Showing papers in "Literature Compass in 2012"

Past, Present, and Future of Digital Medievalism

Abstract: In this article, the author looks back at over 30 years of experience with “Digital Humanities” and argues that while our media for research, delivery, have changed, our methodologies have not. That fact poses a significant challenge for Digital Medievalists because the author believes and advocates for a significant change not just in our delivery systems, but that the digital tools we now have should be changing the way we think and do research, teach, and advertise Medieval Studies as a whole. At once a personal story of experience in the field and an analysis of current practices, this article critiques practices frequently touted as innovative and the wave of the future as nothing more than the same old packages using a new delivery system that may or may not be as effective as the previous delivery system. This critique in the author’s view applies to our teaching as well as to our research. Finally, the author offers some suggestions for both research and teaching that attempt to break out of the old molds and methods and use the digital tools we have in innovative ways that do change the way medievalists research and teach and take fuller advantage of what working digitally offers the field.

Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Victorian Studies

Abstract: Since the turn of the twenty-first century a growing amount of scholarship has focused on the correlations between postcolonial studies and environmental criticism or ecocriticism. Despite the numerous ethical and political connections of global social justice and ecological crisis, postcolonial and ecocritical approaches have historically remained distant from one another. The emergence of postcolonial ecocriticism, however, has aimed to move beyond the mutual unease that has characterized the relationship of these two critical perspectives, formulating a more ecologically aware postcolonialism and a more politically conscious ecocriticism. While the majority of postcolonial-ecocritical scholarship so far has concentrated on contemporary literature, postcolonial ecocriticism has particular relevance for Victorian Studies. As an era of intensive imperial expansion and industrial development, the nineteenth century comprised a pivotal stage in global environmental history that brought dramatic ecological change to many regions of the world in the same moment that it forged momentous political shifts. After introducing the theoretical premises of postcolonial ecocriticism and situating these within the environmental history of empire, this essay sketches some areas of possibility of this new critical approach for unpacking the global environmental resonances of Victorian literature, concluding with four suggested areas within which a Victorian postcolonial ecocriticism might unfold.

The Concept of Shame in Late‐Medieval English Literature

Abstract: As well as describing dishonor itself, the Middle English word ‘shame’ can refer either to the emotion resulting from an awareness of dishonor or disgrace, or to the anticipation of dishonor, the potential for disgrace to be experienced. Late-medieval English literature reveals the interrelation between the personal experience of shame and the way it is produced in relation to others, typically through such kinds of exposure as showing and telling. This essay draws attention to the complex ways in which shame is imagined in late-medieval English literature. It begins by considering the two major focal points of late-medieval shame studies so far: chivalric literature and Christian shame. After surveying the approaches that have been taken to date, it suggests new themes that deserve critical attention in these areas. The remainder of this essay points to other literary contexts in which we might investigate shame more closely. While chivalric and devotional texts are significant areas in which shame was imagined, medical, conduct, and advisory texts also engage with the concept of shame in important ways.

Coinage of the Term Environment: A Word Without Authority and Carlyle’s Displacement of the Mechanical Metaphor

Abstract: Translating the word ‘Umgebung’ in a work by Goethe, Carlyle coined the term ‘environment’ in the South of Scotland in 1828. Goethe’s usage involves reference to a Scottish subject, Macpherson’s Ossian. Referring to this, in 1942 Spitzer argued that the broader meaning of the word was misrepresented by Carlyle’s translation. However, after coining the term environment, Carlyle’s later work can be read as a significant realisation of this broader Goethean meaning, through his literary-critical discussion of Robert Burns, literary-philosophical Sartor Resartus, and his biography and historiography. The term needs to be seen partly as a response to a large number of intersecting social, political, economic, and agrarian changes associated with the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and in particular the modernising transformations of the Lowland Clearances. But, through the ways in which this examination of the term’s coinage brings into relation Goethe, Carlyle, the philosophy of Thomas Reid, and a theory of concepts by Sir William Hamilton, the hybridising processes involved in coining the term can also be seen as constituting a pivotal moment of transnational cultural exchange, an encapsulation of diversity, an interdisciplinary interrelation of literary, philosophical, and social critique, and a paradigm-shifting challenge to the authority of mechanism. These intersecting elements are peculiarly apt with regard to certain radical dimensions of continuing relevance to the counter-Enlightenment position of Adorno and Horkheimer, humanity’s relation with nature, our continuing struggles with the Enlightenment legacy, and to the expansive, plural, and potentially evolving character of the notion of environment – but also to the later emergence of environmentalism.

