Literature Compass最新文献

Eyles Irwin (1751–1817), an East India Company official who spent much of his life in the British settlement of Fort St. George, Madras, was one of the earliest practitioners of anglophone belles lettres in the Indian subcontinent, and his writings predate the development of a robust culture of English-language literary composition in the colony by quite a few years. The scant scholarly attention he has received belies his importance as an anticipator of the momentous literary-historical processes that would transform India's public sphere in the 19th century. This essay offers a contextual reading of Saint Thomas's Mount (1774), his earliest extant poem, which is avowedly modelled on canonical English topographical poems like Alexander Pope's Windsor-Forest (1713) and makes use of a host of neoclassical conventions, but which also differs from them in terms of the kind of landscape that is represented (Irwin's is a tropical landscape, with abundant mangoes, palms, and Oriental fauna, unlike Pope's pleasant, idyllic British park). However, Irwin's target readership being chiefly metropolitan, he contends with the difficulty of highlighting India's irreducible foreignness while simultaneously trying to ensure that readers in London do not find the Oriental descriptions too alien, incredible, and unrelatable. The authorial strategies he adopts to navigate this difficulty constitute the focus of the first part of the essay. The second (and final) part seeks to shed light on his hybrid, hyphenated identity as an Indian-born Irish poet, and on his perception of himself as somehow fundamentally unlike those Britons who never ventured beyond the geographical confines of Europe, let alone setting down roots in places on the very fringes of the British empire. The affiliative bonds he forges with expatriate colonial officials living in and confronting the hardships of life in the monsoonal tropics mark him as a member of the steadily growing community of Anglo-Indians in the Indian subcontinent. While noting the shifting connotations of the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, this essay will also examine the implications of identifying Irwin as a member of this initially amorphous but steadily growing community.

This article considers how a recent wave of Latin American short fiction captures with immediate topicality new forms of transversal political subjectivity engendered by the international feminist reinvention of the strike in the 21st century. Drawing on Verónica Gago's theorization of the political cartography of feminist potencia (power), alongside the work of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato and Sayak Valencia, it considers how the short story form facilitates a strategic recognition of interconnected violences perpetrated against women and feminized bodies, “mapping forms of violence based on their organic connection, without losing sight of the singularity of the production of the nexus between them” (Gago, 2020, p. 58). In particular, the article examines two exemplary short story collections, Cars on Fire (2020) by Mónica Ramón Ríos and Things We Lost in the Fire (2017) by Mariana Enríquez, considering how these writers repurpose the potential for socio-criticism embedded in the fantastical short story by offering a multi-focal critique of how patriarchy and gender violence interact with the structural inequalities unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. The article also considers how these riotous collections mediate the transversal fabric of communitarian struggle in feminist imaginaries, drawing narrative energy from the localised proliferation of neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity networks, while speaking to transnational feminist movements more broadly.

This paper introduces a teaching experiment that uses a set of local translations of a European medieval text—in this case, Korean translations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—as teaching texts in the Korean classroom alongside the original work. Students compare a range of translations dating from all periods of the 20th century, including one from as early as 1915 and others from the 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s. Tracking the variety of translation methods and different linguistic and artistic choices employed by these multiple translations allows even students unfamiliar with Middle English to gain a better sense of the particulars of Chaucer's language and character-making. Treating translation itself as a creative mode, this paper argues that even bad translations and messy histories of linguistic interference can be put to productive pedagogical use. Recuperated local translation archives can be used in the teaching of Middle English literature by helping students understand Chaucer's own positionality as a translator and compiler. Such archives also contribute to the study of comparative literature more broadly as they present case studies of how ideas of world literature are formed over time and space, and encourage a critical engagement with the canon even as it is being taught.

Pedagogies of the premodern in anglophone contexts face many obstacles, like cultural differences, linguistic remoteness, and stereotypical representations. In EFL learning and teaching settings, student motivation, cultural adequation, and historical imagination are also needed. In Tunisia, this was further complicated after the Jasmine Revolution when newly radicalised students of English resented aspects of premodern literature which they considered inaccurate, uninteresting, or inappropriate. In this paper, the author presents a learning and teaching model developed to help post-revolutionary Tunisian learners with diverse backgrounds and orientations better understand and appreciate the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Combining elements of cognitive studies, comparative literature, and digital codicology, this bricolage was used in graduate seminars at the University of Sousse to study digitised manuscripts and texts in Arabic, Latin, and (Middle) English. Informed by active pedagogy and enhanced by audio-visual aids, activities based on this model effectively addressed challenges, helped achieve learning outcomes, and made Tunisians more at home with Chaucer.

