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The Challenge of Ambivalence: Hitchens on Orwell Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Roseanna Webster
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The Real Age of Newspapers: Hitch, the Vanity Fair Years Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Stephen Smith
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Inclusive Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Kathryn Allan
Inclusive is an important term in modern times, central in governmental and institutional discourse on a range of issues, in educational settings, and in discussions about language policy. In its earlier meanings, some of which continue in use, inclusive marks the boundaries of what is and is not in a set, but it has also become a keyword in relation to social equality agendas, indicating a removal
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‘Too Straight’ for Fiction: Christopher Hitchens and No One Left to Lie To Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Ash Caton
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T.S. Eliot, Post-War Geopolitics and ‘Eastern Europe’ Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Juliette Bretan
Digressing from decidedly prosaic themes in a letter to his mother in December 1919 – a lingering cold, Christmas plans and a vague New Year's resolution of writing ‘a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time’ – to include a rousing, two-pronged critique against American apathy towards global peacemaking, and the complicated reconstruction of new nation-states, T.S. Eliot pulls no punches at
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Witch Hunt Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Peter Womack
Although almost nobody has been prosecuted for witchcraft since the eighteenth century, people are often accused of it today if we can believe Daniel Barenboim, John Bercow, Jair Bolsonaro, Novak Djokovic, Paul Gambaccini, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Luis Rubiales, Alex Salmond, Donald Trump, Jacob Zuma or the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.1 Over the last three or four years, all these people
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-01-02
No abstract is available for this article.
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Oh, Mr Hitchens! Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-12-17 Laura Kipnis
In 2010, when a book I'd written called How to Become a Scandal was going to press, my editor contacted Christopher to ask for a blurb. He sent back three choices, the first of which read, ‘Laura Kipnis promised me a blowjob if I endorsed her latest triumph, which I hereby warmly and devotedly do.’ I'm sure it says nothing good about me that I found this funny, especially since using it would have
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Terrorist Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Peter Womack
A few days after the massacre of civilians in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the BBC was criticised by Jewish groups, Conservative newspapers, and a chorus of MPs, including the leaders of both main political parties, for not referring to the perpetrators as ‘terrorists’. It is surprising that the political nation should respond to a terrible atrocity by conducting an argument about the use of
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Intelligence Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Holly Yanacek
Intellectual, not intelligence, was the headword in Raymond Williams's Keywords (1976, 1983).1 In the early twenty-first century, despite discussions of the rise of anti-intellectualism in the United States and in other places around the world, intelligence is the more complex and contested term. The meaning of the word intelligence has changed over the past six centuries in response to social, political
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-11-17
No abstract is available for this article.
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A Revolution of the Screw: Peripheralising Europe Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-11-12 Peter Boxall
‘Where is your “home” moreover now – what has become of it?’ Henry James, The Ambassadors, 438
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CHE Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Matthew Sperling
1 2010. Leafy mid-October in a university town. Early evening. Forty academics sitting in a ring for the Autumn Term meeting of CHE, the Campaign for Higher Education. ‘Hi, I'm Florence, I'm a Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at Whichcote College and I'm also social media officer for CHE’. The introductions take five or six minutes. The Chair, a Racine scholar, speaks about developments during the
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Afterword to the Critical Quarterly Special Issue ‘Peripheral Europes’ Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Timothy Garton Ash
After reading this set of fascinating essays in cultural-political analysis, one is left with an overwhelming question: Is there any Europe that is not peripheral? Is Europe actually the continent where everything, everywhere and everyone is liminal? If so, has not Critical Quarterly brilliantly subverted its own special issue title ‘Peripheral Europes’? Tempting though it is to pursue this conceit
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Habeas Corpus? Cultural Keywords, Statistical Keywords, and the Role of a Corpus in their Identification Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Martin Montgomery, Carol Ting
1.0 Prologue At the end of World War II, a young officer from the British army was granted immediate demobilization to return to Cambridge in order to complete his degree, which had been interrupted by the war. He had enlisted in the army in 1941 at the age of 20 and had led a unit of four tanks as part of the Guards Armoured Division during the battle for Normandy. After successfully completing his
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Neither Centre nor Periphery: Rethinking Postcoloniality through the Perspective of Eastern Europe Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-09-24 Daniella Gáti
In an early scene of the second season of the HBO TV series The Wire, the Baltimore police are confronted with the dead bodies of thirteen women who were found suffocated inside a shipping container. As they attempt to identify the Jane Does, the police interpret every object found on the women, and, by a seeming stroke of luck, recover a passport that reveals at least one of the women as a citizen
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The Ecstasy of Messaging: Coleridge's Natural Telegraphy Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-08-26 David Trotter
My topic is a hitherto unexamined aspect of the poetics and politics of a famous collaboration between Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth, by no means the only outcome of which was the publication in 1798 of the era-defining Lyrical Ballads.1 One of the reasons why that collaboration has possessed an especial and enduring resonance within and beyond British literary
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Theorising from the European South: Italy, Racial Evaporations, and the Black Mediterranean Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Gabriele Lazzari
In March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic had just begun to ravage through Italy and would soon sink its already struggling economy, the spectre of past divisions and internal fragmentations in the European project resurfaced with glaring clarity. As finance ministers of EU countries commenced discussions about a series of coordinated measures to support the economic recovery of member states, Northern
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Lessing's Legacy Explored Through Her Personal Archive Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Justine Mann
In 1998, having just published the second volume of her autobiography, ‘Walking in the Shade,’ Doris Lessing appeared at the University of East Anglia's Literary Festival for the third time in a decade. At the end of the interview while still on mic, following audience questions and during rapturous applause, her interviewer and friend, Professor Christopher Bigsby, asked Lessing if he could announce
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-07-20
No abstract is available for this article.