Renaissance Humanism and the Future of the Humanities

Abstract: The academic humanities trace their origins to the Renaissance. Yet recent discussions of the humanities despite their profusion and visibility, have ignored recent scholarship on Renaissance humanism, which challenges long-held ideas about the humanities’ historical origins and meanings. This essay surveys both bodies of work, asking what recent scholarship on Renaissance humanism can offer our current understanding of the humanities, their purposes and functions, and their future.

The Career and Critical Reception of Paul Auster

Abstract: This article offers an overview of the literary career of Paul Auster, a contemporary American writer whose prolific output commands a remarkably loyal following. Furthermore, it outlines the reasons for the polarized critical reception met by his novels, which continue to attract – by Auster’s own admission –‘the best reviews and the worst reviews of any writer I know’ (Burns, Carole. The Washington Post 16 Dec., 2003). Famous for his concern with the plight of the artist, and for his meditations on the power and the limitations of language, Auster has been typically analysed from a (largely a-political) postmodern perspective. This article will therefore also consider the shift in recent Auster scholarship towards a re-evaluation of the political charge of his fiction, especially in the light of his response to George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’ in the wake of 9/11.

Energy, Ecology, and Victorian Fiction

Abstract: This article discusses the state of ecocritical thinking in Victorian literary scholarship. It proposes a distinctive Victorian ecocriticism, informed by thermodynamics, wherein we may understand the living and non-living, the biological and the physical to be both linguistically and energetically entangled.

Late Modernism: British Literature at Midcentury

Abstract: This essay examines the relatively new field of late modernist studies. It gives an overview of the development of late modernism as a literary historical category during the debates over postmodernism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From there, the essay surveys recent efforts in modernist studies to conceptualize and historicize late modernism with greater precision. Attention then shifts to a range of modernist activity in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Each of these sections serves a double function: first, they offer close readings of late modernist texts that detail how modernism endured and transformed in relation to historical pressures; second, they plot these readings alongside recent critical work that is reshaping how we understand the political and aesthetic dimensions of late modernist writing. The conclusion addresses the promises and risks of the study of late modernism.

Rewriting English Literary History 1042–1215

Abstract: The last 10 years have seen a swathe of revisionary scholarship on the afterlife of Old English texts in the 12th century. This article places this research beside work on the earliest Middle English texts and contemporary writing in Latin and French to suggest that the time is now ripe for a new, synthetic literary history of the period. In particular, the article identifies three key aspects of post-Conquest literary culture which have been neglected because they chafe against the conventional paradigms of literary history, with its expectation of a literature national, monolingual and constantly original. The 12th-century norms, by contrast, were regionalism, multilingualism, and the habitual recycling of older texts. Medievalists must insist these differences should inform wider discussions about the form and purpose of literary history in the 21st century.

Eighteenth-Century Verse Miscellanies

Abstract: Thousands of verse collections containing the works of multiple authors were published in the 18th century. This essay offers a guide to recent scholarship on these collections of ‘poems by several hands’. It provides an overview of the many different kinds of miscellany and anthology that were produced, before exploring what these publications might reveal about the 18th-century literary landscape. It considers what miscellanies and anthologies contribute to our understanding of authorship and anonymity, genre, canon formation and the literary past, women writers, and regionalism and nationalism. It then investigates what these texts reveal about 18th-century reading practices, and about the workings of the 18th-century book trade. The essay concludes with an account of an important current research project, the Digital Miscellanies Index.

