Showing papers in "Literature Compass in 2008"

Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object

Abstract: How do we read the premodern representation of objects? This essay surveys recent approaches to medieval literature and culture that focus attention on ‘objecthood’ and the debates that it inspired in the premodern period. This work eschews the exclusive focus on ‘subjectivity’ that was the hallmark of late twentieth-century poststructuralist accounts of medieval literature in Britain. Subjects do not disappear in these readings, however; they are instead shown to be dialogically produced, always in conversation with things. In offering a genealogy of what has come to be known as ‘thing theory,’ this survey interrogates a number of related (but not necessarily compatible) strains of materialism, including those influenced by Marxism, phenomenology, sociology, and New Historicism. Neither a return to old positivist historical models seeking ‘the thing itself’ nor a retreat from the significant questions posed by poststructuralist theory, these object-oriented studies all seek ways of approaching narrated things that do not render them merely ‘mirrors’ of human desires or just signs pointing us toward the ‘inner lives’ of literary personas. Instead, this work takes seriously the idea that premodern objects were endowed with an autonomy and agency that was largely misrecognized in the wake of Enlightenment empiricism. Taking Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a point of departure, this essay argues that where and how the line between human and nonhuman, subject and object, society and nature gets drawn is always an ideological process. The work surveyed here attempts to make available some of the manifold cultural pressures that influenced this permeable boundary across the Middle Ages.

An Overview of Race and Ethnicity in Pre‐Norman England

Abstract: This article surveys ideas about race in pre-Norman England (c.450–1066). I review contemporary race categories that tend to structure our view of the medieval evidence; modern and medieval vocabulary; and some ideas about race and ethnicity current in the early Middle Ages. Within that broader context, I then discuss Gildas, Bede, and King Alfred. Race and ethnicity are vexed categories. Anyone inquiring into medieval English ideas of race must try to disentangle the historical evidence from our own ideas of race. Some medieval English people thought about race in entirely different ways than we do; some did not. The point here is that race belongs first and foremost to the domain of thought, and only accidentally to the domain of objects. There is nothing one can point to, dissolve in a beaker, or grind into a powder that reveals an English race. We must also try to distinguish race from family, which does have biological markers, as well as from tribes and clans. The historical study of race and ethnicity is largely a record of thoughts about race and their real-world effects. Since our own thoughts about race can prejudice our study of the past, in what follows I review some of the dominant thoughts about race in the last two centuries before turning to Anglo-Saxon England. Race and ethnicity are not fixed categories. They change over time. Sometimes they are defined along cultural or religious lines, sometimes along political or linguistic lines. As time passes, one or another idea of race comes to dominate narratives of national or regional self-identity, and then evanesces.1 For example, the dominant nineteenth-century American racial consensus designated the Irish as a race distinct from Anglo-Saxons. By the mid-twentieth century, the Irish had been ‘whited’, or integrated into a larger ‘white’ race, itself a relatively recent innovation.2 Today, the United States government presumes that each individual belongs to one of five races, or to one of two ethnicities, although it acknowledges multiple affiliations.3 None of them is Irish. The five races are ‘American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White’. The two ethnicities, so to speak, are ‘ “Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino” ’.4 We can discern here various strata of racial categories, including geographical definitions of race and familal ones. We can also see that American categories of race differ from British ones and, for that matter, from Spanish ones. Spain is divided into a number of ethnoterritories, and so the Spanish national government recognizes multiple ethnicities under the more general rubric of Hispanic (as did Isidore of Seville in the seventh century). Thus, the American ethnic category ‘Hispanic’ does not correspond to the ethnic categories recognized in Hispania herself. The Mexican government has different definitions again.5 So, it's not clear that ‘Hispanic’ is a category that would be defined similarly by an American, an Englishman, a Mexican, and a Spaniard. So, if the categories of race and ethnicity differ from one country to another, then we need to pay attention to where we are speaking from when we look back at the Middle Ages. We also need to pay attention to who is speaking. Who defines a race, or an ethnicity? Can it be reasonably self-defined, is it socially defined, or are races and ethnicities stable, biological categories? Are racial categories nominal conveniences or do racial categories reflect physical essences? We may flatter ourselves to think that the former is the more sophisticated, modern position. In fact, the latter is more recent. Francois Bernier was perhaps the first (in 1684) to use ‘race’ to describe essential biological characteristics as definitive of races. Racial categories also came to be described culturally. Hippolyte Taine, the hugely influential nineteenth-century literary critic, spoke of race much like we speak today of culture– nationally defined as French, English, Irish, Italian, and so forth. In the confusing tumult of nineteenth-century anthropology, races were differentiated from, equated with, and confused with peoples (Volker), cultures, families, nations, clans, and tribes. An infamous case of abstract racial categories demanding biological definition arose in the Nurnberg Laws of September, 1935. The National Socialists of Germany had declared Jews racially distinct from Germans, but there were no tests to determine who was and who was not a Jew. Similarly, in the American South after the Civil War, local legislatures produced codes that tried to distinguish black citizens from white citizens biologically; these were known as Jim Crow laws. Many such approaches assume that race simplifies (or ‘purifies’) the further back in time one goes. So, if my grandmother was white, then I am white. But, what makes my grandmother white? And her grandmother? Our dominant narrative of biological diversity is inherited from Charles Darwin, and tends to presume a single origin point – like horses or birds evolving from a single-cell organism (monogenesis). One might be tempted by analogy to impose this model on humans, and to assume thereby that racial categories simplify as we go further back in time. But, they don't. One may want to acknowledge that medieval people were no less sophisticated in this regard than we are. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, academics tend to define race as a conceptual category that correlates with culture, and perhaps with geography, but not explicitly with biology. Debates have been further confused by political ideology. Premises grounding one's political attitudes can limit or direct the questions one asks of race.6 However complicated the situation seems today, it was no clearer during the Middle Ages.

