Academic institutionalization of the environmental humanities began in the early 1990s, and since 2000 the field has grown rapidly because of infrastructural support and because of funding for curricular innovation and programming. The environmental humanities include historical, philosophical, aesthetic, religious, literary, filmic, and media studies; they are informed by the most recent research in the sciences of nature and the anthropogenic factors that contribute to increasingly extreme weather events—drought, fire, hurricanes, melting glaciers, and warming and rising oceans (see Adamson, “Humanities” 135; Nye et al. 22-28).

The Poetomachia, no matter how explained, embarrasses nearly everyone now working with Elizabethan drama. The term itself sounds like a coinage which a nineteenth-century crank lifted from some minor essayist who copied Bacon or Burton—“World, I was once resolu'd to bee round with thee, because I know tis thy fashion to bee round with euery bodie: but the winde shifting his point, the Veine turn'd: yet because thou wilt sit as Iudge of all matters … I care not much if I make description (before thy Vniuersality) of that terrible Poetomachia, lately commenc'd” et cetera—and out of it coaxed a provincial philosophy. Disturbing to some eyes and naïve to others, this Victorian heirloom, like a former source of innocent merriment which any amateur psychoanalyst can tell screens a neurosis or like great-grandfather's waste tract which never yielded its ore, serves chiefly as an ornate tribute to misapplied ingenuity. Contriving chimeras in a fantastic realm between the Globe stage and the Mermaid hearth or searching for the key to release beleaguered playwrights from dramatis personae bothers equally scholars who attempt to reconstruct and critics who seek to renovate. Literary historians alone cannot drop the romantic fiction with impunity, but no one blames them for relegating it to a footnote. Reviewers of the Variorum Troilus and Cressida dutifully listed the aspect among the many surveyed or begrudged the three pages out of six hundred which the volume allocated it. Shortly after one group established the neutrality of Shakespeare's supposed foray, another, through several monographs, dismissed Jonson's and Marston's (and Dekker's and everyone else's) hostility beyond the sniping in Poetaster and Satiromastix. To a backward glance peace or, rather, the absence of war may reign.

Anyone in literary studies who has looked recently at titles of books, conferences, research clusters, and even syllabi across the field cannot have missed two key words, borrowed from historical studies, that are doing substantial periodizing duty for literary and cultural criticism: one a chronological unit, the longue durée, and the other nominally a geographic unit, the Atlantic world. While it may not be obvious, each of these terms has spatial as well as temporal dimensions that reflect their shared origins with Ferdinand Braudel. Braudel first developed an application of the concept of the longue durée (pioneered by Marc Bloch) during the 1940s when, as a German prisoner of war, he wrote the initial draft of his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; later, in 1958, he published his famous conceptual piece on the longue durée in Annales. Braudel posits that time moves at different speeds, defined as geographic, social, and individual, each corresponding to a different durée (literally, a duration of time). The longue durée (usually translated as “long perspective” or “long term”) is the slowest-moving, operating on the scale of centuries, in which historical changes are humanly imperceptible. Braudel's Mediterranean constructs a geography commensurate with his theory of time, the methodological and conceptual frameworks of his book-its geohistorical plan, its comparative approach, its macrohistorical, multidimensional perspective, shifting from the longue durée to the courte durée of political events, embodied in its tripartite division into structures, conjunctures, and events, each section proposing a different mode of periodization and time scale. Braudel's Mediterranean thus consists spatially of multiple seas unfolding temporally over the longue durée and as such simultaneously provides literary studies with a flexible tool for revisionist periodization and Atlantic studies, both historical and literary, with the powerful model of a region as a unit of geographic and chronological analysis.

The victory of neo-classicism in England was won only after a struggle against forces which are sometimes called romantic but which are more accurately described as anti-classical. These forces were partly survivals of the past and partly tendencies that pointed forward to nineteenth century romanticism. The latter, so far as they were merely germinal, fall outside the scope of the present discussion, which deals with actual obstacles interfering with the complete dominance of the neo-classical movement after 1660.

