This article reads Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) in relation to the rise of subsurface resource extraction in the early eighteenth century. Against the backdrop of Britain’s emergence as what E. A. Wrigley calls the world’s first “inorganic,” or mineral-based, economy, the author positions literary depictions of the subsurface in Defoe’s work as a bellwether for changing attitudes toward extractive industries. The central contention of the article is that Defoe fashions the subterranean and subaquatic settings on Crusoe’s island into ideal sites for colonial capitalist exploitation, repurposing these environments in the cultural imaginary. The detailed portrayal of the subsurface environments Crusoe must navigate, excavate, and inhabit throughout Robinson Crusoe geographically centralizes the resource accumulation and commodity production that sustains Crusoe, while also distinguishing such sites from their counterparts above the surface, thus aligning Defoe’s conceptions of political economy with a distinct “vertical” imaginary. Reading Defoe “vertically” reveals a writer attentive to the political and economic affordances of the subsurface: a discovery that situates his work alongside the conceptual and ideological foundations of industrial modernity.

This essay considers Eliza Haywood’s late-career novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, in terms of its relationship to realism and didacticism. On the surface, Haywood’s novel reads as a reformed coquette plot, with elements that respond to the popular, didactic novel Pamela, by Samuel Richardson. This essay argues that Haywood is instead critiquing didactic novels and their assumptions about both the merits of realism and the utility of novels to teach women in particular about preserving their virtue, navigating courtship, and, finally, negotiating marriage. The novel does this through a sophisticated use of metafiction to comment on genre and the utility of novels. Haywood adapts genre conventions and amatory plots in this novel to contemplate the importance of pleasure in novel reading. Renewed attention to this novel alters both our understanding of Haywood’s place in the eighteenth-century canon and the centrality of didacticism in the rise of the novel.

Although the majority of authors who wrote for the Monthly Review at the mid-eighteenth century have been identified, there are many important reviews for its rival the Critical, whose authorship is unknown or contested. In this essay I examine the reviews of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and of De l’esprit (1758) by Claude-Adrien Helvétius, both previously credited to David Hume, but now attributed to the chief journalist and editor of the Critical, the historian and novelist, Tobias Smollett. The principle of coherentism underpins my argument, which means that a network of reciprocally supportive textual evidence—comprising aspects of method, stance, style, and rhetoric—informs the case for Smollett’s authorship. Significant incongruities undermine the attribution to Hume. Once we analyze these reviews from the perspective of Smollett’s modus operandi at the Critical, we can see how he adapted and revised Hume’s work in the course of elaborating his own views on moral philosophy and philosophers.

Sir William Jones’s orientalist writings on Arabic and Persian poetry exerted a profound influence over European understandings of non-European literature at the end of the eighteenth century. This article reassesses Jones’s role in the development of world literature as a field of study. It draws upon a series of overlooked treatises that Jones composed in French and Latin—most notably his Poeseos Asiaticae commentariorum libri sex (Six Books of Commentaries on Asiatick Poetry) (1774)—in which Jones privileges discussion of Arabic and Persian metrics. I contend that Jones’s preoccupation with non-European metrics perpetuates assumptions prevalent among eighteenth-century literary critics, for whom “measure” or meter was a basis of literary comparison and judgment. Jones’s scholarship, I argue, evinces a desire to find—or forge—metrical correlations between disparate languages, thereby exemplifying an eighteenth-century theory of world literature enamored with the notion that the universality of poetry dwells in its metrical structure.

This article unpacks stories of John Paul Jones, the Kirkcudbrightshire sailor who mounted a series of raids around the British coast over 1778–79 as a privateer under the flag of the revolutionary United States, including an invasion of his home region in southwest Scotland. This turned Jones into a powerful mythic entity through which contemporaries attempted to negotiate questions of loyalty and belonging. The article pursues this overdetermined figure through a clustering of Romantic-era texts, most prominently Allan Cunningham’s novel of 1826 Paul Jones, yet to receive scholarly attention, with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1824) as a counterpoint. It draws on a diverse critical landscape, pairing work on the nineteenth-century Scottish novel and on seafaring narratives with theoretical approaches developed within the environmental and specifically “blue” humanities. It understands the Romantic figure of Jones in littoral terms, Cunningham in particular having turned him into an embodiment of the coastal region of the Solway Firth. In Cooper’s The Pilot, the article finds Jones’s history displaced to the seaboard of Northumberland in northeast England, in proximity of his most famous victory against HMS Serapis in September 1779. This act helps to illuminate Cunningham’s chaotic novel, in which the interest of the historical romance in locale has gone into pathological overdrive. There, Jones’s perceived betrayal of Britain, Scotland, and (most powerfully) his birthplace, generates a narrative context in which the archipelagic circulations of global history are offset by a fixation with the ultimate expression of the local: home.

