Because textual scholarship, having no definable Fach, or subject matter, is an exemplary postmodernist antidiscipline, it can serve as a site for testing the epistemological assumptions and protocols of the current debate over the status of evidence and the nature of proof. Since text is “authority” and “original” and yet also “network” and “tissue” and since forensics encompasses both hard physical “facts” and the rhetorical formulation that gives such data interpretive meaning, a textual forensics will codify and test the interaction of the phenomenological world and the hermeneutic analysis of its evidence. With procedural and conceptual links both to scientific empiricism and to rhetorical strategies for persuasion, textual scholarship becomes a vehicle for anatomizing the postmodernist breakdown of the master narratives, including that of evidence and proof.

Richard Morris, in editing the Blickling Homilies, called attention to a passage in the xviith Homily which presents striking resemblances to the description of the mere of Grendel in Beowulf, “of which [in his opinion] it is probably a direct reminiscence.” Though almost sixty years have passed since this resemblance was pointed out, during this whole period it has received scant attention from students of Old English, being either ignored altogether or dismissed with only brief discussion.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted, as she says, “to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” Her critical attention is focused not on individuals but on the values of a particular class at a particular historical moment. Her novel examines the governing class’s control over English society in the period immediately following the First World War, showing how coercive the ideal of stoical fortitude nurtured during the War had become by the time it was over. The dominant faith in the value of self-control creates an atmosphere of emotional austerity that in one way or another affects the behavior of all the characters in the novel. It inhibits the natural expression of feeling in those who live by the governing-class code and turns the more rebellious members of the society into unstable emotional exhibitionists.

Skelton's poem begins with a radical view of reading in which the text “cues” readers to create (rewrite) texts in their own images, as does the work's fictional reader, Jane. Although Jane's rewritten text appears to be uniquely hers, the second section of Phyllyp Sparowe deconstructs it to show how it was predetermined or “cued” by her past reading. The third section of the poem disempowers Jane further, deconstructing her physical person and reconstructing her as a text that Skelton the poet “scripts.” Although Jane soon escapes his control, he once again deconstructs her autonomy and power. This time Skelton points to another form of both licensing and limiting the reader, the interpretive community of male readers that enables Jane to challenge Skelton and simultaneously determines and shapes her criticism. Ultimately, Phyllyp Sparowe requires us to examine the nature of reading and the ways in which interpretive communities function.

One of the many interesting stories current in the Middle Ages is that of a young man who puts his marriage ring on the finger of a statue of Venus and is surprised to find that the image, taking the matter au sérieux, jealously forbids him the embraces of his earthly bride. Its relation to a large group of miracles of the Virgin has been frequently noticed (for example, by Mussafia and by Ward and Herbert ); it has received some attention from students of Mérimée as the source of his Vénus d'Ille; and Massmann, in his edition of the Kaiserchronik (1849-1854) collected a large number of variants (together with an almost equal number of faulty references). But Graf is the only scholar who has studied it in any detail, and his treatment is far from complete. I propose here to bring together the scattered materials of previous students, both of the story of the ring-betrothal to the Venus statue and of the Virgin miracle. I shall add no new versions of either story, but I shall discuss the former from a point of view radically different from Graf's, and shall endeavour to follow the tale from its obscure beginnings before William of Malmesbury, through its adaptation as a miracle of the Virgin, down to some of its present literary forms.

Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia has emerged as a paradigmatic “contact” text, in large part thanks to Stephen Greenblatt's canonical interpretation in “Invisible Bullets.” The pair of texts is examined in terms of an implicit codification of the disciplinary tensions between anthropology and history. An alternative reading of an Algonkian ethnography of the English suggests new ways of revisiting the disciplinary rift in colonial studies.

Everything concerning French Louisiana seems at this time to possess an interest for the public; and it has been my purpose in some measure, to give an account of its language, its literature, its dialects, its folklore and its inhabitants. My papers published in the Transactions of our Modern Language Association have been so kindly received that I feel encouraged to continue my labors in a field vast and fertile but difficult to explore. The work to be done is, to a great extent, one of original research and of patient investigation, and it will require several years to present a tolerably complete tableau of picturesque French Louisiana. I now desire to present another feature of the picture by giving a brief sketch of the Acadians and their dialect. It may not be amiss to begin this study by taking a bird's-eye view of the history of Acadia, from the settlement of the colony to the dispersion of the inhabitants. We shall then accompany Evangeline to the beautiful banks of the Teche and follow her canoe and that of Gabriel as they glide along its placid waters, leaving scarcely a ripple on the gentle stream which, the names of the unhappy lovers have rendered immortal.