Women and Shakespeare in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Abstract: This article examines the role of gender in the popularisation of Shakespeare in the long eighteenth century, providing an overview of scholarship on three groups of women: actresses (the first women on the stage and later performers such as Catherine Clive, Susannah Cibber and Hannah Pritchard), women in the theatre audience (including Elizabeth Pepys and the Shakespeare Ladies Club) and female critics (notably Charlotte Lennox and Elizabeth Montagu). In addition to suggesting further reading on the topic of women and Shakespeare and highlighting directions for subsequent research, the essay demonstrates that women were instrumental in shaping the Bard's reputation in the period from the reopening of the theatres in 1660 to David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, the height of the period's adulation of Shakespeare.

Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks

Abstract: This paper discusses recent trends in digital resources for early modern literary studies, as well as the implications of these resources for research and scholarship In addition to comparing the use by scholars of print reference works and online databases, the essay analyzes the recent shift from ‘first-generation’ digital resources, such as the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Early English Books Online (EEBO), to newer ‘second-generation’ resources like DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks Rather than strive for comprehensive coverage of early modern print culture, as ESTC and EEBO do, these ‘second-generation’ sites typically aim for in-depth coverage of a particular kind of text or document DEEP, for example, is a searchable database of all extant plays printed in England to 1660, while the English Broadside Ballad Archive focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ballads This shift in emphasis – from comprehensiveness to specialized subject matter – has resulted in, and been driven by, changes in thinking about the fundamental architecture of the databases, their searchability, and their analytical and editorial principles, all of which have significant ramifications for the type of research they enable

Beauty Spot, Blind Spot: Romantic Wales

Abstract: Romantic-period Wales was a fascinating place: part literary construct, part tourist destination, it appears in the work of many writers as a locus of alternative possibilities, both political and personal. Welsh landscape, language and literature attracted poets, artists, antiquarians and historians alike, and an energetic literary cultural revival within Wales produced a rich blend of texts, legends and fabrications which would inspire makers of both fiction and history on either side of the border. The questions of national and cultural allegiance at the heart of this revival are of profound importance to current discussions of ‘British’ identity, particularly in the light of so-called ‘four nations’ criticism. This article argues that the Welsh contribution to British Romanticism has been seriously neglected by Romantic studies in general. It suggests reasons for this neglect, surveys recent work in the field, and points to future possible directions for research.

