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America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in a transatlantic constellation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, it locates many of the crisis points of 1830s, 40s, 50s, and 60s America in a broader cisatlantic struggle over transatlantic connection. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, transatlantic telecommunications, and free trade discourses, northern and southern partisans—abolitionists, Unionists, and slaveholders alike—re-imagined the terms of the conflict, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise irreducibly cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. This re-conceptualization of sectional issues in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of the United States formed a unified biological or cultural community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural bases of the American polity. Moreover, a continued reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations allowed public intellectuals and authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Charles Sumner, and Henry Herbert, to situate an era of developing national acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming an account of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic political bearing at transatlantic remove from northern and southern combatants.

Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.

Has the battle for equality solved problems of woman in society? Has the cry for woman’s emancipation from her degraded condition liberated women in India and in the world? This volume analyses the life and works of one of the foremost Indian women writers, Ashapurna Devi (1905–1995), from the point of view of her as an author of an ex-colony, and the changes and stirrings of the new social order she saw as India moved from the colonial to the postcolonial times. While remaining sensitive to her feminist insights, it is underscored that the meaning of feminism within the Indian discourse needs to be expanded in terms of the particular social and political reality of the times. The volume, therefore, as it examines her trenchant critique on certain gendered assumptions prevalent in society, equally brings to the fore Ashapurna’s comprehensive understanding of men and women not as ‘opposing parties’. Expanding the meaning of feminism along the lines of human solidarity and hopes for future, by maintaining difference from exclusiveness and deference for a culture that transcends the male–female dichotomy, this study shows that feminism is a vibrant contemporary force in India. Through Ashapurna’s literary feminist activism this volume invites rethinking of Indian feminism as much as its praxis, which is not the rejection of patriarchal culture as a solution to the ‘women’s question’. In fact, feminism in the context of India that has its roots in the antahpur days is an advanced social and literary discourse on the empowerment of women.

Avant-Doc is a collection of in-depth interviews with filmmakers who work in the territory between documentary and what is usually called avant-garde film, either within particular films or over the life of filmmaking careers. The volume is organized in a rough chronology beginning with a scholar (Annette Michelson) whose writing and editing have bridged the gap between documentary and avant-garde film, and several filmmakers (Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Nina Davenport) whose work was formative in the development of particular kinds of documentary and “avant-doc.” Several European filmmakers (Leonard Retel Helmrich, Michael Glawogger, Susana de Sousa Dias) provide a broader perspective on current avant-doc practice; then the volume pans across a wide range of recent accomplishments, including the work of filmmakers who have dealt with the personal in inventive ways: Jonathan Caouette, Paweł Wojtasik, Todd Haynes, Susana de Sousa Dias, Amie Siegel, Alex Olch, Jane Gillooly, Betzy Bromberg, and Godfrey Reggio. Avant-Doc concludes with a focus on Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) and the remarkable avant-docs that have been produced under its auspices. The influence of MIT’s Film Section and Harvard’s Film Study Center and Carpenter Center for the Arts (and more recently, the SEL) is a major focus of the volume, though the filmmakers interviewed and the films they discuss raise a wide range of issues that are relevant to filmmakers around the world. The book as a whole and each interview is contextualized by an introduction. Filmographies and bibliographies are included.

While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.

As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of historical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, this book develops a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. It achieves this by means of four special sets of investigations: into the relation between the so-called ‘autonomous’ poem and its political/historical contexts; into the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; into the problems of canon and the characterisation of period; and, finally, into the ideological dimensions of both literary works and the criticism of such works. Whilst focusing largely on 19th-century works — among them those of Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti — its arguments are applicable to literary studies in general, and its emphasis throughout is theoretical and methodological.

Fictional character is an ontologically ambivalent category—at once a formal construct and a quasi-person—which lies at the heart of the life of textual fictions of all kinds. The book explores that ambivalence by investigating not only the kinds of thing that character is but how it works to engage readers and the range of typologies through which it has been constructed in very different periods, media, and genres. At the same time, it seeks to explore the ways in which character is person-like, and through that the question of what it means to be a social person. Its focus is thus on the interaction between its two major categories, and its method involves a constant play back and forth between them: from philosophical theories of face to an account of the mask in the New Comedy; from an exploration of medieval beliefs about the body’s existence in the afterlife to a reading of Dante’s Purgator; from the history of humoral medicine to the figure of the melancholic in Jacobean drama; from Proust and Pessoa to cognitive science. What develops from this methodological commitment to fusing the categories of character and person is an extended analysis of the schemata that underpin each of them in their distinct but mutually constitutive spheres of operation.

Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 (‘Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?’), as it did in the 20th century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his 19th-century context, this book's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the 17th and 18th as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries). The book also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, this book maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term ‘classic’ altogether.