The Psychology of Reading and the Victorian Novel

Abstract: This article examines a growing body of work on the psychology of novel reading in the Victorian period by focusing on how three related fields have recently, simultaneously, turned their attention to readers’ minds: the history of reading; studies of psychology and literature; and, more surprisingly, studies of Victorian sociability. Across these fields, critics have found that Victorian readers were not always expected to pay attention: 19th-century psychologists and observers of literary culture thought that many layers and vagaries of the reader’s consciousness and unconscious mind were at work in the reading process. Newly accessible, first-hand accounts of reading experiences have also underscored that Victorian readers used books in unpredictable ways, often as a prompt for their own associations or to turn inward and reflect on social practice. Partly in response to the Foucauldian emphasis on the coerciveness of novel reading that long monopolized literary studies, critics have been redrawing 19th-century reading history to include not reading, or perhaps not only reading, but also the ways novel reading afforded unique forms of self-knowledge amidst the pressures and worries of the modern Victorian world.

From One Gulf to Another: Reading Masculinity in American Narratives of the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars

Abstract: Recent avenues of exploration in cultural studies reveal new possibilities for a reading of masculinity in Persian Gulf War and Iraq War narratives. There has been much debate regarding the impact of technology on the soldier’s sense of self, exploring ideas of speed, distance, and the possibilities and drawbacks raised by cyborg theory. What is yet to be fully explored, however, is how these factors have affected the trajectory of masculinity which has been thoroughly mapped through the wars of the twentieth century, and can be extended to encompass the literature of these conflicts. This article examines the ways in which masculinity is represented and challenged in Gulf War and Iraq War narratives, specifically Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (2003), Tom Paine’s The Pearl of Kuwait (1997), Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time in Iraq (2005) and Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (2004). It explores how the literature of these wars can be read as portraying the impact of technowar on the masculinity of soldiers in the Gulf War, and the return to the post-Vietnam style ‘manly man’ in the later Iraq War. Crucially though, it explores how these narratives complicate such a simplified analysis and identifies the ways in which the technological circumstances of each conflict impact on representations of masculinity at both an individual and collective level.

Translation and World Literature

Abstract: Translation plays an important role in creating the category of ‘world literature’, a term that has acquired new currency in this era of globalization. Commenting on essays by Susan Stanford Friedman, Rebecca Beasley, Jessica Berman, Eric Bulson and Laura Doyle, I suggest that the global spread of modernism and its local flowerings need to be understood through the vigorous translation activity that accompanied it. I focus on vernacular modernisms in India between the 1920s and 1960s in order to show that the impact of translation was by no means unidirectional or targeted towards the West. Translation from both European and non-European languages was an indispensable element in the climate of Indian modernist writing, especially as printed in the poetry magazines of the early twentieth century. The simultaneously local and cosmopolitan character of this modernist literary corpus, far more important and extensive than Indian literature in English, can only be understood through a continuation of the project of modernism’s translations.

Global Dickens: A Response to John Jordan

Abstract: In this response to John Jordan s essay ‘Global Dickens’, Juliet John explores the importance of ‘undisciplined knowledge’ to global literary studies and the challenges it poses to established models of academic scholarly rigour. She argues that the bicentenary of an author like Dickens makes clear that print culture is just one aspect of global literary studies, new and established media working together to expand the category and influence of the literary. Understanding of ‘global Dickens’, she maintains, marks a return to scholarship as dialogue, dialogue that includes languages other than English, media other than books, and cultural institutions other than Universities.

Multiplied Modernities and Modernisms

Abstract: There are different forms of modernity or modernism since there is no such thing as the so-called “singular modernity” or modernism. The paper illustrates how Chinese modernity or modernism has formed to deconstruct the “singular modernity” and Westcentric form of modernism. As an alternative modernity or modernism, the rise of Chinese modernity or modernism has not only contributed to the grand narrative discourse of global modernity or modernism but also paved the way for different forms of modernity or modernism in the current world.

Peripheralizing Modernity: Global Modernism and Uneven Development.

Abstract: This essay explores how global modernism might be understood to reveal the agency of the periphery in the creation of modernity, thus countering Eurocentric understandings of global history and exposing to view the exploitation, violence and uneven development that characterizes the modern world.

