This article reads Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory and which formed the basis of what I describe as the Victorian biopolitics of intelligence. Although these novels reflect Hardy's endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. I suggest that the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière illuminates the extent to which these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatized forms of intelligence.

Critics writing on the poetry of Charlotte Mew have long considered the cri de coeur—often described as an involuntary exclamation of the speaker's, or the poet's, secret suffering—a defining element of Mew's poetics; this focus has contributed to an ongoing critical tendency to read Mew's work as pathologically divided between authentic feeling and artificial performance. Due to Mew's liminal position in literary history—writing from the 1890s through the 1910s—her work is often also read in terms of a struggle between Victorian propriety and modernist innovation. Attending to Mew's own use of the phrase “cri de coeur,” however, shows that she used it not primarily to indicate the expression of deep feeling but as a quotable, extractable catchphrase or tag that might circulate independently from its source text in quite different literary and cultural contexts. Reading Mew's poems “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête,” as well as her unpublished short story “Thic Theer Kayser,” with this definition of the cri de coeur in mind reveals a poetics rooted in the lively print and performance cultures of Mew's own lifetime—a flexible, entertaining poetics that challenges conventional understandings of the boundaries of literary periods.

“We saw no issues,” reports the Department of Homeland Security in a self-study of its practices for detaining children at the US–Mexico border, “except one unsanitary bathroom.” The system is working as it should; all is well. “CBP [Customs and Border Protection] facilities we visited,” the report summarizes, “appeared to be operating in compliance with the 2015 National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention, and Search.” A footnote on page 2 of the September 2018 document defines the prisoners at these facilities, the “unaccompanied alien children,” as “aliens under the age of eighteen with no lawful immigration status in the United States and without a parent or legal guardian in the United States ‘available’ to care and [provide] physical custody for them.” Available is in scare quotes. This tic of punctuation discloses to us that the parents of these children have been arrested and removed. They are not available, and cannot take physical custody of their children, because they themselves are in physical custody. In a further typographical error, the word “provide” has been omitted: the children are without a parent or legal guardian in the United States “available” to care and physical custody for them. The dropped word turns “physical custody” into a verb and sets this new action, to physical custody, in tense relation to “care.”

What does it mean to commit? And why are men stereotypically afraid to do it? At some point in the last, say, sixty years, commitment-phobia displaced sexual neurosis as the acceptable euphemism through which men could talk about (or at least be talked about as though they talked about) the obsessive fear of castration that, from Ovid to Freud, took as its sign the phallophagic vagina. Thus, in one of the key contemporary representations of male commitment-phobia, the relationship between Chandler and Janice on Friends, our sympathetic horror derives not from Chandler's having been encompassed by Janice's body but by her postcoital laugh. To surrender, by surrendering to the feminizing procedure of commitment, one's contempt for women; to put oneself in the position where one had no choice but to put up with such a laugh—worse, perhaps, to feel compelled to excuse such a laugh among one's friends: such would be the anxious hypothesis of a heterosexual body magnetized toward feminization, but just as strongly defended from it.

In the fall of 2017, a year into the current U.S. administration, a month into the #MeToo movement, I reread Adorno's 1962 essay “Commitment,” on the creation and consumption of art in an authoritarian world. I reread it at the same time that I became brave enough, and angry enough, to teach Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) for the first time in my fifteen-year career. Adorno says that Sartre's question, “‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’ is also the question whether any art now has the right to exist” in the wake of atrocities like the Holocaust. Adorno ultimately resolves the question in the affirmative, but only at the end of an essay otherwise dedicated to the difficulties of producing literature that resists a consumerist regime. For Adorno, committed literature (that is, progressive, instrumentalized, messaged) all too often assimilates itself to the brutalities against which it protests, while autonomous literature (that is, art that exists for itself) runs the risk of degenerating into a “fetish . . . an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political” (177). In returning to both Tess and Adorno after a longish absence, I wondered whether, in spite of Adorno's overtly modernist leanings, we might nevertheless consider that certain Victorian novels manifest his concept of tensed oscillation between commitment and autonomy. Adorno suggests that certain nonrealist art forms (one of his examples is Picasso's Guernica) neither “do” nor attempt to compel others to “do” anything instrumental, and yet such works simultaneously both illuminate and (precisely in their turning away from action) condemn systemic brutalities. We need not entirely agree with Adorno's reading of Guernica specifically, nor his fetish-treatment of modernist art broadly, to entertain the idea that—even in their realist projects—certain Victorian novels also “negate empirical reality, [and] by merely existing endlessly reiterat[e systemic] guilt” (190). I'll return to this question more directly later in the essay; for now, let it lurk in the corners of my discussion of Tess.

It has been a long time since the poetry of Adelaide Anne Procter, a favorite of Queen Victoria, captured much interest from readers of poetry, whether they be anthology aficionados, scholars, or students. Now considered a minor poet of the period, she was nevertheless a quintessential poet activist of her day, raising money for and working with the Providence Row Night Refuge, editing and contributing to the English Women's Journal alongside the Langham Place Feminists and the Society for the Employment of Women. She published volumes of her own poems, one of which ran to as many as nineteen editions between 1858 and 1881, and her work was featured regularly in Charles Dickens's periodical Household Words. Her legacy stands as a powerful testimony to the way ideas and tastes change over time. Full of angels, Christmases, quietly suffering children, and pious nuns (she converted to Catholicism in 1851), her poetry is often dismissed as sentimental and clichéd. A glance at her forms reveals many straightforward tetrameters with expected alternating, end-stopped rhymes, an easiness that seems to ally form and content. If Adorno had ever taken the time to read her poetry, he probably would have hated it, not just for its Catholic faith and its frequent focus on sin and redemption, but for its attempt “to work at the level of fundamental attitudes,” typical of committed art. Consider these lines from her frequently anthologized “Homeless,” which asks readers to recognize that their society takes better care of animals, criminals, and commodities than of the homeless poor:

In these times of ours, whither art? What is the use of the defamiliarizing and the sublime amidst cataclysmic conflicts over identity and belonging, resources and institutions, climate and extinction? Understandably, many defenders of art have lately come to frame their defenses in terms of messaging: artists make art to convey messages otherwise excluded from official discourse (ideology, policy, history, social science), to testify and self-express, to achieve recognition and elicit identification. Spectators and readers in turn look to art in order to see themselves mirrored, their experience confirmed, their truth avowed.

This article proposes a way of linking textual form and the social world. The forms in question are the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, specifically those he kept between 1866 and 1875, a period that begins with his conversion to Catholicism, initiation into Jesuit training, and rejection of poetry. These five notebooks (A1–A5) have struck some readers as intensely asocial. Their creator was famously resistant to circulation and readership, on one hand (“Please not to read,” he inscribes on the inside front cover of the first), and more concerned with natural than human phenomena, on the other. I show instead that the notebooks project networks of relation between humans, objects, and the natural world. My hope is that what follows will refresh some of the ways we think about and navigate online social forms in the twenty-first century.

Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.” While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?