Leigh Hunt by Benjamin Robert Haydon

Leigh Hunt, the Unstoppable Critic

Convicted and imprisoned for libeling the Prince Regent, Hunt capitalized on his incarceration by turning his prison cell into a newsroom and grand salon.
Caricature of Joseph Conrad by David Low in Lions and Lambs, 1928

Joseph Conrad’s Travel Stories Weren’t Black and White

Conrad’s celebration of imperial exploration is accompanied by an acknowledgment that such feats often go hand-in-hand with oppression and exploitation.
A collection of several book covers in the LGBTQ Canon

Is There an LGBTQ+ Canon?

An English professor considers the questions raised about selecting queer works for study and discussion when planning a course on LGBTQ+ literature.

Graffiti Limbo

A University of Virginia professor enlisted students to document the messages—profane, hopeful, despairing—left on library carrels by previous generations.
Publicity photo on the set of the CBS anthology television series Studio One for a presentation of George Orwell's 1984

Turning Orwell into Propaganda

Many read the novels of George Orwell as pro-capitalist/anti-socialist propaganda, but his work has become a resource for all kinds of political arguments.

10 Sestinas by Modern and Contemporary Poets

The sestina form features the repetition of end words across stanzas. Here are sestinas by Louise Glück, Terrance Hayes, Elizabeth Bishop, Patricia Smith, and more.
Cross Reference image

Introducing Cross Reference

The new JSTOR Daily crossword puzzle is here to entertain and educate you.
An illustration from Aleksandr Volkov’s Wizard of the Emerald City

Twin Curtains: Oz and the USSR

Aleksandr Volkov’s The Wizard of the Emerald City reimagined L. Frank Baum’s classic, imbuing the story with a love of labor for readers in the Eastern bloc.
The cover of A Passage to India on top of a 1920s map of India

The Sociopolitical Impact of A Passage to India

E. M. Forster’s novel captured not only the tensions between colonizers and colonized but also the fraught internal politics that shaped India’s fight for independence.
A photograph of a red pill in someone's left palm and a blue pill in his right palm

An Age of Fantasy Politics

Tropes from science fiction and fantasy have become fodder for political rhetoric and action on all sides in the twenty-first century.