In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).

Poets writing in English frequently use the simple present form of action verbs where the progressive form would be more natural in speech. Probably they do so in order to take advantage of overtones resident in the simple form, overtones that permit a physical action to seem timeless yet permanent, pastlike yet edging toward the future, repeatable yet provisional, urgent yet distant, ceremonious and archaic. Never quite a stage direction, and different in feeling even from temporally unlocated past tense verbs, the action verb cast in the lyric present tense serves every epoch of English literary history differently but is always expressive of the poets' deepest perceptions and fears. An appendix reports and comments on an extensive survey of the frequency with which British and American poets have used progressive forms.

Since the mid-1980s, lyric has been stigmatized by its association with the New Criticism. This circumstance raises the question whether an ideology can be assigned to a text on the basis of the text's identification with a particular genre or school of critical thought. Observing several recent critical constructions of the ideology of lyric, both hostile and sympathetic, I argue that the act of identifying lyric as either an oppositional genre or a reactionary one encourages oversimplification of the term's history and criticism and desensitizes readers to the ideological diversity of texts identified as lyrical.

Literary criticism thrives on the distinction between first and second reading, on what is often parsed as absorptive reading versus critical reading, belletristic versus analytic reading. It sets itself against the idea that a irst reading of a text might be the one in which we have “seen [it] well”-on the assumption that critical insight is belated (Emerson 476). “As scholars, we read lengthy texts [such as novels] sequentially; then, in order to write, we inevitably reread recursively,” which has the efect, as the critic Michaela Bronstein goes on to observe, of producing conlicted conceptions of the novel as either “a static object (a form) or an experience in time” (77). One goal of literary criticism would appear to be to keep readers from lingering in that temporal and immersive irst reading in order to arrive at an assessment of the total work. First reading and critique are viewed as largely anathema; second thoughts inspire us to relinquish irst impressions, in a process of questioning and revision infused with a spirit of skepticism and doubt. here is an air of supersession- something vanguardist-about critique, but as Bronstein also points out, “the purpose of rereading need not be to revise the irst reading from an analytic distance. . . . Close reading [can use] the recursive process of analysis to approach, rather than to erase, sequential reading” (78). I take Bronstein's projection of a literary criticism that accounts for rather than dismisses the absorptive aspects of irst reading as an accurate description of Rita Felski's project in The Limits of Critique, a manifesto that calls on literature scholars to recommit to “care or concern for [aesthetic] phenomena” (107). Felski makes the case for a pragmatist phenomenology and calls her method for its achievement “postcritique,” a mode of reading that declines to unmask, demystify, interrogate, subvert, or expose the literary text (the habit of generations of recent critics). Postcritique means to expand the uses of literature beyond that of marking an absence or an insufficiency, returning readers to the values that drew them to the literary work of art in the first place (“aesthetic pleasure, increased selfunderstanding, moral relection, perceptual reinvigoration, ecstatic self- loss, emotional consolation, or heightened sensation” [188]).

Much recent thought in the humanities has been devoted to understanding the contours and character of the global economic collapse approaching its fifth year (unless it is approaching its fortieth, a matter to which we will return). The interplay of social arrangements and political economy has of late taken on an urgency and inescapability impossible to overstate-not least because within higher education it is humanities programs that are most readily threatened with amputation, if not elimination, and are expected to prostrate themselves before economic rationales in their struggles for survival.

For me, entering this profession involved the broader context of native american and indigenous studies as well as native American literary studies. My scholarship, pedagogy, and professional connections have relied on a synergy between texts as Native authors have crafted them and the social, political, and experiential contexts from which those authors and their texts emerged. Though plenty of work in Native literary studies does not draw on the broader field of Native studies, my own approach has most often placed me firmly in the overlapping space between the two.

For some time Webster's Duchess of Malfi has been interpreted by reference to brother-sister incest, but that explanation has not been well integrated with other concerns in the play, nor has its sheer presence been questioned. Anthropological kinship theory, however, which conceives incest as a social act, reveals relations among the brother-sister plot, the play's major thematic element of social mobility, and the Jacobean setting from which the theme arose. Seen in this anthropological light, social-structural relations come into view among Ferdinand's incestuous inclination, his sister's cross-class marriage, and Antonio's and Bosola's upward social mobility. These relations in turn show how the play is grounded in its particular historical setting, at a time of substantial changes in notions of social role, changes that helped make visible the social determination of personal identity.

