Additional Publications
2020
Books
William Blake: Modernity and Disaster
Edited by Professors Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak | 2020
University of Toronto Press
William Blake: Modernity and Disaster explores the work of the Romantic writer, artist, and visionary William Blake as a profoundly creative response to cultural, scientific, and political revolution. In the wake of such anxieties of discovery, including the revolution in the life sciences, Blake’s imagination – often prophetic, apocalyptic, and deconstructive – offers an inside view of such tumultuous and catastrophic change.
Following the Formula in Beowulf, Örvar-Odds saga, and Tolkien
Professor Michael Fox | 2020
Palgrave Macmillan
Fox's book proposes that Beowulf was composed according to a formula. Michael Fox imagines the process that generated the poem and provides a model for reading it, extending this model to investigate formula in a half-line, a fitt, a digression, and a story-pattern or folktale, including the Old-Norse Icelandic Örvar-Odds saga. Fox also explores how J. R. R. Tolkien used the same formula to write Sellic Spell and The Hobbit. This investigation uncovers relationships between oral and literate composition, between mechanistic composition and author, and between listening and reading audiences, arguing for a contemporary relevance for Beowulf in thinking about the creative process.
Chapter: "The Indian Wife Abroad: Narrating Nation and Tradition in Popular Hindi Films" in Post-Colonial Praxis: Ramifications and Intricacies
Chapter by Anmol Dutta, PhD Student | 2020
Notion Press Publishing
This book offers a perspective of the future by looking through the scope of the past, meeting in a focal point of the present. The paradox echoed models concerns that are relevant to the current climate of the Global Economy: “Where are we now?” “How do we move forward?” The subthemes explored dissect the influence of Postcolonialism across a diverse spectrum and its relation to socio-economic application. Authors take a dive into the minds of a selected few of the foremost authorities on these disciplines, proposing their synopsis in a critical exploratory manner. Through these papers, the provocation that brings along revelation, enlightenment, introspection, refreshed perspective, context, self-realization and inevitably change, marks the genesis of a new frontier in chartering the way forward.
Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University
Professor Kim Solga | 2020
Routledge
Exploring how educators and institutions might embrace the STEAM turn to ensure that theatre and performance can be instrumentalto the neoliberal university, without being instrumentalizedby it, this volume showcases alternative models for teaching and learning in theatre and performance in a neoliberal age.
Originally a special issue of Research in Drama Education, this volume foregrounds the above ideas in six principal articles, and provides a range of potential models for change in twelve case study discussions. Detailing a variety of ‘best practices’ in theatre and performance education, contributors demonstrate how postsecondary educators around the world have recentred drama and performance by collaborating with STEM-side faculty, using theatre principles to frame and support interdisciplinary learning, and working toward important applications beyond the classroom. Arguing that the neoliberal university needs theatre and performance more than ever, this valuable collection emphasizes the critical contribution which these subjects continue to make to the development of students, staff, and institutions.
This book will be of particular interest to students, researchers, and librarians in the fields of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Applied Theatre, Drama in Education, and Holistic Education.
Conference Presentations
Dutta, Anmol. "Coro(Na)tionalist Solidarity Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic in India." Re:Locations 2020 Symposium: Resilience and Disaster: The Global South During COVID-19, University of Toronto.
2019
Books
Asemic The Art of Writing
Professor Peter Schwenger | 2019
University of Minnesota Press
In recent years, asemic writing—writing without language—has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Asemic is the first critical study of this fascinating field, proposing new ways of rethinking the nature of writing and exploring how asemic writing has evolved and gained importance today.
Citrus and Shadow
Jeffrey Reid Pettis, MA Student | 2019
Vocamus Press
Citrus and Shadow is a chapbook of lyric poetry, thoughtful and measured, deft and curious. It is a poetry that explores the world, not by dissecting it or pulling it to pieces, but by holding it closely and paying it full attention. Its challenge to the reader is that we also come to hold the world more closely, that we also pay it our full attention, so that we also can come to know it better.
Writing the Self in Illness
Amala Poli, PhD Student | 2019
Manipal Universal Press
Writing the Self in Illness: Reading the Experiential Through the Medical Memoir attempts to understand the contemporary turn to health narratives through closely reading medical memoirs. The author uses the term medical memoir for a narrative of illness that seeks to question, resist, and engage in a dialogue with prominent medical discourses and cultural perceptions. The book attempts to understand how individuals have reflected on their experiences of illness, redefined health for themselves, and responded to systemic and social depersonalization through the writing of memoirs. It encompasses select literary memoirs from the 1980s to 2017 that seek to explore perceptions of health and illness through various assimilations and rejections. In doing so, it also delves into the social and individual contexts of these memoirs to explore the embedded meanings and questions raised about love, hope, and recovery in the wake of illness. Writing the Self in Illness invites readers to a deeper exploration of the spectrum of health and its meanings for each of us.
