OTHER PUBLICATIONS

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Chapters in books and journal articles made available here for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author or the copyright holder.

For articles and book chapters published after July 2024, please go to CV and click on links provided.

"The Tug of Memory: Affect and Invention in Shakespeare's Drama," in Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England, ed. Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 201-219

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This chapter examines Shakespeare’s dramaturgical “cuing the past” through spoken directives to recall things preceding the play’s chronology. His ingenious staging of “the tug of memory” – grounded in traditional mnemotechnic oratorical tactics – elicits and guides the audience’s affective response to some specific aspect of a character’s backstory. Special attention is given to “invention” and “memory” from classical rhetoric, by way of illustrating how the appositive yet complementary tropes of “augmentation” and “abbreviation” in Merchant of Venice and Comedy of Errors, for example, can be used to unpack the rampant play of proverbs in Henry V (3.7). Shakespeare’s affective cueing of the past sets memory to work, tugging at what is to be recalled and yanking it center stage for all to see and then factor into their judgment of the character.

"Intertheatrical Cues and Shakespearean backstories," in Shakespeare et les acteurs, ed. Gilles Bertheau, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 39 (2021), pp. 1-16:


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"In his essay, Engel focuses on mnemotechnical cues, reminding us of the early modern use of adages as valuable memory aids and, more broadly, also wonders how memory shapes identity. The power of proverbs, he contends, is particularly remarkable in a play such as Henry V, where the French are regularly derided for their ostentatious behaviour as well as for their highly artificial, stilted language."

“Animal Analogues and the Character of American Wildlife in 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,'" in Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, ed. John Gruesser (Texas A & M, 2022), pp. 1-30:


"The essayists are also interdisciplinary, with ...William E. Engel drawing on Audubon's illustrations of birds. ...[T]he essays are erudite but accessible, and in addition to being a valuable source of research for scholars themselves, this book could be a useful source for teachers looking for academic essays to share with their students, especially since the essays cover texts that are often taught in the undergraduate context." --Mark Twain Journal 61.1 (2023) pp. 200-201

William E. Engel’s chapter on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a pleasurable read .... (lovely illustrations duly appear). Images from John James Audubon grace discussions of the birds who haunt the text.  --Poe Studies 56 (2023), E3-E7
"Marx's scholia: Annotations Involving Classical and English Literary Texts in Capital," in Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 29  (2020),  pp. 190-219:


"Much can be learned from tracking Marx’s use of literary texts in his footnotes, a practice that best can be understood in the context of his classical rhetorical training. His annotations, I argue, both contribute to and—as a kind of counter discourse—reflect the larger dialectical process carried out in his critique of political philosophy. Even though Marx is not writing a literary text as such, he is in fact doing a fair amount of literary criticism, all neatly tucked away in his notes, going so far as to quote long passages from key works in the classical tradition and from the English Renaissance that he then annotates."



"[Engel's chapter] seeks to highlight and examine critically some representative moments associated with these seismic shifts in the history of Western thought by paying attention to the place of memory in this time of rapid epistemological change."

"...individual contributions of high quality and considerable scholarly depth and discernment, [...]  This volume will prove to be an indispensable reference guide for the bookshelves of scholars working within memory studies today." --Renaissance Quarterly 75.4 (2022), pp. 1346-7
"Melville's 'Bartleby’ and the Prefiguration of the Author's Own Preference Not to Write,” in The Birth and Death of the Author: A multi-authored history of authorship, ed. Andrew J. Power (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), pp.117-43:


The Birth and Death of the Author is a work about the changing nature of authorship as a concept. In eight specialist interventions by a diverse group of the finest international scholars it tells a history of print authorship in a set of author case studies from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Engaging particularly with the history of the materials and technology of authorship it places this in conversation with the critical history of the author up to and beyond the crisis of Barthes's "Death of the Author." 



This special issue offers a series of transhistorical and interdisciplinary studies that draw the dense network of contexts, uses and meanings assumed by Montaigne’s figure and work in America, along different fields (literature, philosophy, political theory, cultural and gender studies). What emerges from the articles presented is a clear picture of the diversity of contexts, uses, and meanings that Montaigne and his Essais might have had along the progressive process of political and cultural self-definition of America since the 18th century. 
"Poe's Cultural Inheritance," in The Oxford Handbook to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (Oxford University Press, 2019), 499-519​  WINNER OF THE QUINN AWARD FOR 2019.

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"William E. Engel’s essay on 'Poe’s Cultural Inheritance: Literary Touchstones and the Cultivation of Erudition' charts a nicely informative map of major cultural and literary influences on Poe’s work" --Poe Studies 52 (2019)

"This remarkable book provides the ‘authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research’ promised on the dust jacket. [ … ] [O]verall the book is an exceptional achievement. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." --CHOICE (Sept 2019).

