Journal Description
Humanities
Humanities
is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on the meaning of cultural expression and perceptions as seen through different interpretative lenses. Humanities is published bimonthly online by MDPI.
- Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
- High Visibility: indexed within Scopus, ESCI (Web of Science), ERIH Plus, and other databases.
- Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision is provided to authors approximately 30.4 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 5.4 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the second half of 2023).
- Recognition of Reviewers: reviewers who provide timely, thorough peer-review reports receive vouchers entitling them to a discount on the APC of their next publication in any MDPI journal, in appreciation of the work done.
Impact Factor:
0.3 (2022)
Latest Articles
Goethe’s Early Historical Dramas
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 67; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030067 - 25 Apr 2024
Abstract
In this essay, Goethe’s early historical plays, Götz von Berlichingen, published in 1773, and Egmont, published only in 1787, are compared. So far, scholarly work has not recognized enough of the differences between both works. Goethe’s intellectual development from the young
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In this essay, Goethe’s early historical plays, Götz von Berlichingen, published in 1773, and Egmont, published only in 1787, are compared. So far, scholarly work has not recognized enough of the differences between both works. Goethe’s intellectual development from the young Storm and Stress writer of Götz to the publication of Egmont fourteen years later has not been considered sufficiently. Goethe’s development is clearly reflected in his protagonists’ deeds and intentions. Goethe’s Götz fights predominantly for his own rights and his family. Egmont aims higher; he is more concerned with the welfare state of society and reflects on political issues Götz is unable to consider. Moreover, Goethe takes, in both cases, poetic license to create a different picture of his protagonists’ failures than historical sources provide. This finally leads to the introduction of the term preclassic to differentiate between Götz and Egmont.
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(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
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To Speak with the Other—To Let the Other Speak: Paul Celan’s Poetry and the Hermeneutical Challenge of Mitsprechen
by
Alexandra Richter
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 66; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030066 - 24 Apr 2024
Abstract
This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or “with-speaking” in Paul Celan’s poetry. “With-speaking” supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan’s notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of
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This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or “with-speaking” in Paul Celan’s poetry. “With-speaking” supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan’s notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of dialogue, challenges the separation between author and interpreter, rendering the traditional concept of intertextuality inadequate. The poems, according to Celan, give voice to human destinies, making texts audible as the voices of others. This vocal dimension of Celan’s poetry has prompted extensive discussion among philosophers, particularly in France. Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, influenced by German phenomenology and hermeneutics, critically examine the ethical implications of speaking “about” the other. They challenge traditional hermeneutical practices, emphasizing the responsibility of interpreters to respect the unique and untranslatable character of individual voices. This critique extends to Protestant categories of interpretation, drawing on alternative Jewish perspectives on being-in-the-world and alterity. The text explores the tensions inherent in speaking “for” or “in the name of” others, especially in the context of interpreting Celan’s work, raising questions about maintaining the fundamental difference and distance that otherness implies. The discussion concludes by highlighting Werner Hamacher’s formulation of a new philology that disrupts hermeneutical violence, influenced by the critiques of Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, and offering an alternative way of addressing the particular challenges posed by Celan’s poetry.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
Open AccessArticle
“Damn the Empire!”: Imperial Excess, National Nostalgia, and Metaphysical Modernism in the Poetics of Parade’s End
by
Molly Elizabeth Porter
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 65; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020065 - 22 Apr 2024
Abstract
Ford Madox Ford famously intended his First World War tetralogy Parade’s End to have “for its purpose the obviating of all future wars”. But why do we engage in war to begin with? Modernist literature provides some provocative explanations. Ford’s Sylvia Tietjens, for
