With only small exceptions, The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of even the most mature of George Eliot's art—morally energetic yet unsentimentally perceptive about the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. But the vision, here as elsewhere, is, I would argue, incomplete. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. She pushed the boundaries of Victorian experience as far as any of her contemporaries and moved to the brink from which one can observe the modern sensibility, but inevitably she pulled back.

The aim of the following paper is two-fold. First, its endeavor is to point out the probable source of Christopher Marlowe's posthumously published pastoral poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and to trace the direct influence of this set of verses through English literature down to the present time. Second, the article strives to demonstrate the fact that, initiated by Marlowe's poem and its frequent imitation, a literary device, “the invitation to love,” became established in English literature and has persisted in it down to our own time. My design, therefore, may be briefly given as a discussion of “The Passionate Shepherd” and its influence, with an incidental history of the invitation to love so far as it is related to Marlowe's poem.

Area studies and world literature share a spirit of comparison, despite their distinct historical formations in cold war tactics of knowledge for power and the flurry of globalization theory that accompanied the neoliberal 1990s vision of open market as world stage, and notwithstanding recent critical narratives that cleave area studies' particularized zones of specialized, philologically deep knowledge from world literature's globe-spanning yet difference-erasing ambition. That spirit will not speak in these brief remarks, nor can I promise a report, readable or otherwise, to one disciplinary field (the comparative) from any other field (e.g., area studies). Area studies was always comparative. It emerged alongside a host of comparative methodologies whose slicing spatial divisions (continents, spheres of influences, West/East) and stealth temporal ladders (civilization, modernity, development) later comparatists of the literary-critical persuasion may question but whose gestures we are perhaps condemned to repeat in cutting the globe to new spatio-temporal measures. The task is not to redress historical error in the name of comparison (as if the verbal sense of discipline was intended and comparative literature could complete area studies) but rather to re-cognize comparison, which we are always learning how to do, through the remembrance of area studies' ambitions and omissions.

None of her writings now exists; if any existed, it would be in Latin, and perhaps little better than the earliest poem in English, that of the earliest English poet.

In 1113 nine canons of Laon in northeast France traveled through southern England, raising money to restore their church through miracles wrought by their relics of Mary, and casually giving us the earliest information as to the vogue of the Arthur-tradition after the Norman conquest. At the great nunnery of Wilton in Wilts they were shown the grave of the Venerable Bede (containing a relic perhaps, hardly the body); “prope quern sepulta est inclyta versificatrix, quae proprio nomine vocata est Murier.” Defuncta adhuc loquitur. A feverish patient who had been hoping for a cure from Bede was warned in a dream by “Murier ilia versificatrix” to betake himself to the mother of the Lord, who was descending among them. From all this we can draw several inferences. She enjoyed for whatever reason high fame at Wilton; not only the canon's manner of speaking, but her grave near Bede's, seemingly with her name on it, shows this. They believed also that her repute as a poetess was great and wide. The surprising word versificatrix, probably on her tomb, may show unwillingness for some reason or other to call her poeta or votes; probably also that she excelled especially in the technique of verse, as her correspondents did. Her strange name was unfamiliar to the canons, but is little corrupted if at all: by proprio nomine they tell us that Murier is her proper name and not a distortion of mulier.

