Abstract:Plague is a central, albeit strangely indeterminate feature of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. I argue that this indeterminacy is a crucial insight into the etiological and ethical questions at the novel’s core. Drawing from debates in early nineteenth-century medicine, Shelley’s representation of pandemic indexes the living body’s contingency—its indefinite yet continuous exposure to other potentially infectious bodies and environments. Shelley’s approach to contingent embodiment intervenes in the Romantic-era reception of vitalism, particularly Baruch Spinoza’s vitalist ontology of interconnection. Pandemic in The Last Man troubles the Romantic ethical idealization of interconnection, illustrating the potential for life’s contingencies to hurt connected bodies, and especially bodies of color, which are unrecognized by that ethical ideal and disproportionately exposed to sickness and pain.
{"title":"Race, Vitalism, and the Contingency of Contagion in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man","authors":"D. Newby","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Plague is a central, albeit strangely indeterminate feature of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. I argue that this indeterminacy is a crucial insight into the etiological and ethical questions at the novel’s core. Drawing from debates in early nineteenth-century medicine, Shelley’s representation of pandemic indexes the living body’s contingency—its indefinite yet continuous exposure to other potentially infectious bodies and environments. Shelley’s approach to contingent embodiment intervenes in the Romantic-era reception of vitalism, particularly Baruch Spinoza’s vitalist ontology of interconnection. Pandemic in The Last Man troubles the Romantic ethical idealization of interconnection, illustrating the potential for life’s contingencies to hurt connected bodies, and especially bodies of color, which are unrecognized by that ethical ideal and disproportionately exposed to sickness and pain.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"19 1","pages":"689 - 718"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85008103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines the historical and material relationship between William Shakespeare's Sonnets and Jen Bervin's Nets (2004), an unusual edition of Shakespeare's sequence. Nets emerges from the avant-garde tradition of erasure poetics, yet it relies on and revives the temporal and material complexities of early modern textual practices. Further, it articulates its own position within literary history in distinctly Shakespearean terms, as a hinge between pre-modern and modern poetics. This essay argues that Nets both is and is not an early-modern object. It articulates a chiastic repetition of the Sonnets: repeating the past yet sustaining its difference.
{"title":"\"What Beauty Was\": Jen Bervin's Untimely Sonnets","authors":"T. Altman","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the historical and material relationship between William Shakespeare's Sonnets and Jen Bervin's Nets (2004), an unusual edition of Shakespeare's sequence. Nets emerges from the avant-garde tradition of erasure poetics, yet it relies on and revives the temporal and material complexities of early modern textual practices. Further, it articulates its own position within literary history in distinctly Shakespearean terms, as a hinge between pre-modern and modern poetics. This essay argues that Nets both is and is not an early-modern object. It articulates a chiastic repetition of the Sonnets: repeating the past yet sustaining its difference.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"16 1","pages":"489 - 522"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80225089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Recent work in the history of realism has marked a queer turn as queer scholarship has increasingly become interested in narratology. This essay builds on that work by exploring realism's relation to voyeurism and exhibitionism. In particular, I examine Willa Cather's "Coming, Aphrodite" (1920), her most sexually explicit story, which turns on the discovery of a peephole. I emplace this story within Cather's career, arguing that the figure of the peephole is prevalent throughout her early work and is foundational to her sense of realism. In doing so, I argue that Cather's models of voyeurism and exhibitionism diverge dramatically from that of contemporary sexologists
{"title":"Willa Cather's Voyeuristic Realism","authors":"B. Kahan","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent work in the history of realism has marked a queer turn as queer scholarship has increasingly become interested in narratology. This essay builds on that work by exploring realism's relation to voyeurism and exhibitionism. In particular, I examine Willa Cather's \"Coming, Aphrodite\" (1920), her most sexually explicit story, which turns on the discovery of a peephole. I emplace this story within Cather's career, arguing that the figure of the peephole is prevalent throughout her early work and is foundational to her sense of realism. In doing so, I argue that Cather's models of voyeurism and exhibitionism diverge dramatically from that of contemporary sexologists","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"39 1","pages":"463 - 487"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76742688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Within literary studies, social media is treated as a fringe extension of a history of reading centered on print culture and dominated by the form of the novel. This has led to the assumption that the impact of social media has not been significant enough to warrant a formal and aesthetic study. Working specifically with Facebook and "Dear Ijeawele," Chimamanda Adichie's feminist manifesto posted on Facebook in 2016, this article challenges that notion by arguing that the social media platform—its design features, affective architecture, epistemological concerns, and ideological investments—constitutes a new discursive context for literary form.
