Abstract: This essay examines a horror topos deployed by Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan writers in which bodies become suddenly and violently legible. It argues that such transformations, which Spenser uses to theorize allegory in The Faerie Queene , provide a mechanism for writers to interrogate the nature of literary character more broadly. The essay revisits Thomas Nashe's proto-novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), to examine how its character-system constitutes its subject in different ways—as printed texts, liquid bodies, costumes, conjurations, heraldic devices—before invoking this topos to dramatize characterization as the outcome of violent silencing and forcible signification.
Abstract: This paper reconsiders the idea of climate fiction as speculative fiction, arguing that this categorization has reached an impasse in the context of contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the genealogy of speculative fiction from mid-twentieth-century SF debates onwards, I situate climate fiction as the paradigmatic speculative fiction of the early 2000s, valued for its proleptic warning—this is what happens if we do not act. As climate change emerges as a pervasive condition of life today, however, the speculative premise underpinning this warning begins to collapse. I turn to the ethical and political pressures placed on climate fiction by authors, critics, and popular discourse that have accompanied—and, indeed, helped to construct—normative prolepticism as the sine qua non of climate fiction. The paper ends with brief readings of Jeff VanderMeer and Kim Stanley Robinson, identifying two ways forward for a post-speculative climate fiction.
Abstract: Engaged with the medieval philosophical tradition of speculatio , this article emphasizes the importance of mental perception to speculation about the world. The problematics of speculation emerge by way of literary equivocation: in Chaucer's account of Dorigen's fretful thinking in The Franklin's Tale as well as in Kazuo Ishiguro's treatment of Gawain's confusions in his speculative novel, The Buried Giant . Both texts demonstrate the difficulties of pondering the material things of the world. Considering them together clarifies the complex vicissitudes that perception poses to speculation as an activity in the here and now, emphasizing the difficulties of understanding what is right before our eyes.
Abstract: Hawthorne's fiction dramatizes the difficulty of processing information in literature. Readers jump to conclusions and do not correct them; they make wrongful inferences and statements unsupported by evidence. This is achieved through simple but effective methods—appeals to prejudice and self-righteousness, repeated assertion, insinuation, and basic unreliability—and through complex designs that require more explanation. These include setting equally important messages at odds with each other at the level of evidence, wrapping up plots in a way that encourages inferential forfeiture, and experimenting with near-identicality and confounding similarity. This essay recreates how this happens in Hawthorne's short stories "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Young Goodman Brown," "Alice Doane's Appeal," and "Wives of the Dead," and his novels The Scarlet Letter and House of the Seven Gables . It also pieces together Hawthorne's general interest in these difficulties from lesser-known works including Tanglewood Tales , his personal and family history, and the unique way he continued the project of Puritanism.
Abstract: This article takes Joshua Clover's argument that poetry gives different speculative ways of charting shifts in cultural production since the economic crisis as its point of departure: the 1970s, which marks a global recession, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the end of the Civil Rights/Black Power era, as well as the emergence of the personal computer, is an important antecedent for the present conjuncture. The article considers the rise of computational poetics as an outgrowth of the earlier Conceptual poetry, on the one hand, and a longer history whereby both computational techniques, data, and the idea of poetic expression have been racialized. Considering the ways makalani bandele and Lilian-Yvonne Betram respectively use computational techniques to randomize output and declare affiliation with the past, the ultimate argument is that the computational is also an affective posture for managing unwanted intimacies.
Abstract: When Eve proposes to Adam in Paradise Lost that they should work apart, he acknowledges the pleasure of a separation: "short retirement urges sweet return." This is not the couple's first time away from each other, and Eve and Adam are not the only characters who part in Milton's poem. This essay addresses Adam's conciliatory gesture in relation to both the epic's other depictions of leave-taking and other early modern meditations on separation and return. Adam's concession in book 9 is crucial for understanding Eve's authority and for appreciating the way her experience helps to shape the world's first marriage.
Abstract: This essay argues that R. F. Kuang's 2022 novel Babel rejects "dark academia"'s fetishistic attachment to the cloistered "ivory tower." Instead, it reads the novel—which explicitly takes up language and automation—as an allegory for the problem of mechanization in higher education. It narrates the speculative history of efforts to deskill and automate the labor of teaching via "teaching machines": from early-twentieth-century experiments with radio and film, to mid-century "AutoTutors," to millennial innovations in computer assisted education, and finally to contemporary AI. Babel , it contends, suggests possible resources for imagining a labor resistance to ed-tech automation born in the university.
Abstract: This essay develops "reading as a relative" as a critical methodology for Indigenous literary studies, arguing that Indigenous literary texts don't merely represent relational ontologies but actively enact them, positioning readers within networks of kinship and responsibility through specific formal strategies. Drawing on Kenneth Morrison's post-Cartesian anthropology and his concept of dividuation, or personhood that emerges through relationship rather than prior to it, I propose "temporal technologies": practices that generate recursive relationships between past, present, and future, maintaining kinships that colonial structures have tried to sever. I situate this methodology against Fredric Jameson's dialectical speculation, which for all its utopian ambition retains the detached observer position encoded in the Latin specula and speculum, and New Materialist frameworks that account for nonhuman agency but stop short of personhood understood as ethical addressability within obligation-bearing, territorially specific kinship relations. Close readings of Layli Long Soldier's Whereas and Sherwin Bitsui's Flood Song demonstrate these temporal technologies in practice, proposing Indigenous future-making not as utopian projection but as the reactivation of relationships that have never ceased generating futures.
