Faculty Bookshelf

From Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Volume 3, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 559–570

Abstract:

Zeta is a relatively recently developed tool for authorship attribution and computational stylistics (Craig and Kinney, 2009, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In ‘The Interpretation of Zeta Test Results’ (2019), Perves Rizvi raised several objections to the method. I responded to and rejected those objections in ‘Zeta Revisited’ (Hoover, 2021a, Zeta revisited. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 1–20). Rizvi has renewed two of his main objections in a critique of my response in his ‘The Interpretation of Zeta Test Results: A Supplement’ (2022). First, he reiterates and expands his argument that the separation of base and counter segments in a Zeta analysis is a mechanical consequence of Zeta, rather than a significant and meaningful finding. Second, he again rejects the use of the bisector line to attribute texts in a Zeta analysis as unsound and adds new arguments that it leads to invalid attributions. This rejoinder provides further evidence and argument that both of Rizvi’s claims must be rejected.

In To Make Negro Literature Elizabeth McHenry traces African American authorship in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation. She shifts critical focus from the published texts of acclaimed writers to unfamiliar practitioners, whose works reflect the unsettledness of African American letters in this period. Analyzing literary projects that were unpublished, unsuccessful, or only partially achieved, McHenry recovers a hidden genealogy of Black literature as having emerged tentatively, laboriously, and unevenly. She locates this history in books sold by subscription, in lists and bibliographies of African American authors and books assembled at the turn of the century, in the act of ghostwriting, and in manuscripts submitted to publishers for consideration and the letters of introduction that accompanied them. By attending to these sites and prioritizing overlooked archives, McHenry reveals a radically different literary landscape, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.

More Anon gathers a selection of poems from Maureen N. McLane’s critically acclaimed first five books of poetry.

McLane, whose 2014 collection This Blue was a finalist for the National Book Award, is a poet of wit and play, of romanticism and intellect, of song and polemic. More Anon presents her work anew. The poems spark with life, and the concentrated selection showcases her energy and style.

As Parul Seghal wrote in Bookforum, “To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she’s at home in the essay and the fragment, the polemic and the elegy.” In More Anon, McLane—a poet, scholar, and prizewinning critic—displays the full range of her vertiginous mind and daring experimentation.

Transversal takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.

Featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. This collection explores walking poems improvised on a smartphone, as well as remixed classical and experimental forms. Poems are presented in interlocking bilingual versions that complicate the relationship between translation and original, and between English and Spanish as languages of empire and popular struggle. The book creatively examines translation and its simultaneous urgency and impossibility in a time of global crisis.

Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.

From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe.

Lucasfilm examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a “filmmaker and philosopher”?

More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way.

Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges presents an empirical study of the writing programs at one hundred small, private liberal arts colleges. Jill M. Gladstein and Dara Rossman Regaignon provide detailed information about a type of writing program not often highlighted in the scholarly record and offer a model for such national, multi-institutional research. Utilizing the mixed methods approach of grounded theory, Gladstein and Regaignon weave together survey, interview, and focus group data, site document analysis, and institutional history. They describe the writing programs at small colleges today as being dominated by writing across the curriculum-based approaches to writing instruction and the writing centers as emphasizing peer tutoring, and hence the development of undergraduate students as leaders and scholars. For small colleges, the movement toward vertical writing curricula, professionalized leadership positions, and innovative writing assessments occurs when institutions deepen or reaffirm their commitment to writing across the curriculum. In addition, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges offers a heuristic for understanding and comparing writing programs within and across institutions.

The Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontë—whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period.

Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, The Masses Are Revolting reveals significant new connections among these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.

Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Cold War Reckonings argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, political and economic agendas in the reunified German capital have worked to dismantle long-standing traditions of state-subsidized theater even as the city has redefined itself as a global arts epicenter. Institutional Theatrics charts the ways theater artists have responded to these shifts and crises both onstage and off, offering a method for rethinking the theater as a vital public institution.  
 
What is the future of the German theater, grounded historically in large ensembles, extensive repertoires, and auteur directors? Examining the restructuring of Berlin’s theatrical landscape and most prominent performance venues, Brandon Woolf argues that cultural policy is not simply the delegation and distribution of funds. Instead, policy should be thought of as an artistic practice of institutional imagination. Woolf demonstrates how performance can critique its patron institutions in order to transform the relations between the stage and the state, between the theater and the infrastructures of its support. 

Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style employs the tools and methods of computational stylistics to show that style is extremely resistant to changes in how texts are produced. Addressing an array of canonical writers, including William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, along with popular contemporary writers like Stephen King and Ian McEwan, this volume presents a systematic study of changes in mode of composition and writing technologies. Computational analysis of texts produced in multiple circumstances of composition, such as dictation, handwriting, typewriting, word processing, and translation, reveals the extraordinary durability of authorial style. Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature will be essential for readers interested in exploring the rapidly expanding field of digital approaches to literature.

Essays demonstrating how the careful study of individual words can shed immense light on texts more broadly.

Dedicated to honoring the remarkable achievements of Dr Antonette di Paolo Healey, the architect and lexicographer of the Old English Concordance, the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, and the Dictionary of Old English, the essays in this volume reflect firsthand the research made possible by Dr. Healey's landmark contributions to her field. Each chapter highlights how the careful consideration and study of words can lead to greater insights, from an understanding of early medieval English concepts of time and identity, to reconceptualizations of canonical Old English poems, reappraisals of early medieval English authors and their works, greater understanding of the semantic fields of Old English words and manuscript traditions, and the solving of lexical puzzles.

At the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of black literary response to natural and agricultural experiences, whether the legacy of enforced agricultural labor or of the destruction and displacement brought about by a hurricane. In Cultivation and Catastrophe, Sonya Posmentier uncovers a vivid diasporic tradition of black environmental writing that responds to the aftermath of plantation slavery, urbanization, and free and forced migrations. While humanist discourses of African American and postcolonial studies often sustain a line between nature and culture, this book instead emphasizes the relationship between them, offering an innovative environmental history of modern black literature.

Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.

Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.

The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. They include poet-activist John Watkins's John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives in what was probably a misfired attempt to spark a nationwide rebellion. Gregory Vargo's introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction.

Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. She analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. She concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature.

By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, Worlds Enough suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

Loose-limbed, freewheeling and conversational yet musically taut, Maureen N. McLane's poetry has been described as having 'a tonal register somewhere between teenage fangirl and Wordsworth professor' (London Review of Books). What I'm Looking For gathers selections from her first five books of poetry, from the mixture of love poems and breezy skewerings of Great Literature that characterize her debut, Same Life, to the later collections' shadowing of a mind roaming wittily through nature, philosophy, music and sex, and the bravura life-story-in-episodes of Mz N: the serial.

