ABSTRACT Robert Shaw’s The Sun Doctor (1961) presents medicine as an ideological – rather than value neutral – component of the imperial project and questions one of the pillars of the colonial administration’s self-justification: namely, that the introduction of Western-style scientific medicine was an unbridled social good. In response to the ‘hero’ narratives found in adventure stories and medical dramas in mid-twentieth-century Britain that promulgated the trope of the ‘civilising’ rescue of the native, Shaw presents an image of the colonial doctor as a destructive iconoclast, exposed as a product of vanity, hubris, and egotism rather than genuine empathy and care. By deconstructing the modernist desire for iconoclasm, Shaw exposes the paternalistic attitudes and exploitative power structures embedded in colonial medicine at mid-century which disrupted indigenous knowledge systems and undermined established cultures and societies. This article situates The Sun Doctor as a currently overlooked and undervalued literary critique of the broader ideological framework that sought to justify colonialism under the guise of humanitarianism and progress.

ABSTRACT Valerii Pereleshin, a Russian-Chinese-Brazilian poet, translator, and monk, remains an underexplored and virtually unknown figure despite a life that spanned pivotal political and cultural moments of the twentieth century. Born in 1913 in Russia and dying in obscurity in Brazil in 1992, Pereleshin’s experiences of displacement, queerness, and marginality were central to his identity, yet he has largely been relegated to the periphery of literary scholarship. This article reinterprets his work through the Hegelian notion of alienation (Entäusserung), arguing that alienation is not a deficit but the very condition of freedom. Rather than a source of suffering, alienation enables subjectivity to emerge through misinterpretation, self-division, and eccentricity. Drawing on queer theory and psychoanalysis, and working within the broader Hegelian-psychoanalytic tradition, the article examines how Pereleshin’s queerness unsettles conventional notions of identity and belonging, casting alienation as a dynamic process of becoming. Pereleshin’s life and poetry demonstrate how freedom arises from the disruption of social norms and expectations, rejecting the myth of coherence or unity. By reclaiming alienation as a generative force, this study shows how transformation – of the self and the collective – occurs not through harmony but through shared dissonance.

ABSTRACT This essay explores how works of literary fiction contribute to the aims of critique, understood along Foucauldian lines as a transformative engagement with modes of subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, these modes are defined in terms of the ‘conduct of sensibility'. Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992) reveals aspects of the conduct of sensibility and of the battle between conflicting forces that strive to give shape to that conduct. The novel makes a contribution to the practice of critique by providing both an analysis of a certain framework of subjectivation and by offering a strategic map for its transformation. If the conduct of sensibility unfolds along an axis of perception, interpretation, and action, then works of fiction offer privileged access to that complex web, not only as tools for analysis but also as interventions that nudge, probe, and disrupt. Hence, rather than critique on its own, or literature on its own, being able to engage in effective critique, my argument is that the practice of critique needs fiction, not as an occasional object of analysis but as a constant ally in its work.

ABSTRACT Although a shipwreck in Twelfth Night violently separates Viola from her twin, the catastrophe also shows Shakespeare’s audience that water is a tool which can assuage grief and allow Viola to hide herself while operating as an instrument for managing other women’s bodies and desires, too. Disguising herself as a eunuch allows Viola to dam up the flood of desire and halt growth, but these infrastructural adjustments to flow work on larger and smaller scales, reorganising the imagination while upending how the world is viewed. Power operates differently when water swamps thinking and Twelfth Night’s multiple references to things like ‘tears’, ‘brine’, ‘foam’, ‘waves’, and ‘storms’ help us see water as a symbol, resource and ordering device. If women’s bodies seem particularly defined and changed by watery flow, Viola’s story suggests how the same forces coursing through bodies work outside them, with water activating engines for industry, trade and empire. Drawing on oceanic studies, decolonial feminist theory, the biology of menstruation and early modern imperial thought, I analyse Twelfth Night as awash in ideas about the ways globalisation unfolds across ‘hungry’ seas and inside women’s bodies, with water’s hydraulics coordinating how, when and why people and empires might come together.

ABSTRACT This essay reads together three texts that present unhousing as an urgent necessity: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), James Baldwin’s ‘My Dungeon Shook. Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation’ (1963) and Ocean Vuong’s ‘The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation’ (2014). All three, written by self-identified-as gay men, argue for the need to consciously acknowledge that the domestic space is not necessarily a safe refuge and may be a dangerous site that one must always have the possibility of escaping from. In their presentations of the house, all three deliberately ignore the traditionally predictable trope of the closet in gay writing and, in a gesture of literal and metaphorical outwardness that I read as queer, rather than gay, they focus on the fire escape. For them, this domestic exo-element reveals human inherent exposure and vulnerability while also pointing to the possibility of salvation through our, also inherent, co-dependence on the inter-relationalities within the community. In leaving the (fiction of the) safe house behind, all three demonstrate that unhousing may, paradoxically, be the safest way to create habitable spaces.