The Prison in Early Modern Drama

Abstract: Prison scenes and references to incarceration are ubiquitous in early modern drama, ranging from the Counter-scene in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour, to Hamlet’s famous statement that ‘Denmark’s a prison’. This article considers the reason for the early modern obsession with incarceration, providing a survey of the influence of contemporary prison legislation and conditions on city comedies; the use of chronicles and martyrologies in the writing of history plays; and the linguistic traces of prison literature and literary tropes of imprisonment. In doing so, it demonstrates that many of the recurring features in those plays deemed to be influenced by contemporary London prisons – including the representation of the prison as corrupt and variable in its administration, as unjust or lacking in power – have analogues in earlier literary and historical works.

Recent Studies in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism

Abstract: Inaugurated some thirty years ago, the massive resurgence of scholarly interest in nineteenth-century Spiritualism – a once-derided heterodox movement which offered believers the opportunity to speak with the dead – continues to gain momentum as we reach the second decade of the twenty-first century. This article examines how twenty-first century feminist, cultural studies, post-structuralist, and periodical studies approaches to the movement develop and differ from those of both its nineteen-eighties recoverers and indeed its nineteenth-century practitioners and adherents. What is at stake, intellectually, politically, and ethically, in the ways in which contemporary critics now interrogate and align transatlantic practices of mediumship and seance communication? In particular, I trace the growing challenge to the long-ubiquitous and near-exclusive emphasis on the movement’s feminist and proleptically radical dimensions, one which, however laudable in its progressive ambitions, has nonetheless tended to over-homogenize Spiritualism’s chaotically diverse political and philosophical identifications and to sometimes skew our understanding of its constituency. Recent moves to republish and digitize rare works from the transatlantic Spiritualist archive have the potential to remedy this situation, not by installing an univocal Ur-meaning for the movement, but by revealing new areas of dynamic tension and cross-fertilization within it.

Eighteenth-Century Indians’ Travel Narratives and Cross-Cultural Encounters with the West

Abstract: Though scholarship abounds on early modern Europeans’ first encounters with India and its people, any scholarship in general, and particularly in the English language, on their contemporary Indians’ first encounter with Europe and Indians’ view of the West is limited. The article discusses three 18th-century Indian travelers’ travel narratives about Britain, Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 1726-1809 by Joseph Emin; The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, originally in Persian of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765 by Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin; and Westward Bound: Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb by Mirza Abu Taleb Khan to show that a two-way flow of communication and representation existed between 18th-century Britain and India. An analysis of these travel accounts reveals that depending on the shifting cultural point of view and geographical location of the Indian travelers, “home,” and the foreign or “vilayet” as it is called in Persian (Farsi), was a shifting perception for the writers. The writers found that Britons living in Britain had a more positive response to them than the condescending attitudes, a result of power and political dynamics, which the British living in India had toward Indians, thus revealing an important heterogeneity in British attitudes toward Indians in the 18th century. The writers’ exploration of gender and sexual relations and religious attitudes in Britain was both an important means of defining “home” and self identity as well as marking differences from Europeans. Identifying gender and religious differences with British culture through comparison provided the writers a means to assess and critique Indian culture.

“Don’t Be Too Careful of Your Silks and Rags”: Domesticity and Race in 19th-Century American Literature

Abstract: An ideal domesticity of the mid-19th century advocated a role for white women in civilizing and defending the American family home from cultural incursions. Black (and other non-White, non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant) women, omitted from dominant representations of domesticity, provided their own literary interventions to appropriate and adapt the ideology. Short scenes of mundane domestic labor show authors reworking the relationship of domesticity to race and class. Textile work such as sewing (depicted in the works of Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Fanny Fern, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) becomes the focal point for social change, enabling an appropriation of domesticity by individuals usually excluded. Current material culture studies investigate the interaction of human subjects and material objects in specific contexts that enact cultural meaning. Applying these studies to fictional and non-fictional narratives reveals how authors used their lived experiences with objects to query the racial and ethnic foundations of domestic womanhood in varied narrative contexts.

