With great sadness, we have learnt that Alan Rudrum passed away on April 19, 2024. He was not only the doyen of Vaughan studies and a leading expert in seventeenth-century poetry and culture but also a founding member of Connotations and a member of our editorial board. We will miss […]
Belatedly, but no less sadly, we would like to notify the readers of Connotations that Judith H. Anderson passed away last year, leaving a gap in our editorial board that we have felt acutely. In an article on Donne published in Connotations in 2018, she set out by wondering in […]
by Francesca Pierini The notion of Italy as a country relatively free of class constraints and stark social divisions – a space appropriate for returning to unaffected behaviour, sensual openness, and existential re-invention – is part of a composite constellation of counter-values to British standards and ideals that have been […]
by Sophie Franklin On the first page of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, which was first published thirty years ago this month, the nameless narrator declares: ‘Love demands expression’ (1993, 9). The proceeding narrative (Winterson does not like to call her books ‘novels’) then seeks to deconstruct the clichés […]
The 17th International Connotations Symposium (July 30 – August 3, 2023) will investigate “Textual Reasons for Canonicity.” Texts become canonical when they are felt to embody the spirit of an age or to voice concerns considered universal at a particular moment. But what about the texts themselves? Can any text become canonical […]
by Angelika Zirker While much was made of the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth (in 2014), John Donne’s 450th birthday remains a little in the shadows. And yet Shakespeare’s near-contemporary is one of the major poets of the period, and one of the most prominent metaphysical poets at that. […]
As is tradition at Connotations, we are once again happy to host the Literary Advent Calendar 2021 for the English department of Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. And what better way to prepare for the festive season of gift-giving than to turn to literature’s abundance of reflections on – or representations […]
by Tobias Kunz As the changing seasons make outdoor activities increasingly unattractive, the slow re-opening of cinemas has coincided, unsurprisingly, with the return of superhero blockbusters to the top of the box-office rankings. Films like Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or Suicide Squad (all 2021) […]
by Sarah Briest As sheep roam the early summer meadows of Tübingen, creating idyllic pastoral tableaux on the slanting green hillsides, it is not incongruous to feel reminded of the setting of early modern pastoral romances. The imagination only has to supply a prince or two, in shepherd’s robes, striding […]
by Vera Yakupova Text Read in the Video: “Monday or Tuesday” Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. A lake? […]