For the student of acting and actors, the Eighteenth Century is a rich period. Within a century the careers of such players as Betterton, Quin, Macklin, Garrick, and Kemble ran their courses; these were actors of varying techniques, yet they had in common their century's earnest desire to imitate “nature” and they all subscribed to the same basic set of acting conventions. The century is rich too in theorists and critics: Gildon, John and Aaron Hill, Churchill, Lloyd, Hiffernan.

The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior exhibit parallel narrative strategies. The respectively black and Chinese American protagonists work their way from speechlessness to eloquence by breaking through the constraints of sex, race, and language. The heroines turn to masculine figures for guidance, to female models for inspiration, and to native idioms for stylistic innovation. Initially unable to speak, they develop distinctive voices by registering their own unspoken grief on paper and, more important, by recording and emulating the voices of women from their respective ethnic communities. Through these testimonies, each written in a bicultural language, Walker and Kingston reveal the obstacles and resources peculiar to minority women. Subverting patriarchal literary traditions by reclaiming a mother tongue that carries a rich oral tradition (of which women are guardians) the authors artfully coordinate the tasks of breaking silence, acknowledging female influence, and redefining while preserving ethnic characteristics.

Recent studies of medieval English literature have queried anew the role of the anthology (medieval and modern) in shaping both historical and current notions of vernacular canons. Here, my examination of two major assemblies exemplifies the theoretical, interpretive, and pedagogical problems raised by this recent work. In British Library manuscript Harley 2253, an early-fourteenth-century collection, and in Sammelbände of printed books put together in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, I discern sequences of texts that take as their theme the idea of the anthology: the languages of poetic expression, the technologies of public literacy, and the cultural values that generate canons. Studying and teaching medieval literature requires us to restore texts to such early compilatory contexts; but it also requires us to reflect on our contemporary fascination with anthologies and with the de-authorizing of the literary in the wake of postmodern theory—a move, I suggest, anticipated in medieval literary culture.

In its frequent attention to visual acts, Wuthering Heights explores the sexual politics of the gaze. Not only does Bronte's novel make the gaze important thematically (as both a psychosexual phenomenon and a means of surveillance), it also suggests that narration itself is dependent on and produced by a gaze. But through its treatment of its two narrators and of Hareton and the second Catherine as gazing subjects, the novel suggests that there are limits to the power of the gaze to objectify, appropriate, and control. Thus Wuthering Heights anticipates questions that feminist theory has been asking about a possible “female gaze” and provides a feminist context for thinking about the visual metaphors pervading post-Jamesian theories of the novel.

The poems called in this study Weaving Songs were in ancient times also known as History Songs, for the first name applied to them was Chansons d'istoire; then, a little later apparently, they were called Chansons de toile or Weaving Songs. By modern critics they have also been termed Romances but this name is not altogether satisfactory. If one glances through the critical edition of these poems published by Karl Bartsch under the title Romanzen und Pastourellen one finds that the Weaving Songs are mixed up with other poems under the loose title of Romanzen. The term Romance, in use since the days of Grimm and Fauriel but first made popular by the collection of old French poems published by Paulin Paris under the title of Le Romancero français, was borrowed from the Spanish towards the end of the eighteenth century and then it designated, as it does still today, poems of historical content like our English Ballads. If the term was suitable enough during the Romantic period when the Romancero appeared, it is a source of dangerous confusion nowadays when the same term is applied to poems so widely different in nature as the Weaving Songs and, to give only one instance, the lament of the young girl in the famous poem of Marcabru, A la fontana del vergier, which is generally termed a Romance.

In an undoubtedly misbegotten moment, some months ago i set out to protest widespread disregard or stereotyping of feminism (especially among those the age of my undergraduates) and to do so by means of the humor feminism supposedly dampens. It was to be a Cosmo-like or DailyCandy.com-type questionnaire that readers could fill out in the privacy of their own homes to ascertain whether they were vulnerable to any allegation that they were or could be considered feminists. The higher their score, the more secure they could feel.

Fanny Burney's diaries and the reading lists to be found in her unpublished notebooks and memorandum books yield many references to the courtesy writers and to the courtesy books and allied works widely read in her age. The date of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, often taken as the culminating point in studies of the courtesy literature for men, marks the beginning of an accelerated production of courtesy books for women. In 1759 Thomas Marriott, the author of Female Conduct, was rejoicing that “such an agreeable Theme” should have been so long reserved for him. As far as he could remember, “very few [had] touched this Subject in Prose, and None in Verse” to any appreciable length before him, so that he was able to appropriate, as he thought, an uncultivated “Spot of Ground in Parnassus.”1 In the following decades, however, the problem of the conduct of the young lady was investigated so thoroughly that the lifetime of Fanny Burney, or more accurately the years 1760–1820, which saw also the rise of the novel of manners, might be called the age of courtesy books for women.

