Herman Melville began his literary career as the author of popular, presumably ephemeral works. He employed fiction for its entertainment value and, though he was a storyteller of genius, had no respect for the fictional mode. His view of authorship changed and his ambitions expanded over time, but his basic distrust of, and lack of interest in, fiction remained constant—may even have grown stronger—in his works. He accepted an Emersonian view of fiction as an impediment to the direct utterance of truth and found the requirements of fiction—story, character, point of view—a limitation and a distortion of the absolute expression for which he strove. Melville’s impatience with, and lack of regard for, the mode of fiction can be traced through his works from 1846 to 1857, after which he ceased to write for a large public.

The present study is an attempt to examine the growth of use of the progressive, or expanded, tense system in Modern English. The shades of significance of the system have been minutely analyzed by Jespersen, Curme, and others. Jespersen's explanation of the form as taking its rise in the preposition on + the gerund after the verb to be (fused with the use of be + the ing participle) seems unchallenged. But the frequency of use is yet another matter.

We have recently been growing more aware of the differences between oral cultures and literate cultures. The effects on modes of thought inherent in the successive media of expression—oral speech, analphabetic writing, alphabetic writing, letterpress printing, the electronic media, wired and wireless—have been studied in some detail, and we know something of the effect of (alphabetic) writing on the ability to perform abstract analysis and to exercise individually controlled thinking as against communally controlled thinking.

In the field of medical imaging, theory, technique, and rhetoric converge to produce knowledge. Historical taboo and cultural belief in the fragility of life have protected the interior of the human body from the scientist's prying eyes; nevertheless, in the modern period (since about 1540), the production of medical knowledge has depended on the unveiling of physical detail. Recent work in the sociology of science—notably Bruno Latour's concept of the theater of proof—has questioned this epistemology. Latour argues that scientific knowledge can be produced by superimposing data that create an effect of reality. To illuminate traditional strategies for constructing convincing accounts of hidden biological processes, I examine texts by Andreas Vesalius, William Beaumont, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. I then discuss an advertisement for a contemporary medical-imaging device that, by foregrounding the superimposition of diagnostic data, provides a useful counterexample to the constructed objectivity of the earlier texts.

The Canterbury Tales is the culmination of a frame tradition that originated and developed in Arabia, not in the West. The Arabic practice of enclosing tales within a frame may be explained by principles of organization peculiar to medieval Arabic literature, art, music, and mathematics: a preference for concreteness, a stress on autonomous elements, and a reliance on external organizing devices. Most Arabic literature emphasizes the individual unit; frames remain open-ended and inconclusive and rarely determine the subject or form of any included part. Although many Western characteristics are present in medieval European frame narratives like the Disciplina Clericalis, the Decameron, and the Confessio Amantis, those works, nonetheless, reveal themselves as continuations of the Arabic tradition. Even the Canterbury Tales, with all its subtle artistry, retains qualities typical of its Arabic ancestors, notably the controlling travelpilgrimage motif, the pointedly random order of tales, and the prominent authorial personality.

The old question: Why did Milton's Adam and Eve disobey the Divine Commandment? continues to provoke conflicting answers and consequently diverse accounts of the meaning of Paradiae Lost. That Milton's epic is, like King Laar, or Faust, or Moby Dick, a work able to sustain many seemingly-contrary interpretations—that in fact it contains them all to some degree—is clear to anyone who will reread the poem at intervals, following the lead first of one and then another critical guide. But this richness of implication has obscured the real logical handicap assumed by anyone who attempts to find the ultimate origins of the narrative action in what is familiar to us as occasion or motivation—in a word, in cause.

Foucault's work has been investigated from within the Western intellectual tradition. My study approaches it from outside that tradition, from the perspective of Oriental thought. Oriental concepts were appropriated by the Western counterculture of the sixties and were espoused by associates of Tel quel when Foucault began to develop his radically subversive critique of Western discourse formation. Eastern models appear to have shaped his own discourse to such an extent that they function as a concealed subtext in his work. He criticizes the West for its anthropocentrism and logocentrism, its antagonistic dialectics, and its confidence in an unlimited advance of systematic knowledge. Foucault's enterprise is grounded in Oriental, chiefly Buddhist, systems that emphasize a progressive decentering of the individual through praxis rather than theory, a logic of coexisting opposites, a paradoxical language, and a knowledge unattainable through logocentric rationality.