Brainy, funny, passionate, uncool and always utterly charming, these 'sexy, cerebral and romantic' poems (The New York Times Book Review) will make you 'laugh, cry and think in quick succession, or all at once' (Sarah Howe).

Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning, and scope of human rights. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature introduces this new and exciting field of study in the humanities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts, genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researches, this Companion emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights and the humanities.

Postdramatic theatre is an essential category of performance that challenges classical elements of drama, including the centrality of plot and character. Tracking key developments in contemporary European and North American performance, this collection, co-written with Michael Shane Boyle and Matt Cornish, redirects ongoing debates about postdramatic theatre, turning attention to the overlooked issue on which they hinge: form.

Contributors draw on literary studies, film studies and critical theory to reimagine the formal aspects of theatre, such as space, media and text. The volume expands how scholars think of theatrical form, insisting that formalist analysis can be useful for studying the ways theatre is produced and consumed, and how theatre makers engage with other forms like dance and visual art. Chapters focus on a range of interdisciplinary artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Ann Liv Young and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, as well as theatre's enmeshment within institutional formations like funding agencies, festivals, real estate and healthcare.

A timely investigation of the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance, this collection refines what we mean, and what we don't, when we speak of postdramatic theatre.

This book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.

Pablo de Rokha was one of the great Chilean modernists, but he is arguably known more for his feud with Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro than for his vast and remarkable poetry. De Rokha is relatively unknown outside Chile, and this volume redresses that by offering an introduction to this astonishing body of work, the first comprehensive selection in English. Daniel Borzutkzy calls this book "an event, a monumental work of translation and poetry that will force us to rethink our understanding of global modernism and the hemispheric avant-garde."

In Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars advances the theory that charisma may be a quality of art as well as of person. Beginning with the argument that Weberian charisma of person is itself a matter of representation, this volume shows that to study charismatic art is to experiment with a theory of representation that allows for the possibility of nothing less than a breakdown between art and viewer and between art and lived experience. The volume examines charismatic works of literature, visual art, and architecture from England, Northern Europe, Italy, Ancient Greece, and Constantinople and from time periods ranging from antiquity to the beginning of the early modern period. 

How does the literature and culture of early Victorian Britain look different if viewed from below? Exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and the journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest movements, Gregory Vargo challenges long-held assumptions about the cultural separation between the “two nations” of rich and poor in the Victorian era. The flourishing radical press was home to daring literary experiments that embraced themes including empire and economic inequality, helping to shape mainstream literature. Reconstructing social and institutional networks that connected middle-class writers to the world of working-class politics, this book reveals for the first time acknowledged and unacknowledged debts to the radical canon in the work of such authors as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell. What emerges is a new vision of Victorian social life, in which fierce debates and surprising exchanges spanned the class divide.

Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed from the 1970s to 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism, and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present?

In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field: universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; politics vs. culture. The essays reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments, doing so under four interrelated analytics: postcolonial temporality; deprovincializing the global south; beyond Marxism versus postcolonial studies; and postcolonial spatiality and new political imaginaries.

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon's work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day.

Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon's entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.

Just as today’s embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, so in eighteenth-century Britain the dramatic proliferation of print gave rise to urgent efforts to historicize different media forms and to understand their unique powers. And so it was, Paula McDowell argues, that our modern concepts of oral culture and print culture began to crystallize, and authors and intellectuals drew on older theological notion of oral tradition to forge the modern secular notion of oral tradition that we know today.

A dazzling collection of poems exploring the mental landscape of our moment

Maureen N. McLane’s Some Say revolves around a dazzling “old sun.” Here are poems on sex and death; here are poems testing the “bankrupt idea / of nature.” Some Say offers an erotics of attention; a mind roaming, registering, and intermittently blocked; a mortal poet going “nowhere fast but where / we’re all going.” From smartphones to dead gods to the beloved’s body, Some Say charts “the weather of an old day / suckerpunched” into the now.

Following on her bravura Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes, McLane bends lyric to the torque of our moment—and of any moment under the given sun. Some Say encompasses full-barreled odes and austere lines, whiplashing discourse and minimal notations. In her fifth book of poems, McLane continues her “songs of a season” even as she responds to new vibrations—political, geological, transpersonal, trans-specific. Moving through forests and cities, up mountains, across oceans, toward a common interior, she sounds out the ecological mesh of the animate and inanimate. These are poems that make tracks in our “unmarked dark” as the poet explores “a cosmos full / of people and black holes.” From its troubled, exhilarated dawns to its scanned night sky, Some Say is both a furthering and a summation by a poet scouring and singing the world “full // as it always was / of wings / of meaning and nothing.”

Crystal Parikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Affiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, she illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century.  

The Stage Lives of Animals examines what it might mean to make theatre beyond the human. In this stunning collection of essays, Una Chaudhuri engages with the alternative modes of thinking, feeling, and making art offered by animals and animality, bringing insights from theatre practice and theory to animal studies as well as exploring what animal studies can bring to the study of theatre and performance.

As our planet lives through what scientists call "the sixth extinction," and we become ever more aware of our relationships to other species, Chaudhuri takes a highly original look at the "animal imagination" of well-known plays, performances and creative projects, including works by:

• Caryl Churchill
• Rachel Rosenthal
• Marina Zurkow
• Edward Albee
• Tennesee Williams
• Eugene Ionesco

Covering over a decade of explorations, a wide range of writers, and many urgent topics, this volume demonstrates that an interspecies imagination deeply structures modern western drama.

“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history.

Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.

The acclaimed poet, memoirist, and essayist Maureen N. McLane here charts a new path into vital genre-bending territories. Not a novel, not a memoir, not a lyric, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes offers something else—“life . . . a continual allegory” (to invoke Keats): a life intense, episodic, female, sexual, philosophical, romantic, analytic. Tracking the growth of one poet’s mind, switchbacking its way through American English, Mz N toggles between story and song. This is a poetry both “furious / & alive.”

Alive to the lash of love, the longueurs of adolescence, the limits of identity, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes is a bravura experiment in life-writing—an assaying, a testing, a transforming, an honoring of the tentative and the torqued. What is it to be contemporary, to be “one / among other ones” in a “cracking world”? How does a body vibrate into being? How is a mind made out of other minds? Seizing the queer realities of any life, Mz N explores how one is surprised, seduced, and struck into speech, thought, song, silence. “Then, what is life?” cried Shelley. So too Mz N.