Although instinctively formalistic, modern criticism has avoided the basic problem of interpretation: not what a universally valid method should be, but why there should have to be any interpretation in the first place. Whence the first principle of metacommentary: each interpretation must account for the necessity of its own existence. Russian Formalism is the model of a criticism which refuses to interpret: it is unable, however, to deal with diachrony, and in particular with the novel as a form. The second principle of metacommentary: the fact that a work needs no interpretation (as in the novel of plot) is itself something to be explained. Thus, the possibility of plot reveals a wholeness in the society that produces it. To the evolution of the plotless novel corresponds the structuralist hermeneutic, with its reading of the work as a single sentence or as a system of binary oppositions. Structuralism can be transcended by the realization that its abstract mental categories are in reality historical moments. The ultimate model of metacommentary is one which, distinguishing the manifest and latent contents of the work, then seeks to account for this distinction (or repression). Since the latent content is an experience, the elaboration of the work corresponds to a question about the possibilities of Experience itself, and the disguises of the content to an attempt to conceal the causes of the limitation of experience in the social situation.

I am interested in questions of reading and interpretation. I am also drawn to actor-network theory and the work of Bruno Latour. Can these attractions be brought into alignment? To what extent can a style of thought that describes itself as empiricist and rejects critique speak to the dominant concerns of literary studies? Can actor-network theory help us think more adequately about interpretation? Might it inspire us to become more generous readers? How do literary studies and Latourian thought engage, enlist, seduce, or speak past each other? What duels, rivalries, intrigues, appropriations, or love affairs will ensue?

A Funeral Elegy was written in February 1612 by “W. S.,” a poet of “name and credit” closely familiar with Shakespearean texts. The pamphlet was registered by a stationer, Thomas Thorp, whose livelihood depended chiefly on the Shakespeare-Jonson theatrical circle and who had published Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Privately issued and surviving in just two copies, A Funeral Elegy received scant notice until 1989, when I first presented archival, statistical, and literary evidence that WS could be William Shakespeare. Focusing on intertextual evidence derived in part from new electronic resources, this essay addresses a vexing conundrum: the elegy is aesthetically disappointing and yet distinctively Shakespearean—a paradox that raises larger questions about attributional methodology and canonical theory. An emerging scholarly consensus supports a Shakespearean attribution for the elegy, though the poem challenges prevailing notions of what it is that makes Shakespeare “Shakespeare.”

WHEN members of an institution debate, it may seem that they are arguing about fundamental principles, but it is more often the case that the truly fundamental principle is the one that makes possible the terms of the disagreement and is therefore not in dispute at all. I am thinking in particular of the arguments recently marshaled for and against blind submission to the journal of the Modern Language Association. Blind submission is the practice whereby an author's name is not revealed to the reviewer who evaluates his or her work. It is an attempt, as William Schaefer explained in the MLA Newsletter, “to ensure that in making their evaluations readers are not influenced by factors other than the intrinsic merits of the article” (4). In his report to the members, Schaefer, then executive director of the association, declared that he himself was opposed to blind submission because the impersonality of the practice would erode the humanistic values that are supposedly at the heart of our enterprise. Predictably, Schaefer's statement provoked a lively exchange in which the lines of battle were firmly, and, as I will argue, narrowly, drawn. On the one hand those who agreed with Schaefer feared that a policy of anonymous review would involve a surrender “to the spurious notions about objectivity and absolute value that … scientists and social scientists banter about”; on the other hand those whose primary concern was with the fairness of the procedure believed that “[j]ustice should be blind” (“Correspondence” 4). Each side concedes the force of the opposing argument—the proponents of anonymous review admit that impersonality brings its dangers, and the defenders of the status quo acknowledge that it is important to prevent “extraneous considerations” from interfering with the identification of true merit (5).

The research that I reported in the darker side of the renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) was driven by my desire and need to understand the opening up of the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, its historical, theoretical, and political consequences. How was it that coexisting socioeconomic organizations like the Ottoman and Mughal sultanates as well as the incanate in the Andes and the tlahtoanate in the Valley of Mexico were either inferior or almost absent in the global historical picture of the time? I became aware, for example, that people in the Valley of Mexico living in the Aztec tlahtoanate, whether in conformity or dissenting, were compared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews. The comparison was twofold: on the one hand, the Indians and the Jews were dirty and untrustworthy people; on the other hand, the Indians in the New World may have been part of the Jewish diaspora. So, the comparison got in trouble, because Indians and Jews may have been the same people. The Jesuit priest José de Acosta, in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589), asked whether the Indians descended from the Jews, addressing a question that was on everybody's mind. He dismissed the possibility of the connection, because the Jews had had a sophisticated writing system for a long time while the Indians were illiterate (in the Western sense of the word). Jews liked money, Acosta pointed out, while Indians were not even aware of it; and while Jews took circumcision seriously, Indians had no idea of it. Last but not least, if Indians were indeed of Jewish origin, they would not have forgotten the Messiah and their religion.

Archipelagoes, cosmopolitanism, creolization: From antiquity to the present, from early Greek colonial settlements to twentieth-century postcolonial sites, these terms capture an idea of diversity linked to fluidity and mobility, exchange and transformation. Early modern European colonial expansions intensified processes that have continued to affect populations and landscapes, languages and worldviews. Today, postmodern global cities are the setting for new forms of creolized identities that are altering understandings of ethnic and national belonging across the world, even if established political and educational institutions do not always follow suit and adjust to this changing human landscape.

