Debates


This links in the list of debates published in Connotations will take you to an entrance page for each debate on which all the contributions in the respective debate are listed and linked. The debates below are listed in chronological order of the primary text they deal with.

"Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization"


"New Alchimie": Reading John Donne's "Nocturnall" Through Poems by Kimberly Johnson and Alice Fulton


"Single Nature's Double Name": Some Comments on The Phoenix and Turtle


"The Road Not Taken" in Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"


"The road to happiness": Jane Austen's Mansfield Park


(Re-)Telling Aesopic fables in the 21st century


(Un-)Surprise in Alice


A Sentimental Journey: Lost in Translation


Colin Clout's Homecoming: The Imaginative Travels of Edmund Spenser


De Doctrina Christiana and Milton


Dracula and the Idea of Europe


If and It in Shakespeare


Lolita's Sources


Macbeth and Problems of Identity


Marcus Tullius Cicero


Piers Plowman


Silas Marner as Quasi-religious Text


The Faerie Queene as Satirical Intertext


The Family Reunion: Eliot, James, and the Buried Life


The Secret Garden and Wuthering Heights


The Tempest in the Trivium


Titus Andronicus in the Early Eighteenth Century


A Bakhtinian Take on Conversational Modes in Poetry


A Good Natured Warning: Herman Melville's 'Benito Cereno'


A Reading of George Herbert's "Heaven"


A Visitation of Kipling's Daemon?


A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects


Adaptations and the Initiating Text


Advertising and Vindicating Eighteenth-Century Novels


Agency in Vaughan's Sacred Poetry


Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George III


Alfred Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar"


Ambiguity and Ethics in Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns


Ambiguity and the Poets


An Introduction to Metagenre


Anne Fine, Goggle-Eyes


Anthony Burgess's Shakespeare and "fin de siècle" Conceptions of Genius


Arthur Golding's Translation of Ovid


Arthur Kopit's The Hero in Context


Artistic Rivalry Over Classes and Countries


Artists as Parents


Assessments of the Urban Experience: Toni Morrison's Jazz and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land


Ben Jonson's Dramaturgy of Procreation


Between Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth


Blending Genres in Sidney's Arcadia


Byron's Procreative Poetry


C. S. Lewis's Complex Relationship with Queer Milton Studies


Carnival and the Grotesque in Ben Jonson's Plays


Catholic Shakespeare?


Character Names in The Winter's Tale


Charles Talbut Onions and the Oxford English Dictionary


Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, Nature and the Sublime


Chasing Possibilities in "The Jolly Corner"


Chinese Diaspora Writing


Christmas as Humbug: A Manuscript Poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon ('L. E. L.')


Christopher Marlowe's Edward II


Class, Race, and Sexuality in John Gray's Park


Clones, Doubles and What’s in Between


Close Reading Donne


Competing Discourses in The Winter's Tale


Concepts of Honor in Shakespeare


Conrad, Capitalism and Decay


Contemporary Perspectives on Verse Drama


Conversation and the Poetics of Modernism


Conversation in Celan's Poetry


Criminality and Detection in Eric Ambler's The Siege of the Villa Lipp


Crucifixion Imagery in Paradise Lost


Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year


Decadence and Renewal in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend


Defoe and "The Other"


Dickens and Colour


Dickens and the Comic Extraneous


Dickens' A Christmas Carol: Revisiting and Reformation


Discourse in Pinter


Disenfranchisement and Diegesis in David Goodis


Doctor Faustus and His Books


Don Juan Between the Cultures: Derek Walcott and Tirso de Molina


Donald Barthelme as Disgruntled Liberal


Donne's Anniversaries: Matter and Spirit, Body and Soul, Time and Eternity


Donne's Sermons as Re-enactments of the Word


Drama and Stage Design in the Stuart Masque


Dylan Thomas: Place, Voice, Rebirth


E. K., A Spenserian Lesson in Reading


Edward Taylor's Poetry


Edwin Muir's Chorus of the Newly Dead and its Analogues


Ekphrastic Poetry and the Black Atlantic


Elegance and Poetic Economy


Elizabeth Bishop: Language, Gender, Class


Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Prodigal'


Elizabethan Drama and the Seasons


Ellipsis in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”


Emerson and Milton


Empirical Readings of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"


Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion


Evelyn Waugh's Humanism in A Handful of Dust


Falconbridge in Shakespeare's King John


Faulkner and Race


Faulkner and Racial Mythology


Faulkner and Racism


Faulkner and the Problematics of Procreation


Formal Limitations in Golden Age Villanelles


From Poetry to the Novel


Gary Snyder's Sense of Place


Geoffrey Chaucer's The House of Fame


Geoffrey Household's Thrillers


George Herbert and Nature


George Orwell's Style and his Politics


Gerald Manley Hopkins Revisiting Binsey


Ghosts and Resurrections in Hardy, Joyce and Beyond


Grotesque Mythology: Faulkner's The Hamlet


Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Concept of Divine Womanhood


Hawthorne and Poetic Economy



Henry James's The Jolly Corner


Henry James's Turn of the Screw as Tragedy


Henry Vaughan's "Isaac's Marriage"