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At Last Someone is Saying It Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Peter Womack
The Daily Mail rather likes announcing that something or other has happened ‘at last’. At last Boris Johnson has ditched green dogma on energy; at last we have a political leader who knows what a woman is; at last the police are prioritising the victims in their approach to crime; at last we have a true Tory budget.1 The phrase is a little ambivalent. Certainly it is supportive: the reported action
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The shaping of character: The classics as a remedy for cultural despair in Victorian England Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Stephen Gaukroger
In an essay on Grote's History of Greece, John Stuart Mill remarked: ‘The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.’1 We may find this statement surprising, but Mill's contemporaries would not have. Just as nineteenth-century European scholars focused on the ancient Orient and its religions largely because they thought modern Eastern cultures
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Care Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Holly Yanacek
With global shortages of health-care workers, child care, eldercare and care for people with disabilities, news outlets around the world have reported a care crisis worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. In The Care Manifesto (Verso Books, 2020), the authors observe, ‘Rhetorically at least, governments worldwide have responded [to the pandemic], and in sharp contrast to 2019, talk of care is currently
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The Solitary Mind in the Anatomy of Melancholy Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Angus Gowland
It is a notoriously expansive and digressive book which divides and subdivides its subject matter into a bewildering variety of forms, and many readers have found the central theme of The Anatomy of Melancholy elusive, perhaps deliberately so, or even non-existent. Nevertheless, Robert Burton did provide his readers with an ‘Abstract’. Amongst the many additions that he made to the Anatomy, first published
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-04-27
No abstract is available for this article.
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‘To Save a Likeness’: Berger on Drawing & Resemblance Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Anna Hartford
The moment pen hovers above paper, the world divides. So recently just one form—a plum, say—it now splits into at least three. There is the plum as perceived by sight. There is the plum the mind anticipates: round, purple, of a certain size and density. And then there is the plum on the page; what the line itself can create and achieve. When a mark is made, so too ‘a microcosm’.1 With each succeeding
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“It’s Fucking Obvious!” Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Maria Horvei
The book consists of seven numbered essays. They can be read in any order. Four of the essays use words and images, three of them use only images. These purely pictorial essays … are intended to raise as many questions as the verbal essays. ‘Note to the reader’, Ways of Seeing Here’s a question: are the visual essays that make up almost half of Ways of Seeing important to Ways of Seeing? Fifty years
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Errata to ‘Parsing Time in the Lyric’ Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-04-27
David, Nowell Smith, ‘Parsing Time in the Lyric’, Critical Quarterly 64: 4 (2022) pp. 138– 54. https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12689.
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‘We Talked about Solitude’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Affective Bonding Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Melissa Alexander
Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.1 Woolf pictures Mansfield
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Passionate Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Peter Womack
A packet of soft brown sugar informs us that ‘Since 1878 our passionate team have been making and packing high quality sugar on the banks of the River Thames.’ There is an inadvertent touch of grotesque comedy to this: Tate and Lyle's employees seem to be Dickensian monomaniacs, kept alive by their inexhaustible enthusiasm for making and packing sugar and their sentimental attachment to the banks of
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-01-25
No abstract is available for this article.
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Consorting Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Steven Connor
Middle children are alleged to be calmer than first-borns because they make their entry in the second act – even if it is also in a sense as the second act – of a play that has already been going for some time. They assume that everybody else on the stage knows their lines and cues. Many inaugural enterprises depend on the shared confidence that others involved in them know why they are there and what
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Parsing Time in the Lyric Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-01-25 David Nowell Smith
Some years ago, at a point when the category of ‘lyric’ had, as it spasmodically does, become a source of academic controversy, it became increasingly prevalent to define lyric by way of a distinctive form of temporality.1 This started from the basic intuition that poems we call ‘lyrics’ tend to be short. Brevity seems a reassuringly neutral criterion, at once minimal and capacious; yet one can derive
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Deliver Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Peter Womack
Towards the end of her short-lived premiership, Liz Truss did a sixteen-minute television interview in the course of which she said ‘deliver’ thirty-three times.1 It was as if she believed that she could dispel the evidence of failure, and reassert a lost sense of business as usual, by merely uttering the word. It didn't work; the iterations became more frequent and desperate as the conversation went
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-10-23
No abstract is available for this article.
