European Society of Comparative Literature ESCL

16/06/2026

🍀 Dear colleagues,

you are welcome to attend Professor Christopher Schliephake's online lecture titled

On beginnings - (Pre-)Foundational Narratives and the Environment in Graeco-Roman Literature

Date: 4th of July 2026
Time: 17:00 p.m. EEST (Eastern Europe Summer Time zone / Athens, Greece)
Venue: Zoom
Registration link: https://forms.gle/JmRBcGWScJ5efiBv5

16/06/2026

An English professor considers the questions raised about selecting q***r works for study and discussion when planning a course on LGBTQ+ literature.

16/06/2026

Joyce made this recording in Paris at the HMV studios at the insistence of Sylvia Beach (the woman behind Shakespeare and Company, the publisher's of Ulysses), although HMV would only loan out their equipment at a cost and would have as little to do with the recording as possible. Beach recounts:

16/06/2026

The term apocryphal may sound antiquated, but any reasonably serious reader encounters it fairly often, even in recently published texts. In the modern usage, it usually describes words or events that, despite probably never having been spoken or taken place, tend to be cited as if they had.

16/06/2026

OPEN ACCESS🏆
Adèle Kreager, Transformation and Identity in Old Norse Literature: The Human and Beyond (Boydell & Brewer, June 2026)

https://boydellandbrewer.com/book/transformation-and-identity-in-old-norse-literature-9781843848080/

Investigates how Old Norse myth, saga, and poetic traditions imagine human identity through encounters with animals, materials, and environments.

What happens to the category of the “human” in a world where bodies shift shape, objects fuse with living beings, and identities slip between species? This book explores how thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic texts confront this question, treating transformation not just as a narrative device, but as a way of thinking about what people are and how they inhabit the world.

From the fragmented and reassembled bodies in Snorra Edda to the intricate play between humans and things in skaldic verse and eddic riddles; from mind-altering acts of consumption in the Sigurðr-cycle to the sequence of limb-loss, prosthetic substitution, and reattachment in Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana – these works reveal a culture keenly attuned to bodily contingency and material entanglement. Tracing episodes and images of change across the corpus, including the wider lexicon of shapeshifting, the author presents a vision of medieval Icelandic thought creatively alive to the instability of human identity in its running negotiation with the nonhuman world.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.

16/06/2026

Dear God*! I just realised—it’s Bloomsday!

*“God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain” (Episode 15, Circe).

16/06/2026

The Northern Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell seems to defend the enterprise of historical fiction with the delight she takes in storytelling that is expansive and full of vigor. Her new novel, “Land,” follows Tomás, a skilled laborer in 1860s Ireland, tasked with making maps for the British, who are occupying the country. He’s insistent on accuracy—on supplementing the official and misleading chronicle of empire with the reality of those living under it. Though historical fiction is often derided as disrespectful, unserious, or florid dreaming in the face of reality, “ ‘Land’ is less interested in how fantasy may be exchanged for reality than in how the two are complementary,” Katy Waldman writes. Read her review of Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/08/land-maggie-ofarrell-book-review?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhfacebook&utm_content=app.dashsocial.com%2Fnewyorkermag%2Flibrary%2Fmedia%2F685341395

15/06/2026

CFPs Archipelagic Imaginaries and the Americas: Islands - Narratives - Mythologies— RIAS Vol. 20, Fall-Winter (2/2027) (Call open until Oct. 30th, 2026) Articles should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words.

"Archipelagic Imaginaries and the Americas: Islands - Narratives - Mythologies"RIAS Vol. 20, Fall-Winter (2/2027)Edited by Marta Silvera Roig and Asunción López-Varela AzcárateExecutive Editor: Paweł Jędrzejko(Call open until Oct. 30th, 2026)