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Ford Madox Ford famously intended his First World War tetralogy Parade’s End to have “for its purpose the obviating of all future wars”. But why do we engage in war to begin with? Modernist literature provides some provocative explanations. Ford’s Sylvia Tietjens, for example, proclaims that “You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women. It was what war was for”. And in the very same year, Virginia Woolf’s shell-shocked Septimus Smith “went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare…” I argue that Ford’s understanding of the causality of war involves a strange combination of these two explanations in Parade’s End’s triangulation of seventeenth-century English literary tradition along with sexual and imperial conquest. While countless modernist novels exhibit a sensibility to the power of early modern poetry amidst battle, Parade’s End displays a particularly emphatic and extended focus on the relationship between poetic tradition and war. Soldiers of various ranks “talk…in intimate undertones about the resemblances between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet form”, host timed sonnet competitions in the trenches, recurringly quote the seduction poetry of Marvell, and fantasize about George Herbert’s lifespan being “the only satisfactory age in England…yet what chance had it today? Or, still more, to-morrow?”. To answer this question, my own transtemporal study will use early modern scholarship to investigate seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry’s dual power to inspire and potentially obviate war. Much has been written on this tetralogy’s anti-linear plot but less on the broader temporality of its politico-literary vision. I contend that the metaphysical allusions of this text help Ford to show us the complexities of nationalism in the imperial conquest and imperial damnation that (early) modern aesthetics can catalyse.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ford Madox Ford's War Writing)
Open AccessArticle
Mordaith in Mallorca: Playing with Toy Tourism
by
Hazel Andrews
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020064 - 19 Apr 2024
Abstract
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This paper is an exploration of play in tourism. It is situated in an approach to play and toys informed by phenomenological perspectives and theoretical insights drawn from existential anthropology. It argues that tourism and play are intimately linked and outlines the ways
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This paper is an exploration of play in tourism. It is situated in an approach to play and toys informed by phenomenological perspectives and theoretical insights drawn from existential anthropology. It argues that tourism and play are intimately linked and outlines the ways in which connections between the two have been made. This paper focuses on a particular practice of play in travel—one that involves the use of a toy. Using the notion of ‘toy tourism’, I examine the ways in which touristic practices associated with play are brought into being in the moment of doing. The research is located in the resorts of Palmanova and Magaluf on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. I conducted the research using a doll from the Barbie Fashionista range, who I named Mordaith. I outline how and why Mordaith became my travel companion and the experience and events associated with my time with her in the resorts. This paper recounts the story of what happened when I brought about the play of toy tourism in Mallorca. It is an experimental approach that unfolds in the writing as much as in the gathering of information during fieldwork. I argue that what play is, and what a toy is, are neither fixed nor graspable objectivities. Rather, both toy and play, and, thus, toy tourism, emerge in my embodied imaginative understanding of what touristic and toy tourism practices are, as well as the actual embodied and emotional movements of employing a toy in practice.
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Dorsal Practices—Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World
by
Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 63; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020063 - 07 Apr 2024
Abstract
Dorsal Practices is a process-based, interdisciplinary artistic collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer–artist Emma Cocker. This research enquiry explores the notion of dorsality and the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to the self,
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Dorsal Practices is a process-based, interdisciplinary artistic collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer–artist Emma Cocker. This research enquiry explores the notion of dorsality and the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to the self, others (human, more-than-human), and interconnected world. Since 2021, Dorsal Practices has unfolded through the interrelation of three fields of experimental, embodied research practice: movement-based practices, conversation practices, and experimental reading practices. Dorsal Practices explores how the tilt or inclination towards dorsal (dis)orientation might enable new modes of thinking–perceiving and being–with, and more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness based on the reciprocal, entangled relationship between self/environment. We ask: How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our embodied, affective, and relational experience of being-in-the-world? Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? Central to this enquiry is an attempt to explore how different linguistic practices might be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality: how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied)
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Open AccessArticle
Sounding Grief in Henry Dumas’s “Echo Tree”
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Timothy Pantoja
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020062 - 07 Apr 2024
Abstract
“Sounding Grief in Henry Dumas’s ‘Echo Tree’” engages Dumas’s experimental short story about two youths discussing how to speak to the dead while on a Southern hillside at dusk. This article studies how this short story meditates on how grief affects our engagement
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“Sounding Grief in Henry Dumas’s ‘Echo Tree’” engages Dumas’s experimental short story about two youths discussing how to speak to the dead while on a Southern hillside at dusk. This article studies how this short story meditates on how grief affects our engagement with and reliance upon voiced languages to express a desire for communion that persists beyond death. “Echo Tree”, the article argues, reveals how openness to grief, and the subsequent desire for communication with the dead, improves the imaginative capacity needed for empathetic alignment among the living. In its presentation of the psychological and imaginative difficulties of performing a call-and-response with the dead, “Echo Tree” also analogizes how a reader engages in an act of call-and-response with a muted acousmatic voice from the printed page.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sound Studies in African American Literature and Culture)
