Grendel's mother projects Anglo–Saxon cultural anxieties about weaknesses in the system of feuding and revenge. Killing off one opponent (Grendel) will only trigger the appearance of another (Grendel's mother) as long as the system of revenge by kin is in place. That she is an avenging mother may have seemed particularly monstrous, in ways that resonate with Julia Kristeva's comments on abjection and the maternal. Grendel's mother attacks to avenge her son shortly after Wealhtheow has attempted to weave the ties of kinship on behalf of her sons. By contrast, women in Old Norse literature often incite men to vengeance or on rare occasions take vengeance themselves. Seen from the social world of the Anglo–Saxon hall, however, a maternal avenger can only be imagined as monstrous or subhuman, carrying the male hero to the threshold of death. The abjected mother returns, with a vengeance, to haunt the patriarchal stronghold. (PA)

Waste has been a recognizable socioeconomic problem since at least the late Middle Ages. In England, because of land and labor shortages, wars, famines, and especially changes in legal and penitential discourses, waste became, by the mid–fourteenth century, a critical concept. But a fully fleshed-out vocabulary for thinking through the meaning and consequences of the practice of committing waste does not yet exist. This essay argues that two fourteenth-century poems, Wynnere and Wastoure and Piers Plowman, address the lack of such a thinking through, tackling the problem of waste in all its vicissitudes. They deploy the formal resources of poetic language—from personification to episodic structure—to draw together the various ideas of waste from other discourses and to raise medieval readers' consciousnesses about the seriousness of waste's consequences. The essay calls their use of formal resources in creating this critical discourse a “poetics of waste.”

Since Bacon was the first Englishman to mention “real characters” and among the first to insist on the need for a truly precise means of expression, scholarship has come to regard the outcropping of linguistic schemes in the seventeenth century as a direct result of his writings. The influence of his “semantic sense” on later thinkers has been traced with some care; Richard F. Jones and others have shown us how to connect the language projects with specific passages in his works; evidence of his influence has been seen in the support given in scientific circles to projects like John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, which the Royal Society published in 1668.

Matthew Arnold asserts that because the motivation of the Antigone's heroine is obsolete the play's action no longer interests us. This dismissal contrasts sharply with Hegel's recurring celebration of the tragedy's ethical and dramatic perfection. Moving between these positions, George Eliot accepts the modernity of Antigone's character as moral pioneer but finds the play's action without much application to Victorian reality. For Virginia Woolf Antigone is a natural counter within the feminist polemic of Three Guineas and an image capable of complex novelistic development in The Years, while Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age makes the purported irrelevance of Antigone's motivation to the 1970s the very basis of the play's absurdist appeal. The Antigone thus serves, pace Arnold, as an Arnoldian touchstone to correct his merely “personal estimate,” that of a statist who might naturally object to the heroic treatment of an individual in defiance of the state's claim to primacy.

Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth documents a twenty-nine-year-old debutante's disinheritance—from money, family, power, love, and social position. On a more profound level, however, the novel pursues the opposite end. Although Lily Bart is plainly vulnerable to the whims of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called the “sexuo-economic relation,” she is nonetheless dramatically resistant to the attritional ravages of racial disintegration. This paper argues that race in The House of Mirth is an essentialist—if deeply problematic—answer to the cultural slippages of class and gender. By locating the novel within the diverse range of cultural phenomena that contributed to its racialized logic, this essay connects Wharton's fears of class mobility, mass production, immigration, and “race suicide” to the taxidermic aesthetic of racialized stasis. Part of a rare and endangered species, Lily becomes Wharton's decadent specimen of racial permanence.

The study of textual evolution, or revision as a textual phenomenon, requires a form of fluid-text editing that not only gives readers access to the textual identities that constitute the versions of a work but also makes the revision process witnessable by generating revision sequences and revision narratives for every revision event. Traditional editorial approaches that mix versions in the editing of a work compromise the integrity of textual identities, and the problem of mixing versions is demonstrated in three examples of the way editors and critics (in the context of orientalist and colonialist discourses) have changed the text of, or rewritten, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: Edward Said's mistaking John Huston and Ray Bradbury's film ending for Melville's, the British expurgations that modulate Queequeg's homosexuality to preclude the idea of homosexual domesticity and marriage, and the British editors' conversion of Queequeg's Christianity (and modern editors' perpetuation of the unwanted conversion). These historical and modern cases show that readers, sometimes despite themselves, revise texts materially in ways that mirror their desire and the ways of power. Editing the rewriting of a text like Moby-Dick in a digital critical archive would preserve all versions and generate revision narratives that textualize the otherwise invisible dynamics of revision in a culture. With its capacity to edit fluid texts, digital humanities scholarship is well situated to expand the discourse on the dynamics of textual evolution into the literary and cultural criticism of the twenty-first century.

