Abstract This article is interested in the ways in which Toni Morrison’s novels have provided a foundation for theorizations of Black time. Beginning with the debates surrounding conceptualizations of temporal collapse in Beloved, it outlines and expands interventions from Stephen Best’s reading of A Mercy and Aida Levy-Hussen’s reading of Jazz that offer additional forms of Black temporality. The article then suggests that Paradise conceptualizes a fugitive no-time that refuses the logic and grammar of knowable temporal structures. These gathered theorizations imagine multiple Black a/temporalities in a refusal of anti-Blackness.
The appearance in 2002 of Philip Larkin's Brunette Coleman texts (two novellas, an autobiographical fragment, a polemical essay, and some poems, written in 1943) prompted a good deal of mockery and, even amongst Larkin's admirers, embarrassed perplexity. Since then, scholarship has had time to assimilate Larkin's youthful extravagances, arguing that these strange productions are attempts at psychological resolution and that strands of continuity can be traced between Larkin's Brunette and his later work. Nevertheless, more than twenty years on, Larkin's heteronymically lesbian extravagances still look eccentric, not to say risible. This essay approaches the Brunette Coleman enterprise from a new angle, arguing that it represents a significant attempt by the ambitious young novelist to integrate fictional strategies he had encountered in other writers into his own ludic experiment.
Within the cultural context of eighteenth-century moral sentiment philosophy and physiognomic discourse, sympathy was commonly understood as a sensory mechanism dependent on visibility and perceived similarity, thereby excluding those marked by physical anomaly from the sphere of ethical response. By constructing a non-human being whose human resemblance fails to secure recognition, Frankenstein exposes the exclusionary logic of physiognomic sympathy. Through an embedded narrative structure characterized by narrative delay and multiple acts of representation, the novel foregrounds sympathy's formation, obstruction, and failure as a structural condition of narration itself. Rather than resolving the ethical impasse it stages, the novel problematizes it, prompting readers to recognize how sympathy is mediated, distorted, and selectively distributed within prevailing regimes of perception and discourse. In doing so, Frankenstein transforms sympathy from an immediate emotional reaction into a reflective capacity for ethical judgment.
The isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic changed how many Saudi female students engaged with English literature, especially the writing of black, female, and postcolonial authors. This article draws on Virginia Woolf's notions of solitude and Gayatri Spivak's interpretation of silence to suggest that, freed from the usual classroom pressures, students engaged with the texts in a freer and more intimate way. Reading became slower and more introspective without the usual demands of the traditional classroom. Students started to see their own lives reflected in stories of exclusion, resilience, and resistance. The change also illuminated the problem of reading English literature in a non-native context, a problem common in such contexts. As the connection grew, cultural and linguistic differences started to disappear. This article presents a feminist and postcolonial reading of how disruption can be a source of unexpected opportunity in the teaching of literature, through reframing solitude not as an obstacle but as a stimulus for contemplation.
It is often said that by prescribing sympathy between classes, Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novels evade a political solution to proletarian immiseration and help maintain the capitalist system. This article calls for broader ways to consider Gaskell's use of sympathy: in Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854-55), Gaskell uses sympathy not only to critique capitalism's distorting effect on human psychology and relationships but also to reenvision the mechanics of realizing Christian brotherhood. Her novels do not so much prescribe sympathy as a solution to class conflict, as show sympathy's suppression or distortion by capitalism that leads to class conflict. To redevelop human sympathy, Gaskell envisions a 'realistic', humanistic means of realizing a sense of universal brotherhood that relies on humans' emotional and rational capacities rather than God's intervention. Grounded in an examination of Gaskell's reenvisioning of Christian conversion, this article shows that her model of sympathy is more complicated than critics have assumed, straddling the paradigms by Adam Smith and David Hume in a number of ways. Showing Gaskell's hybrid model of sympathy, this article enriches existing understanding of Victorian sympathy.
While recent years have seen increasingly diverse modes of assessment in Higher Education English, the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted fresh concern that the essay remains the default practice, and one that - whether for administrative, workload, or pedagogical reasons - cannot suddenly be reimagined even though now heavily exposed to academic misconduct. In this paper, we try to unlock the 'black box' of generative AI by exploring how ChatGPT responds variously to different forms of wording commonly used in English Literature exam questions, taking as our case study a suite used in modules at a UK university. We know that, pre-AI, the precise wording of essay questions can significantly affect the learning outcomes, formal structures, and methods that students are expected to adopt in response. Drawing on computational and inductive analysis, we identify that slight changes in question framing can elicit small but identifiably different outputs from generative AI. This allows us to recommend how questions might be set in order either (potentially) to expose AI use where it has been employed, or (idealistically) to encourage students to engage in more independent writing and thinking to mitigate obvious AI limitations. It also informs a basic human-led criteria by which the most egregious AI use may, albeit unreliably and provisionally, be detected either at an individual or cohort level. Finally, it allows for a provisional outline of what an AI-assisted detection process might look like based jointly on the methodological framework of the study and the patterns identified.