The Global Middle Ages increasingly prove to be a fascinating challenge for current scholarship. The critical questions pertain to the issue of whether there was any kind of global exchange of ideas, otherwise “global” does not mean much. Only “transculturality” can serve as a solid benchmark for the existence of true “globalism” already in the premodern age. This article introduces the translations of ancient Indian literature into German by the fifteenth-century German scholar and writer Antonius von Pforr, who can be identified as a major forerunner of mostly nineteenth-century poets intensively engaged with Oriental poetry. Significant sections of the early parts of the Buch der Beispiele der Alten Weisen are here translated into English. 

This article offers the first sustained analysis of the printed glosses and envoys to Alexander Barclay’s Shyp of Folys. The Shyp’s glosses and envoys have been neglected in what little scholarship exists on Barclay. Revising scholarship on the nature of Barclay’s relationship with his printer, Richard Pynson, the article moves to consider how these paratexts branded Barclay as an authoritative translator in the Shyp. This main focus is set around questions which touch on early Tudor print culture more widely. What were the innovations and developing conventions underpinning the use of paratexts in this period? How also could paratexts be used to construct the auctoritas of a hitherto unknown translator such as Barclay? By suggesting some answers to these questions, the article hopes to shed further light on this dynamic moment in the history of English print. 

The essay examines the reception of Robinson Crusoe on the basis of how the illustrations included in Amsterdam editions of two 1720 translations, the French and the Dutch ones, made sense of Daniel Defoe’s work. It considers how these illustrations, in turn, influenced the reception of the work in Germany where they were adopted and adapted in four illustrated editions of German translations of Robinson Crusoe in 1720. Offering the first ever contextualization of these series of illustrations, the essay charts a hitherto undocumented chapter in the continental reception of Robinson Crusoe, in the process arguing for the centrality of the illustrations in this transnational tale of the mediation of Defoe’s popular text.

A pamphlet entitled Annus Mirabilis (1722) predicts a forthcoming universal sex change. From 1732 it appeared in the Miscellanies of the Scriblerus group, whose members included Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot. However, it has never been edited, and the only substantial discussion by Yvonne Noble dates back to 2001. This article seeks to augment Noble’s contextualization of Annus Mirabilis within the events of 1722 and 1723, notably the arrest of Bishop Francis Atterbury and developments among composers and singers at the London opera house. Extensive links with other Scriblerian satires are located in terms of common targets, shared narrative features, and parallels among rhetorical strategies. Changes between the early English and Irish editions of 1722 to 1723 and all subsequent printings are described for the first time. Formerly included among the works of Swift, the pamphlet is now generally assigned to Pope and Arbuthnot; a close review of the evidence confirms this attribution, but fuller analysis suggests that Arbuthnot may have played the larger role.

Laurence Sterne and William Falconer, writing in the 1760s, shared an enthusiasm for the decade’s colonial expansionism, but also expressed concern for the soldiers and sailors who enabled those successes. This ambivalence is apparent in Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762), and in Sterne’s Uncle Toby. Both authors modified their pride in commercialism and militarism with significant counterarguments against the greediness of those in power and the exploitation of the poorest among them, those who manned the ships and conducted the sieges, both with a very high cost in fatalities. Both had connection to the East India Company, Sterne through  friendship with Commodore William James, Falconer as a successful writer celebrating the merchant and military navy. Still, in the last volume of Tristram Shandy (1767), Sterne includes a diatribe against warfare; two years later, Falconer embarked for a colonial position in India, only to be lost at sea.

The apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew found widespread popularity throughout the medieval period across much of Europe. As the transmission of Pseudo-Matthew spread in the early Middle Ages, it exerted a strong influence on early English culture. In order to elucidate the specific textual forms of this apocryphal gospel used for translations in early England, this article presents a detailed examination of two Old English sermons that rely on the apocryphon, known as the Old English Pseudo-Matthew and Vercelli 6. Throughout this examination, Latin witnesses to Pseudo-Matthew train our view to even more capacious localities abroad, and situating the Old English translations allows us to see this literature within a much wider world.