Made of recycled clothes, slaughtered animals, and felled trees, Bibles in Renaissance England were filled with visible traces of ecological matter, remainders that remind one that words on a page are thought fused with—and inflected by—matter. This essay places Henry Vaughan's poem “The Book” in a broader conversation about the poetics of paper: the rhetorical effects of the varied colors and qualities of paper used in the production of the vernacular Bibles that transformed reading practices in Renaissance England. Historical writers and readers, who were directly involved in a flax-to-rags-to-paper economy, recognized and commented on the natural resources from which cheap, widely distributed Bibles and other texts were made. Further, this essay models a reading strategy that attends to the natural history of books, to both the function and the form of the organic matter used to mediate human ideas.

In Paradise Lost, Milton imagines a cosmos at odds with orthodox theology, making a heretical departure that parallels his reluctance to dwell on the Crucifixion and his Arian Christology. Belief in a plurality of worlds threatens the integrity of the Trinity: it exalts the omnipotence of the creator, while it limits the significance of the redeemer. In effect, it produces a tension best resolved by Milton's position that the Father and the Son are two distinct beings—the former uncreated, infinite, and immutable and the latter created, finite, and changeable. This distinction enables Milton to fashion a theory of salvation that transforms Christ's sacrifice from a singular, traumatic event to an ethical decision that other created beings can emulate. These heterodox views constitute the theological underpinnings of his radical republicanism, which embraces an idea of human dignity and agency antithetical to the tyrannical politics of torture and blood sacrifice.

A large body of Eliot scholarship is dedicated to the question of human sympathy. My essay moves in a different direction, arguing that Eliot saw literature not only as a medium for intersubjective understanding but also as an amplificatory technology, a tool for sensory enhancement. This technology is embodied by the affective dynamics of character in Eliot's final published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), a collection of character sketches and philosophical essays composed in conversation with the ancient Greek naturalist and sketch writer Theophrastus of Eresus. In Impressions Eliot invokes the descriptive traditions of natural history and the character sketch to suggest that human beings, like other animals, are conditioned by bodily frameworks and habitual responses that allow them to sense some things and not others. A meditation also on the history of characterization itself, Impressions puts pressure on the modern association of character with individual human psychology.

This article challenges the interpretive consensus on Anton Shammas's 1986 Hebrew novel Arabesques. A narrow application of theoretical postcolonial constructs (e.g., making the events of 1948 the historical trauma that defines the collective memory of Shammas's narrative) misrepresents the complexity of the text as a whole. Analyzing the limitations of readings based solely on minority-discourse assumptions, the essay offers a counterreading, balancing the postcolonial grid with a postmodernist one. Tracing the novel's screen memories and its most daring (yet well-camouflaged) intertextuality opens up possibilities of representation and redefines the minority-majority relations in the novel. This reading strategy, attentive to the text's “difference from itself,” allows for a nuanced redefinition of the identities constructed in Arabesque and suggests a new explanation for the choice of Hebrew as the language for this remembrance of lost Arab time.

Milton’s sonnets display the conventionalized career of their implied author, a Christian poet. As poet, he rises from Petrarchan apprenticeship to the role of his community’s conscience and is then retired; as Christian, he follows the career of fall and redemption. The poetic career is implied by the sonnets’ pattern of concerns: from amatory concerns to public concerns to private stocktaking. The Christian career is implied by the progress of the sonnets through a four-level structure of imagery: Heaven, Eden, the fallen world, and the world of sin. These patterns are intrinsic to the sonnets and justify regarding them as a sequence.

Five of Jonathan Swift’s scatological poems of the early 1730’s—A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, The Lady’s Dressing Room, Strephon and Chloe, Cassinus and Peter, and A Panegyrick on the D–n—are comic masterpieces. In the case of A Beautiful Young Nymph, appreciation of the comedy involves recognition of its grimness, lightened only by the precarious successes of Corinna’s daily struggles for survival, indeed, for resurrection. With the other poems, this appreciation depends on a perception of the basic incongruities between fantasy and fact, sublimation and reality, the standards of pastoral romance or polite society and the need to evacuate waste. Although Swift satirizes those who would ignore or deny this need, his own willingness to face its results and his mock-heroic allusiveness in the scatological poems suggest the tolerance and playfulness characteristic of and conducive to a comic outlook.