The Poetics of Place and Space: Wordsworth, Norman Nicholson and the Lake District

Abstract: This article draws upon the ‘spatial turn’ in critical practice to open up thinking about Romantic and post-Romantic representations of geo-specific space. The opening section maps out the philosophical foundations for spatial literary criticism by tracing two main strands of spatial theory: one which emerges out of Heideggerian phenomenology; and the other which is based on the Marxist cultural analysis of Henri Lefebvre. The article then highlights some ways in which these spatial theories have been used to offer new readings of Romantic texts. The second half of the essay roots this spatial thinking by focusing on literary representations of the Lake District. It shows how notions of boundary and boundedness are central to Wordsworth's spatial configuration of his native region; alongside this, it indicates how Wordsworth's mapping of the area has influenced later constructions of the landscape as a ‘social space’. The final section points towards further thinking by briefly examining the work of the twentieth-century Cumbrian writer, Norman Nicholson (1914–87), and highlighting the tensions in his development of a site-specific, post-Romantic poetics of place and space.

Keats's ‘Dull Rhymes’ and the Making of the Ode Stanza

Abstract: This article focuses on how John Keats's experimentation with the sonnet genre led to the development of his famous ode stanza. Several sonnets written in 1818 and 1819, most notably ‘If by dull rhymes our english must be chain'd’, illustrate Keats's dissatisfaction with traditional forms and his desire for a stanza that could present a more meditative speaker. Providing a brief survey of critical approaches to Keats's odes, the author stresses that the vital connection between ode stanza and the sonnet needs renewed discussion. With close readings of the interplay between syntax and form in the stanzas of Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and To Autumn, the article attempts in a preliminary way to explore how the odes highlight their speaker's revision of tradition, presenting a lyric voice conscious of its own position in literary history.

Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge's ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’

Abstract: In this essay, Timothy Morton explores ecological ways of reading Coleridge's poem ‘Effusion 35’, which he revised as ‘The Eolian Harp’. Previous criticism (such as M. H. Abrams's) has suggested that the Aeolian harp is a way of thinking about relationships between humans and nature, but how precisely should we define these? And do these definitions have anything to do with artistic form (as well as content)? Morton demonstrates that Coleridge conducts an experiment in environmental form, for which the Aeolian harp (or wind harp) provides a key. This popular household gadget was common in the eighteenth century, and several poets had written about it, notably James Thomson. Coleridge innovated in poetic form by making the Aeolian harp a figure for automation, and for the monitoring and recording of environmental processes. The poem thus anticipates, in an imaginary way, contemporary cultures of sound recording and reproduction. Using Marx, Morton demonstrates how the poem organizes meaning in a radically democratic way. ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’ ultimately open our minds to the possibility of ‘ecology without nature’– a deconstructive, open-minded idea of ecology.

From translator to Laureate: imagining the medieval author

Abstract: Today we largely take it for granted that every text has an author, but what is understood by the term ‘author’ was very different in the Middle Ages. Medieval English ideas of authorship were many and varied, and show some key changes from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. In manuscript cultures, like England before the late fifteenth century, the author has little control over the repetition of his text; in many medieval vernacular texts the author is represented as a craftsman and translator rather than a visionary or virtuoso. Texts in manuscript were inherently open to rewriting and were often anonymous. The role and status of the author was interrogated by poets and scholars, often revealing a remarkably open sense of who, or what, an author could be. In the later medieval period, traditions of depicting real (Geoffrey Chaucer) and imagined (Sir John Mandeville) authors developed, signalling a growing trend of attaching an authorial identity to a text worth reading. The development of mysticism and affective religion brought further transformations in the role of the author, given the anxiety over who has the right and access to represent divine communication; this issue is raised in The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Margery Kempe, both of which play with conceits of anonymity. After Chaucer, in particular in the poetry of John Lydgate, we can identify the development of the English ‘laureate’ poet. In the early era of print, especially in the prologues of William Caxton, one discerns the emergence of an author, through the posthumous image of Chaucer, similar to that known today: not only a writer but also a creator, a celebrity and an authority.

