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This article examines Arthur Conan Doyle's status as a ‘London’ writer. It places his own experiences of the city within the same historical frame as that of his father, his uncles, and his grandfather. The Doyles had spent decades working in London print culture before Conan Doyle had even been born, and it is helpful to understand his early struggles to make his name as part of this longer literary-historical narrative. The London Doyles were able to establish their names as artists, illustrators, and writers before the tectonic plates of printing technology and public taste shifted beneath them. The article also focuses on the Doyles' status as a family of immigrant Irish Catholics who found that their faith, as well as their politics, made them perpetual outsiders.

Placing C. P. Cavafy among the modernists raises interesting questions. Which century can claim Cavafy? What does it mean to claim Cavafy for modernism? What space do we need to make for Cavafy in an approach to modernism that shapes and is shaped by his work? What re- and disorientations might that positioning require? Which nineteenth-century filiations does Cavafy carry over into his modernism? Is courage rather than contemporaneity a better guide in these orienteering exercises? This essay fleshes out these questions, asks a few more in the process, and attempts a set of triangulations and mediations between Cavafian and early twentieth-century words and worlds. This is not to trace influences or deep affinities but to deploy Cavafy as the “century's interlocutor,” in Paul's immodest but resonant phrase. Among the mediating or triangulated figures are F. T. Marinetti, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, George Seferis, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Vernon Lee, and Pierre Louÿs, with cameo appearances by Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Rimbaud, and Eugène Marsan.

Wordsworth’s very early “Now ye meet in the cave” (dating from 1786 or a little later) is a strange fragment. It emanates from a desperate, unidentified speaker and bears on the burial of a mysterious female whose death is yet uncertain. It has been largely passed over by critics, with the exception of Duncan Wu - who suggested the poem might be about Wordsworth’s mother. This article follows this intuition, and explores common features of language and theme with a range of works of Wordsworth’s early youth. The conclusion is that “Now ye meet in the cave” is a significant document, and expresses fundamental, yet inevitably covert, facets of Wordsworth’s sensibility. In broadening this case, the article relates a final close reading of the poem to two important, inter-related contexts. The first is Stanley Cavell’s discussion of Romantic scepticism as a metaphysical fantasy involving the refusal of finitude, and a suspended sense of the world’s existence. The second references recent research in Child Psychology that demonstrates the automatic unconscious fantasy of a young orphaned child who affectively bargains his knowledge of his parent’s death for the belief that she still somehow is incorporated, within himself, and within nature.

This article emphasises the unrecognised popularity of the Caroline playwright James Shirley’s drama on the Restoration stage, demonstrating that – after Fletcher – Shirley, Shakespeare and Jonson pegged pretty level in the 1660s when it came to revivals. Aphra Behn’s use of Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure (printed 1637) in her later play, The Lucky Chance (performed 1686), raises questions about why neither it, nor Shirley’s popular The Bird in a Cage (printed 1633) were revived in the Restoration. Behn must have been reading Shirley in the 1680s since there are direct verbal echoes in her play, arguing for a direct engagement with earlier drama. Scholars repeatedly connect The Bird in a Cage to Behn because Shirley’s playlet leaves room for a lesbian desire which reverberates also within Behn’s poetry and other drama. Shirley and Behn also share an interest in the politics of transactional sex, themes that run through both Shirley plays and also in so much of Behn’s writing. The Lucky Chance follows both Shirley plays in showing the negotiations necessary for women to remain both independent and virtuous in a system stacked against them.

This essay responds to Frederic Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson’s own model of allegorical reading, the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus’s The Plague, Jameson’s central example of ‘bad’ allegory. While this novel is ‘bad’ for implying a one-to-one allegorical relationship between the plague infection and the Occupation of France during World War Two, or to the human condition, a reading of the text as biopolitical allegory reveals the complex presence of the masses. Finally, this response considers the ‘immortality’ of the masses as the utopian moment traced within Allegory and Ideology.