Starting with Raglan's suggestion that Falstaff may be a “holy fool” and with Auden's belief that he is a comic symbol of charity, this essay explores the medieval tradition of wise fool, and especially Falstaff's always canny use of biblical allusion. His various jests, if read in relation to the political action of the main plot, reveal him as characterizing England's time of day and parodying the unchristian behavior of Hotspur, Henry, and Hal. By the time he dies mumbling Psalm xxiii to an uncomprehending Nell Quickly, there have accumulated many hints that he is, in fact, a candle to his age, a professional Fool with the heart of a faithful Lazarus, and destined to join Mowbray in Abraham's bosom. The merriment for which readers have found him lovable amid his masquerades of vice has its mysterious basis in his covertly Christian understanding of England's neo-Roman Caesars.

My field consists of those works of diary or epistolary fiction in which the author has limited the narrative voice to one diarist or letter writer. The strategy allows the author to focus on a drama of self-perception involving two main participants: the diarist and the text. The outcome of the drama basically depends on how the diarists write and how they read what they write. In the first part of my essay, I treat the drama of successful self-discovery through representative works by Tennyson, Mauriac, Bernanos, Sartre, and Gide. In the second part, I treat Werther, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Mariane of the Lettres portugaises as writers who use their literary mode in essentially the opposite way: to maintain an existing idea of themselves.

Mikhail Bakhtin described a novelistic world bound to the reader's point of view and perception of reality. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity justified Bakhtin's elevation of the reader to a central position in his theory of the novel. This essay examines Bakhtin's engagement with Einsteinian relativity in the context of two of his most influential contributions to critical discourse—polyphony and the chronotope. Originating in the 1920s, Bakhtin's notion of polyphony was initially an expression of his Kantian mind-set. When Bakhtin reworked his formulation of polyphony in 1963 (having already broached the topic of literary spaciotemporality with the chronotope), Einstein had replaced Kant as Bakhtin's guiding intellectual paradigm. In advocating a relativistic model to explicate the literary world, Bakhtin aligned centuries of novelistic tradition with a distinctly modern worldview. His use of the epistemological possibilities inaugurated by twentieth-century physics allowed him to interpret centuries-old texts with an insightfulness available only to a post-Einsteinian reader.

When I began my career in higher education in the early 1980s, English departments at elite, historically white colleges and universities typically only had, at most, one faculty member of color. With a few notable exceptions, that person was usually the only one in the department to teach or conduct research on topics that engaged questions of race. Now, almost thirty years later, the study of race has assumed a more prominent role in academic life. Not only is it increasingly common to find clusters of scholars working on race in English departments, but scholars of all races and ethnicities are engaged in the study of race. Moreover, scholars of color are no longer assumed to focus on works of literature and culture produced by people of their own racial or ethnic backgrounds. Generally speaking, we have moved beyond the expectation that academic specialization follows phenotype.

The Last Man, Mary Shelley's novel of 1826, describes the extinction of humanity by a plague that leaves only one man alive. The plague exerts pressure on the idea of national community by forcing a reevaluation of the number of people needed to continue a nation. It also increases human mobility, severing all local attachments as its survivors seek safety. By considering these issues, The Last Man engages with contemporary sociopolitical debates, reflects on the consequences of those debates for literary production and readership, and meditates on the possibilities for cultural memory in a peripatetic world. This essay introduces a neglected historical context for the novel: the debates over emigration, especially state-aided emigration, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Shelley's novel aligns itself, in a strikingly pessimistic way, with those who opposed any encouragement of emigration.

This essay explores the relays of publicity and privacy structuring Frank O'Hara‘s “Personism: A Manifesto” and his personal poetry. Though these works have recently been celebrated for their candid expression of homosexual desire during a cultural moment set on silencing queer voices, I argue the inverse. Focusing on O'Hara‘s ambivalent relation to a calcified poetics of impersonality promoted by New Critics and confessional poets, I suggest that O'Hara does not simply reject the New Critical creed of public poetry. He instead reformats New Critical tenets to create a fantastic space of closeted openness that successfully depersonalizes himself and his audience. Apparent in poems such as “Poem” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) and “Personal Poem,” this project enables the poet to fashion an intimately imagined queer community that facilitates impersonal identifications. Through personism, that is, O'Hara fabricates an alternative public sphere in which public individuals paradoxically become visibly invisible.

In a queer-theory reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in the 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman relied on a narrow concept of reproduction as procreative heteronormativity anchored in heterosexual sex. He left untold the other story of reproduction: our daily reproduction in the service of capitalism. Marxist and materialist feminist theories of reproduction remind us that we all engage in reproductive work and that women have traditionally been considered natural providers of this work. A reading of J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man, in which a male protagonist depends on the domestic labor of a migrant woman, provides a counterpoint to No Future.