A comparative reading of secular medieval literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries nuances our modern preoccupation with things as challenging a human-centered view of the world.  Courtly texts exhibit a hermeneutic tension between an object such as stone that could hold meaning for the human interpreter, and a formless, transforming thing with various physical effects in particular moments or through time—what I shall call a “substantive” materiality. In examples that range from descriptions of palaces in the Latin east to vernacular courtly romance and lyric (Le Roman de la Rose, Gottfried’s Tristan, troubadour lyric), crystal acts as a medium for illusory effects and multiple sensory experiences that often celebrate carnal love and erotic desire.  Moments when crystal should symbolize a transparency associated with universal knowledge are the same moments that are the least transparent.  Rather than standing as a symbol of crystalline wisdom, crystal disrupts contemporary frameworks of thinking about stones established in lapidary and iconographic traditions by allowing for the perceived sensual pleasure of a formless, material substance.

This article argues that the representation of violent crime in early modern tragedy fits neither neo-Aristotelian conceptions of hamartia nor the subsequently widespread views of the nineteenth-century idealism, with its emphasis on “tragic sublimity” and transcendence of suffering.  The example of Alexandre Hardy’s French tragedy Scédase, ou l’Hospitalité violée [Scédase, or Hospitality Violated], composed ca. 1605-15 and published in 1624, instead suggests an anti-cathartic aesthetic in which the audience would be stirred to anger at an unjust cosmic and social order.  The eponymous protagonist’s “mistake” is to trust in human and divine law, and his experience, following the rape and murder of his daughters, leads him to profess  atheistic and socially critical views at a time when freethinkers with similar views were being severely repressed.

Putting Charles Le Brun’s painting Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre in dialogue with the artist’s influential treatise on the visual representation of emotions, Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière, this article rethinks the affective economy of absolutism through a wider palette of emotions than is traditionally acknowledged. Le Brun’s painting cultivates the subject of absolutism as a feeling subject through aesthetic and affective choice. Les Reines de Perse thus depicts an impossible mistake: the misrecognition of a king that founds the absolute monarch’s power on a feeling of choice. If the painting and its different intertexts define the feeling subject of absolutism, however, they also reveal the possibility of a counter-affect in the passion of wonder.

Catalepsy is not a term often used in historical narratives of the French Enlightenment.  It was, however, during this period that catalepsy emerged as a medical problem and infiltrated the vocabulary of French literature, aesthetics, and moral philosophy--trends tied both to the period's glorification of genius and ecstasy, and to its concern over the pathological effects of intense passions. Eighteenth-century discussions of catalepsy crystallized around three sorts of figures: the "deep" thinker utterly absorbed in thought; the religious enthusiast; and the individual deemed vulnerable to debilitating nervous excitation tied to chagrin. This essay surveys how those figures were depicted by physicians and moral philosophers, with particular emphasis on Dr. Samuel-Auguste Tissot. It also examine selected literary stagings of catalepsy, ecstasy, and mental absorption in the works of Denis Diderot. Finally, it considers the divergent paths (aesthetic vs. medical) which these concepts took in early nineteenth-century French culture.

Masonic rituals drew upon subject matter and narratives similar to those found in neoclassical tragedy, and managed bodies and spaces in discernibly theatrical ways. But it is the fusion of pathetic, tearful sentiment to bonds that modeled archetypal masculine relationships that most palpably links Masonic ritual to the theater culture of eighteenth-century France. Freemasonry also likely informed French dramaturgy. The valorization of artificial paternal, filial, and fraternal bonds central to Freemasonry became a prevalent theme in French drama in the third quarter of the century. French versions of The London Merchant, which had an outsized impact on the development of French drame, suggest that, regardless of playwrights’ affiliations with Freemasonry, the passionate male bonds promoted by the brotherhood informed late-Enlightenment French dramatic literature. 

