A rich critical literature explores the relation between Edmund Burke's theatrical style and his counterrevolutionary argument. Redirecting this line of inquiry, the essay treats Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as a histrionic literary performance, arguing that to appreciate its significance we must recover a neglected subtext: a preoccupation with boredom and restlessness. Burke's loyalties are divided: defending England, he counsels against extremes of torpor and excitement. He works to preserve England in a state of settled “repose,” yet his rhetoric reveals a baseline of boredom. Indulging in fantasies of reform and utopia and deploying strategies of tragic hyperbole and self-parody, he mobilizes conventional associations of boredom and revolution to negotiate a new position from which to exercise cultural authority. Textual histrionics do more than contain a revolutionary threat; they establish an alternative theater of boredom.

Missbronte has written a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel … one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read,“ wrote Matthew Arnold to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, shortly after the first publication of Villette. The novel struck Arnold mainly as a case of morbid religiosity. Only a month later another critic, George Henry Lewes, writing more from the point of view of the amateur psychologist, said of the very same novel: ”It is a work of astonishing power and passion. From its pages there issues an influence of truth as healthful as a mountain breeze.“ These are typical of the antithetical responses that Villette has always evoked.

The emerging science of anthropology created myths of the primitive that became important to literary modernism's mythic interpretation of contemporary history. T. S. Eliot and James Joyce in particular were attracted to the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, whose theory of the mentalité primitive appeared to offer alternatives to prevailing modes of Western logic. Eliot took this myth of anthropology and other ones at face value insofar as they contributed to his theories of poetic origins and to his attacks on modern civilization. He opposed a primitivist ideal of tradition to the notion of a corrupt civilization embodied in the figure of the Jew. In contrast, Joyce treated anthropology ironically as a discursive construct rooted in colonizing enterprises of European institutions and thought. He satirized anthropology's pretensions while exploiting its material for his artistic ends.

Reunified Berlin's ubiquitous examples of architectural citation—such as the Reichstag, the plans for the Stadtschloß, the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, the new Hotel Adlon, and the FriedrichstadtPassagen—variously inscribe contemporary architectural styles with allusive reinventions of previous forms and cultural discourses, incorporate remnants of older edifices, or use partial reconstructions for new social purposes. In the process, these projects problematize conventional principles of architectural restoration by dramatizing a productive tension between past and present, between authenticity and simulation, between genuine nostalgia and the sometimes cynical manipulation of historical memory. Relying on the synchronicity of (seemingly) nonsynchronous styles, architectural citation goes beyond postmodern pastiche; such citation signifies Berlin's renegotiation of its identity as the new-old capital by recycling half-obliterated and yet irrepressible traces of urban history within the parameters of international capitalism, Europe-directed national politics, and the rampant tourist industry.

What is the relation between Marian lament and the distinctively modern, autobiographical complaints of Thomas Hoccleve? What, moreover, is the relation between Hoccleve's performances of private misery and his ability to offer advice and counsel to princes? This article argues that Hoccleve's “Complaint of the Virgin” can teach us to recognize the complex interweaving of gender, genre, ideality, and excess that informs Hocclevean complaints more generally. “The Complaint of the Virgin” explores a woman's exemplary transition from subversive investment in private connection and private suffering to self-abnegation and participation in public power. In doing so, the poem provides a model for Hoccleve's own movements between marginalized interiority and public rhetoric—and for his meditation between Lancastrian subjects and their sovereign. The Virgin offers a lesson in the 1364 Abstracts [PMLA pleasures and power of complaint, the disciplining of interiority, and the production of social relations through spectacle and sacrifice.

The central axiom of Mathew Arnold's cultural arithmetic is well known; less familiar is this curiously precise elaboration:

And, as the discipline of conduct is three-fourths of life, for our aesthetic and intellectual disciplines, real as these are, there is but one-fourth of life left; and if we let art and science divide this one-fourth fairly between them, they will have just one-eighth of life each.

The relationship between Emerson and Wordsworth, or rather the influence of Wordsworth upon Emerson, needs to be defined. There is a nebulous impression of close kinship between the two, particularly in their views concerning nature. Since Wordsworth's more original and potent verse had been written before 1820, while Emerson's earliest significant address was delivered in 1837 and his earliest significant essay was printed in 1836, we are apt to assume that Wordsworth exerted an important influence upon the young Emerson in the 1830's. The assumption does not appear to be well founded as I shall attempt to demonstrate. During the years that followed his first efforts, Emerson's attitude grew successively friendly, enthusiastic, confident toward the Wordsworth he had formerly found interesting but blundering, admirable in intention but ludicrously incapable. It is not difficult to mark the very year in which the transition from very considerable disapproval to almost unbroken approval was completed.

