The academic and public interest in supernatural invasion narratives has increased exponentially in the 20th and 21st centuries. According to Terrence Rafferty of The New York Times, the fascination with the zombie apocalypse …
View More Reconsidering Quarantine in Invasion NarrativesTag: fiction
Margaret Thatcher in the 21st Century
Democracy, Franco Moretti once declared, is not interested in the production of good novels (1987: 192). It is not self-evident that parliamentary politics should…
View More Margaret Thatcher in the 21st CenturySuperhumanity: Refiguring the Superhero
Like the urban thoroughfare it’s named after, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2012) contains diverse and highly specific multitudes. It is a…
View More Superhumanity: Refiguring the SuperheroStill Here: Post-Millennial Metafiction and Crypto-Didacticism
In 1993, David Foster Wallace published an essay piece entitled “E Unibus Pluram” in which he outlined his belief that fiction should move away from the ‘critical and destructive’ postmodern irony that he saw as…
View More Still Here: Post-Millennial Metafiction and Crypto-DidacticismEmpathy After 9/11
In his book, Empathy and Moral Development, the psychologist Martin Hoffman defines empathic response as ‘the involvement of…
View More Empathy After 9/11On Literary Darwinism
As I inform my students exhaustedly year on year, cultural criticism is concerned with asking crucial questions about the world…
View More On Literary Darwinism