In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular or Democratick Part of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

Andrew Marvell's “The Garden” foregrounds the role of subtraction in aesthetic creation and seeks to imagine sameness independent of metaphor, similarity, and relation. The poem employs a subtractive poetics that challenges modern presuppositions about the networked, connected essence of literature. It also points to the critical limitations of recent accounts of surface and formalist reading, both of which still present poetry as productive, especially insofar as it heightens attention. For Marvell, in contrast, the value of lyric resides in the ways in which it challenges the dialectical notion of creative destruction and, instead, conceives of an annihilation that does not transform into its more respectable opposite. “The Garden,” then, shows that we and our students are overburdened with connection—that there is too much relation, not too little—and that the function of poetry is to dismantle these links in the interest of creativity.

This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China's connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the Cold War, China's Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West's Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China's short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.

Aliterary analysis of the Eldorado episode in Candide should undertake to answer three interlocking questions: (1) What is its philosophic meaning in relation to the whole? (2) By what artistic devices is that meaning conveyed? (3) How successfully has Voltaire fused form and substance? To date no such analysis exists. Questions 2 and 3 have been handled either scantly or not at all. Question 1, while much more frequently and for the most part satisfactorily treated, has in a few instances produced divergent interpretations springing from divergencies of critical approach. It is the purpose of this essay to elaborate an analysis of the episode which will, among other things, provide a standard for evaluating the partial answers thus far offered.

This essay examines the shadowy brokerage of literary and anthropological value during the era of decolonization and its connection to the institutionalizing of African literature. Drawing on original archival research, it recovers the conversation between the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek's major long poem Song of Lawino and the Oxford Library of African Literature, a series of oral-literature anthologies edited by Okot's and Talal Asad's advisers at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology. Instead of reciprocating the series's temporal and hierarchical assumptions, which appropriate late modernist literary criticism's nostalgic veneration of the British past, Song of Lawino reconfigures the protocols for the textual production of oral poetry by revising social anthropology's theories of time and matter. If accounts of the departmentalization of African literature portray it as a transfer of colonial paradigms to postcolonial contexts, this interfield account of the making of Song of Lawino calls for an alternative history.

This essay examines theater's role in recording public history, positing a performance-sensitive approach to historiography against the singularity of both monuments and canons. The recent removal of monuments has drawn renewed attention to the problem of singular public histories. I argue for a polyvocal, repertory model of public history as theorized through the collectively written 2016 play The Fall, which records the events of the 2015–16 student protests in South Africa. The essay begins by contextualizing the play in the longer history of workshop theater and educational inequality in South Africa before specifically examining its approach to public history. Such performance-sensitive historiography enacts anticolonial epistemologies by replacing the singular representation of monumentalism with copresence amid contested histories.

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama.

Julia Kristeva's recent interest in the work of Simone De Beauvoir stems from a concern to identify transformative possibilities in the “society of the spectacle”—a term Kristeva appropriates from Guy Debord to diagnose contemporary society's reduction of personal identity, sociality, and meaning to the status of mere representation. Over the last fifteen years, the spectacle constitutes one of the central notions employed by Kristeva to measure the significance of twentieth-century figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes (discussed in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt), as well as the three women she addresses in her biographical trilogy on female genius—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. In 1996, in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva promised to return to the work of Beauvoir in the light of her analyses of Sartrean revolt. The past several years have begun to fulfill that promise. In 2002 Kristeva dedicated the conclusion to her trilogy on female genius to Beauvoir, and in 2003 she presented a lecture entitled “Beauvoir présente,” subsequently included in La haine et le pardon in 2005. The essay published here was presented in January 2008 as the keynote lecture at a conference in celebration of Beauvoir's centenary, which was initiated by a committee from the University of Paris 7 chaired by Kristeva.

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, has garnered attention for her sustained engagement with religious themes. Yet for all its robust participation in the theology of a distinctively Calvinist Protestantism, Robinson's fiction is invested in religious forms that are less propositional than phenomenological. It imagines belief as both a perceptual background and a system of thought that activates concentrated aesthetic attention to quotidian moments of temporal contingency and worldly ephemerality. Consequently, Robinson's work intervenes in the burgeoning critical discourse surrounding religion and literature, offering an alternative to methodologies that prioritize the ontology of belief over the aesthetic modes of perception that belief makes available.

Events in the life of Edmund Burke from his birth in Dublin in 1729, his schooldays at Ballitore, his undergraduate career at Trinity College, and his venture into pamphleteering during the Lucas controversy, have been reconstructed in much detail. That he came to London to read law and keep his terms in the Middle Temple at some time shortly before May 2, 1750—the date of his bond—is also readily inferred. And then, after a lapse of years, when he contracted with Dodsley in 1758 to publish The Annual Register; when he began to meet Garrick, Johnson, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, and other distinguished people at about the same time; and finally when he began his political apprenticeship under William Gerard Hamilton in 1759 —Burke's life is increasingly illuminated by well-known names, until within a few years the young Irishman is a celebrity in his own right. But between these dates lies almost a decade which the historians of Burke's career, such as Bisset, MacKnight, and Prior, have passed over with vague conjecture. Lord Morley, in the best-known of all Burke's biographies, refers to these years as “enveloped in nearly complete obscurity,” while the Dictionary of National Biography observes that “we scarcely know anything of this period of his life.” Such lack of knowledge has helped to keep alive various canards which even in Burke's lifetime were circulated about this interlude of his youth—that he went to St. Omer's and became a convert to Popery, that he visited America under mysterious circumstances, and that he was the lover of Peg Woffington. Indeed, the life of such a forthright person as Edmund Burke, who once declared “that he had no secrets with regard to the public,” appears often to attract dark and mysterious legends—perhaps on the principle of lucus a non lucendo.