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)

This essay calls for a conceptual reorientation of how quantitative methods in literary studies are currently framed, arguing for an expansion from a linear model bounded by the endpoints of distant and close to a space defined by multiple dimensions of scale. I explore the axis bounded by visible and invisible as an example of one of the additional dimensions that might constitute this expanded conceptual frame. In demonstrating its potential for producing new knowledge, I examine the editorial work of two women abolitionists, Mary Ann Shadd (1823–93) and Lydia Maria Child (1802–80). I show how topic modeling and statistical analysis can help identify and describe their invisible editorial labor. I thus provide an additional layer of evidence in support of the argument that positions women, and black women in particular, at abolition's vanguard. I also show how both women employed editing as a method of community formation and world building. I conclude by extending the example of editorial work to the labor required to perform quantitative work today, underscoring the importance of expanding the frame in which quantitative methods in literary study are conceptualized and deployed. (LFK)

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) can usefully be read in the context of the Christian existentialist thought to which Auerbach was exposed during his years as a professor at the University of Marburg between 1929 and 1935–36. Specifically, placing Auerbach's account of Peter's denial of Christ as related in the Gospel of Mark in conversation with the work of Auerbach's Marburg colleague Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) helps us to understand Auerbach's indebtedness to Bultmann and to see Mimesis in new ways, as a project with a longer collaborative history that concerns not only literary “realism” but also the dargestellte Wirklichkeit (“represented reality”) of the finitude of the human condition. Acknowledging the importance of early-twentieth-century Christian existentialism in Germany for Auerbach's work helps explain the affective hold that Mimesis has had on lay and professional readers alike.

In the midst of the earth's sixth mass extinction, there has been a turn to the redemptive power of biological life in various new materialisms, neoanimisms, neovitalisms, and affirmative biopolitics. In this essay I outline a series of historical and conceptual cautions against staking our lives or others' on such reconsiderations of life. Exploring the fascination with hylozoism (the theory that all matter is alive) in turn-of-the-twentieth-century biology, philosophy, and fiction, I demonstrate a recurring link between theories of universal life and eugenic racism that troubles any attempts to base political and ethical norms on supposedly biological ones. An examination of Mark Twain's “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes” reveals an alternative philosophy of life that uncouples hylozoism and imperialism but does so at the cost of a deadening nihilism. Such examples suggest that we look elsewhere than to life for our animating principles.

Literary histories of the twentieth century often emphasize how rapid technological innovation spurred writers to reimagine the novel's form and central concerns. This essay investigates that claim, comparing the presence of various information technologies in American fiction with their nonfictional presence in American households. What this comparison reveals is a pronounced lag: a gap in time between when a new technology becomes ubiquitous in the home and when it becomes ubiquitous in the novel. Moreover, the shape of this lag is consistent across multiple technologies, tracing a normative trajectory of fictional representation over time. Whereas more popular and more prestigious novels travel in tandem for much of the twentieth century with respect to their inclusion of technology, the two subfields diverge substantially at the close of the century, as conceptions of literary prestige become increasingly defined by an opposition to technologies of the present. (AM)

This essay uses a case study of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and (1876-1924) to argue for an approach to world literature called “reading distance.” Through a close reading of Lin Shu's and translations of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia) into Chinese and Arabic and a consideration of their work as translators and intellectuals, the essay reads between peripheries—places like Cairo and Beijing—to understand how intellectuals in those places grappled with difficult questions concerning translation, language reform, and changes in reading publics. By thinking with models of distant reading but also engaging with materials that are usually excluded from those models, the essay examines an important point of overlap in the intellectual and cultural histories of the Arab and Chinese enlightenments of the early twentieth century.

