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Writing about neurophysiology more than a century ago, what were US authors doing? Literary Neurophysiology: Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 examines their use of literature to experiment with the new materialist psychology, which bore upon their efforts to represent reality and was forging new understandings of race and sexuality. Sometimes they emulated scientific epistemology, allowing their art and conceptions of creativity to be reshaped by it. Sometimes they imaginatively investigated neurophysiological theories, challenging and rewriting scientific explanations of human identity and behavior. By enfolding physiological experimentation into literary inquiries that could account for psychological and social complexities beyond the reach of the laboratory, they used literature as a cognitive medium. Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Gertrude Stein come together as they probe the effects on mimesis and creativity of reflex-based automatisms and unconscious meaning-making. Oliver Wendell Holmes explores conceptions of racial nerve force elaborated in population statistics and biopolitics, while W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins contest notions of racial energy used to predict the extinction of African Americans. Holmes explores new definitions of “sexual inversion” as, in divergent ways, Whitman and John Addington Symonds evaluate relations among nerve force, human fecundity, and the supposed grave of nonreproductive sex. Carefully tracing entanglements and conflicts between literary culture and mental science of this period, Knoper reveals unexpected connections among these authors and fresh insights into the science they confronted. Considering their writing as cognitive practice, he provides a new understanding of literary realism.

This dual biography takes on the daring task of examining how two women, who didn’t feel like women, survived as a couple, raising an illegitimate child during a period when such arrangements were frowned upon, if even recognized. When they met in 1918, H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle in 1886), had already achieved recognition as an Imagist poet, engaged in a lesbian affair, was married to a shell-shocked adulterous poet, and was pregnant by another. She fell in love with Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1894), who was trapped both in a female body and in the shadow of her father, Sir John Ellerman, a wealthy shipping magnate. They felt a telepathic and electric connection, bonding over Greek poetry, geography, ancient history, and a shared bodily dysphoria. Bryher introduced H.D. to cinema, psychoanalysis, and politics, herself rescuing refugees from Nazis throughout the 1930s. Bryher engaged in legal strategies to protect H.D., marrying Kenneth Macpherson, who adopted H.D.’s child and collaborated with the couple in filmmaking. Both H.D. and Bryher were on vision quests, and their cerebral eroticism led them to otherworldly experiences. During World War II, they held séances in London. After V-J Day was announced, H.D. had a severe breakdown, which Bryher, taking great pains, ensured she survived. As a love story born out of war and modernism, the book speaks to their struggles to escape binary gender and homophobic and white supremacist agendas, while celebrating their creative triumphs and courageous aspirations.

An intellectual biography of early Arabic feminist Zaynab Fawwaz and a study of her life in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, in the context of debates on gender, modernity and the good society, 1890s-1910. Chapters take up her writing and debates in which she participated, concerning social justice, girls’ education, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the question of ‘Nature’ and Darwinist notions of male/female, and intersections of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and feminism. Fawwaz also wrote two novels and play, which are analysed in the context of fiction rewriting history, and on theatre as a reformist tool of public education in turn-of-the-century Egypt. The book also comprises a study of some important periodical venues for public debate in Egypt in this period, particularly the nationalist press and one early women’s journal, and it highlights the writings of lesser-studied journalists and other intellectuals, within the context of the Arab/ic Nahda or intellectual revival. It argues that Fawwaz’s feminism, based on an Islamic ethical worldview, was distinct from prevailing ‘modernist’ views in posing a non-essentialist, open-ended notion of gender that did not, for instance, highlight maternalist discourses. Fawwaz’s own background was Shi’i, an element that was quietly present in her work.

This book discusses the relationship between word and image in writing of many kinds during the inter-war years, seeing it as central to the presentation of factual and fictional material. It first examines studies of an England increasingly felt as threatened by suburban expansion, and then moves to consider official and independent house designs, seeing them as another form of imagined involvement and experience of the actual. It goes on to argue that visual material was for the first time central to book publishing, in dust jackets, internal illustration, and the design of books as part of the period’s social structures. Magazines aimed at general readers, for men, and for women are explored to show word and image unite to convey information, give advice and show shared interests. The final section considers ways in which the need for protection in the air and on the ground were treated, with official presence in magazines. A final section explores other uses of word and image, and the ways in which they contributed to wartime material and the construction of an ideal nation.

Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City sheds new light on the literature of the early US by exploring how texts, theater, architecture, and images worked together to allow readers to imagine themselves as urbanites even before cities developed. In the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the new nation was a loose network of nascent cities connected by print. Before a national culture could develop, local city cultures took shape; literary texts played key roles in helping new Americans become city people. Drawing on extensive archival research, Urban Rehearsals argues that literature, particularly novels and plays, allowed Bostonians to navigate the transition from colonial town to post-revolution city, enabled Philadelphians to grieve their experiences of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic and rebuild in the epidemic’s aftermath, and showed New Yorkers how the domestic practices that reinforced their urbanity could be opened to the broader public. Throughout, underrepresented voices and texts call attention to the possibilities for women, immigrants, and Black Americans in developing urban spaces, while showing how those possibilities would be foreclosed as the nation developed. Balancing new readings of canonical texts of the early Republic, including The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, with novels whose depictions of early cities deserve wider readership, such as Ormond, The Boarding-School, Monima, and Kelroy, Urban Rehearsals shows how US cities developed on the pages and stages of the early Republic, building the urban imaginations that would construct the nation’s early cities.

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History reaches back to the English civil wars (1642–1646, 1648) when a distinctive and anti-authoritarian hermeneutic emerged from the dissident community known as the Levellers. Active between 1645 and 1653, the Levellers argued that a more just political order required that knowledge, previously structured by the epistemology of singularity upon which sovereignty had built its authority, be reorganized around the interpretive principles and practices of affiliation and collectivity. Defined by the century’s central ideological conflict between sovereignty’s epistemology of singularity and the civil war era plebeian “hermeneutics of collectivity,” the book contends that late Stuart and eighteenth-century literature played a central role in marginalizing the non-elite methods of interpretation and knowledge production that had emerged in the 1640s.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book’s life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization—all aspects of what can be termed ‘dynamic architextuality’. The ten chapters of this study include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts’ blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts’ heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as ‘relics of existence’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book’s wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.

The fictive inhabitants of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, the stories they tell each other, and the framing fictions that bring them together collectively acknowledge a radical uncertainty that characterizes most human endeavors, challenging the achievement of effective knowledge, perception, and strategy, and lacking intervention by Divine Providence. Dependable knowledge of the future, the past, or the distant present is thwarted by the fickle forces of chance (fortuna) and unverifiable report (fama); accurate perception of meaning is compromised by the instability or equivocality of all systems of signification, linguistic or symbolic, and by the notorious opacity of human intention; and successful strategies for dealing with power in its many forms founder on power’s chronic arbitrariness and irrationality. The key to coping with these challenges is pragmatic prudence: rational calculation issuing in an opportunistic, often amoral choice of ingenious deeds and/or eloquent words appropriate (though without guarantee) to mastering a specific crisis. The goal of pragmatic prudence is agency now, not salvation later. Following an initial chapter that explores the Aristotelian antecedents, contemporaneous cultural influences, and narrative techniques shaping the radically uncertain world of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, and identifies components of pragmatic prudence animating the quest for agency in both collections, succeeding chapters pair, and compare, novelle and pilgrim tales that illustrate that quest—its successes and its failures—as it confronts the challenges posed by chance, faulty communication, the unstable referentiality of signifying systems, hidden intentions, and both institutional and emotional power.

Films about chainsaw killers, demonic possession, and ghostly intruders. Screaming audiences with sleepless nights or sweat-drenched nightmares in their immediate future. What’s going on here? Presumably, almost everybody has experience with horror films. Almost everybody has sat through a terrifying motion picture and suffered the aftereffects, such as hypervigilance and sleep disturbances. Some people would even characterize themselves as horror fans. But what about the others—the ones who are curious about horror films, but also very, very nervous about them? This book delves into the science of horror cinema in an attempt to address common concerns about the genre. Why is the jump scare so effective and so dreaded? What are the effects of horror films on mental and physical health? Why do horror films so often cause nightmares? Aren’t horror films immoral . . . and stupid, too? Are horror films bad for children and adolescents? What does the current profusion of horror films say about our society? Should we be concerned? Or can horror films be a force for good—do horror films have health benefits, can they be aesthetically and morally valuable, and might they even have therapeutic psychological and cultural effects? The book addresses these questions in short, readable chapters, peppered with vivid anecdotes and examples and supported by scientific findings. It notes that while horror films can have negative effects, they can also help people confront and manage fear.

In A Modernist Cinema, edited by Scott W. Klein and Michael Valdez Moses, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise. Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors—Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles—these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography. The contributors are Richard Begam, Maurizia Bascagli, Enda Duffy, Laura Frost, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Scott W. Klein, Douglas Mao, Laura Marcus, Jesse Matz, Tyrus Miller, Michael Valdez Moses, Michael North, Elizabeth Otto, Carrie J. Preston, Lisa Siraganian, and Michael Wood.