This roundtable discussion took place at the International Summer School of Romanticism held at the University of Ghent in June 2025. Six specialists on British Romanticism from different countries discussed Hazlitt's book The Spirit of the Age on the occasion of its bicentenary in front of an audience of international graduate students. This is an edited transcript of their conversation, with light annotation. The roundtable was in three parts: first, an introduction and three opening presentations which had been pre-circulated to participants; then, two shorter response statements, also prepared in advance and pre-circulated; finally, an open-ended discussion in which presenters took up points raised by respondents and a dialogue between all participants ensued. Topics covered include the relationship between the original essay series and book version; the alteration of 'Spirits' to 'Spirit' in Hazlitt's title; the significance of the book's subtitle 'Contemporary Portraits'; the relationship between essayistic and visual portraiture; the tradition of the 'character' and characterization; Hazlitt's contrastive and diagnostic method; the concept of Zeitgeist; the legacy of the French Revolution; Hazlitt's critiques of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron; his impartiality or otherwise; Legitimacy and ideology; celebrity and media culture; Romanticism and periodization.
Ian Davidson is perhaps best known for his critical work on space and mobility in modern literature, but he is also a prolific and respected poet. In the first part of this essay, I discuss his collection By Tiny Twisting Ways, a sequence in which an emphasis on the mobile natural world of sea and sky, of animals and trees, of wind and walkers, is overtaken by an encounter with cancer and the temporalities of disease and treatment. In the second part of the essay, I discuss another collection, The Matter of the Heart. The two sequences of poems in this volume record the events of the months following his emergency admission to an acute hospital ward in Dublin. The first sequence, 'In Many Hands', documents the twenty-three days between his admission and 'the main event' of his heart-surgery; the second sequence, 'Stress Management', offers a poem a week for the six weekly rehabilitation classes he had to attend subsequently. The essay focusses on 'Stress Management', in which formal mobility is set against 'the pause': the pause of a heart attack, and the resulting always anticipated pause of the moment when the heart stops beating. In these first two sections, both works are considered in relation to the pause of enjambment to show how Davidson's handling of the line-break creates a hesitation that can be interpreted psychologically or philosophically. In the concluding part of the essay, this close reading of Davidson's work provides the basis for a more theoretical discussion of enjambment. This discussion is used to extend Agamben's account of 'the end of the poem' from his emphasis on sound in poetry to an attention to the visual dimension of poetry on the page. This section becomes a meditation on the line-break as an intimation of mortality. In this context, Davidson's pause, his creation of movement backwards and forwards across the line-break, produces the experience of both potentiality and the end of all potentiality, both living in the moment and an awareness of precarity.
This article reads the poem ‘Spilt Milk’ by the British poet Sarah Maguire (1957–2017) in light of material held in the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA). By examining the drafts of the poem, it shows how the feminist poetics of ‘Spilt Milk’ developed in parallel with Maguire’s first-year undergraduate studies at UEA in 1984–85, from a history essay on Anglo-Saxon adultery law to a creative-critical coursework essay in which she asserted that ‘the silence around the text’ in literary studies and deconstructionist theory was a silence about the female body. The sexual encounter described in the poem is read as the corollary of Maguire’s critical assertion that ‘for women to write poetry, to authorise desire, it’s necessary to move from being the object of poetry to being its subject’. The cultural significance of the poem’s challenge to the male-dominated poetry culture of late twentieth-century Britain is reconstructed, and Marianne Moore’s phrase ‘the raw material of poetry in/all its rawness’ is used to argue that one of the valuable functions of a poetry archive – and also poetry itself – is to preserve the historical and social context of the moment of writing. A final section introduces this special issue on poetry, representation and the archive as the outcome of ‘New Ways of Collecting, Collaborating and Curating: Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive’, a Mellon-funded research project and conference on poetry archives undertaken at UEA in 2022–23.
Masculinity remains a well-established site of contestation in eighteenth-century British literature. In Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a sense of phallic loss places masculinity in crisis. The novel calls into question the futurity of its male subjects. Using queer theory, this essay takes the uncertainty about Tristram's patrilineal heritage as its point of departure to examine the ways in which Walter and Tristram perform masculinity in the novel. I demonstrate that Walter's monthly documentation of sexual intercourse alongside Tristram's aversion to female bodies reveals their inadequacy as heterosexual male subjects. Read this way, Walter's and Tristram's respective performances of masculinity in Tristram Shandy are, I argue, queer facades masking their inadequacy. The underlying challenge to normative logics of gender and gender behaviour lays the foundations for what I call masculinities in eighteenth-century narratives of masculinity.
