Nicholas Birns
Biographic Data
| ID | 504456 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas Birns |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Birns |
| SIGNATURE | BIRNS N |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9133-5265 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Pablo Neruda in Context
Pablo Neruda in Context includes forty-two essays by some of the main experts on Pablo Neruda's oeuvre that focus on how his places of residence and travel (Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France, Asia), the landmark event of the Cold War, as well as literary and political influences affected his poetic evolution. It also considers the other genres of his writing, including memoirs, letters, translation, and drama, as well as the musical and film adapt…
Inflections and Situatedness
“But Hermengyld Loved Hire Right as Hir Lyf”: Conversion, Gender Transposition and History in The Man of Law’s Tale
This article explores the role the name “Hermengyld” plays in delineating the Mediterranean arena of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale". Derived from Hermenegild, the name of a male Visigothic prince in the late sixth century, the name is used of a Northumbrian constable’s wife by Chaucer and his sources, John Gower and Nicholas Trevet. But both figures, male and female, are martyrs who died for their faith at times of conversion of political…
The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry
The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry offers an authoritative and comprehensive engagement with poetries that range from some of the world's oldest to significant innovations of the twenty-first century. Bringing together insights from First Nations experts, internationally renowned scholars, distinguished practitioners, and future critical leaders, this volume analyses the role of poetry in the multiple cultural imaginaries of Australia wit…
Pacifism
Bethinking Ourselves: Tolstoy, Pacifism, and Critiques of Eurocentrism
The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry
An invaluable resource for staff and students in literary studies and Australian studies, this volume is the first major critical survey on Australian poetry. It investigates poetry's central role in engaging with issues of colonialism, nationalism, war and crisis, diaspora, gender and sexuality, and the environment. Individual chapters examine Aboriginal writing and the archive, poetry and activism, print culture, and practices of internationall…
In My Eyes You Are Beautiful: In My Eyes You Are Beautiful David Unger Oakville, On: Mosaic Press, 2023
Transnational Postwar Catholicism and Social Spirituality in Ruth Park’s *Serpent’s Delight
The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel
The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the…
Poems of Good Love … And Sometimes Fantasy: Pedro Mir Translated by Jonathan Cohen Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2023
In his highly illuminating introduction to this dual-language volume, “The Triumph of Art over Dogma,” Silvio Torres-Saillant says of the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000) that as he composed hi
Manduca’s Choice: Machado de Assis, the Crimean War, and the Affects of the Semiglobal
This essay closely examines the role played by the Crimean War in Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s 1900 novel Dom Casmurro . In portraying the narrator of the novel, Bento Santiago, nicknamed “Casmurro,” and his boyhood friend, Manduca, as quarreling over their preference in the 1854-56 conflict between Russia and an Anglo-French-Ottoman coalition, Machado delineates certain character traits in the two friends, differentiating the sympathetic Man…
Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island: Contesting Refugee Experience in the Global South
This article makes a case for reframing refugee literature through reading Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian. Written in detention on Manus Island via text messages on WhatsApp, Boochani’s book has won wide acclaim in Australia and internationally, not only among literary critics, but as a work of popular appeal in writers’ festivals and cultural prizes. The popular narrative around No Friend …
Roberto Bolaño in Context
Looking at him, how it hurt”: Tsiolkas’s Merciless Gods and Conjectural Literary Space
The short stories in Christos Tsiolkas’s Merciless Gods (2014) offer perhaps his most complete and comprehensive portrait of the contemporary world. This assertion goes against conventional wisdom, especially in postcolonial literature, where the novel has long been a privileged form of speaking truth from the periphery to the centre, and in Australian literature, where what Timothy Brennan calls the “national longing for form” has typically dict…
A Type of House-Paint for All Weathers
Criticism on the work of John Kinsella is made particularly lively by the fact that Kinsella himself practices so much criticism, and self-criticism, in his poetry, fiction, and essays. This can ma
The Scrub of Vicissitude: The Experimental Fiction of John Kinsella
John Kinsella’s achievement as a poet has overshadowed his fiction. But his narrative accomplishment is a considerable one. Whereas his poetry is usually classified as either experimental or “dark pastoral,” the fiction evades these kinds of categorizations. This essay delineates Kinsella’s fictional oeuvre, from the estrangements of his short stories to his recent series of short novels, novellas, and full-length novels, all of which feature a p…
Two Elegies of Hope: Pedro Mir Translated by Jonathan Cohen New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019
