It remains surprising to never see Heidegger pose the question What is literature? In this sense, our interrogation will revolve around why Heidegger never applies the “fundamental question” to the very specific form of logos at work and in play in literature. And thus, why Heidegger never overtly enquires into the heading which literature could provide for and in the “History of Being.” Does something lie in literature – a secret – which impedes its grasp in the ontological horizon of the “History of Being”?

Turning from communities of free people of color in Louisiana to New York City, Chapter 3, “Freedom’s Conduit: Spiritual Justice in ‘Theresa, A Haytien Tale’,” examines early African-American print culture, particularly the first African American short story, the anonymously authored “Theresa, A Haytean Tale” (1828). While Haitian Revolutionary histories in the US have often centered on Toussaint Louverture, “Theresa” follows the travails of a young woman and her all-female family in their struggle for Haitian independence. A cross-dressing spy against the French, Theresa frequently experiences visitations, possessions, and visions from God. Theresa’s political and spiritual labor forms a complex network of spiritual cosmologies and Haitian Revolutionary iconographies that help expand colonized understandings of gender and sexuality. In doing so, the tale reroutes the energy systems of both colonial plantation violence and early African-American domesticity by imagining a prophetic form of female futurity tied to Haitian independence, not biological reproduction. Ultimately, I argue, “Theresa” transforms the cult of Mary, showing how the female body serves as an instrument of divine energies in which the final product is not a child but instead political sovereignty.

This essay proposes that the English literary anthology is a genre that triangulates the canon, the curriculum, and the classroom. Its colonial legacy is undeniable, and the core processes of anthology editing – selection, excerption, arrangement, and framing – do closely replicate the decontextualizing and objectifying practices of imperial epistemologies. Nonetheless, the anthology remains an affordable textbook and is most popular in nonelite universities and college classrooms where survey and general literature courses are taught as important parts of the English literary curriculum. Rather than dismiss the anthology as a pedagogical tool, the author presents editorial strategies for decolonizing it and for presenting literary tradition in the English language in more equitable ways. Drawing upon her experience editing the eleventh edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL), the author offers a reappraisal of critical theories of anthologizing alongside strategies for reframing the global diffusion of English literature through the power dynamics of territorial, educational, and cultural imperialism.

This chapter identifies habitat as a crucial concept for literary animal studies. Habitat, as a biological concept, is compared with Jakob von Uexküll theory of Umwelt, a given organism’s subjective experience of inhabiting its distinct territory. Both terms are important for animal studies because they enable us to attend to the material and perceptual life worlds of wild creatures, ways of living threatened by habitat loss and climate change. I consider the distinct imaginative work of evoking habitat as a literary setting, discussing four literary works – John Clare’s poetry, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” – that connect human self-awareness with careful attention to the particular ways in which different species of animals dwell in the world.

This chapter accounts for how animals appear in Victorian literature in connection with two overarching themes: shifting definitions of the animal and the human, especially in relationship to racialization and empire, and the incorporation of animals into the political sphere, especially as they proliferate throughout daily life. Both themes offer a productive and foundational lens to analyze the vast representations of animals across Victorian literature, and relate to a variety of other topics such as care and control, domesticity and the family, class and gender, and imperial strategies. Through examining a range of genres, from realist texts and animal autobiography to travel narratives and the literature of empire, this chapter demonstrates how relationships with animals shifted how Victorians saw themselves, their animals, and those across the empire. The chapter argues that texts by authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anna Sewell, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schriener, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Kingsley, and Richard Marsh, among others, illuminate the broader implications of extending political care to animals, controlling them across the empire, and using them to account for human difference through demarcating racial categories and structuring the borders of the human.

The Bible remains the book of empire. The liberal project of the “the Bible as Literature” has engaged in mostly placing the Bible on a pedestal as an important cultural artifact of the Western imagination, worthy to be read and to be studied in schools or university contexts. The contention of my analysis is the Bible needs to be understood as an ambiguous text in terms of its position vis-à-vis empires. Not only does the Bible as a text is replete with both tendencies, it has also been used both as an instrument of terror and as a tool of liberation. The question of interest in this particular essay is how can one decolonize the Bible? To answer that question, I will use the Book of Revelation as my canvas to show how a particular biblical text may offer both liberative ways for confronting empire and its economic aspects as it can also serve to recolonize. I will situate some of the decolonial impulses of the Book of Revelation in the specific social and political contexts of Haiti, a place where the Bible has been used and continues to be used mostly for colonizing effects.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

This chapter examines the Singapore state’s commemoration of the 200 year anniversary of the island’s colonial founding. IT argues that the celebrations were part of a wider state-directed pedagogy to narrate a national story that is inextricably tied to Singapore’s British colonizers and their definition of modernity. This bout of state-driven historical performance points to the role of the fictional in both official and unofficial versions of the Singapore story. The chapter then turns to the award-winning graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew, and Alfian Sa’at and Neo Hai Bin’s play Merdeka/ 獨立 / சுதந்திரம். It reads both these texts as self-reflexive counternarratives and counterpedagogies. Secondary to their depiction of counterfactual or confabulated histories is their insistence of a decolonial pedagogy that insists on an emancipatory approach in confronting Singapore’s national narratives. The texts seek to provide artistic and theatrical spaces for collective learning, contemplation, lacunae, and possibility. Confabulation is a crucial strategy against wilful state-sponsored amnesia and suppression.

This essay examines the changing fortunes of the university in Ireland through a history of the English department. With literary references to Joyce and Yeats, it describes colonial and postcolonial encounters in the classroom.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.