Die einheit von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren und ihrer Fortsetzung, betitelt Wilhelm Meisiers Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden, wird von der neueren Goethe-Forschung fast einstimmig bejaht. Die Verbindung zwischen den beiden Romanen wird einmal durch die vielen Personen hergestellt, die zuerst in den Lehrjahren und dann wieder in den Wanderjahren auftreten. Unter diesen Personen stent natiirlich an erster Stelle der Titelheld selbst, der in beiden Romanen den Mittel-punkt einnimmt. In den Wander jahren werden ferner pädagogische und bevölkerungspolitische Plane, auf die in den Lehrjahren schon hinge-wiesen wird, fortgesetzt und vertieft. Die Forschung hat diese Verbin-dungspunkte geniïgend hervorgehoben. Bisher ist es jedoch nicht gelun-gen, ein Motiv im Wilhelm Meister selbst zu finden, mit dem Goethe diese Einheit zwischen den Lehrjahren und den Wanderjahren auch dichterisch zum Ausdruck bringt. Das Bild vom kranken Königssohn, das an mehreren wichtigen Stellen der Lehrjahre erwähnt wird, bildet ein solches Motiv, das von einem zum anderen Roman weist. Ein beträcht-licher Teil dessen, was in den Wander jahren vor sich geht, wird in dem Geschehen, das auf dem Bild vom kranken Königssohn seine Darstellung gefunden hat, schon vorgedeutet. Andererseits lassen sich einige Szenen der Wanderjahre erst dann völlig deuten, wenn man sie im Zusammen-hang mit diesem Bilde betrachtet. Dieser Gesichtspunkt erweist sich als besonders wertvoll bei einer Analyse des Schlufibildes der Wanderjahre, dessen tiefe Bedeutung für den gesamten Wilhelm Meister sich so zum ersten Mal offenbart.

From his early short stories through his as yet unpublished second novel, Ralph Ellison pursues the theme of the quest for black self-definition by reference to black folklore. “In the folklore,” he says, “we tell what Negro experience really is.” Ellison adapts black folklore to fiction by fitting it into the forms of American and Western myth. As he enlarges the context of black folk tradition, he reduces the importance of its basis in racial oppression and conflict and transforms its social meaning into the metaphysical meanings of the framing myths. Thus black identity becomes indistinguishable from American identity or the human condition, and the effort to define it from within results instead in continued definition by the enslaving society.

The story of John Merrick—the “Elephant Man” of late Victorian sideshows who became a cause célèbre of the aristocracy—has achieved a new and perhaps surprising popularity in recent years. An examination of Bernard Pomerance's 1979 play and David Lynch's 1980 film reveals several sources of viewing pleasure that may account for this attraction, all of which converge on representations of Merrick. Among these sources are the appeals of melodrama and Brechtian epic theater, as well as the more deep-seated gratifications connected with voyeurism, pornography, and theatrical and cinematic spectating. In distinctive ways, each narrative constructs both a mythology of Merrick's life and spectators who are alternately empowered and submissive, politically aware and emotionally engaged.

The twentieth century has witnessed a crumbling not just of diverse types of authority but of the social and intellectual foundations on which the very idea of authority is built. This “crisis of authority” needs to be viewed in historical perspective. Ever since the Protestant Reformation, attempts have been made to internalize authority, “to shift the basis of its verification from external and public modes to internal and private ones” (Harris 1). This controversial shifting of credentials is connected to a comparable change in the representational forms and functions of authorizing discourse. The increasingly uncertain premises of representation, especially its ambivalence as a mode of linguistic and cultural organization, appear to have much to do with the “present confusion” of authority (Arendt 95). Since many voices have been raised against representation, there is little need to document the intellectual disaffection it has produced, except to recall what, in our context, is the most characteristic charge of all: namely, that the much deplored power of representation to order and to command language and to impose on it “the imperious unity of Discourse” (Foucault 386) forces on us an incompatible link between language and humankind.

As i write these lines, back in Argentina a myriad of commemorative events mark the thirtieth anniversary of the genocidal military coup that destroyed our movement for social change in the 1970s. An outpour of testimonial texts is reaching the presses. The words of public intellectuals pepper interviews and newspaper articles dealing with the currency of the testimonial first person. Beatriz Sarlo's new book Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusion contributes to this debate. Sarlo recognizes the value of the testimonial first person for legal purposes, to set records straight while other documentation is not available (24) and to secure justice. She admits that personal narratives can be a source for historians (25). Sarlo argues, however, that excessive trust is placed on victims and survivors as producers of historical truth (62, 63). Her intervention has been called polemical by journalists in the country and abroad. Arturo Jiménez, from the Mexican newspaper La jornada, has seen it as a call to “go beyond the overwhelming predominance of the testimonial account of the repression by the military dictatorship and to engage with more strength in theoretical reflections to be able to understand what has happened” (my trans.). What concerns me about these words and Sarlo's statements is the belief that survivors are unfit for theoretical reflection unless they undergo traditional academic training and do not refer directly to their experience.

