In this essay, I examine Colley Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III (1699) to explore the intersections between celebrity and surveillance in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on vocabularies from performance studies, disability studies, theater history, and literary studies, I theorize a strategy of self-representation that England's first modern celebrities developed to maintain their fame while protecting their privacy from the spectators' anatomizing gaze. Cibber used his performance of Richard's disabled body to disrupt his spectators' attempts to characterize or categorize his identity. By displaying a body that demanded attention at the same time that it defied Enlightenment grammars of behavior—and by publishing literary self-representations littered with misspelled words and blotted pages—Cibber became an early practitioner of “overexpression,” a strategy that allowed him to make himself visible without becoming vulnerable to his public's attempts to interpret, dissect, and disseminate the secrets of his private life.

Between the Volga and the Ganges lies a vast yet little-examined zone of linguistic, religious, ethnoracial, and political contact shaped over many centuries by mobile communities of traders, saints, soldiers, and rebels. This is the space from which Velimir Khlebnikov, modernist poet and philosopher of history, articulates a vision of revolutionary internationalism. Khlebnikov's quasi-fictional journey from Russia's Islamic borderlands to the Indian subcontinent “in search of an idea that will free all oppressed people” transforms Madame Blavatsky's heosophical interpretation of ancient Indian religious philosophy into a cornerstone of political resistance against global imperialism in the twentieth century. The intersectional history of violence through which Khlebnikov imagines a community of minorities, misfits, and mystics wandering between the peripheries of the Russian and British Empires challenges monolithic constructs of the Orient as well as dominant discourses of Russian and Indian national identity.

Adorno's Minima Moralia was part of a publishing boom in the genre of advice literature in postwar West Germany. The combination of economic resurgence and attempted cultural restoration resulted in a widespread wish to master forming models of social intercourse; this craving for guidance accounts for the volume's commercial success. But while Adorno participates in the culture of counseling, he couples practical suggestions with repeated announcements of the demise of the self-determining subject, the projected recipient of advice. He addresses problems that appear in the individual's frame of attention but consistently disputes that this is a meaningful scene of action in the age of total administration. Minima Moralia both inhabits and violates the conventions of advice literature in order to dramatize the experience of the discrepancy between societal logic and the individual's resources.

Suspended animation emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century as part of the efforts of the newly founded Royal Humane Society to convince lay and medical readers that individuals who had apparently drowned might still be alive, albeit in states of “suspended animation” (a condition we would now likely describe as a coma). The term was quickly taken up by medical and literary authors, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Exploring these Romantic-era approaches to suspended animation can help us understand the reception and formal structures of creative literature, grasp the often counterintuitive links that Romantic-era authors established between “altered states” and “Romantic sobriety,” and articulate why poetry and other slow media remain important in our contemporary new-media landscape.

Secularism is said to support cultural imperialism by propagating the colonizer's religion in nonreligious guise or by touting a nonreligious worldview that attracts native intellectuals already disenchanted with local tradition. I take a different view. Reading Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī's Arabic translation of Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), published in Egypt in 1911, I argue that secularism attracts the colonized less by presenting itself as an alternative order—religious or not—than by validating an existing religious episteme, but doing so in translation, refracting native religion through an empowered yet seemingly empowering colonial eye. Secularity infiltrates British Egypt as Islam's likeness, not antithesis. Carlyle's alluring Islamophilia moves al-Sibāʿī to prescribe English literature to Egypt against French “unbelief,” eliding the Briton's subordination of the Prophet Muḥammadto Shakespeare. Willing the native Islamic “religious” into translatability with the Western colonial “secular,” al-Sibāʿī reconstructs modern Islam as belief in the human.

This article reexamines the role of the folding fan in Mallarmé's poetics by placing the fan in the context of its history as an art form, its evolving significance in European and East Asian culture, and its practical materiality as a writing medium. The fan is uniquely important in Mallarmé's lifelong quest to challenge the standard written and print media and to transfigure the physical form of the book into a work of art fully implicated in its literary content. The fan is a flexible, hybrid medium that resolves Mallarmé's numerous and contradictory criteria for the ideal book. It is also a metaphor and an instrument of thought. The essay attempts, therefore, to think like and with Mallarmé: taking its cue from the fan, it unfolds the fan's material aspects and tropological incarnations until it reaches the butterfly, Mallarmé's choice symbol of poetic flight and evanescence.

