public domain review
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Travel Writing as Artifact
At the Public Domain Review, Nandini Das revisits The Principle Navigations and argues that the massive folio of travel writings compiled by Richard Hakluyt in 1589 is more than an artifact of British colonialism. It also memorializes, “the elusive traces of those…
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The 18th Century from a Balloon
In the first of a two-part series at the Public Domain Review, Lily Ford uses 18th century illustrations and drawings from balloonists to capture the changes in science and society brought by the first people to see the world from…
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Fingerprints, Racism, and Sherlock Holmes
Fears of mistaken identity and unconscious slips were crystallized in the literature of detection but emerged from a broad range of hermeneutic practices across the era, at a time in which those in power considered the borders of empire and…
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Michelangelo vs. Raphael
Having goaded the formerly pre-eminent Michelangelo by winning papal favour and sneaking into his as-yet unfinished Sistine Chapel, Raphael further insulted his Florentine rival in the Laocoön competition. The Public Domain Review tells the story of how the restoration of Laocoön and…
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The First Bohemian
The Public Domain Review examines the work of Elizabethan writer Robert Greene, the original Bohemian, and the first known reviewer of William Shakespeare: Greene’s chief target was “an upstart Crow,” who “supposes he is as well able to bombast out…
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Was Oscar Wilde Unoriginal?
“Oscar,” Whistler’s barbs continued, “has the courage of the opinions… of others!” The Public Domain Review looks at the accusations of plagiarism that dogged Oscar Wilde’s oft-quoted career, and his highly-publicized feud with the American artist James McNeill Whistler.
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The Science of the Supernatural
Certain people, Barrett decided, were… exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses.” He considered these persons able to receive messages from super-normal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and…
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Between Living and Dying
At the Public Domain Review, Sharon Ruston examines contemporary influences on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, specifically with regards to scientific developments in discovering the line between life and death.
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Pynchon in Colonial New England
At the Public Domain Review, read about Thomas Pynchon’s oldest colonial ancestor, who also happened to be a writer—though he was much less successful and much more heavily censored.
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Writing In Another Dimension
Edison floods the world with light; biologists discover germs and defy Death; botanists grow tropical plants in Parisian glass-houses and affront Nature with hot-house orchids; the phonograph and the cinema fold Time and Space for the masses. And for some…
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The Underdog Botanist
This, then, is the story of how one of Britain’s most promising, skilled explorers struggled to find a place in Victorian science, unable to shake his love for the underdogs of the plant world. The Public Domain Review shares the story…
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The First Urban Apocalypse
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. For the Public Domain Review, Brett Beasley examines Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City, widely considered to be the first science fiction novel…