While the hemispheric turn in literary studies has reshaped the geographical study of William Faulkner, the transpacific dimension in his early fiction remains largely unmapped. Reading his 1920s New Orleans fiction against the biopolitics of the Exclusion era, this article reveals a narrative laboratory where racial forms and modernist aesthetics intersect. On the one hand, texts like "Yo Ho and Two Bottles of Rum" (1925) crystallize the era's biopolitical logic; here, an Orientalist erasure hollows out Chinese figures to construct a mirror for white colonial instability and anxiety. On the other hand, the unpublished manuscript "Peter" (c. 1925) experiments with an alternative framework: modernist impersonality. And yet, this detached gaze proves precarious, ultimately ruptured by the disruptive vitality of the unclassifiable Chinese-Creole subject. Through the profound tension between Orientalist objectification and internal resilience, these narrative experiments complicate the era's racial discourses and disrupt the region's geographical insularity. Ultimately, these texts not only anticipate the human endurance central to Faulkner's later fiction but also map a transpacific South that extends far beyond established hemispheric boundaries.
This paper reads Serindia (1921) as an archaeological afterlife of Xuanzang's Da Tang Xiyu Ji, arguing that Aurel Stein's explorations participate in a distinctly modernist geography shaped by movement, fragmentation, and layered temporality. Guided by earlier textual itineraries, Stein reconstructs Central Asia not as an empty terrain but as a landscape structured by memory, ruins, and historical circulation. His method transforms travel into a form of reading, in which space is approached through philology, translation, and material traces. Through close attention to Stein's descriptions of desert routes, rediscovered sites, and manuscript and artefact finds, the paper demonstrates how Serindia constructs space through a spatial synthesis of ruins, texts, and routes, bringing disparate temporal and material strata into alignment. Rather than producing fragmentation for its own sake, this process reorients multiplicity toward historical reconstruction, integrating archaeological evidence with textual memory. Xuanzang's narrative geography persists as a latent structure within Stein's empirical mapping, shaping the rediscovery of Buddhist networks across the Silk Road. Space in Serindia thus emerges not as fixed territory but as a palimpsest of textual and material histories, in which past journeys continue to organize modern perception and movement across regions. Stein's work reveals how modernist geography can take form through the reactivation of earlier spatial imaginaries, suggesting an alternative genealogy of modern spatial consciousness. In this sense, Serindia constitutes an afterlife of Xiyu Ji, translating a seventh-century sacred landscape into a modern archaeological and historical consciousness.
This article traces the emergence and development of debates on "resistance" in Japanese literary discourse from the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat in 1945 to the conclusion and implementation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In the turbulent postwar literary scene, writers and critics vigorously pursued questions of wartime responsibility, repeatedly emphasizing the alleged absence of resistance within Japanese literature during the war. In response to this perceived historical "blank," French R & eacute;sistance literature was introduced as an exemplary model, and an idealized notion of resistance-understood as a collective, national movement-was conceptually transplanted into the Japanese context. By examining how this transplanted model came to structure postwar discussions of resistance, this article argues that the framework itself imposed significant limitations on what could be seen and articulated. Precisely because resistance was imagined primarily in national terms, it became closely aligned with emerging postwar visions of the nation-state, while the legacies of empire and colonial domination were rendered largely invisible. Through a close analysis of postwar criticism, literary debates, and key texts, this article critically reassesses both the possibilities and the blind spots of postwar Japanese resistance discourse.
This paper analyzes Nino Haratischwili's international bestseller Das achte Leben (f & uuml;r Brilka) (2014), translated into English as The Eighth Life (2019). Living and working in Germany while writing in German as well, Hartischwili has played a key role in the recent internationalization of Georgian culture. With Georgian literature invited as the guest of honor at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair, Hartischwili served as a spokesperson. However, this gesture directly contradicted Georgia's cultural branding, which relied on the uniqueness of the Georgian language. As such, this paper explores why Haratischwili was deemed the most suitable writer to showcase Georgia's culture to the world. The paper reflects upon the combination of local, national, and global elements in The Eighth Life, a novel that has found massive success in translation, including in Georgia. Telling the story of six generations of women in a Georgian family, while capturing Georgian history along with global twentieth-century events, several concerns typical of the so-called global novel permeate the text-whether one understands the global novel as a poetic form or as a material process of circulation. Significantly, however, the nation is not absent from the equation: a quest for identity and anxieties about what it means to be Georgian infuse the novel. The novel appears to take the form of National Allegory while seeking out belonging at a larger scale. Meanwhile, ambivalent feelings concerning the Georgian language permeate the discourse of those agents involved in the novel's circulation.
