This essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.

Tort law, which governs civil wrongs, coalesced during the late nineteenth century as courts became increasingly willing to compensate injured people. Its history, however, has been told without reference to issues of race or compensation for slavery and its aftermath. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Charles Chesnutt stretches tort discourse by using its principle of corrective justice to theorize liability for racial injustice and so discovers what law suppresses—the problem of collateral consequences when responsibility is made a function of race. Not only does corrective justice reach an operational limit when the enormity of the wrong exceeds the ability to pay, but using race to assess liability aligns corrective justice with the logic behind the southern practice of lynching. Recovering Chesnutt's use of tort challenges the dominance of contract law as the framework for reading Marrow and revises our historical understanding of the significance of reparations.

Just three centuries ago, in January, 1649, thirteen days before the execution of King Charles, his Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, the Marquis of Ormond, proclaimed a peace with the Catholic Confederacy of Kilkenny which seemed to promise ultimate virtual independence for the Irish, subject only to a tenuous loyalty to the English crown. The promise was fallacious, for both Ormond and Charles were bargaining for Irish support with pledges that they hoped never to have to keep. At the height of the Irish negotiations, in November, 1648, Charles had professed to the commissioners of Parliament that he disapproved of Ormond's work, and had even offered to “publish such a declaration against his power and proceedings” as Parliament might desire.1 But the treaty was ratified and when Ormond proclaimed Charles II in Ireland, its terms became a matter of practical politics, if not as the immediate basis of a working constitution for a free kingdom, then at least as incentives for the Kilkenny Confederates to put their forces into the field for Charles in Ireland, and perhaps ultimately in England also. One of Parliament's first measures of defense was to order Milton to prepare them and three other highly relevant documents for publication in the form of the pamphlet that was printed by Matthew Simmons in Alders-gate Street and published on or before 16 May 1649, under the title: Articles of Peace, made and concluded with the Irish Rebels, and Papists, by James Earle of Ormond, for and in behalfe of the late King, and by vertue of his autoritie. Also a Letter sent by Ormond to Col. Jones, Governour of Dublin, with his Answer thereunto. And A Representation of the Scotch Presbytery at Belfast in Ireland. Upon all which are added Observations. Publisht by Autority.

After Professor Lowes' monumental study of the Ancient Mariner as a work of pure imagination, it may seem futile to search the poem for any didactic meaning or philosophical message. Professor Lowes has written that “to interpret the drift of the Ancient Mariner as didactic in its intention is to stultify both Coleridge and one's self!” But I trust that this essay will not result in verification of Professor Lowes' dictum. We must not be too quick to class even slightly obscure poems of Coleridge's as works of pure imagination. When we recall his philosophical disposition and the great fame which his somewhat murky speculation brought him during his own lifetime, the danger involved in such procedure should seem obvious.

Yesterday Margaret Fuller returned home after making us a visit of three weeks,“ Emerson noted in his Journal on August 12, 1836. To this brief statement of fact he added these few words of characterization: ”A very accomplished and very intelligent person.“ She had sought for two years to make Emerson's acquaintance. On October 6, 1834, she had written that the Rev. Frederick Henry Hedge

The Waste Land has important connections with the Aeneid beyond those of a shared mythic configuration. These connections are primarily literary and we receive them as Gilbert Highet describes the allusions of symbolist poets—in hints, nuances, phrases repeated in a dream. So Eliot evokes the concatenation of events in the first six books of the Aeneid, and like Virgil he reformulates the literary monuments of the past as a comment upon the present age. Episodes in the Aeneid that have become part of the literary tradition, that have been reformulated by Dante, Spenser, and Milton, are echoed in Eliot's poem. Images of The Waste Land—the drowned Phoenician sailor, the lady of situations, the man with three staves, the Wheel, the card that is blank, Mrs. Equitone—have conspicuous analogues in the Aeneid. Significantly, Anchises' great sermon in the sixth book of Virgil's poem is not only a recapitulation of Aeneas' own purgatorial experiences as quester but also suggests the movement of The Waste Land as a series of trials by water, wind, and fire. In sum, The Waste Land assumes the central importance of Virgil; Virgil is for Eliot, as he was for Dante, a guide and an inspiration.