The work of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and anti-colonialist activist who died prematurely in 1961 at the age of 36, has marked generations of anti-colonialists, civil rights activists and specialists in postcolonial studies. Since the publication of his books (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; The Year V of the Algerian Revolution, 1959; The Damned of the Earth, 1961), it was known that many of his writings remained unpublished or inaccessible. In particular his psychiatric writings, including those devoted to "colonialist alienation seen through mental illness" (in the words of its editor François Maspero). This material constitutes the heart of this volume, drawn up and presented following a patient work of collecting and a long research by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young. The reader will find there the scientific articles of Fanon, his thesis in psychiatry, as well as certain unpublished texts and texts published in the interior journal of the hospital of Blida-Joinville where he practiced from 1953 to 1956. There will also be two pieces. written during his medical studies (L'Oeil se nie and Les Mains parallèles), the correspondence that could be found as well as certain texts published in El Moudjahid after 1958, not included in Pour la Révolution africaine (1964). This remarkable collection is completed by the correspondence between François Maspero and the writer Giovanni Pirelli for a project to publish Fanon's complete works, as well as by the reasoned analysis of the latter's library.

In its playful and irreverent mash-up of voices and poetic traditions from across the Americas, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico imagines an alternative to the monolingualism of the U.S. literary and political landscape, and proposes a geo-neuro-political performance attuned to damaged or marginalized forms of knowledge, perception, and identity.

The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature offers an engaging survey of Asian American literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. Since the 1980s, Asian American literary studies has developed into a substantial and vibrant field within English and American Studies. This Companion explores the variety of historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements affecting the development of Asian American literature. Written by a host of leading scholars in the field, this book provides insight into the representative movements, regional settings, archival resources, and critical reception that define Asian American literature. Covering subjects from immigrant narratives and internment literature to contemporary race studies and the problem of translation, this Companion provides insight into the myriad traditions that have shaped the Asian American literary landscape.

Empire, Colony, Postcolony provides a clear exposition of the historical, political and ideological dimensions of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism, with clear explanations of these categories, which relate their histories to contemporary political issues. The book analyzes major concepts and explains the meaning of key terms.

We all have an animal story—the pet we loved, the wild animal that captured our childhood imagination, the deer the neighbor hit while driving. While scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the effects of global climate change and dwindling animal habitats, and the exploding interdisciplinary field of animal studies have complicated things, such stories remain a part of how we tell the story of being human. Animal Acts collects eleven exciting, provocative, and moving stories by solo performers, accompanied by commentary that places the works in a broader context.

Theatre is a uniquely powerful site for the kind of thinking called for by the crises of climate change. Encompassing academic research, theatre work-shopping, playwriting, dramaturgy, and theoretical writing, this book offers a practical, theoretical, and critical engagement with the urgent issue of making art in the age of climate change.

Part literary history and part medical sociology, Gilman’s book chronicles the careers of three major immigrant Yiddish poets of the twentieth century—Solomon Bloomgarten (Yehoash), Sholem Shtern, and H. Leivick—all of whom lived through, and wrote movingly of, their experience as patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Gilman addresses both the formative influence of the sanatorium on the writers’ work and the culture of an institution in which, before the days of antibiotics, writing was encouraged as a form of therapy. He argues that each writer produced a significant body of work during his recovery, itself an experience that profoundly influenced the course of his subsequent literary career. Seeking to recover the "imaginary" of the sanatorium as a scene of writing by doctors and patients, Gilman explores the historical connection between tuberculosis treatment and the written word. Through a close analysis of Yiddish poems, and translations of these writers, Gilman sheds light on how essential writing and literature were to the sanatorium experience. All three poets wrote under the shadow of death. Their works are distinctive, but their most urgent concerns are shared: strangers in a strange land, suffering, displacement, acculturation, and, inevitably, what it means to be a Jew.

Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.

The work of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and anti-colonialist activist who died prematurely in 1961 at the age of 36, has marked generations of anti-colonialists, civil rights activists and specialists in postcolonial studies. Since the publication of his books (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; The Year V of the Algerian Revolution, 1959; The Damned of the Earth, 1961), it was known that many of his writings remained unpublished or inaccessible. In particular his psychiatric writings, including those devoted to "colonialist alienation seen through mental illness" (in the words of its editor François Maspero). This material constitutes the heart of this volume, drawn up and presented following a patient work of collecting and a long research by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young. The reader will find there the scientific articles of Fanon, his thesis in psychiatry, as well as certain unpublished texts and texts published in the interior journal of the hospital of Blida-Joinville where he practiced from 1953 to 1956. There will also be two pieces. written during his medical studies (L'Oeil se nie and Les Mains parallèles), the correspondence that could be found as well as certain texts published in El Moudjahid after 1958, not included in Pour la Révolution africaine (1964). This remarkable collection is completed by the correspondence between François Maspero and the writer Giovanni Pirelli for a project to publish Fanon's complete works, as well as by the reasoned analysis of the latter's library.

A vital, exhilarating new collection of poems from the National Book Critics Circle nominee. From lichens to malls to merchant republics, it's "another day in this here cosmos," in Maureen N. McLane's stunning third poetry collection, "This Blue. "Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now. In the middle of life, stationed in our common "Terran Life," the poet conjures urban pigeons, Adirondack mountains, Genoa, Andalucia, Belfast, Parma; here is a world sounded out, broken, possibly shareable, newly named: "Take it up Old Adam-- / everyday the world exists / to be named." "This Blue" is a searching and a singing--intricate, sexy, smart."

The first book-length study specifically devoted to Nuyorican poetry, In Visible Movement is unique in its historical and formal breadth, ranging from the foundational poets of the 1960s and 1970s to a variety of contemporary poets emerging in and around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “slam” scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Emergent U.S. Literatures introduces readers to the foundational writers and texts produced by four literary traditions associated with late-twentieth-century US multiculturalism. Examining writing by Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and gay and lesbian Americans after 1968, Cyrus R. K. Patell compares and historicizes what might be characterized as the minority literatures within “U.S. minority literature.”

Drawing on recent theories of cosmopolitanism, Patell presents methods for mapping the overlapping concerns of the texts and authors of these literatures during the late twentieth century. He discusses the ways in which literary marginalization and cultural hybridity combine to create the grounds for literature that is truly “emergent” in Raymond Williams’s sense of the term—literature that produces “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships” in tension with the dominant, mainstream culture of the United States. By enabling us to see the American literary canon through the prism of hybrid identities and cultures, these texts require us to reevaluate what it means to write (and read) in the American grain. Emergent U.S. Literatures gives readers a sense of how these foundational texts work as aesthetic objects—rather than merely as sociological documents—crafted in dialogue with the canonical tradition of so-called “American Literature,” as it existed in the late twentieth century, as well as in dialogue with each other.

Penda’s Fen, written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, is one of the key films in the pantheon of what has been called The Old Weird Albion. A radical archaeology of Deep England, a work of dark pastoral, a praise-song to anarchistic transformation, it culminates with perhaps the most euphoric revelation in British cinema: “My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure!”