This is a state-of-the-field essay on scholarship on hostile feelings in eighteenth-century British literature. While it is impossible to say whether eighteenth-century Britain was especially hostile, feelings such as hatred, contempt, and resentment energized the print market and attracted significant philosophical and religious discussion in the period. Literary studies of hate have appeared sporadically since the mid twentieth century, most notably D. W. Harding's seminal essay on Austen, "Regulated Hatred" (1940), but in the past 25 years literary scholars have given increasing attention to hostile feelings, broadly understood, in reaction to influential scholarship on eighteenth-century discourses of politeness, sympathy, and sensibility. The essay begins with a discussion of the history of emotions, by now a large and complex field. It then describes the ongoing turn against politeness in historical and literary studies, and reviews scholarship on hostilities in eighteenth-century satire and novels.
This essay argues that Jane Austen's Persuasion critiques the British Navy's problematic history of involvement in Atlantic slavery following the passage of the 1807 Slave Trade Act. Drawing on new historical evidence, the essay suggests that Captain Frederick Wentworth, Persuasion's male hero, can be understood as implicated in the Atlantic slave trade's economic networks, thereby linking his naval success to the wider ethical framework of the imperial economy. The novel's critical assessment of the British Navy's ties to Atlantic slavery gestures toward an acknowledgment of history-a step Austen may have viewed as a prerequisite for progress, while still allowing for her familial ties to the navy and her personal sympathy for the service.
This article argues that Shih-I Hsiung's The Bridge of Heaven (1943) and Tianqiao (1960) together constitute a bilingual continuum of historical rewriting through which diasporic Chinese modernism binds diplomatic mediation to historiographic reclamation across imperial and Sinophone contexts. Written in wartime London, The Bridge of Heaven enacts diplomatic mediation by securing China's cultural visibility within an imperial regime of legibility shaped by Allied wartime discourse. Its narrative architecture and paratextual design reframe late-Qing reform and revolution as a process of historical agency rather than a static cultural spectacle, converting externally imposed legibility into narrative control. Seventeen years later, Tianqiao, produced in colonial Hong Kong under the conditions of serial publication and a historically attentive readership, realises historiographic reclamation by reorienting the same historical materials toward Sinophone readers shaped by migration and colonial pedagogy. The Chinese version expands revolutionary narration, restores provincial specificity, and incorporates archival materials accumulated over decades within a reconfigured horizon of address. Read together, the two versions articulate bilingual resistance as a historically situated textual practice that links diplomatic mediation to historiographic reclamation across languages. The article thus advances historical rewriting as an alternative axis of modernist innovation beyond canonical paradigms of formal rupture.
This article discusses the nonreferentiality of both language and the object in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons through an analysis of "Book.," a section of the chapter "Objects." While the inaccessibility of Tender Buttons is well known due to Stein's linguistic experimentalism, the objects presented as section titles also challenge conventional perceptions of the "object" by encompassing non-material and living entities. These title-objects remain largely obscure, as they are partially described but simultaneously left largely undescribed throughout the text. At the same time, other objects continue to appear with a similar kind of inaccessibility, and consequently the text remains elusive despite the scholarly attention it has received since its publication in 1914. Tender Buttons thus suggests that language cannot be entirely controlled, nor can objects be fully possessed from an anthropocentric perspective. In this regard, a recognition of strangeness when encountering objects in the text may be viewed as a step toward perceiving a lesser-known aspect of reality in which, to modify Stein's manifesto, "[t]he difference" of objects "is spreading."
After servants of the former Bristol Mayor terrorized and beat her sons, Ann Yearsley found she did not have the money or clout to continue with an official legal complaint. She could, however, make her complaint in print, writing Stanzas of Woe (1790). This understudied short volume serves as a complaint against Levi Eames, as it details her and her sons' experiences with his servants as well as her emotional distress. This essay explores Yearsley's attempts to express her anger and sorrow, and to win public opinion. It argues that Stanzas of Woe is more than complaint: it is also didactic literature, offering instruction in human connections. If the anger percolating through the volume reflects Yearsley's hurt, her advocacy of connection seeks to teach Eames and other readers to engage in kinder treatment of others. After considering the structure of the volume and its place in Yearsley studies, the essay looks more closely at the title poem, analyzing how Yearsley mixes instruction with complaint. As a way of understanding the success of her complaint, the end of the essay looks at contemporary reviews of the volume.
