combines psychoanalytic and cultural theory to advance an innovative interpretation of Renaissance history and subjectivity. Locating the emergence of the modern subject in the era’s transition from feudalism to a modern societal state, Pye supports his argument with interpretations of diverse cultural… Continue reading »
By John Limon Almost all twentieth-century philosophy stresses the immanence of death in human life-as drive (Freud), as the context of Being (Heidegger), as the essence of our defining ethics (Levinas), or as language (de Man, Blanchot). In Death’s Following, John Limon makes use of literary analysis (of Sebald, Bernhard,… Continue reading »