The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt (2022)
Journal Article
Corstorphine, K. (in press). The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt. Studies in American Fiction, 49( Special Issue on the Ecogothic),

Ambrose Bierce’s short stories present Gothic visions of the colonial encounter with the American wilderness in a way that complicates notions of land ownership and the relationship of humans to the environment. In ‘The Damned Thing’ (1893), a seemin... Read More about The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt.

“A most excellent medicine”: Malaria, Mithridate, and the death of Andrew Marvell (2021)
Journal Article
Mottram, S. (in press). “A most excellent medicine”: Malaria, Mithridate, and the death of Andrew Marvell. Seventeenth Century, 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117x.2021.1901240

The poet Andrew Marvell (1621-78) died suffering from vivax malaria, a common disease in the seventeenth century, endemic in estuary regions of eastern England. This article explores Marvell’s death alongside the literature and history of malaria and... Read More about “A most excellent medicine”: Malaria, Mithridate, and the death of Andrew Marvell.

The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery, presbytery, and parti-coloured picts (2018)
Journal Article
Mottram, S. (2018). The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery, presbytery, and parti-coloured picts. Seventeenth Century, 33(4), 441-461. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2018.1484636

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by pr... Read More about The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery, presbytery, and parti-coloured picts.

“With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’s Ruines of Time and the Saints of St. Albans (2018)
Journal Article
Mottram, S. (2018). “With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’s Ruines of Time and the Saints of St. Albans. Spenser studies, 31(1), 533-556. https://doi.org/10.1086/694442

Alban is conspicuously absent from Spenser’s Ruines of Time. Although Camden writes that Verulamium was “famous for […] bringing foorth Alban,” Spenser’s Verlame is silent on Alban and again departs from Camden to claim Verulamium had been built on t... Read More about “With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’s Ruines of Time and the Saints of St. Albans.