Freud's discovery of the unconscious at the end of the nineteenth century bids fair to be the defining factor in the intellectual life of the twentieth. Already, Freud's ideas seem to have touched everyone from the juvenile delinquent on the corner to the scholar in his study. Biography, history, literary criticism, and, not least, the study of Shakespeare, psychoanalysis has affected them all. Hamlet's Oedipus complex (thanks to Sir Laurence Olivier's film) has become as conspicuous a feature in the popular image of Shakespeare as the controversy about authorship. Freud was a psychologist, however, not a critic, and his remarks about Shakespeare, like all his literary comments, were only incidental to his main study, the mind of man. As a result, his Shakespearian insights are scattered through his works. No one, so far as I know, has clearly established just exactly what Freud said about Shakespeare or where he said it. The purpose of this article is to answer those two questions, that is, to set out in systematic form Freud's comments on, references to, and quotations from Shakespeare, and second, to provide via the footnotes a bibliography for them. I have summarized Freud's remarks in the following order: first, his remarks on Shakespeare generally; second, his views on authorship; third, the points he makes about particular plays and poems (arranged alphabetically). Within these large divisions, references are arranged in order of generality, larger topics first. Topics of equal generality within a given work are put in the order in which they appear in the work. Where Freud made more than one reference to a topic (e.g., a particular character or quotation), the references are arranged chronologically according to the time Freud made them (which may or may not coincide with the order of publication).

The illustrations created by Jörg Breu for the 1515 edition of Ludovico de Varthema's account of his voyage to the Middle East, India, and the East Indies (Die ritterlich uñ lobwirdig Rayss “The Noble and Praiseworthy Journey') were reprinted in other travel narratives published in the mid-sixteenth century, including Hans Staden's Warhaftige Historia ‘True History’ (1557), about his captivity among the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil. As recycled illustrations their presence in Staden's text is usually ignored or derided, but their iconography and placement suggest that they were chosen deliberately and not merely for the sake of economy and expedience. By analyzing the images' relation to the accompanying text and comparing the images with those used in other editions and other travel narratives, the article argues that these traveling illustrations do not merely demonstrate the interchangeability of exotic ”others“ but rather suggest a growing awareness of and interest in ethnographic specificity among mid-sixteenth-century European readers.

On 25 november 2012, when the united states novelist jonathan franzen opened mexico's feria internacional del libro de guadalajara, he spoke of his experience of reading Latin American fiction. Asked about the region's representation through literature in English translation, Franzen stated that, magic realism having now “run its course,” Roberto Bolaño had become the “new face of Latin America.” Franzen's words echo what has almost become a commonplace in the United States over the last five years: naming Bolaño “the Gabriel García Márquez of our time” (Moore), after the publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux of the translations of Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives [2007]) and his posthumous 2666 (2004; 2666 [2008]). Bolaño is also considered by many writers, critics, and readers in Latin America to be “reigning as the new paradigm” (Volpi, sec. 3). If in the United States market, through the synecdoche of literary commodification, García Márquez's revolutionary Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude [1970]) and, specifically, the magic realism of his fictional Macondo came to stand in for the diverse literary projects of Latin American authors in the 1960s, one must ask if a similar operation is taking place with Bolaño. While the number of translated Latin American literary works continues to be limited and most “go virtually unnoticed” (“Translation Database”), the significance of Bolaño's place at the center of a new canon in translation is magnified and necessitates inquiring into how his critical success in the United States market may be shifting the politics of translation of other texts. As a critic announced in 2011, “a second Latin American literature Boom is happening … [that] probably owes its existence to the explosion of the late-Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, whose popularity re-opened the door to North American publishing houses for Latin American authors” (Rosenthal).

Whereas first-generation theorists of virtual reality tended to regard simulated worlds as separate from real life, current trends in miniaturization, implants, wearable computers, and embedded sensors have shifted the emphasis to “mixed realities” mingling computationally intensive simulations with input from the real world. Contemporary films and novels have mirrored this trend, creating a blend of simulations mixed with everyday reality that Bruce Sterling has called “slipstream fiction.” To explore this phenomenon, we analyze three films that mix simulation with reality: The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive. These films present themselves initially as murder mysteries, but this pose quickly gives way to even more serious concerns, about the ontological status of the represented worlds. The narrative configurations suggest that when death is no longer the plots' logical end point, storytelling techniques undergo significant transformation, subverting usual assumptions about chronology, subjectivity, and topology and requiring new interpretive techniques.

The Mahabharata, composed in sanskrit, is generally described as an epic. Other sanskrit texts refer to it occasionally as a kavya, or poem, and more often as an itihasa, which literally means “thus indeed it was,” suggesting an element of history. As with many early epics, it carries a consciousness of history but does not claim historicity. It evokes a past society of clans and narrates the events that bound them together or tore them asunder, focusing on the actions of those regarded as heroes.

