Comparison was once supremely a matter of method. ernest renan in his pensées de 1848 called comparison “the great instrument of criticism” (296). Echoing the sentiment some two decades later, Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett asserted that “we may call consciously comparative thinking the great glory of our nineteenth century” (76). Comparison had been extensively deployed as an analytic tool before the nineteenth century—to produce, for instance, the massive taxonomies that lay the foundations for natural history and in the gathering of the concordances and chronologies of universal histories. What sharply distinguished the comparative method, what made it in effect a specific method, for nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century scholars, by their own account, was the principle of development. This underlying temporal unity allowed for the most disparate entities to be set into meaningful relation. In words from an 1871 lecture by an early and enthusiastic proponent of comparative literature:

Metrical organization exists more importantly in the pattern constructions of the listener than in the physical signal. It serves a major function in control of attention, as prosodic features do in daily speech. The accents of speech are timed attention peaks, presenting meanings for which they prepare our attention in advance. Metrical organization fosters expectancy through larger durations—metrical stanzas are larger expectancy spans. The metrical effect is not a mere physical drumbeat; it is an atmosphere of shaped sustained expectancy. Perception is an active process, in which the perceiver contributes pattern. The rhythm of speech is a conspicuous example of such contribution. A technique for investigating and demonstrating the order contributed by meter is provided by unled choral reading.

Mark twain's range in point of view is readily apparent in those works in which he uses fictional narrators. To reassure oneself on this point it is necessary only to recall some of his more famous narrators: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan, Sieur Louis de Conte, King Leopold, and Captain Ben Stormfield, not to mention Adam, Eve, a horse, and a dog. What is not so readily apparent, however, is that an analogous range in point of view exists in those works narrated not by personae but by “Mark Twain”—such works as the travel letters and books, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” and the bulk of the short newspaper and magazine sketches. In some of these Twain played it straight; that is, he employed in them a point of view that was essentially his own. In others he assumed a pose, a point of view other than his own. And in still others, especially in the longer works, he alternated between real and assumed points of view. My concern in this essay is with the nature and range of these assumed points of view.

The traditional comment of Ben Jonson that “in affecting the ancients Spenser writ no language,” amplified by objections of nineteenth century philologists against Spenser's supposed inaccuracy in reviving old words and his lawlessness in coining new ones, has been much qualified by recent critical analysis. Professor Renwick has emphasized the relation of Spenser's diction to the general Renaissance problem of developing and enriching the modern tongues as mediums for serious literature. In somewhat greater detail Miss Pope has traced the course of Italian, French, and English Renaissance criticism on the subject of literary diction and its relation to Spenser's practice. From these studies Spenser's experiments in language are seen to have a dignity of purpose quite different from the freakishness implied in Jonson's petulant remark and all too often assumed by previous critics. Though Spenser was the first great English poet of the sixteenth century, general cultural activity had been vigorous. Printing had made possible the vogue of translations, both scriptural and purely literary, and English as a literary language assumed a growing importance.

This essay traces the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors' recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supranational, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an effort to retrieve from colonial modernity the residues of premodern, often presecular modes of solidarity that persist in yet lie athwart the colonial-modern. The analysis focuses on two novels: Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992) and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2006). It engages with work on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, with theoretical critiques of utopia, and with the Lukácsian concept of typification (and Ian Baucom's criticism of it). The essay concludes by linking the birth of postcolonial historical fiction to the form of finance capital undergirding our contemporary moment—a form of capital that reprises while intensifying that which held sway at the moment of historical fiction's first emergence.

Despite efforts among recent critical theorists to remove, banish, or even kill the author, the author remains at the center of general critical attention. It is commonplace now to understand that all texts produced by authors are not the products of individual creators. Rather, they are the result of any number of discourses that take place among the writer, the political and social environments in which the writing occurs, the aesthetic and economic pressures that encourage the process, the psychological and emotional state of the writer, and the reader who is expected to receive or consume the end product when it reaches print. Even if not intended for an audience or the publishing marketplace, a piece of writing cannot escape the numerous influences that produce it. All discourse is socially constructed.