The last decade or so has seen an explosion of interest in “mediterranean studies.” a half century after the original publication of Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949), scholars in a number of disciplines have once again found the Mediterranean a productive category of analysis, as evidenced in a proliferation of conferences, edited volumes, journals, and study centers. This renewal of Mediterranean studies is part of an upsurge of interest in “oceanic studies,” or, alternatively, “the new thalassology” In recent years, as Kären Wigen writes,

[h]istorians of science have documented the discovery of longitude and the plumbing of underwater depths; historians of ideas have mapped the conceptual geographies of beaches, oceans, and islands; historians of labor and radical politics have drawn arresting new portraits of maritime workers and pirates; historians of business have tracked maritime commerce; historians of the environment have probed marine and island ecologies; and historians of colonial regimes and anticolonial movements alike have asserted the importance of maritime arenas of interaction. (717)

In the field of medieval literature, on the other hand, “Mediterranean studies” has found much less purchase. An MLA database search for the keywords “Mediterranean” and “medieval” or “Middle Ages” yields a total of thirty-two entries, over half of which treat topics in intellectual or art history. Taking that asymmetry as a point of departure, this essay explores the different ways “medieval Mediterranean literature” might be conceived; how it would relate to the study of the medieval Mediterranean in other disciplines; and what linguistic, thematic, and theoretical modifications or challenges it would offer to the field of literature as currently configured.

By rejecting Wonderland and the world behind the Looking-Glass, Alice is rejecting not only the horrifying chaos of meaninglessness but the liberating chaos of comedy as well. Thus, the tone of the Alice books is ambivalent in relation to the protagonist. Insofar as Alice suggests a child taking a well-earned revenge on adult silliness or defeating the anarchy of the subconscious, she is supported. But she just as often appears either as an insensitive child, rudely attacking the gentle and the kindly, or simply as a human being, deeply corrupted by her obsession with nothingness, predation, and death. The presence of almost uncontrolled hostility in the Alice books has been noted, but the fact that this malice is often directed at Alice has not. And it is just this tonal ambivalence which makes these books so baffling and complex.

Critics have argued that Adam in Book ix of Paradise Lost is responsible for Eve's fall in that he permitted her to go forth alone on the fatal morning. This view of indirect responsibility may not be consonant, however, with Milton's doctrine of individual responsibility enunciated elsewhere in the poem. Neither God in Book iii, Raphael in Books v-viii, nor the Son in Book ximplies that Adam's headship over Eve requires that he control absolutely his wife's actions. If his function as husband was not to restrain Eve, then he can hardly be found delinquent for not having done so. Eve, though inferior to Adam, should not be thought incomplete without him and thereby unable to bear the responsibility of resisting Satan alone. Eve's intellectual inferiority does not make her more susceptible to sin, for Milton has shown repeatedly in Paradise Lost that nothing in a creature's innate being predisposes him to sin and that, moreover, it is not intellectual prowess which enables a creature to repulse sin, but love and allegiance to God. Thus, each creature is responsible individually for his own obedience. It is incompatible with the meaning of the entire poem to suppose that Eve was only conditionally responsible to God and therefore, when separated from Adam, unable to succeed against Satan.

Why should comparison be an act laden with ethical obligation? Readers of ethnic literatures have long insisted that doing justice to these literatures must be a tenet central to work calling itself ethnic studies. I argue for a renewal of that sense of obligation: the difference of ethnicity is an occasion for articulating, juxtaposing, and reworking the relations among otherwise separate ethnic literary traditions. To the extent that difference follows a logic of intertextuality–one of crossing, exchange, and perpetual expansiveness–it enables reading ethnic literatures together even as it emphasizes the ethical difficulties of such a reading practice. From the disciplinary discourse of comparative literature to the metatextual commentary in Richard Wright's “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” and ultimately to the pragmatic context of an intertextual reading, this essay seeks to suspend ethnic difference from its position as a point of permanent untouchability. (Y-HW)

