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).

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.

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 metaphor of the cidade partida (fragmented or broken city), which has been used to characterize Rio de Janeiro's darker aspect—its stark inequality, its class conflicts and violence—is not new but has gained, in the last couple of decades, widespread circulation. Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, when formal democratic practices such as free speech and open elec–tions were reestablished, it has become more obvious than ever that equal citizenship rights for all, de facto rather than on paper, are still an elusive ideal in Rio and in Brazil as a whole (as in many other places). The neoliberal economic policies of recent decades, with curtailed social spending and privatization of state-owned property, have increased poverty in Rio significantly. The arrival of the large-scale commercialization of cocaine since the late 1970s has deepened urban divisions and intensified violence. The retail end of the drug business often takes place in poor neighborhoods, or favelas. But the violence that prevails in Rio is not limited to warring drug factions or their conflicts with the police. It also inheres in unemployment and inadequate education and health care for the poor, as well as in severely flawed security, judiciary, and penal systems. All in all, the urban experience is fraught with violence and the fear of violence for all residents—though here too there is inequality, since this violence and fear affect some segments of the population far more than others.

Though apparently only a fragment, the posthumously published New Atlantis provides insights into Bacon's idea of science not discoverable in his other works. In Salomon's House, the poet of science gave a local habitation and a name to the process and product of science, creating a concrete image of the “learning” for which he had sued so eloquently and so fruitlessly twenty years earlier before the new monarch, the learned James. Clearly an integral part of Bacon's program, in many places the New Atlantis is no less than a fictionalized paradigm of The First Book of the Advancement of Learning For example, as a correlative to the arguments by which he defended learning from the ignorant zeal of religious, political, and social fanatics, Bacon created in the New Atlantis a little world sanctified to God, politically stable, socially conservative, and morally pure and dedicated to the pursuit of science. Further, in its leading institution, the College of the Six Days Works, we find also a correlative to the criticisms of contemporary scientific practice that Bacon had offered earlier in The Advancement in his analysis of “the errors and vanities which have intervened amongst the studies themselves of the learned” and in the “peccant humours” which weaken and corrupt learning. But the New Atlantis is more than a mere paradigm: it projects an image of science in operation and of the relation of scientists to society not to be found in Bacon's earlier works. My purpose here is to explore the structure of that image, emphasizing in particular the contrast between it and the image of science projected by other Renaissance Utopias.

Historiography in Francoist Spain (1939-75) sought to affirm the morally and historically correct role of the regime within the flow of Spanish history. As an important vehicle of dissidence, the novel of memory stands in sharp contrast to Francoist history: it explores the past largely eschewed or appropriated by the regime and contests the so-called truths that Franco shaped through the discourse of myth. This essay examines the role of subjective memory as a challenge to historiography and discloses the narrative strategies novelists used to counter the government's myths. Unlike Francoist historiography, the novel of memory lays out history as a series of disruptions and undermines the referential illusion of truth and wholeness in our understanding of the past.

In 1986, when the frenzy of renown was first published, let alone in the 1970s, when I first started working on it, little did I know that a few decades later fame and its history would be a subject of expanding academic study. After all, when I was in the midst of writing it, I was told by my agent that I had better hurry up and finish before no one was interested in fame anymore.

As a way of restaging certain questions about postmodernity (is it marked by rupture or repetition, or is it all illusory?), this essay imagines Fredric Jameson's iconic disorientation at the Bonaventure Hotel as a reenactment of Dante's crisis in the selva oscura. That imaginative act allows one to see how a nonmodern measure makes postmodernism visible (the concept of “cognitive mapping,” for instance, derives from Kevin Lynch's appreciation of the urban fabric of Florence). And it allows one to perceive how Jameson's response to our contemporary condition assumes a Dantean cast, becoming an incorporative act of totalizing, manifest stylistically and conceptually, that deploys allegory to trans-code phenomena into the terms of the dominant system. To what degree does the internalization of such a hermeneutic enterprise (a medieval Christian legacy) render religion as such imperceptible, compelling us to perceive acts committed in the name of Islam as merely a displacement of (proper) politics?

