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For almost 100 years, the Monthly Review documented literary history in Britain through its efforts to review every published text. Appearing monthly from 1749 to 1844, the periodical sheds light not only on texts published during this time, many of which are now "lost" to scholarly analysis, but also on the original critical discourse surrounding these texts. Analysis of the Monthly Review presents an opportunity to discern influential trends in publishing and literary criticism, yet close examination of the periodical proves formidable due to its size. In this paper, we use statistical topic modeling to "read" the over 140,000 pages of the Monthly Review, revealing prominent themes and discourses in the corpus. In particular, we highlight the periodical's presentation of genre differences and its privileging of specific discourses and frameworks of critical evaluation, all of which served to shape contemporary readers' perceptions of the rapidly expanding literary sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a 'mother tongue' (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works of Anita Bharti and Meena Kandasamy, contemporary Dalit women authors who write in Hindi and English, respectively. Thus, this paper extends the definition of the vernacular beyond the confines of linguistic and regional specificity, allowing for a feminist reclamation of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose a reading of Coleridge and Hölderlin using Stanley Cavell’s philosophical theory of acknowledgment and avoidance as an interpretive rubric. I argue that recognition (acknowledgment) of the skeptical limits of reason and the imagination allow Hölderlin, through his poetical theory, philosophy and practice, to overcome the epistemological limits of the romantic imagination; this factor is instanced in his poetry. On the other hand, Coleridge's work remains trapped within skeptical limits because of his “avoidance” of this ontological recognition, which is due to his continued desire for an intellectual intuition. I further my argument by using the hermeneutics of Heidegger as a secondary tool in reading both poets and in helping to illuminate their relative poetic and philosophical positions. Both poets ultimately recognize the limits of our imaginative autonomy; however, they articulate these limits in very different ways – ways that are useful keys in unlocking the work of Coleridge and Hölderlin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite Jane Hirshfield's having published 11 books of poetry and having received six awards for poetry, there is a dearth of published criticism on her work. Most of the existing literature consists of online tributes and interviews with the poet, with barely any scholarly consideration. In light of this academic lacuna, we offer a two-fold framework for reading and exploring her poetry. Our foci are the expression of Zen Buddhism and feminist concerns in her poetry. These two themes, although apparently divergent, intersect in Hirshfield's representation of desire. Desire plays a central role in Zen Buddhism, which theorises it as a central, but problematic, feature of human existence. Desire traps the desiring subject in sensory reality, which is, by its nature, always already contingent. Feminist thinking also foregrounds desire, insisting on women as desiring subjects, and on the complexity of the desiring relation, imbued with overtones of power and domination. Our article explores the representation of desire and relations of desire in a selection of Hirshfield's poems, demonstrating the centrality and relevance of our twin foci. We offer these here as preliminary tools for reading Hirshfield's poetry, in the hope of stimulating further research into her work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a case for greater inclusion of poetry as distinctive data within interpretive consumer research. It considers that alternative means of representation provide insight into difficult to access consumption fields. The poetic voice allows the emergence of an emic language of experience as the subject engages in self-reflexivity expressed in ways unconstrained by typical research norms. The article also considers some of the methodological choices inherent in engaging with poetic data and illustrates the research value by considering poems that unpack hidden and mundane consumption and consumer resistance. It shows how intimate experiences can be accessed and interrogated using poetic analysis, how poetry can capture the minutia of mundane consumption while laying bare the poet's reflexivity about its meaning, and how the reclamation of a dead art-form can become an active form of rejection and consumer resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary works that appeared in almost every issue of the Revolution, the organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in the Woman's Journal, the organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association, enrich our understanding of these two organizations. Contextualized readings of the fiction and poetry reveal that these pieces played an integral, polemical role within the journals as they articulated and advocated each organization's particular view of new womanhood and the changes needed to advance women. These literary works also elucidate how the two group's disparate views on divorce and the reforms most needed to improve women's position within marriage were crucial in defeating a call for union in 1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and the Mukden Incident (1931), Japan’s mounting colonial presence manifested itself in the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company as well as in the Japanese forces’ skirmishes for control of the region. