Literature Compass最新文献

This essay offers a survey of scholarship on eighteenth-century British law and literature, highlighting developments and debates in the field over the past 50 years. The essay begins with a discussion of work on the interplay between the legal and the literary professions, including literary representations of lawyers and legal processes, the uses of narrative and rhetoric in law, and the legal regulation of authorship. The essay then turns to work on literary engagements with legal developments in four areas: property and contract; marriage, family, and sexuality; crime and punishment; and slavery, empire, and human rights. The essay concludes with reflections and suggestions for new work in the field. The essay ultimately seeks to demonstrate the mutual entanglements of law and literature in the long eighteenth century as well as the contributions of eighteenth-century studies to the law-and-literature enterprise.

Across the eight volumes of her Letters from France, Helen Maria Williams closely attends to women's participation in the French Revolution. This essay explores Williams's views on militancy by examining her representations of women's participation in the first and final insurrections of the Revolution: the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 and the coup of Prairial III (May 20–23, 1795). Despite similar backgrounds and the same method of political participation, Williams depicts these angry women differently: she praises the women who storm the Bastille and condemns the women who march on the National Convention for bread, the constitution of 1793, and the Mountain faction. While Williams's views on gender and class influence the way she portrays women's militancy, I argue that the specific policies that the women militants fight for determine how she represents them. Williams only presents women's anger as a positive force for political change when it is motivated by democratic policies.

Drawing from the fields of affect theory and post-critique, this article defines and reflects on the ubiquity of ‘scholarly anger’ in feminist literary criticism. Feminist critique has sometimes approached historical women writers in affective, sympathetic and often identificatory ways. They have been, what I will call in this article, ‘reading for rage’, an affective reading method fuelled by anger and indignation which considers the emotion a key strategy of patriarchal resistance. A focus on locating a sense of identificatory universal anger in women's history, I argue, has sometimes eradicated the intersections of gender with other types of social identities and structural oppressions. This article will read Mary Chudleigh's The Ladies' Defence (1701) as a test case for understanding feminist ‘scholarly anger’. Chudleigh has often been studied as a brash proto-feminist troublemaker who fiercely condemns misogyny. However, such interpretations which singularly read the power dynamics of anger in Chudleigh's text through gender have tended to gloss over the racial dimensions of the imagery she instrumentalises to advance her cause.

This article employs Timothy Ponce's student-centered pedagogical approach which privileges the dialogical relationship between reader and texts to inquire if our 21st century students can see Shakespeare's works as engaging cites for questions about race and the residual impact of empire building in our world. This study traces how Shakespeare is recognized as a cultural and literary icon who is widely respected––however, to students from marginalized communities––is increasingly distant from their psychic reality. With the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, to the widely critiqued social trauma of police brutality, systematic racism, and other race-based issues––these examples of racial traumas in our contemporary moment are remnants of a longer history that predates our time. When Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) students think of literature that can engage these social issues, Shakespeare is not commonly cited. However, once a dialogic channel is established between Shakespeare's works and students, the playwright's interest in exploring––with complexity––a multiplicity of minoritized perspectives such as persons of color, women, individuals with disabilities, as well as Jewish and Muslim persons become visible. I propose thus that students can bring their questions about race to Shakespeare via what I call experience retrieval exercises. I import my experience of using this pedagogical approach with university students reading The Tempest (1611), which galvanizes students to recognize Shakespeare's works as rich intellectual touchstones to engage their questions about our uncritiqued biases on race and empire building.

White nationalists have coopted medieval symbols and perverted the history and culture of “Anglo-Saxons.” While these references are often ahistorical, they speak to the strong connection white nationalists feel toward a fantasied idea of the European Middle Ages. The most horrific examples of this practice are when medievalisms appear on the weapons and in the manifestos of white nationalist terrorists. We cannot know definitively if Brenton Tarrant, or Anders Breivik, both white nationalist terrorists, have read specific Old English poems, but white nationalist forum, Stormfront, and white nationalist book collection, The Colchester Collection, include references to, or full-text translations of the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer. By exploring the isolated heroicism, displacement, and ironic nostalgia in these Old English poems, the reasons for white nationalists' niche interest in and identification with Anglo-Saxon peoples and Old English poetry become clear. White nationalists believe the global “white” community is threatened by mass immigration from non-European countries and that the only way to protect “whites” is to take up arms. Since not all white nationalists can reside in Europe, they use medieval references to bolster the idea of Europe as an ethnoracial home for all “white” peoples. White nationalist terrorists specifically use medievalisms to portray themselves as isolated heroes, like the Anglo-Saxon warrior in exile, avenging the loss of “white” land.