Familiar Landscapes are Today Challenged by Illicit Sea Journeys. The Southern Shores of Occidental Modernity are beached by the uninvited guest, by the arrival of histories and cultures that exceed its desires and augment its fears. Like a nemesis from the sea, the interrogative presence of the migrant, who announces planetary processes that are not ours to manage and define, draws Europe and the rest of the West to the threshold of a modernity that exceeds itself. In Isaac Julien's video installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007), the cruel passage of northward migration—across the inhospitable desert and perilous sea—proposes a dramatic poetics that seeks to force apart the conclusive framings of existing political, cultural, and historical narratives. Contorted black bodies gasping in the foam, abandoned on the beach in silver body bags among the sunbathers or writhing on the palace floors of European hierarchies replay the black Atlantic, memories of slavery, and racial oppression in the modern-day Mediterranean.

Guernsey, in shape a triangle and sloping toward the North, is divided into twenty parishes. The Lower or Northern Parishes are those most frequently visited by strangers; here the scenery is quiet, the bays are large, with beautiful white sand-beaches, varied, here and there, by some bold projection. The Southern coast, on the contrary, is beautiful in its very ruggedness; here, cliffs a hundred feet in height, wild and fierce, sea gulls and crows with their piercing shrieks, waves dashing against the rocks and into the caverns, all contribute to produce a peculiar fascination on the visitor.

ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH VESELOVSKY (1838-1906) IS WIDELY REGARDED AS RUSSIA'S MOST DISTINGUISHED AND INFLUENTIAL Literary theorist before the formation of Opoyaz (“Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), whose members—Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, Roman Jakobson, and others—developed the approach generally known as Russian formalism. Readers of Shklovsky may note the prominence accorded to Veselovsky in Theory of Prose (1925). Some will also recall the use of the term historical poetics—in reference to the method put forward by Veselovsky—in the 1963 edition of Mikhail Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky and in his “The Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics” (1937-38, pub. in 1975). Another eloquent testimony to Veselovsky's spectral ubiquity in Russian literary theory is the concluding paragraph of Vladimir Propp's pathbreaking Morphology of the Folktale, where Propp humbly asserts that his “propositions, although they appear to be new, were intuitively foreseen by none other than Veselovsky” and ends his study with an extensive quotation from Veselovsky's Poetics of Plot (115-16). It is rarely recognized, however, that Veselovsky's method, in its rudimentary form, constitutes a common denominator of Shklovsky's, Bakhtin's, and Propp's widely divergent approaches.

Readers of PMLA Recognize 26 Broadway, in New York City, as the Headquarters of the Mla, One of the Major Hubs of Intellectual work in literary and cultural studies in North America. But in the summer of 1840, 26 Broadway was a commercial hub that connected the world of the Atlantic Ocean with the world of the Indian Ocean. Here, in the offices of the New York firm Barclay and Livingston, Ahmad Bin Na'aman, special envoy of the sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Said, offered for sale merchandise that had been brought to the United States from Muscat and Zanzibar. The merchandise included “1,300 bags of dates, 21 bales of Persian wool carpets and 100 bales of Mokha coffee” that had been acquired at Muscat and “108 prime ivory tusks, 81 cases of gum copal, … 135 bags of cloves and 1,000 dry salted hides” from Zanzibar (Eilts 32). The cargo had come to New York on 30 April 1840 aboard the Sultanah, a bark owned by the sultan and commanded by William Sleeman, an Englishman. Except for two Frenchmen whose identities are uncertain and two Englishwomen who had sought passage to London, where the ship was headed, most of those on board were African slaves belonging to the ship's officers and hired lascars, Muslim seamen from the lower Konkan and Malabar coasts of India who had been signed on in Bombay, where the ship had been refitted for the transatlantic voyage and from which it first embarked (3). The slaves, we are told, were dressed in garments made of coarse cotton cloth “called merikani, after the country of its manufacture” (4). In his account of the voyage of the Sultanah, Hermann Frederick Eilts writes of “the pungent vapors of cloves, gum copal and coffee (from the ship's cargo), of tar and pitch, of open-hearth cooking in deep, acrid sheep tail's fat, called ghee, of primitive shipboard sanitation and of coconut oil” (4). This account of the “first Arab emissary and the first Arab vessel to visit American shores” is a rich reminder of the historical interconnections in the world (6).

With adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the United Nations conscripted, almost by default, the historically Euronationalist forms of the Bildungsroman and natural law to legitimate its vision of a new international order. This essay elaborates the conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vision that normative human rights law and the idealist Bildungsroman share in their cooperative efforts to articulate, normalize, and realize a world founded on the fundamental dignity and equality of what both the UDHR and early theorists of the novel term “the free and full development of the human personality.” Historically, formally, and ideologically, they are mutually enabling and complicit fictions: each projects, in advance of administrative structures comparable to those of the nation-state, an image of human personality and sociality that ratifies (and makes legible) the other's idealistic vision of the proper relations between individual and society. (JRS)