Na Rim Kim

This essay presents Nathaniel Hawthorne’s children’s book A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys as an overlooked but timely resource for environmental humanists invested in wonder. While Hawthorne adapts classical myths to lead child readers to wonder about heroes, gods, and monsters, he also presents nature—for example plants, pets, and seasonal phenomena—as equally wondrous. That is, he depicts nature as a complex presence that both reassures yet disrupts human expectations, thereby inviting furthe

In antebellum America, rising tensions between North and South sparked debate over the system of slavery. Proslavery logic defended slavery by depicting the plantation as a “patriarchal institution,” protected by a benevolent white patriarch. White female activists of the time found fault with this patriarchal reasoning, and so sought to deconstruct proslavery discourse by exposing the immorality of the white master. Thus, they chose to reveal graphic testimonies of his prime victim, the sexuall

Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful (2021) is a critical queer adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Rather than criticizing and overwriting Fitzgerald’s text, Vo draws out its subtle queerness. In doing so, her adaptation extends an overlooked aspect of The Great Gatsby: its anti-heteronormativity. Specifically, Vo critiques the workings of heteronormative culture through the eyes of Jordan, whose insider-yet-outsider status as an ethnic minority who is also passing as

Abstract: This essay examines how the African American writer magical realist novel Sing, Unburied, Sing elicits melancholic hope: hope that does not conceive of history as linearly progressive and is conscious of past casualties. In Ward’s novel, a Black mother is unable to face her brother’s ghost because of her trauma after his murder by a white supremacist. In contrast, the mother’s biracial children are able to form mutually beneficial relations with the ghosts who visit them. With this con

Reading Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) as a magical realist text is overdue, for the novel intervenes into a patriarchal tradition within magical realism: using women as bridges to the “beyond” of everyday reality. This essay first explains this tradition by examining Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The essay then explicates how Paradise represents a feminist subversion of this tradition. While in the earlier novel magical women use their power mainly to serve others, in

in British and American Language and Literature 117, 179-198. Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Heidi Chronicles appeared on Broadway in 1989, at the end...

Pet keeping first became a popular way of life among Americans in the nineteenth century. Across the span of the century, texts for children actively participated in the shaping of pet keeping culture by instructing the next generation on how humans might best engage with domesticated nonhuman animals. This essay sheds light on Louisa May Alcott’s participation in this history by examining a number of her (potential) pet-featuring stories for children, all of which raise serious questions about