Twentieth-Century Re-Workings of the Victorian Novel

Abstract: This essay offers an overview of recent critical studies of the neo-Victorian novel alongside a discussion of revisions of Victorian writing from the 1880s to the present day. The piece seeks to examine some of the recent critical debates surrounding what Robin Gilmour has termed ‘using’ the nineteenth century. It will map the trajectory of these revisions from the late nineteenth century to the present day to consider how and why Victorian novels and cultural icons continue to be re-worked, and what makes the Victorians such an attractive source for writers and artists.

Devolving Romanticism: Nation, Region and the Case of Devon and Cornwall

Abstract: This essay considers the ways in which four nations, or archipelagic, criticism has impacted upon the study of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain. It traces the history of four nations’ criticism from its impact on the Celtic nations and the study of regional identity and culture. The second half of the essay considers Devon and Cornwall, and in particular the Cornish writer Richard Polwhele as a case study for this four nations approach. It considers Polwhele's literary and other writerly activities (particularly in the field of antiquarianism and topographical county histories) as an example of a possible regional Romanticism.

John Skelton and the New Fifteenth Century

Abstract: John Skelton's writing career took place roughly between 1488 and 1528, years that straddle two centuries and, most awkwardly, two epochs. Perhaps because of that awkwardness he has been a poet marginalized in our literary histories and critical discourse until quite recently. This overview essay suggests that to re-engage Skelton is to test alternative literary histories that think beyond the fifteenth century as a merely transitional moment and that put into play methodologies flexible enough to accommodate inter-related notions of aesthetics and context. This essay traces Skelton's critical tradition as a series of perspectives on the poet's own nimble engagements with form and history. The first section follows the story of formalist and historicist approaches to Skelton working in tension up until the last part of the twentieth century. The second section explores the interventions of the new Skelton scholars. The third and final sections speculate briefly about fresh directions in Skelton scholarship, noticing that many of the themes and questions raised around Skelton over the past century remain open for more extensive development.

Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)

Abstract: In ‘Transatlanticism Now,’ Laura Stevens suggests that scholars should construct a taxonomy of the field. This article takes its cue from Stevens and classifies existing research as well as outlines categories for future scholarship, based on where knowledge of the field runs threadbare and where there is the most pressing need for scholarly study. Future work on transatlantic romanticism must incorporate more studies of women and people of color as well as interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary connections (especially to transnational, transpacific, transoceanic, and postcolonial studies). The article seeks to provide the most complete survey and definition of transatlantic romanticism to date as well as a good starting point for all researching and teaching in the field. Based on a firm belief that further scholarship is needed to define this field, this article is an open call for more work on transatlantic romanticism(s) and the development of existing categories as well as new ones. The following categories are interdependent, not hierarchical; they do not seek to differentiate between, say, British and American Romanticism, but to set up comparatist frameworks that link, rather than separate, transatlantic romanticisms: ‘Imag-I-Nations: race, gender, colonialism, notions of national identity and the self’; ‘Circum-Atlantic sisterhood and brotherhood: Atlantic constructs of femininity and masculinity’; ‘Revolution, Rebellion, and Reform: communities of interpreters and literary history’; ‘Transatlantic Greenery: nature, ecology, and the politics and poetics of preservation and pastoral’; ‘Trans(atlantic) migration of souls: conversations with other wor(l)ds’; ‘Transatlantic romanticisms and science: the physical and the mind’; ‘Emotion and sensibility: transatlantic discourses of sympathy, sentiment, and feeling’; ‘Transatlantic travel writing: the ethnocentric Atlantic and international interventions’; ‘Literary and cultural aesthetics and genres: influence, confluence, and difference’; and ‘Transatlantic Translation: language, diction, linguistics, and stylistics.’

Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A State of the Field

Abstract: Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be regularly included in discussions of Anglo-Saxon cultural agency. This paradigm shift can and should inform broader cultural understandings of the history of gender relations, despite current communication problems among the varied subfields of medieval studies and gender studies. Furthermore, the pedagogy of both medievalists and faculty specializing in later periods must be informed by this shift as well.

Seductive Voices: Rethinking Female Subjectivities in The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer

Abstract: This essay provides a summary of recent scholarship on the two female-voiced Old English elegies, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, relating to the position or condition of women in Anglo-Saxon England as ‘witnessed’ in those poems. In doing so I make no attempt to champion a particular view, but try instead to consider the implications of reading in particular ways and think about how the questions raised by these poems may broaden our understanding of female subject positions in Anglo-Saxon England, even if we cannot ultimately come to any conclusions about what and how those poems mean.

Contemporary British-Jewish Writing: From Apology to Attitude

Abstract: This article surveys contemporary British-Jewish writing. It looks at a variety of texts to argue that British-Jewish writing is gaining a new visibility, momentum and confidence. In fiction, memoirs, criticism and journalism, writers are addressing increasingly challenging questions about what it means to be both British and Jewish in the twenty-first century, and exploring the profound ambiguity about Jews that can be traced back throughout the history of Anglo-Jewry.

Literature and Medicine: Twenty-Five Years Later

Abstract: An analysis of ten recent studies in Victorian literature and medicine examines the changes in the interdisciplinary field since G. S. Rousseau published an influential article on the topic in 1981.

Transcendentalism and Religion: The State of Play

Abstract: This essay surveys the scholarship on American Transcendentalism for the last fifty years, focusing on its treatment of the place of religion in the movement. It finds that after an initial period when interest in religion, defined in terms of the history of ideas and institutions, was high, the 1970s and 1980s saw a neglect or exclusion of religion as a factor in Transcendentalism. More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest, however, with emphasis on such topics as spirituality and multiculturalism.

Religion and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Abstract: A chronological overview of the questions, assumptions, and methods characteristic of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has treated religion in eighteenth-century British literature, centered on how ideas concerning the relationship between secularization and modernity have impacted this scholarship. It draws primarily on representative book-length studies and monographs on eighteenth-century British poetry and fiction published over the past sixty years.

Victorian Psychology and the Novel

Abstract: Over the last three decades, literary critics have evinced growing interest in nineteenth-century psychology and its reciprocal relationship with the Victorian novel. The resulting body of interdisciplinary scholarship has yielded insight into how early and mid-Victorian psychological movements (moral management, associationism, evolutionary psychology, and so forth) left their mark on realist authors like George Eliot and writers of sensation fiction such as Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon. But these scholarly works have dealt less comprehensively with the psychological significance of late Victorian genres like the romance and neo-Gothic novel. Moreover, literary critics are only beginning to explore the ways in which psychology subtly shaded into physiology during the late Victorian era. This materialist shift was felt most strongly after 1870, when cerebral localization experiments by David Ferrier, John Hughlings Jackson, and other neurologists linked specific emotions, faculties, and movements to discrete areas of the brain. These experiments suggested that human behavior amounted to the sum of various neurochemical impulses, a conclusion that raised hackles because it threatened cherished notions of the soul, will, and individual identity. Literary scholars have only recently discussed the ways in which late Victorian novels engaged with these unsettling neurological discoveries. Based on the early promise of these discussions, we might expect to see more work on Victorian brains than Victorian psyches in future literary criticism.

‘a mixed Parenthesis’: John Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of Honour