Any discussion of comedy as a dramatic form is rendered difficult by the fact that the term "comedy" has two quite separate meanings: a work that is intended to make spectators laugh and a work that has a happy ending. In the early modern period, literary theorists were eager to make clear distinctions between the two definitions - in large part, because of the contemporary suspicion regarding the ethics of laughter, which was commonly seen as being related to cruelty. Theorists like Philip Sidney argued that we laugh at those to whom we feel superior, whereas a true comedy should aim to produce the rather different emotion of "delight". Modern critics are similarly prone to make distinctions between the "elevated" comedy of delight and the "low" comedy of laughter: the one rooted in an audience's sympathy towards the play's characters; the other in its amusement at those characters' follies. However, this essay will offer a different perspective. Through a consideration initially of The Winter's Tale, but also Shakespeare's earlier romantic comedies and problem plays, I will argue that the kind of 'delight' provoked by the end of much Shakespearean comedy often discourages a sense of true sympathy towards its subjects, and, indeed, may seem to share some of the heartlessness that Sidney saw as inherent in the comedy of laughter.

In raising the topic of Jonathan Swift and queerness, we might just as plausibly ask: what is not queer about Swift? From the strangely erotic spectacle of libidinous Yahoos in Gulliver's Travels (1726) to his gruesome suggestion to cannibalise Irish children in A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift's satire singularly bristles with queer potential. The six articles in this supplement variously offer queer theoretical and pedagogical engagements with Swift's work, while also, importantly, foregrounding how Swift's writing was queer and queering in its own time. This introduction presents a brief case study in queering Swift before surveying the articles that feature in this 'Queer Swift' supplement.

This article explores three of Agatha Christie’s early non-crime short stories written in the mid-1920s. I examine Christie’s use of symbolism and key motifs to explore the representation of relationships through the prism of romance. I argue that Christie’s short stories serve as a highly significant creative site for her investigation of the relationship between genre, subjectivity and symbolism.

The pioneering editorial practices of Canadian Professor Edward Bishop and the late Professor David Bradshaw offer distinct but complementary approaches to annotating Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922). Bishop, editors of the Shakespeare Head edition of the novel and of a transcription of the holograph draft, has gifted new modernist editing the hugely influential, crucial instruction “Mind the gap!,” urging close attention to Woolf’s spacing and lay-out of the material page as important literary signifiers. “Mind the word!” might well be the riposte of Bradshaw (1955–2016) who has left a body of scholarship pressing for close critical attention to every passing cultural, material reference, not least in the numerous proper names of people, places, etc., populating this highly allusive, densely palimpsestic text. Building on Bradshaw’s critical technique and research into the onomastics and Bishop’s editorial insights into the spaces and gaps in Jacob’s Room, this essay explores some of my findings whilst working as an editor and annotator of the work for the forthcoming Cambridge UP edition. “tunnelling,” as Woolf herself called it, into the signifying networks behind her writing, to consider questions of paternity, war and national identity that hang over Jacob’s Room: “‘Did you ever hear who his father was?’”

Drawing on the work of Bertrand Westphal, this essay attempts to perform a geocritical reading of the London district of Clerkenwell. After discussing the spatial turn in the Humanities and introducing a range of spatial critical approaches, the essay “maps” literary Clerkenwell from the perspectives of genre hybridity and intertextuality, spatially articulate cartography, multifocal and historically aware public perception and potentially transgressive connection to outside areas. Clerkenwell is seen to have stimulated a range of genre fiction, including Newgate, realist, penny and slum fiction, and social exploration journalism. In much of this writing, the district was defined by its negative associations with crime, poverty, incarceration and slaughter. Such negative imageability, the essay suggests, was self-perpetuating, since authors would be influenced by their reading to create literary worlds repeating existing tropes; these literary representations, in turn, influenced readers’ perceptions of the area.Intertextual, multi-layered and polysensorial geocritical readings,the essay concludes, can producepowerful andnuanced pictures of literary placesbut also face a formidable challenge in defining an adequate geocentric corpus.

This essay will re-evaluate several women writers of the 1910s as neo-Edwardian writers, by examining a range of fictional and autobiographical texts that are set in the recent past of the Edwardian period. It will focus in particular on three suffragette narratives that were published in the pre-World War One years - Constance Maud, No Surrender (1911), Gertrude Colmore, Suffragette Sally (1911) and Lady Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners: some personal experiences (1914) – that seek to represent, and evaluate, the movement’s activities during the Edwardian decade and which have not yet been the subject of sustained critical comparison. By identifying some distinctive formal and thematic tropes in these texts, I aim to explore their continuing interest to different scholarly communities and to develop a fresh reading of these works’ literary, and wider cultural and social, provenance as neo-Edwardian texts.