“The Greatest Mistake Made in Judging Southern Literature, Even by its Friends, is That We are Apt to Speak of it By Itself as if it were a thing apart and a country apart.” John Bell Henneman made this assessment a century ago, in 1903 (347). Fifty-one years later, Jay B. Hubbell observed, “The literature of the South … cannot be understood and appraised if one neglects its many and complicated relations with the literature of the rest of the nation” ('x“). Not long after Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs published The Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South (1953), a collection of essays by distinguished United States scholars in and beyond the South, the study of southern literature, conceived in the spirit of Henneman and Hubbell, became an academic specialty, with its centers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (where Rubin taught); at Vanderbilt University (the home of Thomas Daniel Young, the New Critics, and, a generation earlier, the Agrarians); and at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (where Lewis P. Simpson edited the Southern Review). There were outriders: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren infiltrated Yale. They made such an impression that, today, when people from the Northeast are asked to define southern United States literature, they are likely to channel Brooks in his emphasis on the importance of family, kinship, community, history, and memory in the imagined South. None of this is meant to imply that the literature of the southern United States was not studied before the mid-fifties; it was. Its departures from the broader national tradition were noted, but it did not constitute an academic specialty as it does today. The publication of The Southern Renascence and subsequent work by Rubin, Hubbell, Brooks and Warren, C. Hugh Holman, and many others not only institutionalized southern literature as a specialization in the United States academy but also defined the field in terms of the South's relations with the rest of the nation.

By relying on Foucauldian panopticism as a universally explanatory theory, surveillance studies has collapsed two separate issues: the power relations between watcher and watched and the visibility or nonvisibility of the watcher. The presumption that the watcher's visibility or nonvisibility is irrelevant is especially dangerous for observers of color, who are already more vulnerable because of racial hypervisibility. This essay examines the simultaneous operation of surveillance (watching from above) and sousveillance (watching from below), both predicated on racial hypervisibility. To demonstrate the continuity of racial hypervisibility across a broad historical period, I compare the risks taken by sousveillants of color making smart‐phone recordings of police brutality in the twenty‐first century with the dangers faced by visible African American sousveillants in nineteenth‐century slave narratives by Charles Ball, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. (KR)

Suspended animation emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century as part of the efforts of the newly founded Royal Humane Society to convince lay and medical readers that individuals who had apparently drowned might still be alive, albeit in states of “suspended animation” (a condition we would now likely describe as a coma). The term was quickly taken up by medical and literary authors, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Exploring these Romantic-era approaches to suspended animation can help us understand the reception and formal structures of creative literature, grasp the often counterintuitive links that Romantic-era authors established between “altered states” and “Romantic sobriety,” and articulate why poetry and other slow media remain important in our contemporary new-media landscape.

In a lead 1990 article for the atlantic monthly, bernard lewis, a well-known historian of islamic studies, conjured the catchphrase “clash of civilizations” to narrate what he saw as fundamental relations of enmity between Islamicate societies and the countries of “the West”—“the West” being shorthand for polities that bear the legacies of Christendom, the Crusades, and the European Enlightenment—since the seventh-century emergence of Islam. Three years later, Samuel Huntington, a well-known political scientist, picked up Lewis's theme and, in an article for Foreign Affairs, embroidered it into a theory of global relations to fill what Huntington saw as the political vacuum that had materialized after the cold war's closure (“Clash”). (In 1945–90, the rhetoric of civilizational clash seemed to have been adequately, if temporarily, filled by superpower contests between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies/surrogates.)

This article examines the prevalence of confusion and incoherence in James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country, arguing that the novel should be read as an extended and theoretically rich meditation on the difficulty of gaining self-knowledge in oppressive social contexts. Its central thesis is that the novel is motivated less by the tragedy of Rufus Scott's suicide early in the novel than by the ethical imperative that compels all the characters to risk their sense of self (to figuratively commit suicide) in order to better understand the circumstances they face. Through this “suicidal” sensibility, Baldwin examines how self-knowledge in oppressive contexts frequently depends on people making extreme shifts in their conception of self—of who they are in relation to their society. These shifts are often dreaded and appear self-menacing, but Baldwin ultimately implies that they hold liberatory promise.

In his tale of the miraculous healing of a mute youth in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (bk. 5, ch. 2), Bede figures language pedagogy as poetic emancipation. The tongue's loosening is an escape from physical disability and a figurative deliverance from the bonds of pagan sin through baptismal gesture. It also signifies liberation from the desolation of being trapped in one's own consciousness, a freeing into communion with other people. Bede uses the figure of a linguistically disabled youth to explore the grammatical underpinnings of all language, spoken or written. While he depicts the sacramental aspects of Latinate language learning, he also makes a startling move, hinting that English, a tongue ideologically and geographically peripheral, can adopt the pedagogies of Latin for its own secular uses. The story is an interpretative capstone to Bede's accounts of Cædmon, Imma, and Gregory I's encounter with English slaves in a Roman marketplace.