Literary style, like human personality, is a compound exceedingly difficult of analysis, for when its more obvious constituents are made clear, there still remains an illusive element, consciousness of which leaves the analyst with the unpleasant sensation of not having reached the bottom of the matter. As the most complex phenomenon in literature, style is the resultant of all the forces, known and unknown, underlying literary development, and the method and extent of the contribution made by each of these forces are a matter of probable inference rather than of positive demonstration. For that reason, any attempt, however ambitious, to account for the style of a literary epoch must be content with pointing out those more obvious influences that are combined and reflected in speech and writing, and with ignoring other factors which may escape detection. Under the protection of this confession I shall attempt to make manifest what seems to me the most important influence instrumental in changing the luxuriant prose of the Commonwealth into that of a diametrically opposite nature in the Restoration.

Critics who work at the intersection of psychoanalysis and narratology frequently examine Freud's “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”). A close reading of the anecdotes interpolated in Freud's essay suggests that while narrative is often motivated by an effort to contain charged material, something always escapes that control, threatening to proliferate without stopping. The dual containing and dispersing effect of narrative is reflected in Freud's doubling of himself as narrator and protagonist; in his ambivalence toward women, the maternal, and creativity; and in his attraction and resistance to literature. Although Freud often appears to reduce literature to an illustration of psychoanalytic laws, the subversive literariness of language and the instability of the subject emerge dramatically in the uncanniness of his own narratives.

Cleanness, an alliterative Middle English poem attributed to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, contains a graphic account of the destruction of Sodom. Elaborating the theme of cleanness, the poet advocates not only sexual purity but also right conduct and respect for God's will. Exhortations to clean behavior are conventional; less expected are the poem's bold censure of “unclean” sexual acts, especially sodomy, and insistence that the clergy maintain vigilant surveillance of sexual wrongdoing. A poem with a salacious cast, Cleanness takes unusual risks in describing sodomy while denouncing it. Using Foucault's “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses,” I analyze Cleanness in relation to contemporary manuals of confession, which avoid mentioning sodomy for fear that the word might encourage the act. The poem's description of Sodom concludes with a construction of the feminine that serves as a corrective to the sins of male lust.

“El celoso extremeño” is one of the most widely read tales in Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares. The story—a variation on the tale of the old man with a young bride—has been analyzed in the contexts of the Hispano-Arabic tradition (e.g., Américo Castro) and of the European humanist tradition (e.g., Alban Forcione). This essay attempts to develop a reading that identifies, and comes to terms with, the novella's numerous allusions to the Americas. Three neglected circumstances motivated this reading: “El celoso extremeño” takes place in Seville (the city that enjoyed an official monopoly on traffic between Spain and the New World in Cervantes's time), centers on the government of an isolated community of racially diverse women, and begins and ends with a character's departure for the Indies. The essay speculates that Spain's early colonial experience may have influenced and informed the debates concerning domestic social relations on the peninsula.

My title is meant to pose a real question. It's an old question, but it is worth asking why the anxiety betrayed by the question has been around for so long, and especially why it has spiked in recent years. The question expresses a worry that nobody reads much poetry, or that few people do, or that the right people don't at the right times or in the right ways. So it's a real question to which it's difficult to give a real answer, since the sane response to such anxiety tends to be either “You're right to worry, since nobody reads poetry these days” or “Don't worry; lots of people do. You just haven't noticed.” In her 2006 address as outgoing president of the MLA, Marjorie Perloff gave a little of both responses. “Out in the world beyond the academy, individual poets are warmly celebrated …,” Perloff told her audience (654). Don't worry, in other words. On the other hand, do worry, since that “beyond” means that those gathered—that is, literary critics, members of the MLA, all of us in that room or reading this journal—have not noticed such warm popular celebrations because we are the ones who don't read poetry these days or who don't read it in the right ways. “A specter is haunting the academy, the specter of literature,” Perloff warned us, turning worry into revolutionary foreboding (658). We sat back in our seats, reassured. Oh good, we thought, poetry is about to make a comeback.