Cet article etudie le poeme en douze parties de Peter Larkin « Skies in Flight of Tree » (2019) a partir de l’approche des Critical Plant Studies, pour analyser la puissance d’affect des arbres. Faisant appel aux travaux d’Eduardo Kohn, Emanuele Coccia et Michael Marder, l’auteur montre que Larkin sacralise cette puissance d’affect comme forme d’etre inclusive, collective et organisationnelle liee a la cosmologie catholique. Il pose que l’etre-arbre rejette la logique contemporaine d’appauvrissement et d’exploitation, ce que Larkin traduit par une langue empruntant a la priere pour amener ses lecteurs a une relation intime avec le monde materiel. Tout en rappelant les menaces que font peser les relations organiques entre etres, Larkin revele que la priere est finalement ce par quoi l’homme trouve acces (le poete parle d’« accueil par le souffle ») aux formes de pensee participative et meditative du non-humain, qu’il soit arbre ou ciel. En imaginant et en pratiquant cette pensee dans « Skies in Flight of Tree », Larkin aborde les arbres non pas seulement comme elements d’une economie en declin fondee sur l’exploitation d’un heritage geologique, mais comme etres incarnant des relations de plenitude plutot que de manque.

Between 1884 and 1936, Rudyard Kipling wrote over 300 short stories, most of which were first published in colonial and cosmopolitan periodicals before being reissued in short-story collections. This corpus contains a number of critically neglected Gothic stories that fall into four groups: stories that belong to the ghost-story tradition; stories that represent the colonial encounter through gothic tropes of horror and the uncanny but do not necessarily include any supernatural elements; stories that develop an elegiac and elliptical Gothic Modernism; and stories that make use of the First World War and its aftermath as a gothic environment. This essay evaluates Kipling's contribution to the critically neglected genre of the Gothic short story, with a focus on the stories' persistent preoccupation with spatial tropes of travel, disorientation and displacement.

This essay reflects on the paradoxical intention of capturing and preserving texts that were printed to be ephemeral and disposable by design. It considers the implications of this contradiction in the way we use and engage with eighteenth-century cheap print via subscription databases that include full-text digitized editions of periodicals and newspapers. The conversion of individual texts addressed to discrete moments into big data, which is more often searched than read, has led to new ways of modelling eighteenth-century print culture and brought about a genuine paradigm shift in the way we think about and interact with historical materials. At the same time, this essay recommends some caution as we proceed. Cheap print that has miraculously survived this long, in one form or another, must not now suffer decontextualization or be lost amid new canons formed by search criteria and hidden algorithms.

The growth of advertising and PR industries in recent years, combined with the economic downturn in many news organizations has led to renewed debates about the influence of commercial pressures on...

This article offers a new interpretation of the neglected epic poem Alexander’s Expedition (1792) by the Bristol scientist and ‘Jacobin’ Thomas Beddoes. The poem’s classical / heroic theme is used as a vehicle for anti-colonial polemic. Beddoes’s influence on the science of the period, as the mentor of Humphry Davy and experimenter with nitrous oxide and other gases, has been extensively re-evaluated; to an extent, he is also known for his impact on the radical politics of the 1790s. This article aims to demonstrate Beddoes’s importance as a literary writer, in terms of both poetic genre and political belief. It also includes a discussion of the nature and status of heroic poetry in the early Romantic period.

Although the popularity of Shakespeare's Falstaff from 1597 to now receives frequent acknowledgement, his straight-woman, Mistress Quickly, has attracted relatively scant attention. She was popular enough, however, for Shakespeare to include her in four plays, within varied social contexts but with a consistently inconsistent voice. \ud \ud This collaboration reviews the role of Mistress Quickly across all four plays — 1&2 Henry IV, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor — drawing on our experience of editing the character electronically for Internet Shakespeare Editions. These papers report on the problems, choices, and insights that e-editing Mistress Quickly has exposed

This article is in two parts. The first seeks to set an agenda for the study of Victorian popular fiction by examining what the field comprises today in terms of texts studied, methodologies and affective engagement, and then thinking through the implications of studying such fiction today in a global and remediated context. I argue that Victorian sentimental popular fiction self-consciously models processes of relationship formation and exploration in its characters, its explicit scenes of reading, and above all in its plots, in order to mould and maintain readers’ relationships to it. “Sympathy” and its interrogation defines both the representation of characters’ relations to one another and readers’ relationship to that representation. It is a textual technique used by the fiction industry to create and maintain customer loyalty. Our affective responses to this technique constitute one reason we, as students of a still marginal field, continue to read it with energy and enthusiasm. What we need to do is self-consciously think through the implications of this energy’s rootedness in the commercial imperatives of the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Part 2 offers two case studies to examine that call, one very famous and the other virtually unknown, by American women writers whose work circulated globally: Susan Warner and E.D.E.N. Southworth. I ask what the ethical and methodological implications might be for the checking of our pleasure through what neuroaesthetics calls “cognitive elaboration.”

