At the turn of the sixteenth century, John Skelton left a strange legacy to the English literary canon: a verse form characterized solely by short lines and long rhyme sequences. This formal innovation, a species of close rhyme now called “the Skeltonic,” has puzzled Skelton's interlocutors for centuries, leaving him a liminal figure within literary history. But if Skelton was an anomaly, the Skeltonic does not stand alone within the English-language literary canon. American hip-hop, one of the most formally innovative, commercially successful, and contentious poetic forms of our day, foregrounds a style and ethos that in many ways picks up where Skelton left off. Hip-hop, like the Skeltonic, requires the explanatory force of its own context, and yet its remarkable, persistent, historically dissonant commitment to rhyme suggests a striking formal parallel with Skelton's verse, one that offers transhistorical insight into the performative poetics and paradoxical politics of close rhyme.

This essay examines connections between the materiality of language and the impulse to translate through the hybrid series Cuadernos de lengua y literatura (2000– ; Language and Literature Notebooks) by the Argentine writer Mario Ortiz. These books confront historical trauma through a study of materials and processes that generate language in their author's domestic environment. I read Ortiz to argue that a task of translation consists of tracing how words function through ways in which their original meaning breaks down. Their function is revealed through the tasks the translator carries out to create the new linguistic object of the translated text. This essay revisits a key image from Walter Benjamin's “The Task of the Translator,” the broken vessel, through broken vessels in Ortiz's work, as well as recent materially focused translation scholarship. I conclude that the material specificity of language intervenes in the lives of readers, writers, and translators to respond to grief.

Susan Howe's recent collage poems—an intricate, sui generis form—are the flowering of her editorial theory, which I describe as “intimate editing.” I challenge scholarly assumptions that sideline Howe's engagement with the field of textual criticism from accounts of her poetry by showing how her unique approach to texts puts avant-garde poetry and textual editing into conversation, introducing reciprocal possibilities for both. Poems can model new forms of editing, and editorial debates can expand the reach and resonance of innovative poetry. Drawing on The Birth-mark, Howe's collection of creative-critical essays that probe the motivations and ethos of textual criticism, I show how intimate editing expands the typical, often rigid, values of traditional editing and contributes to growing discussions about what a feminist textual criticism might look like. Then I discuss the collage poems, particularly those in Concordance, as whimsical manifestations of Howe's textual approach.

This essay responds to Countee Cullen's reputation within Harlem Renaissance studies as an out-of-date poet who had little concern for the “new” by reassessing his career under the sign of an older, nineteenth-century decadence. In so doing, it stages a larger exploration of the intersection between decadence and the Harlem Renaissance. I begin by sketching a genealogy of African American decadence that extends from W. E. B. Du Bois to second-generation Harlem writers like Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman. I highlight Cullen's place within this lineage by examining the poetry from his 1927 Copper Sun in relationship to Charles Cullen's decadent illustrations for that volume. I conclude by showing how Cullen distinguishes himself among other Harlem writers in the way he uses decadence's investments in decay and afterlife to complicate the progressive views of history inherent to both the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement.

Science fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.

Reading Moby-Dick alongside the groundbreaking tort and accident jurisprudence of Melville's father-in-law, Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, reveals that the white whale's attack on Captain Ahab involves the same questions of risk, responsibility, and redress posed by nineteenth-century industrial accidents. More specifically, Ahab embodies the recrudescence of an earlier, revenge-based conception of justice that emerges in reaction to the pro-business jurisprudence of Shaw, in which industry was increasingly shielded from liability to its victims in cases of “pure accident”—precisely the possibility Ahab is fatally unable to accept. As narrator, Ishmael in turn augurs the rise of a new legal order that disavows the focus on blame and responsibility altogether.