Abstract: This paper is part of the second Literature Compass panel cluster arising from The Texas A&M John Donne Collection: A Symposium and Exhibition. [Correction added after online publication 24 October 2008: ‘This paper introduces the second Literature Compass panel cluster’ changed to ‘This paper is part of the second Literature Compass panel cluster’.] Comprising an introduction by Gary Stringer and three of the papers presented at the symposium, this cluster seeks to examine the current state of Donne Studies and aims to provide a snapshot of the field. The symposium was held April 6–7, 2006. The cluster is made up of the following articles: ‘Introduction to the Second Donne Cluster: Three Papers from The Texas A&M John Donne Collection: A Symposium and Exhibition’, Gary A. Stringer, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00551.x. ‘Donne into Print: The Seventeenth-Century Collected Editions of Donne's Poetry’, Ted-Larry Pebworth, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00552.x. ‘“a mixed Parenthesis”: John Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of Honour’, M. Thomas Hester, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00553.x. ‘What We Think About Donne: A History of Donne Criticism in Twenty Minutes’, Paul A. Parrish, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00554.x. *** This 1651 (rpt. 1654) edition of 129 letters composed by John Donne (1572–1631) presents the witty poet and preacher in many of his most significant styles and roles; ‘conveyors of me to you’, he called them. Despite the ‘tampering’ of many of the letters by its editor or collector, the letters yet maintain an overall impression of the ‘vitality of mind’ and ‘purposeful mental recourse’ for which this Renaissance poet and preacher was known. Attacks on the corruption of the court are balanced in the volume overall by its many meditative considerations; the portrait here of Donne the family man and loving father and husband is set beside the clever writer who declared friendship to be his ‘second religion’; and these revealing insights into his public and private self are balanced by letters affirming his life-long assertion that ‘There is no Vertue, but Religion’. Letters about the ongoing religious conflicts in Europe are followed often by newsless letters he called ‘ghosts’ and ‘apparitions’, both examples of his epistolary art expressed in those dexterous conceits that characterize his vibrant poetry and prose. This varied collection of Donne's letters seems often, that is, to be framed to illustrate his understanding of that ancient and Renaissance adage, Stylus virum arguit: ‘Style argues the man’.

New Directions in British Art History of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: This essay examines new developments in the history of eighteenth-century British art since the publication of David Solkin's Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England in 1993. While Solkin's account of an urban professional class recasting a civic humanist ideology in its own polite and commercial image continues to hold tremendous sway in the field, this state of the field article identifies three major trends that have tempered and challenged that account. Recent scholarship dealing with gender, space, and empire has subtly reoriented the field towards a more inclusive notion of artistic agency and reception, a more synchronic and spatial approach, and an increasingly global perspective.

Romanticism/Secularization/Secularism

Abstract: The romantic period is often considered a time of secularization. However, recent critiques of the secularization thesis, as well as recent scholarly accounts of romanticism, have questioned this assumption. At the same time, a number of scholars have begun to analyze secularism itself. Secularism, some have suggested, actually ‘invents’ the concept of religion during the period of European colonialism. It is therefore not possible to investigate the question of ‘romanticism and religion’ as if ‘religion’ was a definite thing. However, the relationship between secularism and romanticism remains an important research topic. One question of particular interest is how literature came to be understood during the romantic period, and the degree to which literary reading is associated with secularism.

Romantic Literature and Colonialism

Abstract: Current critical approaches to Romantic literature recognise the formative influence of historical and political developments on its creation. This article contributes to this understanding by focusing on British colonialism of the period from 1780 to 1830, in order to illustrate the relationship between these events and the writing which emerged from that context. The texts discussed include a wider variety of different forms of literary engagement with colonialism, and therefore a broader interpretation of Romantic literature than it is conventionally accorded. Travel narratives, missionary accounts, journalism and reports written to encourage settlement, as well as novels and poetry are all considered. Suggestions for further reading, particularly secondary works that discuss specific geographical regions in more detail, are provided in the Works Cited.