This essay reads Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale—a retelling of the popular Constance exemplum—as a case study for thinking about a global Middle Ages. The tale's globalism emerges most pointedly in its depiction of the ocean and, more surprisingly, in Constance's pale face during her trial for a murder she did not commit. By reading these unlikely images together, this essay argues that both operate as oceanic sites of exemplary justice and that the Man of Law frames the Constance story as a call for global justice outside the reach of territorial law. Chaucer imagines a legality that works like exemplarity, conceptualizing witness testimony in particular as a fluid narrative form that can accommodate the needs and expectations of various audiences, cultures, and temporalities. (JKT)

This essay uses performance theory to intervene in a decades-long debate about a characteristic of children's literature: it is the only major category of literature written by one group (adults) for another (children). According to a contested but tenacious school of thought, this difference between writers and readers embeds top-down power, or adult domination of children, in children's literature. I identify a popular subcategory of children's literature, the “going-to-bed book” (exemplified by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon), which appears to epitomize and therefore shore up this top-down model. I then read going-to-bed books through function—that is, the ritualistic actions or performances that these books prompt, or script, among child and adult readers. This mode of analysis initially produces seemingly powerful evidence in support of the top-down model of children's literature; but that evidence, as I show by examining two recent best sellers, ultimately unravels.

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its colonies that has been the prevailing emphasis of literary criticism about empire. I focus on the eighteenth century's overlooked military men and lowlevel colonial administrators who wrote newspaper verse, travel poetry, and plays. I place their compositions in an institutional chronicle defined by the “cultural company‐state,” the British East India Company, which patronized and censored Anglo- India's multilingual reading publics. In the process of arguing for Anglo‐Indian literature as a local and regional creation, I consider the how the terms British and anglophone should function in literary studies of colonialism organized not by hybridity or creolization but by geographic relations of distinction. (JM)

How could American students of intermediate French be the catalysts for a work of avant-garde French literature? This article centers on Le rendez-vous, an intermediate French-language textbook that combined a novel written by the French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet with grammatical exercises written by Yvone Lenard, a prominent textbook author and instructor of French in the United States. Focusing on previously unexamined archives of this publication, from its release in America to the publication of Robbe-Grillet's novel in France under the title Djinn, the essay reveals an unknown literary history of transnational collaboration and exchange and places new emphasis on Robbe-Grillet's formative involvement with American higher education during his literary career. Through close reading of manuscript drafts and publishers' papers, the essay demonstrates how the dynamics of global publishing and shifting trends in language pedagogy aligned to condition the production of what would become Robbe-Grillet's most commercially successful novel.

This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)

The digital humanities is today overwhelmingly visual. Even as DH has increased access to the humanities at an astonishing rate, it has also inadvertently narrowed our sensory access to information. It is time to add new dimensions to a field structured predominately by the flat screen. Emphasizing touch, we call for a textured digital that challenges the logic governing many notions of access—that is, the unproblematic translatability of information between the senses. As an epistemological intervention, texturing DH promises new ways to approach sensorial history and to engage diverse sensory abilities and experiences—past, present, and future. As an ethical intervention, it emphasizes our responsibility to evaluate carefully the structures of digital accessibility and to increase access for all. (SA and DW)

Recent work at the intersection of literary history and sound studies has taught us to regard lyric poetry as a sonic medium in its own right, but what sort of medium is it? This article unfolds lyric's intrinsic intermediality by way of the American composer Harry Partch and his brief collaboration with William Butler Yeats. Rekindling Yeats's turn-of-the-century dream of a new art uniting word and music, Partch's experiments setting poetry to microtonal music involved notating the subtle melodies of speech with new scales and instruments–homemade lyres, in fact. Built to compete with the phonograph, these new-old media pressed lyric to its absolute limit as a symbolic medium, clarifying both lyric's intermediality and its sensitivity to technological change. When Partch, who spent several years as an itinerant “hobo” in the 1930s, transplanted his Yeatsian speech-music to the transient shelters of the Depression-era West and began notating migrant voices, this compositional practice heralded unprecedented possibilities for the literary inscription of speech.

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)

Working at the intersection of translation theory and medical humanities, this article interrogates the term brain fever, which Constance Garnett, adhering to clichés of English sentimental fiction, uses in reference to a wide variety of medical conditions in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Garnett's choice has become useful shorthand for the narrative function of delirium in Dostoevsky's works, but it obscures the sensitivity to medical terminology that informs the Russian texts. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky stages the conflict between Enlightenment rationality and religious mysticism by satirizing the terminology of medical authorities and contrasting it with the language of faith, which posits its own etiology for mental diseases. Garnett's abundance of interpolated brain fevers can be read not as a simple mistranslation but as marking the roles of translation and diagnosis in mediating the various cultural paradigms produced in fictional worlds.