A textual edition can be read as a cultural performance if one considers its interlaced linguistic and bibliographical codes as monumentalizing rhetoric, opening the textual space of the edition into the social space of its production, distribution, and reception. Mary Shelley's 1824 edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Posthumous Poems and the pirated volume published by the radical William Benbow in 1826 each produce what might be called a “rhetoric of Shelley,” a product of—and participant in — a larger set of social discourses and mechanisms of cultural reproduction. Whereas Mary Shelley's edition was successful, however, Benbow's “illegitimate” edition was not. Derwent Coleridge's discussion of Benbow's piracy reveals how the failure to appropriate Shelley for radical discourse could be claimed not merely as a justification of the “purity” of Shelley's poetry but also as what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “sociodicy,” the justification of an entire social hierarchy. (NF)

The traditional history of the rhyme royal stanza in early English literature, including its earliest attribution to James I of Scotland, needs reexamination. The name was apparently first recorded by Gascoigne in 1575, and, while no evidence exists to connect it with James I, the stanza itself was used in fourteenth-century poetic contests to address real or imaginary royalty. It appears in royal entry ceremonies, as illustrated by a text surviving from York in 1486. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address, as in the Parlement and the Troilus, but later, in the Canterbury Tales, as a characterizing device. The word “prose,” which he uses to describe the verse of the Man of Law's Tale, has been universally misread. It actually refers here to formal stanzas of equal length, and it must be read as the first attempt to create a poetic high style in English literature.

Traditionally, criticism on Phillis Wheatley has emphasized her conformity to neoclassic conventions, failing to explore the depth of her commitment to Western culture or her resistance to colonial society. Building on recent studies that have focused on Wheatley's use of double voicing to mediate racial and political issues in her poetry, I examine how Wheatley exploits neoclassic conventions to rage at the limitations she felt prevented her from practicing her vocation fully. Wheatley sought to authorize her poetry in a culture that refused to legitimize her talent and accomplishments. Throughout her oeuvre she insists on her paradoxical identity as an “Afric muse” and stresses the peculiar spiritual and epistemic authority this oxymoronic identity gives her. Wheatley could not condemn her forcible transport to America, despite her abhorrence of slavery. Enlarged as well as oppressed by her society, she experienced a clash of competing ethnic allegiances that for her became a fructifying authenticity.

The Promulgation, in 1812, of the Constitution of Cadiz provoked throughout Spain and her domains a bitter controversy between the opponents and the partisans of that liberal and innovative body of legislation. Among the supporters in Mexico City was José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827), who, as soon as the Constitution went into effect there, established a sheet, El Pensador Mexicano (1812–14), with the avowed purpose of defending the new form of government and of praising its liberal provisions, particularly those granting freedom of the press and abolishing the Inquisition. His first article began with an exlamation: “¡Gracias a Dios y la nueva Constitutión que ya nos vamos desimpresionando de algunos errores que nos tenían enterrados nuestros antepasados!” But, in spite of the freedom of the press, the Viceroy ordered his arrest, and some months in jail dampened his enthusiasm; he continued, however, his periodical as well as its successor, the Alacena de Frioleras (1815), with articles of a less controversial nature, until the end of that year. Continually in difficulty with the censors after 1814, when the Constitution was abrogated by Ferdinand VII, he finally limited himself to the writing of fiction until the reestablishment of the Constitution in 1820. During this period he produced four novels, one of which, El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), is his masterpiece. While the characters and setting of this novel are definitely Mexican, with certain autobiographical elements, the mold in which it is cast is that of the Spanish picaresque. Like its prototype in general, the Periquillo is concerned with matters of a purely ethical nature; but this aspect of the novel is less impressive—in contrast, for example, with Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache or the novels of Francisco Santos—than the wealth of ideas in regard to definite reforms that the author believes would contribute to the general welfare. These ideas, interwoven with incidents in the life of a picaro, did not originate with the author but reflect wide reading in many fields. To point out the sources of these ideas, and thereby fathom the intellectual background of Lizardi, is the object of this article.

