Literature Compass最新文献

In this essay, I survey the North American literature classroom post-#MeToo, using my Spring 2024 undergraduate honors course, an introduction to Literary Sexuality Studies, for my case study. Picking up Susan Faludi's classic concept of the anti-feminist backlash, I show that Gen Z students (and their instructors) are aware of #MeToo's promises, breakthroughs, and challenges—and of the fact that last decade's period of intense agitation is, for now, over. Once again, feminist pedagogy must be done from within the backlash, during a period of dimming hope and fearful retrenchment. I rehearse strategies for introducing students to #MeToo as a historically situated phenomenon and for cultivating a transnational feminist consciousness to weather the storms to come. I use three conceptual heuristics to do so. The first, “bodies,” allows me to track post-#MeToo changes in how students approach gendered corporealities, both in cultural texts and their own experience. Second, “hearts,” attempts to paint a picture of students' consolidating political commitments, riven as they are by local and global dynamics. Finally, “time” seeks to theorize feminist pedagogy's fundamental challenge of addressing politically diverse students, many of whom haven't gotten around to subscribing to feminism. Overall, this piece wants to articulate feminist pedagogy's obligation to inhabit different temporalities and nationalities while remaining attentive to local and personal contexts.

Britain's colonial history has exerted a profound and enduring influence on both world history and global literary production—a legacy from which British Chinese literature, situated at the intersection of British and world literature, is by no means exempt. This article critically examines the impact of British colonialism on British Chinese literature, focusing on three interrelated dimensions: the formation and composition of British Chinese writers, the shaping role of the imperial gaze and racial hierarchy rooted in British colonialism, and the resulting literary constraints that manifest as writing codes. It argues that the legacy of British colonialism fundamentally shaped the demographic and diasporic composition of British Chinese writers, leading to a rich diversity in both authorial backgrounds and literary output. Furthermore, the entrenched racial hierarchy of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Britain's historiographic preference, and market-driven demands for ethnic exoticism—each intimately linked to Britain's imperial past—have decisively determined the thematic interests, genre preferences and stylistic characteristics of British Chinese writings. The complex identities and diasporic trajectories of British Chinese writers, shaped by layered experiences of migration and belonging, as well as the historically and politically entangled relationship between China and Britain, have collectively forged a distinct literary field. As such, British Chinese literature emerges as a distinctive and essential domain within the broader spectrum of world literature, continuously shaped and reshaped by the enduring legacies of empire.

This article offers a transtemporal reading of Geoffrey Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, situating the text within the ideological framework of crusading discourse in late 14th-century England while tracing its symbolic afterlife into post-9/11 political rhetoric. Drawing on Kathleen Davis's critique of periodization and Geraldine Heng's theory of the romance as a historical actant, the essay argues that Chaucer's narrative participates in a cultural logic of Manichean dualism that casts religious difference as metaphysical opposition. Through close readings of the tale's zoomorphic metaphors—especially the lamb, serpent, and scorpion—and the moral polarization between Custance and the Sultaness, the article demonstrates how the tale encodes a crusade mentality that continues to inform modern representations of Islam and Muslims. By placing Chaucer in dialog with figures such as George W. Bush, Bernard Lewis, and Samuel Huntington, as well as with contemporary critiques by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Riz Ahmed, the essay reveals the ideological durability of medieval allegory in justifying war, surveillance, and civilizational hierarchies. Ultimately, the article argues for a nonlinear understanding of medievalism as a rhetorical toolkit whose logics endure beyond the historical Middle Ages, challenging scholars to read across time in order to confront the persistent structures of racialized and religious exclusion.

This article examines Mengele Zoo by Gert Nygårdshaug as a compelling yet underrecognized case of the global novel. Although the novel exhibits many formal and thematic features associated with the genre—such as planetary environmental concerns, transnational settings, and linguistic complexity—it has been excluded from dominant definitions of global literature, which tend to prioritize English-language texts or those widely translated into English. Mengele Zoo's circulation has been largely peripheral, with notable success in Norway, France, and Colombia, but minimal presence in the Anglophone world. This absence raises questions about the ideological and market-driven criteria by which texts are included in global literary discourse. The novel's stark moral dichotomies, anti-corporate stance, and implicit endorsement of eco-terrorism may pose ideological challenges to its reception in English-speaking countries, particularly in a post-9/11 context. At the same time, its narrative offers a form of symbolic reparation for the Global North's environmental responsibility, but in a selective form, which may explain its appeal in certain European contexts. By analyzing Mengele Zoo's complex reception history and ideological framing, the article proposes the concept of the “defective” or “anomalous” global novel—a text that imagines the global and engages planetary issues but is hindered in its cultural circulation by linguistic, geopolitical, and ideological barriers. This case invites a reevaluation of how global literature is defined and canonized, highlighting the need to decenter Anglophone markets and consider alternative trajectories of global textual mobility.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its distance from Britain, the Pacific islands occupied complicated symbolic and material terrain in Victorian culture. Home to major settler populations in New Zealand and Australia, the Pacific was also an exotic tourist destination, the setting for popular adventure novels and travelogues, a field laboratory for the burgeoning disciplines of ethnography, biology, and race science, and one of the last battlegrounds in the global scrabble for resources. This essay surveys the small but rich body of scholarship that has emerged over the past 30 years to elucidate Victorians' engagements with the Pacific. In particular, this essay highlights the unique challenges and opportunities posed by its study: attending to the Pacific requires us to rethink our terminology, expand our archives, refine our methods, and interrogate our approach to Indigeneity. As such, a survey of scholarship on this still somewhat marginal subject offers insights into the state of Victorian studies more broadly, at a juncture in which the field is reorienting itself toward the global.