Open AccessArticle
‘I Don’t Want to Be Other. I Want to Be Normal’: Mental Boundaries and the Polish Experience in the UK in Agnieszka Dale’s Fox Season and Other Short Stories
by
Isabel María Andrés-Cuevas
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 61; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020061 - 06 Apr 2024
Abstract
Borders and frontiers are often problematized in Agnieszka Dale’s Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), where mental borders seem to be more divisive than spatial boundaries. Many of these narratives feature Polish immigrants in Britain who struggle with their displaced condition in
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Borders and frontiers are often problematized in Agnieszka Dale’s Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), where mental borders seem to be more divisive than spatial boundaries. Many of these narratives feature Polish immigrants in Britain who struggle with their displaced condition in various ways. As some of the stories in the collection reveal, the scenario of post-Brexit Britain compromises conviviality amongst different groups, including the Polish community. Special attention is placed upon how several narratives in the volume underscore the prevalence in British society of Polish stereotypes as the crystallisation of the still widespread animosity against non-Europeans. Homi Bhabha’s notions regarding the formation and dynamics of stereotypes will be helpful in understanding the mechanisms beneath such constructions. Likewise, some of the major tenets of social theory, as well as Edward Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’, will contribute to shedding light upon this resentment towards the Polish minority, occasionally adopted too by already established immigrants against their former compatriots. This article will ultimately intend to draw attention to the cautionary nature of Dale’s collection as a call for harmony and the appreciation of difference among nations, thus preventing the gloomy perspectives the dystopian futures of some of these stories forecast upon Europe.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Border Politics & Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature)
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“Until It Suddenly Isn’t”: Two Novels on Life after a Pandemic Disaster
by
Åsa Nilsson Skåve
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020060 - 04 Apr 2024
Abstract
This article investigates two recent novels that deal with environmental and pandemic disasters: Severance (2018) by Ling Ma and Under the Blue (2022) by Oana Aristide. The analysis is based on ecocritical and posthumanist perspectives and on a division made by Chakrabarty (Planetary
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This article investigates two recent novels that deal with environmental and pandemic disasters: Severance (2018) by Ling Ma and Under the Blue (2022) by Oana Aristide. The analysis is based on ecocritical and posthumanist perspectives and on a division made by Chakrabarty (Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being Modern), in two different understandings of the globe: one connected to the planetary-focused discourse on global warming and the other on human-centered globalization. The clashes of these discourses are highlighted in the novels. They illustrate a process of understanding that humans are not separate from the natural world, through the disease itself and through the sudden need to survive without modern healthcare and all the comfort we are used to being able to buy. The gradual insight of the depicted characters, and perhaps also the readers of the novels, is that we live on a planet of extreme complexity and interdependence.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue World Literature in the Times of Pandemics and Plagues)
Open AccessArticle
Dante’s Political Eschatology: Resurrecting the Social Body in Paradiso 14
by
Filippo Gianferrari
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 59; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020059 - 02 Apr 2024
Abstract
This article investigates Dante’s engagement with one of the key and most controversial academic questions of the late Middle Ages: the beatific vision after the general resurrection. This essay focuses on Paradiso 14, where the character of King Solomon explains that the souls’
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This article investigates Dante’s engagement with one of the key and most controversial academic questions of the late Middle Ages: the beatific vision after the general resurrection. This essay focuses on Paradiso 14, where the character of King Solomon explains that the souls’ vision of God will increase after reuniting with their resurrected bodies. After briefly reconstructing the theological debate engaged by Dante’s treatment of the general resurrection, and discussing the prevailing tendencies in the scholarship on Paradiso 14 and the body–soul relationship in the Commedia, this essay provides a new interpretation of this canto from a social and political perspective. It argues that in Dante’s eschatological vision, the resurrected body appears to be essential for the ultimate fulfillment of humanity’s social nature.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue “In terra per le vostre scole” (Par. XXIX, 70): Dante’s Paradiso and the Medieval Academic World)
Open AccessArticle
A Snapshot of Ongoing Transculturalism in Britain: Refugee NGO Website Personal Narratives and Global Border Crossing—A Case Study
by
Eduardo De Gregorio-Godeo
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 58; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020058 - 28 Mar 2024