It may be of some importance to the professors of French in the United States to know something about the history and form of that language as used in the Old French settlement of Louisiana. It is a well-known fact that the descendants of the French in the colonies have always retained the language of the mother country. In America, as, a general rule, the children of Germans, of Spaniards and Italians know very little of the speech of their fathers, while we see Americans of French origin retaining the language of their ancestors as a mother-tongue down to the fifth and sixth generations. The same thing can be observed in Canada and my friend, Prof A. M. Elliott, has shown with what tenacity the Canadians have clung to their original language, and how the French element, contrary to the general law of the philosophy of history, seems to be absorbing the English population to such an extent that the country tends to be “Frenchified,” and that a Jones or a Smith speaks French better than the language of his ancestor, the English conqueror, or of his father, the English settler.

The multiethnic and multilingual character of Nigeria compelled the country's writers to use some form of English, but standard imperial English was not long acceptable to patriotic Nigerians. So Nigeria must develop for its literature an English whose norms were created by Nigerians in response to the special circumstances in their country. Such an English (Nigerian Pidgin) existed at the time of independence, but because it was maligned, the first generation of Nigerian writers sought a more respectable English literary medium. Hence they devised the strategy of “transliteration”—introducing ethnic-language tropes and idioms into the English text. But transliteration was a flawed approach, and its literary output, in a language only marginally different from imperial English, remained inappropriate in Nigeria. Even so, the strategy served the desired goal by demystifying standard English. As a result, Nigerian Pidgin is coming into its own as a literary medium, and Nigerian writers are taking greater liberties in their reconstitution of English.

I'd like to begin with an anecdote. when i was an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a leader from an African country came to speak on the impact of a recent revolution in his homeland. The speech was inspired and exciting and provoked many questions. It being Santa Cruz in the late 1970s, a woman stood up in the back of the room and asked, “After the revolution, what will your country do to help our lesbian sisters?” The speaker looked perplexed and turned to a translator, who explained that lesbians were women who made love to one another like men and women did. The speaker expressed shock until a flash of recognition came over him as he explained, “Well, we will cure that with medicine!”

In 1975 the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia published a trasgressive appropriation of a short story from a prestigious European tradition to call into question the notion of literary private property. Using such postmodernist techniques as scholarly parody and metaplagiarism, Piglia succeeded in catching critics at their own game: few read carefully enough to decipher the elaborate literary crime he had constructed as a tribute to an important but undervalued Argentine writer, Roberto Arlt. The double codes of entrapment and disclosure in Piglia's narrative pose a special challenge to contemporary readers: in a noteworthy reversal of current critical fashion, the vanguard reader on whom Piglia's text depends must engage in a careful, formalist decoding in order to apprehend the text's larger theoretical concerns.

The fortunes of epiphany indicate both recent historical disparities within literary criticism and current cultural disparities between academic and popular discourse. The contextualist practice of Wordsworth and Joyce, in contrast to the purist theory that arose with the New Criticism, suggests that epiphany is a narrative device underscoring the historical and cultural construction of character. This conception is borne out by the original Epiphany, in Matthew, which manifests divine personality to human eyes through an episode of cultural difference and accommodation. Robert Browning's historicist poetry uses comparable but secular means of manifesting personality. In his dramatic monologues “Karshish,” “My Star,” and ‘“Transcendentalism,”’ epiphanic themes serve as measures of their speakers’ cultural construction. In discerning the relative differentiae that characterize such speakers, Browning's readers encounter their own relativity to interpretive conditions. As these examples imply, the modern literary epiphany ultimately effects the hermeneutic manifestation of the reader.

John Milton only enters Slavoj Žižek's in defense of lost causes through a passing reference—to Satan—but in the history of unlikely attempts to draw victory from the jaws of defeat Milton's response to the Restoration ranks high by any standard (345). In 1660, when almost everyone else associated with the revolutionary government was trying to look as innocuous as possible, Milton instead wrote The Ready and Easy Way, a defense of republicanism, published it, then republished it, even as Charles II was on his way back to England. Why make such a seemingly futile, potentially life-threatening gesture? The most interesting answer might be that The Ready and Easy Way is the political equivalent of Walter Benjamin's stunning assessment of art in “The Task of the Translator”: “No poem is intended for the reader …” (253). From this point of view, all great human gestures and accomplishments belong to eternity: they are enacted or produced because they intersect with truth. We can participate in their truth, but that is our good fortune, not their purpose.

