This essay draws on Freud's case history of the Wolf Man (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis; 1918), which presents one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis, in order to consider a moment in David Copperfield (1850) that constitutes the earliest childhood memory in Dickens's fiction. These two moments in Freud and Dickens occupy problematic sites that seem to slide between fantasy on the one hand and dreams on the other, and an examination of them helps open up the question of how texts remember—or fantasize—childhood and its power to structure adult experience.

During the past several decades, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been widely represented in novels, memoirs, film, television, and other genres and media. What distinguishes representations of OCD from depictions of other mental disorders is the frequency with which OCD is treated with humor and levity. Drawing on genre theory, disability studies, and philosophies of humor, this essay explains why OCD symptomatology evokes laughter and resonates with contemporary popular culture. The essay focuses on the ways in which popular portrayals of OCD distort the actual experience of the disorder.

The privileging of aesthetic over material value in the nineteenth-century English novel is reiterated in the marital choice offered the hero when he is positioned between a rich woman and a poor one. Through the contrast between these two female figures, the novels invoke the dilemma that, Adam Smith argued, troubled individuals in an increasingly commercial culture: the choice between wealth and virtue. The rich woman or heiress embodies the concerns about wealth lurking at the heart of narratives that apparently celebrate the overcoming of such material interests. Read against the backdrop of nineteenth-century political economy and anthropology, she reflects the novel's engagement with England's economic development over the long nineteenth century. She also reveals the irresolvable tension inherent in the cultural project, which begins in the middle of the eighteenth century, of disentangling the discourse of political economy from that of literature.

Popularized in Spain through the work of the Italian satirist Traiano Boccalini, the motif of the occhiali politici, or political lenses, is one of the most understudied conceits in early modern Spanish satire. This essay examines four early modern Spanish texts where anteojos de larga vista (“eyeglasses” or “telescopes”) become central elements as the eye is given the ability to perceive the reality beyond deceptive appearances. But a capacity to see beyond reveals two parallel concerns: the adoption of spectacles as a mark of social distinction by a society suffering from the moral blindness these novels denounce and the increasing tensions between astronomy and religion stemming from the use of lenses as stargazing tools. Contextualizing these anxieties in the contemporary polemics regarding the divulgation of Galileo's Copernican theses, I illustrate how a simple corrective instrument triggered a fierce debate at the center of Spain's uneven modernity.

The reputation of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood as a work of “marginal” modernism is complicated by its affinities with the aesthetics of high modernism, a fact signaled by its role as the inspiration of Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form. At once emblematic and eccentric, the novel is devoted to both recognition and obscurity. Nightwood enacts this paradox through a strategy of queer ekphrasis that aestheticizes moments of loss, giving aesthetic form to experiences of stigma in order to “dazzle” them. Attending to Barnes's spatial form will forward debates about modernism and queer theory, suggesting a more useful vocabulary for both: an account of the aesthetic that is neither wholly subversive nor wholly conservative and a nuanced account of queerness that does not subscribe to either total negation or total affirmation.

Antiwar activists in the United States have often made recourse to satire in order to rebut claims that their dissent is sententious and effeminate. Federalist opponents of the War of 1812 used the genre to posit, moreover, that they alone could manage the military and economic crisis that resulted from a disastrous second war against Great Britain. But satire, in an era of incipient nationalism, was problematically associated with British snobbery. I argue that wartime periodicals show Federalist satire pulling in diverging directions. Projects like Alexander Hanson's Federal Republican are regressive, reviving the Augustan archetype of the satirist as intellectual martyr, even as they unwittingly lay the groundwork for a liberal model of civil disobedience. Projects like George and Henry Helmbold's Tickler are progressive, phrasing Federalist principles in the post-Federalist vocabulary of liberal competition through their experiments with populist dialect, which also anticipate the postwar transformation of British American “satire” into all-American “humor.”

This essay posits that literary studies at the University of Hong Kong during the cold war 1950s exemplify how English as an academic subject is transmuted through the peripheral voices that engage with metropolitan literature. Focusing on the term “imagination's commonwealth,” which the poet and critic Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) invented to denote transnational literary communion, I show how it departs from imperial literary diffusion and how Blunden's poetry and professorial career at Hong Kong University enact the departure. As his interlocutors and partners, Blunden's students played a crucial role in the emergence of a literary commonwealth. In their dialogue with Blunden, they not only query his conception but also push against the boundaries of their own colonial and cold war situation.