The term transnationalism is used frequently in reference to the rapid circulation of “capital, labor, technology, and media images” in the global economy governed by postindustrial capitalism (Sharpe 110). When incorporated into such phrases as transnational capitalism, the term implies a critical view of historically specific late modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and consumption for neocolonial ends. By the same token, transnationalism is often used to suggest counterhegemonic practices prompted by or accompanying the migrations and diasporas occasioned by these new economic processes of globalization. Thus, Homi Bhabha's privileging of “cultural hybridity” as a way to resist global homogenization is often traceable to his emphasis on “migrant workers,” who are “part of the massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world” and thus “embody […] that moment blasted out of the continuum of history” (8). If these new, exploited cosmopolitans experience every day their dislocation from the familiar boundaries of nation, first language, and citizenship, they may also be particularly able to comprehend how to negotiate transnational situations, even in some cases turning such circumstances to their advantage.

The aesthetic definition of monstrosity underwent a change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from a concept of deformity to a notion of monstrosity as too much life. Scientific discourse between 1780 and 1830 was preoccupied with the idea of a living principle that could distinguish living matter from nonliving, and the physiologist John Hunter posited an even more speculative “principle of monstrosity” as an extension of the formative capacity. Such monstrosity did not remain on the level of theory but became the motivating force for a new kind of monster in the literature of the Romantic period. Keats's Lamia emerges here as the consummate Romantic monster—a vision of life conceived beyond the material fact of organization. Viewed in this light, Lamia, no mere narrative swerve from Keats's epic ambitions, is a brilliant if tragic response to the question of what it means to “[d]ie into life.”

An enormously popular narrative device, speaking objects were used frequently in eighteenth-century British fiction to express authorial concerns about the circulation of books in the public sphere. Relating the speaking object to the author's status in a print culture, works featuring such narrators characteristically align authorship, commodification, and national acculturation. The objects celebrate their capacity to exploit both private and public systems of circulation, such as libraries, banks, booksellers' shops, highways, and taverns. Linking storytelling to commodities and capital, they convey an implicit theory of culture in which literary dissemination, economic exchange, and public use appear homologous. But as object narratives dramatize, such circulation estranges modern authors from their work. Far from mediating between private and public experience or synthesizing national and cosmopolitan values, these narratives record the indiscriminate consumption that characterizes the public sphere in a print culture.

As the daughter of two notorious Romantic rebels and as the wife of a third, Mary Shelley was encouraged from her youth to “enrol [herself] on the page of fame,” to prove herself by her pen and her imagination. But since Shelley also wanted to conform to the more conventional feminine model—to be modest, self-effacing, and devoted to a family rather than to a career—she developed a prevalent ambivalence toward self-assertion. In the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, this ambivalence surfaces in her criticism of the egotistic imagination and in the grotesque but sympathetic monster that symbolizes its essence; the 1831 revision applies this judgment more forcefully to her own youthful “transgression.” Nevertheless, by characterizing the artist as the victim of an uncontrollable destiny, Shelley also sanctions the very self-expression she professes to regret and elevates the dilemma of the female artist to the status of myth.

An examination of the similarities between the experience of reading and the transference process of psychoanalysis demonstrates that, by activating the mechanisms of projection and identification, reading literature can function to re-form the self. After outlining the general workings of the self, we look at those elements that are called into play by engaged reading, showing how reading can serve to alter both cognitive structures and the deep structures of the self. Like successful psychoanalysis, a literary text often evokes grandiose aspiration and later frustrates the most unrealistic avenues of that aspiration, thereby decommissioning those routes of desire and behavior. And just as psychoanalysis develops more fulfilling patterns of desire and action through the patient's identification with new ego ideals offered by the analyst, so reading can promote such structural changes through identification with characters and personae of literary texts.

In the career of the once famous and now all but forgotten Oxford philologist F. Max Muller we may trace not only the changed assumptions about language brought about in the nineteenth century by comparative or scientific philology but also some of the subversive consequences of those assumptions for Victorian ideas of literature and culture. Muller succeeded with his audiences because he was able to reassure them that in the new linguistic order language remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. His highly idiosyncratic and unstable blending of Romantic idealism, linguistics, religious humanism, and pulpit oratory, however, ultimately assured his failure as a linguistic scientist.