The continuing fallout from the theory wars, evident not least in the nostalgic after-theory narrative that is still in vogue, has dissipated critical energy in contemporary literary studies. Rejecting that narrative, this essay calls for a review of the legacy of theory and the polemical oppositions that set it against other scholarly enterprises, like book history. In particular, it suggests that the theoretical interrogation of the category of literature in the past forty years fruitfully intersects with book history's investigation of the material conditions of literary production, opening up new possibilities for literary historiography, while also imposing new demands on it. The essay identifies two traditions of antiessentialist thought (the skeptical and the enchanted), considers the ontology of the printed literary text, and examines the legacies of, among others, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu. (PDMcD)

Gulliver's Travels is a battleground of interpretation, both within and outside the text. Acts of interpretation within Gulliver's Travels—acts of writing and reading texts, of inventing characters for one's fictions and in turn becoming characters in others' fictions—signal a central controversy in eighteenth-century culture, in the relations of language to truth and to power, and in readers' unceasing stratagems for mastering what a text means over and against the human subject it seeks to represent. The epistemological question is thus inescapably also the political question of the fate of human subjects in a public sphere in which they are made objects in others' interpretations and fictions. As “splendide mendax,” Gulliver exemplifies how human attempts to totalize truth are forms of lying as well as expressions of power and, in the absence of these insights, too readily become expressions of injustice and violence.

The figure of the wound is central to Derek Walcott's Omeros, one of the most ambitious works of postcolonial poetry. Walcott grants a European name to the primary bearer of the wound, the black fisherman Philoctete, who allegorizes African Caribbean suffering under European colonialism and slavery. This surprisingly hybrid character exemplifies the cross-cultural fabric of postcolonial poetry but contravenes the assumption that postcolonial literature develops by sloughing off Eurocentrism for indigeneity. Rejecting a separatist aesthetic of affliction, Walcott frees the metaphoric possibilities of the wound as a site of interethnic connection. By metaphorizing pain, he vivifies the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury and at the same time deconstructs the experiential uniqueness of suffering. Knitting together different histories of affliction, Walcott's polyvalent metaphor of the wound reveals the undervalued promise of postcolonial poetry.

Milton scholarship has long regarded chaos in Paradise Lost as hostile to God and creation. This judgment identifies Milton with traditional Western attitudes toward matter and material disorder—evident as early as the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma elish. In contrast to such attitudes, modern science conceives of chaos as dynamically productive of order, and postmodern cultural studies sees chaos as a relevant principle of ironic indeterminacy. Milton anticipates the postmodern endorsement of chaos in his theology of matter and in the symbolic reflections and allegorical representations of chaos in Paradise Lost. Appreciation of chaotic disorder and of indeterminacy and disapproval of the tyrannical suppression of these qualities distinguish Milton's idiosyncratic theology, political theory, and aesthetics. Even Milton's God contains the potency of chaotic matter, a womblike virtue essential to God's creative power.

A number of critics suggest that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature femininity is portrayed as both similar to and different from colonial otherness in ways that destabilize the English woman's relation to empire. Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) presents an opportunity to enrich this discussion because of the novel's synchronization of domestic and colonial authority, sustained attention to the sexual, national, and racial ambiguities posed by transvestites and Creoles, and chaotic variety of events that prohibits political fixity. Following the multiple allusions to “home” and “abroad” in Belinda, I argue that female homoeroticism and miscegenation become analogous dangers and reflect eighteenth-century concerns about the mutability of bodily and colonial boundaries.