Edited by Frances Ferguson and Kevis Goodman

Thirty-one authors included in the pages of this issue select one passage from Hartman’s work that they have found particularly generative and offer a brief reading of it—whether to comment on its significance for their own or others’ scholarship, to think about its place among Hartman’s critical passions and interests, or to discuss its influence in the critical landscapes of the past or the present. The result is a kind of florilegium-with-commentaries. Each piece is thus very short; each starts with an excerpt from Hartman’s prose (or in one case poetry) and then unfolds from there, so that his voice threads in and out of ours, drawing together critics with very different interests and relationships to Hartman’s own work, as well as quite various understandings of it. As befits Hartman—who was the student of Erich Auerbach, Rene Wellek, and Henri Peyre, who made his home and career in the United States, but who first became famous as a reader of England’s William Wordsworth—this collection is also an international collaboration: scholars from Germany, Belgium,

England, and Israel here join others writing from all across America.

This article explores the assembly of six fictional narratives of global warming and the catastrophes it is now bringing about. The article argues that the narratives all make lively, individualized use of a varied set of recent discursive traditions, ones enacted in areas ranging from environmental politics and ecocultural theory to geological periodization, risk theory, recent technoculture and capitalism, and contemporary post-apocalypticism. The narratives focused on are one early text, Soylent Greenb, and five contemporary novels, ones by Paolo Bacigalupi, Barbara Kingsolver, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nathaniel Rich, and Octavia Butler.  

The vast regions of Patagonia in present-day Argentina and Chile fascinated British writers during the long eighteenth century. Between the equatorial coast of Brazil and the Spanish colonies in Chile there were no European outposts of any size, little wood for repairs, and thousands of miles of uncertain navigation through some of the world’s most dangerous seas. Daniel Defoe's last novel, A New Voyage Round the World (1725), helped to shape, even as it was shaped by, early modern understandings of the southern reaches of South America and, more broadly, a global climatology that depended on complex analogies between known and unknown regions. Defoe’s novel and its historical sources reveal some of the ways that the understanding of “climate” emerged through differential, experiences of weather conditions in remote regions of the globe. A New Voyage relies on a chain of analogical substitutions and displacements to normalize alien patterns of wind, precipitation, and temperature. Patagonia–even more than the Caribbean and or the monsoon regions of South and Southeast Asia—reflects a widespread cultural desire to project the “normative” climatic conditions of “home” onto the blank spaces on maps of the South Seas.

This essay reads “ ‘Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ ” in the context of Victorian concerns about ecological breakdown and the human impact on the environment. It argues that the poem’s blasted, highly anthropomorphized landscapes express something of the strange new epistemology of what would come to be known as the “Anthropocene.” Through its upending of teleological narrative drive, and its emphasis on the inescapable warping pressures of human mediation, “Child Roland” represents a significant imaginative response to an emerging environmental crisis.

This essay examines John Kinsella’s prize-winning poem “Bushfire Approaching.” Drawing on Brian Massumi's work on anticipated disaster—in particular his attention to trauma-survivors haunted by “the smoke of future fires”—we analyze Kinsella’s treatment of debates surrounding climate change in Australia.  Fire in ‘Bushfire Approaching’ is both symbolic and real, representing burning in the past, present and future.  The poem's articulation of place, space and time captures oppositions between the willed amnesia attributed to many fire survivors, along with a vision of a future punctuated by repeated climatic catastrophes.  Deploying affect theory and close reading through an ecocritical lens, we interpret the bushfire as a signifier of the complex relationship between climate change and custodianship of the land. This approach situates Kinsella’s poetry within a broader discussion of the bushfire as a natural phenomenon, while we also consider the poet’s deep respect for fire and its role in Australian ecology.

We’re Alive, an audio drama podcast downloaded more than 20 million times, initially seems to be a narrative of conventional zombie apocalypse. Upon closer examination of the podcast and the responses of its listeners, however, We’re Alive appears to be uniquely equipped to engage its audience with issues surrounding climate change and environmental degradation. This article examines the ways in which We’re Alive encourages listeners to confront, process, and imagine solutions to real-world environmental issues within the dynamic soundscape of the podcast’s alternative reality: a process that makes them all the more capable of doing so in their extra-textual lives.

