“The Crocodile,” Dostoevsky’s Weirdest Short Story
Why being eaten by a crocodile named Little Karl is really a lesson in the dangers of foreign capital.
Writing Online Fiction in China
Many amateur “fan fiction” writers on the Chinese internet use real history as a canvas for time-travel stories that often break the fourth wall.
How Jazz Albums Visualized a Changing America
In the 1950s, the covers of most jazz records featured abstract designs. By the late 1960s, album aesthetics better reflected the times and the musicians.
Nella Larsen’s Lessons in Library School
Larsen’s novels were influenced by her training in the New York Public Library system, where she faced rigid ideas about the racial classification of knowledge.
Dorothy Richardson and the Stream of Consciousness
Though often associated with Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, “stream of consciousness” novels spilled first from the pen of British modernist Dorothy Richardson.
The Ethics of On-Screen Violence in The Sympathizer
Film scholar Sylvia Shin Huey Chong offers a feminist reflection on the theme of rape in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer.
Painting Race
The construction and expression of race by skin color literally became visible in Western art in the eighteenth century.
The Governess, in Her Own Written Words
Although few women were employed as governesses in Victorian Britain, their potential for social and class transgression left Britons awash with worry.
How Renaissance Art Found Its Way to American Museums
We take for granted the Titians and Botticellis that hang in galleries across the United States, little aware of the appetites and inclinations of those who acquired them.
Lessons in Mannerism at the Palazzo del Te
The offbeat and unexpected Palazzo del Te, designed by Giulio Romano for Federigo II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, has become an icon of Mannerist architecture.