Abstract: The repudiation of radicalism in Wordsworth and Coleridge's disavowal of politics in the years 1797–98 is often attributed to generalized fears of a French invasion, or a recoil from "remembered terror" years earlier. This essay contends that the terror was both closer to home, and to the present, in the form of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, a threat to empire which precipitated a renewed English nationalism. Faced with violence within, Romantic flights of transcendence are best conceived as exercises in imaginative mastery screening off the source of terror, negotiating "a conflict of sensations without name" (Wordsworth) through a poetics of indirection and displacement.
Abstract: In this essay I offer an alternative vision by which we can understand the course of nineteenth-century British writing and thinking regarding aesthetics and art. Drawing on a range of theological, scientific, philosophical, medical, critical and literary resources, I explore how a broad constituency of writers and practitioners came to develop a distinctive form of Anglophone aesthetic teleology. Following the emergence of this tradition within natural theological aesthetic theories, my argument traces how the same basic conceptual architecture used to grasp aesthetic purposiveness would undergo manifold transformations, unveiling how the logic of the Divine artist became the logic of Decadence.
Abstract: This essay offers a thick description of how folds were used, and what and how they signified, in the "fold, tuck and seal" bifolium, a familiar epistolary format in long-eighteenth-century Britain. Manuscript letters sent by Dorothy Osborne and Hester Lynch Piozzi, epistolary novels, paintings and prints, and manuals of midwifery articulate folding as an action at once material and symbolic, in reciprocal relation with folding selves, spaces, and temporalities. The letter-locked letter does not simply enfold, like an envelope, but can unfold, reversing, revealing, developing; the bifolium conjures depths from its surfaces, and relinquishes neither.
Abstract: The European and North American collecting of the bones of Indigenous people was largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon. This article considers the origins of this practice in the context of the history of collecting and looks to British understandings of Indigenous funerary traditions and attitudes to death, their own attitudes to death as in Gray's Elegy , and the rise of scientific racism to better understand it. Using the Mi'kmaw concept of Etuaptmumk or "two-eyed seeing," the paper shows various Indigenous responses to their own objectification and their maintenance of a radical hope in the future through their funerary practices.
Abstract: The following essay traces the global, independent, and simultaneous invention of magical realism in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on five novels that mark the first example of this style in their respective traditions—Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma (1928), Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (1949), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), and Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (1966)—this paper suggests that two factors are responsible for the multiple invention of this form: 1) similar levels of combined and uneven development in the countries in which these writers were working, and 2) the parallel emergence of field anthropology and ethnography in all of these places, a practice which would inspire these authors to produce the detached, ambivalent narrator that is so essential to this form.
Abstract: For over a century, scholars have failed to recognize that F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous imposter, Jay Gatsby, is a literary descendant of Joseph Conrad's Black imposter, James Wait, in The Nigger of the "Narcissus." As this essay shows, by conspicuously using Conrad's novel as a palimpsest on and over which to write The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald, through intertextuality, reveals Gatsby's race and comments on the themes of racial passing, miscegenation, and anti-Blackness in 1920s America.
Abstract: For many notable practitioners of the historical novel, writing in the genre means first and foremost engaging in a literary activity of a different kind: translation. Yet it remains a critical curiosity that in spite of their shared preoccupation with representational fidelity, literary translation and the historical novel have rarely been read in relation to each other, even in cases when the latter depends upon the former. This essay establishes a representational and epistemological common ground between these two literary modalities by reading closely George Eliot's 1863 historical fiction Romola , which grapples with the task of historical and linguistic fidelity primarily through the means of translation.
Abstract: This essay reads Geoffrey Sax and Andrew Davies's ITV Othello (2001) as not merely an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, but also as an appropriation of the Macpherson Report (1999), the conclusion of William Macpherson's investigation of institutional racism in London's Metropolitan Police Service. The Sax/Davies Othello complicates Macpherson's reliance on the logic of recognition to conceptualize institutional racism. By appropriating the report's rhetoric of uncovering, the film demonstrates how this logic simplifies institutional racism and understates its pervasiveness. Ultimately, the film foregrounds the limits of recognition as a conceptual paradigm for responding to institutional racism, in and beyond Macpherson's context.
Abstract: This essay contends that John Milton's treatment of the sentence is best read as an aesthetic extension of extemporary conduct: an improvisatory openness to circumstance richly theorized in religious controversy of the 1640s. Not only an attack on mental images or static representations, Milton's contestation of idolatrous form, in the early prose tracts examined here, engages the "practical sense" embedded in habituated and institutionalized syntactic forms, among them the "cross-jingling periods" of an overconforming Church.
Abstract: Using Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), I delineate a narrative form that I call the interpersonal field: a web of relations that forms when a real narrative world purports to stand independent of the narrative that conjures it. I provide a theoretical and historical account of the interpersonal field and the two fictions crucial to it: the substantive character, who purports to transcend its textual instantiations; and the local narrator, who disclaims creative control over the narrative world. The resulting narratives are fluid zones of engagement, to which readers can bring diverse kinds of balance and coherence.