Faced with the question “whom are you writing for?” I would have to say, no specific audience. But I do not want to create an audience either, a goal that for a scholar-critic would be unachievable anyway. I have neither written a textbook for students nor promulgated any partisan interest, for I have no political agenda. Furthermore, I have always painstakingly avoided playing up to fashion. Do I then write for my peers only? If not, what is the purpose of my scholarly engagement? There is no doubt that one would like to have readers. However. does an intended readership set the guidelines, or does one want to communicate something to potential readers? Audience-related writing is to a large extent conditioned by what one assumes to be adequate, beneficial, opportune, necessary, advantageous, and also enlightening for those whom one addresses. This holds true even if the appeal is critical because, more often than not, criticism is meant to make the audience aware of what they can do to improve their situation. Thus audience-related writing is basically affirmative, and affirmation presupposes an indisputable knowledge to be transmitted. I am not one of those critics who set out to provide corroborative evidence for special causes, such as nowadays often motivate politically inspired audiences.

Performance as a genre allows for alternative mappings, providing a set of strategies and conventions that allow scholars to see practices that scripted genres might occlude. Like other genres, performance encompasses a broad range of rehearsed and codified behaviors, such as dance, theater, music recitals, sports events, and rituals. A performance lens allows scholars to look at acts, things, and ideas as performance. Looking at America as performance might explain why it is difficult to approach it as a disciplinary field of study. What might the shift in genres—from the scripted genres associated with the archive to the live, embodied behaviors that are the repertoire of cultural practices—enable? This essay proposes that an analysis of the performance of America might allow scholars to rethink not only their object of analysis but also their scholarly interactions.

Shaped by a history of mobilities, displacements, and creolizing processes, the Caribbean is a significant testing ground for theories concerning the circulation and remapping of genre. Taking Patrick Chamoiseau's theory of generic wandering as my point of departure, I argue that his Solibo Magnifique exemplifies the principle of generic creolization. This is evident in the novel's intermixing of the detective novel, film noir, the spaghetti western, the comic book, the hard-boiled crime novel, and creole storytelling techniques. By manipulating the conventions by which the classical detective, the hard-boiled police officer, and the private investigator are characterized, Chamoiseau's narrative turns from an investigation into one man's death to an interrogation of Martinique, its history and the workings of its neocolonial psyche. Through the example of Solibo Magnifique and its radiating influence on other postcolonial crime writers, I conclude that this principle of creative creolization is increasingly relevant to understanding a world in which genre's radiating and rhizomic web of mobilities involves local and global confluences.

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.

It is now customary among the most advanced students of modern education to divide the area of collegiate studies into the three great departments of Science, Philosophy, Language and Literature. Although within the sphere of a liberal training there are some studies not strictly included in this division, it is for all practical purposes a convenient and comprehensive one. It is with the last of these three departments that the present paper will deal. We mean by English,—the English Language and Literature as including, also, the subject of English style and criticism. The place of English as thus defined among other collegiate branches is one of the many open questions before the educators and the educated public of to-day. It is a question so prominent and so urgently pressing for discussion and adjustment, that it must in some way be met. In the recent Modern Language Convention held at Columbia College, N.Y., it elicited special interest and clearly indicated the drift of modem opinion regarding it. It is the object of the present informal discussion to say a word on its behalf, if so be the department of English in our American Colleges may be more truly appreciated and a more generous provision be made for its needs.

On 27 February 2009, The Essays for this PMLA issue on war were coming in, against a background of various wars. The Iraq War had claimed over 100,000 civilian lives. The newly elected Obama administration vowed to amp up efforts in Afghanistan. The rubble in Gaza still smoldered from the recent Israeli attacks. The ongoing conflict in Darfur had already left 300,000 people dead, not to mention the 2.5 million displaced. When President George W. Bush left office, his boundless war on terror had exacted more lives, money, civil-liberty concessions, and international goodwill than one could even begin to tally. These were just the newsworthy wars that happened to be featured that month in the New York Times. Other, “low-intensity” wars—the devastating fighting in East Congo, the ongoing Zapatista uprising, Colombia's fifty-year-old armed conflict, Sri Lanka's civil war, and similar struggles—simmered on the back burner. The topic of war seemed as urgent that February morning as it had two years earlier, when the editors proposed this special issue. Ironically, that morning's Times showcased “Weekend at War” in its Escapes section (Sokol). The oversize image showed a crowded ballroom full of happy dancers in World War II outfits swinging to a big band orchestra—the uniforms, insignia, hats, hairdos all conjured up another time. The caption read, “It's winter 2009, but for hundreds of reenactors, it's December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.”