The author argues that the play King Lear stages a reformation of religious conversion itself, that the play banishes God (or the gods) from the world (as if God had abandoned the world or as if there has never been any such thing as God), and that the play has nevertheless bestowed on its audiences and readers, from the early seventeenth century to the present day, conversional narratives of what might be called ensoulment—stories about how we become ensouled beings by turning to face the other and speak the other, whether the other is a human animal or an animal of a different kind.

Shakespeare’s most famous play is also one most saturated with poison, both as a murder weapon and as a metaphor for moral corruption. Stage killings by poison may appear less spectacular than violence involving force and bloodshed, but they are nonetheless deeply unsettling because of the secretive nature of the often invisible weapon. Unlike the conventional sword and dagger, in Shakespeare’s England poison was considered dishonorable and unmanly, alien to the national character and its assumed chivalric code, and was often associated with women as the disempowered sex as well as with Machiavellian politics from continental Europe, especially Italy. The literal poison that launches the revenge plot in Hamlet also affects the moral toxicity of the Danish court, full as it is of falsehood, distrust, hypocrisy, incest, spying and betrayal—the “rotten” state of Denmark that culminates in the wholesale slaughter, again by poison, of the entire royal family.  

Drawing on some forty years’ experience editing a scholarly edition of the University of Florida Works of Laurence Sterne (9 volumes, 1978–2014), the author's essay suggests the usefulness of it and The Shandean, an annual devoted to scholarly discourse on Sterne’s life and works to the next biographer of Sterne—and, indeed, to the next editor(s) of his work as well. The inevitability of such projects, assuming the continuation of Sterne’s presence in the literary canon, is assumed, and some possible new directions based on new facts and insights are suggested. In some measure, the essay is an experiment in personal discourse intersecting, at a career’s conclusion, with the more typical  expectations of impersonal scholarship, a summation of observations about Sterne and his past, present, and future at the hands of the scholarly community. 

While women did not gain the right to vote or access to many public institutions until the twentieth century, they were already conquering the public sphere in the late nineteenth century by discussing politics at home. This paper examines women discussing politics at home with friends and family in Victorian literature and culture, highlighting the subversive power of the domestic space, a space already ideologically assigned to them, and women's idea to advance the emancipation movement from the feminine comfort of the drawing room. Thus, this paper aims to rethink the spatial connotations of the political public sphere in the Habermasian sense, as well as the spatial position of women in the late Victorian period.

In 1609, John Davies published his plague-poem, The Triumph of DEATH: OR, The picture of the Plague: According to the Life, as it was in Anno Domini 1603. As a poet Davies routinely thought in, with and through figures of repetition, and this article explores how these are essential to the composition and communication of The Triumph of Death. The language of this poem is characterized by recurrence: words duplicate, they motion back and forth, and as they reproduce they might also transform and mutate. This is to say that transformation and communicability are central to this plague-poem's operation, and that in Davies’s hands the language of plague becomes a plague of language.

Incest was a vibrant theme in Renaissance English drama. In this essay, we argue that jealousy was the governing emotion of early modern staged incest. Renaissance contemporaries understood jealousy to primarily manifest in two domains: erotic relationships and familial relationships.  In incest, the distinction between erotic and familial boundaries collapses, making particularly fitting conditions for the emotion that was, most centrally in the Renaissance, about the erotic and familial management of women. We thus analyze the entanglement of incest and jealousy in a variety of plays, including The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, Women Beware Women, and ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore.

The public may have loved Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, but the young Henry Fielding did not. Needing money, however, he proceeded to try his hand at ballad opera, the unorthodox new form that Gay’s play had inspired. Meeting with immediate success, he continued working in the genre, but his reservations about it persisted. As a result, he gradually modified the form by introducing original music, limiting the number of airs, stressing story over song, and integrating the play’s constituent parts to create a unified whole. Fielding was well on his way to creating a type of musical comedy that prefigured future theatrical developments when the Licensing Act of 1737 effectively forced him off the stage. Had it not been for this outside intervention, the man who is today remembered as a father of the modern novel might instead be remembered as a father of the modern musical.

My double-syntaxed title “Tempting Eve” twins Satan’s temptation of Eve to the temptation that Eve’s existential plight and restless inner life present to readers of Paradise Lost. This is a great poem, with a great heroine, but not without threads of misogyny in its weave. While this is no news to professional Miltonists, the textual ground deserves fresh scanning, given a popular opinion about Eve’s happy situation before the Fall, recently voice in The New Yorker: “There was inequality in Eden before the fall, but there was no misogyny.” To me, a distinction without a difference. This remark prompted my essay, with fresh attention to Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist view of Eve in Paradise. Wollstonecraft virtually launched A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) on her reading of Milton’s Eve as an insulting construction, praised in terms subversive of her own advocacy for respecting women’s rational human capacity.

When Trollope wrote a short story about the difficulties of being a journal editor, he invoked Sterne’s own difficulties with conscience and temptation. Using this confluence as a starting point, the essay confronts the literary profession’s present dilemma at a time when the virtues of discrimination and exclusion that have long established canon and curriculum have become vices, replaced by the virtues of inclusion and nondiscrimination. The drastic changes that have resulted are highly dubious, but insufficiently discussed, not least because when one calls attention to them (and to concomitant declines in our enrollments and more generally to the literacy of our population), one is met with great hostility; as the editor of another journal responded in unseemly heat to this essay, “keep these ideas to yourself.” Conscience dictates that in spite of the temptation I accede to that editor’s request that I not publish her name, but blessed be the editors of Philological Quarterly for recognizing that learning thrives best when there is debate and least when there is censorship.  