A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age
Professor Kim Solga | 2019
Bloomsbury
To call something modern is to assert something fundamental about the social, cultural, economic and technical sophistication of that thing, over and against what has come before. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age provides an interdisciplinary overview of theatre and performance in their social and material contexts from the late 19th century through the early 2000s, emphasizing key developments and trends that both exemplify and trouble the various meanings of the term 'modern', and the identity of modernist theatre and performance.
Theatre and Performance vs the ‘Crisis in the Humanities’
Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
Professor Kim Solga | 2019
Routledge | Taylor & Francis Online
In this introduction here, guest editor Kim Solga reflects on the origins of the issue, details its scope, offers grounding definitions of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘the neoliberal university’, and charts one possible way forward, in hope.
Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose
Professor Jonathan Boulter | 2019
Edinburgh University Press
Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House and Beyond
Professor Miranda Green-Barteet | 2019
University Press of Mississippi
Under the Gamma Camera
Professor Madeline Bassnett | 2019
Gaspereau Press
Under the Gamma Camera is a frank portrait of our relationship with disease, exploring the contrary state of being that is illness. Rooted in her own experience of diagnosis, treatment and remission, Madeline Bassnett’s poems bristle with authenticity, with tactile and emotional detail available only to one who has lived it. A major preoccupation in these poems is reconciling the contradictory ways in which we experience illness and treatment—an experience at once deeply personal and human and also strangely impersonal and clinical. On one side is a catalogue of emotional responses, from denial, resistance and a sense of betrayal, to gratitude and relief; on the other, the strange detachment from our own body, the indifference of our corrupt cells to our fate, and the often alienating medical complex and the technology mobilized in our aid. Bassnett pays particular attention to the way the body is the medium through which all these things are experienced.
THE SUPERMARKET OF THE VISIBLE - Toward a General Economy of Images
Professor Jan Plug | 2019
Fordham University Press
Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described “a one hundred per cent image-space.” Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics.
Theory for Theatre Studies: Space
Professor Kim Solga | 2019
Bloomsbury Press
Her latest book provides a comprehensive introduction to the “spatial turn” in modern theatre and performance theory, exploring topics as diverse as embodied space, environmental performance politics, and urban performance studies. The book is written in accessible prose and features in-depth case studies of a range of performance works.
Professor Clarissa (Harwood) Suranyi | 2019
Pegasus Books
Pitched as Grantchester meets Great Expectations, Bear No Malice is the story of Tom, an Anglican priest and social reformer who has been covering up his mistakes and lying about his traumatic past for so many years that he no longer knows who he is. It’s also the story of Miranda, an artist and Lady of Shalott figure who is haunted by her own painful past. When Tom’s secrets catch up with him and his reputation is destroyed, he realizes that Miranda is the only person he trusts with the truth. What he doesn’t realize is that even if she believes him and returns his feelings, he can’t free her from the shackles of her past.
2018
Books
Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson
Cambridge University Press
A Heraldic Miscellany
Liverpool University Press
Queerness in Play
Palgrave Macmillan
The Patriot Poets - American Odes, Progress Poems, and the State of the Union
McGill-Queen's University Press
Book Chapters & Articles
Adams, M., Rambukanna, N., “Why do I have to make a choice? Maybe the three of us could, uh…”: Non-monogamy in Video Game Narratives”, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 18.2 (September 2018).
MacLean, A., “Writing Back To Massa: The Black Open Letter in Transnational Abolitionist Literature.” Reading Between the Borderlines: Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel, Ed. Gillian Roberts, McGill-Queen’s University Press (2018): 41-66.
Pennee, D., “Transatlantic Figures in The Imperialist: Public Sentiment, Private Appetite”, Canadian Literature 234 (Autumn 2017): 33-50 (published August 2018).
Shrivastava, N., "The Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Priya’s Shakti (2012)", South Asian Review (October 2018): pp. 1-15.
Sunder, J., “Religious Beef: Dalit Literature, Bare Life, and Cow Protection in India”, Interventions – International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (December 2018).
2017
Books
The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell
University Press of Florida
A Woman Killed with Kindness
Bloomsbury
Today's Medieval University
Arc Humanities Press
Performing Self/Performing Gender: Reading the lives of Women Performers in Colonial India
Manipal Universal Press
Peninsula Sinking
Biblioasis
In Peninsula Sinking, David Huebert brings readers an assortment of Maritimers caught between the places they love and the siren call of elsewhere. From submarine officers to prison guards, oil refinery workers to academics, each character in these stories struggles to find some balance of spiritual and emotional grace in the world increasingly on the precipice of ruin. Peninsula Sinking offers up eight urgent and electric meditations on the mysteries of death and life, of grief and love, and never shies away from the joy and horror of our submerging world.
