The multidisciplinary Many Happy Returns project aimed to enable reusable packaging systems and reduce single-use plastic. The Language team built a corpus of over 4.5 million words of discourse ab...

The recent acquisition of a sixteenth-century manuscript containing copies of Katherine Parr’s Praieres or meditacions (1545) and other devotional works has prompted a new look at women as book produc...

This article develops “hydro-reading” as an ecocritical methodology that translates water’s material properties into replicable operations of narrative analysis. Grounded in a “triple-evidence prin...

This article examines Matthew Medbourne’s dedication of St Cecily (1666) to Catherine of Braganza, the only dedicatory epistle of a play addressed to the Queen Consort. While the tragedy—featuring ...

The second European Conference on the Fantastic Karlstad, Sweden 15-17 June, 2027

Confronting an urgent need to reconsider the nature of human influence in the current era of climate crisis, this article reexamines Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), throu...

This paper analyses Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun using the Aristotelian notion of anagnorisis and demonstrates the two kinds of recognition involved in such a reading protocol. First, placing the n...

Despite considerable scholarship on China Miéville’s King Rat (1998), few critics have examined its exploration of posthuman embodiment. Informed by the concepts of vibrant matter (Jane Bennett) an...

This paper investigates how the politics of gender and race intersect with questions of empathy and interpretation in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus through a close reading of critical mome...

In 2021, Terence P. Murphy's contended that the short story is particularly constrained by the readerly expectation for fictional world discreteness and textual self-sufficiency, and thus often pre...

This essay explores the complex embodiment of Helen in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, focusing on her role as a female physician whose identity emerges through her interactions with other...

This interview with Lennard J. Davis, a leading figure in disability studies, explores the conceptual foundations and critical developments that have shaped the field over the past three decades. T...

This essay reads queer shame as an affective force structuring Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, a novel centred on Calliope (later Cal), an intersex protagonist assigned female at birth who later liv...

Underlining (and undermining) the notion of literary merit, this book focuses on noncanonical works and asks: what happens when we look away from modernism? See…

M. John Harrison’s early fiction is often interpreted through the lens of New Wave stylistics or viewed as an homage to Ballardian catastrophe writing. Yet such approaches tend to overlook the auth...

This article examines Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) as a literary exploration of radical care in times of crisis. The trilogy presents care as a relational, embodied, and adaptive...

Oslo in June. Paris in July. And Virginia Woolf at both. Next year two international conferences focused on Virginia Woolf will be held in Europe. The first, the 36th Annual International Conferenc…

This paper reads Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother as an analysis of the body in its connection to colonial history and counter-history. It situates René Descartes’ theory of mind-body d...

This article examines Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) as a transformative contribution to the emerging genre of Muslim women’s Bildungsroman in Anglophone literature. The novel ...

This article examines the narrative representation of the One Ring’s destruction in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, arguing that, while grounded in medieval interlace, Tolkien constructs th...

The New Old Style explores how the deliberate use of cartooning styles that mimic those of the early twentieth century has paradoxically become one of the mo...

Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited—a cut-up poetry collection from 91 Western novels in the public domain—disrupts, fragments and resists colonial narratives of Indigenous vanishing through ...

This interview was conducted with one of Ireland’s most iconic and relevant writers, Donal Ryan, on 3 December 2024. It has since been updated in consultation with the author. Ryan discusses issues...

YouTube video by The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing