From the witch-like widow on the edges of civilisation to the retired spinster who, after an active but disappointing sexual past, chooses to continue her single life, the celibate women of Edna O’Brien’s fiction have as much to contribute to the author’s career-long examination of the damage done by Irish patriarchy as any of the miserable housewives, resentful mothers, and abused girls who dominate critical analyses of her work. Unlike the many admirable nun characters in O’Brien’s fiction, the women in this study are not consciously renouncing society or deliberately retreating from the world. While they can be vulnerable characters who risk disapproval and even violence, they can also offer alternative models of Irish womanhood, subtle and complex, alternatives not always recognised when the narrator is a young girl and sometimes appreciated too late by more mature narrators and characters.

In Molly Keane’s 1934 novel Devoted Ladies, the young Irish character Piggy Browne is dismissed as a “fat, hungry virgin”, an insult that incites the text’s denouement. This article uses the figure of Piggy Browne to juxtapose virginity and fatness in Keane’s writing, asking how fat can inform our understanding of the single Irish woman in Keane. I set up both fat and virginity as relevant concerns to Keane’s work, drawing on a range of her fiction as well as writing about virginity, land, and time. Focussing on Piggy in Devoted Ladies demonstrates how the novel is interested in the emotional lives of women, however satirically. Moreover, ideas of virginity, fat, and hunger become useful ways of thinking about Piggy’s role in the ending of Devoted Ladies. Keane ultimately emphasizes a fall, not a culmination, concluding on a moment of agency, if not progress.

The article has two objectives: It begins by noting that, in memory studies, indexicality has thus far played a role primarily in the analysis of photographs. Central to this was Roland Barthes’ insight that photography should be read not only as an iconic sign but also as an indexical sign: a photograph touches us not only through what it shows, i.e., not only as a pictorial representation of its referent, but also through the fact that it is an imprint of light, causing it to function like a trace in the snow. While the insight into the indexical quality of photography has been extremely fruitful, it is surprising that other indexical signs (such as shadows or echoes) have received no attention in the discussion of memory studies. The first objective of this essay is to make a start on this, and it does so in dialogue with a Norwegian comic book. In Steffen Kverneland’s Skygger (Shadows), family memories of the German occupation of Norway play a decisive role. Most studies of World War II in contemporary literature focus on how historical events are represented. Kverneland takes a different approach. He is not interested in the representation of memories but in the function of remembering. He relates memories of World War II to current crises and to the aesthetics of his artistic work. The second objective of this essay is to analyse the comic, paying close attention to the various dimensions of indexicality.

Saitama, the titular hero of ONE’s One Punch Man, is a man so absurdly powerful that nothing, and no one, can stand against him. This limitless ability, rather than acting to make a superhero idol of Saitama, has instead reduced his psychological state to that of extreme nihilistic apathy. It is not until Saitama begins to unlock other aspects of his life, including friendship and community, that he begins to see there is more to life than strength. Working within the satirical bounds of the text, which skewers everything from false fulfillment in accolades to false friends to just about every superhero and manga trope in between, Saitama eventually reengages with his life and becomes far more heroic because of it. In the Overview, the text discusses the manga’s origin and explains some of the satirical jabs. In the Heroic Journey, the article takes you through Saitama’s past and current mental state. In the Super Takeaway, the life lesson Saitama’s story can teach us is that even in the face of boredom and a world in which work itself feels obsolete, there remain ways to overcome apathy so long as we are willing to find them for ourselves.

Throughout her oeuvre, Mary Lavin (1912–1996) engages with the nuances of “celibate moments” within masculine life cycles. This periodic sexlessness is often expressed through the complexities of strained or upended marital unions, as in “A Happy Death”, as well as the homosocial and fraternal relationships depicted in “The Joy Ride” and “The Becker Wives.” Within these overlooked narrative spaces, we can consider the relational implications of sexlessness, singleness and marital struggle on interpersonal relationships and the intimacies of masculine sexual identity in post-independent Ireland. In Lavin’s work, the short story is not a conclusive form, and celibacy is not always a permanent practice or observed behaviour. Instead, celibacy can be transient, often silent but equally charged with generative or destructive potential. This article will theorise male celibacy as part of Lavin’s commitment to silence and restraint and include this as part of her refusal of conventional romantic closures. Celibacy in this case takes on a significant positionality within interpersonal characterisations, not merely as a passive symptom of unhappiness or a given consequence of marital decline or spousal death, but as an active and at times frustrated response to hegemonic expectation. To conceive of masculine celibacy in these works, this article considers how celibacy functions within domestic short fiction and Lavin’s conceptualisation of everyday estranged intimacies.

