An image of a naked female figure displaying layer upon thin paper layer of internal anatomy sits gazing at her beholder; she is 500 years old, and she hides inside her body a spectrum of performances. She is a “fugitive sheet”, and this article is about uncovering such performances embedded in Western human history. The earliest known moveable print bodies in the West, the “fugitive sheets” are a group of European printed sheets dating 1538–1754 that feature woodcut male and female figures with superimposed, moveable, paper flap layers of internal anatomy. By using performance studies, the work of Robin Bernstein, Andrea Carlino, and Suzanne Karr Schmidt and my own methodologies and theories to inform a re-examination of the fugitive sheets, this work reconfigures and reconceptualizes the historical reality and function of the fugitive sheets as capacious objects which are best understood through the performances they create and evoke. This article demonstrates the fugitive sheets offer prompts that allow it to be read as a “script” for performance. I trace these performances by employing an interdisciplinary approach which brings early modern bodily and print histories into conversation with performance studies to express hidden narratives and performances that enliven the human experiences of early modern people in Italy and England. By examining the Sabio Figura (Venice, 1539) and the (Anonymous) Woman (London, 1540) for culturally specific invitations, and contextualizing normative historical behaviors between print and user, I identify embedded performances in the fugitive sheets that include selfhood and self-making, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, agentive performativity, gender, social relation, resemblance, and the fashioning of corporeal imaginaries.
This article brings Dan Shen’s theory of covert progression into the literary study of biblical narrative and argues that it offers a disciplined way to demonstrate a cumulative, text-wide evaluative undercurrent alongside overt plot development. After defining the model and outlining transferable methodological theses, the study shows that Ruth’s dispersed legal language, procedural episodes, and seemingly minor details cohere into a parallel evaluative movement portraying an unstable social world in which Pentateuchal norms are weakened, selectively observed, and pragmatically adapted. Building on the findings from the case study, the article then distinguishes covert progression from adjacent approaches and closes with methodological considerations for scale and compositional complexity in biblical studies.
This article examines Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008) through a tripartite framework drawn from classical Daoist cosmology, particularly the relational dynamics of Dao, Yin-Yang, and Qi. Moving beyond binary interpretations of gender, agency, and silence, it argues that Le Guin’s reworking of Virgil’s epic is structured by a triadic ontology in which differentiated forces remain interconnected through mediation. In this account, Yang corresponds to the epic logic of conquest, teleology, and political foundation, while Yin finds expression in Lavinia’s embodied relationship with the land, ritual practices, and cyclical temporality. Qi, understood as the dynamic force of transformation and balance, mediates these contrasting orientations through Lavinia’s consciousness, her encounters with Virgil, and her role as an ethical witness. Drawing on the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, the analysis shows how Le Guin’s narrative brings Daoist relational ontology into dialogue with questions of agency, power, and ethical responsibility. Through Lavinia’s perspective, the novel challenges the logic of domination that governs the epic tradition and imagines a form of agency grounded in relational awareness, continuity, and non-coercive action (wu wei). In this reading, storytelling emerges as an ethical practice that makes interdependence visible and opens up possibilities for inhabiting the world without seeking mastery over it.
Gianna Molinari’s 2018 novel Hier ist noch alles möglich is set in a Swiss factory approaching closure, narrated by a night watchwoman whose repetitive patrols along the fences defamiliarize borders and surveillance by making them visible as practices enmeshed in regimes of capital accumulation. At a time of mass redundancies, policing the factory’s fences in its dying days becomes an allegory of modes of securing the stability of capital during crisis times. I read Molinari’s allegorical aesthetics as illuminating how controlling people who are about to be rendered surplus goes hand-in-hand with displacement onto a racialized crisis of borders. Textual figuration of avoiding dealing with the root causes of surplusification emphasises the question about what has the capacity to render people disposable. Drawing on Marxist materialist methodologies, racial capitalism and critical border studies, I argue that the text’s imagery foregrounds questions of the political economy by showing the economy and border security working in tandem. Bordering and security appear as political-economic technologies that create and perpetuate the divisions upon which capital depends. Molinari mobilizes the figure of the wolf, said to be lurking around the fences, to critique the expansion of borders by showing them as a response to the crises of capitalism which does not resolve the structural contradictions but performs sovereignty through infrastructures of exclusion and securitization. The externalized and racialized figure of the wolf exposes the ways that economic turmoil is politically negotiated through displacement onto narratives of belonging and a panic about dangerous figures. The text effects a reverse displacement by foregrounding the real violence which is the rendering of populations excludable in the service of capital accumulation. The wolf refers to the institution of the ‘free’ labour market as a form of capitalist domination, as well as to how the real crisis of working people’s disposability is displaced onto a crisis about external threats. In a second critical strand, the text links the factory to the nearby airport to foreground the close relation between the fences of capital and national borders. By weaving in the true story of a stowaway, probably from Cameroon, who fell to his death from the wheel well of an aeroplane near Zürich, Molinari re-routes the criticism of capital through colonial–racial histories. Property and racialized belonging, capitalism and the state, emerge as an encompassing political-economic system. The man’s death is viewed through the fences of capital and, conversely, European capital in relation to the nation-state’s race-making. Molinari’s novel addresses in codified form the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, contemporary border enforcement and migration control, and rising ethnonationalism in Europe. My reading of Molinari, expands Swiss literary studies predominantly concerned with the construction and deconstruction of (national) identity.
The medical understanding of lovesickness in the Early Modern period emerged from the convergence of several intellectual traditions, including Hippocratic and Galenic diagnostics, medieval theories of amor hereos, and natural-philosophical problem literature. This article examines how Spanish physician-authors writing in the vernacular popularized and transformed medical knowledge about the bodily signs of erotic passion through the genre of the problem book. Focusing on works by Francisco López de Villalobos, Juan de Jarava, Agustín de Ruescas, and Alonso López de Corella, it analyzes the symptoms most frequently associated with lovesickness, such as alterations of the pulse, insomnia, sighing, emaciation, and changes in the eyes and complexion. By contextualizing these texts within both ancient and medieval medical traditions, the study demonstrates how problem literature functioned as a vehicle for disseminating complex medical theories to a broader readership. The conclusion shows how this medical lore could be reworked in a playful and ironic manner in literary texts such as La pícara Justina, where conventional symptoms of lovesickness become the object of parody.
