Literature Compass最新文献

It was in 2015 that the Blair edition featuring Blake's design first appeared in the Serbian language. Simultaneously, it was the first time in Serbia that Blake was approached solely as an artist, and not as a poet, i. e. not as the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) or Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789)—works he was mainly recognised for there. The aim of this article is to bring the figure of William Blake the designer closer to the Serbian reader, and to set it apart from the previously dominant figure of Blake the poet, when it comes to his reception in that country. Our conclusions point towards Blake the designer acting as a constructive reader, deconstructing the meaning of Blair's poem which he designed, confirming the notion by Morris Eaves (1980) that Blake was his own sole audience. We also tend to examine the hitherto neglected relationships that exist between English Graveyard Poetry and the so-called “Serbian Graveyard Poetry”.

This essay canvasses a variety of approaches to the cultural and literary study of water in recent historical eras. While various aqueously-minded approaches have been presented in recent decades, they have not been fully integrated into the ecological mainstream of environmental humanist criticism, particularly in nineteenth-century studies. This essay integrates discourses across geography, geology, cultural studies, and literary studies in order to theorize critical hydrography, an aqueous approach to cultural objects that apprehends water as an ecological domain influencing both method's design and its attentions. The essay shows how critical hydrography reflexively attaches itself to histories of race, empire, and capital in apprehending the scientific filiations of the environmental humanities. Critical hydrography conceptualizes water as method to raise its visibility in ecocritical discourse.

Acting on recently surging critical interest in late Romanticism, a subperiod taken to range roughly from the later 1810s through the 1840s, the present article reviews past and current work in this burgeoning field, particularly highlighting developing avenues for future research. Two competing accounts of late Romanticism are contrasted: a long-dominant take which regards the subperiod as fundamentally secondary, derived, and inferior; and a recently energised perspective which reveals the vibrancy and innovativeness of late-Romantic culture. If the former construes history by prioritising the experiences of poets, acting on a cultural paradigm that pivots on the centrality of a particularised genre, the latter pursues a Romanticism that is reconfigured under the pressure of a developing media system, in which multiple specialised genres acquire distinct functions. The discussion of these two perspectives is anchored in the late-Romantic fascination for times and places; that is, in debates pertaining to periodicity and eventfulness, and to nationalism and transnationalism.

“Quixotism” is a term pivotal to the histories critics tell about literature. Despite a scholarly consensus regarding the significance of quixotism to eighteenth-century transatlantic writing, there remain vast discrepancies in critical formulations of what quixotism actually is, to the point where trying to find common ground in different scholars' definitions of quixotism might appear, at first glance, a quixotic endeavour. Yet scholarship on quixotism persistently returns to dichotomies: romance versus the novel; the exceptional versus the typical; the original versus the copy; reason versus imagination. Quixotism remains both vexing question and floating signifier, caught between character and genre, system and allusion as it traverses and transforms eighteenth-century literature and culture. In this article I will both reflect on the state of quixotic studies in eighteenth-century studies and offer an account of Don Quixote's place in the history of literary criticism and theory.

This essay identifies emerging trends in Jane Austen scholarship published between 2010 and 2020, with a focus on monographs and edited collections. In recent work examining Austen through contemporary theoretical and critical lenses, the following new topics have been central: material culture, animal studies, masculinity, place, and celebrity. The last of these includes Austen's use of Regency celebrities in her novels and her connections with other women writers. Studies of the parallels between her and Shakespeare's rises to fame have also surged. Connected to the interest in celebrity is the explosion of fan-culture studies: Austen is now a multimedia superstar with wide appeal. This expansion of audience has meant a shift in the style of much scholarly writing on Austen as books try to cater to both academic and non-academic markets.

Taking as prerequisite Peter Frase's argument that the labor markets and living conditions of the twenty-first century will be primarily determined by the dual “specters of ecological catastrophe and automation,” this article investigates William Blake's poetic response to the problems of religious and financial debt within the context of his own environmentally compromised era. It briefly historicizes the financial components of Blake's printmaking before turning to an examination of his illuminated books, which imagine a form of debt relief grounded in a millenarian theory of political intervention. While Blake's investment in artisanal labor reveals an aversion to technological reproducibility, his cyclical notion of an artificially constructed ecological future models a technologically hybrid ontology useful for addressing Frase's nexus of environmental destruction and mechanized production.