Laurence Sterne's “Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais” was first published seven years after Sterne's death. A collation of that edition with the holograph MS preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library reveals that the text is bowdlerized, with no pretense to accuracy or integrity. Moreover, all subsequent reprintings of the fragment, including the standard editions of 1904 and 1927, merely copy this inaccurate text. The edition presented here represents, then, an effort to provide the first true text of Sterne's Rabelaisian fragment. In addition, the Introduction makes use of several canceled passages to argue that the fragment should be dated one year earlier than previously supposed (1759 rather than 1760); if correct, this new date suggests that the fragment was Sterne's first creative attempt after his success with the Political Romance. As such, it deserves a significant place in the Sterne canon.

In every large city we find peculiarities in the language and customs which serve in the aggregate to mark its distinctive and individual character. They strike the stranger upon his first contact with its people as archaisms or as innovations, at least as developments peculiar to the place itself. They are often, indeed, heirlooms which the founders of the city have left it, invaluable and sacred, whose historic worth is incomparable to the philologist and historian. Often a single expression, or even sound, or a peculiar custom, conveys an historic truth more forcibly to the attentive observer than long chapters of dry history. For words, sounds, customs, also have their history, and a word has often been called an epic poem. Moreover, these peculiarities set their seal, as it were, upon each of its citizens, identifying him with itself, and whatever distinction he may acquire, either at home or abroad, is reflected upon his native place. They carry us back, historically, to the fatherland of those pioneers who founded the city and peopled the adjacent country. They still preserve the kindred relations to the mother-country, even after those of a political nature have been severed. We may see this in those colonies of Greece which have left their impress upon the country colonized, observable after everything Greek had passed away. (cf. Lower Italy, Marseille in France, and Louisiana in this country).

Die 1934 im Schlussband von Georges Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke veröffentlichten fremdsprachigen Gedichte enthalten außer den beiden in der von George selbst gebildeten “lingua romana” verfaßten Gedichten und zwei englischen Sonetten auch drei französische Gedichte, “Frauenlob,” “Proverbes” und “D'Une Veillée,” die hier einer näheren Betrachtung unterzogen werden sollen. Das einzige von diesen Gedichten, das vor dem Herauskommen des Schlussbandes schon im Druck erschienen war, ist “Proverbes,” während die von George selbst verfaßten deutschen Übertragungen bereits in den Blättern für die Kunst veröffentlicht worden waren. Daß George aber mehr, als auch im Schlussband zum Abdruck kam, in französischer Sprache dichtete, kann aus der Bemerkung im Anhang zu den Büchern in der Gesamt-Ausgabe geschlossen werden: “Beim ersten druck aus den ‘Sagen’ in den Bl.f.d.K.I.F.4 B. fand sich die Bemerkung 'zuerst französisch gedichtet, dann vom Verfasser selbst übertragen.' Die im nachtrag des 'Jahr der Seele' erwähnten: Pendant que ta mère sind indessen die einzig gedruckten französischen verse.” Die Annahme wird noch bestärkt durch C. A. Klein, der im Anschluß an Georges Dichtungen in der “lingua romana” berichtet: “Auch dichtete er vorläufig in anderen Sprachen, besonders der französischen, wie nach ihm Rainer Maria Rilke.” Da George die deutschen Übertragungen seiner französischen Gedichte auch in seine Werke aufnahm, den “Frauenlob” in die Sagen und Sänge, die “Sprüche an die Geladenen in T …” und die “Nachtwachen” in Das Jahr der Seele, die französischen Originale aber erst jetzt alle durch das Erscheinen des Schlussbandes der Gesamt-Ausgabe allgemein bekannt wurden, so ist es erst jetzt in vollem Umfang möglich, die französischen und deutschen Fassungen miteinander zu vergleichen.

