In the fall of 2019 I taught my eighteenth-century novel course as an exercise in slow reading, taking a tactic I had used before: putting a canonical work of fiction into the context of the other voices in the literary marketplace, and the circumstances of its making. For such a course, Tristram Shandy is an ideal central text. It was published…[Read more]

We are quickly approaching the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the 10th anniversaries of Twitch and Itch.io, and the ninth generation of video game consoles. The most successful TV/film Kickstarter of all time funded the animated series for D&D livestream Critical Role. Game Studies has existed as an interdisciplinary field for over three…[Read more]

Syllabus for a upper-level English course focused on roleplaying games. Features active learning classroom, contract grading, and student-led midsemester readings. (This was the document students received on the first day, and has already changed. You can follow my “campaign diary” recapping discussions at…[Read more]

This afterword discusses the most important, most under-rewarded, and most unsexy aspect of data visualization: the production and use of reliable underlying data. Starting from the premise that visualizations are only as good as their underlying evidentiary base, Freidman addresses the contributions of digital projects that have laid the…[Read more]

Tristram Shandy itself was at the forefront of technological innovations, both as copyright protection and as bravura performance. What John Mullan has called the “stuff” of Tristram Shandy are among the most accessible ways into the text.
Of these techniques, marbling is one of the easier (and more pleasurable) techniques to introduce into the…[Read more]

Like Catherine Morland, we all dream of discovering that a manuscript tucked away in an archive, among dusty boxes in an attic, or in a mysterious chest in our guest room is really a long-forgotten work by a beloved author. This is the story of a collector who thought he had done just that – and a scholar who almost believed it. Fair warning: t…[Read more]

For Johnson, the “nose of the mind” can be understood as closely connected to a notion of the mind’s nose—in other words, the osmology or scent-connotations insofar as we can recover them. As I have argued elsewhere, the level to which that ambition is achievable is low. That said, in this essay I explore a few ways we can examine the work of…[Read more]

Jane Austen’s Sanditon (begun 1807) is something of a mystery for Austen scholars. Since its first description in 1871 and its publication in 1925, Austen’s incomplete final novel fragment has inspired innumerable essays speculating about Austen’s intentions and plans, and countless continuations that attempt to provide a plot on top of Austen’s…[Read more]

Between 1776 and 1800 — at the end of Garrick’s reign at Drury and the rise of Edmund Kean — the shape of Europe, the role of women in the public sphere, and even the size of London’s patent theatres underwent renovation and reconstitution. The results often wore familiar faces, even as meaning was changed by new contexts and editorial f…[Read more]