"Fantastic Spaces, Angelic Places," in Poe and Place, ed. Philip E. Phillips (Palgrave, 2018), 169-92.   WINNER OF THE DAMERON AWARD FOR 2018 


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William E. Engel’s impressively researched study of the angelic realm evoked in Poe’s poetry and prose shows it to be a remarkably consistent, fully realized place of Poe’s own design, based on his reading in philosophy and his notions of Middle Eastern cosmologies rather than on conventional ideas of a Christian heaven. -- Poe Studies 52 (2019), pp. E19-E22.


“Rejecting that notion that Lenore of ‘The Raven’ is, as some illustrators have suggested, an inhabitant of a Christian heaven where the departed enjoy everlasting peace, William Engel takes a corrective view, illuminating the ways in which Poe’s unsettling supernal imaginings diverged from consolatory visions of the afterlife conveyed through popular antebellum poetry. ‘An amalgam of Miltonic, Islamic, and Gnostic elements’ (183), Poe’s angels are, Engel insists, remarkable for their mysterious alterity, which leaves them ‘just out of reach of our conceptualization’ (182). Mystery also pertains to the obscure world they tenant, a ‘space of indeterminacy . . . upon which Poe relied to pursue a wider gamut of imaginative and affective possibilities in his writing’ (186), and through a close reading of ‘The Haunted Palace,’ Engel shows how Poe explored those possibilities.” – The Edgar Allan Poe Review 21.1 (2020), 131-137, p.136.


“William Engel’s chapter on Poe’s angelic imagination aims to recapture its key disturbing ambivalence...to argue that these spaces afford 'a glimpse into the fiery, starry crucible of [Poe’s] own poetic temperament' (184) and suggest an 'aesthetic practice' 'predicated on a metaphysics of absence' (189)” --Transatlantica 2 (2018), 1-6, p.3.

"Handling Memory in the Henriad: Forgetting Falstaff," in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder (Routledge, 2017), 165-79.

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The book begins with a series of "Critical Introductions" offering an overview of memory in particular areas of Shakespeare such as theatre, print culture, visual arts, post-colonial adaptation and new media. These essays both introduce the topic but also explore specific areas such as the way in which Shakespeare’s representation in the visual arts created a national and then a global poet.
"Poe's Resonance with Francis Quarles: Emblems, Melancholy, and the Art of Memory," in Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings, ed. Alexandra Urakova (Lehigh University Press/Rowman Littlefield, 2013), 1-11

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The essays in this collection offer a highly nuanced picture of Poe's engagement in the major discourses of the time, including his debt to baroque aesthetics, his tribute to the philosophical idea of sublimity, his complex response to racial issues, and his controversial afterlife reception--plus new readings of his texts explicitly using codes, secret writing or techniques of detection.

"Locative Memory and the Circulation of Mnemic Energy," ed. Christophe Hausermann, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 30 (2013), 183-196

"La célèbre « scène de la statue » du Conte d’hiver (v.iii) a donné lieu à de multiples analyses critiques, mais aucune approche jusqu’ici n’a examiné, de façon soutenue, l’influence des principes mnémotechniques employés au début de l’ère moderne. De ce fait, cette étude s’appuie sur les traités de rhétorique de la Renaissance portant sur l’« Art de la mémoire » afin de retrouver les prémisses esthétiques en jeu dans la réalisation de cette scène, ce qui rendra possible l’interprétation, dans son contexte d’origine, de la puissance émotionnelle évoquée par ce coup de théâtre à résonance religieuse.
"Emblem Books" and "John Florio," in The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., et al. (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 


"The most comprehensive resource available for those working in English Renaissance literary studies, canonical authors and their works, as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, broadside ballads, commonplace books, and other popular literary forms; arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes...cutting-edge critical discussion of literary works."
"Kinetic emblems and memory images in The Winter's Tale, in  Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, ed. Andrew J. Power and Rory V. Loughnane (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 71-87. 285-88. Also available in paperback.

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"Engel uses the idea of the kinetic emblem in order to integrate stage architecture, dramaturgy, and Renaissance mnemonics and print culture in a dazzlingly comprehensive thematic and scenographic reading of The Winter's Tale." --Studies in English Literature 54:2 (2014), p.512.



A comprehensive, accessible and lucid coverage of the major issues and key figures in Shakespeare studies, designed to facilitate progression from introductory topics to more sophisticated approaches.
'Death Slips onto the Renaissance Stage: Morris Dancing, Mimed Moors, and Nascent Rituals in Fletcher and Shakespeare," in Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Laurie Postlewate and Wim Huskin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 269-302

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"For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created and propagated through public performance. [...] Diverse in their objects of study, the essays in this volume all examine the links between the actual events of public performance and the textual origins and subsequent representation of those performances."
"Reflecting on Performativity" in The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Shakespeare Yearbook, XVIII), ed. Douglas Brooks et al. (Mellen, 2007), 389-407.

