Portrait of Indian author and poet Rabindranath Tagore, circa 1935.

Tagore in Saigon: Culture, Contradictions, Champagne

Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Vietnam in 1929 fanned the debate about the region’s potential future without the French.
Pausanias sacrifices a lamb to Greek and Roman pagan gods before fighting in the battle of Plataea

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Animal Sacrifice and the Greek Gods

The ritual of animal sacrifice in ancient Greece brought humans closer to the gods even as it defined their differences.
Virginia Woolf

A Hundred Years of Mrs. Dalloway

An exemplar of modernism, Virginia Woolf's revolutionary novel explored ideas—psychology, sexuality, imperialism—that roiled the twentieth century.
Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, July 1915

The Bloomsbury Group: A Reading List

In 1905, a group of writers and painters gathered in a London home and began a conversation on politics, love, sex, and art that lasted decades.
From the cover of Rising Sun by Michael Crichton

Colorful Plots and Racial Undertones in Modern Crime Fiction

Tarik Abdel-Monem argues that American crime fiction reflects mainstream prejudices in depicting mixed-race individuals as either deformed or superhuman.
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories

Wartime Injustice: When “Yes” Means “No”

The mother-daughter relationship in Hisaye Yamamoto’s fiction is a stand-in for the relationship between the American nation-state and the Nisei male citizens.
Cross Reference image

A Game of Words from JSTOR Daily

Test yourself against Cross Reference, our monthly crossword puzzle!
Leigh Hunt by Benjamin Robert Haydon

Leigh Hunt, the Unstoppable Critic

Convicted and imprisoned for libeling the Prince Regent, Hunt capitalized on his incarceration by turning his prison cell into a newsroom and grand salon.
Caricature of Joseph Conrad by David Low in Lions and Lambs, 1928

Joseph Conrad’s Travel Stories Weren’t Black and White

Conrad’s celebration of imperial exploration is accompanied by an acknowledgment that such feats often go hand-in-hand with oppression and exploitation.
A collection of several book covers in the LGBTQ Canon

Is There an LGBTQ+ Canon?

An English professor considers the questions raised about selecting queer works for study and discussion when planning a course on LGBTQ+ literature.