Herman Melville and Christian Grabbe: A Source for "The Godhead is Broken"


Herman Melville and Cosmopolitanism


Historical Fetters and Creative Liberation in Shakespeare


Homosexuality in John Milton's Paradise Lost


Hopkins and Home


Hopkins's Portraits of the Artist


How to Have a Conversation with Gertrude Stein


Identity Politics in Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Plays


Image and Imagism


Interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities


Jacqueline Vaught Brogan's "Notes from the Body"


Jane Austen: Mansfield Park


Jane Hirshfield and Modernism


Joe Orton's Laodicean Tragedy: The Good and Faithful Servant


John Dryden's Concept of Poetry and Imitation


John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure: An Aesthetics of Textual Surprise


John Lyly and the Most Misread Speech in Shakespeare


John Lyly's Poetic Economy


John Marston's The Malcontent


Joyce Carol Oates and Thomas Mann


Joyce Carol Oates's "By the River"


Kazuo Ishiguro and Tom Stoppard


Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice


Len Deighton’s Political Skepticism in The Ipcress File


Lindsey Collen's The Rape of Sita


Literary Allusions and Poetic Economy



Literature and Cliché


Literature and Mnemology


Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal


Love, not-love and “amor Dei” in George Herbert’s “Affliction (I)”


Maria's Riddle in Twelfth Night


Marx’s scholia: Annotations Involving Classical and Renaissance Texts in Capital


Mary Butts and the Return of the Nativist


Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey


Medieval Visions of the Other World


Medievalist Perspectives on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice


Melville's Pierre


Meta-Epic Reflection in Twenty-First-Century Rewritings of Homer, or: The Meta-Epic Novel


Metafictional Discourse in Early American Literature


Miles Franklin's My Career Goes Bung


Milton and the Restoration


Milton's Astronomy


Mnemonics and Renaissance Literature


Motives for Rhetoric and Action in Troilus and Cressida


Mourning Place in Pastoral Elegy


Music and Literature in Conversation


Music as Textual Principle in Toni Morrison's Jazz


Myth and Language - Mythos and Logos in Emily Dickinson


Myth in The Soft Machine of W. S. Burroughs


Myth in the Contemporary American Theatre


Naming und Unnaming in Spenser


Narrative Techniques and the Fragmented Hero in Mary Shelley and Théophile Gautier


New Intertexts for David Dabydeen’s “Turner”


Prefaces


Old England and Shakespeare's Nostalgia


On English-Canadian Literary Criticism


On the Reception of Poetry


On Writing in Second Person


Oppositions in Thomas Heywood's The English Traveller


P. G. Wodehouse and Arthurian Legend


Paradise Remembered in Poems and Paintings


Parodies of Six-Word Stories: A Comic Literary Metagenre


Parody as Cultural Memory in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2


Parody—and Self-Parody in David Mamet


Parody, Paradox and Play in The Importance of Being Earnest


Parody, Satire and Sympathy in Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels


Paronomasia from Sidney to Herbert


Paronomasia in the Poems of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop


Paterson, Plath and Dante


Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude


Patterns of Antonomasia in Shakespeare


Pauline Smith's Short Stories


Perspective, Vision and Memory: Mountain-Climbing in Literature


Perversions and Reversals of Childhood and Old Age in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron


Peter Ackroyd's English Music


Peter Martyr and his Translator Richard Eden - Reading Culture in Translation


Philip Roth, Authorship and Death


Poe-tic Economy


Poe's Detective Dupin as Mythological Figure


Poetic (In-)Justice and the Law


Poetic Economy in English Haiku


Poetic Economy: Redundancy and Ellipsis


Poetic form and function in George Herbert's "Deniall" and Henry Vaughan's "Disorder and frailty"


Poetic Insertions in The Lord of the Rings


Poetic Justice


Poetics and Conversation


Poetry and Poeticity in Joyce, Baudelaire and Amichai


Poetry in Daniel Deronda


Poetry in Fiction


Poetry in Kipling's Short Fiction


Poetry in Poe


Polygeneric Narration in Atwood's Penelopiad


Pope's Ombre Enigmas in The Rape of the Lock


Possible Stories in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White


Post-WWII Japanese-American Narrative: David Mura


Poverty Studies and Contemporary Indian Literature


Procreation, Communication and Incarnation in Sidney and Wordsworth


On Puzzling Shakespeare


Pynchon Takes the Fork in the Road


Quixotic Exceptionalism: Gulliver's Travels and Don Quixote de la Mancha


Re-Evaluating Alan Bennett


Re-Reading M.M. Mahood's Shakespeare's Wordplay


Re-Reading Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer and the American Myth of a Republic