Between the credit crunch and the greek debt crisis, the cohead of emea global finance kindly found time to walk me through the fixed-income trading floor of Barclays Capital. I noted no vestige of bull pen or bear pit in what seemed a high-end call center, but mainly I listened. At one point, in relation to derivatives trading, my guide spoke of “real money,” “less real money,” and “barely real money.” Perhaps prompted by the economic historian Robert Brenner's assurance that “the real economy” retains links to manufacture (1), I asked what made money real. The ensuing rebuke, graciously delivered, continues to give pause: “You sound like my father.” He had a point: given that I am a child of Britain's long postwar recovery through manufacture (there was no economic miracle here), might not my allegiance to a labor theory of value in matters literary be no more than an archaic, conditioned response? Karl Marx and Frederick Engels define language as “practical consciousness” made from “agitated layers of air” (51) and acting on a reality whose elements it renders inseparable from its processes. Their definition, in its subsumption of the intellectual in the laborious, might have been made for the academic son of a printer.

David Garrick, having achieved unprecedented fame in a world newly shaped and suffused by the daily press, conducted his career from a perception that no predecessor had had reason to grapple with and that scholars now are just beginning to explore: that newspapers had altered the cultural timescape—had extended indefinitely the now wherein performer and public might mesh with one another. At stake throughout Garrick's career was the question not only of what press and player might do to or for each other tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow but also of whether the not-altogether-poor player's reputation might outlast, in any way and to any extent, his corporeal hour upon the stage. The answers Garrick tried for—at once ingenious and incomplete—can help us calibrate the intricate relation between performance and documentation, at a moment when each was newly, powerfully inflecting the other.

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.

In a lead 1990 article for the atlantic monthly, bernard lewis, a well-known historian of islamic studies, conjured the catchphrase “clash of civilizations” to narrate what he saw as fundamental relations of enmity between Islamicate societies and the countries of “the West”—“the West” being shorthand for polities that bear the legacies of Christendom, the Crusades, and the European Enlightenment—since the seventh-century emergence of Islam. Three years later, Samuel Huntington, a well-known political scientist, picked up Lewis's theme and, in an article for Foreign Affairs, embroidered it into a theory of global relations to fill what Huntington saw as the political vacuum that had materialized after the cold war's closure (“Clash”). (In 1945–90, the rhetoric of civilizational clash seemed to have been adequately, if temporarily, filled by superpower contests between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies/surrogates.)

Before Walt Whitman became the self-celebrating poet of Leaves of Grass, he was a professional journalist. This paper examines the journalism Whitman produced from 1840 to 1842 in the context of an emerging celebrity culture, and it considers celebrity's effects on the public sphere. It traces the penny press's personal style of journalism to both its artisan-republican politics and the formation of celebrity culture, in which celebrities assume status parallel to that of traditional representatives of authority. As editor of the Aurora, Whitman adopts the first-person, polemical style of the penny press and singles out prominent people for criticism. In other pieces, he presents himself as the ever-observant flâneur. As editor and as flâneur, he is a participant in and observer of the life of his community, and he assumes unassailable interpretive power. But he also regards his readers as fellow participants-observers who make judgments about the public figures he reports on. The tension between these positions is never resolved: Whitman's dialogic addresses to readers aim to extend the public sphere of critical debate even as Whitman holds steadfastly to his own social and political authority. Encouraging and modeling readers' negotiations over the meaning of public figures, he extends the features of celebrity culture to the public at large. His early journalism shows how and why it is so difficult to reconcile political and social community in the era of mass culture, and it highlights the complexities of the coexistence of celebrity and critical discourse in the personal public sphere.

