Literature Compass最新文献

This paper examines Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) through the lens of affective geography. It argues that Vuong reimagines modernist ideas of space through emotion and the body. He adopts techniques like fragmentation, montage, and disjunction but redirects them toward relation rather than separation. His poems use the bodily acts of breath and touch to connect moments and histories that could otherwise remain apart. The paper employs close readings of “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” and “On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous” in two separate sections in order to demonstrate how Vuong turns themes of displacement into possibilities of intimacy. The notions of space in his work cannot be fixed or measured in the physical sense. Space instead is experienced through movement, sensation, and the body's awareness. The body becomes both map and memory, carrying history and rewriting it through tenderness. Vuong thus turns modernist geography inward, grounding it in queer and diasporic life. His poetry builds an emotional landscape where vulnerability fosters relation and belonging can exist even within fracture.

After servants of the former Bristol Mayor terrorized and beat her sons, Ann Yearsley found she did not have the money or clout to continue with an official legal complaint. She could, however, make her complaint in print, writing Stanzas of Woe (1790). This understudied short volume serves as a complaint against Levi Eames, as it details her and her sons' experiences with his servants as well as her emotional distress. This essay explores Yearsley's attempts to express her anger and sorrow, and to win public opinion. It argues that Stanzas of Woe is more than complaint: it is also didactic literature, offering instruction in human connections. If the anger percolating through the volume reflects Yearsley's hurt, her advocacy of connection seeks to teach Eames and other readers to engage in kinder treatment of others. After considering the structure of the volume and its place in Yearsley studies, the essay looks more closely at the title poem, analyzing how Yearsley mixes instruction with complaint. As a way of understanding the success of her complaint, the end of the essay looks at contemporary reviews of the volume.

Moving beyond the critical binary between formalism and sociohistoricism that has polarized readings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, this article specifies how Cha forges avant-garde formalism into a political instrument for diasporic expression. Synthesizing crip theory, new materialism, and affect theory, this article argues that Dictée functions as a performative cartography, mapping the diasporic condition as a specific mode of structural and somatic disablement. Integrating Asian American disability studies, this study analyzes this practice less as a representation of trauma and more as a mode of knowing grounded in the experience of being socially and linguistically disabled by normative national structures. It traces three interlocking layers: the unsettled temporalities of crip time, the material geography of the book as an archival body, and the affective terrains generated within the reader. In so doing, this reading offers Asian American literary studies a critical vocabulary for reframing formal difficulty as an embodied political strategy and expands postmodern geography by positioning the body as a primary site of historical inscription.

This essay reviews recent treatments of time and temporality in Romantic literary studies. The essay first tracks how critics' operative conceptions of time—and the Romantic conceptions of time they focus on—have changed over the last few decades as critical methods have changed and observes that critics have increasingly analyzed the central social and intellectual tensions of the Romantic period in terms of the interactions among multiple temporalities. The second section considers critical studies not only of literary treatments of time but also of the temporality of reading literature. The essay concludes with a proposal that time spent reading has a texture similar to time spent in the company of another person.

This article rereads H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and argues that what has been called “cosmic horror” in the text is not, as it is traditionally understood, a form of metaphysical oppression in which humanity confronts an existential terror at its own insignificance before the universe. Rather, it is an “epistemological accident” that takes place inside the operational frame of modern science. By means of modern technologies of observation it deliberately forces itself into a position of observation that no human subject had previously occupied. Horror is no longer defined as some mysterious entity. It emerges instead as the recoil of scientific observation itself against the perceptual architecture of the observing subject. Lovecraft's cosmic horror can therefore be read as the self-collapse of the modern scientific subject under extreme spatial conditions. It is an epistemological catastrophe triggered in the field by technologies of observation, rather than a one directional threat imposed by an external other.

This article delves into discussions around the global novel through a poetic and material analysis of The Island of Missing Trees (2021) by British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak. Internationally acclaimed, the novel's central plot is a love story set in 1974 Nicosia (Cyprus) between Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, who secretly meet amidst the political violence of a divided city, against the backdrop of golden beaches, climbing bougainvilleas, and stuffed vine leaves. I argue that the narrative tension between locality and globality mediated by a cosmopolitan writer like Shafak is one of the fundamental strategies for the novel's global legibility, circulation, and reception. First, I analyze its narrative strategies—articulated through multiple points of view (including that of a fig tree), a multiscale narrative construction (temporal, spatial, but also non-human), and a picturesque production of the local (Cypriot) and the regional (Mediterranean)—to problematize the mechanisms of internationalization in the novel. Second, I question how the novel thematically participates in popular global discourses such as humanitarianism or environmentalism. Finally, I consider the circulation and reception assumptions around the novel in Western English-language media.

Excepting satiric illustration and the work of William Blake, this article will sketch the state-of-the-art pertaining to the study of the copper-engraved period illustration of 18th-century literature. It will outline the different phases of illustration studies within the British literary context of the past 90 years, concentrating particularly on the developments of the past 40 years. Focusing on the ways in which scholars have, in recent years, argued for the centrality and significance of illustrations in literary-historical narratives of 18th-century British literature, it will introduce the latest directions in the field. These include the role of illustrations in literary material culture and transnational book and text history, as well as extra-illustration practices and the recycling of illustrations, which demonstrate the pervasive reach of literary illustration in the 18th century.

This article examines the pedagogical challenges and strategies of teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby within the intensified anti-feminist climate of post-#MeToo South Korea, where feminist perspectives face severe marginalization and active opposition. Korean college students typically admire Gatsby's self-made success and romantic idealism while uncritically accepting the novel's portrayal of female characters as morally deficient. Drawing from experiences teaching the novel at Korean universities between 2023 and 2024, this study analyzes how targeted pedagogical interventions—critically examining Nick Carraway's unreliable narration and implementing mock trials inspired by Azar Nafisi—created safe spaces for gender critique without provoking the anti-feminist backlash prevalent in Korean academic settings. By contextualizing the novel within both 1920s gender constraints and the contemporary Korean anti-feminist climate, these strategies helped students recognize the lack of voice afforded to female characters and structural limitations on their agency, thereby developing more nuanced interpretations of characters commonly dismissed as unworthy. Post-exercise reflections demonstrated students' emerging awareness of their previously unexamined gender biases when assessing literary characters. The findings demonstrate how literary pedagogy can foster critical consciousness about gender representation in environments where feminist discourse faces significant stigmatization, thereby offering insights for teaching canonical texts in similarly contested cultural contexts.

In this article, I offer a thematic overview of differing conceptions of happiness in the long 18th century. These conceptions are hedonism, subjectivism, and eudaemonism. Philosophers today term these ‘the big three’, meaning that most theories of happiness can be described in terms of one or other of them. Broadly speaking, it can be argued that, during the Middle Ages, happiness was generally conceived of in eudaemonistic terms. Wellbeing involved living in accordance with one's essence, which was to say, living as God intended. Happiness was seen to be closely related to virtue and piety. To live well meant to live in the right way. From the 17th century onwards, medieval eudaemonism was profoundly challenged by a range of socio-economic, intellectual, and cultural factors. These provided an impetus to conceive of happiness in terms of hedonism and/or subjectivism. Aside from offering an overview of scholarship relevant to these historical themes, an additional focus of this review is to describe how different literary forms contributed to the proliferation of these forms of happiness. Furthermore, towards the end of the review, I offer a discussion of contemporary debates about wellbeing, highlighting the relevance of the 18th century to those seeking to grapple with the nature of the good life in the present day.