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature is the first anthology exploring human cognition and literature in the context of early modern Spanish culture. It includes the leading voices in the field, along with the main themes and directions that this important area of study has been producing. The book begins with an overview of the cognitive literary studies research that has been taking place within early modern Spanish studies over the last fifteen years. Section II traces the creation of self in the context of the novel, focusing on Cervantes’ Don Quixote in relation to the notions of embodiment and autopoiesis as well as the faculties of memory and imagination as understood in early modernity. Section III illustrates how the concept of embodiment is especially pertinent to delve into the mechanics of the interaction between actors and audience both in the jongleuresque and the comedia traditions. Section IV centers on cognitive theories of perception, the psychology of immersion in fictional worlds, and early modern and modern-day notions of intentionality to discuss the role of perceiving and understanding others in performance, Don Quixote, and courtly conduct manuals. Section V focuses on the affective dimension of audience–performer interactions in the theatrical space of the Spanish corrales and how emotion and empathy can inform new approaches to presenting Las Casas’ work in the literature classroom. The volume closes with an afterword offering strategies to design a course on mind and literature in early modernity.

Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, TS Eliot's notion of impersonality could help to recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.

How are a reader’s perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation as textual clues as opposed to explicit narration, and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? Conspicuous Silences answers these questions by examining central, sustained emphases on implicature within the Victorian novel. ‘Implicature’ denotes a communicative strategy in which a reader infers the primary meaning of an utterance from that utterance’s relationship to its context, rather than its explicitly presented information. While all communications rely on implicature to an extent, the novels examined here contain notable gaps in their explicit narration and rely heavily on implicature to communicate central elements of their plots. If readers do not recognize these texts’ implicatures, the texts will often appear incoherent: their implicatures must be acknowledged in order for their basic premises to be understood. Moreover, authors often exploit certain reader assumptions to generate implicatures; this work focuses on the exploitation of the reader’s potential assumption of narratorial omniscience and relates it to the reader’s assumption of the narrative’s fictionality. Reliance on such sustained, fictionality-related implicatures is fairly ubiquitous: Conspicuous Silences concentrates on texts by M. E. Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Frances Trollope. This work contributes to Victorian literary scholarship, narratological discussions about narratorial omniscience and fictionality, and pragmatic stylistic debates about fictionality and the use of implicature.

This book considers the advantages of describing fictions as governed by a set of social contracts. It combines current cognitive research with attention to the historical context of works of imagination to argue against the claim that fictions corrupt clear thinking and provide, at best, inert pleasures. The chapters explore the different ways creative work in media from statues to stage plays helps to maintain cultural homeostasis. Like the social contracts of law, language, kinship, and money, the social contracts of fiction are constructed and continually revised within communities. They teach us how to think about the stuff of daily life, animate and inanimate, as abstractions. It is because our brains have evolved to toggle between concrete tokens and abstract types that we can speak, trade, and live together. The discussions of lyrics, portrait paintings, religious relics, plays, and films explore the ways fictions work within culturally constructed and historically specific frames that since Plato have been used to mark fiction’s exclusion from daily concerns—and challenge this assumption. Rather than mark these fictions as peripheral, the framing effects of their genres, styles, and of the places where we experience them—theaters and museums, for example—afford communities the cognitive time and space to reconsider and revise. An extended consideration of The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet in the context of judicial instability in early modern London suggests how the balances and imbalances of fiction, seen as scaled-up versions of life-sustaining homeostasis, might just enable restorative and revisionary thinking.

This volume explores the concept of personhood in Dante’s Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. This study suggests that Dante presents a vision of ‘transhuman’ potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into copresence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, the author argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual’s person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante’s implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the ‘corporeal’ modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante’s journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

Through the lens of poetry and fiction, Darwinism as Religion tells the history of evolutionary theory, arguing that Charles Darwin was the significant figure in this story, that his Origin of Species published in 1859 was the key work, and that the revolution he brought about was less one of science and more one of religion. Evolutionary thinking focusing on Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection formed a rival worldview to the Christianity from which his ideas in major respects derived. Darwinism as Religion is unique in combing a deep feeling for literature with a synoptic knowledge of the theory of evolution and its past, from the early days when it was essentially a pseudoscience resting on the back of enthusiasm for the ideology of Progress, a direct challenge to the Christian commitment to Providence, through the years after the Origin when it was the great popular science of the museums and lecture halls, and on to the professionalism of the genetically informed twentieth century. Drawing on novelists including George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence and poets including Alfred Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, the tale is told of Darwinism growing and rivaling and challenging Christianity, continuing the story to the present, through such Darwinian writers as the poet Philip Appleman and the novelist Ian McEwan, and such Christian writers as the poet Pattiann Rogers and the Calvinist novelist Marilynne Robinson.