When Jane Eyre first appeared (Oct. 16, 1847) the publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., sent a complimentary copy to a young journalist named George Henry Lewes. The compliment had unexpected results. Lewes afterwards wrote Mrs. Gaskell: The enthusiasm with which I read it made me go down to Mr. Parker, and propose to write a review of it for Fraser's Magazine. He would not consent to an unknown novel—for the papers had not yet declared themselves—receiving such importance, but thought it might make one on “Recent Novels: English and French”—which appeared in Fraser, December 1847. Meanwhile I had written to Miss Brontë to tell her the delight with which her book filled me; and seemed to have “sermonized” her, to judge from her reply.

Examining the epistemological assumptions governing Calderón's theocentric view of life provides an accessible framework to overcome the many difficulties in reading La vida es sueño as a document of human experience. Segismundo's problems arise from an incomplete understanding of himself and the world. A prisoner since birth, the prince overcompensates intellectually for a life of sensual deprivation. Alienated from both the world and the sensitive centers of his humanity, he thinks to excess because his principal conduit to the world, his imagination, has remained underdeveloped. Through his palace experiences and his three encounters with Rosaura, Segismundo learns to adapt his inappropriate thinking by understanding that he must dialogue with the world rather than construct arguments against it.

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama promotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.

In “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Henry James locates the uncanny in the servants' quarters at the top of the house, where the genteel protagonist finally corners his ghostly double. James thus prompts us to reread Freud's “The Uncanny” (1919) with a pair of questions in mind. First, how does class identity bear on the uncanny; and, second, how in turn does the uncanny bear on class identity? Steering well clear of servants in his discussion, Freud apparently dodges the issue altogether; a closer look, however, reveals that he cannily represses the social value of the uncanny so as to hold it in reserve. James, on the other hand, documents how and why psychoanalysis converts bourgeois anxiety about servants into “the uncanny,” an abstraction that floats freely across the twentieth century from séance to academic circles, where it continues to function as a ghostlier demarcation of class. (BMcC)

Nothing is more remarkable in the tradition of Althusserian Marxism than the silence that has dogged the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez. One thinks of the relative importance attached to the work of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Some might believe the discrepancy is a matter of merit rather than of willful or unconscious neglect. But even the most casual comparison of Rodríguez's Theory and History of Ideological Production with Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (1975) and with Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981) suggests that this can hardly be the case. The parallel with Jameson is particularly intriguing. Like Rodríguez, the North American scholar accepts Louis Althusser's view of the social totality as a “decentered structure” in which various levels develop in “relative autonomy” and in which different feudal and capitalist matrices coexist. Also like Rodríguez, he considers literary works to be a form of ideological discourse that represses historical truth. Why, then, the silence that surrounds Rodríguez? The answer lies in the extent to which Jameson's work recontains diverse critical positions in the larger horizon of Marxism. Such a practice, as Eagleton has argued, is congenial to a dominant American pragmatism and eclecticism, as are the presiding Marxist Hegelian categories of reification and commodification (60–62). The consequences, politically, are found in Jameson's amorphous brand of “alliance” politics. The material situation of Rodríguez was very different. Given the militancy of the working class in Spain, his presiding categories were those of exploitation and class conflict, which combine to form the basis of a revolutionary proletarian politics that is anything but acceptable to the North American academy.