This essay begins with an erroneous slip of paper found in the archives of the American poet Susan Howe, at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library. I take this original 'slip' in Howe's archive and connect it to the different resonances of 'slip'-as paper, as error, as parapraxis, as counterfeit, and as that which eludes attention-in order to excavate several pressing questions for how literary studies has conceptualized 'archival poetics': what slips occur when archival and documentary poets give themselves to the archivization process? How does archival slipperiness spill over, and to what else might it slip into? Attending to these questions across the work of Susan Howe-a 'poet of the archives'-I offer close readings of several textual 'slips', with a particular interest in questions of personal and historical representation. I conclude by arguing that sustained attention to the granular-to the occurrence of these 'slips' without an attendant urge to recuperate them into something else-is necessary to newly conceptualize the politics and affective relations of poetic archival encounter.
This article examines five documents from the Vagarth poetry archive at Bharat Bhawan, a cultural centre in Bhopal, India, situating the archive in its worldly aspirations and local contradictions. Using the event of World Poetry Festival, 1989, as a landmark moment that left tangible traces in the archive, the article studies five intermedial poetry pages from Arun Kolatkar (India), Nicanor Parra (Chile), Miroslav Holub (Czechoslovakia), Vasko Popa (Yugoslavia), and Gabriel Okara (Nigeria). These pages were submitted to the archive, perhaps as testimonials or souvenirs, in addition to these poets' participation at the Festival. Notably, the Festival consciously invited poets from across the factions of the Cold War, including poets from the supposedly neutral Non-Aligned countries, such as India itself. Also intertwined with the Festival and these documents is the history of the Bhopal industrial disaster (1984), which was made visible as a relief-seeking anti-government protest march at the site of the Festival. This article is a short speculative as well as material analysis of the archival space as it unfolds in this singular convergence between industrial disaster, Cold War politics, and world poetry.
This article reads the poem 'Spilt Milk' by the British poet Sarah Maguire (1957-2017) in light of material held in the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA). By examining the drafts of the poem, it shows how the feminist poetics of 'Spilt Milk' developed in parallel with Maguire's first-year undergraduate studies at UEA in 1984-85, from a history essay on Anglo-Saxon adultery law to a creative-critical coursework essay in which she asserted that 'the silence around the text' in literary studies and deconstructionist theory was a silence about the female body. The sexual encounter described in the poem is read as the corollary of Maguire's critical assertion that 'for women to write poetry, to authorise desire, it's necessary to move from being the object of poetry to being its subject'. The cultural significance of the poem's challenge to the male-dominated poetry culture of late twentieth-century Britain is reconstructed, and Marianne Moore's phrase 'the raw material of poetry in/all its rawness' is used to argue that one of the valuable functions of a poetry archive - and also poetry itself - is to preserve the historical and social context of the moment of writing. A final section introduces this special issue on poetry, representation and the archive as the outcome of 'New Ways of Collecting, Collaborating and Curating: Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive', a Mellon-funded research project and conference on poetry archives undertaken at UEA in 2022-23.
Bill Griffiths (1948-2007) was a poet, publisher, activist and researcher of languages and local history whose work is beginning to attract more attention. Although the immensity and importance of Griffiths' diverse, multiform and multimedia archive-and the task of studying it critically-is becoming more visible in the academy, what made him such a unique artist, and what criticism perhaps finds difficult to correlate, are the ways his scholarly training in Old English language and literature (pursued independently, but also at and with universities) consistently informed, and even fused with, his creative and activist endeavours. This essay begins with the fire that burned Griffiths' houseboat-archive, Amra, in the late 1980s, tracing his work and movements in the aftermath and then through his years in Seaham in North East England. It does this by focusing on an Old English poem Griffiths translated and retranslated over many years, the Old English Phoenix. Burned drafts and fragments of Griffiths' work with this poem, which mark a significant turning point in his creative and critical practices, survive in his archive at Brunel. Reading Griffiths' work on this poem alongside his local activism in Seaham, we see how the early medieval period offered him not only consolation in the aftermath of losing his home, but also the creative inspiration for new kinds of poetry, resistance and research in place.
'[W]hat is the use & mldr; of thought that is not the outcome of feeling? You must feel before you can think; you must think before you can express yourself.'This article explores the relation between thought and emotion to examine how Katherine Mansfield conveys 'a keen sense of Life' in her short stories in light of two different modern models: cognitive appraisal theories, which view emotions as the outcome of our evaluations of events, and the phenomenological framework of 'existential feeling', which refers to the affective experience of how we relate to the world. In 'The Garden-Party', Laura's subjective self-evaluation leads to an experience of shame, bringing forth an inarticulate epiphany at the end of the story; in 'Psychology' and 'Revelations', characters are caught in sudden emotional encounters that change their way of relating to the world. For Mansfield, cognitive appraisals and existential feelings are inextricably entangled in our everyday emotional experiences. By considering how the two models are intertwined in complex ways in Mansfield's fiction, I propose that for the writer, emotion is essential to provoking revelations that are pivotal to our perception and experience of the world. Paying close attention to both feeling and thinking in emotion, Mansfield's stories reveal a 'truth' in life that is pronounced and inarticulate at the same time.