This second and final edition of The Edge Is Where The Centre Is has been significantly expanded and redesigned. It contains a number of new contributions including an essay by historian Michael Wood and an interview with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Paddy Kingsland who constructed the sound design for Penda's Fen.

Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism- progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental- in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit (“untouchable” caste) fiction. Drawing on a wide array of fiction from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V.S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce? Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text, and its radical critique, with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia. Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to its unique and groundbreaking literary interventions while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment in the literary genealogy of the 20th and 21st century. How might we trace the origins of the rise of Dalit fiction in the critical “realism” of the Progressive Writers Association of the 1930s, or in the gaps laid bare by the peasant novel of the 1950s? And what kind of dialogue does “untouchable caste” writing with its more famous counterpart: the Anglophone fiction of the last few decades? Under Gajarawala’s lens the aesthetic languages of Hindi and English are intertwined and caste becomes a central category of literary analysis.

This book, grounded in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian literatures, and cultural studies will be important for all readers interested in the problematic relations between aesthetics and politics, between social movements and cultural production. Engaged as it is with contemporary theories of realism and the problem of aesthetics, it would also be of interest to students of English, comparative literature, contemporary Third World literature, and historians of literary movements. More specifically, as a text that considers recent developments in genre theory and South Asian fiction, it would interest scholars of the Indian and Indian Anglophone novel. Finally, this project, as an interrogation of caste politics in the cultural sphere, is an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Dalit studies.

We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion). Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every click and every “like” stored somewhere for something. This book reminds us that data is anything but “raw,” that we shouldn’t think of data as a natural resource but as a cultural one that needs to be generated, protected, and interpreted. The book’s essays describe eight episodes in the history of data from the predigital to the digital. Together they address such issues as the ways that different kinds of data and different domains of inquiry are mutually defining; how data are variously “cooked” in the processes of their collection and use; and conflicts over what can—or can’t—be “reduced” to data. Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for astronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary “dataveillance” of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation.

Fieldworks offer a historical account of the social, rhetorical and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site.

Drawing on the later writings of Martin Heidegger, the book traces the correspondence between the philosopher's concept of technology and Shakespeare's poetics of human and natural productivity in the Sonnets.

"Oh! there are spirits of the air," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book, Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet's mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. "I am marking here what most marked me," she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the "growth of a poet's mind," as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an "erotics of interpretation": this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your "my poets," or "my novelists," or "my filmmakers," or "my pop stars," might be.

The study of English language and literature in Britain changed dramatically between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. From Philology to English Studies explores the contribution of philology to this evolution. Haruko Momma charts both the rise and fall of philology from antiquity to the late eighteenth century, and the impact of modern philology on the study of modern languages and literatures. Focusing in detail on the work of key philologists in the nineteenth century, Momma considers how they shaped European discourse and especially vernacular studies in Britain: William Jones' discovery of Sanskrit in British India gave rise to Indo-European studies; Max Müller's study of this same language helped spread the Aryan myth to the English-speaking world; the OED achieved its greatness as a post-national lexicon through the editorship of the Scottish dialectologist.

Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges presents an empirical study of the writing programs at one hundred small, private liberal arts colleges. Jill M. Gladstein and Dara Rossman Regaignon provide detailed information about a type of writing program not often highlighted in the scholarly record and offer a model for such national, multi-institutional research. Utilizing the mixed methods approach of grounded theory, Gladstein and Regaignon weave together survey, interview, and focus group data, site document analysis, and institutional history. They describe the writing programs at small colleges today as being dominated by writing across the curriculum-based approaches to writing instruction and the writing centers as emphasizing peer tutoring, and hence the development of undergraduate students as leaders and scholars. For small colleges, the movement toward vertical writing curricula, professionalized leadership positions, and innovative writing assessments occurs when institutions deepen or reaffirm their commitment to writing across the curriculum. In addition, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges offers a heuristic for understanding and comparing writing programs within and across institutions.

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. 

Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today.

Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

The Ninth Edition offers more complete works and more teachable groupings than ever before, the apparatus you trust, and a new, free Supplemental Ebook with more than 1,000 additional texts. Read by more than 8 million students, The Norton Anthology of English Literature sets the standard and remains an unmatched value.

HE TWILIGHT LANGUAGE OF NIGEL KNEALE is a limited-edition Risograph book -- published by Texte und Töne in collaboration with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture — to mark A CATHODE RAY SÉANCE: THE HAUNTED WORLDS OF NIGEL KNEALE, a day-long event held in November 2012. The book was designed by Rob Carmichael, SEEN and was printed by Keegan Cooke at Circadian Press.

Contributors include: Sophia Al-Maria, Bilge Ebiri, Mark Fisher, William Fowler, Ken Hollings, Paolo Javier, Roger Luckhurst, China Miéville, Drew Mulholland, David Pike, Mark Pilkington, Joanna Ruocco, Sukhdev Sandhu, Dave Tompkins, Michael Vazquez, and Evan Calder Williams.

Ernst Moiré was a mysterious Swiss photographer whose career has been obscured by silence, documentary voids, and misinformation. So much of his life is shrouded in speculation and half-truths that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure who will forever be remembered as the inadvertent inventor of the blur that bears his name.

The unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England (graffiti, tattoos, writing on clothes or ceramics...): a startling new perspective of early modern literature and cultural history.

Two kids in their early twenties walk down the Bowery on a spring afternoon, just as the proprietor of a club hangs a sign with the new name for his venue. The place will be called CBGB which, he tells them, stands for "Country Bluegrass and Blues." That's exactly the sort of stuff they play, they lie, somehow managing to get a gig out of him. After the first show their band, Television, lands a regular string of Sundays. By the end of the summer a scene has developed that includes Tom Verlaine's new love interest, a poet-turned-rock chanteuse named Patti Smith. American punk rock is born.
Bryan Waterman peels back the layers of the origin myth and, assembling a rich historical archive, situates Marquee Moon in a broader cultural history of SoHo and the East Village. As Waterman traces the downtown scene's influences, public image, and reputation via a range of print, film, and audio recordings we come to recognize the real historical surprises that the documentary evidence still has to yield.

 In The New Asian City, Jini Kim Watson provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore. In doing so, Watson demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development. 