Although literature and philosophy are concerned with many of the same problems, attempts to combine them have seldom been successful; too often the union of fiction and philosophy has produced the hybrid novel of ideas or, more recently, the highly complex symbolic novel, a metaphysical kaleidoscope which creates a Weltanschauung however one twists it. However, at least one modern philosopher-novelist, Iris Murdoch, has succeeded in creating genuine fictional worlds which are enriched but not dominated by her philosophical interests. One of Miss Murdoch's central theses, propounded in her essays and her book on Sartre, is that both contemporary fiction and philosophy fail to set forth an adequate idea of human personality. Across the spectrum of modern thought—in philosophical works like Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind and in novels like Sartre's Nausea—Miss Murdoch finds the same shallow image of man, an image derived from Hume's materialistic behaviorism and Kant's idea of the isolated will. What is needed, she feels, is a better grasp of man's nature and his situation: “we have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave, naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we substituted a facile idea of sincerity. What we have never had, of course, is a satisfactory Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn.” In her novels Miss Murdoch tries to correct the current oversimplified concept of man by delineating with great persuasiveness both the complexity and diversity of human beings and the complicated relationship between the individual and the society; in The Bell the ideas which emerge from a very credible fictional world are concerned with the inadequacy of absolute moral codes, the nature of love, reality, the irrational, and freedom.

According to the report of the United Nations commission on Human Rights, rape is the least condemned war crime (coomaraswamy, Further Promotion 64n263). Although wartime rape was listed as a crime against humanity by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and by the Geneva Conventions, it was not until 2001 that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia identified rapists as war criminals. In that year the tribunal sentenced three men for violations of the laws or customs of war (torture, rape) and crimes against humanity (torture, rape) committed during the war in Bosnia during the 1993 takeover of Foca, where women were systematically raped and killed, the purpose being “to destroy an ethnic group by killing it, to prevent its reproduction or to disorganize it, removing it from its home soil.”

The evolving political landscape of a multicultural America grown disenchanted with the mythology of the melting pot had vast repercussions for the Jewish American literary imagination. Nonetheless, critical race theory has yet to take full stock of the role of Jewish writers in the debates over canonicity, representation, and multicultural literary genealogies occurring in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Philip Roth's The Human Stain, published in 2000, directly engages questions of literary history, race, and the position of the Jewish writer and intellectual in the canon wars. By depicting the tragedy of an African American man who passes into whiteness by passing for a Jewish professor, Roth uses the trope of passing to simultaneously critique the puritan impulse he perceives at the heart of the multicultural academy and write himself into the multicultural canon taking shape at the time.

In 1959, in the midst of the liberation struggle in Algeria, Frantz Fanon published L'an v de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism), which contained a chapter dedicated to the role of radio in anticolonial resistance. The chapter, “Ici la voix de l'Algérie” (“This Is the Voice of Algeria”), describes how the radio changed from mouthpiece of the French occupation to voice of the Algerian resistance, primarily between 1954 and 1956. Before the liberation struggle, Fanon tells us, over ninety-five percent of radio receivers belonged to Europeans, for whom the radio was a link to Radio-Alger—or, simply, “Des Français parlent aux Français” (“Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen” [“Ici” 309; Dying Colonialism 74]). The station was a “réédition ou écho de la Radiodiffusion française nationale installée á Paris” (“re-edition or an echo of the French National Broadcasting System operating from Paris”) and “exprime avant tout la société coloniale et ses valeurs” (“is essentially the instrument of colonial society and its values” [305; 69]).

Ludwig Wittgenstein's closely related critiques of language, Cartesian skepticism, inner criteria, and hermeneutics have instructive parallels in the work of Samuel Beckett, whose avowed interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy elucidates, for example, the treatment of expectation in Waiting for Godot, of solipsism in Company, and of rule following in Endgame and What Where. Wittgenstein's insistence that interpretation is not compulsory but remedial, resting on a primitive rule-following competence that permeates our “forms of life” and thus our language, endorses the antimetaphysical dramaturgy Beckett developed while directing stage and screen productions of his own writing. Adapting Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblance” to an exemplary conjunction of philosophy and literature, this essay proposes that Beckett's works are less aporetic scenarios of deferral and undecidability than meticulous representations of the largely unarticulated convergent behaviors constituting forms of life. As a director, Beckett could draw from Wittgenstein clarifying confirmation of an aesthetic practice that, like the Philosophical Investigations, begins “where interpretation comes to an end.”

