From 1477 when Caxton, in his little Westminster shop, published the first book printed in England, the history of English book production is richly documented. Even before the invention of printing, the story of monastic books, in England and elsewhere, can be fairly well traced. A good deal is now known about the output of medieval university books. But there is a notable gap, even in our theorizing, about the early production of vernacular works in England, especially about the very large amount of secular verse that was composed before 1350 by anonymous authors. We know practically nothing about either the authors or the transcribers of those works, or about the circumstances under which manuscripts of contemporary date were compiled.

In his now classic essay of race discourse analysis, “race under representation,” David Lloyd observes that “the discourse of race … undergoes a crucial shift in the late eighteenth century from a system of arbitrary marks to the ascription of natural signs” (69). The consequent fetishistic obsession with phenotype and somatology holds hegemonic sway over discourses of racial difference from that moment up to the early 1900s and the 1920s, when anthropological relativism and the cultural pluralism of Horace Kallen and Robert Park (of the Chicago school) eclipse nineteenth-century biological racism, at least in the United States.

In december 1968 the journal science published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by the ecologist and geneticist garrett Hardin that became one of the twentieth century's most influential essays. Hardin's thinking resonated in particular with policy makers at the International Monetary Fund, at the World Bank, and at conservative think tanks and kindred neoliberal institutions advocating so-called trickle-down economics, structural adjustment, austerity measures, government shrinkage, and the privatization of resources. Although Hardin's paramount, Malthusian concern was with “overbreeding,” his general critique of the commons has had a far more lasting impact. He memorably encapsulated that critique in a parable that represented the commons as unprofitable and unsustainable, inimical to both the collective and the individual good.1 According to this brief parable, a herdsman faced with the temptations of a common pasture will instinctively overload it with his livestock. As each greed-driven individual strives to maximize the resource for personal gain, the commons collapses to the detriment of all. Together, Hardin's pithy essay title and succinct parable have helped vindicate a neoliberal rescue narrative, whereby privatization through enclosure, dispossession, and resource capture is deemed necessary for averting tragedy.

My Title, a variation on Susan Sontag's regarding the pain of others, is meant as an homage to sontag and as an extension of her searing critique of war photography and its reflexive objectification of suffering, its conversion of victims into objets d'art. But why, in particular, the pain of women Holocaust victims here? Because we have finally begun to amass a large and profound critical literature on gender and the Holocaust, which, alongside Sontag's work on photography, might help us look at how and why the public gaze of photographers, curators, historians, and museumgoers continues to turn women into objects of memory, idealized casts of perfect suffering and victimization, and even emblems of larger Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

In Thomas Hardy's fiction, the human body is the untranscendible foundation of putatively ethereal interior entities such as mind and self. The emerging sciences of physiological psychology and evolutionary biology, with which Hardy was familiar, provide a context in which to understand his bodily materialism. Hardy explores these interests in The Return of the Native through a striking emphasis on the faces of characters and landscape and particularly on sensory perceptions–primarily associated with organs located in the face–as means of bringing the world into the human interior and of dissolving distinctions between subjects and objects. Reading Hardy's materialism with the tools provided by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of faciality elucidates both the fiction and the theoretical model, for the writers share an idea of depsychologized character. For Hardy, as for Deleuze and Guattari, experience of the self and the world is fundamentally corporeal, and perceptual experience makes landscape inextricably contiguous with the human. (WAC)

Through the concept of abstraction I examine the relation between female subjectivity and writing in Jane Eyre. In the novel abstraction means a lack of attention or a lapse of will, conditions that permit Jane to realize her wishes. Three other meanings of the term shed light on Jane Eyre and on Charlotte Brontë's career. Through abstraction as a degree of relative disembodiment, both Jane and Brontë avoid becoming female spectacles, Jane by shifting from corporeal rebelliousness to an anonymous advertisement, Brontë by adopting an ungendered pseudonym. Abstraction also involves the alienation of the self into objects and texts, as when Jane and Brontë project themselves into their written products. Finally, abstraction entails the synthesis of the particular into the general: Jane rhetorically enters a professional body of governesses, and Brontë participates in the commercial literary marketplace.