In World Enough, Maureen N. McLane maps a universe of feeling and thought via skyscapes, city strolls, lunar vistas, and passages through environments given and built. These poems explore how we come to know ourselves―sensually, intellectually, politically, biologically, historically, and anthropologically. Moving from the most delicate address to the broadest salutation, World Enough takes us from New England to New York to France to the moon. McLane fuses song and critique, giving us poetry as "musical thought," in Carlyle's phrase. Shuttling between idyll and disaster, between old forms and open experiments, these are restless, probing, exacting poems that aim to take the measure of―and to give a measure for―where we are. McLane moves through many forms and creates her own, invoking the French Revolution alongside convolutions of the heart and revolutions of the moon. Shifting effortlessly between the species and the self, between the sentient surround and the peculiar pulse within, World Enough attests to experience both singular and shared: "not that I was alive / but that we were."

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and performance in the city, celebrating Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Eugene O'Neill, and Allen Ginsberg among a host of authors who have contributed to the city's rich literary and cultural history. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is the ideal guide for students of American literature as well as for all who love New York and its writers

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and performance in the city, celebrating Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Eugene O'Neill, and Allen Ginsberg among a host of authors who have contributed to the city's rich literary and cultural history. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is the ideal guide for students of American literature as well as for all who love New York and its writers

Culture in Camouflage aims to remap the history of British war culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the literature of the Second World War. The book offers the first comprehensive account of the emergence of modern war culture, arguing that its exceptional forms and temporalities force us to reappraise British cultural modernity.The book explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill,Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene contested the dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful and persuasive mass media and culture industry. Patrick Deer reads war literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also includes popular culture and masscommunications, the productions of war planners and military historians, projections of new technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of strategists, and the material culture of total war. Modern war cultures, Deer contends, are defined by their drive to normalize conflict and war-making, by their struggle to colonize the entire wartime cultural field, and by their claim to monopolize representations and interpretation of the conflict. But the mobilization of cultural formations during wartime reveals, at times glaringly, the constitutive contradictions at the heart of modern ideas of culture. The Great War failed to produce a popular war culture on the home front, producinginstead an extraordinary literature of protest, yet the strategists struggled to regain their oversight over both the enemy across no man's land, and the minds and bodies of their own mass conscript armies. The interwar years saw a massive effort to make strategic fantasies a reality; if thetechnology of imperial air power or mobile armoured warfare did not yet exist, culture could be mobilized to shore up the ramshackle war machine. During World War Two a fully fledged British war culture emerged triumphant in time of national crisis, offering the vision of a fully mobilized island fortress, a loyal empire, and a modernized war machine ready to wage a futuristic war of space and movement. This was the struggle that British World War Two writers confronted with extraordinarycourage and creativity.

During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation.

Josephine Hendin's landmark study explores the fiction that erupted from Flannery O'Connor's enigmatic contradictions: she was the dutiful daughter of a conservative Southern family, the uncompromising Roman Catholic, the stoic figure enduring a painful fatal illness, and the author of strange and violent tales that exploded all the virtues of heritage, obedience, and faith. The tension between those disparate selves drives the complexity of Flannery O'Connor's literary achievement into the center of American experience. While other critics have chosen to treat Flannery O'Connor as a traditional Southern or dogmatic Catholic writer, Hendin takes a perceptively fresh view of her work in the context of contemporary fiction. Hendin illuminates all her fiction, beginning with the early novels and ending with Everything that Rises Must Converge. Differentiating her from other Southern writers, Hendin shows how O'Connor created a unique art, remarkable for its portrait of the agony of American yearning.

In An Ethics of Betrayal, Crystal Parikh investigates the theme and tropes of betrayal and treason in Asian American and Chicano/Latino literary and cultural narratives. In considering betrayal from an ethical perspective, one grounded in the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, Parikh argues that the minority subject is obligated in a primary, preontological, and irrecusable relation of responsibility to the Other. 

This book is a history and theory of British poetry between 1760 and 1830, focussing on the relationship between Romantic poetry and the production, circulation and textuality of ballads. By discussing the ways in which eighteenth-century cultural and literary researches flowed into and shaped key canonical works, Maureen McLane argues that romantic poetry's influences went far beyond the merely literary. Breathing life into the work of eighteenth-century balladeers and antiquarians, she addresses the revival of the ballad, the figure of the minstrel, and the prevalence of a 'minstrelsy complex' in romanticism. Furthermore, she envisages a new way of engaging with romantic poetics, encompassing both 'oral' and 'literary' modes of poetic construction, and anticipates the role that technology might play in a media-driven twenty-first century. The study will be of great interest to scholars and students of Romantic poetry, literature and culture.

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

From the alphabet inscribed in our DNA to the stars that once told stories, Same Life maps a cosmos both intricate and vast. In her first full-length book of poems, Maureen N. McLane has written a beautifully sensual and moving work, full of passion and sadness and humor and understanding. Erotically charged lyrics conjure a latter-day Sappho; major sequences explore citizenship and sexuality, landscape and history, moving us from Etruscan ruins to video porn, ushering us through cities, gardens, lakefronts, and airplanes. Here are poems equally alert to shifts in weather and cracks in consciousness; here is a poet equally at home with delicate song and vivid polemic. Same Life evokes an American life in transit, shareable yet singular; singable, ponderable, erotic; an unpredictable venture in twenty-first-century soul-making.

This Companion brings together more than 60 distinguished contributors to offer a wide-ranging survey of the history of the English language, from its Indo-European and Germanic past, through British and American usage, to the rise of colonial and post-colonial English. Many of the essays investigate regional and ethnic varieties and take up issues of class and gender.

The book explores the many diverse approaches to the study of English in one volume, ranging from linguistics and etymology to the philosophy of language and literary history. Concise introductions place individual essays within larger contexts; notes on phonetics, a chronological list of events, and a glossary of linguistic terms facilitate use and connect the reader to the uses of the English language over the centuries.

A meeting ground for students of language and literature, this broad-ranging volume considers cultural, social, literary, material, and theoretical approaches to the study of language.

In this major contribution to debates about English identity, leading theorist Robert J.C. Young argues that Englishness was never really about England at all. In the nineteenth century, it was rather developed as a form of long-distance identity for the English diaspora around the world. Young shows how the effects of this continue to reverberate today, nationally and globally.

Tracing the evolution of the library as a modern institution from the late eighteenth century to the digital era, this book explores the diverse practices by which Americans have shared reading matter for instruction, edification, and pleasure. Writing from a rich variety of perspectives, the contributors raise important questions about the material forms and social shapes of American culture. What is a library? How have libraries fostered communities of readers and influenced the practice of reading in particular communities? How did the development of modern libraries alter the boundaries of individual and social experience, and define new kinds of public culture? To what extent have libraries served as commercial enterprises, as centers of power, and as places of empowerment for African Americans, women, and immigrants?Institutions of Reading offers at once a social history of literacy and leisure, an intellectual history of institutional and technological innovations that facilitated the mass distribution and consumption of printed books and periodicals, and a cultural history of the symbolic meanings and practical uses of reading in American life.In addition to the editors, contributors include Elizabeth Amann, Michael Baenen, James Green, Elizabeth McHenry, Barbara Mitchell, Christine Pawley, Janice Radway, James Raven, Karin Roffman, and Roy Rosenzweig..

