This article considers the ways in which temporality operates within medieval accounts of conversion. Although we tend to think of conversion in teleological terms, time does not necessarily move simply or unidirectionally in medieval conversion narratives. Using the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Giorgio Agamben, the article develops a reading of three interlocking temporalities within the Early South English Legendary Life of Mary Magdalene: the always already, the yet and yet and yet, and the already/not yet. It argues that these temporalities are particularly associated with the “messianic time” Agamben sees as characterizing Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and that the exploration of the “times of conversion” in the Middle English Life might apply not only to the lives of converts but also to medieval Christian experience more generally.

Questions about the color of Jews emerge in medieval discourses describing their complexion as pallid and/or black.  These colors also denote a melancholy illness frequently ascribed to Jews as punishment for their alleged deicide.  English psalters depicting the life of Jesus reveal a similar confusion.  While some images blacken the skin of all Jesus’s Jewish antagonists, others portray his tormentors as dark and light.  This may reflect thirteenth-century England’s ambivalence towards Jews, evidenced in seeking both their conversion and expulsion.  Elizabeth Cary’s early modern play, Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, expresses a comparable indeterminacy on Jewish complexion.  It represents the Christological context through the lens of gender, using color to distinguish and prefigure Jesus’s Jewish adherents and enemies in the persons of Mariam and Salome.  However, the play also undermines the moral stability of its color binary in suggesting that Mariam’s purported whiteness signifies sin, not virtue. 

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Jews, both actual and fictional, who turned away from Jewishness have long attracted scholarly attention. But less attention has been paid to those who turned back to Jewishness in, so to speak, good faith. Indeed, Victorians’ uncertainty about what to call this process—spiritual conversion? national return? racial “regression”?— highlights uncertainties about Jewishness itself in this period of religious, cultural, and imperial transformation. This essay examines Victorian representations of such returns in three texts: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Israel Zangwill’s “Transitional,” and especially Celia Moss’s little-known story “The Two Pictures: a Sketch of Domestic Life.” These works expose frictions between Jewishness as an identity that can be learned and chosen vs. one predicated on heredity or race. In particular, Moss and Zangwill challenge understandings of Jewishness by depicting characters with Jewish families and upbringings whose “returns” are complicated by their realization that they have never been, as Moss puts it, Jewish “in the true sense of the word.”  

This review essay considers the representation of Jews in three recent books spanning different time periods, countries, and disciplines: medieval England in Anthony Bale's Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages; early modern Germany in Yaacov Deutsch's Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe, and post-war France in Sarah Hammerschlag's The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought. In each case, the essay focuses on the idea of the figural importance of Jews in Christian society, and its tenacious hold on the Western imagination.

This article compares and contrasts the political allegiances and artistic sensibilities of two Scottish shoemakers turned poets as part of their active involvement in the campaign for universal suffrage and the emancipation of the working class. The “moral force” position embraced by Mitchell and underpinned by strong religious belief enabled him to occupy a high moral ground, which in turn translated into an elevated moralizing diction characterized by great philosophical and political abstractions such as “freedom”, “justice”, and “truth”. Wright’s poems, less steeped in the Romantic tradition, engage the reader through a more often defiant rather than ardent tone, appeals to human agency instead of a higher authority, and a sharper focus on the economic sites of the struggle for social and cultural betterment. Even in his nature poetry Wright’s voice is not one of inward-turned lyric subjectivity.

“Working-Class Women in the Radical Periodical Press,” discusses working- class women (E.H., F. Saunderson, and “Marie”) who published in Chartist, labour, and trade union journals between roughly 1830 and 1850. In this essay, I argue that, through the nineteenth-century periodical press, working-class women not only reflected working-class politics, but also actively participated in its creation. Within each of the journals I discuss, I trace the politics of working-class women’s poetry within the context of Chartism, and examine the potential of these poets to identify with a particular working-class poetic intertextuality. I show that working-class women’s poetry engaged with nineteenth-century politics by employing many of the same literary strategies as the Chartists: the invocation of community and collective voices, religious and emancipatory rhetoric, and the deployment of differing poetic forms (e.g., pastoral poetry, medieval romance, polemical poetry), and that each of these poets participates in a type of literary labour politics.