Ruinenlust (‘ruin lust’) or ruin aesthetics is a prominent feature of George Gissing's unfinished historical novel, Veranilda (1904), which is set in sixth-century Italy and contains many memorable images of ruins. Drawing on the work of Georg Simmel, Rose Macaulay, Brian Dillon, and others, this article argues that, by examining these images in relation to the novel's characters' psychological states and motives, the thematic significance of decadence and anti-imperialism is heightened. The article closes by considering the unfinished nature of Veranilda, arguing, with reference to Susan Stewart's The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (2020), that the novel itself can be appreciated as a kind of ruin. In doing so, it aims to shed light on an underexplored aspect of Gissing's work.

This essay examines the treatment of air and atmosphere in literary scholarship of the late 17th- to mid-19th-century periods, from the first, early Enlightenment discovery of the air's chemical structure and the coining of the word ‘atmosphere’, to the dawning of Victorian industrial pollution. As climate has become the predominant focus of environmental campaigning, and as air pollution and air infection have become near-universal concerns, the air itself has gained a corresponding increase in academic attention. Part I of my essay begins by sketching out the longer history of this interest, showing that air and atmosphere are complex words that have longstanding philosophical and literary histories alongside their everyday ‘real’ meanings. I explore the place of air studies in the History of Science, and look at how this discipline and English studies have enjoyed a close proximity with regards to the major chemical discoveries of the Enlightenment period. Part II defines the field of ‘atmosphere studies’ as it has emerged from 20th-century philosophy, and its importance to contemporary geography, anthropology and architecture. The complexity of the idea of ‘atmosphere’ is, however, rooted in early 19th-century aesthetics, and hence, I argue, literary scholarship of this period makes a crucial contribution to this broader atmospheric enquiry. Part III explores how literary critics and historians have begun to respond to contemporary discourse on air as primarily an issue of climate change and pollution, and suggests that there is a new eco-realism or literalness in discussion of atmosphere, borne out by increasing reflection on the carbon impact of academic work itself. I sketch out some suggestions for future research and emphasize again the importance of the 18th- and 19th-century legacies for understanding and even acting upon the contemporary air and climate crisis.

This article examines how two nineteenth-century Bengali adaptations of Cymbeline transfer Shakespeare's play to a Hindu field of signifiers and reinterpret the elements of tragicomedy according to the worldview of traditional Indian drama. Kusumkumari Natak (1868) by Chandrakali Ghosh, which was enacted before a ticket-buying audience at the nascent phase of the Bengali public theatre in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), condenses or rejects much of the action and dialogue of Cymbeline for the sake of economy. For example, it excludes Cloten and the confusion over his beheading and discards Posthumus's dream together with the prophetic riddle. On the other hand, Sushila Birsingha (1868) by Satyendranath Tagore, which was probably never staged, follows the convoluted plot and characterisation of Cymbeline quite closely. Cymbeline would appeal to the Bengali audience because it recalls traditional Hindu tales of reunion and reconciliation, including those of Sakuntala-Dushyanta (referenced by Kusumkumari Natak) and Damayanti-Nala (referenced by Sushila Birsingha). Moreover, Innogen's ordeals would be compatible with the trope of the abandoned faithful wife (as exemplified by Sita, Sakuntala, Damayanti) in Sanskrit epic and drama. This would also enable the valorisation of wifely fidelity and chastity, a favourite topic of Hindu patriarchal imagination in the nineteenth century. More importantly, the theme of loss and recuperation inherent in Cymbeline accords with the episteme and aesthetics of classical Sanskrit drama, which avoided exploring grave moral challenges and rejected the finality of sufferings (thanks to the doctrines of Vedanta or monistic theism, karma and reincarnation). This article also suggests that Cymbeline fell out of favour with subsequent Bengali translators and playgoers as the taste for tragedy grew among them.

As premodern studies continues to develop tools for anti-racist scholarship and pedagogy, this essay establishes the stakes of adaptation/appropriation studies especially committing to these efforts. Turning to the novel The Serpent of Venice, I demonstrate how appropriations that engage with race too often employ what I frame as racial euphemism: palliative engagements with race that sidestep questions of power and inequity. This is especially true for those attempting to maintain distance between Shakespeare and questions of race, and especially racism, often under the guise of historical accuracy. This racially euphemistic approach, therefore, disseminates to especially wide audiences white supremacist approaches to race. Premodern Critical Race Studies provides a vital activist framework, and with it, important conceptual and methodological tools, that help adaptation/appropriation scholars identify racial euphemism in premodern retellings, while at the same time offering appropriators scholarship that can help them craft anti-racist appropriations that resist the idea of a race-neutral past.