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In the decade between 2009 and 2019, China emerged as an economic power with geostrategic dimensions in the Mediterranean and Southeastern Europe, a region contested by great powers for many centur...

Although the painter Joseph Severn left little in the way of textual commentary on Keats’s poetry in his extensive body of letters and memoirs, he did offer a rich analysis and response to the poet’s verse in his artwork, especially his portraits and his best early painting, The Fountain (1828). The picture not only provides a sophisticated reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) but also offers a coded assessment of Keats’s legacy. Further, it wrestles with the public debate over the causes of Keats’s death and, in the end, acts as a complex private memorial to the intense friendship between painter and poet. Severn’s picture takes as its textual source an influential poem by Samuel Rogers and as its visual sources a network of paintings, sculpture, and sketches that lend a multidimensional context to what appears at first to be a straightforward Italian genre scene. Together with key passages from his letters, these artworks persuade us that Severn had more on his mind than a pastoral landscape...

Humor that addresses race can easily backfire. This article engages in an analysis of The Boondocks, an adult cartoon, to investigate how humor about race and racism can function not only to generate laughter through satiric rejection of long-held racist stereotypes in the American context but also to encourage new perspectives. The analysis makes use of rhetorical concepts drawn from theorist Kenneth Burke to analyze the rhetorical and comedic functioning of the dialogue, the use of music, and the visual features of the show.

American graphic artist Lynd Ward's detailed wood engravings for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, allotted scant attention by critics, depart radically from other book illustrations of the novel. While these renderings borrow heavily from the cinema, Ward's woodcuts are Gothic in atmosphere and psychology and build on the nineteenth-century stage history of Frankenstein. In addition, Ward's illustrations constitute the earliest attempt in the medium to offer a sustained queer reading of the novel, anticipating like-minded critical investigations of Frankenstein by about sixty-five years. While Ward's interpretation lays the foundation for such theoretical readings, it also mediates Victor's homoeroticism through the illustrator's own socialist politics of the early 1930s and the visual narratives that constitute his two earlier graphic novels, Wild Pilgrimage (1932) and Prelude to a Million Years (1933).

A recent discovery of hundreds of letters from Joseph Severn to his wife Elizabeth sheds new light on Severn’s relationship with Keats, especially in the period from 1841 to 1861 when he returned to England. A pair of unpublished letters, printed here for the first time, concern Severn’s handling of the poet’s relics and invite us to revise standard notions of his famous role as “The Friend of Keats.” Through these letters Severn becomes a much more complex psychological figure than the legendary label allows. We see him struggle to balance his own declining fortunes as an artist with his enduring commitment to Keats’s legacy.

In this paper we study window barrier options, where a single constant continuously-monitored barrier prevails for a period that commences strictly after the start date of the option and terminates strictly before expiry. We determine valuation formulae within a limited deterministic term-structure in terms of trivariate normal distribution functions. These formulae offer a generalization of the valuation formulae for partial barrier options given by Heynan and Kat.

It is no accident that most of the important critical literature on William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel appeared in the mid-1980s, the exact historical moment when critical theory finally converged with Williams' poetics. Following the lead of pioneering work by Joel Conarroe and John Dixon Hunt in the early 1970s, critics such as Mary Ann Caws, Marjorie Perloff, Henry M. Sayre, Wendy Steiner and Ulrich Weisstein were instrumental in developing a methodology for reading the intricate visual surfaces of Williams' poems. They saw the poems as verbal icons, theorizing a system of structural correspondences between poem and picture, and attending carefully to the syntactical complexity of the poems. In the heyday of structuralism and semiotics, critics focused almost exclusively on the poems as ahistorical linguistic structures, as highly patterned ‘visual texts.’

In this paper we prove that all finite dimens~onal complex nilpotent Lie algebras containing an abelian ideal of codimension 1 have unirnodal Betti numbers.