Es ist bekannt, wie es dazu gekommen war, daß Schiller's Leiche nicht in einem besonderen Grab, sondern in einer “standesgemäßen” Massengruft, dem Kassengewölbe auf dem Friedhof vor der Weimarer Jakobskirche beigesetzt wurde. 1826 wollte die Stadtverwaltung diesen Friedhof, der seit einiger Zeit nicht mehr benutzt worden war, räumen lassen. Dabei wäre dann jede Spur von Schiller's Begräbnisort auf immer verschwunden. Der damalige Bürgermeister, Carl Leberecht Schwabe, empfand, was für eine Schande das sein würde. Er erbot sich, die Reliquien ausfindig zu machen und dafür zu sorgen, daß sie auf dem Neuen Friedhof auf eine Art beigesetzt würden, die des großen Toten würdig war. Aber als man daran ging, den Sarg zu bergen, stellte es sich heraus, daß in dem kleinen Gewölbe ein chaotisches Durcheinander von morschen Brettern und modernden Gebeinen herrschte. Keine Inschrift, kein Merkmal wies den Weg zu Schiller's Ueberresten. Der wackere Schwabe mußte sich schliesslich damit begnügen, 23 Schädel zu sammeln und zu versuchen, nach dem Bild des Verstorbenen, wie die Erinnerung es heraufzurufen vermochte, den Schädel des Dichters zu ermitteln. Ein bestimmter Schädel fiel ihm gleich auf, der “durch edle, regelmäßige Gestaltung” ausgezeichnet war. Dies, so war Schwabe überzeugt, müße Schiller's Schädel sein. Er verglich die Maße von Schiller's Totenmaske, von Ludwig Klauer hergestellt. Sie schienen für diesen Schädel genau zu stimmen, und nur für ihn. Die untere Kinnlade fehlte; auch sie wurde noch in der Gruft gefunden. Nun wurden die drei bekanntesten unter den Aerzten Weimars gebeten, die Messungen zu kontrollieren. Sie bestätigten Schwabes Feststellung. Endlich wurden alle Bewohner Weimars und der Umgegend, die Schiller näher gekannt hatten, aufgefordert, den ausgesuchten Schädel zu besichtigen. Sie fanden “ohne eine einzige Ausnahme,” dies müße der echte Schädel sein. Eine Rolle spielte dabei auch der Umstand, “daß Schiller seine trefflichen, vollständig erhaltenen Zähne mit ins Grab genommen hatte.” Bei allen andern Schädeln fehlten die Zähne. Nun war Schwabe seiner Sache gewiß. Er unterrichtete den Großherzog und Goethe über den kostbaren Fund. Schwabe dachte daran, die Reliquien an einer ausgewählten, weithin sichtbaren Stelle des neuen Friedhofs begraben zu lassen und auf öffentliche Kosten ein Denkmal zu errichten. Die Angehörigen Schiller's waren damit einverstanden. Der Großherzog und Goethe entschieden sich schließlich für eine andere Lösung. Die nach Schiller's Tod von Dannecker hergestellte Marmorbüste, die er den Hinterbliebenen geschenkt hatte, sollte erworben und im Saale der Bibliothek aufgestellt werden. In dem Sockel der Büste wollte man den Schädel niederlegen. Das geschah denn auch durch einen feierlichen Akt am 17. September 1826. Die Familie war durch Schiller's Sohn Ernst vertreten. Es erschien als selbstverständlich, daß Goethe teilnehmen würde; war er doch als Freund des Toten und als Aufseher der Bibliothek gleicherweise verpflichtet.