Reading Yang Mu's The Skeptic


Reason in English Renaissance Humanism: Starkey, More and Ascham


Rebuilding Africa - A Myth and its Rewriting


Recent Responses to Shakespeare's Non-Dramatic Verse


Religion in King John


Religious Literary Style in Milton's Paradise Lost


Renegotiating Scottish Identity in the Pilgrim Narrative of William Lithgow


Restoration She-Tragedy: Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved


Resurrection as Blasphemy


Revisitings and Repetitions in Beckett's Later Works


Richard McCoy's The Rites of Knighthood


Richard Savage's The Wanderer: A Vision


Riddles of Procreation


Robert Frost's Conversational Style


Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour"


Sandra Billington's Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama


Self-Imposed Fetters: The Productivity of Formal and Thematic Restrictions


Sensory Perception and Literary Images in Edgar Allan Poe


Shakespeare and New Historicism


Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in Nabokov's Pale Fire


Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in an Irish Context


Shakespeare's Falstaff as Parody


Shakespeare's Lost Code: Tracing Mythology in Hamlet


Shakespeare's Ovid and Arthur Golding


Shakespeare's Scruple of Gold


Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Christian Premises


Spenser and Ireland


Spenser as Prometheus: The Monstrous and the Idea of Poetic Creation


Spenser's Parody


Staging Dissent in A Midsummer Night's Dream


Sujata Bhatt's "The Hole in the Wind"


Surprises in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night


T.H. White's The Once And Future King


Tennyson’s “Tithonus” and the Revision of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”


Textual, Contextual and Critical Surprises in "Désirée's Baby"


The American Adam in Mailer and Didion


The American Carnival of The Great Gatsby


The Arthurian Legend in Graham Swift's Last Orders


The Author's Name as an Object of Paronomasia


The Character of Lucius in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus


The Conversationalists and Literature


The Country House Poem Revisited


The Economy of Literary Interpretation


The End of Editing Shakespeare


The Essays of Storm Janeson


The Ethics of Otherness in Ian McEwan's Saturday


The Ghost Visitations of Lew Welch and the Art of Zen Failure


The Historical Context of John Ford's Plays


The Inhuman Non-Human in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin


The Last Moments of Hamlet


The Loss of the Artist's Agency


The Mysterious Genesis of Paradise Lost


The Myth of the Self in Whitman and Traherne


The Narrator of Conrad's Under Western Eyes


The Opening of All's Well That Ends Well


The Origins of the English Laureate Micro-Epic


The Pivotal Position of Henry V in the Rise and Fall of Shakespeare's Prose


The Place Revisited in T. S. Eliot


The Poetics of Alice Oswald's Memorial


The Poetics of Conversation in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own


The Politics and Poetics of Robert Lowell


The Politics of Mucedorus


The Re-representation of African Identity in Kojo B. Laing's Fiction


The Reader in Fielding


The Reception History of C. S. Lewis's "A Preface to Paradise Lost"


The Republican Imagination in Eighteenth-Century America


The Return of the Dead in Margaret Atwood's Fiction


The Search for F. P. Greve/Grove


The Search for the Holy Grail


The Sepulchral City Revisited: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


The Theological Background of Twelfth Night 4.2


The Titles of George Herbert's Poems


The Unworthy Servant in Milton's Sonnet 19


The Vertue of Spectacle in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus


The Woman Taken in Adultery: A Literary Perspective on Christ’s Writing in John 8:1-12


Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Persephone


Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness


Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies


Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1966-)


Tom Stoppard's Arcadia


Toothpicks in Literature


Tragedy and Trauerspiel: John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi


Trauma, Writing and Simulated Orality in Toni Morrison's Beloved


Tropes of Falling, Rising, Standing in Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle


Understanding (through) Annotations


Unscrambling Surprises in Faulkner's Stories


Verse Satire: Its Form, Genre and Mode


Vladimir Nabokov and the Surprise of Poetry



W. B. Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter"


Walcott's Concept of Mythic History


Wallace Stevens and Mesoamerican Mythology


Was The Raigne of King Edward III a Compliment to Lord Hunsdon?


Wharton's Hudson River Bracketed and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"


What is the Dream in Midsummer Night's Dream?


Who was the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnet 86?


Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting"


Willi Erzgräber's Studies in Modernism


William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham


William Godwin's Political Justice v. His Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft


William Harmon's "1943"


Wodehouse and the Baroque


Wodehouse Linguist?


Wodehouse Parodist


Wordplay in William Carlos Williams's Poetry


Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"


Wordsworth's social critique and "The Baker's Cart"


Yeats and Indian Philosophy


Youth, Race and Nation in Colin MacInnes's Novels


Revisiting Halberstadt