Extending recent work in feminist book history and critical bibliography, this article offers a reassessment of Lady Caroline Lamb's public reputation after her affair with Lord Byron in 1812 and the publication of her first novel Glenarvon in 1816. Lamb's complex public standing manifests most interestingly in her relationship with the respected author and educator Frances Arabella Rowden. While previous scholars have noted Lamb's brief attendance at Rowden's school, the significance and longevity of their associations remain underexplored. This article presents new research about Lamb's decades-long connections to Rowden in print and her notable presence at Rowden's girls' school in London, even after the Byron affair. This ongoing relationship with Rowden contradicts common narratives about Lamb's irreparably fallen status. Lamb's case has wider implications for studying celebrity culture and respectability, and it demonstrates how understandings of the gendered nuances of the Romantic-era public sphere shift significantly when we de-center canonical (male) figures.
This essay reconsiders the most conspicuous lacuna in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)-the omission of how Bishop Latour's cathedral is actually built. Rather than assuming that this gap masks coerced Indigenous labor, I triangulate Cather's fiction with the archival and legal history of the Santa Fe cathedral under Jean-Baptiste Lamy, revealing a wage-based, financially precarious project that resists easy analogy with Acoma. The article then draws on borderlands theory to propose an anthropological reading of Latour's cathedral. To temper overpoliticized interpretations, I argue that the church's foreign style is a negotiated form shaped in dialogic space, where Cather sustains logics of difference and equivalence. Finally, in conversation with settler colonial studies, this essay shows how Cather's "deep time" can both invite ideological suspicion and interrupt triumphalist imperial temporality by decentering human agency within the Southwestern landscape.
This article is an introduction to the special issue 'Critical Responses to the Global-Novel Debate: Bridging Material Objects and Forms'. It looks critically at the global novel debate and proposes to understand the novelistic interests for representing a global imagination from a different angle. Scholarship on the global novel debate has been mostly divided between formal and sociological approaches and has taken a dominant Anglophone perspective and corpus. The four essays that compose the issue cross circulation data and formal features in order to highlight new aspects that deserve attention. They do so by analysing a corpus from diverse literary traditions that is not usually included in the global novel discussion. The articles shed new light on understudied critical problems in the global novel scholarship such as ecotemporalities, evolving interpretations derived from uneven re-publishing paths, branding of exotic discourses, contradictory uses of multilingualism and translation in the promotion of peripheral writers, and gatekeeping in growing promotional forms such as literary festivals.
This article undertakes a transtemporal reading of H. P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu (1928) and The Colour Out of Space (1927) through twenty-first-century frameworks of precarity in the Anthropocene. Contending that Lovecraft's cosmic horror anticipates contemporary ontological vulnerabilities, the analysis deploys Lauren Berlant's concept of 'slow death' and Andrew van der Vlies's notion of 'blocked futurity' to demonstrate the ways Lovecraft's fiction stages species-level precarity through attritional violence and temporal impasse. Reading Lovecraft both historically-as a product of modernist racial and scientific anxieties, and proleptically-as a theorist of planetary-scale precarity, the article reveals how his narratives collapse deep geological time into the present, rendering the familiar world porous to archaic, nonhuman forces. Cthulhu is analysed as an antiquarian uncanny, whose presence forecloses progressive futurity, while Colour exemplifies slow death as environmental contamination that gradually dissolves bodily and ecological thresholds. Such an approach demonstrates that Lovecraft's generic distortions offer not mere nihilism but a critical hermeneutics for navigating our own age of destruction, transforming his pulp weird fiction into an art of noticing humanity's contingent tenure in an indifferent cosmos.
This paper examines Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) through the lens of affective geography. It argues that Vuong reimagines modernist ideas of space through emotion and the body. He adopts techniques like fragmentation, montage, and disjunction but redirects them toward relation rather than separation. His poems use the bodily acts of breath and touch to connect moments and histories that could otherwise remain apart. The paper employs close readings of "Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds" and "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" in two separate sections in order to demonstrate how Vuong turns themes of displacement into possibilities of intimacy. The notions of space in his work cannot be fixed or measured in the physical sense. Space instead is experienced through movement, sensation, and the body's awareness. The body becomes both map and memory, carrying history and rewriting it through tenderness. Vuong thus turns modernist geography inward, grounding it in queer and diasporic life. His poetry builds an emotional landscape where vulnerability fosters relation and belonging can exist even within fracture.
