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‘An Act of Love’: The Representation of Bodily Autonomy and Free Choice in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’
In the afterword to ‘Bloodchild’, her self-described ‘pregnant man story’, Octavia Butler writes that she wanted to challenge herself to write a story of a man becoming pregnant ‘as an act of love — choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of difficult circumstances’. ‘Bloodchild’ imagines a world… Continue reading
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Liberty in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
As a text depicting the Fall of humanity, the question of liberty and by extension, free will, is central to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with questions of Adam and Eve’s freedom in the poem being the subject of extensive criticism. The discussion of the characters’ liberty—most commonly defined as self-government… Continue reading
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Human and Non-Human Entanglements in Mid-Late Medieval English Literature
Carolyn Dinshaw begins her chapter ‘Ecology’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies with a discussion of medieval roof bosses depicting humans with leaves sprouting from their heads and growing out of their mouths. The ubiquity of these sculptures across Europe, as ‘one of the most popular decorative motifs in… Continue reading
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Report: The voyages and adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto, A Portugal
The voyages and adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto, published in 1653, is the first English translation of Fernão Mendes Pinto’s 1583 memoir Peregrinação, which details Pinto’s experiences in various parts of the world not yet widely explored by contemporary European powers. In being translated into English at all—around the beginning… Continue reading
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Close Reading: Autobiography of Eve by Ansel Elkin
Wearing nothing but snakeskin boots, I blazed a footpath, the first radical road out of that old kingdom toward a new unknown. When I came to those great flaming gates of burning gold, I stood alone in terror at the threshold between Paradise and Earth. There I heard a mysterious… Continue reading
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“A Rich Man’s Whimsy”: Approaches to Rewilding in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border
In her 2015 novel The Wolf Border Sarah Hall depicts the phenomena of rewilding, a process in conservation biology whereby extirpated species are reintroduced to their original landscapes in an effort to decrease human intervention in nature’s processes. Set against the backdrop of an alternate Scottish independence referendum, Hall explores… Continue reading
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“Harlotrye” and “Moralitee”: Sexual (& Other) Violence in Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Reeve’s Tale’
Excluding ‘The Knight’s Tale’, the first fragment of The Canterbury Tales is characterised by “harlotrye” referring to crude jesting, not exclusively of a sexual nature as harlotry particularly means now. Chaucer represents harlotry as the antithesis of morality, or “virtuous conduct and thought” as in the ‘Miller’s Prologue‘ Chaucer the… Continue reading
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Close Reading: Opening of ‘The Miller’s Tale’, Geoffrey Chaucer
This carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf Which that he loved more than his lyf;Of eightene yeer she was of age.Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage,For she was wilde and yong, and he was oldAnd demed himself ben lyk a cokewold.He knew nat Catoun, for his wit… Continue reading
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Close Reading: ‘Sonnet 45’, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Mary Wroth
Good now be still, and doe not me torment, With [multituds] of questions, be at rest, And onely let me quarrell with my breast,Which stil lets in new stormes my soule to rent. Fye, will you still my mischiefes more augment? You saye, I answere crosse, I that confest Long… Continue reading