One of the highlights of the ISCH conference so far, for me, was a paper on cognitive theory and cultural history by Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton. In April, I wrote a post on literature and neuroscience, triggered by Raymond Tallis’ objections to the application of popular neuroscience in the study of literature. He considered it a [...]

The first keynote at the International Society for Cultural History’s inaugural conference yesterday was by Catherine Belsey, who critiqued the new historicism - and especially Stephen Greenblatt - for its monolithic representation of culture - a familiar complaint. Her solution to the problem, however, was not the traditional cultural-materialist answer.
She suggested that attention to literary form [...]

I am off to the new International Society for Cultural History’s inaugural conference in Ghent today. I will be chairing a session on culture and value by the PhD students of the Dutch Huizinga Institute, and presenting a paper called “Living Theory: Shakespeare Biography and Cultural History.” It is a topic rather unrelated to my current [...]

Via Renaissance Lit comes the news of The Shakespeare Post, a new site on Shakespeare. It promises to bring you the latest news on all matters Shakespearean, gathered from the net and based on the editor’s own journalism. In the latter category, the site features a podcast of an interview with archeologist Jo Lyon about [...]

The 42nd Carnivalesque (early modern edition) is up at Early Modern Notes. It’s a great edition, with a section on ‘Writers and Readers’ that includes a link to this interesting post on modern and early modern information overload.

More on readers: Paper Cuts, the NY Times blog on books, has a review of Norton’s reissue of André Kertész’s 1971 On Reading, [...]

I read on The Freudian Petticoat this morning that the Arden Shakespeare has one-sidedly decided to end their contract with Patricia Parker for her edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Arden 3 series. The Chronicle ran an article on the matter. There is also a website in support of Patricia Parker on which she tells her side [...]

Riddle machines, virtual codexes and algorithmic criticism - it’s all in Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007). I am slowly making my way through its 620 pages printed on good old-fashioned non-digital paper, to review it for The European English Messenger. 
I started, of course, with Matthew Steggle’s chapter surveying the field of early modern literature [...]