In this essay, I examine Colley Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III (1699) to explore the intersections between celebrity and surveillance in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on vocabularies from performance studies, disability studies, theater history, and literary studies, I theorize a strategy of self-representation that England's first modern celebrities developed to maintain their fame while protecting their privacy from the spectators' anatomizing gaze. Cibber used his performance of Richard's disabled body to disrupt his spectators' attempts to characterize or categorize his identity. By displaying a body that demanded attention at the same time that it defied Enlightenment grammars of behavior—and by publishing literary self-representations littered with misspelled words and blotted pages—Cibber became an early practitioner of “overexpression,” a strategy that allowed him to make himself visible without becoming vulnerable to his public's attempts to interpret, dissect, and disseminate the secrets of his private life.

In the summer of 1814 a group of young men who had known each other in the campaigns of the War of Liberation formed a literary circle in Berlin. They were Count von Kalckreuth, Count von Blankensee, and Wilhelm Hensel (later the celebrated painter who married Fanny Mendelssohn). They soon drew into their group two kindred spirits, Wilhelm von Studnitz and Wilhelm Müller. Müller was the youngest, but was recognized as having the choicest talents, and he became the leader of the group, which was held together by the strong bonds of personal friendship and a common love of poetry. In 1815 they published a volume of their united poems under the title “Bundesblüthen,” which contains the first fruits of Müller's gifts. A somewhat extended search through university libraries in Germany failed to disclose the book, and on going to Berlin I was disappointed that it was not entered among Müller's works in the catalogue of the Royal Library. One day while reading the book-titles under the numerous “Wilhelm Müllers” who occur in that catalogue, I found a cross-reference to the book among the works of quite a different individual. The volume is dated “Berlin 1816. In der Maurerschen Buchhandlung.” I later found another copy (preserving the original cover of blue paper) in the British Museum. Müller's contributions include 20 titles, as follows:

1. An die Leser, 173.

2. Morgenlied am Tage der ersten Schlacht, 174.

3. Erinnerung und Hoffnung, 176.

4. Leichenstein meines Freundes Ludwig Bornemann, 179.

5. Dithyramb. Geschrieben in der Neujahrsnacht 1813, 183.

6. Die zerbrochene Zither. Romanze, 190.

7. Der Verbannte. Romanze, 193.

8. Der Ritter und die Dirne. Romanze, 195.

9. Die Blutbecher. Romanze, 199.

10. Das Band. Romanze, 203.

11. Ständchen, 205.

12. Der Kuss, 207.

13. Der Zephyr, 207.

14. Die erste Rose, 208.

15. Die letzte Rose, 208.

16. Mailiedehen, 209.

17. AmorsTriumph, 210.

18. Weckt sie nicht, 211.

19. Ihr Schlummer, 212.

20. Epigramme:

1. 1. Weihe, 213.

2. 2. Amor und die Muse, 213.

3. 3. Lenz und Amor, 213.

4. 4. Mars und Amor, 214.

5. 5. Apollo als Schäfer, 215.

6. 6. Gruss des Winters, 215.

7. 7. Auf einen Sternseher, 217.

8. 8. Auf den Dichter Krispin, 217.

9. 9.-18. Auf denselben, 217-220.

The reading habits of the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity, and Patience remain a fascinating and fruitful field of study. Much has been written about the books the poet read, or may have read, but it is unlikely that the catalogue of books owned or read by him has by any means been completely reconstructed. Of the books he certainly knew, the Vulgate is of first importance for its influence upon the poet's thought and style. Certain, but less important, are the Romance of the Rose and the French text of Mandeville. Of the books very probably read by him the Divine Comedy stands first, followed by the Vita Nuova and the Convivio, Boccaccio's Olympia, and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. Less probable is his reading of Tertullian's De Patentia and De Jona et Ninive, the Travels of Marco Polo, Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica, the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, the French lapidaries, and a few others still less certain.

In 1776 the russian merchant grigor ivanovich shelikhov outfitted a ship bound from the siberian peninsula of kamchatka to the Aleutian Islands, which dot the sea at the westernmost reach of the North American continent. The expedition would hunt sea otters for trade in China, where the pelts fetched a high price. The same year nearly two hundred Spanish colonists arrived at the presidio in Monterey after a six-month journey from present-day southern Arizona. The expedition, led by Juan Bautista de Anza, aimed to populate northern California as part of Spain's efforts to resist encroachment from the north by Russian merchants like Shelikhov. Meanwhile, also in 1776, the explorer James Cook left England for the South Pacific in Britain's continuing attempt to rival France's scientific discoveries and access to potential trade goods in Asia. Throughout the European Atlantic, publications and translations of Cook's final travel narrative circulated details of the profitable trans-Pacific fur trade that until this point had largely been enjoyed by the Russians. Together, the Shelikhov, Anza, and Cook expeditions illustrate inter-European competition for resources and trade in the eighteenth-century Pacific while also suggesting the extraordinary transcultural, intercontinental, and multilingual reach of those encounters—including exchanges between several European nations (such as Russia, Spain, England, France), a variety of indigenous peoples (including Aleuts, Tlingits, Haidas, Ohlones, Tahitians, Hawaiians), and the inhabitants of and visitors to Canton (among them Chinese merchants and laborers, foreign traders from many European nations, and sailors and slaves from the Philippines, India, and other regions of Asia).

