Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies

Review of Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature: Gold Mountains, Weedflowers and Murky Globes by Begoña Simal-González, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; XV, 273 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-35618-7

Małgorzata Jarmołowicz-Dziekońska — 2025-03-25

Review of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature by Matthias Klestil, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, 307 pp. ISBN: 978-3-030-82102-9

Magdalena Łapińska — 2025-03-25

Exploring New Avenues Beyond Literary Historicism: A Cross-Temporal and Cross-Cultural Dialogue Between American Posthistoricism and Slavic Literary Theory

Sayantan Pahari — 2025-03-25

This study works toward filling the Slavic blind spot in American literary posthistoricist discourse. Drawing upon Rita Felski’s onslaught on historicist contextualism, Russell Berman’s refutation of periodization in literary studies, and Wai Chee Dimock’s manifesto for a diachronic (post)historicism, it argues that these paradigms have shown a high degree of territorial confinement and would do better to engage with Slavic theories on literature. Given the centrality of the act of reception in posthistoricist perspectives on literature, the article posits the reception-oriented theories of the Prague School of Literary Studies and the Polish School of Literary Communication as the representative Slavic voices for symbiotic transactions with American posthistoricism(s). The resonant interactions the study orchestrates between these literary-theoretical paradigms across a spatial and temporal chasm pave the way for an amplified riposte to the hegemony of various historicizing tendencies in contemporary literary scholarship. The article does not limit itself to the mere refutation of literary historicism but also outlines a few posthistoricist directions that future literary/cultural scholarship could take. These alternatives, pivoting around the figure of the lay reader, could lead to the proliferation of studies on the history of reading and the dynamics of canon formation while questioning the viability of academically mandated interpretations of literary/cultural texts driven by the historicizing imperative.

An Anatomy of Melancholy, or The Strange Beauty in Walter Pater’s The Child in the House

Michele Brugnetti — 2025-03-25

The object of this paper is to offer a new understanding of Walter Pater’s assessment of beauty as a process that contains within itself the pangs of melancholy; first, since Pater himself suggests in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry that beauty is to be investigated in its singular, relative appearance, I propose to examine his refusal of dogmatism to grasp the multifariousness of experience; second, I will turn to Pater’s short story to provide an example of a perceiving subject whose appraisal of beauty is marred by a sense of melancholy. Employing Bourdieusian terminology, I will then argue that by positioning the appraisal of beauty as a Baudelarian practice that requires “a difficult initiation,” Pater may also be aiming at legitimizing the role as a British aesthete as a nomothete of the autonomy of art. Lastly, I will consider some notions of Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie, as to explore the technique of imaginative recollection employed by Pater in The Child in the House is a crucial component in his effort to substantiate the far-reaching breadth of aesthetic perception as an experience that claims completeness in itself.

Transmogrifying Thomas Mann’s Works in Times of Crisis: Colm Tóibín’s The Magician

José M. Yebra — 2025-03-25

The Magician (2021) is Colm Tóibín’s latest novel and his third biofictional text after The Master (2004) and The Testament of Mary (2013). To address the complexity of the biographical novel as a liminal genre, this article makes use of transmogrification, a portmanteau of transfiguration and modification that refers to the act or process of something or someone being transformed into a different form. The Magician (like The Master and The Testament of Mary before) recalls the life of a historical figure, Thomas Mann in this case. In the process of fictionalizing the flesh-and-blood literary icon, the novel transmogrifies the real human being. For detractors of biofiction, this is ethically questionable. However, for those in favour of the genre, novels like The Magician fictionalize historical figures as exceptional and symbolic and, hence, provide a way to understand both their times and the present. Many biofictional texts explore the lives of literary icons. In this sense, this essay delves into the process whereby Mann transmogrified (his) life into fiction. Moreover, it also argues for the significance of this process and Mann’s own singularity that explain both the first half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Religious Celibacy, Coerced Asexuality, and Catholic Nunhood: A Comparative Study of The Runner Stumbles and Agnes of God

