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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

In her 2003 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Amy Kaplan suggests that current crises have “exposed certain limitations of our available tools” (2). Kaplan's address reflects the move beyond the traditionally nationalist concerns of American studies, but her appeal to think more critically about disciplinary identities and methods at this point in our nation's history has wider implications. Alarmed by the “uncanny mirroring” between the lexicon of the champions of empire and that of its critics, Kaplan urges scholars “to do more than expose the imperialistic appropriation of the name America and then turn away from it” (2, 10). Embracing the transnational turn in American studies, Kaplan calls for a comparative historical approach that recognizes the ideological force of “America” and that understands how “America” “changes shape in relation to competing claims to that name and by creating demonic others, drawn in proportions as mythical and monolithic as the idea of America itself” (11).

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The Perlesvaus, even the most casual reader perceives, is intended to have serious religious significance. Certain of its symbolical adventures have been carefully studied as expressions of Christian doctrine, but no one has yet demonstrated the completeness of its religious symbolism.

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.”

Only in the last decade has the field of medieval french literature recognized the need for a critical gaze that looks outside France and beyond the persistent Eurocentric accounts of medieval French literary history. These accounts long viewed medieval French literary production primarily in relation to the Latin, Celtic, and Provençal traditions. My research over the last twenty years has called for a revisionist history of literature and of empires and has highlighted the fact that throughout the Middle Ages France entertained “inter-imperial” literary relations—not only with European traditions but also with extra-European cultures, specifically with the Islamicate world.

Most studies of working-class culture are based on a content-oriented approach to class. While such a mode of interpretation is useful to an understanding of working-class expression, it often fails to come to terms with the nature of class as a relation. Although hardly a manifesto, this essay argues for a theoretically nuanced reading of class that takes up the challenge of abstraction in a working-class representation. In a series of examples drawn from fiction, poetry, and film, the argument shows the myth of the disappearance of the working class to be a symptom of current problems in representational aesthetics.

Literary theory in the twentieth century was heavily influenced by linguistics. The structuralist model that set the waves of literary theories in motion originated in Saussurean linguistics and its Jakobsonian elaborations. One could argue that until the 1980s all literary theory, and all linguistics for that matter, was based on an analysis of langue, or the system of language or literature or text, to the detriment of parole, the practices, contexts, and negotiations of speakers, writers, and readers. The structuralist model, with its theoretical expansion of close-reading practices, already entrenched in the wake of the New Criticism, generalized the frame of mind that was soon to become the bogeyman of poststructuralist and cultural studies attacks. The formula could be summarized as No history, no ethics, no themes, no aesthetics, and no context—period.

Why do we call certain attitudes, both individual and collective, racist? Why do we list certain discourses—admittedly a very wide range of discourses, which single out, stigmatize, threaten, or discriminate against various human and social groups—as racist? Why do we consider that practices, both spontaneous and institutional, unofficial and officially organized, that in the past and present have resulted in lasting forms of oppression, persistent hostilities and misunderstanding, and sometimes tragic violence in all sorts of societies are racist? To my surprise, this basic and preliminary question is seldom addressed in the huge scholarly and popular literature concerning racism—the old and new forms of racism, the modernity or antiquity of racism, the quantitative and qualitative variations of racism, and so on. Or, better said, the question is addressed only partially and indirectly: the category itself is taken for granted, all the more because the study of racism has become an essential sociological and political object, and what are mainly discussed are different definitions and theories and the conditions of their application. It seems that the very fact that there exists (and has long existed) something called racism, which includes a variety of manifestations, is subject to transformations, and does not purely and simply coincide with violence, not even violence based on collective hatred, need not be questioned. But isn't it necessary to discuss the reasons that we consider this fact obvious?