Spring 2017

The essays featured in this issue of Paper Shell Review boldly tackle challenging material, ranging from the Victorian novel’s encounter with disability to the cultural history of an African American military hero whose official recognition for valor arrived about a hundred years too late. They also venture into the primitive dreamscape of a modernist “nightwood” and bear witness to the brutal legacy of Christianity in the postcolonial Caribbean. Surefooted and strongly argued, they have much to teach us about the power of imaginative writing to unsettle familiar worlds and envision alternative ones.

In its own way, each of these essays negotiates past and present. We learn how Djuna Barnes’s Nightwoodretells the Edenic narrative of Genesis as a modernist fall into knowledge of self and other. We see the valuable resources of contemporary disability theory mobilized to discover in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch a critique of the ableist and sexist ideologies that created Victorian ideas of the “normal.” We are exposed to the violent histories of religious colonial intervention in the Caribbean, seen from the perspective of postcolonial fictions from the region. And we are introduced to the true story of World War I hero Henry Johnson, whose brave critique of racism at the time not only cost him all the adulation he had received for courage on the Western Front but remained unremarked, even up to 2015, when President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the Medal of Honor.

The critical journeys undertaken in these essays make for powerful and rewarding reading. Congratulations to their authors for their engaging—and engaged—scholarship.

Theresa Coletti

Professor of English, University of Maryland