2016
Books
Mandeville
Broadview Press
The historical appendices offer contemporary reviews, including Shelley’s letter to Godwin praising Mandeville, material explaining the novel’s complex historical background, and contemporary writings on war, madness, and trauma.
Pilgrimage
Baseline Press
Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England
This book is about the relationship of food and food practices to discourses and depictions of domestic and political governance in early modern women’s writing. It examines the texts of four elite women spanning approximately forty years: the Psalmes of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; the maternal nursing pamphlet of Elizabeth Clinton, Dowager Countess of Lincoln; the diary of Margaret, Lady Hoby; and Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth’s prose romance, Urania. It argues that we cannot gain a full picture of what food meant to the early modern English without looking at the works of women, who were the primary managers of household foodways. In examining food practices such as hospitality, gift exchange, and charity, this monograph demonstrates that women, no less than men, engaged with vital social, cultural and political processes.
The Value of Milton
Cambridge University Press
They Have All Been Healed - Reading Robert Walser
Northwestern University Press
Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama - Canon, Collaboration and Text
Cambridge University Press
Early English Poetic Culture and Meter: The Influence of G. R. Russom
Medieval Institute Publications
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives
University of Toronto Press
The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professionals
McFarland Publishing
2015
Books
Parables of the Posthuman - Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience
Wayne State University Press
Parables of the Posthuman approaches the experience of gaming by asking: What does it mean for the player to enter the machinic "world" of the game? What forms of subjectivity does the game offer to the player? What happens to consciousness itself when one plays? To this end, Boulter analyzes the experience of particular role-playing video games, including Fallout 3, Half-Life 2, BioShock, Crysis 2, and Metal Gear Solid 4. These games both thematize the idea of the posthuman—the games are "about" subjects whose physical and intellectual capacities are extended through machine or other prosthetic means—and also enact an experience of the posthuman for the player, who becomes more than what he was as he plays the game. Boulter concludes by exploring how the game acts as a parable of what the human, or posthuman, may look like in times to come.
Academics with an interest in the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture forms and video gamers with an interest in thinking about the implications of gaming will enjoy this volume.
Shakespeare and Textual Studies
Cambridge University Press
The Ecology of Modernism - American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics
The University of Alabama Press
Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare
Cambridge University Press
Introduction: Schelling After Theory
Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy
Balþos Gadedeis Aþalhaidais in Sildaleikalanda
Evertype
The first Gothic language translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, complete with introduction, commentary, and glossary.
Gothic (Gutiska razda or Gutrazda) was a continental Germanic language spoken by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths in many areas (most notably Spain and Italy) throughout antiquity and the early Middle Ages; while Gothic appears to have become functionally extinct sometime in the eighth century, some form of the language may have continued to be spoken in the Crimea until the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The Gothic Bible, translated from a lost Greek exemplar sometime ca. 360 CE by the Gothic bishop Wulfila, represents the earliest substantive text in any Germanic language. Gothic itself remains the only significant representation of the East Germanic branch of languages, which have since died off completely. Other extant works in Gothic include an exegesis of the Gospel of John known as Skeireins, a partial calendar, and some minor fragments. Unfortunately, all extant texts are incomplete, so it remains unknown to what extent the extant fragments are written in idiomatic Gothic, as well as exactly what dialect of Gothic they might represent.
This translation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” seeks to transport Carroll’s seminal work into the fourth-century Germanic world by Gothicizing both the language and environment of the original text.
We are no longer the smart kids in class
Guernica Editions
From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, We are no longer the smart kids in class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. A fantasia of academic disillusionment and deflating youth, this collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.
2014
Books
By Necessity and Indirection: Essays on Modernism in Canadian Literature
Tecumseh Press Ltd.
The Testimonial Uncanny
SUNY Press
Book Chapters & Articles
Adams, S.,“‘Speaking as an American to Americans’: James Russell Lowell’s 'Harvard Commemoration Ode' and the Idea of Nationhood” in Christopher Hebert & Martin Griffin, eds., American Political Fictions.
Ionica, C., “Masochism ± Benefits, or Acker with Lacan.” Literature and Pornography. Spec. issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory.
McDonald, R., "The Frame-Breakers: Thomas Pynchon's Posthuman Luddites." Canadian Review of American Studies.
Simonsen, R., “Dark Avunculate: Shame, Animality, and Queer Development in Wilde’s ‘The Star-Child’.” Children’s Literature.
2013
Books
Real Money and Romanticism
Cambridge University Press
The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies
The Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970
Oxford University Press
Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress
University of Toronto Press
Book Chapters & Articles
Adams, S., “Philip Freneau's Summa of American Exceptionalism: 'The Rising Glory of America' – Without Brackenridge” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Forthcoming in December 2013. Print.