This essay explores things in translation, examining what translation does to things and what happens to things in their trajectory in translation. Although translation scholars have posed useful questions about how to translate realia, I take a different approach here. When objects circulate among different groups of people, they are transformed in defiance of their material stability. The linguistic analysis of translations may allow us to observe from a unique perspective not only what kind of force things have at different times in different societies but also how the materially stable objects can actually be different things in different translation scenes. Translations of material objects offer, then, a charged locus of study, generating special, valuable knowledge about cultural contact and transfer, as well as about cross-cultural and transethnic misunderstandings. The essay focuses on three case studies from English retranslations of the landmark nineteenth-century Brazilian novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by J. M. Machado de Assis, as well as retranslations of biblical Hebrew narratives. By contextualizing particular linguistic references to clothing and artifacts, I demonstrate that translation imbues these ostensibly stable material objects with new cultural significances and valuations: language effectively remakes them.

Metaphrasis is an exercise of the English humanist schoolroom that harbors both a theory of form and a method of reading. From the perspective of metaphrasis, the central question one asks of a form is not what it is. Metaphrasis encourages us to ask, instead: What is the range of this poem's formal possibilities? What variety of forms might this poem take? What variety of forms should this poem take? Or what variety of forms would this poem take under a specific set of alternative conditions, whether we conceive of those conditions along historical, aesthetic, or ethical axes? In this essay, I take up a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), and I argue that where form establishes the parameters of possibility for a poem, the critical activity of metaphrasis permits us to imagine the world of the poem otherwise.

In this article, I examine divergent ideological impulses at play in the oeuvre of Aída Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Republic, 1918–94), including Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, nationalism (of a leftist variety), and pan-Africanism. By exploring key moments in Cartagena's intellectual development and analyzing her 1978 short story collection Tablero (Blackboard), I argue that such apparent incongruities should be understood through the lens of what I call Dominican black cosmopolitanism, a writerly performance of intersectionality that strategically employs contradictory notions of culture and citizenship to illuminate the complex history of the Dominican Republic and propose a new model of national identity. Drawing on Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo's conceptualization of black cosmopolitanism and an innovative body of scholarship on Dominican history and identity, I show how Cartagena deploys opposing discourses within a single text to reimagine Dominican identity in a global context, elucidate the Afro-Dominican experience, and plumb the liberating possibilities of pan-African alliances.

Robert Lowell challenged the mid-century canonization of the eighteenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. He objected to the way the influential historian Perry Miller instrumentalized Edwards to buttress support for US imperialism, exceptionalism, and Cold War politics. Challenging received views about the Puritan rhetoric of the most recognizable of postwar poets, this article contrasts Miller's captivating thesis of the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” with Lowell's implication of Edwards in acts of colonial expansion and slavery. Lowell's Edwards emerges as a contradictory figure who, in Lowell's 1962 poem “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” is brought into discourse with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosopher-scientists Francis Bacon and Blaise Pascal. Lowell fashions a Puritan genealogy within which Edwards is a cosmopolitan interlocutor and forebear of confessionalism; however, the theologian's flawed moral self-scrutiny occasions the poet's self-reflexive satire, as well as his model for a faltering, self-correcting rectitude.

A wave of self-translated poetry signals a significant new phase in Latinx literature. This inventive poetry, which seeks to expand translation's creative and theoretical horizons, is attuned to inequities in cultural capital associated with English and Spanish in the United States and to the histories and contemporary contexts responsible for those inequities. My case study is Mónica de la Torre's Repetition Nineteen, which illuminates the complexities of bilingual Mexican American experience and the implications of an author's translating her own work. I argue that Repetition Nineteen is a “transcreation” (Haroldo de Campos's term for creative translation) that critiques transculturation in the United States.

James Joyce's Ulysses is rife with Western fantasies about the East: seductive odalisques, damsels with dulcimers, exotic medinas dotted with carpet shops. In invoking them, however, Joyce disarms what Edward Said called Orientalism, or Europe's imperialist stereotypes about Asia and North Africa. Postcolonial critics have seen in Joyce's reformulation of Orientalism an example of his rejection of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and colonialism in Ireland and elsewhere. This essay expands and complicates this scholarly narrative through an examination of Orientalized images of Spain in the novel. A European yet Orientalized country like Ireland, Spain offers Joyce a point of reference to contextualize marginalized national identities beyond colonizer-colonized tensions. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the “minor,” I show how Joyce's engagement with Spain can be conceptualized as a form of Orientalism that decouples Irish identity from British imperialism and the anticolonial nativism that pervaded the Irish Free State after it was established in 1922, the year Ulysses was published.