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The Humanities and the University: a Brief History of the Present Crisis Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-10-23 Joe Moran
The humanities in UK universities are under attack on two fronts. The first is economic. A new government orthodoxy has emerged: the New Labour target for increasing participation in higher education led to too many young people attending university. Arts and humanities courses at lower-ranking universities have come under scrutiny for offering students a poor return on their financial investment and
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Beyond Theory of the Lyric Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-10-23 Chris Scott
Introduction Stephanie Burt ends her review of The Lyric Theory Reader, which doubles as a helpful overview of the fractured field of lyric studies, with an appeal for a ‘synthesis’ between two opposing camps: Without contraries is no progression; let Culler’s, or Warton’s, or Albright’s, claim – that ‘lyric’ has almost always been with us in some form, even if it is not called by that name; even if
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Challenging Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-10-23 Peter Womack
Around the start of the millennium, corporate language was overtaken by a wave of positivity. All over the discursive field, institutions both private and public were advancing beyond their comfort zones, making themselves into beacons, undertaking step changes, developing vibrant cultures, adopting the way forward and delivering their visions. What might otherwise have been called problems were neutralised
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-07-17
No abstract is available for this article.
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A Letter on Decolonising the curriculum Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-07-17 Tomiwa Owolade
Decolonising the curriculum has been perhaps the most important slogan in British academic letters in recent years. In as far as it seeks to emphasise the role of colonialism and the concepts of race it developed in the process by which Western Europe dominated the globe from the sixteenth century on, and the importance of that process in the formation of European national literatures, it is a wholly
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Poetry Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-07-17 John Latta
It durst not merely gaze In abandonment or plug up The teleological with holes, uncountenance’d By anything beyond desire, new Desire and its new science. We get to its end By beginning some other thing, Shirtless and plugging away against Whatever tall indifference moves in To stake us to it, The way any vaunt’d sign Bringeth up a gall, or Fool scarecrow drowning in fen-
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Pronouns: we/us/our Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-07-17 Peter Womack
Today every bien pensant email signature displays the politics of the third-person pronoun, but arguably those of the first-person plural run deeper. The need to decide who ‘we’ are arises at the point of formation of any effectual group, and this makes it a precondition of political speech as such. You won't get far without an ‘us’. Of course, this is a large question for sociology and philosophy
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On vernacular capitalist-iconic-democratic-neoliberal-concrete-territorial-automotive assemblages: Gods in the Time of Democracy by Kajri Jain Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-07-17 Rahul Rao
Between 1995 and 1997, anyone driving from the centre of Bangalore to its old airport would have passed a giant white statue of the Hindu god Shiva in his traditional seated pose, rudraksha mala (bead garland) and serpent around his neck and a trishul (trident) and damaru (drum) in two of his four hands. In 1997, the statue abruptly disappeared from drive-by view on HAL Airport Road, obscured by a
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-04-03
No abstract is available for this article.
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Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021) Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-04-03 Santanu Das, George Potts
The six tributes included here were first delivered at the memorial event ‘Laura Marcus and Twentieth-Century Literary Studies’, a special meeting of Oxford’s Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Seminar which took place online on 20 October 2021. We have kept the tributes as they were originally delivered to retain the rhythm of that gathering. Before the event had even begun, we had reached
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Caspar David Friedrich and Iconographies of Religious Feeling Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-04-01 A.D. Harvey
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Chapters from an Abandoned History of English Literature Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Colin MacCabe
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-12
No abstract is available for this article.
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‘A problem to be faced about history’: Marion Milner on holiday Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-12 Akshi Singh
But these seasons, weather in the soul, not easy to forecast, to know when to lie fallow, when to sow, this only to be found by experiment. Marion Milner, Eternity’s Sunrise Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism I can’t see the least point in being in authority at the price of one’s liberty. Elizabeth von Armin, The Enchanted April The
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‘Redeeming the body’: Embodiment and the ‘other’ in the work of Marion Milner Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-12 Eve Dickson
Introduction In the afterword to The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987), an edited collection of Marion Milner’s psychoanalytic papers, Milner observes how few ‘technical psychoanalytic terms’ can be found in the book. At first seeming to slightly regret this absence, she quickly shifts her position to suggest that: it may be that this disinclination to use technical terms has helped me to get a
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‘A poet of human nature’: Marion Milner’s William Blake Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Emilia Halton‐Hernandez
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Between desire and uncertainty: Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again by Katherine Angel Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Agnes Meadows
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Introduction: Marion Milner: Modernism, Politics, Psychoanalysis Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Eve Dickson,Akshi Singh
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‘Action […] real and effective’: Marion Milner and ‘Expressive Action’ Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Helen Tyson
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‘A reasonably sheltered position’: Marion Milner, David Jones, and the location of art writing Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Hope Wolf
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Issue Information Critical Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-10-11
No abstract is available for this article.