Luther studies have traditionally been confessionally oriented. Today, this author's significance is also secular, and it is most readily interpreted by disinterested literature teachers. Disputes about his writings radically increased European literacy rates. His songs and pamphlets engaged popular tradition in order to achieve broad, democratic appeal. Aside from the increase in readership after 1518, Luther as critic and interpreter brought about a more important qualitative change in literacy. In this way, he influenced writings of other lands and of later centuries. He treated the Bible as literature with great relevance to the individual life. Karl Holl and Heinrich Bornkamm give excellent accounts of his hermeneutics, but the literature student is most impressed by Luther's imaginative participation in the text. He took his contemporaries and countrymen into account, and their experiences, in order to achieve a meeting between their passions and those of the biblical authors.

Daphnaida. An Elegie vpon the death of the noble and vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier. Dedicated to the Right honorable the Lady Helena, Marquesse of Northampton. (Title to the Daphnaida.)

Although representational art does not reflect an empirically verifiable world, novels are nevertheless useful as historical documents, because they can reveal the views that authors expect readers to hold. Extracting those views, however, requires distinguishing the beliefs that authors expect in their readers from beliefs that readers pretend to take on for the sake of the fiction (the belief that a person can turn into a bug, in Metamorphosis). Such an analysis is possible because of a basic rule of reading: all fiction, even the most fantastic, is realistic except where it signals its readers to the contrary. This rule implies that what is not said in a text (a text's assumptions) is a surer guide to readers' views than what is (its assertions). The “sudden-reward” pattern (familiar from Cinderella) and its unmasking by Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson are analyzed to demonstrate how readers' beliefs can be extracted from an apparently unrealistic convention.

I have been arguing, over some years, that thinking about the postcolonial condition in relation to tragedy or, rather, through a critical perspective informed by the idea of the tragic is especially useful in a historical conjuncture in which the triumphalist narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism, and socialism have become exhausted, if not extinct (Scott, Conscripts and Omens). Romance, it seems to me, is the predominant mode of emplotment of the anticolonial and radical postcolonial imaginarles. This is because the salient questions animating the critique of the colonial past have turned, understandably enough, on the identification of the disabling repressive harms of colonial power and the construction of the justificatory narrative of resistance that, at length, overcomes the perceived obstacles to a postcolonial state without these sources of (moral, political, cultural, economic) dissatisfaction. These are narratives of longing and vindication that link past, present, and future in a steady rhythm of progressive (sometimes righteously exultant) redemption. But what if the futures anticipated in this story form come to be fundamentally thrown into doubt so that they lose the self-evidence that so long sustained them as an effective horizon of political desire and political action? What if the futures anticipated by the past are now themselves a part of the past? I have been arguing that, as a consequence of the collapse of the great social and political hopes that went into the anticolonial imagining and postcolonial making of national sovereignties, we do indeed inhabit a postcolonial present marked by such an irreversible transformation. I have been arguing that the problem about the former colonial worlds for the present is not the superficial one of finding better answers to existing questions but the more fundamental one of altering the questions concerning the relation between past and present that have organized our expectations of possible futures.

Scholars in the Humanities May be Surprised to Learn That There has Been an Outpouring of New Work on HIV/AIDS by Economists and political scientists in the past few years, as it has finally become clear that the pandemic has seriously impacted governmental operations, redirected state resources, and threatened national and even international security around the globe. This upsurge of interest accentuates the decline in scholarly attention to HIV/AIDS in the humanities that has occurred now that the high tide of AIDS activism has receded across much of the global North and West and nearly a generation has passed since the pandemic first appeared. In an effort to jump-start a second-wave approach to the study of HIV/AIDS in the humanities, I show here how new scholarship in the fields of economics and political economy helps to revitalize questions of subjectivity, epistemology, globalization, and representation that have long been central to the study of HIV/AIDS in traditional humanities disciplines. Given the global reach of the pandemic and the vast technological, disciplinary, and governmental expertise required to contain it, a deliberate yet self-reflexive turn to political economy may help humanities scholars find a foothold in responding to HIV/AIDS. The pandemic has been the catalyst for an entirely new set of techniques of governance related to the health and well-being of nations and global populations—a global biopolitics of HIV/AIDS—yet there is virtually no work in the humanities responding to these dramatic changes.