Unique not only among social problem novels, Wheeler’s serialized novel Sunshine and Shadow (1849–50) stands alone among midcentury working-class fiction in confronting from within Chartism, based on current events and conditions, the possibility of an imminent English revolution.  This essay argues that Wheeler’s blend of history and fiction makes a truly distinctive contribution to political theory through its contention that workers must break from reliance on the middle class, seek revolution and not simply reform, and organize themselves in a tightly cohesive party for the greatest effectiveness in achieving their aims.  Those aims, for Wheeler, ultimately outstrip the People’s Charter itself.  Unlike other social problem novelists, Wheeler regards revolutionary consciousness not as a regrettable illusion to be overcome by his protagonist Arthur Morton, but as the starting point for strategizing.  The novel’s tone of disappointment and hope make possible its orientation not just to the Chartist movement’s past, but to its future.

This article examines two of the rare surviving early Victorian memoirs by working-class women. In each case, the author wrote or dictated her memoir in response to injustice and violence, and was sustained by forms of medical, familial, and religious support without which she could not have pled her worthy case. Elizabeth Storie wrote to expose the legal biases which prevented a poor woman from gaining reparation for the gross medical malpractice which had rendered her life painful and precarious, and the former slave Mary Prince described the brutal conditions to which she had been subjected in Antigua, Bermuda, and nearby Turks Island. Students of Victorian middle-class women’s autobiographies have argued that with rare exceptions, these memoirists defined themselves primarily in terms of their domestic ties with their families and friends, but for Storie and Prince it was the rupture of those bonds which preoccupied them. Both Storie’s and Prince’s memoirs bore eloquent witness to the complexities and perversities of the actual social order in which they lived, and their acts of resistance have deepened and extended our notions of the range of nineteenth-century working-class writing.

This paper explores the development of Lancashire dialect verse in its written form during the nineteenth century from its roots in the oral vernacular tradition.  Dialect poetry was especially popular among working people in this area of England where cotton spinning and weaving were the basic industries.  In England its cultural significance could be rivalled only by the literature of Tyneside and the North East.  As the paper suggest, it sill has a place in Lancashire culture today.

The theme of posture is an important feature of Anglo-Saxon hagiography that frames decapitation scenes. Ælfric’s account of the martyrdom of Edmund, king of East Anglia, uses many postural descriptions to depict the king’s saintly qualities. From Christian defiance to self-sacrifice, Edmund is portrayed as a Christian king who heroically defies his heathen enemies. After his death, Edmund assumes great control over his enemies and administers divine justice. These key stages of Edmund’s death and burial focus heavily on his posture and that of his adversaries. This saint’s life provides another example of how the Anglo-Saxons used postural gesture, upright positioning, and elevation and descent to describe the virtues of saints and the vices of enemies.

Throughout the Exeter Book Riddles the topic of writing appears repeatedly in the form of books, pens, ink, and various inscribed objects. In these poems writing is imagined as a kind of material speech, one that confers upon inanimate objects voice and power and outfits these items with an enhanced agency for (or heightened effect upon) their human users. A similar arrangement of writing and speech is evident in the Anglo-Saxon epigraphic practice of “speaking objects,” which likewise imaginatively extend speech to inanimate things. I use these inscriptions to inquire into an Anglo-Saxon notion of writing as prosopopoeiac “inscribed speech,” and then examine the way this idea informs the construction of the enigmatic voice found in the Old English riddles. While the earlier Latin riddles also employ personification as a rhetorical device, there is little sense in these Latin texts that the object is itself the actual speaker of the poem.

Critical interest in John Gower’s Vox Clamantis has focused on the beast allegory of the 1381 Rising, contained in the first book of the poem, and on the use of Latin to accommodate Gower’s reactionary perspective to contemporary events. Interest in the allegory of the Rising has supported interpretations of the poem that sharply distinguish the first book from the other six books, Vox 2-7, which Gower wrote as a social and moral critique before 1381. This essay reads the poem as a public outcry before the English Rising and as a response to it thereafter. It studies the terms through which Gower establishes his authority to critique contemporary society. I argue that the deployment of the people’s voice, the plebis vox or vox populi, serves in conjunction with other authorial poses to create an explicit sense of instability through which the pre-1381 critique demonstrates the need for reform. I also propose that the allegory of the Rising enhances the effort to call readers to account by modeling the process of self-examination.

