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  1. Alan Rudrum - With great sadness, we have learnt that Alan Rudrum passed away on April 19, 2024. He was not only the doyen of Vaughan studies and a leading expert in seventeenth-century poetry and culture but also a founding member of Connotations and a member of our editorial board. We will miss a true friend and clear-sighted adviser of our project and the critical exchange fostered by Connotations. For his latest contribution, written with Julia Schatz, see this link. Continue Reading
  2. CfP: 18th International Connotations Symposium - July 29 – 31, 2025 Ruhr University Bochum (Germany)   Comedy and its Borders In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, “these ladies’ courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy”, but the standard happy ending is prevented – or delayed – by the death of the King of France. Berowne, the speaker of the lines just quoted, is told to visit the sick and the dying for one year and to entertain them with his jests, a task that he thinks is impossible to accomplish: “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.” With the unusual ending of Love’s Labour’s… Continue Reading
  3. February 2024 – Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife - by Francesca Pierini (Asian University for Women, Chittagong, Bangladesh) Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife was published in 1914 to sustained critical approval. According to von Arnim herself, it was the “least bad” of her novels (Turner 57). As was the case for most of her literary works, however, The Pastor’s Wife was forgotten for a long time. Today it may still be one of von Arnim’s lesser-known novels, but it is regarded, by critics, as a “neglected classic […] important in the history of British literature […] and the feminist novel, particularly through its portrayal of the domestic world… Continue Reading
  4. December 2023 – The Publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol 180 Years Ago, on 19 December 1843 - by Angelika Zirker   https://www.connotations.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Recording-AZ_CC.mp3   Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of… Continue Reading

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