In the Middle French Mirror of Simple Souls, the word meulequin refers to a textile headcovering worn by women, where chapter 126 uses it in an analogy for the perfection of the Virgin Mary. This Picard/Walloon regional term corroborates other evidence of the religious treatise's having been written in Hainaut, in the northernmost part of Francophone Europe. I conjecture that the word was part of the original book. As manuscripts of the medieval bestseller circulated, ca. 1300-1530, scribes and translators preserved the term in Middle French, and translated it faithfully as "kerchief" in Middle English, while the reference disappeared from most copies in Latin and Italian. This reconsideration shows how the wording changed over time, and it corrects some twentieth-century mistranslations of the passage as having to do not with a veil or wimple but with a worm.

This article analyzes the chapter on Shakespeare, "The Weary Prince," in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis to understand Auerbach's conception of the theatricality of Jewish identity and to explore how Auerbach engages with traditions of Shakespeare performance and criticism centering on the figures of Shylock and Prospero. It argues that Auerbach performs the act of critical reading in the course of this chapter, and that this performance resonates with his own uneasy engagement with theatrical traditions throughout Mimesis. It also attends closely to the edition of Shakespeare that Auerbach used (by St. John Ervine) and to the critical contexts in which that edition was produced. The article uses Auerbach's own words on Leo Spitzer to understand how he associated Spitzer with the performing, stage Jew (Shylock) and located himself as the exiled scholar (Prospero). Finally, the article reflects on the place of Auerbach's work in the context of more recent understandings of character in literature and the idea of the scholarly persona.

When Oliver Goldsmith's protagonist in She Stoops to Conquer, Marlow, discovers that the Hardcastles' house is not an inn, he worries that he will be caricatured as a macaroni. Marlow's anxiety situates him within the discourse about British masculinities in the 1770s, in which the macaroni was a distinctive, negative figure. Goldsmith wrote his character amid widespread representation of this type in print, where caricaturists and authors mocked the macaroni for his dress and manners. Goldsmith juxtaposes Marlow with other male characters, most notably Tony Lumpkin, his rural foil. Through the example of Kate Hardcastle's "refin'd simplicity," Marlow eventually assumes a masculine identity between the urban macaroni and the country bumpkin, as Goldsmith takes a middle way in the larger cultural debate.

What did writers and printers of fiction in the eighteenth century call their work? At what point does the term novel become the dominant name for long works of prose fiction? In this article, I examine the genre labels on the title pages of some 3,000 new works of fiction known to have been printed in the period 1660-1800, including abridgments and new translations of foreign fiction. I argue that the term novel did not become significantly more popular on title pages than other genre labels until the mid 1780s—-much later than critics have assumed. The terms used-—and, to a certain extent, the type of fiction they denote—-appear to depend far more on changing vogues than on the authors' individual artistic decisions. This article concludes by suggesting some further ways in which quantitative research can be used to make interpretive points about eighteenth-century fiction.

How might a focus on Christina Rossetti's poetry recast the relationships among secrets, subjectivity, and gender? This paper argues that one potentially fruitful area of investigation is the role played by the Tractarian doctrine of reserve in communal conceptions of a female self. I begin by considering "The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children" as a proto-Foucauldian critique of the secret's role in the disciplinary processes of individuation and subjectification. By juxtaposing "Winter: My Secret" and Tractarian writings on reserve, I proceed to recover an alternative theorization and practice of secrecy, including its communal dimensions. I conclude by arguing that "Goblin Market" further develops the collective dimension of secrecy and reserve in order to hypothesize a communal subjectivity for women of faith. Taken together, these poems offer a way to think about both the subjective importance ascribed to secrecy and the contemporaneous models of religious selfhood and communality.

In Cather's My Ántonia Jim Burden contends with memories that cloud the narrative of individual and national fulfillment he seeks to tell. At one point, a counter-memory of the South disrupts his tale of mid-western beatitude. An appearance of the pianist Blind d'Arnault puts the plantation past—the commoditization of black bodies, white dependence on black labor, sexual violence, and the persistence of racial exploitation after emancipation—out in the open, where the text acknowledges this national foundation, even as Jim's narrative struggles to disavow it. The modern nation's enabling reality requires the narrative fetishization of unwanted knowledge. By contrast, in Sapphira and the Slave Girl Cather admits the painful historical realities of plantation society and disarticulates them from any narrative of national disavowal. The result is a discomposed work that refuses the sort of modernist aesthetic that might have allowed ideological and narrative dismantling to reinforce one another.

