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Primitive Possibilities: Recovery and Illusion in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World

The act of recovery, when juxtaposed with The Lost World’s purported driving forces of scientific discovery and colonial expedition, reveals the illusory and unstable nature of knowledge in both the scientific and the colonial contexts. 

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Jewish-Canadian Identity in Leonard Cohen’s “The Last Dance At The Four Penny”

Cohen’s poem “The Last Dance at the Four Penny” demonstrates the Montreal Jewish community’s connection to their heritage in the aftermath of immigration, the Holocaust, and assimilation into Canadian culture.

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Incest, Selfish Men, and Vengeful Violence in Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

With the bloody endings of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Duchess of Malfi, in which both women are killed by their brothers, the playwrights suggest that incestuous male desire stems from a selfish and possessive impulse, resulting in vengeful acts of violence against their sisters.

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The Significance of Charity in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street”

Melville comments on the self-gratifying element of charity that reveals the donor’s interiority; the indulgence of the donor’s interior desires demonstrates a disconnect between the giver and receiver of charitable acts. 

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Willful Deception: Methods of Confronting Latent Monstrosity in the Progress of Love

Munro depicts a world where other people’s minds and histories are frustratingly inaccessible. Anyone may in fact realize that there are latent monstrous qualities within their loved ones.

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Darkened Aphrodite(s): Blues Singers and Black Women Poets on the Exploration of Female Desire and Liberation in the Harlem Renaissance

Through their radically different art forms, two groups of Queer Black women artists in the 1920s—Blues singers and Black female poets—provide alternatives to the Black middle-class respectability that stifled autonomy, desire, and possibility for homosexual experiences.

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The Underground Railroad Today: (A Lack of) Progress in the Whiteheadverse

Parallel scenes between The Underground Railroad and Colson Whitehead’s other novels, most notably Sag Harbor, point to a frustration over the lack of racial progress across the decades, but they also indicate that more privileged Black people today can choose to act like their ancestors did with pride by having similar events as their ancestors.

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Resident Evil: Debt, Zombies, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

It’s not a zombie novel without boarded-up windows. Throw in a kook in the basement who thinks boarding up windows is a waste of time, maybe a few zombie hands reaching between the boards, and then busting them apart at the moment of climax, and you have yourself a zombie genre hit.

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Jews As the Other in Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress

In Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, Frances Burney showcases the caricature of the Jew as a conspirator through the character of Mr. Zackery; he lacks description, agency, and dialogue, but his involvement with the titular character through usury puts her fortune at risk, and his peripheral presence throughout the novel threatens her reputation.

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