Flush: A Biography. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf

The Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf's 1931 fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel. Includes extensive introduction, explanatory notes, textual notes and textual apparatus, unpublished drafts and Atlantic Monthly magazine version of the text

A Socio-Legal Analysis of Abortion in Romania: From Inspiring ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to Post-Dobbs Developments

This chapter provides a socio-legal analysis of the status of abortion in Romania, offering insights into one of the most severe limitations of reproductive autonomy in European history and its aftermath. The chapter begins with a discussion of Romania’s abortion ban during the communist era, a restriction so severe that it served as inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. It then follows the socio-legal trajectory of abortion after the fall of communism, when abortion was legalized, until the recent global developments following the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which effectively put an end to abortion rights under the US Constitution. Overall, by looking at Romania as a case study, the chapter shows that the status and accessibility of abortion are deeply contingent on factors extending beyond the legal realm, such as historical legacies, religion, international developments and the involvement of transnational actors

Historians of the Closet: Queering the Past in Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, and Trans Fiction

This chapter traces how history is queerly put to use in contemporary gay, lesbian, and trans fiction. The chapter explores three Anglophone gay, lesbian, and trans novels of the last decade which have engaged in questions of queer historiography: namely, Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (2013); Katherine O’Donnell’s Slant (2023); and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of The Fox (2018). These novels each track very different gay, lesbian, and trans characters in history; however, they are all united in making queer experience itself historical whilst also unsettling some of the ontological assumptions that undergird a historicism that might discount such experience. In foregrounding historiographic modes as a concern, I argue that recent gay, lesbian, and trans fictions have absorbed, and importantly recast, one of the strongest debates in queer historiography of the last twenty years or so: namely, ‘historicism versus unhistoricism.’ In taking up queer historiographic concerns, Anglophone gay, lesbian, and trans fictions over the past decade have positioned characters as both chroniclers of the closet and as historians of the unrecorded, each prompting decisive consequences for how we might, in our present, reparatively curate a queer past beyond fiction that finds queers in history as much as it queers history tout court

'Meke Reverence and Devotion’: A Reader in Late Medieval English Religious Writing

This is an edited collection of materials from English ‘devotional miscellanies’ with manuscript case studies and a substantial critical introduction. The anthology will provide a truly representative assemblage of Middle English devotional and theological writing for the first time since Carl Horstmann’s Yorkshire Writers (1895-96), with up to 50% of its texts never having been edited for publication before

Queer Time in Pamela

This chapter explores how Samuel Richardson both represented, and contributed to, the emergence of eighteenth-century models of heteronormative, white, and genteel, masculinity in his 1740 novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. In particular, it considers how Richardson articulated manliness in relation to the ordered temporality of the domestic space of the home. Critics have long associated Richardson’s writing with the production of new cultural and social modes. Michael McKeon argues that the ‘…spectacle of Pamela is a kind of “glass” in which the gentry see not her “public” meaning but themselves, the authority of her upward mobility…’, whilst Terry Eagleton claims that ‘Richardson did not only share in the bourgeois public sphere of eighteenth-century England; he helped to construct it’. More recently, critics like Paul Kelleher and Kathleen Lubey have approached Pamela from a queer studies perspective with decisive consequences for criticism in the field. Reading the melding of sexuality and sentiment in Richardson, Kelleher has shown how Pamela’s attachment to moral goodness ‘arrests for a time … the narrative development of reciprocated heterosexual desire’. Meanwhile, placing Richardson in the context of the pornographic, Lubey argues that sex scenes provide ‘instructive moments that call on readers to imagine sex acts in multiple ways …’. Adding to these important queer readings, I explore how Richardson’s temporal politics in Pamela contributed to the emergence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century anglophone culture

The periodicity of enamel laminations in human deciduous molars

Objective: Enamel laminations are closely spaced incremental lines that run parallel to striae of Retzius or the developing enamel surface. Here, the timing of enamel laminations is calculated for naturally exfoliated deciduous molars (n=111) from three modern-day populations (Aotearoa New Zealand, Britain and Canada). Design: Teeth were sectioned using standard histological methods and examined using a high-powered microscope. Mean daily secretion rates (DSR) were calculated for the outer enamel of each molar in cuspal, lateral and cervical enamel regions. These DSRs were used to determine the periodicity of enamel growth across laminations in each region. Lamination periodicity was compared between populations and sexes, and within molars to assess the relationship between lamination periodicity and the angle between laminations and the outer surface. Results: Laminations were present in 57% of all molars (n=63 out of n=111). Their presence did not vary between populations or by sex. A mean two-day periodicity was observed in cuspal and lateral outer enamel sampling regions. A mean one-day periodicity was observed in the cervical outer enamel. The angle of laminations relative to the outermost surface of the enamel was significantly related to the presence of laminations. Conclusions: A two-day periodicity for laminations indicates that this incremental marking is not a reliable proxy for a circadian 24-hour rhythm in human deciduous molars. The orientation of laminations was similar to Retzius lines but differed to the orientation of cross-striations