When I was asked to write about the impact of society on our profession over the last twenty-five years, it occurred to me that the period also measures my own lifetime as a professional. I took up full-time teaching in 1957, the year before I received my doctorate. I gave my first paper at a Modern Language Association convention around that time, participated in producing two sons, and published my first article. I left one job, joined in antinuke, anti-ROTC, and prounion activities, and got fired from the second job. I remember complaining to my graduate school director, en route to a third job, how painfully remote upstate New York seemed from everything I valued. Said he, flatly, “You can publish your way out of any place.” Perhaps that was so, then; certainly I acted on that instruction. But I never really put it to the test, for somehow my career swerved that splinter and never returned quite to the groove.

The remarkable autograph manuscript discovered in 1874 by A. J. Horwood among the papers of Sir Frederick Graham of Netherby is one of the basic documents for the study of Milton. It furnishes a list of some ninety authors, many of them by no means obvious, whom Milton knew; it indicates a large number of specific passages which he found interesting; and, finally, it contains, either explicitly or by implication, a host of opinions and ideas, consideration of which affords a new insight into the working of his mind. The Commonplace Book is, indeed, an important key to Milton's intellectual activity, and as such it merits a more careful critical consideration and a wider application than it has yet received. The facsimile published by the Royal Society of Literature in 1876 rendered the document accessible in its original form, and Horwood's edition for the Camden Society attempted a solution of some of the fundamental problems which must be dealt with before the note book can be put to fruitful use. But Horwood unfortunately did his work with little care and left it incomplete in many particulars. His text in the revised edition is reasonably accurate, but the editorial work is in the highest degree unsatisfactory. The editor did not undertake the necessary labor of identifying all the works and authors cited, nor did he always distinguish between those quoted by Milton at first and at second hand. His list of parallels from Milton's published writings is scanty, and he has failed to supply other obvious apparatus.

Despite Mark Twain's prefatory disclaimer of any pretense to historical accuracy, a number of early reviewers of A Connecticut Yankee saw it as fundamentally historical and consequently “a very irrational proceeding.” William Thomas Stead, who read the Yankee with sympathetic insight and thought it a highly significant novel, conceded that it contained “much strange misreading of history.” And Andrew Lang, in a spirited defense of Mark Twain against his English detractors, admitted that he had not read the Yankee because its author did not have “the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the Middle Ages.”

Depictions of the Virgin in Middle English lyrics of the Passion are one of the most common medieval sources for accounts of a woman's gaze. Her gaze in these laments, however, runs counter to cultural proscriptions of female gazing, as illustrated in Dante, Chaucer, Alan of Lille, and Bernard of Clairvaux and as theorized in recent feminist film theory. The Marian poems complicate the gaze by repeatedly enjoining the reader to view Christ's suffering and mutilated body through an intricately mediated visual enterprise: the reader looks not only at the figure on the cross but also at the Virgin gazing, a sight that is further mediated by the poet, often in the persona of someone watching at the scene. Spectatorship in the laments sets up a complex tension between the Virgin as spectacle and the Virgin as a trasgressive subject of maternal and erotic power.

The Prologue to the twelfth-century collection of French narrative poems called the Lais presents a woman poet, now known as Marie de France, who appears to be preoccupied with the significance of origins and who takes a bold initiative while remaining elusive about the exact nature of her enterprise. A close reading of two of these tales—Lastic and Chievrefoil-helps clarify the problematics of Marie's portrayal by showing that it rests on a deliberate poetics of silence. The poet-narrator stresses not what is heroic, public, and patriarchal; rather, she creates an alternative type of lineage rooted in silence, secrecy, and, above all, in a private exchange between two who love. The gradual revelation of the sign and its meaning, achieved by successive attempts to gloser 10 lettre, are intimately connected both to Marie's text and to her poetic persona: to gloss the one is to name the other.

The justification in Paradise Lost of the ways of God to men depends as much on Milton's dramatic and psychological motivation of the Fall as on its theological structure. The designed contrasts between Adam's and Eve's reactions on first awakening to life absolve Eve of the usual charge of vanity by establishing her as a feeling in relation to Adam as a ratiocinating being. Under the influence of Satan's venom Eve fails in love to Adam and then to God. But in Milton's view Adam is the faultier of the two because of his conscious failure to assert the absolute authority of his reason over her misguided feelings. Milton formally depends upon Paul's statement that Adam fell undeceived, but in his psychological motivation of the three key episodes of the Fall he differs from the usual interpretation of the Church Fathers that Paul meant only that Satan had not deceived Adam directly as he had deceived Eve. Milton thus reconciles the apparent paradox that Adam was not deceived but instead foolishly overcome by female charm. The scene in which he weakly yields permission is a direct foreshadowing of his acceptance of the apple since both contain the same false rationalization of his unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of his superior wisdom and its proper exercise in command.

