Q: B.J., why did you choose to write this book? A: As a teacher, I found that my students were scared of theory or thought it was irrelevant. I wanted to show that it wasn’t as hard as they thought…
Tag: literature
Recovering an Eighteenth-Century Gem
I first became interested in The Correspondents as the result of an essay in The Shandean, by Peter de Voogd, outlining the work’s several mentions of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. As the general editor of The Florida Edition of the…
Some thoughts on the writing of Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature by Vijay Mishra
I came to this book very much towards the end of my academic career. For many years, I had written on the Indian diaspora with, where possible, an emphasis on the old sugar plantation diaspora that began with the movement…
Reinventing Mary Wollstonecraft for the Twenty-first Century by Brenda Ayres
In 2017, I wrote Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, identifying the disparities between 18 major biographies that reinvented Mary Wollstonecraft with each retelling of her life. In that book, I alluded to 16 other biographies as well…
Reflections on Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature by way of an imagined interview by Vijay Mishra
1.Why this book? Only 400,000 people worldwide speak Fiji Hindi. Of that number, less than half read the Devanagari (Sanskrit) script in which this language is written. There was then a challenge: How to expose this language to a wider…
Caroline Norton’s Love in “the World”
Now known chiefly for her dramatic life story and reforms of married women’s child custody and property legislation (see Antonia Fraser’s biography, The Case of the Married Woman and Diane Atkinson’s The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton), Caroline Norton was…
African Memoirs and Cultural Representations: Narrating Traditions by Toyin Falola
1. What is your main interest or what aroused your curiosity about contemporary memoirs, particularly in West Africa? I became interested in delving into the study of this area when I completed a part of my research for one of…
“Whatever happened to the epic?” by Jo Ann Cavallo
Miguel de Cervantes famously claimed to have composed Don Quixote de la Mancha to combat the imaginative hold that books of chivalry had over his contemporaries. Reading the novel for the first time as an undergraduate, however, I had been…
Arts and Sustainability in the Land of Eden Barbara Sellers-Young
John Dewey argued in Art as Experience (1934/2005) that art is central to the sustainability of daily life. In doing so, he is not only talking about being a consumer of arts by attendance at events or exhibitions but the…
Melodrama, Masculinity and International Art Cinema
1 . What inspired you to write this book at this point in your research, which has covered a lot of ground from Thomas More and William Shakespeare to Jane Campion and the film adaptations of Māori writers such as…