In responding to the title of this roundtable, i was determined to do two things. First, i did not want to revisit the metaphors of illness and death offered by Susan Gubar as indicative of the state of feminist criticism in 1998. It is clear to me that feminist criticism and what we mean by that term are changing, but I also want to acknowledge the continued significance of this methodology for my own work. Feminist criticism works for me as a mode of literary analysis and as a way of seeing the world, and I am reluctant to offer a doomsday scenario for its future.

Scientists have recently proposed 1610 as a candidate for the first year of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. They pinpoint the rise of European colonialism and the global movement of life among ecosystems it precipitated as the triggers for measurable changes in the earth system. We used digital humanities methods to mine historical archives to evaluate the relations among colonialism, early modern globalism, and the origins of the Anthropocene. We suggest that the Anthropocene was initiated by a premodern earth system that defined life across the globe in spatial terms, furthering the goals of empire—a regime of biopower that has not been adequately acknowledged in debates on the Anthropocene. We propose that the idea of empire, rather than Enlightenment narratives of progress and scientific modernity, must be considered in our definition of the Anthropocene. (JJL and JB)

The challenge facing “distant reading” has less to do with Franco Moretti's assertion that we must learn “how not to read” than with his implication that looking should take the place of reading. Not reading is the dirty open secret of all literary critics-there will always be that book (or those books) that you should have read, have not read, and probably won't read. Moretti is not endorsing a disinterest in reading either, like that reported in the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts' Reading at Risk, which notes that less than half the adult public in the United States read a work of literature in 2002 (3). In his “little pact with the devil” that substitutes patterns of devices, themes, tropes, styles, and parts of speech for thousands or millions of texts at a time, the devil is the image: trees, networks, and maps-spatial rather than verbal forms representing a textual corpus that disappears from view. In what follows, I consider Distant Reading as participating in the ut pictura poesis tradition-that is, the Western tradition of viewing poetry and painting as sister arts-to explain how ingrained our resistances are to Moretti's formalist approach. I turn to more recent interart examples to suggest interpretive alternatives to formalism for distant-reading methods.

Michael Jackson, arguably the most notable popular-culture virtuoso of the late twentieth century, cannot be understood outside the economic moment that produced him. This essay examines relations between his virtuosity as a dancer and the trajectory of American deindustrialization in the period 1983–88. Through the trope of the human motor, Jackson's virtuosity produces nostalgia for a vanishing industrial past, while barely containing the contradictions and exclusions endemic to the industrial modernist project, especially those involving race. This trope is activated by the intersection of his movement vocabulary and his recurring invocations of hard work. Jackson's dancing in this period reveals a neglected aspect of virtuosity in dance more generally. As an allegorical presentation of idealized relations between the body and work abandoned by the relentless motility of capital, Jackson's virtuosity allows audiences to view these disappearing modes with a romantic backward glance.

Modern tragedy faces a number of challenges, many of them compiled in George Steiner's classic study The Death of Tragedy. This essay will add one more to Steiner's list: a crisis of action inaugurated by the rise of capitalism and given its first and clearest discursive form in the works of the classical political economists. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith suggests that the prevalence of happiness or its opposite depends less on ethicopolitical actions than it does on economic production. Nations are wealthy or poor, and thus happy or not, according to how efficiently their populations make things, not how wisely or virtuously their members comport themselves. And for the individual, happiness comes to depend more on consumption than on the exercise of virtue, as it had formerly done in Aristotelian ethics. But if tragedy is, as Aristotle claimed, the imitation of an action, then the dethroning of action by production will simultaneously degrade the very substance of tragic drama. What happens to tragedy when the thing that constitutes it is diminished under conditions of capitalist modernity?

The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)

Like Hegel, Pater often uses images of death and rebirth to describe the historical process. This imagery reflects Hegel's principle that later stages of artistic and spiritual development annul earlier phases and yet also conserve them. The series of rebirth images by which Pater describes the process of historical development is the firmest proof that Hegelés thought was a sustained and creative influence on his work. In the strongly Hegelian Winckelmann essay, Pater represents the Renaissance as a cultural affirmation achieved through negation, while others of the Studies in the Renaissance define the idea of cultural rebirth through the images of metempsychosis and the afterlife of the pagan gods. The original version of the Winckelmann essay also mentions Hegel in connection with the myth of Demeter, which, in his essays on Demeter and Persephone, Pater treats as still another image of cultural continuity. The principal source for these studies was Ludwig Preller's Demeter und Persephone. Pater also borrowed Preller's theory of a primitive religion of the earth, connected it with the Christian imagery of death and rebirth, and employed it again in Marius the Epicurean, his most ambitious treatment of the historical dialectic.

