TagAcademic Essay

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” […]

Prominent American linguists Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir claimed that language affects worldview. As a key proponent of linguistic relativity, Whorf asserted that differences between languages, particularly in the treatment of categories such as colour and time […]

The act of bleeding is fundamentally transgressive, as it reveals what is suppressed, inherited, and predisposed: our mortality and genetics […]

In The Virtues of Our Vices, Emrys Westacott considers an act in today’s society ‘rude’ so long as it satisfies two conditions: if it “violates a social convention; and if the violation were deliberate, indicating a lack of concern for another person’s feelings” (18). Within Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, rudeness is not as overtly defined; nevertheless, it serves as an overarching social mechanism […]

When Canada’s Multiculturalism Policy first emerged in 1971 it was primarily reactionary in nature, seeking to define Canada’s multicultural identity in opposition to two cultural models familiar to the Canadian public: the first, the American “melting-pot” mentality and the second, Canada’s previous cultural structure, biculturalism. However, the Canadian multiculture long predates the policy, stretching back, theoretically, to the nation’s establishment […]