Posts Tagged: public domain review

Travel Writing as Artifact

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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 who disappeared, the disappointment of the non-event, the tedium of travel, and the absence of […]

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Fingerprints, Racism, and Sherlock Holmes

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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 boundaries of racial identity to be insecure. The Public Domain Review looks at the early […]

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Michelangelo vs. Raphael

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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 His Sons only further deepened the rivalry between Renaissance artists Michelangelo and Raphael.

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The First Bohemian

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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 a blank verse as the best of you”…He has a “tiger’s heart, wrapped in a […]

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The Science of the Supernatural

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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 the spiritual—a phenomenon that might account for telepathy. The Public Domain Review examines the history […]

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Writing In Another Dimension

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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 reason bicycles become rather popular. The Public Domain Review looks at the death of Victorian […]

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The Noble Fish and the Man Who Loved Them

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Nothing, in the opinion of a New Yorker, can exceed boiled sheep’shead served up at a sumptuous dinner. . . This noble fish . . . the feats of hooking and pulling him in, furnish abundant materials for the most pleasing and hyperbolical stories. The Public Domain Review examines Samuel L. Mitchill’s nearly obsessive Report, in […]

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Machiavelli: Prince of Comedy

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You could argue that Machiavelli’s entire worldview was comic, but comic in a peculiar way: ironic, wry, a little melancholy, punctuated by an earthy vulgarity that, these days, would get him thrown off a university faculty in a minute. The Public Domain Review takes a look at the more humorous side of Machiavelli’s writing.

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The Mystery and Controversy of Lewis Carroll

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In fact, as far as his daily life went, “Lewis Carroll” was a complete non-person. Charles was always known personally only by his real name, letters directed to the pseudonym were returned unanswered, and he would walk away if strangers dared to mention “Alice” in his presence. For The Public Domain Review, Jenny Wolff examines […]

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Sexy, Scandalous Science

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For centuries the study of flowers and the cultivation of gardens were deemed to be safe pursuits for genteel young ladies – providing they did not aspire to become professional botanists…Carl Linnaeus’s sexual system for the classification of plants, based on stamens and pistils and expressed in overtly sexual terms, changed all that. The Public […]

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