Vol. 1 No. 1

This issue of Meliora was published under the guidance of editors-in-chief Mathilde Nielsen and Audrey Pettit with the support of faculty advisors Professor Atefeh Akbari and Professor Lisa Gordis.

Within this issue, readers will find Isabelle Stromberg’s exploration of the mists and stars in Charles Dickens’s novels, but they will also discover Sarah Leidich’s tracking of Homeric myths as they’ve been adapted into internet memes. As Maya Sibul navigates the idea of an ekphrastic self—one tied to art-making—in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, Hana Rivers considers how Mary Kim Arnold carves out visual iterations of the self in the assemblage of poems, images, and essays that is Litany for a Long Moment. Catherine Ferrante asks what it means to hold a moral system based on mendacity in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, while Chaya Sara Oppenheim takes a much-deserved second look at Dickens's "George Silverman's Exploration," contending that it should be read as the author's final and most comprehensive treatise on writing.  

Meliora’s scholarship does not limit itself to a singular topic or time period. In this way, the journal opens itself up to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives that infinitely intersect with one another.