A new book by York University Professor B.W. Powe explores the radical transformation of consciousness and sensibility through the advent of digital communications technologies. A poet and novelist who has been teaching in York’s Department of English since 1995, Powe released the book The Charge in the Global Membrane (Neo Poiesis Press, 2019) earlier this year and […]
Emily Dickinson's poem, 'This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me --', opens the Introduction, which focuses on the near-anonymity of nineteenth-century women novelists. Close readings of works by five British novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot offer persuasive accounts of the ways in which […]
The French Revolution is over, and Mr. Dob, a tradesman made rich by the Revolution, has decided to start a library of the novels and romances of the day. But quickly finding himself bored with the didactic and moralistic tales of the eighteenth century, Mr. Dob's life is changed forever when his friend Dubert presents […]
Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye are two of Canada’s central cultural figures, colleagues and rivals whose careers unfolded in curious harmony even as their intellectual engagement was antagonistic. Poet, novelist, essayist and philosopher B.W. Powe, who studied with both of these formidable and influential intellectuals, presents an exploration of their lives and work in Marshall McLuhan […]
The word is all over Austen’s novels: what ought to be done, what one ought to say, how one ought to feel (versus how one does feel). When Austen’s characters employ an ought, the delicate oscillation between first- and third-person perspectives that marks her prose leads the reader to distinguish between what they say, and […]
Laws of Rest explores a new form, the prose sonnet—an intricate chamber of text enclosed within four quatrains of right-justified prose. In their box-like aesthetics, the poems conjure the weird, meticulous worlds of Joseph Cornell or Edmund Spenser. But anything can happen in these little rooms, in which the overheard conversation of taxi drivers, invented verses […]
49th Shelf Most Anticipated Fall 2016 Poetry Preview Selection Translation is the extrovert, metaphor the introvert. Without translation, there is no communication. Without metaphor, there is no art. Starting from the notion that every act of speaking is a translation between worlds, writer, scholar, and critic David B. Goldstein’s Lost Originals comprises a collection of elegies for […]
Eating and drinking—vital to all human beings—were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare’s plays, reframes questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama. As a result, Shakespearean scenes that have long been identified as important and […]
This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality—with their numerous scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering—the collection demonstrates how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and […]
David B. Goldstein argues for a new understanding of Renaissance England from the perspective of communal eating. Rather than focus on traditional models of interiority, choice and consumption, Goldstein demonstrates that eating offered a central paradigm for the ethics of community formation. The book examines how sharing food helps build, demarcate and destroy relationships – […]