Pedro Mir’s literary career spanned the twentieth century, and he experienced, in his prime years, the Trujillato and the traumas it brought to Dominican life. Though iconic in his home country, hi
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Magic of Sociality, and Radical Fantasy
Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions that the book is nostalgic for a sovereign magic, when in fact its historicity is a way of shaking up time itself. I argue Clarke is looking to the early nineteenth century as the earliest possible modernity, …
Introduction to John Kinsella's Pink Lake
John Kinsella's fiction emphasizes similar themes of environmental activism, political protest, and critique of Australian society, as does his widely acclaimed poetry. As in his verse, his orientation as a fiction writer is both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan. But in his fiction Kinsella engages in a double interrogation of both mainstream society and his own posture in opposition to it. In the novella Pink Lake a film director is i…
Fire and Snow
C]lassics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on culture or cultures they passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).-Italo Calvino, "Why Read the Classics?"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition
Merely Unfriendly or Slightly Critical’: Christina Stead. The Left, and *I’m Dying Laughing
The principal subject of the novel Stead spent much of her later years working on, published after her death, I'm Dying Laughing, is marked by the crisis of the Western left. As the son of one committed leftist and a nephew of another, and as someone who in his schooling and acculturation was highly exposed to the American left of the 1970s, I sensed the same crisis so seismically registered by Steadâ s novel: of incongruity between aspirations a…
Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead
Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia's distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells…
Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry
Some years ago, tired of literary surveys that emphasised or took as their frame the national, some scholars of Australian literature called for transverse rubrics, approaches to Australian literat
Barbarian Memory
An investigation of the use of Late Antique European history by late medieval and Renaissance writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Davenant, Trissino, and Corneille. The liminality of the late antiqu
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The Trojan Myth: Postmodern Reverberations
Chi crederebbe giù.t nel mondo errante Che Rifëo Troiano in questo tondo Fosse la quinta de la luci sante?"— Dante, Paradiso
The Trojan Myth: Postmodern Reverberations
“Chi crederebbe giù.t nel mondo errante Che Rifëo Troiano in questo tondo Fosse la quinta de la luci sante?”— Dante, Paradiso
Sacrificing Commentary
Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Space
Building the Cathedral: Imagination, Christianity, and Progress in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
BUILDING THE CATHEDRAL: IMAGINATION, CHRISTIANITY, AND PROGRESS IN WILLA CATHER'S DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP NICHOLAS BIRNS The New School for Social Research From the day of its publication, Death Comes for the Archhishop has been - one of Willa Cather's most popular novels. Critics, though, have chafed against the book's historical setting and its interpretation of American culture. Many readers, especially among Cather's original audience,…
Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (review)
Reviewed by: Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot Nicholas Birns Janis McLarren Caldwell . Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 201 pp. Hardcover, $75. Janis McLarren Caldwell's book, along with several other recent works on literature and medicine in the nineteenth century, dissents from Michel Fou…
Barsoom Bonanza
A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900
A fresh, twenty-first-century look at Australian literature in a broad, inclusive, and multicultural sense. Australian literature is one of the world's richest, dealing not only with "local" Australian themes and issues but with those at the forefront of global literary discussion. This book offers a fresh look at Australian literature,taking a broad view of what literature is and viewing it with Australian cultural and societal concerns in mind.…
Governor of the Northern Province (review)
Reviewed by: Governor of the Northern Province Nicholas Birns Randy Boyagoda. Governor of the Northern Province. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006. 208 pp. $32.00 sc. Randy Boyagoda’s comic novel, which appeared on the 2006 Giller Prize long-list, is an intelligent and timely satire. It is highly literary, filled with allusions and jokes [End Page 228] about Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, L. P. Hartley, Joseph Conrad, Robertson Davies, and John Buchan (in his…
Trollope and the Antipodes
On both voyages Anthony Trollope made to Australia, in 1871 and 1875, he passed through the Suez Canal. Suez was not originally British in inspiration, and was not, in origin, the arterial capstone of empire it later became. This is visible in Trollope’s short story, “George Walker at Suez” (1861), where an Englishman’s unglamorous participation in the canal construction hardly bespeaks the later pivotal role that Suez played in visions of empire…