Krishnaja T. S. — 2025-03-25

The representations of Catholic nuns in American theatre often rely on familiar tropes, portraying them either as devout, selfless caregivers or as harsh, ruler-wielding nun teachers. However, the portrayal of sexually repressed nuns on stage, as well as the scholarly analyses of sexual repression embedded within these characters, remains significantly underexplored. The present study seeks to address this gap by critically examining these portrayals and their broader implications within the context of religious and psychological narratives. The study investigates the effects of religious celibacy and coerced asexuality among Catholic nuns as depicted in Milan Stitt’s The Runner Stumbles (1976) and John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God (1982). This study integrates Karen Horney’s psychoanalytical framework with Richard Sipe’s insights on religious celibacy to explore the complexities of human sexuality. It emphasises the adverse effects of enforced sexual abstinence on individual sexual identity, as portrayed in the selected plays. The study also examines the portrayals of sanctuary molestation, the resulting trauma, and the deliberate coping strategies employed by Catholic nuns in the plays as they strive to recover from the trauma of victimization.

Nation-building Uses of Famines in Margaret W. Brew’s Castle Cloyne and Władysław Orkan’s Pomór

Dobromiła Księska — 2025-03-25

The article provides a comparative reading of Margaret W. Brew’s Castle Cloyne (1885) and Władysław Orkan’s Pomór [Murrain] (1910) in the light of Brian Porter-Szűcs’s claim that peasant revolts that question social hierarchy are impossible to include in the nation-centered version of history. It discusses nation-building strategies and the politics of using 1840s subsistence crises as a community-founding event in two (Irish and Polish) famine novels. Special attention is paid to Brew’s idea of the Great Irish Famine as a test of nationhood and Orkan’s ironic approach towards interpreting the Great Galician Famine as a divine punishment for the 1846 peasant revolt against the Polish gentry. Brew’s “double narrative” is analyzed to prove the universality of national suffering, aimed at identifying the Catholic landlords as famine victims alongside the tenants. Pomór’s narrative frame is closely examined with reference to Stanisław Pigoń’s nation-centered exegesis of Orkan’s writing and argued to convey disbelief in the possibility for the subservient to be included in the national community designed by and for the ruling classes. Parallel reading of female characters’ famine biographies abridges the deconstruction of the myth of national unity in Pomór and Castle Cloyne.

Behind the Appearances: Spaces and Places in Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982)

Mateusz Naporowski — 2025-03-25

Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982) depicts a world in which the landscape governs both the characters’ and the readers’ perceptions. Analyzing the novel’s duplicities and peculiarities, as well as the author’s individual approach to fiction writing, the article identifies sources for the plains’ uniqueness. Murnane’s language, along with the writing process, is a bearer of the quality termed uncanniness which shapes the (un)reality of The Plains by employing contrasts and evoking the feeling of un/familiarity in the reader. Following the trope of in-betweenness, the article views the novel through the prism of liminality, treating its various components as sites of transformation. As the further analysis of both the spaces/places of the novel and the protagonist-narrator’s personal experience illustrates, the plains subvert this seemingly linear process of transformation and, opposing their occupants’ attempts to gain control, prove their own existence as the influential, yet elusive, force on the novel’s reality. In essence, the article aims to explore Murnane’s portrayal of this idiosyncratic landscape, probing the applicability of capturing or defining the plains, be it by the protagonist’s camera and senses or our theoretical tools.

At the Crossroads of Life and Death: The Body in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020)

Karolina Kmita — 2025-03-25

This article aims to analyze the representation of embodiment in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). Exploring the novel’s narrative, this paper argues that Emezi employs Igbo spiritual beliefs to dismantle gender taxonomy rooted in the Western episteme. Furthermore, because the novel presents Vivek’s existence as deviating from the linear trajectory of human life, the main character’s embodied form transcends the notion of materiality. In this light, the main protagonist’s departure from life emerges as a form of emancipation from the rigid boundaries of liberal humanist conceptualizations of the body. Following the footsteps of their Nigerian literary predecessors, Emezi portrays life on Earth as a cyclical process, interweaving both the living and the dead. In this light, Vivek’s corporeal death is not presented as a demise, but rather as a step towards imagining a world in which the existence of African queer bodies is not tainted with precariousness.