Constance Naden’s Philosophical Poetry

Abstract: The recent movement to revise and revive the works of nineteenth-century women poets had led to the rediscovery of the works of a Victorian botanist, geologist, philosopher, poet and atheist Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden. Most contemporary readings of Naden’s poetry are based on a feminist approach. This sometimes leads to regarding the philosophy that lied behind composing them as complementary to what is considered to be the main topic of her poetry: the position of a Victorian woman poet and philosopher in patriarchal nineteenth-century England. Naden’s poetic legacy consists of only two collections of poems. Despite the fact that she completely stopped writing poetry in the year 1886 to dedicate herself fully to philosophical pursuits, her verses, however, suggest that composing poetry was not merely a pastime activity. Although it ranked second to science and philosophy, she still used her poetry in many instances to spread philosophical and scientific awareness in the face of religious beliefs and superstitions. This article aims to illustrate the eminence of philosophy, especially Naden’s own theory of Hylo-Idealism, in her poetry, and the significant role her poetry played towards achieving Naden’s ultimate goal of illuminating the minds of Victorian women as well as men.

Why We Blog: An Essay in Four Movements

Abstract: This essay comprises four parts, each by one of the co-bloggers at In the Middle (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com). Karl Steel argues that the benefits of academic blogging outweigh its potential humiliations, and that academic conferences should post their papers publicly and allow for comments so that conferences, in a sense, never end. Graduate students and junior scholars should be encouraged to blog to help build a community and a trade in ideas, and to accustom them to the feelings of exposure and humiliation common to all writing, which will thereby train them to become more confident scholars. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen examines some of the difficulties posed by the age of e-medieval: an internet culture of negativity. Blogging entails finding strategies for managing harsh or off topic comments, as well as for coping with unwanted attention. Drawing on the pedagogical distinction Nancy Sommers makes between process and product, Mary Kate Hurley examines the role blogs might play in creating a communal space in which to share unfinished ideas. Blogs might be an ideal medium for the process of thinking, rather than the finished work of having had thought. Eileen A. Joy argues there may be more value in thinking and “working through” our scholarship online, in an “open” environment that promotes and invites democratic, catholic, and convivial support, as well as the accidental tourist and silent voyuer, than there is in the traditional “finished product” of a journal article or book. It pleads, further, for a better awareness of the fact that intellectual property is always co-extensive and communal.

George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and the popularisation of Comte’s Positive Philosophy

Abstract: Harriet Martineau’s ‘freely translated and condensed’ version of Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy (1853) made a significant contribution to the scholarly conversation on positivism in Britain. The translation of Continental philosophy into English during the mid-nineteenth century enabled translators to rewrite and rethink the original text for their home audience according to their own political and social agenda. Yet the idea of translation can be broadened to include translating philosophical ideas into different genres in order to broaden the readership – to popularise and, to some minds, bastardise the philosophy. The translation of philosophy into literary fiction arguably bridges the gap between scholarly integrity and popularisation that Eliot feared; indeed, both Eliot and Martineau, as established translators, vividly understood their power to manipulate and mould foreign philosophies through both their literal translations and their fiction. This paper examines the translational role of Eliot’s Middlemarch (1877) and Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) in reproducing, reshaping and popularising Comte’s positivism within the British public mind.

Canonising the Shakespeare Apocrypha: Shakespeare, Middleton and Co‐Existent Canons

Abstract: The Shakespeare Apocrypha has persisted as a category for plays of dubious authorship since 1908. Despite recent calls for this group to be dissolved, it persists as the “other” of the Shakespeare canon. The definition of the plays as a collectively excluded canon leads to their relative obscurity in print and on stage. Yet recent calls for the adoption of different kinds of dramatic canon present a means of reintegrating canon and apocrypha. The new Middleton Collected Works offers a model for “co-existent canons” which share plays and disperse the authority of fixed authorial canons, allowing the plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha to be read and seen in new, productive contexts.

