Cuts at Goldsmiths University in London could threaten up to half of departmental jobs in English, history, music, theatre and visual cultures.
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In the latest higher education funding freeze: sacrificing the arts for STEM subjects makes no sense.
A Muslim protester shouts at security personnel on the streets of Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in Delhi, in 2020.
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Thanks to a strong oral Urdu literary tradition in South Asia, poems from the past linger in the popular imagination.
Screenshot from the video game ‘The Stanley Parable’.
Stanley Parable
Songwriting, theatre, rap and graphic novels have won literary awards, but video games remain an overlooked part of the wider literary canon.
Maya Angelou’s political journalism, written in the 1960s, was radical and anti-colonial.
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Angelou’s 1960s political journalism in Africa demonstrates her desire to link the struggle for civil rights in the US to global campaigns against racism.
Esther denouncing Haman, who, according to the Purim story, attempted to have all Jews within the Persian Empire massacred.
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Whether thousands of years ago or right now, fans have always created new stories based on familiar characters, weaving their own experiences into the tale.
Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo/Waddesdon Manor/National Portrait Gallery
Their novels feature defiant heroines, who resist the tyranny of forced marriages and seek moral, intellectual and economic liberation.
Around the Fish – Paul Klee (1926)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Alice B. Toklas and her partner, the influential modernist writer Gertrude Stein, hosted a celebrated Paris salon. Toklas would go on to write an unusual bestseller.
L-R: Mike Skinner, Ray Davies, James Smith of Yard Act and Lady Leshurr.
Edd Westmacott/John Atashian/Thomas Jackson/UPI/Alamy Stock Photo
Social and literary realism have long detailed people’s everyday lives – and they have been a staple in popular music for decades.
Betty Smith’s novel sold millions of copies in the 1940s.
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No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation. But Smith rarely saw her hometown through rose-colored glasses − and even grew to resent it.
Wassily Kandinsky – Composition 8 (1923).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Yevgeny Zamyatin was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent.
America’s biggest book publishers originally viewed LGBTQ+ romance as a niche market.
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It’s tempting to see this trend as a sign of the times. But the biggest book publishers started changing their approach only once they realized they were leaving money on the table.
Retranslations are making their way into book covers.
Which version of “The Metamorphosis” or “Crime and Punishment” should you choose? In a particularly well-stocked library or bookshop, you could find many different English translations.
Sonnets still have a reputation for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman.
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These moving poems are a reminder that on Valentine’s Day, it’s OK to celebrate a broader definition of love.
We need to speak more about how to become the kind of man who can openly show love for others while accepting love from those who care.
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Encouraging men to take the risk of expressing tender feelings for others is part of relying on love as a tool of anti-racist and decolonial education.
Photo of J.M. Coetzee: Laterthanyouthink, via Wikimedia Commons
The fiction of J.M. Coetzee is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky – Vasily Perov (1872).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dostoevsky’s sudden recovery from his gambling mania is an example of how a chance happening can change everything
Ellis Humphrey Evans, known by his bardic name Hedd Wyn, was killed on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele.
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Bard Hedd Wyn was killed in action in France in 1917.
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Research suggests the act of creative writing can have therapeutic benefits.
Detail from the cover of Peponi, the Kiswahili translation of Tanzanian Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Paradise.
Mkuki Na Nyota
Swahili readers who have not encountered Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work in other languages are in for a great treat.
These books had our academics gripped until their final pages.