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For many years Brian Abel Ragen entertained dining companions with stories about D.C. Collier Junior High. It was evidently not the sort of institution that one might have expected a [...]

As Papers on Language and Literature enters its 51st year, it remains committed, as strongly as ever, to publishing rigorous scholarship. PLL has always sought to break through boundaries and [...]

I rise with divided heart to speak in honor of Alvin Sullivan, my friend and colleague of almost 25 years. The American poet, Hyam Plutzik, writing a Requiem for a [...]

This January saw the retirement of Jean Vassier, who had served as PLL's business manager for many years. During 37 years at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, she had held [...]

Introduction Given the paucity of material offering in-depth scholarly analyses of experimental film and video from both traditional and revisionist theoretical perspectives, this special issue of Papers on Language and [...]

Rambsy II, Howard. Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2020. 223 pages. Paperback. $29.50 In 'Born in a Mighty Bad Land': The Violent Man [...]

O.V. Vijayan (1930-2005) is regarded as one of the most gifted novelists to contribute to the literature of the South Indian state of Kerala. His The Legends of Khasak (1969) [...]

Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical stories, titled 'School Days of an Indian Girl' and 'An Indian Teacher among Indians,' appeared initially in The Atlantic Monthly (1900) and were subsequently compiled with her fictional [...]

Federico, Annette R., ed. My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice. U Missouri P, 2020. 316 pages. Hardcover. $36. My Victorian Novel, edited by Annette Federico, gives us [...]

'All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.' Toni Morrison, 'The Site of Memory' On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a [...]

DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE FOREIGN In their edited volume The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (2014), Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti define detective fiction as 'a [...]

In their latest novel, The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi delves into the exploration of the violent death of one of its protagonists, Vivek Oji. Through [...]

Aramburu, Diana. Resisting Invisibility: Detectingthe Female Body in Spanish Crime Fiction. U of Toronto P, 2019. 296 pages. Hardcover. $30.82. In recent years, scholars from around the world and from [...]

Joyce, Laura, and Henry Sutton, editors. Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century CrimeFiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 292 pages. Paperback. $95.50. Domestic Noir is an edited collection of essays [...]

As two figures that exist on the margins of society and culture, the antiheroine and the stranger are uncannily alike in their boundary-crossing and liminal occupation of physical and metaphorical [...]

Despite the publication of Hubert Poppel's 2001 study, La novela policiaca en Colombia [The Detective Novel in Colombia], local writers have not demonstrated the kind of sustained engagement with the [...]

Crime fiction is a 'strange' genre traditionally situated at the paradoxical coordinates of best-selling success and academic marginality. (1) Often considered a subliterary type and associated with low-class entertainment, thrillers, [...]

Since her first novel, Lightning Field, appeared in 2001, Dana Spiotta has published new novels in five-year increments, with Eat the Document in 2006, Stone Arabia in 2011, Innocents and [...]

Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai, eds. Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster's Maurice. Liverpool UP, 2020. 296 pages. Hardcover. [pounds sterling]85.00/ $120.00 In the first book-length study of Forster's posthumously-published [...]

The fascination with nostalgia has marked British culture, and indeed the whole of European culture, from the 1970s onwards, asserts David Lowenthal (36). The currency of nostalgia notwithstanding, the phenomenon [...]

Fretwell, Erica. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling. Duke UP, 2020. 336 pages. Paperback. $28. Erica Fretwell's Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling examines [...]

Fiona Kidman is one of New Zealand's premier contemporary novelists with a writing career spanning about half a century. A prolific writer in multiple genres, including the novel, short story, [...]

'Women and Humour in the Long Nineteenth Century' British Association for Victorian Studies Conference 23rd - 26th June 2021 Online Event Can women be funny? After a 2017 conference on [...]

More than a one observer has called the work of Julian Barnes 'odd' or 'strange' (Greaney 225). Part of this surely comes from the form his books tend to take--some [...]

When we began collecting medieval texts featuring positive human-animal relations for our annotated anthologies, (1s we were surprised at the vast number of such texts our search uncovered, particularly in [...]