With a catchy theme song and exotic scenery from the South, Kaiketsu Harimao (“Fast Thief Harimao”) made its debut in Japan on 5 April 1960. The first domestically produced television movie broadcast in color and the first to have locations overseas (notably in Angkor Wat), Harimao ran until June 1961, with a total of sixty-five episodes. Harimao opens with a procession of native men—their nativeness marked by their sarongs and painted dark skin—walking warily along the beach. They are vigilantly guarded by British soldiers with guns and whips to enforce the march. The opening scene not only establishes the exotic locale of the south but also accentuates the opposition between master and slave, between white and nonwhite races. As a soldier strikes down with a whip, the camera cuts to the lower torso of a man wearing a gun holster with a tiger-figured buckle and then moves up as the man pulls his gun and ires. Our hero wears a white turban and dark sunglasses. His shots send the soldiers' weapons flying. He mounts his horse as the camera zooms out to show him on a distant cliff, underscoring his extraordinary marksmanship. After the startled soldiers ask, “Who's there, who's that?” in unison with the hopeful natives, they shout, “Harimao, Harimao, it's Harimao!” and the airy and melodious theme song begins. As the credits roll, Harimao and his followers defeat the British soldiers and free the natives. The lead-in ends with the natives waving gratefully as Harimao and his men gallop off in triumph.

On a recent trip to nicosia, cyprus, i grabbed a city map from my hotel. The venetian walls of the old city formed a perfect circle on the map. But the northern part of Nicosia was blank—not a road named or landmark identified, not even the airport or the Venetian column that marks the center of the circular city—except for the notation “Area under Turkish occupation since 1974.” Of course, Turkey is a secular nation, but the divide between Turkish and European Cyprus is also a divide between majority-Muslim and majority-Christian populations. A member of the European Union since 2004, Cyprus is, like the rest of Europe, haunted by a spectral Islam that it has difficulty acknowledging, let alone assimilating into a broader cosmopolitan identity.

“Nothing,” Paul Jay writes in his recent work Global Matters: The transnational turn in literary studies, “has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism” (1). Certainly the shift toward a transnational model has been useful in mounting a critique of nation-based literary studies and in debunking the “natural” link among national identity, race, and language, challenging both the “hermeneutic preeminence of nations” and the “neutrality of comparison as a method” (Seigel 62–63). Combined with a postcolonial attentiveness to local or peripheral literary production and an expanded notion of agency, transnationalism works to designate “spaces and practices acted upon by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal” (Lionnet and Shih 5) and to diversify the authors and texts available to students of literature, broadening curricula and the scope of literary studies (Jay 22). Those studying and teaching non-Western literatures might well find value in the challenge to the nation as the unquestioned context for the production and interpretation of literary works and in the healthy skepticism toward a supposedly neutral comparative method.

Oscar Wilde's Salome, composed in French in 1891, represents both an episode in the history of celebrity and a dramatization of celebrity's theatrical structure. The play first entered the orbit of stardom when Sarah Bernhardt, internationally hailed as the world's greatest actress, agreed to play the title role in 1892; its author had long been a celebrity, known as much for his artfully crafted persona as for his published writings. Bernhardt, Wilde, and Salome, a play in which almost every character is both fan and idol, were all defined by the volatile conjunctions shared by theatricality and celebrity: the asymmetrical interdependence of actors and audiences, stars and acolytes, exhibition and attention, distance and proximity, absolutism and democracy, exemplarity and impudence, worship and desecration, and presence and representation.

In her 1892 study of children's literature, the child and his book, louise frances field complains, “the subject of this volume is one which, from its nature, presents many difficulties as regards material. It is the fate of children's books to be destroyed by children themselves” (v). Of course, the difficulties of children's literature are not only material. Jacqueline Rose's insistence on the “impossibility of children's fiction” has had the salutary effect of keeping scholars warily attuned to how adult desires—from sex to money to politics—structure the genre. Despite the claim of possession housed in that apostrophe, most scholars of children's literature acknowledge that these books don't really belong to children at all (Hunt). My intention in this essay is to use one of these impossibilities to circumvent the other. I am interested in children's own relation to their reading; I strive to understand not just the books adults produced for children—that is, what adults thought about childhood and wanted to say to children—but also what children actually did with these texts, how they took possession of them. I hope to demonstrate that the penchant for destroying books that Field deplores can provide insight into the literary history of childhood. For this brief essay, I take as my archive the book-destroying habits of the children of one affluent, highly literary family in post–Civil War New England: the niece and nephews of the poet Emily Dickinson—Edward (“Ned”), born in 1861; Martha (“Mattie”), born in 1866; and Thomas Gilbert (“Gib”), born in 1875.