King, F., “Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the Queer Space of the Book.” Wilde's Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Annette M. Magid. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013. Print.
Wenaus, A., "Twilight of Information Illiteracy: Kenji Siratori's Asemic Cyberpunk." Foundation 113 (2013): 29-48. Print.
2012
Books
Melancholy and the Archive
Bloomsbury
Shame and Guilt in Chaucer
Palgrave Macmillan
Praharfeast: James Joyce in Prague
Prague: Litteraria Pragensia
At the Borders of Sleep
University of Minnesota Press
Book Chapters & Articles
Groden, M. and Mahaffey, V., "Silence and Fractals: 'The Sisters'," in Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, edited by Vicki Mahaffey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012, pp. 23-47. Print.
Groden, M. and Mahaffey, V., "Silence and Fractals: 'The Sisters'," in Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, edited by Vicki Mahaffey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012, pp. 23-47. Print.
Northrup, K., "Lyric Scholarship in Controversy: Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson." Studies in Canadian Literature 37.1 (2012). Print.
Rajan, T., "Excitability: The (Dis)Organization of Knowledge from Schelling’s First Outline (1799) to Ages of the World (1815)." Romanticism and Modernity. Ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert Mitchell. New York: Routledge, 2012. 47-64. Print.
Rajan, T., "Romanticism and the Unfinished Project of Deconstruction." European Romantic Review, 23:3 (2012): 293-303. Print.
Saint-Amour, P.K., Groden, M., Shloss, C., Spoo, R., “James Joyce: Copyright, Fair Use, and Permissions: Frequently Asked Questions. The International James Joyce Foundation: Special Panel on Intellectual Property. May 2012. Web.
Stuart, T., "Recurring Dreams: Haunting Fantasy in John Fowles’ The Magus" in "Curious, if True": The Fantastic in Literature edited by Amy Bright. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 243-269. Print.
Taylor, C., "Shadows and Mysteries: Illusions of Imagined Communities in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction. Ed. Chitra Sankaran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. 79-93. Print.
Wenaus, A., "‘Spells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself’: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 23.2 (2012): 260-284. Print.
Wenaus, A., “Rhizomatic Horror: Eclipsed Narrative and Experimental Weird Fiction in Steve Beard’s Digital Leatherette”. Extrapolation 53.1 (2012): 1-23. Print.
Wennekers, M.E., "Genre, Non-correspondency, and the Fantastic Real in The Hound of the Baskervilles" in "Curious, if True": The Fantastic in Literature edited by Amy Bright. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 42-65. Print.
2011
Books
Elegies
Frog Hollow Press
Elegies address death and illness, and are primarily texts of feeling: harrowing word-borne devices that wrest the perspective of emotion from experience. Professor Bassnett’s poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Room of One’s Own and echolocation. In 2010, she was shortlisted for the Winston Collins/Descant Prize.
2010
Books
Romantic Narrative
John Hopkins University Press
Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, in Romantic Narrative noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel.
2009
Books
The Year's Work in Medievalism, 2008
WIPF and STOCK
Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance
Palgrave Macmillan
The Spread of Novels
Princeton University Press
Mary Helen McMurran explores the active movements of English and French fiction in the eighteenth century and argues that the new literary form of the novel was the result of a shift in translation.
2008
Books
Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement
Pearson Education India
Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation
Routledge
Shakespeare’s plays continue to be circulated on a massive scale in a variety of guises – as editions, performances, and adaptations – and it is by means of such mediation that we come to know his drama. M.J. Kidnie addresses fundamental questions about this process of mediation, making use of the fraught category of adaptation to explore how we currently understand the Shakespearean work.
2004
Books
Genetic Criticism - Texts and Avant-textes
University of Pennsylvania Press
This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. Genetic Criticism contains translations of eleven essays, general theoretical analyses as well as studies of individual authors such as Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Montaigne. Some of the essays are foundational statements, while others deal with such recent topics as noncanonical texts and the potential impact of hypertext on genetic study. A general introduction to the book traces genetic criticism's intellectual history, and separate introductions give precise contexts for each essay.
2003
Books
Paradise Lost
Penguin Classics
In Paradise Lost Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men', or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.
John Milton (1608-1674) spent his early years in scholarly pursuit. In 1649 he took up the cause for the new Commonwealth, defending the English revolution both in English and Latin - and sacrificing his eyesight in the process. He risked his life by publishing The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth on the eve of the Restoration (1660). His great poems were published after this political defeat.
2000
Books
Paradise Lost
Penguin Classics
John Leonard’s revised edition of Paradise Lost contains full notes, elucidating Milton’s biblical, classical and historical allusions and discussing his vivid, highly original use of language and blank verse.