The discussion which follows of two dark passages in Beowulf rests fundamentally on habits of composition which are idiomatic to and generally pervasive in Old English poetry. Among these habits variation, and what I have previously called ‘generation,‘ are commonplace. And because they are commonplace and because Old English poetic language is by nature and tradition extremely conventional, it would seem a reasonable assumption that familiarity with these habits may guide us to predictions or probabilities of what a poet intended in a scribally confused passage. Such an assumption is based on the fact that Old English poets tend to repeat words, prefixes and suffixes, head-words and base-words in compounds, word clusters or phrases, and that in some poems, such as Beowulf, there is a marked tendency to repeat these lexical elements closely together in bound contexts, such as speeches, set descriptions of person or place, and episodes. The debut of Wealhtheow in lines 612b–641 is an excellent instance of multiple repetition throughout with an accumulation of repeated elements at the end.

The story of the introduction of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's dramatic masterpieces to the American theatre is itself an American Revolutionary drama. When once the materials widespread over many years and places are duly assembled and ordered, the resultant outline of events unfolds like the scenario of an arresting chronicle play. The dramatic factors of time, place, and action become clear and colorful. The action develops against dramatic backgrounds—the American Revolution, the birth of the American Republic. The scene shifts from the American mainland to the British West Indies, and back to focal points of the American scene. The plot thickens as theatrical enterprise encounters various forces of moral and political hostility to the theatre. The time of the action prolongs over years, until the progressive campaigns of American theatrical managers, despite sundry temporary local reverses, attain conclusive victory. Within this larger framework of American theatrical venture and warfare, Sheridan's dramatic work may well illustrate “the play within the play.”

The remarkable construction referred to in the title, þon mā þe, þon lēofre þe, etc., was first studied by the present writer in a previous article (MLN XLI, 300-313). There, by bringing together some twenty occurrences from different OE writings, prose and poetry both early and late, it was shown that the construction was something more than the sporadic expression it had previously been thought to be. Its wide-spread use in OE and the fact that different adjectives and adverbs occurred in the construction (e.g. nēar, lēofre, betran, swīður, ēð, etc.) showed that it was not confined to one time or one place or one writer. So far as the evidence in that article went the construction was used as a subordinate conjunction equivalent to than in the comparison of inequality, following only negative main clauses.

A survey of the journal early american literature from the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.

One of the most interesting chapters in the literary career of Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) deals with his advocacy of naturalism and the creation and defense of his most famous original work, La Regenta. Early in his literary life Alas placed himself in the forefront of the Spanish followers of Emile Zola and for many years was one of the most vigorous advocates of naturalism in Spain. He came to the movement with abundant enthusiasm, defended it in many fiery polemics, but maintained throughout his life very definite reservations which reveal a Leopoldo Alas scarcely ever recognized by his contemporaries.

The magic and holy number seven, sum of the noumenal and phenomenal (3 plus 4) is at the very center of Thomas Mann's novelistic work since Der Zauberberg. It determines the structure and offers a clue to the meaning of his “educational novel.” This meaning becomes fully apparent in Mynheer Peeperkorn, synthesis between Christ and Dionysos. This synthesis is by no means weird and even less blasphemous, as has been often contended. Peeperkorn is the embodiment of Incarnation, and as such subject to the Passion, in both the Christian and the pagan sense. Through the life and death of Peeperkorn, Hans Castorp comes face to face with the highest Lebenswert. It is the great experience, anticipated in the chapter “Schnee,” by which the spell of and sympathy with death is broken. In the triangular covenant Peeperkorn-Mme Chauchat-Hans Castorp, caritus and eros, noumenal and phenomenal, are joined, pointing toward the “Third Humanism” of Thomas Mann's biblical novels. The number game, elucidated in numerous instances, is structure and meaning in one.