Chimamandaadichie summarizes the current dilemma of the peripheral writer in thetitle of her recent ted talk: “The danger of a Single Story.” The talk's masterly braiding of ethos, pathos, and humor epitomizes the winning formula of this distinctively metropolitan media genre. But Adichie's rhetorical ingenuity interests us not as a cultural spectacle—the scene of a young African writer's anointment by metropolitan brokers as an upcoming “world writer”—but for what it structurally illuminates about the kind of minoritarian literary consciousness that gave birth to the concept of world literature. The speech begins by taking the audience down a well-trodden path, the story of Adichie's beginnings as a young writer in Nigeria—specifically, the naïveté of her childhood compositions: “All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.” How deluded and childish it now seemed to Adichie, this business of putting cloudy skies and sumptuous apples in an African story. Luckily, African novelists like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye already existed to dispel her original disorientation, so that she learned to replace the landscapes of British and American fiction with familiar settings where “people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.”

Throughout his life as teacher, lecturer, and author of numerous articles, as well as in his letters and in his journal, Robert Henri gave vigorous expression to attitudes and ideas which exerted a pervasive and significant influence upon his contemporaries. It will be seen that these ideas were ultimately linked with the great intellectual tradition of American transcendentalism whose leading exponents—Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—explored, among other problems, the persisting cultural dependence of America on Europe and the individual, social, political, and artistic implications of the new democracy. As one writer has stated in commenting upon the movement, “its vitalizing effect upon American art and literature and, indeed, upon the development of American democracy as a whole, remains unrivaled.”

Two arguments about theory and comparative literature have been influential in recent years. on the one hand, there has been much talk of the “death of theory,” or the “end of theory,” or “post-theory” in the humanities. On the other hand, there is a “crisis” of comparative literature, perhaps a perennial condition, if it hasn't culminated in the “death of a discipline.” Under these circumstances, the question “What does the comparative do for theory?” assumes a poignant significance, which depends on what is meant by “comparative” and “theory.” To answer this question, I explore an epistemological category I call “comparativity”—that is, metacomparison or the theoretical potential of comparison—in contrast to the usual term “comparison.” If there is a crisis of comparative literature, it may be because we have moved too far from thinking comparativity as a way of knowing and engaging the world. Epistemology does not precede ontology, or ethics, or politics, but it is deeply involved in all of them. In this paper, I will argue for comparativity as at once an epistemological and metaepistemological mode of inquiry. Comparativity cannot be displaced or replaced by another disciplinary way of thinking, for comparativity is a trans- and metadisciplinary thought process, which by virtue of its self-critical reflexivity applies to all humanistic studies. My focus is therefore on the theoretical implications of comparativity.

Lamb's Shakespearean criticism unfortunately survives as an injunction not to perform the plays. This is an oversimplification of a carefully reasoned critical opinion. An assessment of all of his Shakespearean criticism demonstrates that it is derived from an awareness of the limitations of the London theater of Lamb's time and of its audience, and by extension, of the limitations inherent in transforming any script into performance. Relying on clumsy scenery in enormous theaters, having to please an audience that did not easily distinguish between art and life, allowing star-system actors to employ melodramatic techniques (e.g., exploiting a certain comic self-dramatization inherent in some Shakespearean heroes and villains), working from freely cut or “improved” texts of Shakespeare's plays–all helped convince Lamb (1) that “the plays are made another thing by being [thus] acted,” and (2) that no foreseeable production could extract all the imaginative richness available to a reader of an uncut text.

This essay provides a revisionary interpretation of one of the most important treatments of emotion (and its relation to reason) in the early period of modern European vernacular literature, Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”). According to the prevailing interpretation, the poem denigrates love as an animal power, a subhuman force that destroys our properly human rationality. Reading the poem's treatment of love in the light of Averroës's views, especially as presented in his Long Commentary on Aristotle's De anima, reveals that Cavalcanti celebrates love as paradigmatic of human reason, part and parcel of one's leading a rational and therefore human life. Love, the operation of a rational power that is mortal (not immortal) and natural (not supernatural), is for human beings the “perfect good,” the full extent of our flourishing and the best for which we can hope.

This essay argues that Edwin Abbott's Flatland brings into focus the wide-ranging implications of the dethroning of what Victorians regarded as the preeminent representational system: Euclidean geometry. The contemporary debate surrounding the challenge to Euclid, conducted not just in mathematical but also in psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic terms, turned on an anxiety that signs might not have the capacity to bridge subjective and objective worlds, and Flatland seeks solace for this uncertainty by granting even empty signs unprecedented virtues.

From Comparative Literature to Cultural Renewal: Georg Brandes's 1872 Introduction to Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature

“The only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate.” These words ring out in the first published version of a lecture Georg Brandes gave at the University of Copenhagen on 3 November 1871. The lecture was the introduction to a series that changed the course not only of his life but also of Scandinavian and European cultural history. Born in Copenhagen in 1842 to assimilated Jewish parents, Brandes had recently completed a dissertation on French aesthetics and literary criticism and hoped that his lecture series would allow him to replace Carsten Hauch as professor of aesthetics at the university. Brilliant and iconoclastic, the lectures also responded to the Danish defeat in the 1864 war with Prussia, portraying Danish literature and culture as morbidly inward and insular. Brandes urged his countrymen to look abroad, to traditions such as the French, whose literature included many notable writers who grappled with social and political issues, especially those who came of age during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830.