This cluster of essays stems from the spring reception workshop on autoexoticism, which was organized by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Programme (OCCT) and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and took place on 19 March 2015 at the University of Oxford. Speakers at the workshop, also the contributors to this special feature, had been discussing the question of exoticism for the past few months. The topic of autoexoticism emerged through our discussions, and we felt the need to explore it because we were dissatisfied with the status quo of criticism on exoticism and intercultural practices. These essays are therefore both the result of our attempt to rethink exoticism and its discourses by articulating the autoexotic and an invitation to further explore and problematize the topic.

The Pun, Addison notes, is “a Sound, and nothing but a Sound.” Lamb elaborates: a pun “is a pistol let off at the ear”; it has, he says, “an ear-kissing smack with it.” But the position is not entirely sound; like “The Echo,” a poem which Hood rejected, it “will not answer.” Any hearing on the pun must first admit the pun effect, which precedes analysis and shows that we distinguish the pun semantically, not aurally. The sound is only echo to the sense, and through reflection we conclude that the pun effect is a function of multiple meaning. But even the best pun, whatever that may be, when it must be explained fails to elicit those unusual noises which are the punster's usual reward; the pun effect, it seems, results from some kind of greatly accelerated or simultaneous perception of multiple meanings. Psychology is here deeply involved—for any kind of meaning perception is singularly difficult to analyze—and such tangled affairs are most wisely avoided. A more reasonable approach lies in study of the conditions permitting and the significance attending this curious and characteristic phenomenon; for the pun effect hints at larger matters.

As teachers of language and literature, you have all noticed that my title is even more ambiguous than most. Those of you who are amiably disposed may even have called it general, in the old style, rather than ambiguous, in the new. The word “rhetoric” has for a long time served for both the study of the art of persuasion and for the art itself; Aristotle's Rhetoric, upper-case, is still unsurpassed, but take away the capital letter and Aristotle's rhetoric is often very bad indeed, at least as we view it. In the second sense rhetoric has never had a real quantitative revival because it has always thrived; but in the first sense we seem to be in the midst of a revival of rhetoric unmatched in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in spite of some very good work, there are signs that it may prove a very shoddy revival indeed, with no more lasting effect than the rhetorically-oriented “communications” movement of a decade ago, unless we take thought about what we are doing. Judging from some of the recent freshman texts I have seen, I would not be surprised to find in my box tomorrow when I return a new work entitled A Speller's Rhetoric.

Interpretations of violence in Christopher Marlowe's plays have emphasized biographical, literary, and philosophical roots over social and historical conditions. If, however, we glance out Marlowe's window at contemporary rituals, we can enlarge these views of staged violence. His numerous references to official methods of persecution—from boiling to pressing, from branding to beheading—are not only projections of dramatic character but also revisions of corresponding Tudor social practices: public executions and their kin, torture. Although these entertainments provide Marlowe with ready-made elements for dramatizing tragedies of will, he uses those elements to turn theatricality against itself and to expose the fraudulent core of such exhibitions, even as he acknowledges their thematic power. Exaggerating the profound ambiguity of artifice, Marlowe undermines the moralizing that accompanies spectacles of punishment and transforms a theater of pain into a drama of subversion.

Though some Victorian readers believed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's partisanship for “the cause of Italy” led to a failure of inspiration, I argue that for a complex of reasons Italy became the embodiment of this woman poet's aesthetic and utopian desires: through her commitment to Italy's revolutionary struggle for political identity, Barrett Browning reenacted her own struggle for identity, a risorgimento that was, like Italy's, both an insurrection and a resurrection. Moreover, by using metaphors of the healing of a wounded woman/land to articulate both the reality and the fantasy of her own revitalization, Barrett Browning located herself in a re-creative female poetic tradition that descends from Christine de Pizan to H. D. Infusing supposedly asexual poetics with the dreams of a distinctively sexual politics, these women imagined nothing less than the transformation of patria into matria and thus the risorgimento of the lost land that Christina Rossetti called the “mother country.”