{"title":"Unruly Archives: Literary form and the Social Media Imaginary","authors":"Ainehi Edoro-Glines","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Within literary studies, social media is treated as a fringe extension of a history of reading centered on print culture and dominated by the form of the novel. This has led to the assumption that the impact of social media has not been significant enough to warrant a formal and aesthetic study. Working specifically with Facebook and \"Dear Ijeawele,\" Chimamanda Adichie's feminist manifesto posted on Facebook in 2016, this article challenges that notion by arguing that the social media platform—its design features, affective architecture, epistemological concerns, and ideological investments—constitutes a new discursive context for literary form.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"2022 22","pages":"523 - 546"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72536535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The opposition between story and instruction set out in the preface to Samuel Richardson's Clarissa establishes a relationship between the novel's moral import and its form, genre, and style. It is a dichotomy that appears to privilege an ethical schema that is ideal, theoretic, and reflective alongside a prose style that is impersonal, emphatic, and also reflective. In this article, I show that the moral economy of the novel is, in fact, quick to display the limitations of departicularized and abstract moral thinking, and that Richardson invites his reader's suspicion of modes of reading and writing that would circumvent the linearity and particularity of story. I conclude by demonstrating that Richardson uses the italic character–particularly in the third edition of the novel–not to stress the maxim-like neutrality of moral truths, but to illuminate the expressive multivalence associated with this typography.
{"title":"Writing in Character: Ethics, Plot, and Emphasis in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa","authors":"Charlotte Roberts","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The opposition between story and instruction set out in the preface to Samuel Richardson's Clarissa establishes a relationship between the novel's moral import and its form, genre, and style. It is a dichotomy that appears to privilege an ethical schema that is ideal, theoretic, and reflective alongside a prose style that is impersonal, emphatic, and also reflective. In this article, I show that the moral economy of the novel is, in fact, quick to display the limitations of departicularized and abstract moral thinking, and that Richardson invites his reader's suspicion of modes of reading and writing that would circumvent the linearity and particularity of story. I conclude by demonstrating that Richardson uses the italic character–particularly in the third edition of the novel–not to stress the maxim-like neutrality of moral truths, but to illuminate the expressive multivalence associated with this typography.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"7 1","pages":"407 - 435"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72788842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Eucharistic language and imagery are the connective tissue that unites William Shakespeare's history tetralogies into a coherent whole. Together, they depict England's communal crisis—civil war—as a crisis of Communion; eucharistic sacrilege collapses a sacramental ontology, which in turn breaks mechanisms of atonement, fragments society, and corrupts signification. Appropriately, Richmond effectuates England's communal regeneration by restoring this sacramental ontology through real, sincere eucharistic participation at the conclusion of Richard III. This reading challenges interpretations that hold that the second tetralogy unravels the providentialist conclusion of the first, or which treat the plays as discrete episodes.
{"title":"Crisis of Communion: Eucharistic Representations in Shakespeare's History Cycle","authors":"Daniele C. Zimmerman","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Eucharistic language and imagery are the connective tissue that unites William Shakespeare's history tetralogies into a coherent whole. Together, they depict England's communal crisis—civil war—as a crisis of Communion; eucharistic sacrilege collapses a sacramental ontology, which in turn breaks mechanisms of atonement, fragments society, and corrupts signification. Appropriately, Richmond effectuates England's communal regeneration by restoring this sacramental ontology through real, sincere eucharistic participation at the conclusion of Richard III. This reading challenges interpretations that hold that the second tetralogy unravels the providentialist conclusion of the first, or which treat the plays as discrete episodes.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"1 1","pages":"317 - 343"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83728652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Responding to recent work on race in early modern studies, this essay urges further scholarship more fully grounded in analysis of the emergence of racial capitalism. At the same time, it acknowledges the limits of the archive and explores the Black aesthetic thought responsive to such limits, namely Fred Moten's adjustments of Theodor Adorno. Inspired in part by the recent study Black Samson, the essay concludes by applying some of its remarks on methodology to John Milton's Samson Agonistes, which is shown to have a complex relationship to an early modern English culture of enslavement.