Stylistics: Prospect & Retrospect looks backward toward classic and foundational approaches and texts that helped to establish the field of stylistics. It also looks forward by examining recent innovations that seem likely to alter the ways in which style is studied in the years to come. The essays presented here, written by an array of experts from nine countries on four continents, employ a wide range of approaches to works that range from romantic poetry to contemporary fiction and from traditional folktales and nursery rhymes to contemporary film. The variety of authors, approaches, and works found here testifies to the vitality of the field of stylistics, and these essays should appeal to all those interested in the nature of style and in the history and future of stylistics.

This book presents a series of narratives that reflect the compelling and sometimes dangerous allure of the world of books - and the world in books - in late-medieval Britain. It envisions the confines of medieval manuscripts as virtual worlds: realms that readers call forth through imaginative interactions with books' material features.

In the 1790s, a single conversational circle―the Friendly Club―united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place―the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads―geographical, professional, and otherwise―of American literary and intellectual culture.

While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages. The Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood here reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell.

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all--part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history.Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

From Medea to Goneril to Sharon Stone's ice-pick murderer to Susan Smith, the image of the violent woman has fascinated readers and audiences in a way that other figures have not. Jo Hendin looks at the figure of the violent woman in her latest book where she argues that a violent woman is a grenade pitched towards both conservative and liberal views of women. Peopled with some of the most fascinating women in history, both real and imagined, Heartbreakers is a thought-provoking read.

This innovative study examines the dialogue between British Romantic poetry and the human sciences of the period. Maureen McLane reveals how Romantic writers participated in a new-found consciousness of human beings as a species, engaging with major discourses on moral philosophy, political economy and anthropology by preeminent theorists such as Malthus, Godwin and Burke. The book provides original readings of canonical works, including Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and has much to say about the place of Romantic poetry within its culture.

In this stimulating and innovative synthesis of New York’s artistic and literary worlds, Lytle Shaw uses the social and philosophical problems involved in “reading” a coterie to propose a new language for understanding the poet, art critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara (1926-1966).

O’Hara’s poems are famously filled with proper names—from those of his immediate friends and colleagues in the New York writing and art worlds (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Grace Hartigan, Willem de Kooning, and many musicians, dancers, and filmmakers) to a broad range of popular cultural and literary heroes (Apollinaire to Jackie O). But rather than understand O’Hara’s most commonly referenced names as a fixed and insular audience, Shaw argues that he uses the ambiguities of reference associated with the names to invent a fluid and shifting kinship structure—one that opened up radical possibilities for a gay writer operating outside the structure of the family.

As Shaw demonstrates, this commitment to an experimental model of association also guides O’Hara’s art writing. Like his poetry, O’Hara’s art writing too has been condemned as insular, coterie writing. In fact, though, he was alone among 1950s critics in his willingness to consider abstract expressionism not only within the dominant languages of existentialism and formalism but also within the cold war political and popular cultural frameworks that anticipate many of the concerns of contemporary art historians. Situating O’Hara within a range of debates about art’s possible relations to its audience, Shaw demonstrates that his interest in coterie is less a symptomatic offshoot of his biography than a radical literary and artistic invention.

Shakespeare was not a citizen of London. But the language of his plays is shot through with the concerns of London 'freemen' and their wives, the diverse commercial class that nevertheless excluded adult immigrants from country towns and northern Europe alike. This book combines London historiography, close reading, and recent theories of citizen subjectivity to demonstrate for the first time that Shakespeare's plays embody citizen and alien identities despite their aristocratic settings. Through three chapters, the book points out where the city shadows the country scenes of the major comedies, shows how London's trades animate the 'civil butchery' of the history plays, and explains why England's metropolis becomes the fractured Rome of tragedy.

Securing the Commonwealth examines how eighteenth-century American writers understood the highly speculative financial times in which they lived. Spanning a century of cultural and literary life, this study shows how the era's literature commonly depicted an American ethos of risk taking and borrowing as the peculiar product of New World daring and the exigencies of revolution and nation building.

Some of the century's most important writers, including Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Judith Sargent Murray, believed that economic and social commonwealth—and one's commitment to that commonwealth—might be grounded in indebtedness and financial insecurity. These writers believed a cash-poor colony or nation could not only advance itself through borrowing but also gain reputability each time it successfully paid off a loan. Equally important, they believed that debt could promote communality: precarious public credit structures could exact popular commitment; intricate financial networks could bind individuals to others and to their government; and indebtedness itself could evoke sympathy for the suffering of others.

Close readings of their literary works reveal how these writers imagined that public life might be shaped by economic experience, and how they understood the public life of literature itself. Insecure times strengthened their conviction that writing could be publicly serviceable, persuading readers to invest in their government, in their fellow Americans, and in the idea of America itself.

This volume makes available for the first time the complete surviving works of the London printer-author Elinor James (c.1645-1719). Uniquely in the history of early modern women, James wrote, printed and distributed more than ninety pamphlets and broadsides addressing political, religious and commercial concerns. Written over a period of 35 years, her works provide us with a running commentary on the major national events of a tumultuous period such as the Revolution of 1688, the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, and the Jacobite uprisings in 1715-16. During her lifetime, England saw the succession of six different monarchs. James petitioned all of them and claimed to have obtained audiences with three. In 1689 she was gaoled in Newgate prison, accused of disseminating seditious material condemning William III for accepting the English crown. James's texts address a staggeringly broad range of concerns. She petitioned Parliament concerning legislation affecting the printing trades and petitioned fellow printers concerning labour relations in London printing houses. She petitioned City authorities on issues such as the enforcement of bylaws or who to vote for in City and parliamentary elections. It is hoped that by making available all of James's known works, this volume will inspire the collective efforts of scholars from many different disciplines to decipher her references to contemporary events, issues and persons, as well as prompting further discoveries of as yet unidentified works.

Thousands of men left their families for the bustling cities of nineteenth-century America, where many of them found work as clerks. The Clerk’s Tale recounts their remarkable story, describing the struggle of aspiring businessmen to come of age at the dawn of the modern era. How did these young men understand the volatile world of American capitalism and make sense of their place within it?

Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.

This anthology brings together writings ranging from the canonical to the obscure that suggest the scope of responses--from wondrous celebration to apocalyptic horror--elicited by the advent and establishment of the factory system in nineteenth-century Britain. Addressing complex questions about the possible effects of mass production on human life and labor, this collection presents important works by John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and William Morris alongside lesser-known selections from factory tourists' tales and inspectors' reports, Parliamentary testimony, a Luddite pamphlet, and a cotton mill worker's autobiography. These texts reveal the richness and complexity of the debates, contradictions, and conflicts that accompanied the rise of the factory as the most important site of commodity production. The selections are arranged and introduced in a way that helps students make sense of this complicated field. An introduction by the editor and a chronology of the British factory system help place the materials in their historical context. 

Postcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial challenge to western dominance. This lively and innovative account of both the history and key debates of postcolonialism discusses its importance as an historical condition, and as a means of changing the way we think about the world. Key concepts and issues are considered, with reference to particular cultural and historical examples, such as the status of aboriginal people, cultural nomadism, Western feminism, the innovative fiction of Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, and the postcolonial cities of London, Bombay and Cairo. The work of theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Spivak are woven into the discussion, making this fascinating subject relevant and accessible to a wider audience.

Although much attention has been paid to early modern European travel to the New World, attention is just beginning to be paid to the travels in the Old World, even though they speak to contemporary concerns with categories like civilization, race, and nation as much as, sometimes more than, the New World explorations.

This book aligns travel narratives and historical surveys of parts of the Old World Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Russia with texts by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden that contributed to English ideas about those regions. Addressing the current interest in Europe's relationship with its neighbors and near-neighbors in the Old World, the author introduces the term "paracolonial" to describe Europe's attitude toward those areas where its colonial reach was intermittent or nonexistent.

The book begins by matching ancient and early modern accounts of Egypt and Ethiopia with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, showing how antiquity's veneration of Egyptian values was tainted in Shakespeare's time by anxieties of racial and sexual degeneration. The next chapter, centered on Milton's Paradise Lost, relates degeneration to the epic cycle of imperial rise and fall attributed to Southwest Asia and its monumental ruins by European historians and travelers. The Elizabethan and Jacobean fascination with Russia is the topic of the third chapter, which argues that Herodotus' Scythia and early modern slavery were the dual origins of the barbarous Russia glimpsed in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost and Milton's Muscovia. In the process, the author offers a novel explanation for the puzzling link between Russia and racial "blackness" in the English Renaissance. The book concludes with India, where degeneration, cyclic empire, and bodily images of racial and sexual difference were combined in geographical writings and sensationally staged in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe.

Tracing the overlap between Graeco-Roman geography and the itineraries of Renaissance travelers and traders, Old Worlds brings together a rich array of texts that rewrite European traditions about a plural antiquity from an early modern English perspective.

There are more public libraries in the U.S. than McDonald's restaurants. More children participate in library summer reading programs than in Little League baseball. Libraries—public, school, and academic libraries—are ubiquitous cultural agencies. Yet how much do we know about the multiple ways that they serve and enrich our culture? These essays explore the role of the library in the life of the reader and the library as a place in the life of its users. Contributors are Thomas Augst, Ari Kelman, Elizabeth Jane Aikin, Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Christine Pawley, Juris Dilevko and Lisa Gottlieb, Jean L. Preer, Jacalyn Eddy, Benjamin Hufbauer, and Emily B. Todd.

Land/Scape/Theater proposes landscape as a necessary paradigm for understanding modern theater's increasingly spatialized aesthetic as well as its engagement with the cultural meanings of place and space.

Thomas Howard, the 21st Earl of Arundel (1586-1646) was famed in the day as the "Collector Earl" whose unparalleled galleries were filled with paintings, sculpture and antiquities. His circle included a diverse collection of individuals who enjoyed the Earl's patronage:  Anthony Van Dyke, the classical philologist and art historian Franciscus Junius, the natural philosopher Kenelm Digby, and the physician William Harvey.  This study focuses on the ways in which the Earl's project to plant an English colony on the island of Madagascar enlisted the contributions of all these individuals in various but related ways.  The centerpiece of this analysis (the cover illustration) is Van Dyck's "Madagascar portrait" of the Earl and his Countess contemplating this venture.  Junius appears in the background at the right along with a classical head--likely Homer's--to connect the Earl's current colonial adventure with the ancient tradition of epic seafaring.

Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded.

Rachel Rosenthal is an internationally recognised pioneer in the field of feminist and ecological performance art. Her revolutionary performance technique integrates text, movement, voice, choreography, improvisation, inventive costuming, dramatic lighting and wildly imaginative sets into an unforgettable theatre experience. In the last twenty years she has presented over thirty-five pieces nationally and internationally. She has been called 'a monument and a marvel' and critically ranked with Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Ping Chong, Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. Her work is passionately dedicated to interrogating, illuminating and improving the relationship between human beings and the planet we share with so many other species. Her performances explore and embody the long history and urgent future of this deeply troubled relationship, and use viscerally compelling performance to draw us into a direct experience of the beauty and power of our lives in nature.

Tattoos and graffiti immediately bring to mind contemporary urban life and its inhabitants. But in fact, both practices date back much further than is generally thought—even by scholars. Drawing on a previously unavailable archive, Juliet Fleming reveals the unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England.

            In Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Fleming argues that our modern assumptions of what constitutes written expression have limited our access to and understanding of early modern history and writing. Fleming combines detailed historical scholarship with intellectual daring in a work that describes how writing practices have not been limited to the boundaries of the page; instead they have included body surfaces, ceramics, ceilings, walls, and windows.

            Moving beyond what has been preserved in print and manuscript, this book claims the whitewashed wall as the primary textual canvas of the early modern English, explores the tattooing practices of sixteenth-century Europeans, and uncovers the poetics of ceramic cookware. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England will provide a startling new perspective for scholars of early modern literature and cultural history.

Since the nineteenth century, ideas centered on the individual, on Emersonian self-reliance, and on the right of the individual to the pursuit of happiness have had a tremendous presence in the United States—and even more so after the Reagan era. But has this presence been for the good of all? In Negative Liberties Cyrus R. K. Patell revises important ideas in the debate about individualism and the political theory of liberalism. He does so by adding two new voices to the current discussion—Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon—to examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narrative generated by U.S. liberal ideology. 

This key new introduction, by one of the leading exponents in the field, explains in clear and accessible language the historical and theoretical origins of post-colonial theory. Acknowledging that post-colonial theory draws on a wide, often contested, range of theory from different fields, Young analyzes the concepts and issues involved, explains the meaning of key terms, and interprets the work of some of the major writers concerned, to provide an ideal introductory guide for those undergraduates or academics coming to post-colonial theory and criticism for the first time.

In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places.

“For several years,” write the editors of What’s Left of Theory, “a debate on the politics of theory has been conducted energetically within literary studies. The terms of the debate, however, are far from clear. What is meant by politics? What is meant by theory?”

