Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012) is a contemporary narrative of climate change, which presents the interplay of rurality and cosmopolitanism. The novel describes the ways in which its heroine―a marginalized farmwife―evolves into a cosmopolitan citizen inasmuch as she tries to find a practical solution for climate change upon encountering the sudden arrival of the Monarch butterflies at the mountain right behind her house, which is a by-product of global warming. Over the course of the narrative, the farmwife opens her rural and domestic space to visitors from all over the world, working closely with them. Her change unfolds in ways that territorialize cosmopolitanism within the rural community. In this article, I examine the process of her development through the theoretical lens of rural cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, I argue that the novel prompts the reader to closely look at how one's habits of everyday life in the countryside can be assigned cosmopolitical meanings in the twenty-first-century world risk society.

This essay is a study of a particularly “queer” moment in Byron's lyric poetry. In “To Thyrza,” a short poem Byron wrote in response to the death of John Edleston, a choirboy Byron fell in love with at Cambridge, the speaker struggles through an exceedingly convoluted and ambiguous passage to express his excruciating pain. In answer to this perplexing poem, this essay proposes a study of the correlation between queer desire and the lyric form in Byron's poetry. The lyric is not a poetic form usually associated with Byron, and yet in “To Thyrza,” we find a poet who relies on the lyric voice to express what is the most private and dearest to his heart. Queer desire has always been a slippery slope for those who question the possibility of a proper language for desire, and poststructuralist theories of sexuality have looked to language as a site of displacement and substitution for illicit desire. This essay's reflection on queer lyric is an intervention into this poststructuralist perspective. Lyric poetry is a peculiar fusion of voice and text, and the intrinsic tension between these two linguistic impulses in the lyric has us wonder what the lyric voice can do beyond and against textual displacements of desire. When the lyric voice makes itself heard somewhere outside the structure of the text, it makes space for the voice of displaced desire to reverberate as in an echo box. Queer lyric resides in that space, and this essay's reading of Byron's “To Thyrza” contemplates the radical possibility of such a queer lyric.

This essay looks at how the images of female martyrs were appropriated in post-Reformation England while relieving public anxiety for absent objects to worship. I suggest Mary Magdalene as an apt substitute provided by reformers for the lost female sacredness and their self-contradictory desire to remove carnal idols but to preserve the palpable worship simultaneously. Through examining medieval virgin martyr legends and John Foxe's female martyrs in Acts and Monuments, this essay traces the conceptual changes or inheritance of female sacredness throughout pre- and post-Reformation era. Lastly, the essay analyses Lewis Wager's Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene as a stage version of post-Reformation female sacredness and discusses how theatrical representation repeats and reveals the inner conflicts of the idea. The inconsistencies Mary Magdalene displays originate from the self-contradiction intrinsic to the Protestant desire to deny corporeality but to be incapable of removing it. So does the powerful representation of Elizabeth I, which overwhelms the public with the tension between her earthly female body and her sacred conceptual body. The regret Mary Magdalene indulges in might be the self-reflection of the contemporaries who are secretly yearning to worship and to touch the bodily form of the divine.

Despite the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, the decade of the 1930s in America was an unprecedentedly productive time for Hollywood, and the woman's film, which depicts the life of an adult female protagonist and is designed to appeal mostly to female spectators, was one of the flourishing genres that survived the Great Depression. While scholars have viewed classical Hollywood cinema as an ideological apparatus, representing dominant ways of seeing the world and reinforcing hegemonic views, this essay proposes Hollywood films as a version of modernism that is not exclusive, arcane, and anti-modern, but inclusive, mass-produced, and highly susceptible to the experience of modernity. Drawing on Miriam Hansen's notion of vernacular modernism marked by texts' susceptibility to reflect and confront the constitutive ambivalence of modernity, this essay focuses on the woman's film and fashion in tandem and examines how in the woman's film fashion is represented through the female protagonists' costumes and circulated in the form of a discourse. This essay argues that the woman's film of the 1930s tends to associate the heroine's experiences of modernity involving fashion and glamour with the themes of class rise and acquiring manners, and that in case of maternal melodrama, as manifested in King Vidor's 1937 film Stella Dallas, the pattern is inverted. That is, the heroine's sartorial practices do not necessarily lead to her class rise, but bespeaks her subversive individuality immune from ideological views on fashion.

This article argues that for Virginia Woolf, racial alterity or the trope of race operates as a grounding for imagining androgynous subjectivity. In doing this, I will first sketch out how the author's preoccupation with the question of race came into contact with the gender issues that she saw as important to address in order to tackle the oppressive, masculinist literary climate of early twentieth-century England. I will then turn to examine how Woolf's construction of race as a prerequisite for androgyneity is ultimately an impossible task, by a close reading of Orlando: A Biography, specifically, the title character Orlando's relationships with the unnamed dead Moor, his Russian lover, Sasha, and the Turkish gypsy named Rustum, respectively. Although the concept of androgyneity, as many Woolf critics contend, was intended by Woolf as a means to authorize herself as an aspiring woman writer, a rendering of race as a prerequisite for androgyneity is a task doomed to fail, precisely because identity itself is the contentious space where its normalized and subversive repetitions form and deform each other in constant conflict and negotiation with one another, almost always risking the reinforcement of gender binarism and normative sexuality.