ABSTRACT Saunders critiques the effects of capitalism on the lives and the bodies of what Rando has called the ‘postmodern working class’ through his representation of the ways in which his characters relate to their homes or dwelling places. A significant number of Saunders's short stories are set either in homes turned into units of production and population control or in workplaces that are examples of the ‘experience economy’ paradigm (Pine and Gilmore), among them an array of decadent and surreal theme parks. These unconventional homes are markers of the devastation of the working- and middle class by the social and economic structures of the U.S. In a few of his stories Saunders includes characters that step aside from the structure that is crushing them. Interestingly, what triggers their decision is not a nostalgic return to the normative household, but a step further toward a radical unhousing. The few characters that become free from the structures that hold and dehumanise them pay a price: their complete removal from a society which, apparently, carries on unscathed. This article reads as both political and suggestive of a new collective subjectivity these brave decisions, which are perceived by the overpowering power structures as futile.

ABSTRACT This article follows the development of Celan’s poetic quest in order to understand why, since the late 1950s, he felt close to Osip Mandelstam’s poetics, as well as to Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on language and finitude, and Martin Buber’s dialogism. Although his relationship to Heidegger and Buber has been at the centre stage of Celan studies for decades, the importance of his readings of Mandelstam have not been sufficiently attended to. Understanding his connection to Mandelstam and Russian acmeism can illuminate more profoundly the role Heidegger and Buber play in his reflections on poetics. The way acmeists ‘digested’, to use an anthropophagic term, Baudelaire’s symbolism, was critical for Celan to value a poetics of existence over a poetics of formal experimentation, the latter is what his contemporaries were interested in exploring as they followed Mallarme’s legacy, criticised by Celan in The Meridian speech he gave in 1960.

ABSTRACT This study investigates how non-academic readers engage with Asian American literature through AI-assisted sentiment analysis of online reviews of Celeste Ng's novels. Ng's novels represent two motifs in the genre: one centred on Asian American experiences and the other situated in a multicultural context. Keyword analysis identifies frequently discussed aspects in reader reviews, including overall evaluation, literary elements (such as characterisation, plot, theme, setting, and authorial style), and comparative discourse on Ng's work. Assisted by the large language model ChatGPT, sentiment analysis of these aspects uncovers the affective and critical undercurrents in public reception. Specifically, the narrative about Asian American experiences elicits varying degrees of empathy, depending on readers' identities and perceptions of the characters' ethnic experiences. When the narrative is set in a multicultural context, readers underscore the importance of skilful plotting in satisfying their curiosity. However, both writing modes draw criticism for abrupt endings, reflecting readers' expectations for resolved conflicts and clear character epiphanies. These findings suggest authors should create relatable characters, develop compelling plots, provide sensible resolutions, and clarify character growth. Methodologically, this study showcases the potential of ChatGPT for literary criticism and opens new avenues for human-AI partnered research.

ABSTRACT This essay examines a high-profile campaign to roll back civil rights in Britain in the years before World War One. By persuading government and the people that Britain was already invaded and facing imminent colonisation, its aim was to place the nation in a state of emergency, requiring a new regime of disciplinary control. Popular novelist William le Queux, Field Marshall Frederick Roberts and government intelligence specialist James Edmonds have all been associated with ‘spy mania’ by historians. However, their role in a larger effort to erode legal and social protections in Britain has not been sufficiently addressed. I examine their attempts to stage an existential crisis for Britain using the platform of the Daily Mail in 1906, and the strategies they followed thereafter. Importantly, the essay locates these within a sustained campaign of advocacy for exceptional measures, both in war and civil crisis. As the essay seeks to demonstrate, the joint actions of these collaborators helped initiate far-reaching changes in the relationship between security and democracy in Britain.

ABSTRACT This essay addresses an ambivalence about the political vitality and efficacy of the lyric, a genre paradoxically associated with politically committed verse and expressions of bourgeois subjectivity. In the wake of these critiques, we argue that modern lyric poetry has utilised an eighteenth-century tradition of locodescriptive poetry for its singular vantage on how capitalism has intermediated subjectivity and space, from 1800 to the present. We revise dominant accounts of locodescription by moving beyond the dyadic relationship between speaker and landscape, to consider how ‘the crowd’ (the real, imagined, projected, and spectral presence of the masses) confounds any attempt to isolate the individual from collective consciousness. Tracing the figure of the crowd through two centuries of English poetry from William Cowper, William Blake and Charles Baudelaire to Frank O’Hara, Terrance Hayes, and John Keene, we contend the crowd indexes the diminishing distance between space and capital. The Crowd as a locodescriptive figure represents, variously, the shock of the masses, the force of sociality, and the collapse of subjectivity, expressivity, and privacy.