What’s Left of Theory is a vigorous engagement with that thorniest of critical questions: how today are theory and progressive thought connected? Michael Warner, activist and critic, examines ‘zones of privacy and zones of theory’ while law professor Janet Halley considers theory and its applicability to sex harassment. Jeff Nunokawa examines Oscar Wilde, Marjorie Levinson reads Elizabeth Bishop alongside National Geographic; John Brenkman considers ‘extreme criticism’, Michael Berube the ‘future of contingency’; William Connolly addresses the matter of secularism, Gayatri Spivak explores what she calls ‘theory-remains’, and Jonathan Culler demonstrates once again his gift for explaining the complex in an essay that identifies ‘the literary in theory’.

Editors Butler, Guillory, and Thomas have brought together not only outstanding questioners, but outstanding questions. As their introduction puts it, “Are there ways of pursuing a politically reflective literary analysis that have definitively left theory behind, and must ‘theory’ be left behind for left literary analysis to emerge? Has the study of literature passed beyond its encounter with theory? If so, in passing beyond theory, has it remained unchanged? Does the recent cry for a ‘return to literature’ signal the surpassing of theory, the fact that literature remains after theory? Does literature remain (the same) after theory?” For students of literature and the humanities in general, these questions are not only left: they endure.

Language and Style in The Inheritors links the linguistic characteristics of the language of William Golding's underappreciated second novel with larger stylistic and thematic issues to achieve a satisfying and persuasive interpretation while also demonstrating the usefulness and effectiveness(and some of the limitations) of linguistic and computer-assisted approaches, without being overwhelmingly theoretical or technical. This analysis uses comparative data from a corpus of more than thirty British and American novels to compare and contrast with the contents of The Inheritors. It begins with a discussion of point of view, style, and interpretation and moves into an examination of The Inheritors in regard to other works that focus on it. The author then provides a discussion of Golding's manipulation of transitivity to produce the animistic character of the novel, and a statistical analysis of its readability, sentence complexity, and vocabulary complexity, followed by an analysis of diction. He concludes with an integration of the linguistic discoveries with important thematic issues, and a consideration of altered versions of The Inheritors.

Volume 7 examines a broad range of American literature of the past half century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970. John Burt discusses the writers of the American South. Wendy Steiner examines postmodern fictions since 1970. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers.

Original both in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, this book provides a wealth of new information about middle- and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. Quite to the contrary, women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religio-political allegiances played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie simultaneous powerful claims that women had no place in public life.

This book offers an imaginative new way of understanding the relationship between syntax and meter in Old English verse. It challenges the view that Old English poetry is composed in loose syntax to compensate for the strict requirements of prosody, such as meter and alliteration. The author proposes a "prosodical" syntax to replace the syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application. She formulates three concise rules that apply to the entire Old English poetic corpus.

What is the relation of politics to theory? Theories make political claims, theorists make political critiques, and academics use theory in the pursuit of institutional ends: theory is not only "about" politics but is itself a political practice. Politics and theory, like high art and popular culture, are marked by a common dialectic: in Adorno's famous phrase, they bear the stigmata of capitalism - are torn halves of a system which doesn't add up. Robert Young's critique of the politics of theory shows how the dynamics of this schism are repeated in contemporary debates about historicism, psychoanalysis, racism, and the academic institution itself. In their dialectics of identity and difference, power and resistance, subversion and containment, north and south, centre and margin - the heart of contemporary political and theoretical debate - today's cultural theories themselves act out the torn halves of a conflictual culture. But, Young argues, if theory repeats the irreconcilable antagonisms of late capitalism, then it must also renew its politics of protest against diaspora, deprivation and despair.

Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama reimagines the content and continuities of theater history and exposes underlying dialogues between "home and homelessness, belonging and exile"—a century-long struggle with the meaning and power of place, which the author terms "geopathology." By reading canonical works in conjunction with contemporary ones, Chaudhuri charts the evolution of a dramatic paradigm with profound theatrical and thematic implications.

This work uncovers a culture of courtly surveillance, secrecy and espionage in an era generally regarded, since Foucault, as characterized by the association of sovereignty with public display. Examining the centrality of espionage in the careers and works of Michel de Montaigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis Bacon, it demonstrates the association of surveillance with sovereignty before surveillance became the characteristic mode of discipline in the modern, abstract state. The author substantially revises our understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge in the rise of the modern state while subtly illuminating the inscription of that relationship within Renaissance texts.

John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over "multiculturalism" and the current "crisis of the humanities." Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups than as a question of the distribution of "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.

A New Theory of Old English Meter sets out a simple new theory of Old English meter that is based on a bare minimum of initial assumptions and metrical principles, and supported by rigorous arguments and by evidence from a computer-assisted analysis of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. The new theory is revolutionary in concluding that alliteration rather than stress is the most important feature of the meter, and in rejecting the traditional assumptions of two lifts and four metrical positions per verse. It provides improved solutions for many of the perennial problems of Old English meter, makes possible an elegant logical explanation for the kinds of verses that occur and those which do not occur, and prepares the way for the most radical conclusion of the book: that Old English meter is not based on rhythm.

The book traces the literary appropriation of the theory and practice of linear perspective in the visual arts in English writing from Shakespeare to Milton.  The word "perspective" itself comes into the English Renaissance by way of the pictorial tradition and is employed both literally in relation to visual art and metaphorically as a way of seeing-- specifying an individual "perspective" that both empowers and delimits the seeing (or reading) subject who is accorded a unique "point of view."  The analysis focuses specifically on a species of "curious" or "witty" perspective that extends the visual and poetic representation of space as a mathematically precise "window" onto the real, into the anamorphic realm of distortion and duplicity.

The iconoclastic spirit of the English Reformation is examined in the works of Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Quarles and Milton. The central issue engaged here is the negotiation in these writers between the Sidnean tradition of "ut pictura poesis" that 'sees' poetry as a "speaking picture" and the antipictorial Protestant suspicion of the eye as the "devil's doorway"--according to Luther, the portal of idolatry. 

How is literary authority acquired? How does a poet persuade himself of his own authority? By what process is a writer elevated above his peers and ultimately to immortality?

In Poetic Authority John Guillory attempts to answer these questions by considering the works of Spenser and Milton, two great poets of the English tradition whose struggles with the represented sources of poetic authority led them to define their own original poetic voices.

Both Spenser and Milton, Guillory argues, resist the secular triumphs of Renaissance literature, and attempt in their major works to produce a sacred poetry which would neither contend with, nor be too much diminished by, the authority of the Bible. The ambition and ultimate failure of the sacred poet has important consequences for literary history, particularly for the later history of “imagination.”

With an eye to the larger questions of the canon and the long English tradition, Poetic Authority seeks to explain that strange hiatus in literary history when Spenser and Milton asserted an already archaic claim to vatic authority, against the very language of imagination that would soon come to be associated with their names.