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.
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.
Seeking Clues in Cabinet Cards
The poignant images, at once banal and intimate, in the Lynch Family Photographs Collection contain mysteries perhaps only the public can solve.
Pondering the Pritzker Prize
It’s the Pritzker’s ultimate challenge: highlighting the important contributions of architects working today without knowing how their legacies will play out.
Remembering Mavis Gallant
Shaped by her Canadian origins and early work as a journalist, expatriate Gallant used the short story to examine the sociopolitics of post-war Europe.
The Post-Millennial Poe, or, Edgar Allan Holmes?
In life, Edgar Allan Poe was best known as a literary critic. Today, he’s best remembered for his disquieting tales...but that may be changing.
Pulp Woman: Leslie F. Stone
Cloaked in an ambiguous pseudonym, Stone was one of the first women to write science fiction for the pulps.
Odette vs. Odile: A Tale of Two (but Not Opposing) Swans
The distinction between the leading female characters of Swan Lake—the swan princess and her “black” counterpart—initially wasn’t so sharp.
Fish Addiction: An Ancient Greek Paranoia
An obsession with eating fish mapped onto all sorts of social anxieties, from gluttony and gambling problems to wasteful spending and licentiousness.
Man of Science, Man of God
In The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley parodied the dogmatic belief held by many in Victorian England that faith and reason are incompatible.