Donne into Print: The Seventeenth‐Century Collected Editions of Donne's Poetry

Abstract: This paper is part of the second Literature Compass panel cluster arising from The Texas A&M John Donne Collection: A Symposium and Exhibition. [Correction added after online publication 24 October 2008: ‘This paper introduces the second Literature Compass panel cluster’ changed to ‘This paper is part of the second Literature Compass panel cluster’.] Comprising an introduction by Gary Stringer and three of the papers presented at the symposium, this cluster seeks to examine the current state of Donne Studies and aims to provide a snapshot of the field. The symposium was held April 6–7, 2006. The cluster is made up of the following articles: ‘Introduction to the Second Donne Cluster: Three Papers from The Texas A&M John Donne Collection: A Symposium and Exhibition’, Gary A. Stringer, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00551.x. ‘Donne into Print: The Seventeenth-Century Collected Editions of Donne's Poetry’, Ted-Larry Pebworth, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00552.x. ‘ “a mixed Parenthesis”: John Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of Honour’, M. Thomas Hester, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00553.x. ‘What We Think About Donne: A History of Donne Criticism in Twenty Minutes’, Paul A. Parrish, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00554.x. *** The early printing history of John Donne's collected poetry was largely shaped by his attitude toward printing. Throughout his life, Donne preferred manuscript circulation to print publication, and that preference had significant consequences for the early dissemination of his poems, their posthumous publication in 1633, and their subsequent textual histories. The modern editor must consider carefully all early artefacts of Donne's poetry – both manuscript and print – in the pursuit of the authorial text. Fortunately, the acquisition of the I. A. Shapiro collection of seventeenth-century editions of Donne by the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M University has facilitated the study of those early printings.

Hemispheric American Studies: Preliminary Thoughts on Research and Pedagogical Challenges

Abstract: Over the past two decades, important work in many academic disciplines has increasingly begun to break down many of the regional and national boundaries that have long characterized the study of the Americas. Future research and curriculum on the hemisphere will, no doubt, continue to emphasize comparative and cross regional studies. What happens to U.S. and Americas literary and cultural studies if we recognize the asymmetry and interdependency of nation-state development throughout the hemisphere? This is the question the following article addresses.

Shakespeare Now: The Function of Presentism at the Critical Time

Abstract: Presentism styles itself a distinctive critical approach to literary texts, characterized by heightened self-critical awareness. It sees itself as complementing (rather than competing with) historicism. Its main proponents – Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes – are Shakespearean scholars, and in several recent works, including a recent anthology (Presentist Shakespeares), they elaborate and showcase their approach. This essay argues that the likes of Grady and Hawkes have failed to face up to the simple consideration that ‘presentism’ means a species of error, or it means nothing. They have also failed to square up, satisfactorily, against what is evidently their real target: namely, post-Theory approaches to Shakespeare. (David Kastan is a target, but his name is really more a convenient marker for the target zone, due to the title of his book: Shakespeare after Theory.) Presentism is, in effect, oblique apologetics for Theory, but fails to say anything in its defense.

Presenting the Sister Saints of Ely, or Using Kinship to Increase a Monastery's Status as a Cult Center

Abstract: At the time of the Norman Conquest, the monastery of Ely in Cambridgeshire was the second wealthiest in England, holding significant lands, boasting royal patrons, and housing a number of Benedictine monks. To augment its status as a cult center, the monastery developed a genealogical narrative about their founder, AEthelthryth, which included four sister saints, two nieces, and a great-niece. This essay considers how the narrative of kinship was established, how it was maintained throughout the later medieval period, and why the monastic center felt compelled to augment the cult of AEthelthryth with the smaller cults of her sisters. This survey demonstrates not only the means by which audiences came to know the saints venerated at Ely, but it also illustrates how one might investigate the rhetorical strategies by which a monastery could develop its status as a cult center and compete with rival houses for pilgrims, money, and benefactors.

Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract: Artists rarely accompanied sixteenth-century voyages of discovery and exploration.1 As a consequence, few first-hand visual representations of the New World were produced. Despite this, published accounts of the Americas in the sixteenth century often included illustrations. With some notable exceptions, the voyagers themselves did not supply the images, or directly supervise their publication. Accurate or not, these images, together with the texts they illustrated, contributed to the construction of the Americas in European consciousness. Only a small number of original first-hand pictorial works survive today, the most important being John White's drawings of the Algonquian Indians of Roanoke, Virginia, from 1585–86. The recent major exhibition of John White's drawings may provoke new scholarly interest in sixteenth-century visual images of the Americas, a topic which offers a rich and relatively neglected area of study.2 This article offers an introduction to the field together with some suggestions for avenues of further research.3