Science and the Atlantic World in Early American Literary Studies

Abstract: Although scientific literatures by British American colonists have not traditionally been included in studies of early American literature, recent work has begun to pay closer attention to the literary elements of natural, medical, and cartographic texts produced in the long 18th century. New approaches have expanded Eurocentric and nation-based paradigms by positioning colonial science in an imperial and Atlantic World context that focuses upon transatlantic exchanges between the British Americas and England. These studies have investigated colonists’ efforts to obtain credit for their scientific contributions in England and the strategies with which colonists resisted metropolitan biases regarding their knowledge. Studies of the literature of place show how natural histories, cartographies, and nature writing rendered the New World familiar, even while establishing colonists’ relationship to and possession of the land. Meanwhile, an emerging focus on anxieties regarding mental and physical degeneration, spurred by theories of America’s degrading influences, offers new directions for investigating colonial subjectivity and racial theories of difference. Finally, examining the various roles that Native Americans and New World Africans played in colonial encounters may facilitate new approaches to non-European contributions to colonial science.

Inverting the Panopticon: Google Earth, Wonder and Earthly Delights

Abstract: This essay considers the user experience of Google Earth, comparing the world it presents with other world views including static print maps, medieval mappaemundi, and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. It also considers the scopic environment of Google Earth in relation to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical prison design intended to provide a single guard the ability to view every inmate while remaining unobserved. The Google Earth interface generates wonder and geographic longing, but also empowers the user by granting new and flexible controls that differ from those available to users of print and manuscript maps. Ultimately, Google Earth is not an application that provides great utility, as traditionally defined – it does not help us navigate the physical world. Instead, it does something much more powerful: it gives us a new way to contemplate the world in which we live.

Blogging and Academic Identity

Abstract: As a blogger, I write about issues that arise in my academic work, but in a different context, a different style, with a different audience. My academic and pedagogical approaches to the environment in literature are descriptive, while in the blog I take an activist ecological stance. I live in the realm of disability studies, and in the blog I try to make sense of the impacts on my academic identity of negotiating the demands of chronic illness. The hidden nature of much disability, mine included, poses a challenge to disability narratives within both academic and popular cultural formations; insights from queer, feminist, and post-colonial theories complicate the ways in which disability studies imagines the body and its social contexts. Narrative scholarship and questions about the place of activism within scholarship provide points of contact between ecocriticism, disability studies, and the study of blogging as social and academic phenomenon. Blogging provides a forum for quick feedback and for conversation with a more diverse audience than traditional academic publishing venues, and can enrich and extend academic discourse.

I Grow Old: T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Inventions of the March Hare 100 Years On

Abstract: This essay describes the origin and significance of T S Eliot’s early notebook, first published in 1995 as Inventions of the March Hare Eliot’s first triumphs, including “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” germinated in this workshop The essay summarizes the place these early, published poems held in the criticism for 80 years, from 1915 through 1995 It then considers how the critical conversation about Eliot’s early development changes significantly with the publication of the notebook, when the unknown apprentice poems are restored alongside their more famous companions

‘Enchanted Traps?’ The Historiography of Art and Colonialism in Eighteenth‐century India

Abstract: This essay examines the visual culture of 18th-century India in the light of recent historiographical debates in art history, postcolonial studies and anthropology. It seeks to highlight the exciting new developments in this long neglected field to explore how and why scholars of the visual are now rising to the challenge of the ‘imperial turn’. My argument foregrounds the relationship between knowledge, power and representation before turning to the issue and the danger of viewing empire as a ubiquitous presence in British and Indian art. I consider whether we need to provincialize Europe or whether ‘Europe’ (i.e. the Western episteme broadly defined) is already ‘parochial’ in outlook.

“A Kyng That Ruled All By Lust”: Richard II in Elizabethan Literature

Abstract: Since the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s Richard II, parallels between its tragic protagonist and Elizabeth I have not gone unnoticed – not least by Elizabeth herself. This essay attempts to move beyond that parallel, examining its implications not only for readings of Shakespeare’s play or Elizabethan imaginings of the queen, but also to the relationship of sexuality and historiography in early modern writing. Richard and Elizabeth both embody a transgressive femininity that exposes, rather than contradicts, the gender norms of monarchy; this exposure becomes, in Elizabethan historical writing, inextricable from the crisis of legitimacy at the heart of Tudor dynastic narratives.