A variant of the iconoclast movement that since the 2010s has questioned the value and meaning of many monuments in the streets of Western cities can inspire new approaches to literary classics in our classrooms and in our civic spaces. In Spain, the responsibility for conserving legacy, officially placed on academics in 1803, continues to be upheld by universities, libraries, museums, and other public institutions. This conservation work now involves critically engaging the public with monumental heritage and its functions and disfunctions. Active interrogation of this cultural legacy is essential for its continued relevance and consequently that of disciplines such as Literary Studies. As scholars seek a balance between preserving and challenging heritage, the current discomfort with certain public monuments may be used to foster dialogue and interest on pre-modern culture. Street monuments to Cervantes direct us towards the author’s (counter-)monumental texts, a portion of his work which is rich in self-referentiality, experimentalism, and irony, and offers keys for a reassessment of different types of monuments conspicuously unseen today.

“Craft, Critical Making, and the Workshop Turn: Literary Pedagogy in the Contemporary English Department” reframes the design school concept “critical making” as a way forward for the literature classroom, building on a range of craft sensibilities animating current arts and humanities teaching. Explaining a craft discourse since the financial crisis of 2008, the essay tracks various permutations of “the revenge of analog.” It shows how the craft discourse parallels recent initiatives in the academy; the essay then exemplifies these practices with reference to a suite of skills prioritized in the literary classroom. Pamela Smith’s “The Making and Knowing Project,” Jonthan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth, Peter Stallybrass’s “Against Thinking,” and the workshop ethos of creative writing classrooms help inform and motivate the essay.

This combined autopsy and memorial service for the literary critical essay in its widespread demise addresses not just the classroom atrophy of expository writing in the surge of AI and its simulated thought, but, well before this pedagogic crisis, laments the lost model of  the classic interpretive essay in its varied persuasive formats. Undergraduate English majors increasingly enrolled in predominantly Creative Writing curricula—students often no longer reading, let alone reading about, great literary writing—tend to become graduate students unmoved by the energies that once animated and sustained the world of literary discourse.  

The Vatican Library contains one of the oldest extant copies of Floire et Blancheflor, a medieval romance that was widely disseminated across Europe. While the witness is incomplete, sufficient material survives to evidence an Anglo-Norman version of the narrative with marked differences from later manuscript versions of the French romance, particularly with regard to the roles fulfilled by women. This essay engages in close comparative analysis of the Anglo-Norman text alongside other witnesses of the French Floire et Blancheflor, illustrating the distinctive narratives that arise out of their textual differences. This approach not only reveals the shifting representations of gender in medieval romance over time, but also explores the ramifications of the ways in which text preservation in the Floire et Blancheflor 

In his twelfth-century romance, Erec et Enide, Chrétien de Troyes retells the story of a knight who becomes recreant, neglecting arms and tournaments, because he loves his wife so much. Into this secular Breton legend, the poet infuses an allegory of the salvation narrative in which the hero’s recreantise replaces pride as the original sin. Multiple evocations of the baptismal rite frame the hero as a figure of Adam and his wife as a font worthy of cleansing him, encouraging readers to understand her tears that fall on his chest as a symbolic baptism. On his journey of repentance, Erec becomes a figure of the second Adam, his continually bleeding wounds recalling those of the wounded Christ. After the hero’s pseudo-resurrection, he enters a garden that resembles both Eden and hell, and from there, liberates the garden’s prisoner, echoing Christ’s harrowing of hell.

This article considers a speech pattern known as an ubi sunt (Latin for ‘where are they?’). These verbal formulae traditionally cross theological, heroic, troubadour, and courtly registers and serve as an emotive response to literal change. This essay considers this pattern’s appearance in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. Whereas Chaucer’s lovelorn Troilus utters ubi sunt speeches on two occasions, Henryson, in his retelling of the Troilus and Criseyde myth, situates Cresseid as the central speaker in a lengthy and complex ubi sunt passage after she is stricken with leprosy and cast from her court. Little scholarly attention has been paid to Chaucer’s use of this tradition and even less to Henryson’s adroit adaptation of it. In both cases, the vocalized elegizing of Criseyde/Cresseid reinforces her status as the embodiment of worldly transience through this formulaic pattern meant to articulate nostalgia and loss. 

The Garlande of Laurell of the early Tudor laureate John Skelton mocks its author's pretensions to Muse-bestowed poetic glory -- his "Fame" is useless, it develops -- in part by modelling his work on the infamous poetry of Cicero. Skelton's "prynce of eloquence" wrote two epics, replete with Homeric machinery of divine intervention, in praise of his own eloquence in discharge of his consular office, avowedly in pursuit of his own immortality. The Ciceronian epics do not much survive, however; Skelton was in a position to understand them, nonetheless, by way of the knowledge of the Ciceronian corpus that the Italian printing industry made possible for him. Cicero's poetry is best attested in its author's own citations in his other writings; and Skelton was amongst his earliest English translators, including Ciceronian correspondence that attests the poetry.