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My book began, as many academic books do, as a dissertation, with a seemingly simple observation: Polish and Irish literature are remarkably similar to each other. I had arrived in graduate school planning to study 20th century Polish and German writing, and...

A Q&A with Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War. What led you to write Not Even Past? A lot of it was just living and teaching in the South. The Civil War shades into almost everything here. It’s in the places...

Somehow, without quite meaning to, I’ve become a sort of de facto travel agent to the (literary) stars. It all began in 2010 with my sixth book, Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, which concerned the...

The idea that society is a system—or that it frequently acts like a system—is so familiar that we take it for granted. In a broad sense, we often find it easy to generalize about the behavior and beliefs of large groups of people. We talk confidently about...

When did the twenty-first century begin? There may briefly have been a temptation to say it began at 12:01 on the first day of January in the year 2000, in that burst of elation and relief when everyone discovered that the dreaded “Y2K bug,” instead of...

Humanists love words, and with good reason. Studying the history of a word like culture reveals an enormous amount about how we make the world meaningful, who we are, and how we got this way. Scholars of literature, culture, and intellectual history have...

The first issue of the 2018 volume of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 seeks to answer the question, "can there be anything 'After Sovereignty.'" That title presents a special issue of nine papers examining the historical aspects of sovereign power...

The final issue of New Literary History's 48th volume took on a big issue. Literally. University of Virgina professors Krishan Kumar and Herbert F. Tucker guest edited the special issue "Writ Large", which featured eight essays on big thinking and big writing...

Today is Bloomsday, a commemoration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce. Today will feature celebrations of the events of his novel Ulysses, which was set on June 16. Earlier this year, Bryony Randall, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of...

Q: Why did you decide to write this book? I wrote Exquisite Masochism because I noticed striking similarities in the ways sexually aggressive women characters were used in nineteenth century novels and I wanted to know why. Often, we think of the nineteenth...