Implicit in Beowulf's thematic involvement with language is a marked and persistent hostility toward the epistemological foundation underpinning the practice of literacy. While the poem seems to acknowledge the psychological posture conditioned by, or at least compatible with, literate practices, the acknowledgment characterizes that posture as a clear, direct threat to the ordering structures—and thus to the basic survival—of the poem's central system of personal interdependencies. Beowulf confronts the psychological demands of the reading experience by persistently reaffirming those idioms of speech and patterns of interaction that require the open immediacy of spoken exchange. The confrontations set in conflict not simply the characters of the poem but the psychological structures that the characters epitomize and thus the linguistic practices most compatible with those structures. (MRN)

A tradition of oral poetry (izibongo) still exists among the Xhosa-speaking tribes of South Africa, but as yet few analytical studies based on fieldwork have been published. The Xhosa tradition differs in some respects from the Serbo-Croatian tradition as defined by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, though there are elements common to both traditions. Parry and Lord concentrated attention on the guslar, an improvising epic poet, but the Xhosa tribal poet (imbongi) should be seen in the context of all poetic activities in his community. The tradition of Xhosa izibongo is complex, consisting of at least four distinct activities: many Xhosa tribesmen have the ability to compose poetry on the inspiration of the moment; most Xhosas commit to memory traditional poems or poems of their own composition; the imbongi, a figure of considerable importance and influence in traditional society, generally composes his refined poetry in performance; and some literate Xhosas commit their poetry to writing. Each of these four kinds of poetic production is significantly different from the others, but each also influences the others.

The Recent Death of AIMÉ Césaire has Been an Occasion for Extolling his Virtues As Venerable Patriarch, Founding Father, and sovereign artist. Even his fiercest critics have considered him a unique poet-politician worthy of being interred in the Pantheon by the French state. Members of the créolité movement, such as Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, hailed him as the “nègre fondamental” ‘foundational black man,’ who was also like the father of the Martinican people. Confiant reiterated his filial devotion as Césaire's “fils à jamais” ‘son forevermore,’ and Chamoiseau identified him as the “maître-marronneur” ‘master Maroon.’ This wave of adulation tends to emphasize the militant poet-politician that Césaire never quite was. He was arguably the founder neither of a nation nor of a people nor, for that matter, of a movement. While he coined the word négritude, he was less the founder of the negritude movement than was his contemporary Léopold Sédar Senghor, who set about creating a totalizing, biologically based ideology around the concept of negritude. Perhaps even more telling is his view of the Haitian leader Henry Christophe as tragically flawed because of Christophe's obsession with founding a people. The protagonist of the play La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) is a heedless builder, so obsessed by the need to construct and to found that he destroys himself, leaving behind the massive stone ship of the Citadelle as his legacy.

A close reading of Ulrich Seidl's Import Export (2007), a film on labor migration between eastern and western Europe, provides an international frame for revisiting the second-wave feminist debate on housework. In the last two decades, “women's work” has been outsourced transnationally on a large scale, leading to the emergence of an international private sphere inhabited by a new housewife figure. The feminist housework debate of the 1970s supplies the groundwork for a critique of autonomist neo-Marxism that foregrounds the role of language, translation, and visual gesture in the contemporary import/export of labor.

Since “American renaissance” criticism emerged in 1876, it has derogated women's writings while idealizing men's, despite its shifting definitions of period, canon, and literary standards. My genealogy of the critical discourse of renaissance details ways that this criticism has denied literary value to women writers, especially at historical moments of women's increased publicity and apparent gains of power, thereby helping to maintain larger gender and racial hierarchies. Because of this tradition, I argue, the renaissance discourse is inadequate to current efforts to reenvision United States literary history and to a democratic culture.

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne forces us to recognize the limiting and distorting effects of the preconceptions which we may habitually impose upon new experience. This instructive confrontation with our own limits is accomplished by three central methods. Most frequently, we cannot resist judging situations that are under consideration by characters in the novel; then the processes that uncover their deluded prejudices lay bare ours as well. Through what amounts to a technique of parable, we are shown our own limitations as we discover those of Sterne's characters. Second, we are made to participate in the double meanings of words, with the effect that we recognize the tendency of our minds to make reductive assumptions on the basis of unreliable evidence. Finally, the narrator repeatedly manipulates us by deliberately disappointing expectations of narrative form developed through earlier reading. By arbitrarily departing from narrative convention, Sterne shows that arbitrariness lies in the conventions themselves and that our allegiance to them is a sign of a preference for convenient artifice over inconvenient reality. Such reevaluations of ourselves and our habitual responses persuade us of our need for the more complex perceptions of experience that Tristram Shandy demonstrates.