In Lucrece, Shakespeare’s heroine interrupts a famous Roman narrative and, “pausing for means to mourn some newer way,” speaks for the figure of Hecuba in an image of the Fall of Troy. Focusing on this ekphrastic scene, Ruud argues that Shakespeare's poem subverts the instrumentalizing logic of epic by heroizing the act of mourning. Though Lucrece’s ekphrasis recreates scenes from the Aeneid, Lucrece employs the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia to delay the poem’s epic action and subordinate it to tragic lament. By transforming the ambitious ekphrastic scene into a space for mourning, Shakespeare resists depicting Lucrece’s loss as merely instrumental to either political change or literary fame. Ruud further argues that Shakespeare’s poem converts the figure of prosopopoeia from an instrument of rhetorical display to a self-cancelling, elegiac poetic form. Lucrece’s commitment to mourning empowers the poem to participate in an ongoing reimagination of humanist rhetoric in the English Renaissance.

The essay throws new light on the master-slave dynamic in Othello. This dynamic is shown to operate on two levels simultaneously: the socio-hierarchical level between general and ancient, and the psycho-hierarchical level between reason and passion. It is argued that Othello’s authority over Iago and Iago’s over Othello is directly proportional to the authority maintained by reason over passion within the economy of their respective souls. The essay is divided into three sections. The first offers a brief case study of Iago as the personified non plus ultra of Nietzschean slave ressentiment and the instrumental reason employed by such ressentiment; the second details the manner in which the rhetorical strategies deployed in Act 1 of Othello foreground the Moor’s complacency and concomitant underestimation of the base affects which will ultimately unseat his reason; and the third offers a sustained close reading of the literary conceit which dominates Act 2, scene 1 and is shown to prefigure the master-slave reversal within Othello’s soul.

This essay finds Bram Stoker’s Dracula strongly sympathetic to the New Woman as Sarah Grand construed her in her 1894 essay for the North American Review and in her 1893 novel The Heavenly Twins. Through his protagonists Wilhelmina Harker and Lucy Westenra, Stoker shows the deleterious effects wrought by a repressive and condescending “brotherhood” and advocates a marriage of partners based on mutual affection and respect. My reading calls for a reconsideration of Lucy Westenra, often read as either a naïf or a latent vamp, and, especially, of Abraham Van Helsing, the novel’s putative hero. Much in Dracula invites us to read Van Helsing as a lonely old man, more interested in regulating sexuality than in vanquishing a vampire, whose treatments harm rather than help his female patients. Dracula dramatizes a struggle between the “oh so clever” “Madam Mina” and the chivalrously cruel doctor whose ambiguous outcome captures the uncertain fate of the New Woman at the fin-de-siècle. Stoker is at best cautiously optimistic: the force of tradition and authority are formidable, and the “chivalry” Grand identifies with true manliness is in Dracula less likely to liberate women than to keep them safely ensconced in the “Sphere.”

This article argues that early English monastic writers were not only interested in borrowing and adapting the writings of early desert monastic communities, but were also interested in reimagining and adapting the physical landscape in which these writings were produced. Examining literary and material sources, this paper explores the ways that early English writers worked to imagine a desert place in the midst of the landscape of England, thereby allowing their readers to approximate and experience some sense of the textures, sounds, and harsh conditions of the desert landscape for devotional ends.

In 2014 was published an identification list of Laurence Sterne’s subscribers, approximately 2,000 in number, as the second half of the final volume of the University of Florida Works of Sterne. Its editor issued a general invitation to students of Sterne to add further information, perhaps identifying names that had thus far proved elusive, perhaps allowing a choice between proposed alternatives to be made with more certainty, perhaps offering corrections. Since then several responses to the invitation have appeared in two articles and several notes. This continuation of that effort, an effort aided considerably, it should be pointed out, by the ever expanding resources of the internet, puts forth information on 48 subscribers, 16 of which are offered with a high degree of confidence.

Aimé Césaire’s négritude is often made sense of by its echoes, but this confuses poetry and philology, mistaking troped echo for originating sound. This article shows how Césaire created this contretemps in coining négritude to make it a term that seems at once old and scientific yet also new and politically urgent. By providing a fuller account of négritude’s etymology, this article also proposes new sources available to Césaire, in particular Girolamo Cardano’s De Subtilitate and its discussion of the touchstone lydite. The work of Césaire as poet is argued to be inseparable from the work of Césaire as philologist.

For half a century, Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite (who only just died in February of 2020) positioned himself as a revitalizing force for “minor modes” of expression, in the Deleuzian sense. His life work collects, conceptualizes, and enacts a rejuvenation of the oral tradition (through “nation language”) and a rejuvenation of the written one (by way of his “video style”) which pursue a Deleuzian minorization in ways that resay and rewrite the literature of empire. Brathwaite’s sense of immanence (his inherent “withinness”) helps enact in his poetry an exemplary deterritorializing for all postcolonial literature.