During a recent re-examination of The Return of the Native I stumbled upon a feature in the construction of that story to which I had been for years totally blind. Turning for similar investigation to others of the Wessex novels, I was startled at the hitherto unsuspected evidence of a special kind of careful workmanship.

The article considers the tendency among young theorists to forget or repress poetry. As symptom, the aberrant dissociation of poetry from theory reflects an increasing technicization, not to say impoverishment, of critical language. The theoretical elders, on the other hand, clung to poetic insight with the urgency of hunger. Focusing on tropes of greeting, celebration, and sending, I explore an exemplary instance in the encounter between poetry and thought—when Heidegger met Hölderlin. Still, Heidegger's appropriation of poetry leaves a violent residue, a kind of critical warping that has remained largely uninterrogated. I turn to a moment in the unprecedented testimony of Hölderlin's late thought in which the poet names the modern experience of mourning. While Heidegger's later work appears to be characterized by a similar tonality of mourning, Hölderlin's thought of finitude is often more joyous and affirmative. I zero in on the figure of “dark-skinned women” in the poem “Andenken” to show how philosophy is tripped up by the permanent insurrection that poetry conducts.

The concept “cultures of reading” should be expanded to include machines that read. Machine reading is exemplified by the computer system called Never-Ending Language Learning (NELL). Because NELL lacks real-world experience, its semantic comprehension is limited to forming categories of words. This process illustrates a major difference between human and machine reading: whereas human reading involves causal reasoning, machine reading relies more on correlations. Human-machine hybrid reading, for example the kind done with an e-book, can be understood as a cognitive assemblage through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. The introduction of mechanical cognition into printing can be seen in the Paige Compositor, from 1878. The transition from electromechanical cognition to more flexible digital and electronic computational media marks the movement from print, understood as a technology involving the arrangement of type pieces to impress ink on paper, to postprint, in which inked products originate as computer files. This change, which signals an ontological rupture in writing and reading practices, is addressed through a cognitive-assemblage approach emphasizing the distribution of cognition among technical and human actors.

In 1600, Will Kemp danced a morris from London to Norwich and published an account of his feat, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. His propensity for histrionics had won him widespread fame in England (as the Clown for the Chamberlain's Men, the acting company he had left in 1599). Attempting to capitalize on that propensity with his morris, he sought immediate monetary gain and also a lasting personal recognition; consequently, his pamphlet emphasizes the affinities between his project and a mercantile venture. In doing so, moreover, it presents Kemp's dance as a reworking of the medieval morris traditions, a version distanced from their carnivalesque associations and communal origins and offered for sale, so to speak, in the marketplace of theatrical representation.

The phrase “ridicule, the test of truth,” which has long been associated with Lord Shaftesbury, was originally fathered upon him by both his disciples and his adversaries in controversies to determine whether ridicule be test or jest. Both groups expended quantities of forensic ammunition on the assumption that Shaftesbury had advocated the use of ridicule as a test of truth even though the phrase does not appear anywhere in the Characteristics. That Shaftesbury does not propose ridicule as a test of truth has been acknowledged for many years, but not widely enough, for many contemporary authorities repeat this erroneous assumption. Shaftesbury merely began the debate over ridicule by discussing its social utility, and the discussion was continued by Anthony Collins, Berkeley, Warburton, Akenside, John Brown, Allan Ramsay and Lord Karnes. The first of the group to refer to ridicule as a test of truth was Berkeley, and after his use of the phrase, nearly every eighteenth-century writer on ridicule took it up. Collins, who preceded him in discussing the ridiculous, had not even mentioned the relation of ridicule to truth. Brown was the first to state that Shaftesbury had advocated the doctrine, in fact, going even further in misrepresenting Shaftesbury by falsely charging that the latter had maintained that ridicule “may be successfully applied to the investigation of unknown truth.” A thorough analysis of Shaftesbury's real position on ridicule is necessary to show the manner in which he has been variously interpreted and misinterpreted. Furious as the controversy may have been in the eighteeenth century, it did not extend itself into the nineteenth, and today we may even apply to it Shaftesbury's own derogatory question directed against pedantic treatises: “What is already become of those mighty controversies with which some of the most eminent authors amused the world?” The present paper is not intended to perpetuate this mighty controversy, but merely to clarify Shaftesbury's meaning and show how the controversy developed. A subject which occupied famous philosophers, poets, physicians, divines and artists of the eighteenth century is a subject of both historic and esthetic importance.