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900-1990) would draw on his memories of Manchuria, where he lived until attending college in Kyoto, to situate hyperobjects and colonial minutiae in counter-hegemonic anticolonial and antiwar prose poems. His subtractive poetic configurations - not Surrealist but certainly building on Dada precedents - isolate incongruous elements (evental traces) in Alain Badiou’s sense of being faithful to a critique of the ethics of a colonial apparatus. Having grown up within the colonial enterprise himself, and subject to high-minded Japanese media representations and instilled imperial affects, Kitagawa positions himself against the machinic drive for colonial profits and the abuse of labour and prostitutes. This article thus situates aesthetic strategies for displacing imperial affect as projected onto spaces of Japanese expansion so as to document radically anticolonial subject possibilities among Japanese nationals themselves. As postcolonial artefacts, these prose poems suggest the contradictions of European modernity writ in the Japanese rhetoric of cosmopolitan East Asian development and liberation as cultural production that aestheticises colonial extraction of labour and raw materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the inter-relationship of journalism and poetry in the nineteenth century, when poems on topical issues regularly appeared in newspapers alongside prose reports of the same events. Poems and news reports addressing the Cotton Famine of the 1860s are examined through the dual lenses of literary analysis and field theory, to query how journalism—and the idea of journalism—might be expanded, challenged, or developed by exchanges with poetry, or, in the Bourdieusian sense, how poems might modify the journalistic field. The article argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems built on and extended the journalism-as-educative paradigm, seeking to move readers from reflection to action, and contributing significantly to the “crusadism” of the late nineteenth-century press. Nineteenth-century newspaper poetry worked with, but distinctly from, journalism to act on and mobilise the reader, and it also critically reflected on the journalism on which it drew and within which it was embedded. The ways nineteenth-century poetry worked to change the way the function of journalism was conceptualised suggest provocative implications for the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay analyses how Shakespeare's sonnets theorise readerly agency. It begins with a brief analysis of English sonnet culture's development from its Continental roots, showing how English sonnets were initially perceived as documents of socially elite circles. By the 1590s, however, as English sonnets became widely popular, they exhibited a complex tension between elite social status and what many believed to be vulgar, empty popularity. By the time Shakespeare wrote his, much of the initial burst of popularity had waned. Belated as they are, Shakespeare's sonnets comment productively on the importance of popularity and the role of ‘ordinary’ readers in constructing cultural value. Many scholars have argued that an inability to control readership—and keep poetry out of the hands of low-status readers—was a source of anxiety to writers in this period. However, this essay claims that Shakespeare's sonnets regularly suggest that the very lack of control over readership is what gives sonnets their cultural value. Although sonnets may have originated in socially elite spaces, Shakespeare suggests that their cultural power comes not from those elite communities, but from widespread circulation to common readers, whose varied readings shape the poems and their afterlives. Shakespeare's sonnets thus claim a cultural status for common readers that can be distinguished from the social status of elite communities in which sonnets were often understood to circulate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the comparison between formal and sociological criticism in South African poetry. It states that there is a lack of importance shown to poetry, which is performed and occasionally paraded at book fairs and literary festivals. The article presents comments from some known South African poets, including Rob Berold, Pumla Gqola and Mzi Mahola.

This article explores the overall meaning of Sappho's "Brothers' Poem" by elucidating its web of interwoven verbal repetitions. "The gods", Sappho seems to say, "reward those who have moderate wishes, think in longer time frames by trying to exploit all their resources and understand the law of natural alternation, regulated by Zeus, by bringing about an even more spectacular reversal of fortune". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the figure of the 'diva' is usually regarded as a nineteenth-century construct, Isabella Andreini (1562-1604), the revered actress, poet, and woman of letters who performed and wrote more than two centuries earlier, may claim the title of the first diva of the Italian stage and page. In this article I argue that a strong and, to date, unexplored, connection exists between Andreini's lyric poetry and her stage work. The 'mad-hotness' for which Andreini became well known in her performances (especially her celebrated Pazzia di Isabella) permeates her madrigals as well. The lover in her madrigals, who may be a man, a woman or ambiguously gendered, feels hatred and madness, may have erotic fantasies, and is constantly burning with desire. Andreini's poetic madrigals move beyond standard Petrarchan topoi such that the ethereal 'Laura' comes down to earth and corporal, sensual and erotic aspects of love and death are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a brief commentary on some of the themes of the previous essays in this journal by way of a classic Renaissance Italian poem about masculinity and its various ‘mutations’, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Milton famously rejected rhyme in Paradise Lost, the Genesis poem by his contemporary Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, is in rhymed couplets. This article asks how Hutchinson used the couplet, how her couplets were read by the seventeenth-century readers who encountered her work, and whether the manuscript of her poem can be treated as evidence of how poetic regularity and irregularity were coded with political and gendered meanings in the seventeenth century, and how differently they are so today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samih al-Qasim was one of Palestine's best-loved and most prolific poets. His work exemplifies the poetry of resistance that for decades emanated from inside the territories occupied by Israel in 1948. Samih and I were born in the same village and we grew up together in families that had been close friends over several generations. This tribute is a personal reflection on the life and work of a man who was equal parts poetry and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including poet Xu Wei's poems on Chinese emperors, images of Miaoshan in the Monastery of the Great Wisdom in Beijing, China, an interview with Ming dynasty scholar John Dardess.