This essay explores the theme of scholarly errancy and amateurism in the ghost stories of M.R. James (1862-1936), a renowned scholar whose career spanned a formative era in the professional development of medieval studies. In particular, his most famous story "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You My Lad" (1904) is analyzed in light of the authors' discovery that the enigmatic inscription on the tale's central artifact, a whistle discovered in a Templar preceptory, has been significantly altered in all editions subsequent to its original publication. The finding allows not only for a reevaluation of an important literary riddle, but a broader reconsideration of the tale's anxious interest in the many terrors of academic error.

Addressed to a providential futurity and leading to the overthrow of a tyrant, Shakespeare’s Dedication and narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece enact a fantasy in which the “publication” of Lucrece’s tale incites political change both in the world of the text and that of the reader, thus justifying the preservation of her story. Against this preservationist urge, however, the poem also conveys a “cancellation fantasy” that contests the medium of preservation. While Lucrece’s grief defies assimilation into narrative view—and consequently eludes the coordinates of politicized readings—her actions and eventual suicide seek to cancel the immortality of the political regime that brought about her demise. By resisting the impulse for preservation and immortality that traditionally typifies the end of the laureate’s craft, Lucrece’s “cancellation fantasy” enacts a new model of authorship that eschews self-presentation and instead arises in a profound complicity with anonymity.

This essay considers the notion of private selfhood as articulated in Emerson’s and Hawthorne’s writings about beauty. Though Nature’s infamous “transparent Eye-ball” is frequently cited as evidence of Emerson’s secular intellectual bent, the 1836 treatise borrows heavily from Jonathan Edwards’s aesthetics. Seen in this light, the early Emerson displays far more reliance on his Congregationalist Christian influences than is typically supposed, promoting a vision of the soul that resembles more than refigures colonial New England’s predominant configuration of homogenous interiority. Hawthorne’s writing about the beautiful, on the other hand, offers art as a vehicle for transcending humankind’s inherent isolation. While art rarely attains the status of true beauty, it does so when bringing particulars of the artist’s innermost self into meaningful contact with his community. Thus Hawthorne’s selfhood resonates with modern discourses of individualism more so than does Emerson’s.

This article argues that early audio-visual recordings of Noh performances played a crucial role in informing Ezra Pound’s reception of Noh and triggered in him the urge to disseminate Noh through film as a means of educating Western audiences. During the years that preceded the Second World War, Pound was interested in Noh both as aesthetical object and as a tool to prevent a conflict between the USA and Japan. Pound wanted to disseminate in the West what he considered to be the product of a refined civilization extolling values the West had lost. Influenced by the vision of early films of Noh performance, in the late 1930s, Pound made repeated attempts to find a diplomatic mediation between Japan and the USA, negotiating peace through Noh audio-visual recordings. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the film medium played a crucial role both in Pound’s politicized reception of Noh, and in his attempt to disseminate it outside Japan.

This essay explores various attempts to cope with the materiality of Joyce’s language in Finnegans Wake, starting with my own efforts of a half-century ago and taking up various models proposed since then by Umberto Eco’s semiotics, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s renegade structuralism, John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Night (a novel approach to the Wake as dream), Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Wake as Lalangue (unrepressed language), Julia Kristeva’s “condensed interpretation” in which the analyst does not try to “normalize” a deviant text but rather consumes it “erotically” in all of its corporeality, perhaps the way John Bishop incorporates so many words from the Wake into his own sentences. In this context Jean-Jacques Lecercle concept of writing as délire (the darkening of transparency) comes into play, as does Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia (a carnival mixing of languages in which nothing is forbidden). Further examples of what Kristeva suggests can be found in Derrida’s Glas (which he described as “a sort of Wake), John Cage’s “Muoyce: Writing Through Finnegans Wake,” and the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos’s Joycean Galaxias (which is made of words like horáriodiáiosemanáriomesárioanuário. Following these various lines of thinking my own preference is for a kind of “erotic philology” suggestive of Walter Benjamin’s idea that “a criticism consisting entirely of quotations should be developed.” Hence the superabundance of quotations throughout my text, with apologies to the protocols of the seminar room and conference paper.