{"title":"On Race and Historicism: A Polemic in Three Turns","authors":"Feisal G. Mohamed","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Responding to recent work on race in early modern studies, this essay urges further scholarship more fully grounded in analysis of the emergence of racial capitalism. At the same time, it acknowledges the limits of the archive and explores the Black aesthetic thought responsive to such limits, namely Fred Moten's adjustments of Theodor Adorno. Inspired in part by the recent study Black Samson, the essay concludes by applying some of its remarks on methodology to John Milton's Samson Agonistes, which is shown to have a complex relationship to an early modern English culture of enslavement.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"64 4 1","pages":"377 - 405"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80771400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay recovers Emily Dickinson's lifelong fascination with longevity, defined as a state somewhere between mortality and immortality. In works like "Because I could not stop for Death" and "My life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Dickinson experiments with durations of existence that fall somewhere between the ambit of her own generation and the outer reaches of eternity, a realm that neither science nor religion had equipped her to explore. By measuring the life that Dickinson's poems envision for themselves and their creator, we may learn to discuss with greater nuance the ways that art lives and dies.
{"title":"Without the Power to Die: Dickinson's Longevity","authors":"Matt Redmond","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay recovers Emily Dickinson's lifelong fascination with longevity, defined as a state somewhere between mortality and immortality. In works like \"Because I could not stop for Death\" and \"My life had stood—a Loaded Gun,\" Dickinson experiments with durations of existence that fall somewhere between the ambit of her own generation and the outer reaches of eternity, a realm that neither science nor religion had equipped her to explore. By measuring the life that Dickinson's poems envision for themselves and their creator, we may learn to discuss with greater nuance the ways that art lives and dies.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"4 1","pages":"437 - 462"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78334393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay considers the intriguing prominence of inscriptions on surfaces such as metal, wood, stone, and flesh in books 3 and 4 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. It argues that in their formal organization, rhetorical configurations, and classical genealogies, these inscriptions replicate the principal characteristics of lyric poetry. In foregrounding the conjunction of language and matter, these lyric inscriptions offer a mechanism of thinking through the nature of poetic creation out of available linguistic resources. As a result, lyric emerges as the foundational form of poetry whose affordances are indispensable to Spenser's epic undertaking.
{"title":"\"Strange Characters\": Inscription and Lyric in Books 3 and 4 of The Faerie Queene","authors":"D. Sokolov","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers the intriguing prominence of inscriptions on surfaces such as metal, wood, stone, and flesh in books 3 and 4 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. It argues that in their formal organization, rhetorical configurations, and classical genealogies, these inscriptions replicate the principal characteristics of lyric poetry. In foregrounding the conjunction of language and matter, these lyric inscriptions offer a mechanism of thinking through the nature of poetic creation out of available linguistic resources. As a result, lyric emerges as the foundational form of poetry whose affordances are indispensable to Spenser's epic undertaking.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"90 1","pages":"345 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80455982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This research article discusses developments in contemporary Anglophone Singapore poetry where a proliferation of writers' groups and literary initiatives has led to efforts to define a localized Anglophone poetic tradition. Focusing on the debut collections of two young poets, Joshua Ip and Hamid Roslan, we argue that the presence of Singlish in their work functions as a site of hermeneutical openness that challenges a neocolonial articulation of Singaporean cultural formations centered on ideologies of standardized English usage, which have homogenized ethnic identities and supported a narrative of national progress. This article theorizes the heteroglossic potentialities of the intersubjective lifeworld found in Ip's and Hamid's poetics by discussing how they eschew any naturalized relationship between language as a semiotic system and sociohistorical being, in favor of a renewed query into Anglophone writing as an accumulation of asymmetrical and uneasy cultural relations.
{"title":"The Poesis and Politics of English-es in Singapore: Intersubjective Worlding in the Poetry of Joshua ip And Hamid Roslan","authors":"Ann Ang, Ian Y. H. Tan","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This research article discusses developments in contemporary Anglophone Singapore poetry where a proliferation of writers' groups and literary initiatives has led to efforts to define a localized Anglophone poetic tradition. Focusing on the debut collections of two young poets, Joshua Ip and Hamid Roslan, we argue that the presence of Singlish in their work functions as a site of hermeneutical openness that challenges a neocolonial articulation of Singaporean cultural formations centered on ideologies of standardized English usage, which have homogenized ethnic identities and supported a narrative of national progress. This article theorizes the heteroglossic potentialities of the intersubjective lifeworld found in Ip's and Hamid's poetics by discussing how they eschew any naturalized relationship between language as a semiotic system and sociohistorical being, in favor of a renewed query into Anglophone writing as an accumulation of asymmetrical and uneasy cultural relations.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"118 1","pages":"547 - 573"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79940095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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