TagAcademic Essay

Nostalgia is a common theme across the Hong Kong cinematic canon, particularly in the New Wave films created during the transition period between the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong. This essay will focus on how nostalgia is configured and located in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1988) and Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) […]

In “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress,” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar quote Richard Chase: “Well, obviously Jane Eyre is a feminist tract, an argument for the betterment of governesses and equal rights for women” (338). This essay will argue that the novel is not at all this straightforward, and by some definitions, can be considered antifeminist. […]

For immigrants of any generation, or members of any underrepresented group, the pressure to define and explain one’s origin or identity is always complicated. In the novel Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai, birth and the body are reframed to justify the difficulties in classifying oneself. Through confronting conventions of birth and the use of shifting bodies, the novel challenges the notion of pure origins. In particular […]

The fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass both feature British children exploring mysterious Northern landscapes and encountering non-human and supernatural beings whose cultures and authority challenge British and Christian hierarchical understandings of existence […]

From the profane transformation of the body of the hanged man at the gallows into the body of the crucified Christ to the tainting of the Eucharist in the consumption of the body and blood of the dead, this paper intends to explore how examining the use of necrobotanicals through this lens of corrupted conversion offers a new perspective into Webster’s complex relationship with religious rituals in The White Devil […]

In Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, queerness circulates through the aesthetics of failure and fragility within the Cho family, and the losses that they desire and grieve as racialized and classed subjects. Racial melancholia, as formulated by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, circulates between members of the family as traces of emotional maps […]

The early modern tragic stage added to its cast of players the unruly member of the tongue. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy all dramatize the tongue’s power to transgress the boundaries of the body and interfere with bodily integrity […]

Published posthumously in 1763, Turkish Embassy Letters gives a detailed account of Montagu’s observations of Turkey and raises insightful critiques of Orientalism […]

Questions about the role of truth, authenticity, meaning, and authorial intent are not new to art and art criticism, yet the upswell of new forms made possible by new technologies cast these questions in a new light […]

The death and mourning of a loved one is an experience that is not exclusive to conventionally prescribed groups of people […]

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both explore instances of duality that negotiate issues of morality and self-control within the Victorian psychological conceptualization of dreams. By exploring popular psychological trends of the era and discussing their influence on dream studies and morality, a framework shall be developed to discuss the mental struggles in the novels[…]

This paper seeks to analyze naming strategies employed in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion and Charles Williams’ All Hallows Eve […]

In 1756, Edmund Burke defined the sublime as “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (49) […]

How do we conceptualize our world? Is it true to reality or do our histories become muddy in the remembering? As humans, idealization is irresistible. We idealize time periods […]

In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Lamb outlines three distinct conceptualizations of “popular culture” […]