The Early Quakers, who liked to call themselves the First Publishers of Truth, swept from the north of England across the nations roughly between 1650 and 1675. And during this same quarter century what we have dubiously labelled “plain” style manifestly supplanted the highly-ornate, rhetorical tradition of English prose which had burgeoned in extravagances of Arcadian rhetoric and Euphuism to flower in the earlier seventeenth century's “Senecan amble.” Clearly, rhetorical analysis can tell us much about the skeletal structure of prose style even in the later years of the century, but it can no longer lay open the center of energy-informing expression, as it can in much earlier prose. The aim of this essay will be to discover those bedrock aspects of expression which are demonstrably homologous with the profoundest conception of life shared by the first Quakers, the most feared and fastest-growing sect of the later seventeenth century, as well as the religious body most neglected by modern students of prose form. The rise of the new “plain” prose has been attributed to the heightened philosophic interest in scepticism, with its pragmatic theories of action; to the intensified interest in empirical science which centered in the Royal Society; and to the rise of a semi-t educated bourgeoisie. But these decades in England's story were characterized most widely by continuous theological debate and exhortations So it would seem probable, granting the convergence of several streams of cause, that the peak swell on which the new prose tradition rode to dominance can most intelligibly be traced to an ultimately theological tide. The literature of early Quakerism is of unparalleled value in testing and illustrating this hypothesis because—with the incalculable human distance between George Fox and William Penn—this evangelistic group cut across all social and educational distinctions, even dimmed the dualism in the rôles of the sexes. Yet when the Quakers pour forth their heart's belief and hope, they do so again and again in the same modes of expression, modes only approximately and infrequently appearing in the sermons and tracts of non-Quaker contemporaries like Everard and Saltmarsh. These characteristics, explained by and explaining the earliest Quaker faith, I should like to call seventeenth-century Quaker style.

Nineteenth-century historians and critics attacked the works of their Enlightenment predecessors as dry, abstract, and overly rational, yet eighteenth-century authors also placed considerable stress on the need for emotional involvement in the reading of history. Using the idea of historical distance, this essay shows that two forms of distance operated in the historical works of this period. On cognitive grounds, Enlightenment historians were committed to a theory of explanation that demanded considerable abstraction. In affective terms, however, the moral psychology of Hume, Smith, and Kames emphasized that history's potential for moral instruction depends on the writer's ability to reduce emotional distance. Actuality rather than exemplarity became the watchword of historical narration as readers were invited to appreciate history in ways that were strongly influenced by the contemporary culture of sensibility.

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the adjective romantisch was a vague and fashionable word denoting the qualities of the unusual, exotic, adventurous, incredible and fantastic. In the last few years of the century, Friedrich Schlegel made it one of his favorite critical terms, used it to denote the specific character of postclassical literature, and thus raised it to the position of primary importance which it has occupied in literary criticism ever since. Why Schlegel selected this term to describe the kind of poetry he wished to foster, and what he meant by it, are therefore questions of considerable consequence. The two most prominent attempts at answering these questions, those of Rudolf Haym and of Arthur O. Lovejoy, though incompatible with each other and made as long ago as 1870 and 1916, have not been superseded by any later investigation. In the meantime, important new sources of information about Schlegel have become available, and a re-examination seems to be called for.

In a letter to Cardinal Newman, written when he was fifty years old, Matthew Arnold mentions four people from whom he is conscious of having learnt—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and Newman himself. Arnold goes on to explain that he does not mean merely receiving a strong impression but actually acquiring “habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me.” Much as he admired Newman, Goethe, and Wordsworth, Arnold's literary fame owes more to Sainte-Beuve than to any other one man. The two volumes of Essays in Criticism, which contain Arnold's most interesting and enduring prose, are a lasting monument to the force of Sainte-Beuve's ideas. Posterity would gladly exchange Arnold's attempts to rationalize religion for a few more volumes of literary essays, but unfortunately, much as he admired Sainte-Beuve, he was too much of an Englishman to follow in Sainte-Beuve's footsteps. Sir Walter Raleigh used to maintain that Arnold was thoroughly unEnglish in his tastes and that he invariably condemned everything that was characteristically British. If that were true he would not have yearned for England as he did whenever he went abroad. Arnold had an unerring eye for national defects, but no man could care more deeply for the welfare of his country. Beneath the gay exterior of the man of the world Arnold was serious to the extent of didacticism. In the letters to his mother he is continually saying that he thinks such and such an article “will do good.” Sainte-Beuve never spared himself in the Causeries du Lundi, but he probably worried more about giving a faithful portrait than about “doing good.”