By telling the story of the “invisible woman”—a character traditionally silenced and effaced in fiction—The Color Purple challenges patriarchal constructions of femininity and female desire and makes representation itself a compelling issue. Initially, the great twentieth-century cultural narratives of sexuality and socialization, Freud's oedipal theory and Lévi-Strauss's theory of kinship systems and the exchange of women, are played out in the drama of Celie's life. But this differently crafted, quilted novel is also differently sexual; it replots the heroine's text within an alternative framework of desire and disrupts the symbolic order with its carnivalesque celebration of polymorphously perverse pleasure.

The Old English lyric The (Banished) Wife's Lament has evoked much critical comment without producing an acceptable interpretation. Ostensibly the situation of the poem is that the wife of a lord has been made a prisoner in an oak grove at the instigation of her husband, who has been led to perpetrate this cruelty by the machinations of his kinsmen. The wife (who is the speaker) first laments her own exiles and sorrows; she continues with a description of her husband as an exile; and she concludes with a bit of gnomic wisdom to the effect that “It is woe for him who must long for his beloved with a sad heart.” But it is a strange poem, with many obscurities. Norah Kershaw has suggested that “It is perhaps an ambitious attempt to portray excited feelings which causes the difficulty of the poem. The asyndetic and not altogether logical sequence of thought, the absence of metrical form in 1.24, and the involved construction in 1. 42 ff. may possibly all be ascribed to this cause.” This does not alter the fact, however, that no satisfactory explication of the meaning of the poem has been made, not even by Miss Kershaw.

Engaging with and amending the terms of debates about poetry performance, I locate the origins of the default, neutral style of contemporary academic poetry readings in secular performance and religious ritual, exploring the influence of the beat poets, the black arts movement, and the African American church. Line graphs of intonation patterns demonstrate what I call monotonous incantation, a version of the neutral style that is characterized by three qualities: (1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch; (2) a flattened affect that suppresses idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in favor of a restrained, earnest tone; and (3) the subordination of conventional intonation patterns dictated by syntax, and of the poetic effects of line length and line breaks, to the prevailing cadence and slow, steady pace. This style is popularly known as “poet voice.” Recordings of four contemporary poets—Natasha Trethewey, Louise Glück, Michael Ryan, and Juliana Spahr—demonstrate this style, which contrasts with more expressive, idiosyncratic readings by poets as distinct as Frank Bidart and Kenneth Goldsmith.

“What have we who are slaves and blacks to do with Art?” asked DuBois in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” In an era of lynching, art hardly seemed appropriate for political struggle. Nevertheless, DuBois and his colleagues at the Crisis risked making connections between lynching and art by putting aesthetics to democratic use even as the theatricality of ritualized violence gave lynching an aesthetic dimension. Starting with DuBois's manifesto and reading in reverse chronological order every issue of the Crisis to its first issue in 1910, this article re-creates a critical narrative that traces the development of aesthetic theory among African American writers associated with the NAACP's national magazine. Contextualizing DuBois's work in the Crisis with fiction by Jessie Fauset and Walter White, I examine an alternative aesthetics that relies on propaganda to assail the ugliness of race relations. (RC)

Tragedy—the word conjures up a multitude of associations, some clichéd. By calling something a tragedy, whether a literary work or an event in a person's or a society's experience, one may suggest suffering and trauma but also grandeur and endurance and nobility. A tragedy is something horrible and yet, paradoxically, edifying. For those who are morally inclined, it demonstrates the punishment that befalls the proud or the flawed; for those more fatalistic, it suggests humanity's unmerited but inevitable suffering in an indifferent universe. To some people, certainly, tragedy as a literary genre is old and boring, loved by the Greeks but of little relevance now.

What would it mean for literary and cultural scholars to incorporate the new historical scholarship on early world systems and states? In particular, what might we who study literature in the context of empire, capitalism, modernity, and globalization since 1500 make of the most recent historical and archival work on non-European parts of the world before 1500?

It has long been recognized that Joyce's writing is a texture of epiphanies and that the basic pattern in most of his major works is a chronological cycle tracing man's life from childhood and youth to maturity and sometimes age. The combination of these devices largely explains the structure of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and both are used in conjunction with other techniques in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Although Joyce's use of them has been much discussed, the influences that led him to combine them have been less fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of the liturgy of the Epiphany season on Joyce's concept of epiphany and his use of the cycle pattern at the period he was writing Dubliners. Related liturgical influences on Dubliners will be discussed.