Offering a layered reading of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, this essay investigates the gender politics of the play's Elizabethan performance conditions together with those of twentieth-century film and video reproductions. Instead of attempting to recuperate Shrew for feminism, this reading confronts the sadomasochistic fantasies lurking behind the facades of farce and romantic comedy; considers how Shrew's representations accumulate cultural capital that can be deployed to make and remake new patriarchies and new myths about “woman,” as well as about women; and explores the play's continuing cultural renewal as a popular pleasure that weaves together voyeurism, fantasy, and consumerism.

Eliot's Middlemarch reveals the effective alliance among ekphrasis (a literary response to a visual work of art), narrative, and the portrayal of desire. The novel's richest example of this dynamic occurs in the Vatican Hall of Statues scene, when Will Ladislaw and his painter friend Naumann observe Dorothea poised beside a celebrated antique statue, “the reclining Ariadne, then called Cleopatra.” Capitalizing on this statue's history of mistaken identity, Eliot affirms the power of visual art for literary representation by using the statue in three important ways: as a catalyst for the birth of desire, as a prefiguration of the novel's romance plot (through narrative references to the myth of Ariadne), and as a vehicle for representing female eroticism, which the statue's long-standing association with Cleopatra underscores.

As Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz note in their introduction to the 2006 collection Bad Modernisms, “[T]here were numerous ways of being outside in the early twentieth century” (7). Efforts over the past several decades to imagine modernism as an expanded field have been remarkably successful. Female modernism, African American modernism, queer modernism, sentimental modernism, low- and middlebrow modernism, and colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial modernism have all been integrated into a renewed understanding of modernism (or modernisms, as it is often written). In addition, the rethinking of modernism as a set of aesthetic movements in relation to a larger context of global modernity and modernization has turned the inside out. Since few modernists, on closer inspection, appear to have stayed high or dry, bad modernism, outsider modernism, and marginal modernism begin to look more and more like modernism itself.

In about 1855, three decades before frances hodgson burnett wrote her first best-selling children's book, little lord fauntleroy, she was a child—Frances Eliza Hodgson—and she read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. She found Stowe's novel, like all the stories she encountered, to be “unsatisfactory, filling her with vague, restless craving for greater completeness of form” (Burnett 44). The form the girl craved—that is, the material she believed she needed to complete the narrative—was a black doll. When Burnett obtained the doll, she named it Topsy and used it to “act” out the parts of the novel she found most “thrilling” (53). Casting a white doll she already owned as Little Eva, she played out ever-repeating scenes of Eva laying hands on Topsy, awakening the hardened slave girl to Christian love. Burnett also kept the Eva doll “actively employed slowly fading away and dying,” and in these scenes she took on the role of Uncle Tom (57). At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva's death, casting the white doll as Eva and herself as “all the weeping slaves at once” (58). And at least once she designated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “[F]urious with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll (fig. 1). Throughout the whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, which suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” of being “brutally lashed” (56, 55).

For a little while now, i've been trying to understand the nature of captivity and confinement in four overlapping but distinct models prominent today. These four are the United States' model of mass imprisonment of surplus racial and ethnic populations as a form of socioeconomic abandonment; military imprisonment, especially in the course of permanent security wars; the European model of the detention of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees (“Fortress Europe”); and the Israeli model of occupation by encirclement and immobilization. In all these forms, or zones, of captivity, the status of the worker, the enemy, the criminal, the migrant, the resident—and thus the prisoner himself or herself—is being modified and mutated in profound ways. In each, older recognizable dynamics of race and class power persist and extend in new directions. In each, the very physicality of the prison takes at the same time more extreme and more abstract concretization as isolation unit, as camp, as safe haven, as city. I've wanted to develop a conceptual and evocative vocabulary for linking the socioeconomic dynamics of accumulation, dispossession, and political power to the dialectic of social death and social life as these meet in the ontological and epistemological status of the prisoner.

The problems of the representation of warfare are approached from two directions: on the one hand, the formal oppositions between the act and the scene; on the other, that between the individual or existential and the totality or collective. The texts examined include Grimmelshausen, Döblin's Wallenstein, Tolstoy, and Alexander Kluge.