Housman's bitter poems about fate, betrayal, and unhappiness were dismissed by many modernist critics and poets on account of their author's pathological self-division, both in content and form. As Housman's thwarted homosexuality became more widely known, it seemed the obvious source of his relentless oppositions between desire and a fateful law. But his newly recovered collection of pornography and sexology shows as much interest in sadomasochistic fantasy scenarios as in homosexuality, scenarios in which sufferer and torturer are covertly agreeing to play the same game. This interest means not only that the poems protesting against punishment might be covertly identifying with it but also that they might covertly ironize the aesthetic criteria of Housman's modernist opponents. Auden's, Richards's, and Leavis's organicist ideas about poetry's cultural mission, based on Schiller's model of the aesthetic state, are parodied by the unmediated, self-contained, and homeostatic relationships found in the masochistic fantasies of Housman's collection.

Emily Dickinson's response to the Civil War—once discounted as nonexistent or negligible, now embraced as part of the canon of Civil War writing—gives evidence of a conscious testing of alternatives. Among these alternatives, the most surprising, perhaps, is her potentially public positioning of herself as a war poet in works that celebrate military heroism. One such celebration, “When I was small, a Woman died—,” written in the aftermath of Ball's Bluff—a disastrous Union loss—revises the scenarios presented in two other Ball's Bluff poems and transforms the horrific death of a local soldier into a glorious ascent into the heavens, an uncharacteristically joyous response to an event that others (including Herman Melville) experienced as entirely mournful. Since the two other poems appeared in her local newspapers and since the soldier was Amherst's first casualty, Dickinson's poem is likely a carefully crafted bid for publication. Read in this way, moreover, “When I was small” reminds us that war presents a poet with unique rhetorical problems but also with opportunities, and that these opportunities can be tempting even for a writer as resistant to the literary marketplace as Dickinson.

Focusing on the prolific mid-Victorian writing of Anthony Trollope, this essay takes present-day theoretical interest in “actually existing cosmopolitanism” for its cue. Trollope's works remind us that from a Victorian perspective, the word cosmopolitan was more likely to evoke the impersonal structures of capitalism and imperialism than an ethos of tolerance, world citizenship, or multiculturalism. Trollope wrote novels eulogizing England's rootedness alongside first-person accounts of colonial travel, making him the arch exemplar of a two-party foreign policy discourse. Whereas Barsetshire novels such as The Warden are archetypes of autoethnographic fiction, Trollope's travel writings construct a transportable mode of racialized Anglo-Saxonness. Evoking the asymmetrical play between two notions of property—heirloom “rootedness” and capitalist “cosmopolitanism”—Trollope's foreign policy imaginary illuminates the difficulties of a genuinely negotiated rooted cosmopolitanism. Exploration of the nineteenth century's actually existing cosmopolitanisms offers the opportunity to historicize the transnational contexts and experiences of an era in which capitalist and imperial expansion was as dynamic as the globalizing processes of our own day.

This essay argues that Edwin Abbott's Flatland brings into focus the wide-ranging implications of the dethroning of what Victorians regarded as the preeminent representational system: Euclidean geometry. The contemporary debate surrounding the challenge to Euclid, conducted not just in mathematical but also in psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic terms, turned on an anxiety that signs might not have the capacity to bridge subjective and objective worlds, and Flatland seeks solace for this uncertainty by granting even empty signs unprecedented virtues.

This essay discusses civilian relations to space in the Second World War, focusing on late modernist fiction about wartime London. In novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Patrick Hamilton, and James Hanley, the modernist city has ceased to be the site of expansive, cosmopolitan opportunity it was for writers of the 1920s: permitting civilian death on a massive scale, the city is newly imagined as an anteroom to a brutal common death. Enforced immobility and coerced collectivity find expression in a recursive, subjectivist form that mimics the claustrophobic entrapments these novels describe. A pervasive sense that the mere existence of other people jeopardized one's own points to the limits of familiar stories about civilian solidarity in wartime.

This essay uses Shakespeare's sonnets to test the implications of the fantasy that poems, although not living things, preserve human life. The most valuable object in the community of the sonnets is the face of a beautiful young man. The speaker in the poems argues that the young man should entrust his most valuable quality to some technology of preservation, such as sexual reproduction or poetry. In every scenario, his beauty is preserved in a form that will not allow him to enjoy it: he inevitably has to die while his beauty lives on. Preservation thus turns out to be an unattractive plan against the fact of mortality and the possibility of holocaust. The fantasy of preservation is compatible with and even encourages a holocaust fantasy: everyone else has to die to prove that the young man's beautiful face is indestructible.

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.