Shakespeare's Henry V explores historiographic moments—relations among past, present, and future in memory, writing, and action. Advantage, Shakespeare's early capitalist term for highest return from least outlay, links historiography to war work, theater work, and love, theorized as “affective labor.” The play figures history not so much as fiction but rather in Walter Benjamin's terms as an achievement depending on the epistemic reliability of disadvantaged historians in danger, who rescue or recruit the dead and maximize affect. Falstaff's reported death reveals, through his friends' dispute about his dying words, Elizabethan and contemporary issues of history and shows lowliest characters with an unofficial authority appropriated also by Shakespeare's epilogue. In the controversial final scene, in which Henry woos the defeated French princess, circumstances and subtle conversational play show the labor of potential love—or hate. Henry is less successful, Catherine less victimized than they are usually interpreted to be, as she becomes the underdog Henry was before his victory, her body as mother in potentia constituting a dangerous future counterhistory and means by which domination may be dominated.

It is in the context of race and revolution during china's long twentieth century that we can best understand the many implications of Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956) in China, where it was translated into the standard Sinitic script as (“The Life of a Boy Servant”) in 1984.

The cycle that had begun as a national strengthening movement in the 1890s achieved some kind of completion or vindication with the early-twenty-first-century rise of China on the world stage. Chinese sovereignty was not only achieved during this century but flaunted; revolutions were not only won but largely put aside. Throughout this process, racial thinking played a crucial role, but its significance has been largely ignored because of an all-consuming nationalism that justified itself through a discourse of wounding: China was the victim of Western imperialism and the object of racism. Racism was and is supposed to be a problem for other, principally Western nations, with tainted histories of slavery and imperialism—hence the failure to acknowledge that Chinese nationalism actually has a distinct, though shifting, racial character. Chinese racial nationalism, and, for a time, racial internationalism under Mao, was a major undercurrent in China's revolutionary sequence in the long twentieth century: the late Qing reform and the ensuing republican revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty; the communist revolution of 1949, which drove out Western and Japanese imperialism and overthrew the republican government; and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, the end of which started China on the path to postsocialism, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I am frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

—Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” (111–12)

Far back as one may go into the past, from the northern Sudanese to the southern Bantu, the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe.

—Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (30)

Sango's history is not the history of primal becoming but of racial origin, which is historically dated.

—Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (9)

These four epigraphs give a sense of the diversity of usages of the category of race in Africa and the discourses and practices that coalesce around these usages. I use the textual fragments to open up questions about race in Africa, to explore the various discursive economies in which race is articulated and circulates, and the registers and vocabularies in which responses to it have been conducted. The approach adopted is therefore metonymic: each fragment represents a larger body of texts and practices that broadly constitute a discourse defined by a set of shared characteristics. My purpose is not to discuss exhaustively these characteristics but rather to draw rough distinctions among the conditions that govern their articulation and circulation. In this way I can indicate the network of social, historical, and discursive relations in which the idea of race functions.

Lindsay waters's “rescue tenure from the tyranny of the monograph“ in the 20 april 2001 chronicle of higher Education complements his “Modest Proposal […]” in PMLA. The longer Chronicle piece insistently deploys the concept of crisis that presided over a 1997 conference of humanities scholars, librarians, and editors, The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis (Case). According to Waters, the overproduction of monographs required of tenure candidates “conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past thirty years […]” (B7). “Above all,” he avers, “the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in leadership” that implicates the university: “the problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis mutandis, the problem of the university […],” an institution “increasingly committed to business values” (B8). In this university in which “the humanities have grown to be beside the point,” Waters submits, the increased stress on the tenure monograph during the eighties and nineties is the most evident symptom of an ill-conceived professionalization of the humanities.

For some time the conviction has been growing that many of the current generalizations concerning eighteenth-century literature have been arrived at by the à priori, or deductive, method. A few outstanding figures that have been studied with considerable care have furnished the chief and sometimes the only basis for characterizations of the period. The age has suffered, as most ages have, from the tendency to dogmatize as to what the people of the time must have thought, and from the corresponding neglect of that humbler and more arduous task of finding out what, as a matter of fact, they said.

Because of its feeble quality and bad text, relatively few students have cared to give much attention to Marlowe's drama of contemporary France, The Massacre at Paris. But it has never been a principle of criticism that the amount to be learned about an author is always in proportion to the literary excellence of the work under study. Investigation reveals that there is at least one definite source for this play not hitherto clearly recognized as such, and that, once this fact is established, observations upon Marlowe's craftsmanship may be made, scarcely less interesting than those which proceed from similar studies of his greater plays.