Tankard, Alex. Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Centur y Literature: Invalid Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 238 + ix pages. Hardcover. $99.99. Alex Tankard's Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth [...]

Pugh, Tison. Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays into Queer Ludonarratology. U of Nebraska, 2019. 282 pages. Hardcover. $55. Tison Pugh's monograph explores the play of queerness at the [...]

Brouillette, Sarah. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford UP, 2019. 192 pages. Paperback. $25. Sarah Brouillette's UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary is a monumental work of [...]

Emily Dickinson's poetry presents two conflicting strands of thought featuring a paradox of power and powerlessness. Some of her personae are small, meek and powerless, submitting to a larger force; [...]

Rachel Ferguson's eccentric 1931 novel, The Brontes Went to Woolworths, troubles many assumptions about modernism and the middlebrow and modernity's distinctions between these categories. The novel's meaning emerges only amidst [...]

Fielder, Brigitte, and Jonathan Senchyne, eds. Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print. U of Wisconsin P, 2019. The History of Print and Digital Culture. 318 pages. [...]

Goyal, Yogita. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York UP, 2019. 268+ viii pages. Paperback. $30. In this ambitious book, Yogita Goyal brings together a corpus of best-selling [...]

Friedman, Dustin. Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019. 248 pages. Paperback. $34.95. In Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman convincingly traces theoretical underpinnings of the [...]

Though seemingly counter-intuitive, the violence of enslavement has both sublime and traumatic dimensions that can be considered in relation to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [...]

Due to their remarkable ability to retrain perception and create an evocative 'illusion of preserving nature,' avant-garde film and VR nature videos often draw on slow and ecocinema aesthetics to [...]

Narratives of escape and transcendence are recurring threads in contemporary media art and cinema. These ideas not only permeate the art world, humanities, and filmic representations, but are fixtures of [...]

Remes, Justin. Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing. Columbia UP, 2020. 264 pages. Hardback, $95; paperback, $28. Justin Remes's second publication, Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing [...]

Jacobs, Steven, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik, eds. The City Symphony Phenomena: Art, Cinema, and Urban Modernity. Routledge, 2019. 360 pp. Hardback. $160. Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik's [...]

Laura Kraning is a contemporary moving image artist from the United States who inquires into landscape using non-fictional and experimental modes of filmmaking. Her films typically navigate strange, remote, or [...]

There is nothing like distance to Remove us from all ugliness. Gaspard-Felix 'Nadar' Tournachon (qtd. in Frizot 385) The city gave birth to the moving image, and the moving image [...]

MacDonald, Scott. The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2). Oxford UP, 2019. 504 pages. Hardback, [pounds sterling]93.00; paperback, [pounds sterling]25.99. The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc [...]

It would not be an error to say that the films of Joseph Cornell are both renowned and little known. Historians of the avant-garde and students of film, especially those [...]

Gifford, James. A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic. ELS Editions, 2018. 287 pages. Paperback. $28.00. If one were to construct a Venn diagram of ideal readers for [...]

Travelling, emigration, and immigration have featured so prominently in Paul Muldoon's poetry that his can deservedly be called an art of the late modern wanderer, for whom 'there is no [...]

When Lucky Jim first appeared in 1954, it received varied responses from different classes of readers and critics. Of course, the general response was favorable. It was positively reviewed by [...]

Orgelfinger, Gail. Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829. Penn State UP, 2019. 248 pages. Hardcover. $89.95. The story of Joan of Arc, told over and over since her [...]

What role does the father-daughter relationship play in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a 'biomythography' by the activist, writer, and poet Audre Lorde. (1) What is the place [...]

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar are two canonical works of fiction that go against the grain of the traditional (male) bildungsroman and its female [...]

Pate, George. Enter the Undead Author: Intellectual Property, the Ideology of Authorship, and Performance Practices since the 1960s. Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2019. 159 pages. Hardcover. $90. It was by coincidence [...]

Marshall, Emily Zobel. American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition, and Brer Rabbit,. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. 182 pages. Hardcover. $115. In one of the most well-known American trickster tales, Brer Fox sets [...]