Recent decades have seen an increase in white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages. While many medievalists have sought to distance medieval studies from racist appropriations, these appropriations echo positions advanced and legitimized by philologists especially during the nineteenth century. Medieval studies as a discipline developed in the nineteenth century during the rise of nationalist movements, which often manifested as racial nationalism in Europe and the United States, and philologists actively participated in these movements by projecting contemporary national identity unto a constructed medieval past. These philologists often conflated language and race, and their nationalist scholarship helped justify imperialism. Although the ideas of these philologists are considered outdated, they set the foundation for racist appropriations of the Middle Ages and established nationalist frameworks that continue to influence the academy.

This essay reads Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853) as an example of Victorian imitative art by reading it through the lens of Victorian domestic handicraft. It does so in order to resituate Atkins's work within the history of scientific visualization and to contribute to the increasing complexity scholars of visual culture and of the scientific image have added to prevailing accounts of the rise of the “objective” scientific image in the nineteenth-century. Building on the work of historians of photography, art, science, and literature, it argues that her cyanotypes point toward an alternative history of scientific image as a form of craft and collection that resonates with recent calls in the study of the scientific image and scientific practices to move “beyond representation.”

The museum is not a neutral container, a passive collection of art and artifacts. Rather the museum is itself a historical argument, using objects and their relations to write our collective stories. This essay shows how the museum, as it developed within nineteenth-century European imperialism, directs meaning both within and beyond literature. The museum integrates readers into its collections and its narratives, directing them figuratively and literally through exhibits. Nineteenth-century literature, I argue, capitalizes on this dynamic interplay among the collection, the viewing subject, and the museum's ideologies. In both poetry and prose the museum appears as a place, a concept, and a form. For example, William Thackeray's “May Day Ode” shows how the Crystal Palace and the 1851 Great Exhibition facilitate an imperialist agenda. The galleries in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, meanwhile, are not just places the characters go; they also exert control over how characters (and readers) experience and evaluate collections. Across these texts, the museum is setting and theme. But, I argue, the museum also works as form, curating the collections, the characters who visit them, and the readers who access the narrative through museum logics. In conjunction with literary examples and an overview of scholarly conversations around nineteenth-century museum studies, I consider how the museum continues to direct bodies, interpretations, and ideas today by drawing on my experiences using museums in the college classroom.

Most accounts of the Ottoman Imperial Museum view the museum primarily as a Westernization project for the Ottoman Empire. In such readings, the museum follows a teleological trajectory toward the European norm. This article reads several of the early practices of the Ottoman Imperial Museum (such as interactive museum displays and the sultan's casual gifting of museum holdings to other European monarchs), not as hiccups on the way to Westernization, but rather as a distinctly Ottoman vision of museology and imperial power. Seen in this light, the early history of the Ottoman Imperial Museum challenges the standard account of the nineteenth-century imperial museum as a site where imperial subjects are molded and where the empire displays its might. Instead, in the case of the Ottoman Imperial Museum, the scientific and orderly organization of the museum artifacts become a testament not to imperial power, but to imperial powerlessness.

This essay surveys the evolution of scholarship that embodies what (Anderson and Mackay [2014], Intolerant bodies: A short history of autoimmunity. Johns Hopkins University Press) have called the “immunological turn,” an interdisciplinary critical movement that takes immunity and vaccination as its primary critical objects. While interest in the relationship between immunology as a field in the life sciences and immunity as a cultural discourse has existed since the 1980s and 1990s, this piece traces the development of this thinking over time across the fields of political theory, anthropology, sociology, the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, as well as literary and rhetoric studies, that together articulate and critique the centrality of immunity to Western society. This article considers how the immunological turn models an approach to the nineteenth century that draws together the humanities and the sciences in both carefully historicized and deeply theoretical ways. This survey of the field concludes with speculations on new directions for the immunological turn that interdisciplinary scholars in the nineteenth century might take up to intervene in ongoing debates over vaccine hesitancy and refusal.

The manipulation of gender in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is utterly opaque. While “The Knight's Tale” potentially entices readers to think that Chaucer defines a woman regarding her relationship to man, “The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale” suggests that the poet views a woman as an independent figure whose identity has nothing to do with man. This apparently controversial portrait of gender causes some critics to read Chaucer as a pro-woman individual; simultaneously, it inspires other critics to view the poet as anti-feminist. Such debate may cause readers to misjudge Chaucer's multifaceted approach towards gender as well as other hypersensitive topics, thus adding to the atmosphere of complexity and lack of clarity that dominates The Tales. Accordingly, this paper revisits Chaucer's gender-oriented philosophy in The Tales sieving what is conjectured by the poem’s critics from what is said by the poet himself regarding gender. The paper concludes that Chaucer has never had the choice to overtly be or not to be the friend of woman but has always adopted a fence-sitting strategy concerning the question of gender due to his sociopolitical status. The paper confirms that Chaucer's viewpoint of women is neither feminist nor anti-feminist but a realistic amalgamation that mirrors the opaque gender culture of England in the fourteenth century.