The suitability of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale to its teller can be demonstrated by analyzing: (1) those elements in the Man of Law's character that are dramatically prominent in the tale of Constance, (2) the references to legal proceedings and the use of legalistic rhetoric, especially exclamatio and interrogatio, in the tale, and (3) the affinities between the Man of Law's Tale and the other tales in the rhyme-royal group. As an example, the manner of the Man of Law's defense is heavily dependent upon the advice and examples given to lawyers in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a dependence not found in those tales, like that of the Clerk, that at first might seem similar to the tale of Constance. Since all of the legal rhetoric and most of the references to the law are Chaucer's additions to Trivet, it is likely that Trivet's account was deliberately modified to suit the Man of Law.

Answers will depend on who's answering—and what they understand by modern, lyric, and poetry. Academic and other cultural institutions will hardly have the only say; the most significant testimonies often come from poets themselves, who in relation to matters academic and institutional may have feet in more than one camp but who perhaps finally have, in proportion to the intensity and overall achievement of their art, no camp at all. Yet an at least century-long critical tradition, which Marjorie Perloff's 2006 MLA Presidential Address joins, has salutarily maintained that for all academia's evident weaknesses—including an often fatal distance from the realities of artistic making and audience engagement—it can still contribute crucially to the life of poetry. In that light, it's worth reconsidering a body of work that for decades has resonated in the larger poetry world but has also known academic prominence: Frankfurt school—and the wider spectrum of Marxian and Marxian-inflected—critical theory. What if, in ways that have mostly escaped notice, a signal exchange between Frankfurt school critics demonstrates (with lessons aplenty for poetry, criticism, and theory today) that, far from merely illustrating theoretical and sociohistorical dynamics, the development of modern lyric animates or generates the theory in the first place, locating itself at the heart of Frankfurt school and related attempts to take history's measure and to enable reflective judgment and critical agency?

This essay tracks relations between Laurence Sterne's sonorous prose and his discussions of time in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), identifying a novelistic technique of rhythmic narration geared to represent experiential temporality. I call this technique sonorous duration, and I demonstrate how it conveys a pulsating embodied experience shared by intradiegetic communities as well as by readers. After giving a brief account of early musicology and eighteenth-century elocutionary treatises to indicate the cultural context in which Sterne develops his notions of rhythm and duration, I offer close readings of key scenes in Tristram Shandy that exemplify a novelistic interest in sonority as a means for representing shared and embodied temporal experience. In conclusion I consider the implications these durational readings have for formalist discussions by critics such as Gérard Genette and Garrett Stewart.

When read in the context of the European discourse on China since the Enlightenment, Kafka's “Constructing the Great Wall of China” (1917) and one of its likely sources, Dittmar's travelogue In New China (1912), reveal their political and cultural significance as early-twentieth-century conceptualizations of China during the late Ch'ing dynasty. Caught in the conflict between empirical observation and textual preconceptions, Dittmar manipulates orientalist discourse in his colonialist construction of Chinese progress guided by the Western powers. Surpassing his precursor in self-reflective insight into the rhetoricity of orientalism, Kafka appropriates the recurrent topoi of this field for an ironic exploration of the interactions among power, language, and sociopolitical stagnation. Kafka's story can be read as an intertextual subversion of Dittmar's Eurocentric ideology, as a response to the shattered hopes for revolutionary change after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty, and as a critique of orientalist discourse in general. (RJG)

As her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous “autobiography,” Jane's ability to predict future events and assume an embodied—yet occasionally omniscient—insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Brontë‘s fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women's biological “periodicity,” Brontë‘s first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane's empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction.