This article addresses the notion of formulaicity and the question of its applicability to the Old Norse skaldic corpus, a substantial part of which belongs to the pre-literate period of poetic composition (c. 850–1150). With few exceptions, scholars maintain that formulaicity, intended as an aid in versification, played a limited role in the composition of Old Norse poetry and...
The article discusses the supernatural in the autobiographical novel as reported by Stanišić (Herkunft, Luchterhand, Munich, 2019), the outstanding representative of contemporary post-Yugoslav migrant literature in German. The article focuses on the formal and narrative aspects of the representation of the supernatural, which is ultimately connected to magical realism. It...
I will discuss the first staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar produced at the Roman theater of Mérida. In 1955, José Tamayo–head of the Lope de Vega Theater Company–mounted Julius Caesar at the city’s Roman theater and amphitheater. José María Pemán wrote a free Spanish version of the play in verse. The company’s style, known as “Tamayoscope,” brought entertainment to the...
The literary depictions of the tirailleurs sénégalais, the West African French colonial troops who fought in World War I, in novels published during the conflict and in the interwar years were often little more than racist caricatures. Two works from the interwar period, Lucie Cousturier’s Des Inconnus chez moi (1920) and Raymond Escholier’s Mahmadou Fofana (1928), based on the...
Henry Bataille’s name is often classified among authors who are fond of the poetics of “boulevard theater”, which seems to perpetuate the canonical form of drama. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, this theater underwent an undeniable crisis that undermined the very foundations of Aristotelian aesthetics, particularly those of action. The questioning of tradition is...
This article contextualises the Anglo-Italian aspects of Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29. This fifteenth-century paper miscellany contains Bevis of Hampton, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, St Alexius, Libeaus Desconus, as well as a recipe collection, a section of Lydgate’s “Doublenesse”, and a fragment of Sir Isumbras. The book is among a very select number of codices...
A number of bloggers, journalists, teachers, and librarians have compared Elizabeth Acevedo’s 2019 young adult novel With the Fire on High with Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989), recommending that fans of Esquivel’s work pick up Acevedo’s—and vice versa. These suggestions echo Acevedo’s own comments about the narrative, which she has characterized as “parecido a...
This article characterises Quevedo's “musa décima”, his poetry not included in the posthumous editions, in order to deepen its features and to consider the future critical edition of the whole. The limits of the corpus are still blurred, due to the abundance of poems of doubtful attribution. After a brief contextualisation in the complex transmission of Golden Age poetry, the...
In this essay, I analyze the extent to which repetition can be considered creative in the context of penitential poetry, and what the ramifications are of that pairing for our own understandings of that poetry. When sin is inherited and confessions were guided by eminently repeatable formulae, how does penitential poetry come into being for the first time and enter penitential...
This essay analyzes the allegorical mode of the previously understudied poem by Robert Henryson, The Bludy Serk. In Serk, a knight saves a lady whom he loves from an evil giant, dying in the process. This story is then compared to the story of Christ's Passion, and the poem concludes by identifying the two stories as, in some sense, the same story. This narrative mode is best...
This article applies an ecocritical approach to the analysis of the nature/culture divide in Oscar Wilde’s “The Young King” and “The Star-Child”. These two tales contrast the realm of nature, embodied in the forest, and the realm of civilisation, represented by the city. Both stories focus on the protagonists’ journey from wilderness to the city, where not only do they need to...
The short eleventh-century lyric Hebban olla vogala is considered the earliest literary text in Dutch. Yet it only survives as a badly faded pen trial, written in England by a monk from the Low Countries. As a result, the exact reading of the text and even the language it was written in remain uncertain. Now, multispectral imaging of the manuscript has made it possible to provide...
Entgegen der Popularität von Joachim Ringelnatz’ (1883–1934) Märchen beim Lesepublikum, fehlt bislang eine diachrone Betrachtung seiner Neigung zur Märchengattung im Gesamtkontext der Entwicklung seiner Poetik. Die Forschungen zu seinen experimentellen Nachkriegsmärchen erläutern deren spezifische tonangebenden, disharmonischen Merkmale und deren Subversion der herkömmlichen...
Important authors of the Spanish Silver Age such as Vicente Aleixandre or Antonio Machado show, at some point in their work, the reading and influence of the romantic writer Carolina Coronado (1820–1911). This article analyses the reception of Coronado's work in Vicente Aleixandre's La Destrucción o el Amor (1935) (specifically, in the poem "La luna es una ausencia", which the...
Kevin Kuhn’s novel Hikikomori is a postmodern Entwicklungsroman. In this essay, I read the novel as a subversion of the neoliberal paradigm, which manifests itself in an omnipresence of self-optimisation options, that the protagonist Till is constantly encouraged to take advantage of. By withdrawing into his room and creating a collaborative online world, Till rejects the cult of...
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho detective novels comprise a seminal series, spanning eighteen novels from 1972 to 2004, that consolidated the novela negra as a popular, denunciatory genre in Spain. While much has been written about the early entries in the series, the latter novels, namely El hombre de mi vida (2000), Milenio I: Rumbo a Kabul, and Milenio II: En las...
Based on a study contrasting the spellings of the Ormulum’s (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1) Hand C with those of Orm, this article proposes that final < tt > did not necessarily indicate a short preceding vowel in the hypothesized spelling system which Orm sought to reform, and that the Ormulum’s double accent marks might serve to prophylactically counteract a spelling...
Marriage and the relationship between husband and wife in medieval literature have often been analyzed from many different points of view. However, there is an aspect which remains unexplored and this is the analysis from a discursive perspective of the conversation between the knight and his lady before he departs in search of adventures, war or whatever other reason. This study...
In 1964, Sudamericana Publishing House printed in Buenos Aires the second edition of the Spanish version of the novel Ferdydurke (1937) by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Apparently, it was identical to the first publication in Spanish (by Argos Publishing House, Buenos Aires, 1947); however, the text had been extensively revised according to Ernesto Sabato’s indications...
The ruined-city motif in the Old English poem The Wanderer (lines 73–87) has long been read as a reflex of traditional Germanic diction, and as a symbol of material transience. In line with more recent biblical readings of the poem, this paper identifies a number of analogues and possible sources for both the excidio urbis image and other images of transience, in the biblical...
For almost two centuries, Böðvarr bjarki has been a household name in Beowulf studies. The exploits of this monster-slaying champion of the Danish king match those of the epic hero at many points, and this has made Bjarki the subject of critical fascination. Many scholars have viewed the correspondences between Beowulf and Bjarki as evidence that certain aspects of Beowulf’s...
Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Nauigations (1589) was a landmark in the history of English travel literature which compiled and glorified the naval deeds and expeditions undertaken by the English throughout the world. This article focuses on the third volume of Hakluyt’s compilation devoted to America which gathers first-hand accounts describing the way of life and the natural...
The revision of the four-position theory of Old English metre by Yakovlev (2008) has had a considerable impact, both for its simplification of Sievers’ (1893) metrical principles, and for its supposed shift to a “morphological” rather than an “accentual” metrical type. I contextualize Yakovlev’s important contribution to metrical theory, highlighting that his main innovations are...
Halfway between orality and writing, the statement of the women accused by the Inquisition of practicing sorcery raises interpretive difficulties that are hard to resolve. The analysis of the confession made by Vicenta Graçia Almenar before the Inquisition of Valencia (1623) will allow us to detect some of the factors that mediate between the discourse of the woman and the text...
Agustín Moreto is one of the most outstanding authors of our Golden Theatre, because he was, in addition to Calderón, the main exponent of a form of composition that, together with collaborative writing, constitutes one of the most common dramaturgical modalities among secular poets: the rewriting. In this sense, the dramatic production of Agustín Moreto includes numerous motifs...