Drawing on literary, historical and cultural studies perspectives, Sinéad Moynihan's Ireland, Migration and Return Migration examines the phenomenon of the “Returned Yank” in the cultural imagination. Taking as its point of departure The Quiet Man (1952), it provides a cultural history that charts the ways in which the Returned Yank indexes a set of recurring anxieties in … Continue reading
Tyranny and Usurpation – In Conversation with Doyeeta Majumder
Tyranny and Usurpation investigates the political, legal, historical circumstances under which the ‘tyrant’ of early Tudor drama becomes conflated with the ‘usurper-tyrant’ of the commercial theatres of London, and how the usurpation plot emerges as one of the central preoccupations of early modern drama. We caught up with Doyeeta Majumder to discuss this recent publication. Firstly, … Continue reading
An introduction to: The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual by General Editor John D. Morgenstern
In 1975, a contributor to the short-lived T. S. Eliot Review characterized the state of Eliot scholarship as an incomplete mosaic, with “the primary materials for research [. . .] either in jumbled disarray or missing entirely.” While a glut of memoirs flooded the literary marketplace, serious scholars lacked the “fundamental research tools” to fill … Continue reading
From catechisms to Voltaire: Religious tradition and change in eighteenth-century novels
Alicia C. Montoya explores how eighteenth-century readers might have moved from catechisms to Voltaire in her chapter of Les Lumières catholiques et le roman français (edited by Isabelle Tremblay), the latest volume to be published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Scholars of the Enlightenment have tended – like intellectual historians generally – to stress … Continue reading
Green Wigs? Ecology and the Long Eighteenth Century
Denys Van Renen explores the relationship between nature and "new science" in his latest book, the first to be published under the new partnership between the Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press. Without a doubt, the Restoration era always exceeds students’ expectations. Students arrive with images in their heads of powdered wigs and royal ceremonies; they leave savoring … Continue reading
