This essay recovers the newspaper writings of the Omaha journalist Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche as the first Indigenous woman to publish about the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Her eyewitness accounts challenge mainstream histories of the massacre that focus largely on frontier violence and Indigenous death by rewriting Wounded Knee as a place of Indigenous resilience and of an Indigenous community bound together by the rights and responsibilities of kinship. By prioritizing the stories of surviving Indigenous women and girls, Bright Eyes's reporting speaks to and becomes a precedent for ongoing acts and discourses of Indigenous activism, feminism, resurgence, and self-determination.

This essay is born of the belief that racial justice, social justice, and environmental justice are mutually entangled. Despite their shared commitments to justice, early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies have rarely been in conversation with each other. We address this aporia here and ponder how such intersections can create pathways to more inclusive futures for early modern studies, and for literary studies more broadly. We begin with a brief reflection about how we came to these topics; we then turn to literary and critical works that illustrate the interconnectedness of these issues in premodern literature and explore how those connections persist and haunt our own thinking and writing. This essay is not argumentative in the traditional sense, but rather invites our scholarly communities to unlearn our way to different possibilities.

This essay argues for the primacy of energy as an impetus in the writing of the Sudanese author al-Tayyib Salih. Taking his most famous novel, موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال (1966; Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl; Season of Migration to the North), as a case study, it explores the significance of climatic factors and of changes to energy regimes in the novel's plot, characterization, intertextuality, and postcolonial critique. Through the character of Mustafa Saʿid, it argues for a posthuman impulse in the novel, as Mustafa uncannily transforms from Faustian archetype to a fantastical, nonhuman force. It concludes by shifting to alternative forms of energy within Salih's writing, as the spiritual energy of the Sufi “unseen” meets the unheeding world of atoms, supercharged with new energies in the modern era.

This article offers an analysis of the embodied speaking voice of Audre Lorde over the span of nearly two decades publicly performing her poems aloud. Drawing from interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze archival recordings from across Lorde's performance history, I argue that Lorde developed a series of vocal techniques—shifting vocal registers, demanding silence from her audience, singing with vibrato, and performing with a communal timbre—that distinguish her from her contemporaries in the Black Arts movement. Lorde's vocal practice was anchored in the aesthetics of the black church but also deeply fashioned by her queerness, a combination that challenged the default heterosexuality within normative genealogies of black sound. Though Lorde's essays are central to affect theory and her poetic voice is often described as polyvocal, I argue that the material aspects of Lorde's poetic performance practice situate her as a prescient theorist of sound and affect.

This essay reads the poet Eileen Myles's recent turn to climate activism as an extension of their queer critique of predatory urban change on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where they have lived since the 1970s. Myles's climate activism opposes the demolition of Manhattan's East River Park to facilitate one of New York City's first large-scale climate resiliency projects. Myles argues that residents’ desires should shape climate resiliency planning priorities. I read Myles's earlier poems and essays to describe how the queer persistence and the attention to the “now” of urban change that they develop in response to New York's housing crisis in the 1980s during the early era of AIDS inform their climate activism. I argue that the environmental humanities tools needed to represent climate change on an urbanizing planet are inextricable from a queer theory approach to sustaining desire and loss amid precarity, as becomes apparent through Myles's writing.

This essay compares two historical novels, one set in the Victorian period that suggests connections between the Victorian and contemporary eras and the other written in the Victorian period but looking back to a similarly unfinished past. The novels in question, Ian McGuire's The North Water (2016) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863), are both whaling narratives of a kind, but whales feature only infrequently in them: they are largely absent presences—if also important vehicles for memory—in the texts. The essay takes a hauntological approach to explore how the figure of the spectral animal forces readers to reflect on the systematic violence that the human world has historically inflicted on the nonhuman; the texts also open up a colloquy with the dead, both human and nonhuman, that is as much a reckoning with the present as a confrontation with the past.