Wordsworth once wrote that he had been indebted to the North for more than he should ever be able to acknowledge. By that statement he probably meant to include, among other writings, the border ballads and certainly the poetry of Robert Burns. Burns was one, Wordsworth assures us, whose light he hailed when first it shone, and from whom he learned in youth “How Verse may build a princely throne On humble truth.” Wordsworth must in fact have been among the earliest of Burns' English admirers. When his sister told her seventeen year old brother of a new book Jane Pollard had recommended to her (it was the Kilmarmock edition then just a few months off the press), he replied that he had read it and, as Dorothy put it, “admired many of the pieces very much; and promised to get it me at the book-club, which he did.” Dorothy, too, was very much pleased with the poems and singled out the “Address to a Louse” and “To a Mountain Daisy” for special mention. The second edition of “poems” (1793) she carefully glossed in the margin.

Most of the scant attention paid by critics to the poetry of Thomas Campion has been sidetracked by two considerations which, however interesting in themselves, have little to do with his real poetic accomplishments. One of these considerations is that he was a musician and almost alone among his contemporaries composed settings for his own poems; the other is that he played some part in the guerilla warfare waged by a few Elizabethan writers against rhyme. Before we can make a fresh adjustment to his poetry, we must dispose of the first and reckon with the second.

Many of the critics of the heroic plays of the Restoration have had at least some passing comment to make about the concepts of love and honor embodied in these plays. L. N. Chase, for example, asserts that in the heroic play “virtue is often sneered at, reason and honor are brushed contemptuously aside.” Though he admits that love is usually justified and even glorified in these dramas, he denies that it is “a high and ennobling passion” for it “sanctions a violation of all moral laws wherever they are opposed to its free sweep and range.” Bonamy Dobrée also asserts that a “sound, guaranteed heroic love was excuse for any betrayal of friendship or dereliction of duty.” Nevertheless, he believes that in an age hungry for heroism and balked of it in real life, these plays provided on a superficial level the kind of heroism which satisfied the emotional needs of Restoration audiences. Allardyce Nicoll accepts essentially the same explanation for the popularity of heroic drama, yet he regards “flaunting honor” and “impossibly idealistic love passions” as typical of these plays.

Two forces are always at work in a language—one licentious, tending towards a disregard of regulation and convention; and the other conservative, tending to hold the language within bounds and to keep it neat and tidy. It is customary to think of English in America as being under the influence of the former, because our exuberant linguistic creations very readily attract attention. Yet there is a strong current in the opposite direction, and the pattern of American speech is not complete unless that is taken into account. Among the evidences of it are the recurring suggestions that an “academy” should be founded, with duties similar to those of the Académie française. Such agitation has been incessant in England since the sixteenth century, and the early suggestions in America reflected opinion in the mother country.

This article investigates how eighteenth-century writers used the figure of the castrato as a privileged metaphor for the negotiation of class conflicts, gender concepts, and the nature of art. A reading of Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse's novel Hildegard von Hohenthal shows that Heinse uses the character of the (fake) castrato to celebrate the artificiality of gender, desire, and art, but his novel leaves class boundaries intact. Friedrich Schiller's poem “Kastraten und Männer” attacks aristocratic supremacy but naturalizes gender codes and equates masculinity and art.

No one really believed in the authenticity of the answers,” complained Poe. “People will not believe I really decipher the puzzles.” But Poe did decipher the puzzles—that is, he really read a good many cryptograms of a certain simple type. Even the most recent biographers of Poe might be surprised to learn how many cryptograms were sent to him from time to time, and how many he solved or nearly solved. Some of the evidence has been published or cited but not much of it ever in one place, and much of it has been left hidden, especially that part which reveals the limitations of Poe as cryptographer. A large part was not available until September 1941, when the American Antiquarian Society acquired a file of the long-sought Alexander's Weekly Messenger for 1840.