To understand what it feels like to read, we might consider what it feels like to have difficulty reading. Those who find it hard to read reveal the demands posed by a modern world that requires literacy even as it raises obstacles to reading. In this situation, the attempt to read can become pathetic: a site of suffering and reflexivity. Beginning with moments in the works of Walter Benjamin and his follower W. G. Sebald, we learn about the pains of reading as they open onto the pains of history in the cities of twentieth-century Europe. But Benjamin's and Sebald's insights on vision, pain, and history are anticipated in a series of sonnets by John Keats, written in metropolitan London in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

A long-standing misreading of Jane Eyre is that Rochester's wife, Bertha Mason, is locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. In fact, she resides on the third floor. This mistake has implications for readings of the novel and for recent critical methodologies such as “surface,” “denotative,” and “dialectical” reading strategies. Jane Eyre associates the spaces of Thornfield with psychological registers that are in turn associated with types of meaning making. This essay delineates these registers by mapping them onto the Lacanian schema of imaginary, symbolic, and real orders, thus drawing out the novel's engagement with a nascent nineteenth-century depth psychology while noting how the novel itself militates against so-called surface reading.

In her introduction to the english institute's e-book on periodization, the editor, virginia jackson, remarks on the ability of its “digital format” to invite innovative ways of interacting with texts. Marshall Brown's article in the book, for example, allows readers to hear Joseph Haydn's music while they read nineteenth-century literature, giving them an immediate understanding of the musical metaphors Brown uses for describing literary history. Our contemporary presence and capabilities in the digital world, Brown suggests, may help us to understand periods as “linked episodes within the rolling flood of time,” enabling what Jackson describes as “a literary historical process” that “is not progress but wave, not transcendence” but, as Brown writes, “the metrics and bar lines shaping the pulse of history'” (Jackson, par. 4). The authors of On Periodization suggest a practice of periodization that allows for simultaneities: “a new plane of historicity on which several temporalities unfold at once” (Jackson, par. 4). This conception of time is made possible by the present moment, the (relatively) new technologies we have in our midst, through which this e-book is expressed. This “new plane” of simultaneities reflects the primacy of the present in that the technologies we use are actively shaping how we experience literature and literary history (Martin 153–56). Furthermore, while chronological periodization can dis-embed events from their places, our process of reading rhizomically in the digital world may move us to reconsider the primacy of place.

This essay reads Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale—a retelling of the popular Constance exemplum—as a case study for thinking about a global Middle Ages. The tale's globalism emerges most pointedly in its depiction of the ocean and, more surprisingly, in Constance's pale face during her trial for a murder she did not commit. By reading these unlikely images together, this essay argues that both operate as oceanic sites of exemplary justice and that the Man of Law frames the Constance story as a call for global justice outside the reach of territorial law. Chaucer imagines a legality that works like exemplarity, conceptualizing witness testimony in particular as a fluid narrative form that can accommodate the needs and expectations of various audiences, cultures, and temporalities. (JKT)

Because hit men in the twenty-first-century Mexican drug war engage in paid labor at the extreme end of dehumanizing economic relations, they expose the shifting notions of work, life, and ethics that support contemporary global capitalism. Hannah Arendt's distinctions between labor, work, and action structure this comparative analysis of two 2010 narratives featuring Mexican hit men: a testimonial text titled El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin and a feature film titled El infierno. These texts explore the subject-producing as well as the destructive effects of murder for hire. Alain Badiou's Ethics illuminates how when professional killing becomes a way of life, it provocatively complicates concepts of the good and the human.