Abstract
With a focus on refugees’ written personal narratives on refugee NGO websites, this paper examines ongoing transculturalism in Britain and its interplay with globalization and current international migration. Conceiving such personal narratives as cultural texts pertaining to refugee narratives as a broad genre
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With a focus on refugees’ written personal narratives on refugee NGO websites, this paper examines ongoing transculturalism in Britain and its interplay with globalization and current international migration. Conceiving such personal narratives as cultural texts pertaining to refugee narratives as a broad genre that encompasses different storytelling modalities, those personal stories on refugee NGO websites are explored from a cultural studies perspective. CDA is employed as a methodology for this cultural studies-oriented piece. A qualitatively oriented case study is accordingly presented based on the detailed examination of an example of such written narratives on the website of one such refugee NGO in the UK so as to instantiate and contribute to disentangling the articulation of this characteristic form of ongoing transculturalism. Special emphasis is laid on the discursive construction of refugees’ transcultural identities in such narratives through their participation in those global border-crossing processes characteristic of the contemporary landscape.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Border Politics & Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature)
Open AccessArticle
A Place to Meet: Community and Companionship in the Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women, 1895–1905
by
Mary Chapman
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020057 - 27 Mar 2024
Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, British women were able to qualify as medical doctors and enter professional practice for the first time. However, they often remained excluded from the specialist journals which were crucial for knowledge exchange during this period. As
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At the turn of the twentieth century, British women were able to qualify as medical doctors and enter professional practice for the first time. However, they often remained excluded from the specialist journals which were crucial for knowledge exchange during this period. As a result, they formed several of their own periodicals, including the Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women (1895–1947), which this paper discusses. Significantly, the Magazine not only provided female doctors with the opportunity for intellectual communication, but social interaction too. This paper will explore how the periodical regularly published community-building content, which emphasised friendship as a key component of female doctors’ relationships. The Magazine encouraged the sharing of humour, stories, and intimate news which both articulated and generated companionship amongst subscribers. Through this content, the Magazine wove professional connections into personal bonds, telling a story of medical sisterhood and offering a welcoming textual meeting place to a disparate network of female doctors.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Medicine)
Open AccessEditorial
Refugees and Representation: Introduction—The Mimesis of Diaspora
by
Adam Zachary Newton
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 56; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020056 - 22 Mar 2024
Abstract
In keeping with the title we have chosen for this follow-up volume to the Special Issue “Ethics and Literary Practice I”, we frame our introduction and summary of the essays collected here with a brief archaeology of modern literary realism at its conjoined
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In keeping with the title we have chosen for this follow-up volume to the Special Issue “Ethics and Literary Practice I”, we frame our introduction and summary of the essays collected here with a brief archaeology of modern literary realism at its conjoined genesis in classical Greece and the ancient Near East; such contextualization serves as a prescient backdrop for the varied focus, across a compilation of thirteen articles, on refugees and their representation [...]
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ethics and Literary Practice II: Refugees and Representation)
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Mário Filho’s O Negro No Futebol Brasileiro (The Black Man in Brazilian Soccer) under and beyond the Shadow of Gilberto Freyre
by
Mario Higa
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020055 - 20 Mar 2024
Abstract
This article aims to provide the reader with a brief introduction to Mário Filho’s O negro no futebol brasileiro (The Black Man in Brazilian Soccer). While emphasizing the importance of this classic book, I will discuss a few of its central
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This article aims to provide the reader with a brief introduction to Mário Filho’s O negro no futebol brasileiro (The Black Man in Brazilian Soccer). While emphasizing the importance of this classic book, I will discuss a few of its central ideas, the context in which these ideas were produced, and how they came to shape the perception of sports and race in Brazil. Furthermore, in the last sections of this article, I will examine how issues of genre classification regarding Mário Filho’s book have affected the way it has been read and interpreted over the years.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Decolonization in Lusophone Literature)
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‘[M]en’s Dwellings Were Thin Shells’: Uncertain Interiors and Domestic Violence in Ford Madox Ford’s War Writing
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Max Saunders
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020054 - 18 Mar 2024
Abstract
The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford’s Parade’s End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominates in his war