"The Decay of Memory," in Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe's Legacies, ed. Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (Routledge, 2004), chapter 1, pp. 21-40

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"To illustrate the fear of forgetting, Engel carefully illustrates the relationships of a variety of examples from visual culture to representations of memory and to several classical and Renaissance texts. [...] This collection is a significant achievement in Renaissance studies.' --Renaissance Quarterly 60.4 (2007), 1455-57, p.145.

“One of the more gratifying aspects of this volume is the way in which the essays speak to one another. This internal conversation is evident in the first two essays where William Engel and Garrett A. Sullivan [...] and these two arguments about forgetting's embodiments provide a useful foundation….” --Renaissance et Réforme 28.1 (2004), 111-113, p. 112.

Entries on "John Florio" and "Francis Meres," in Tudor England: An Encyclopedia, ed. Arthur F. Kinney et al., (Garland Press, 2001; rpt. Routledge, 2003): 262-63 and 483-84


"Monumental and multidisciplinary. [...] Solid scholarship, deft blend of fact and interpretation, and breadth.... Recommended for all libraries supporting teaching and research about early modern England." --Choice (April 2001)

Entries on "Benjamin Banneker," "Marcus Garvey," "Mojo," and "Booker T. Washington,"  in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, ed. J. David Macey, Jr. and Hans Ostrom, 5 vols. )Garland/Routledge, 2005): I.87-90, II.606-609, III.1112-14, and V.1691-94


 With more than 1,000 entries by more than 200 expert contributors, this encyclopedia is the most comprehensive reference available on African American literature. While most of the entries are on individual authors, the encyclopedia gives special attention to the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped African American writing. Included are entries on critical movements and terms, critics and scholars, historical and social issues, cultural and historical figures, literary forms and genres, literary schools and organizations, and many other topics.
Entries on "Jack Ketch, public executioner" and "Roderigo Lopez, physician to Queen Elizabeth," in Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, ed. Carl L. Bankston III (Salem Press, 2007), II.565-66 and II.655-56.


Over six hundred alphabetically arranged entries list basic biographical information, aliases, and notorious activities and briefly describe life history, careers both legitimate and notorious, any legal action that might have been brought, and impact.
"1532: Holbein Settles in London," in Great Events from History: The Renaissance and Early Modern Era, 1454-1600, ed. Christina J. Moose, 2 vols. (Salem Press, 2005), I.494-97


"Facts On File has delivered another valuable general encyclopedia for the novice scholar." --Booklist
Entries on "Antiquarianism,"  "Claudio Monteverdi," and "Hugh Plat" in The Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the Reformation, revised edition by Thomas G. Bergin and Jennifer Speake (Market House Books, 2004), 20-21, 322, 383.
"The Space of Translation," in Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Literature and Culture in Africa and Beyond,
ed. Rita Wilson and Carlotta von Maltzan ((Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 27-47.


A critical examination of notions as well as very real consequences of definitions and understandings of space-- 'positionality,' borders, and crossings--this is a book of geo-spatial tendencies, which gives some indication of the new work being done in Africa as well as in the broader global context, and reflects different moments of conflict and negotiation within the social relations of different societies from pre-apartheid South Africa to the present. The essays chosen for this volume broach the fantastic and corporeal dimensions of cultural spaces and cultural production, issues of marginality and power, hybridity, gender identity, ideology and technology.
"Mnemonic Emblems and the Humanist Discourse of Knowledge," in Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory, 1500-1700, ed. Peter Daly and John Manning (AMS Press, 1999.), 125-42, 276-78.

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 "..an extremely useful and well-thought out collection of essays on a variety of aspects of the emblematic culture in Europe during the early modern period. [...] The contributions are of the highest quality. This volume will be of interest not only to specialists but also those interested in cultural history, semiotics, and poetic theory."

"Montaigne's  Essais: The Literary and Literal Digesting of a Life," in The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe , ed. Thomas Mayer and D. R. Woolf (University of Michigan Press, 1996.), 283-98

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"The volume is especially timely in light of the growing interest in 'micro-history,,' and in the histories that are emerging from nonliterary documents. Chapters consider numerous genres, including hagiography, epistolary and verse biography, and less familiar forms such as parodic prosopography, life-writing in funeral sermons, and comic martyrology.  [...]  A fascinating survey of biographical genres...."





FOR CRITICAL ESSAYS IN COLLECTIONS PUBLISHED PRIOR TO 1996,

PLEASE VISIT MY CV (click here) FOR LINKS TO PDF VERSIONS OF THOSE ESSAYS.