No abstract is available for this article.

But now start the delightful surprises. Time becomes fluid […] And inside this fluidity a permanence, for the person who looks at the old face in the mirror is the same as the one who shares your earliest memories, when you were two, perhaps less: that child’s core is the same as the old woman’s. ‘Here I still am: I haven’t changed at all.’ Best of all, not ever predicted nor, I think, described, a

I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. […] The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje. — Doris Lessing, Going Home Born in the ruinous aftermath of the First World War, raised in southern Africa during the final years of the British Empire and emerging

No abstract is available for this article.

We live in a world of monsters Yōkai is an umbrella signifier for things we usually associate with terms such as monster, spirit, goblin, demon, phantom, spectre, shapeshifter, and so on.11 For a list of equivalent terms, see Michael Dylan Foster, Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore: The Book of Yōkai (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2015), 14. Originating in local legends

I begin with three sites of ruin and construction that occurred during the Covid‐19 pandemic this year.

It has become customary to say that racism has no place in something – in sport, in our organisation, in 2020, in society. The expression has been much repeated in the global response to the killing of George Floyd, but it was already current in the UK as a result of the travails of the Corbyn‐led Labour Party; people often prefaced their interventions in the debate on anti‐Semitism by declaring that

Every action carries with it some risk. For instance, driving carries risks related to personal health and wellbeing that may be realised in the event of an accident, investments have financial risks that depend on changing conditions in the markets, and personal and political viewpoints come with reputational risks that individuals must weigh. Our online lives are no different. Risks of identity theft

When students at Manchester University erased a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling and substituted an almost equally famous one by Maya Angelou, what did their action signify? They stated publicly that it was about colonialism. This critical account confirms their reading, but situates it among a set of supplementary oppositions: ease and difficulty, childhood and maturity, power and subordination. It

This article explores the origins of Critical Quarterly, situating it in relation to Leavisite ideas that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that CQ presented a modified version of the Leavisite project, stressing (against Leavis) the continued vitality of contemporary culture, and seeking to expand the readership for informed literary criticism beyond the walls of the university. This

This essay discusses the relationship between the invention of modernism as a category and the journal 'Critical Quarterly'.

While in the Sherlock Holmes canon Watson is married twice (and once widowed), the domestic scenario most frequently staged by the stories sees Holmes and Watson sharing 221b Baker Street, attended by their housekeeper Mrs Hudson. Holmes himself nostalgically looks back to this menage when he reunites with Watson after seeming to return from the dead at the beginning of The Return of Sherlock Holmes:

This paper explores the emergence of the arts and environmental charity Common Ground and their association with authors such as John Fowles and Alice Oswald. Drawing on the background of its founding members in environmental activism of the 1970s, it suggests a relationship between the charity’s response to the Thatcherite 1980s and the aesthetic strategies of the postmodern novel. But is also traces

Attacks on the status of the mandarin classes have become a common feature of public debate since Michael Gove’s famous declaration that we have all "had enough of experts". But Gove echoes some old themes in British political writing. This paper uncovers the source of those echoes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings on the ‘craft’ of government, and in contemporary satirical literature

Eighteenth-century satire’s deep immersion in and articulation of the prevailing visual epistemology of the Enlightenment has often been noted. But in the case of graphic satire the question of satire’s proximity to the optical metaphors, practices, and technologies of the period is especially complex. Graphic satire is, by definition, visual; its language is that of the image, or, more accurately

What does it mean when we say that computers can ‘write’ and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used structures of authorship in a technological age. The argument makes

Tom Raworth’s Logbook (1976) is considered as the central poetic text of a period of experimentation with prose which ran from 1969–1972, but which had a dispersed publication history. Through consideration of Raworth’s role in a parodic issue of the late Sixties avant-garde magazine, The English Intelligencer, Logbook is shown to satirise prose itself as the formal medium of both academic discourse

Henry James’s 1899 novel, The Awkward Age posits the adolescent girl’s movement forward into the future as an acute problem for the fin-de-siecle. The novel’s titular pun equates the awkward, individual, in-between time of adolescence with the awkward, collective, in-between time of the fin-de-siecle, leading us both towards the turn-of-the-century ‘invention’ of the modern adolescent, and towards

This essay assesses and compares the distinct comic registers of Wheatley’s adaptation and Ballard’s novel High-Rise. To understand how Wheatley’s adaptation has coarsened Ballard’s very particular take on the deadpan, it looks to the theories of Sigmund Freud and Paul de Man.

This essay considers the unusual blend of historicity and digitality present in Ben Wheatley’s Civil War period film, A Field in England. Focusing on the sometimes overlooked post-production techniques involved in the creative process (including colour-grading, sound design and editing), the essay argues that the film’s affective intensity is generated, at least in part, by the use of ‘digital anachronisms’