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  1. October 2024 – Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) – 100th Anniversary of Her Death - by Angelika Zirker I had every opportunity for knowing her well, at least. We were born on the same day, we learned to toddle about together, we began our earliest observations of the world we live in at the same period, we made the same mental remarks on people and things, and reserved to ourselves exactly the same period, we made the same mental remarks on people and things, and reserved to ourselves exactly the same rights of private personal opinion. I have not the remotest idea of what she looked like. She belonged to an era when photography was… Continue Reading
  2. July 2024 – A Passage to India at One Hundred: Rereading the Trial Scene - by Francesca Pierini (Asian University for Women, Chittagong, Bangladesh) A Passage to India, E.M. Forster’s best-known novel, portrays the relations between the British colonial elite and the local community in a fictitious Indian town. When a young British woman accuses a local doctor of attempted rape, all latent conflicts precipitate. These are captured in the climactic trial scene that this short essay briefly revisits. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said points out that the historical moment occupied by E. M. Forster is of special importance in the history of Western imperial consciousness: Modernism is the time in which the… Continue Reading
  3. Alan Rudrum - With great sadness, we have learnt that Alan Rudrum passed away on April 19, 2024. He was not only the doyen of Vaughan studies and a leading expert in seventeenth-century poetry and culture but also a founding member of Connotations and a member of our editorial board. We will miss a true friend and clear-sighted adviser of our project and the critical exchange fostered by Connotations. For his latest contribution, written with Julia Schatz, see this link. Continue Reading
  4. CfP: 18th International Connotations Symposium - July 29 – 31, 2025 Ruhr University Bochum (Germany)   Comedy and its Borders In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, “these ladies’ courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy”, but the standard happy ending is prevented – or delayed – by the death of the King of France. Berowne, the speaker of the lines just quoted, is told to visit the sick and the dying for one year and to entertain them with his jests, a task that he thinks is impossible to accomplish: “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.” With the unusual ending of Love’s Labour’s… Continue Reading

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