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The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford’s Parade’s End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominates in his war writings and often produces its most memorable passages: images of houses or house-like shelters. The mind seeks protection in such structures; but they offer little security against the destructiveness outside, against the bombardments, gas, shrapnel, bullets. Ford wrote that the experience of war revealed: ‘men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. … all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields […]’. This realisation works in two ways. The soldier’s sense of vulnerability provokes fantasies of home, solidity, sanctuary, while for the returnee soldier, domestic architecture summons war-visions of its own annihilation: ‘it had been revealed to you’, adds Ford, ‘that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos’. It is now customary to read war literature through trauma theory. Building on analyses of Ford’s use of repression, but drawing instead on object relations theory, I argue that Ford’s houses of war are not screen memories but images of the failure of repression to screen off devastating experiences. The abysses of Chaos can be seen through the screen or projected upon it. Attending to Ford’s handling of this theme enables a new reading of his war writing and a new case for its coherence. The essay will connect the opening of No More Parades (in a hut, during a bombardment) with the war poem ‘The Old Houses of Flanders’; the postwar poem A House; the memoir It Was the Nightingale (quoted above); and the otherwise puzzling, fictionalised memoir No Enemy, structured in terms of ‘Four Landscapes’ and ‘Certain Interiors’.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ford Madox Ford's War Writing)
Open AccessArticle
Sibling Rivalry, (Dis)Inheritance and Politics in Aphra Behn’s The Younger Brother and Susanna Centlivre’s The Artifice
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Margarete Rubik
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 53; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020053 - 15 Mar 2024
Abstract
Behn and Centlivre used their comedies about the rivalry between an elder and a younger brother concerning an inheritance to make a political statement. Primogeniture was customary in early-modern England, and if an estate was entailed (rather than held in fee simple), it
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Behn and Centlivre used their comedies about the rivalry between an elder and a younger brother concerning an inheritance to make a political statement. Primogeniture was customary in early-modern England, and if an estate was entailed (rather than held in fee simple), it was difficult, though not impossible, to will it away to another person. The reasons meriting disinheritance were widely discussed, but in the two plays, the Tory fathers disinherit their Whig elder sons for political reasons. As The Younger Brother was staged posthumously and altered by Charles Gildon, it is arguable what Behn’s manuscript looked like, but there are indications that the elder brother was meant to be a downright republican and that Behn saw to it that the estate would go to the Tory younger brother, whose political stance she shared. In The Artifice, the father disinherits his upright elder son because he punished a Jacobite clergyman (whom the Whigs would have considered traitorous), but Centlivre—a zealous Whig herself—engineered an ending that reinstates the elder brother but also provides the younger with a comfortable income. Both dramatists also dealt with the inheritance prospects of women and the power of disposal they have over their portions.
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(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
Open AccessArticle
Bloody Petticoats: Performative Monstrosity of the Female Slayer in Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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Michelle L. Rushefsky
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 52; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020052 - 14 Mar 2024
Abstract
In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sparking a subgenre that situates itself within multiple genres. I draw from the rebellious nature of nineteenth-century proto-feminists who tried to reclaim the female monster as an initial methodology to analyze Grahame-Smith’s
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In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sparking a subgenre that situates itself within multiple genres. I draw from the rebellious nature of nineteenth-century proto-feminists who tried to reclaim the female monster as an initial methodology to analyze Grahame-Smith’s Elizabeth Bennet. I argue that the (white) women in this horror rewriting inadvertently become the oppressors alongside contextualized zombie theory. This article also explores Grahame-Smith’s Charlotte Lucas as a complex female monster, as she is bitten and turned into a zombie, which reflects in part Jane Austen’s Charlotte’s social status and (potential) spinsterdom. It is the mythos of the zombie that makes Grahame-Smith’s Elizabeth Bennet’s feminist subversion less remarkable. And it is Charlotte’s embodiment of both the rhetorical and the religio-mythic monster that merges two narratives: the Americanized appropriated zombie and the oppressed woman. Grahame-Smith’s characters try to embody the resistance of twenty-first feminist sensibilities but fail due to the racial undertones of the zombie tangentially present in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Re-imagining Classical Monsters)
Open AccessArticle
Antiracism and Black Self-Defense in the Face of (Juridical) Catastrophe
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Adam Burgos and Khalil Saucier
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 51; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020051 - 13 Mar 2024
Abstract
