Abstract This article is about several texts published after the Royal Entry of James VI and I to London in 1604. It argues that these texts stage a paragone, or conflict between the arts. Stephen Harrison’s account of the day’s events suggests that the triumphal arches he built could speak for themselves. Texts by Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson make a tacit argument to the contrary: the arches would be meaningless unless given voice by the pageants written by Dekker and Jonson themselves. All these texts make the case for their preferred art form’s effects on the reader or viewer’s judgement. They reflect on wider concerns about the relationship between the bodily senses and moral judgement in the period, illustrated with reference to Philip Sidney and John Dryden.
Abstract This article examines E. M. Forster’s writing on the Egyptian Revolution – a formative event for his developing critique of empire that helps us push back against the perception that his oeuvre has an unworldly quality. First, I unearth the novelist’s little-known engagement with the recent history of Egyptian nationalism, from the 1882 Alexandria bombardment to the 1919 Revolution. In his writing on this period, Forster viewed political unrest as a decentred phenomenon, focussing on modest acts of defiance and the lives of ordinary Egyptians. Second, I explore how the novelist’s experiences in Egypt and his observations on the Egyptian Revolution may have influenced depictions of disquiet in A Passage to India (1924), which scholars have almost exclusively read in light of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre. Taken together, the article offers a fresh insight into Forster’s political thought by according his time in Egypt, so often thought of as a hiatus, a central place in his unfolding anti-colonialism.
Abstract This article argues that Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive (2019) draws on technological and cultural tropes associated with Polaroid instant photography to shape its imagination and representation of the real. It first examines how ideas of technological magic and child’s play have been linked to Polaroid photography and reproduced in contemporary fiction. Turning then to Lost Children Archive, it explores how Polaroids function in the novel as a playful documentary tool and a metaphor for slow perceptual attention. But they also become a site of ethical contention, through the suggestion that their redemptive, analogue power may restore to refugee children the childhood the novel claims has been ‘lost’ to them.