“The Garden in the Machine” looks at how video games might raise environmental consciousness and compel thought about human-environment relations. Although games are deeply embedded within networks of exploitation and environmental degradation, they might provide a basis for thinking environmental issues in three ways: as procedural arguments, as spatial allegory, and as simulated, ethically disposed boredom. While independent games like Fort McMoney (2014) attempt to overtly intervene in discourses about oil, energy, and environmental degradation, many popular games like Far Cry 4 (2014) offer a more complex simulation of natural spaces that might be read as allegories for the discursive position of “nature” in modern society. Finally, a third type of game, exemplified by Proteus (2013), forces its users to withhold from the violent exploitation of nature, compelling instead a contemplative attitude toward the world.

The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry is sometimes read as an anthology with no obvious purpose other than an archival one. This essay compares the vocabulary, rhetoric, and imagery of Exeter Maxims and The Order of the World with devotional prayers and psalm translations in Old English verse. In the process, it suggests the Exeter Book was designed to inculcate readers in a monastic ideology conducive to liturgical discipline and the internalization of devotional literature. Engaging with scholarship on the intellectual development of poetic craft in Anglo-Saxon England, I show how visual-verbal collocations and thematic repetitions embedded throughout this important manuscript articulate a “monastic poetics” that stimulates vernacular audiences toward visionary experiences.

Thomas Hoccleve made his official literary debut in 1402 with a loose translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’Amours. Whereas the French original is concerned with championing the dignity of women and rebuking the men who malign them, the English poet imbues his version with irony and ambiguity, thereby laying claim to what he regards as the sophistication of great authors like Chaucer. In other words, by rendering the Epistre, Hoccleve sought to initiate himself into the self-contained male discourse that, according to Christine, both enables misogyny and divorces language from reality. Nearly twenty years later, he returned to the nexus of authorship and the representation of women in his experimental sequence of poems known as the Series. Though likewise expressing contradictory attitudes, this work acknowledges the hazards of faulty communication and predicates Hoccleve’s convalescence on his ability to perceive women correctly and himself in relation to them.

The English language publication history of La vida del Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades (1554) disputes theoretical accounts that have regarded the seminal picaresque narrative as the precursor of the modern novel. Until 1908, all extant editions in English ended with one of several continuations, rendering the text more episodic and piecemeal than in its original form. While much Lazarillo scholarship has underscored continuities between the picaresque and the modern novel, this article argues that English-language editions emphasized differences between picaresque narratives and the emergent novel, highlighting dependency and necessity rather than freedom and autonomy. The publication history of Lazarillo contributes to a better understanding of the affiliation between episodic narrative and representations of poverty.

This essay analyzes Ben Jonson's play The New Inn (1629) alongside the poetry that circulated among Jonson and his literary peers in the wake of the play's failure. It argues that The New Inn’s failure can be analyzed within the context of changing ideas about nobility and status in early modern England. Responding to the play’s failure, Jonson and his peers articulated an antithetical relationship between intelligent judgment and the prominent displays of wealth and status that characterized theater audiences at that time. In the print edition of the play, Jonson declared that the print reader could become his patron, simply through the act of reading -- a suggestion that challenged long-held assumptions that high status and intellectual discernment were linked. In emphasizing the importance of reading well, Jonson articulated a concrete way for people of lower social status to challenge existing structures of authority.

Why did Garrick spend the 1745-46 season in Dublin? (Garrick was disgusted by Lacy’s management at Drury Lane, and he resisted working for Rich at Covent Garden.) Did he serve as co-manager at Smock Alley? (No.) How much did he earn this season? (There is no solid evidence of his earning a reported £600, but that sum is demonstrably possible.) How reliable is anecdotal testimony about this episode? (Most of what Thomas Sheridan says is slanted or actually erroneous; almost all of Mrs. Bellamy’s late-life testimony is lies and nonsense.) Garrick was to spend 1746-47 at Covent Garden, hoping that Lacy’s company would collapse so he could become principal owner and patentee of Drury Lane, but he finally settled for becoming Lacy’s partner, starting in 1747-48.  Whether this was a wise decision may be questioned.  Garrick loathed and despised Lacy – which suggests that Garrick might have been wise to return to Dublin and bide his time.