In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), we are cautioned not to judge a book by its cover. Yet, the marketing team at every publisher knows that we, the audience, inevitably do just that. In the case of Arthur Schnitzler’s The Road Into the Open (1908), various editions have featured paintings or drawings by contemporary Austrian artists, including Max Kurzweil, Gustav Klimt, and Egon Schiele, as the cover art. Schnitzler’s novel initially emerges in Pre-World-War-I Austria, a society grappling with political instability, fears about moral decline, and a preoccupation with neuroses. The anxious society that produced Schnitzler, Kurzweil, Klimt, and Schiele has been considered a representation par excellence of fin-de-siècle decadence. Following Gerard Genette’s Paratexts, I inquire as to the effect(s) of cover art and the competing visions of the novel they represent. This study responds to the following questions. How have publishers used or misused decadent imagery in (re)productions of Schnitzler’s novel? What meaning can be made from the use of the works by Kurzweil, Klimt, and Schiele as cover art? What contribution does each work make to our understanding of the Austria in Schnitzler’s novel? How does the reception of the author complement or compete with the reception of each painter?

This paper reads coal as a metonym for London’s social fabric in the writings of police theorist Patrick Colquhoun, the archival reports on the Wapping Coal Riot, and the anti-carceral poetry of William Blake. In 1798, at the behest of the West India Committee, Colquhoun had developed the first modern police force, the Thames River Police, which predated Robert Peel’s metropolitan police by over 20 years. Colquhoun’s “Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames” (1800) centers on coal in his case for policing. In his argument, coal’s energy economies link domestic affairs with the entire metropolis, making policing a city-wide problem, one that merits public support (and public funding). In reading Colquhoun’s treatise as an example of the entanglement of policing and fossil fuel power, I discuss the relevant literature from the energy humanities that connects fossil energy to the larger extractive ideologies of empire. I also demonstrate how Colquhoun’s figuring of coal builds on but alters portrayals of coal in Jonathan Swift and Anna Barbauld. The final section of this discussion demonstrates how Blake’s Jerusalem (1820) indexes dispersed, atmospheric systems of carceral power and summons dynamic, unpoliceable crowds. Blake’s smoke poetics sketch a limit of generalization, one that recoups figures of pollution and waste to riot against the systems that produce them.

Despite the censorship imposed by the GHQ in postwar Japan, the period saw the launch of numerous fetish magazines featuring explicit sexual expression. These magazines sometimes complied with the censorship of sexual expression and sexual norms and resisted it at other times. This niche print culture enabled the emergence of Japanese gay magazines like Sabu (1974–2002), the primary focus of this paper. Although previous studies have described Sabu primarily as a hardcore SM magazine, this paper argues that it also functioned as a space for articulating gay identities and resisting social discrimination. Through a close analysis of the magazine’s reader correspondence sections, the study demonstrates how Sabu emphasized personal acts of coming out and expressions of solidarity in response to the AIDS epidemic. Furthermore, it shows that Sabu sought to diversify stereotypical representations of gay men by attempting a crossover with the male–male romances created by and for women. By examining Sabu as a case study, this paper re-evaluates the magazine’s place in the history of Japanese gay magazines and explores how such publication employed erotic representations as a medium for the articulation and strengthening of minority identities.

This article addresses the way Frostpunk’s saga highlights the semiotic nature of video games by establishing an aesthetic and ethical link in its ludonarrative mechanics and storytelling, which, in turn, may engage with the player in a debate where the identitarian discourses of both the fictional entities encoded within the game and the player (that is, of both functional and fictional agents) are put into question and thus may be reconfigured. To understand this connection between aesthetics, ethics, and identity, affect is central: through affect, players establish empathic links towards the encoded agents (including, but not limited to, the encoded citizens, the encoded setting, and the encoded avatar of the player within the game world), which in turn allows them to interact with them as if being real, at least while the playthrough is active. To achieve this, this article will first offer a theoretical review of the terms mentioned above (identity, affect, aesthetics, ethics), and then will apply them to 11Bit’s saga, Frostpunk. The article finishes with some conclusions regarding the semiotic nature of the video game and the universality of these analyses.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, is a determined rationalist, yet Doyle was himself a convert to spiritualism. Doyle’s interest in spiritualism informs four, somewhat neglected Gothic tales written during the last decades of the century: “The Winning Shot” (1883); “John Barrington Cowles” (1884); the short novel The Parasite (1894); and “Playing with Fire” (1900). These narratives are notable not only because they respond to the contemporary fascination with spiritualism, but because, in doing so, they explore (sometimes explode) the gendered assumptions of a heteronormative and patriarchal society, which carried over into the close, if erroneous, association of women with the powers of mediumship and mesmerism. Doyle complicates this binary: in his own stories, he presents women as victims of spiritualist power as well as manipulators of it. And while his fictional women do sometimes use that power for their own, self-serving ends, they also use it as a means of taking control back in a male-dominated world. While fascinating in itself, I argue, Doyle’s creation of a Gothicized spiritualism reflects a nuanced engagement with the gendered politics of his historical moment, as the “New Woman” sought to assert herself over the domestic ideology of the day.