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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Emergency Literature

In Camus’s The Plague (1947), two Frenchmen in the Algerian town of Oran “gazed down at what was a dramatic picture of their life in those days: plague on the stage in the guise of a disarticulated...

Manya Lempert | 21 May 2020

Psychoanalysis and The Pandemic

When Freud first glimpsed the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor in 1909, he remarked to Jung, ‘They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.’ Freud felt certain the Americans...

Vera Camden | 21 May 2020

Covocabulary

All over the linguistics world, linguists are staying safe, like everyone else, but in their newly imposed spare time are having a field day, because Covid-19 has given them a new lexical world to explore....

David Crystal | 20 May 2020

Cold Wars

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Customarily, the short answer is that the Cold War was either a clash between the Soviet and superpowers...

Lorenz M. Lüthi | 20 May 2020

Mexico City and Coronavirus

Mexico City is no stranger to the Apocalypse. Carlos Monsiváis, one of its famous chroniclers, often used the term to depict the experience of living in this most surreal of world capitals. In the 1990s,...

Ignacio M. Sänchez Prado | 20 May 2020

Judging a book by its cover

I like to think that much of what this book offers – Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780 – is suggested in the image which illustrates its dust-jacket: an engraved copy of Philip Mercier’s...

Moyra Haslett | 20 May 2020

Asian American Literature in the Time of the Coronavirus

One of the most salient ways in which people of Asian ancestry in the United States (as in many other places) have been racialized is being perceived as foreigners. They’ve just always stood out as...

Rajini Srikanth, Min Hyoung Song | 20 May 2020

Would the Byzantines Have Noticed a Coronavirus Pandemic and How Would They Have Responded to It

“If it bleeds, it leads” – the cynical motto of the modern media, which uses fear and sensationalism to drive up ratings and sell advertising. But were medieval and Byzantine narratives sources...

Anthony Kaldellis | 20 May 2020

Zooming Marx

Thinking with Marx breeds shared projects. Over the last year and a half we have been co-editing a collection of essays on 21st-century Marxist literary criticism, and this winter, in order to prepare...

Colleen Lye, Chris Nealon | 20 May 2020

Apocalypse Now, or Not?

Ask someone what comes to mind when they hear the word ‘apocalypse’. The end of time? Images of cataclysmic destruction? Catastrophic climate change and worldwide devastation brought on by a neglectful...

Colin McAllister | 20 May 2020

The Purchase of the Past

Illustration: Paul Delaroche, Portrait of James Alexandre de Pourtales-Gorgier (1846)

Tom Stammers | 19 May 2020

Public Health Decisions when the Science is Uncertain

Governments across the world have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with measures that are unprecedented in peace time in terms of the degree to which they seek to reshape the behaviour of individuals...

Liam Kofi Bright, Richard Bradley | 19 May 2020