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Have the courage of your convictions. Be a person of conviction. Carry conviction. Stand tall in your conviction. As these idioms attest, we have a strong cultural conviction that conviction is a virtue and that anything less betrays weakness—or as W. B. Yeats put it more dramatically, that civilization itself is at stake when “[t]he […]
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The cover of The Anthropocene and Literature features a photo from an abandoned house in the ghost town of Kolmanskop in Namibia. The former mining town was established in the early twentieth century when Namibia was still a German colony, and it was abandoned only fifty years later, when the diamond mines were depleted. With […]
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For many years I tried, without success, to crack the code of a literary critical puzzle concerning D. H. Lawrence. The tradition of post-World War II Lawrence criticism, remarkable though it was in remaking successive Lawrences sensitive to the discourses of the day (existentialism, feminism, postcolonialism, eco-criticism), hadn’t got me there. But then, amidst the […]
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In 1915, Robert Chenault Givler published the results of his PhD thesis, which he had undertaken at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. The work was entitled ‘The Psycho-physiological Effect of the Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry’ and consisted of Givler strapping a series of readers to an early blood-pressure device in the hopes of […]
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A trip to the theatre, these days, often involves additional purchase. Theatre merchandise (‘merch’) is sold in a related shop or kiosk, so that attending a performance might involve also buying a t-shirt, a mug, a toy, a CD. Some canny productions also ‘product place’ the merch in the production itself, meaning that material goods […]
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When we think about prejudice, we think about people. People who are prejudiced against us; people whom we may be prejudiced against (whether we admit it or not). Yet not all prejudice is directed against people. Sometimes it can be directed against an animal. Or a bird. The cormorant is one such bird. It has […]
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Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi once wondered if he might be a dream that a butterfly was having. A couple of millennia later, a biologist asks a similar question in Greg Bear’s novel Vitals (2002). “Larger and older minds live inside our bodies and all around us,” Bear’s scientist declares. “Perhaps we are only a dream the […]
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Thirty years ago, I planned to write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. With a monograph in mind, I assembled Bowen’s essays and reviews scattered across various magazines and newspapers. What started as a few items retrieved from obscurity quickly snowballed into hundreds. I began visiting archives and fitting […]
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