If we read Rhys's fiction--the "Continental" novels and short stories as well as those set in the Caribbean--in the context of the Americas and the plantation system, a global vision of modernity emerges, spanning the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. In this vision, colonialist stereotypes of idle and lazy West Indians are displayed in dynamic interaction with scenes of actual toil and servitude that appear everywhere in Rhys's fiction. Through a distinctly Caribbean modernist style, her narratives link the labor politics of Dominica where Rhys grew up with the subjectivities of working women across centuries and extending from the Caribbean, to England, Europe, and the Southern U.S. This essay analyzes Rhys's novels of the late 1920s and 1930s, then focuses on Voyage in the Dark, the short story "Temps Perdi," and her last novel Wide Sargasso Sea, discovering a poetics of labor created from the apparent indolence of the Caribbean.

In William Faulkner's Light in August, Joe Christmas manages to exist as a "foreigner" in Jefferson until he is finally racialized as black. This article compares Faulkner's depictions of Christmas and other minority characters (in The Town, Go Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom! and others) with the historical trajectory of the Chinese population in the Mississippi Delta, suggesting that Faulkner's more flexible notions of time and historical narrative surprisingly allow other minorities, including Chinese, to exist as third parties, while sociological studies and legal cases regarding the Chinese pushed them inexorably into the black-white binary.

This paper looks at changes in visual representation in the 1930s as a means of understanding Faulkner's newly historiographic methods in this decade. The advent of Kodachrome® in 1935 as the first widely used color film stock presaged the turn toward the black-and-white documentary mode so important to the nation's efforts to "countenance," or see, the economic crises of the period. Faulkner's descriptive and representational practices in the period 1929-36 also shifted from a more pervasive use of coloration to a style like the silver halide photos prevalent in the middle nineteenth century--the period of the past-tense events in Absalom, Absalom! and of the original "documentary" photos of Matthew Brady and others. In addition to references to the daguerreotype and photographs at key points in this novel–or to Kodak in Light in August–Absalom uses a sustained metaphor of the illuminating "glare" or flash of understanding that Walter Benjamin used to describe the photographic quality of history. The essay uses Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" to explain this pattern in Faulkner's writing and his arrival in Absalom at a full-blown historicist fiction, one that takes the full measure of time's rupture and of characters' efforts to understand material history in the face of Sutpen's designs on time and his dynasty's continuum.

This essay argues for attending to travel--a theme long important in modernist studies, and increasingly so in Southern studies--in its most modest manifestations. In representing movement across rural locales, William Faulkner suggests that conventions are challenged not only by modernization but also by the necessity of translation, a process through which an erstwhile norm can be revealed as contingent and even insufficient. In the case of Light in August, attending to the characters' travels reveals that the novel does not simply critique the consuming illogic of Jim Crow's racial dyad as constructed in closed Southern spaces, but reveals how encountering a broader world confronts that system with racial and ethnic arrays that cannot be located within its binary.

Born to an aristocratic Virginia family, Murrell Edmunds (1898–1981) devoted his life to writing books that explicitly challenged the South's racial, sexual, and economic inequalities, yet his name is virtually nonexistent in the pages of literary history and criticism. Examining his novels Sojourn among Shadows (1936) and Time's Laughter in Their Ears (1946), this essay shows how Edmunds portrayed homoerotic intimacy between men as a queer force that turns alienation into a "useable affect" capable of fostering identifications among all oppressed people and thus impelling a liberal critique of the South's coercive mechanisms of categorization and exclusion. In addition to expanding modernist, Southern, and gay literary canons, Edmunds's work reveals new ways to understand the larger ideological connections between queerness, liberalism, and civil rights.

Until lately, hybrid collaborative texts that involve writers from discrete regions, ethnicities, and a variety of genres have fallen between the stools of traditional categories of classification. In our new era of transnational studies, we can begin to understand the mechanisms that have always been employed in the creation of transnational art forms. A key example is the film that was made of Eugene O'Neill's pathbreaking 1920 play, The Emperor Jones. When he agreed to allow a movie to be made of the play, he requested that Dubose Heyward be the screenwriter. Heyward's play Porgy, based on his novel by the same name, had impressed O'Neill when he saw it in New York, and he instinctively knew that Heyward could unite the South, the Caribbean, and diasporan cultures for audiences. This paper shows how Heyward's new first half of the film introduced Brutus Jones in the context of his Southern background, followed by his participation in the exciting modernist scene of Harlem, and how this contributed to a richer presentation of the links between the South and the Caribbean in the 1933 film, especially as the role was interpreted by Paul Robeson, whose transnational career gave a new dimension to the African diaspora.