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)

Scholars in American studies are generally skeptical of the notion of working within or for the nation-state, for three primary reasons: the alleged eclipse of the nation-state by multinational capitalism, the undesirability of limiting American studies parochially to the study of the United States, and the history of collusion between United States intellectuals and the Central Intelligence Agency during the cold war. This essay argues that although contemporary American studies has done well to reject the American exceptionalism that once defined the field and is rightly averse to engaging in covert international propaganda operations, scholars in American studies need to ask whether the field's rejection of the nation-state might not coincide with rather than resist the movements of global capital and thus to reconsider the importance of the state (in the United States and elsewhere) as a site of intellectual engagement and activism.

Emotions, and truths, are in crisis. in 2005, halfway through the stunning legacy of the bush-cheney-rumsfeld trifecta, stephen colbert kicked off the debut of The Colbert Report and his parodic critique of mendacious politicians and news outlets like Fox by popularizing the notion of “truthiness.” Welcome to the brave new world where felt truths replace facts! The concept of truthiness spread like wildfire, capturing the global zeitgeist. The public crisis of faith in traditionally trusted sources of authority reflects a profound skepticism experienced by many around the world besides discerning dissidents: all we are certain of is that truths proffered by governments, the media, and corporations are constructions (Boler, “Daily Show”; Boler with Turpin). But when we add to this mix the interests of corporate capitalism and science in designing citizens, can we even trust truthiness, what “I feel… to be true”? Or, as Samantha asks in the film Her, “Am I feeling these feelings? Are they mine? Or are they programmed?”

Postcolonial discussion of culture revolves around the twin poles of authenticity and creolization, which are not descriptions of culture but rhetorical constructs used to win the adherence of the members of a community. These metaphors are valid insofar as they convince community members to adopt a certain identity. Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, a postcolonial novel set in the early colonial era, supports my contention that cultural identity has always been constructed by such appeals. The priest Ezeulu invents the tradition that he upholds, and in so doing he (unintentionally) permits the consensual writing of a tragedy in which an authentic identity is lost. The experience of colonization is configured by the community of Umuaro as a tragedy but by the novel as the writing of a tragedy. I emphasize the community's capacity to write a cathartic narrative.

When, in 1990, Gustavo Pérez Firmat asked, “Do the Americas have a common literature?” He was responding to a fledgling critical endeavor that had been pioneered during the previous decade in only a handful of studies, by such Latin Americanists and literary comparatists as M. J. Valdés, José Ballón, Bell Gale Chevigny, Gari Laguardia, Vera Kutzinski, Alfred Owen Aldridge, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (“Cheek” 2). Although “inter-American literary studies”—the comparative investigation of the “literatures and cultures of this hemisphere” as one unit of study—seemed to Pérez Firmat “something of a terra incognita” in 1990 (“Cheek” 1–2), the hemispheric conception of American studies had originated in the United States some sixty years earlier with the Berkeley historian Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870–1953), who argued, in his seminal 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, for an “essential unity” in the history of the Western hemisphere (472). Although the contributing historians in Lewis Hanke's 1964 collection of essays Do the Americas Have a Common History? gave this “Bolton Thesis” a decidedly mixed review, the thesis provided the inspiration for Pérez Firmat's landmark collection and a starting point for much subsequent hemispheric scholarship. Meanwhile, inter-American studies has had a strong tradition in Europe that is, in fact, older than Pérez Firmat's or Hanke's collection. As early as the 1950s, the eminent Italian Americanist Antonello Gerbi was publishing his groundbreaking works in comparative hemispheric and Atlantic history, which studied the early modern polemic about the degenerative influences the New World environments had on plants, animals, and humans. Also, Hans Galinsky, at the University of Mainz, was exploring the literature of the European discovery and aesthetic forms such as the baroque in the early Americas from a comparative perspective in the 1960s.