Review: Game of Thrones: An International Conference
‘Winter is coming’, ‘Valar Morghulis’ and ‘You know nothing Jon Snow’ are widely-known expressions attesting to the global visibility of Game of Thrones (2011- ); each expression offering a reminder of the power of television to resonate through casual forms of oral culture.
Continue ReadingReview: Russia in American Literature
Marking the first centenary of the Russian Revolution, both the ‘Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths’ exhibition and the one-day symposium demonstrated painstaking research and showcased the most arresting highlights of that turbulent era.
Continue ReadingReview: Literary Archives in the Digital Age
In many ways the innovative conference served to emphasise how literature itself has been interrogating the possibilities of archiving for a long time. With the advent of the digital age it is more pertinent than ever that such connections are highlighted.
Continue ReadingReview: War of the Worlds: Transnational Fears of Invasion and Conflict, 1870-1933
One of the aims of the conference was to expand the time frame for Invasion Fiction, from pre-1914 fiction into the inter-war years, and to draw connections and comparisons to other parts of the world outside of Britain.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection by Dorceta E. Taylor
Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Duke University Press, 2016) pp. 486. $29.95. Dorceta E. Taylor introduces The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection as the second book in a series of three, although they were not published in that order. Taylor considers the first to be The Environment, and the People in American Cities: 1600s- 1900s (2009) while the third is Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (2014). Although The American Conservation Movement is ostensibly the middle publication, Taylor does not rely on earlier work and instead uses the formation of the series to her advantage by focusing on different aspects of environmental history with each book structured to read as a standalone piece. This book comprises four interlinking sections on wildlife conservation, wilderness and park preservation, hunting and fishing ethics, and rural […]
Continue ReadingReview: Transatlantic Studies Association Conference 2017
The ‘unofficial’ theme that permeated the conference was the future of the Anglo-American relationship in the age of Trump and Brexit. As concerns continue to grow on both sides of the Atlantic, scholars are attempting to gauge the wider repercussions of both developments and what this means for the role of the US and Britain in world politics.
Continue ReadingReview: Queer Subjects and the Contemporary United States
Queer Subjects and the Contemporary United States was a colloquium born of the present moment. Focused on discussions of what queerness means under the Trump administration, this conference set out to consider the ways queerness figures within a contemporary social, political, and cultural U.S. context.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Border Crossings: Translation, Migration, and Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, and the Transpacific’
The conference themes invited participants to explore the broad spectrum of possibilities generated by cross-cultural interactions and the challenges posed to literary canons to express the nuances and complexities of cross-cultural lives.
Continue ReadingReview: Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association 2017
The Posthumanist Modernism stream was prompted by two deceptively simple questions: What is modernism? And what is Posthumanism? The former question has been the subject of debate for years. The latter is the title of Cary Wolfe’s ground-breaking 2010 book on the subject. An international, comparative approach to these slippery concepts was a refreshing alternative to the often Anglo-centric focus of Modernist Studies in Britain.
Continue ReadingReview: Theorising the Popular 2017
Although assumptions persist regarding ‘popular culture’ as mass-produced, wholly commercial or vacuous, popular texts and practices are now so deeply embedded in western lifestyles that any supposed distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture require persistent challenging.
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