The Afterword explores how the volume's essays adroitly draw on critical approaches developed within the New Modernist and New Southern Studies to produce fresh readings of work by canonical twentieth-century writers and to introduce work by hitherto neglected authors (e.g., Murrell Edmunds). The contributors' strong emphasis on narrative literature prompts some musings on the place of poetry within contemporary U.S. literary studies--musings that include a consideration of the work of Melvin B. Tolson and its claim on the interpretive protocols that emerge at the intersection of the New Modernist and New Southern Studies.

The cluster of erotic riddles found in the Exeter Book (nos. 41-46) has usually been regarded as an isolated case of bawdy literature that inexplicably managed to survive in a codex with conspicuous religious contents such as the opening Advent Lyrics. However, a careful examination of early medieval Latin collections reveals that some of the pieces also present sexual double entendre and imagery that can compare to the erotic components found in the Exeter counterparts. This essay therefore explores the possible existence of the erotic category in the case of Aldhelm's Enigmata and other Latin riddle collections. The study of this neglected aspect of early medieval riddling will thus provide us with relevant information about the ways vernacular literature interacted with Anglo-Latin tradition.

The Old English sun riddle, preserved as Riddle six in The Exeter Book, defines the sun as a killer and a healer: this definition of the nature of the sun has puzzled commentators, but is paralleled in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, a text which is unlikely to have been widely read in Anglo-Saxon England since Macrobius quotes Greek extensively, but which was available and might well have been excerpted or served as the source for marginalia or other forms of learned discourse.

Can we add Matthew Bramble's dissatisfaction with England's biohazards to analyses of his tetchy temperament? In Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771), the Welsh squire Bramble laments the "streams of endless putrefaction" in Bath and London. This article argues that these streams result from commercialism and stand metonymically for trade routes that connect these cities to far-flung commercial ports. In England, Bramble imagines economic refugees as environmental ones, establishing a causal link between commercial excesses and environmental degradation. This environmental degradation prompts Bramble to celebrate the purity of Scotland. In doing so, he attempts to restore a sense of national identity distinct from the excesses of trade and consumption. While he details environmental degradation of England's modernization, Bramble embraces and (re)constitutes a Scottish national identity that rests on Scotland as a pristine natural environment, revealing the limits to his critique of global commerce and territorial imperialism.

"Leda and the Swan," when read in the context of its drafts and foul papers, embodies Yeats's concept of tragedy. The manuscript evidence shows that the poem despairs of any transcendent meaning in conflict and instead explores the value of resistance, even in the face of an omnipotent force. Leda and Yeats, insofar as he can identify with her, come to a point where they translate their suffering into human understanding. In this way, Leda becomes more powerful than the god whose lust created the grotesque swan; the animal form of the swan subsumes Zeus's divine individuality. Leda resists and is overwhelmed, but in the end retains her humanity. Likewise, Yeats struggles against the tides of history, the inevitability of time and its gyres.

Taking as its point of departure Nietzsche's contention that history should be used to invigorate rather than enervate the present, this essay shows how the eponymous antiheroes of Pirandello's Henry IV and Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra deploy masks modeled on historical exemplars as a means of releasing instinctual selves into a more vital, more lived reality. It also argues that while historical role-play cathartically relieves the burden of one's cultural and personal history, these histories are ineradicable. Man, contends Nietzsche, is ineluctably implicated in the follies and aberrations of the past, and in "Henry IV's" fatal wounding of a rival suitor and Zarathustra's eternal return to his symbolic mountain refuge the triumph of the past over the present is made manifest.

This paper is an examination of Charles Portis's True Grit that places the novel in the context of recent debates about history and fiction. The argument asks if there is a metaphysics of authenticity that still resides in our understanding of Western fiction, and whether it derives from history as the definitive measure of value. What degree of ethical responsibility does the historical novelist have, especially in a postmodern culture where history is itself often understood as simply another form of narrative? Mattie's story dramatizes the ways in which history is aesthetically composed, and the American West is thereby used by Portis to question the status of Western mythology.