New Woman literature is typically regarded as an Anglo-American invention, but this assessment ignores the contributions of global authors who shaped the genre's rise in the decades before its more familiar Western emergence. This essay demonstrates that in the late nineteenth century, Indian women authors crafted both fictional and nonfictional writings that anticipate, expand, and complicate standard narratives of the New Woman. These understudied texts—by authors like Toru Dutt, Krupa Satthianadhan, Shèvantibāi Nikambé, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain—also centrally shaped mainstream Indian feminism while occluding alternative counterstrains. New Woman literature and the wider feminist movement cannot be understood without analyzing these transnational incarnations; indeed, I argue, both had transimperial origins. The works analyzed here reframe early feminism as an international enterprise—one more diverse and global in scope than most existing scholarship recognizes.

This article argues that a reliance on material texts tied to the concept of improvement—such as picturesque engravings, diagrams, and account books—pushed the early abolitionist movement toward a reforming, ameliorationist ethic that disavowed revolutionary action and immediate emancipation. Although the term improvement had broad social applicability by the late eighteenth century, its original connections to land management made it an especially important concept for the abolitionist debate. Integrating book history with studies of enslavement and abolition, I show how abolitionists’ use of visual-textual forms such as diagrams and account books created an emphasis on gradual improvement. In response, Black abolitionists both emphasized concepts other than improvement and presented their works in different material forms. Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottabah Cugoano adapted the genre of autobiography to demonstrate how their own ostensible improvements did not have the effects anticipated by the logic of white abolitionists, ultimately undercutting the usefulness of improvement as a guiding concept for abolitionism.

We created a relational database that captures every author and work ever selected for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Given this anthology's influence, our database reveals changes in the literary canon over the past half century. We find that the common story of increased diversity is true, albeit truer with respect to race than gender. However, the biggest structural change has been a substantial growth in the number of anthologized authors. We argue that, while that strategy has produced real gains, it also creates a canon that less effectively manages reader attention, affords women and people of color a less valuable position than many white male authors once enjoyed, and tacitly accepts the notion that the new additions do not have greater literary merit than authors on the original roster, whom we show editors too rarely cut.

Whereas previous criticism of Shakespeare's Sonnets has shown how the early sonnets associate the fairness of an elite young man with the dynastic legitimacy and aesthetic refinement that would come to signify the superiority of racial whiteness, this essay considers certain later sonnets that compromise and threaten to revoke whiteness as a mark of racial privilege. Darkening the friend's complexion, these poems—numbers 27–28, 33–35, 43, 58, 93, and 119–20—materialize him as a nocturnal shadow; stain his lovely face with black clouds, smoke, mud, wrinkles, and ink; and associate his sexual estrangement from the speaker with the torments of blackest hell. By darkening the promiscuous aristocratic friend, these later sonnets suggest that racial fairness is not simply an ontological fact—a stable epidermal sign of aristocratic lineage—but a fluctuating sign contingent on interpersonal value judgments, or an “affective epistemology.”

This essay traces the emergence of Anthropocene fantasy through an analysis of three multivolume series—George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings, and N. K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth. Each of these series repurposes the conventions of epic fantasy to analyze the ideological underpinnings of anthropogenic crisis. Among the most important tropes revised are fantasy infrastructures, which, in Anthropocene fantasy, frequently manifest a problematic division between the human and the nonhuman. Consequently, characters’ responses to these infrastructures often reflect these novels’ ecological politics. The surrender of agency associated with the abandonment of ancient infrastructures further indicates Anthropocene fantasy's interest in reimagining the individualistic mode of human agency that drives so many novel plotlines, fantasy and realist alike. Anthropocene fantasy's revision of its own problematic genre infrastructures thus has implications not only for the epic fantasy but for the novel form more broadly.

This essay brings to light J. G. Farrell's novel The Lung (1965), a singularly inventive and politically incisive fiction of epidemic polio. It situates the novel in three key contexts: the neglected history of epidemic poliomyelitis and the state response to it in the postwar United Kingdom; the mid-century polio culture industry; and the English novel itself, which genre The Lung finds incommensurate with the range and extremes of physical pain caused by poliomyelitis. Farrell's novel has been out of print since a paperback edition of 1967 and has never been published outside the United Kingdom. This essay understands the obscurity of The Lung as indicative of a larger and increasingly urgent disconnect between literary studies and the history of public health.