The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope was among the most prolific, popular, and richly diverse writers of the mid-Victorian period, with forty-seven novels and a variety of other writings to his name. Both a serial and series writer whose novels traversed Ireland, England, Australia and New Zealand, and genres from realism to science fiction, Trollope also published criticism, short fiction, travel writing and biography. The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope pr…
Thickly Studded Oriental Archipelagoes”: Figuring the Indian and Pacific Oceans in Moby-Dick
Tricontinental Modernities: Vargas Llosa's Late Turn against Imperialism in El sueño del celta
In its mixture of the personal and the political, its concentration on an individual making difficult moral choices, and its wide historical lens, Mario Vargas Llosa's El sueo del celta (2010), published only weeks after he garnered that year's Nobel Prize for Literature, is reminiscent of many of his earlier novels. I wish to contend that, even more, it is an effective sequel to his 1981 novel La guerra del fin del mundo, not only treating many …
To Aleppo gone’: From the North Sea to Syria in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Syria is a referent both in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, in which Custance’s first husband is the ‘Sowdan of Surrye,’ and in Macbeth, in which the witches plot to scourge the husband of one of their nemeses, who is ‘to Aleppo gone.’ Both texts treat Syria and the northern reaches of Great Britain as complementary zones, in space as well as time. Such analogous representations of geographical and temporal distance permit a plausible linkage betwee…
Barbarian Memory
An investigation of the use of Late Antique European history by late medieval and Renaissance writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Davenant, Trissino, and Corneille. The liminality of the late antiqu
Rome, Christianity, and Barbarian Memory in Titus Andronicus
This chapter challenges the critical consensus that the setting of Titus Andronicus is ahistorical. Although agreeing that the setting cannot be precisely pinpointed, the chapter argues there are significant clues in the play’s rhetoric and referentiality to Shakespeare intending the play to be set in the third century, before Rome’s conversion to Christianity under Constantine. The chapter examines the crucial role of the barbarian Goths, who, i…
Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry
Some years ago, tired of literary surveys that emphasised or took as their frame the national, some scholars of Australian literature called for transverse rubrics, approaches to Australian literat
Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead
Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia's distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells…
Merely Unfriendly or Slightly Critical’: Christina Stead. The Left, and *I’m Dying Laughing
The principal subject of the novel Stead spent much of her later years working on, published after her death, I'm Dying Laughing, is marked by the crisis of the Western left. As the son of one committed leftist and a nephew of another, and as someone who in his schooling and acculturation was highly exposed to the American left of the 1970s, I sensed the same crisis so seismically registered by Steadâ s novel: of incongruity between aspirations a…
Fire and Snow
C]lassics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on culture or cultures they passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).-Italo Calvino, "Why Read the Classics?"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition
Introduction to John Kinsella's Pink Lake
John Kinsella's fiction emphasizes similar themes of environmental activism, political protest, and critique of Australian society, as does his widely acclaimed poetry. As in his verse, his orientation as a fiction writer is both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan. But in his fiction Kinsella engages in a double interrogation of both mainstream society and his own posture in opposition to it. In the novella Pink Lake a film director is i…
Two Elegies of Hope: Pedro Mir Translated by Jonathan Cohen New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019
Pedro Mir’s literary career spanned the twentieth century, and he experienced, in his prime years, the Trujillato and the traumas it brought to Dominican life. Though iconic in his home country, hi
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Magic of Sociality, and Radical Fantasy
Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions that the book is nostalgic for a sovereign magic, when in fact its historicity is a way of shaking up time itself. I argue Clarke is looking to the early nineteenth century as the earliest possible modernity, …
Looking at him, how it hurt”: Tsiolkas’s Merciless Gods and Conjectural Literary Space
The short stories in Christos Tsiolkas’s Merciless Gods (2014) offer perhaps his most complete and comprehensive portrait of the contemporary world. This assertion goes against conventional wisdom, especially in postcolonial literature, where the novel has long been a privileged form of speaking truth from the periphery to the centre, and in Australian literature, where what Timothy Brennan calls the “national longing for form” has typically dict…
A Type of House-Paint for All Weathers
Criticism on the work of John Kinsella is made particularly lively by the fact that Kinsella himself practices so much criticism, and self-criticism, in his poetry, fiction, and essays. This can ma
Art (25 works) · Literature (21 works) · History (18 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Poetry (8 works)