The silhouette of the Troilus, the kinds of poem behind it that it approximates, are essential and not difficult to perceive. Mr. Young, in the most important recent article on the subject, and in a delicate and masterful style, has shown its pervasive elements from the romances. Chaucer hardly set out deliberately to write a poem in the line of Chrétien de Troyes or Floris or what not, but the usages and assumptions of such poems, the commonest kind of serious secular narrative he knew, he adopted as a matter of course. There is vast variety in medieval romance, and the word itself (meaning at first merely a poem in French) is vague, to say nothing of the rarefied air which we reach when we try to grasp the romantic in the abstract. Medieval romance and the romantic in the abstract are not the same, though historically and essentially allied. I turn to the second. One of the essentials of the romantic, the satisfying a taste for the strange, Chaucer provided plentifully for his own day in the intentional ancient coloring, which affected his readers (and not us at all) just as the inevitable and unconscious medieval coloring affects us. He here aimed however no less at satisfying his own informed awareness that the remote past was very unlike his own present than at creating a romantic impression. The emotionalism which belongs to romance also in good sooth is plentiful. What Mr. Young is specially combating is the summary labelling the poem as a psychological novel, a phrase now almost a cliché, taken too literally, though no doubt meant by its first user as a mere simplification to assure the momentum of a fresh idea. The word novel is onesided, even misleading. The hazy word psychological implies lifelike portraiture of complex people with internal conflicts, which allows us with probability to descry undercurrents and motives. This is true of the Troilus. The facts are, as most critics will admit, that the poem is an intricate blending of romance on every side with delicate and perceptive truth to humanity (though emphatically not a mere “page out of the book of modern every-day life”); that the two are not contradictory, though more intense and more commingled here than in almost any other English narrative one can think of; that though it is stimulating to guess briefly, it is impossible to decide how much would fall into each category for Chaucer and his readers. Emphatically he no more medievalizes than he humanizes his chief source; he complicates and intensifies it.

An inquiry into the sources of Massinger's tragicomedy The Emperour of the East (1632) is made difficult by the abundance and variety of historical literature which contains the principal elements of the plot. On the one hand, the ready availability of the story in Byzantine chronicles has led students of Massinger to search for the sources exclusively in the histories; on the other, the variety in the content of these has made selection virtually impossible, for though many of the histories provide long accounts of the story of Theodosius and Eudoxia, none contains all the details which Massinger introduced in his tragicomedy. As a result, various scholars have proposed interesting, though unsatisfactory, combinations. Langbaine refers his reader to no fewer than five histories; Coxeter, the first editor of the plays, selects the first two of the sources cited by Langbaine, namely Socrates and Theodoret, but he admits that there may be others; Mason, the next editor, repeats Coxe-ter's note; and Gifford in his standard edition is even more vague than his predecessors. But to balance his inconclusive remarks he appends a note provided by his friend Dr. Ireland offering as the main sources Cedrenus and Theophanes, principally because they include the quarrel of Theodosius and Eudoxia; and a second note, this one by Gilchrist, another literary friend, who hazards the opinion that Massinger based his plot on two passages in the Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Burton relates briefly the marriage of Eudoxia and the famous episode with the apple. All of these are unacceptable, however, as both singly and in their sum they leave out of account significant details present in the play. A more satisfactory study of the sources was produced in 1897 by Emil Koeppel, whose conclusions were confirmed three years later by Wolfgang von Wurzbach.

The 2003 Guber natorial recall campaign in California was a perfect political storm. The extraordinary result—the democratic removal of a sitting governor before his term expired (for the first time in California history and the second time in United States history) and his replacement by a bodybuilder turned movie star with not the slightest governmental experience—depended on the improbable conjuncture of several factors, each pretty odd in itself: the special severity with which the Bush recession hit the California economy, largely because of the latter's unusual dependence on high-tech corporations; the California power crisis engineered by Enron and other denizens of the Houston energy industry; the astonishing charmlessness of Governor Gray Davis, whose political career had been based not on attracting strong loyalty or admiration but on fund-raising, negative campaigning, and convincing core Democratic constituencies that he was marginally less repellant than Republican alternatives; the willingness of the multimillionaire United States congressman Daryl Issa to spend two million dollars of his own money to get the recall on the ballot in the first place; and, of course, the overwhelming star power of Arnold Schwarzenegger. One might suppose that the evident contingency of the whole matter precludes finding historical importance in it. It is after all possible, even likely, in what Guy Debord brilliantly analyzed as la société du spectacle, for an event to be sensational without being tremendously significant.