In this paper we analyze the relationship between antiracism and black self-defense. We draw a distinction between liberal and political black self-defense and argue that antiracism can at most sanction a juridical and individualistic notion of self-defense rather than a communal one. We
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In this paper we analyze the relationship between antiracism and black self-defense. We draw a distinction between liberal and political black self-defense and argue that antiracism can at most sanction a juridical and individualistic notion of self-defense rather than a communal one. We argue that any and all theoretical conceptions of contestation, resistance, or revolution need to seriously grapple with the necessity of theorizing black self-defense. In doing so, we thematize antiblack violence through accounts of self-defense given by black radicals. Together, these arguments outline a perpetual conditional threat of violence against any and all black freedom projects, which in turn justifies enunciative black counterviolence.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Global Antiracism)
Open AccessArticle
Against Exceptionalism
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Zahi Zalloua
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020050 - 12 Mar 2024
Abstract
In this article, I question the logic informing paradigms of trauma that ontologize and essentialize events, such as the Holocaust and chattel slavery, making them unique, incomparable exceptions that encapsulate or inaugurate the violence of Western modernity, while standing outside and above the
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In this article, I question the logic informing paradigms of trauma that ontologize and essentialize events, such as the Holocaust and chattel slavery, making them unique, incomparable exceptions that encapsulate or inaugurate the violence of Western modernity, while standing outside and above the order they found. In an effort to avoid the urge to rank that follows almost effortlessly from such ontologization, I mobilize the appeal to the universal undergirding the works of Slavoj Žižek and that of Frantz Fanon. Both Fanon and Žižek read racial trauma and racist violence in light of the eviscerating ontological effects of an imperialist capitalism that divides the world and segregates its peoples. Rather than opting for identity politics, however, these thinkers argue against ontologizing and exceptionalizing victims, in favor of elaborating a politics based on their concrete universality.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Global Antiracism)
Open AccessArticle
The Ordinary Looks behind the Horrifying Screams: The Secrecies of Border Spirits in 20th Century Finnish Belief Narratives
by
Kari Korolainen
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 49; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020049 - 12 Mar 2024
Abstract
This paper discusses the secrecies of border spirits within 20th century Finnish belief narratives. The aim is to explore how and in which contexts the imaginary aspects of border spirit narratives link to the idea of the “power of storytelling”. The following study
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This paper discusses the secrecies of border spirits within 20th century Finnish belief narratives. The aim is to explore how and in which contexts the imaginary aspects of border spirit narratives link to the idea of the “power of storytelling”. The following study touches on areas such as the suspension of the fantasy and sociopolitical aspects within the narratives. The folklore materials focus mainly on the Finnish heartland and partly on the national borders. Especially, narrative research methods were used to analyse what is heard and seen of the border spirits and what contexts these narratives involve. Moreover, the results touch on the dynamics of belief narratives without limiting them to the territorial aspects of borders. Hence, the study also explores interpretative bridges between folklore and border studies.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Seen and Unseen: The Folklore of Secrecy)
Open AccessArticle
The Pragmatics, Poetics, and Ethics of Pronouns in Ford Madox Ford’s War Prose
by
Isabelle Brasme
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 48; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020048 - 08 Mar 2024
Abstract
This essay adopts a stylistic approach to delineate the various—and varying—pragmatic effects inherent in the use and interactions of pronouns in Ford’s war prose. Ford’s singular use of pronouns is shown to be instrumental in his practice of literary impressionism. In particular, the
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This essay adopts a stylistic approach to delineate the various—and varying—pragmatic effects inherent in the use and interactions of pronouns in Ford’s war prose. Ford’s singular use of pronouns is shown to be instrumental in his practice of literary impressionism. In particular, the omnipresent second person is granted a variety of referents that coexist along a “continuum of reference” (as defined by Bettina Kluge), from a “you” that is speaker-oriented to one that is addressee-oriented. Sorlin’s intersection of Kluge’s continuum with a gradient from personalisation to generalisation (2022) is illuminating when examining the manifold significance of Ford’s use of the second person, as it brings to light its ethical impact. Ford’s war essays shift from the general to the particular and from the collective to the individual in a manner that opposes propaganda rhetorics. Furthermore, the gradient established by Sandrine Sorlin to account for the pragmatic effect of “you” also proves remarkably useful when applied to the pronoun “one”. Scrutinising the interplay between these various pronouns allows us to investigate the multifarious relationships that Ford establishes in his war essays between the persona, the reader, those he often called “my men”, and the collective ethos of wartime Britain.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ford Madox Ford's War Writing)
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