Moving beyond the critical binary between formalism and sociohistoricism that has polarized readings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dict & eacute;e, this article specifies how Cha forges avant-garde formalism into a political instrument for diasporic expression. Synthesizing crip theory, new materialism, and affect theory, this article argues that Dict & eacute;e functions as a performative cartography, mapping the diasporic condition as a specific mode of structural and somatic disablement. Integrating Asian American disability studies, this study analyzes this practice less as a representation of trauma and more as a mode of knowing grounded in the experience of being socially and linguistically disabled by normative national structures. It traces three interlocking layers: the unsettled temporalities of crip time, the material geography of the book as an archival body, and the affective terrains generated within the reader. In so doing, this reading offers Asian American literary studies a critical vocabulary for reframing formal difficulty as an embodied political strategy and expands postmodern geography by positioning the body as a primary site of historical inscription.
This essay reviews recent treatments of time and temporality in Romantic literary studies. The essay first tracks how critics' operative conceptions of time—and the Romantic conceptions of time they focus on—have changed over the last few decades as critical methods have changed and observes that critics have increasingly analyzed the central social and intellectual tensions of the Romantic period in terms of the interactions among multiple temporalities. The second section considers critical studies not only of literary treatments of time but also of the temporality of reading literature. The essay concludes with a proposal that time spent reading has a texture similar to time spent in the company of another person.
This article delves into discussions around the global novel through a poetic and material analysis of The Island of Missing Trees (2021) by British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak. Internationally acclaimed, the novel's central plot is a love story set in 1974 Nicosia (Cyprus) between Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, who secretly meet amidst the political violence of a divided city, against the backdrop of golden beaches, climbing bougainvilleas, and stuffed vine leaves. I argue that the narrative tension between locality and globality mediated by a cosmopolitan writer like Shafak is one of the fundamental strategies for the novel's global legibility, circulation, and reception. First, I analyze its narrative strategies-articulated through multiple points of view (including that of a fig tree), a multiscale narrative construction (temporal, spatial, but also non-human), and a picturesque production of the local (Cypriot) and the regional (Mediterranean)-to problematize the mechanisms of internationalization in the novel. Second, I question how the novel thematically participates in popular global discourses such as humanitarianism or environmentalism. Finally, I consider the circulation and reception assumptions around the novel in Western English-language media.
This article rereads H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and argues that what has been called "cosmic horror" in the text is not, as it is traditionally understood, a form of metaphysical oppression in which humanity confronts an existential terror at its own insignificance before the universe. Rather, it is an "epistemological accident" that takes place inside the operational frame of modern science. By means of modern technologies of observation it deliberately forces itself into a position of observation that no human subject had previously occupied. Horror is no longer defined as some mysterious entity. It emerges instead as the recoil of scientific observation itself against the perceptual architecture of the observing subject. Lovecraft's cosmic horror can therefore be read as the self-collapse of the modern scientific subject under extreme spatial conditions. It is an epistemological catastrophe triggered in the field by technologies of observation, rather than a one directional threat imposed by an external other.
This introductory essay sets out the relationship between #MeToo movement and higher education in a global context, arguing that teaching in universities is defined by what we term "Post-#MeToo Consciousness." The essay explores the implications of this for teaching practice and the principles of English literary studies, opening questions about how it tacitly reshapes the discipline (vis authority, the canon, scholarly language), and asking how we can develop an effective global perspective on this fundamental, multivalent subject.
Excepting satiric illustration and the work of William Blake, this article will sketch the state-of-the-art pertaining to the study of the copper-engraved period illustration of 18th-century literature. It will outline the different phases of illustration studies within the British literary context of the past 90 years, concentrating particularly on the developments of the past 40 years. Focusing on the ways in which scholars have, in recent years, argued for the centrality and significance of illustrations in literary-historical narratives of 18th-century British literature, it will introduce the latest directions in the field. These include the role of illustrations in literary material culture and transnational book and text history, as well as extra-illustration practices and the recycling of illustrations, which demonstrate the pervasive reach of literary illustration in the 18th century.