This essay addresses three themes identified in the 'On Wreckage' volume through its focus on the staging of physical and psychological wreckage, the ethics and agency of spectatorship, and what might be of value in the embodied remains. The paper is drawn from my recent research on Katie Mitchell’s theatre directing and her turn to affective neuroscience, which shifted her attention to spectatorship: ‘It was no longer necessary for the actors to feel the emotions, now what mattered was that the audience felt them.’ Having experienced Mitchell’s controversial staging of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (2016, National Theatre), a performance that left me deeply affected and is described and remembered in terms of wreckage, I draw upon practitioner interviews and archive research to trace the composition of this creative carnage and its exploration of what Sianne Ngai refers to as ‘ugly feelings.’ Some audience members are reported to have fainted, assaulted by the escalating body mutilation. Critics refer to the play’s visceral power, but for many the catalogue of horrors was overwhelming, ‘a sense-numbing effect that outweighs its redemptive lyricism (Guardian)’. Mitchell, however, describes the play in very different terms as a ‘beautiful artefact’ and a ‘tender’ piece of writing. The acute detail of Mitchell’s realism contributed to the rawness of the sensations experienced, whilst the metatheatrical abstraction of Kane’s postdramatic style creates self-awareness and agency for the spectator, a consciousness of being present as a co-producer of meaning. I consider this in relation to Jill Bennett’s conceptualization of “critical empathy” which she distinguishes from “crude empathy” in her discussion of trauma and contemporary art. My discussion is informed by feminist, phenomenological and affect theory in considering the cultural politics of emotion, engaging with what emotions do and how they circulate as well as what they are. In this body of work there is a critique of accounts that emphasise positive and empowering forms of emotion at the expense of the “ugly” and an endorsement of the ‘need to think about how histories of injury stay alive’ as articulated by Sara Ahmed. This, I suggest is important to the value of the wreckage of Mitchell’s production. My account brings first and third person perspectives into dialogue in its form and content as, a witness to a trauma that was and wasn’t mine. In questioning what Antonio Damasio refers to as ‘the feeling of what happens’ I investigate the traces of what happened, how and why it matters.

The role of reading in educating a future writer is discussed through the study of memoirs by writers including Janet Frame, James Baldwin, and Eudora Welty. The memoirs show reading books to have been a transformative way of melding forms of experience. The following features of childhood reading are examined: (1) the role of the physical book, (2) the cognitive-aesthetic-affective impact of letters, words and ‘voices’, (3) the partially unplanned and challenging path of children’s exposure to texts, and (4) absorption of models that can be imitated and outgrown. The discussion links sympathetically to views in philosophy of education about the importance of content and beauty and of influences whose impact cannot be planned, measured or captured as generic skills. The autobiographical evidence considered here suggests that these influences can nonetheless be crucial to expanding learners’ horizons and stimulating their educational and artistic progress.\ud \ud

This essay considers how the Aesthete and poet, Rosamund Marriott Watson, explores the idea of the garden as retreat – a treacherously doubled symbol for women, both liberating and confining. In Marriott Watson’s 1891 poetry collection A Summer Night, the garden retreat channels the transgressive energies of the 1890s, sheltering but continuous with the city, fostering the creative, sexually emancipated New Woman. By contrast, in her later garden book The Heart of a Garden (1906), Marriott Watson draws on the idea of the garden as retreat in order to present a valorization of insularity and withdrawal into domesticity. This essay reads this change in garden ethos in relation to Marriott Watson’s own career and also in terms of the conventions of the garden book (a little known genre that was popular at the turn of the nineteenth century). While the garden book has been read as feminist by recent critics, the example of The Heart of a Garden reveals that, like the garden, the garden book carries double and ambivalent meanings. The essay closes by exploring the ways in which we can read Marriott Watson’s garden writing, simultaneously, as a set of reflections on life in the suburbs, another site that conceived, within the Victorian imagination, as a space of retreat.

2002: three months, three Palestinian women, three bombs. That same year, Sulayman Al-Bassam premiered The Al-Hamlet Summit, his political appropriation of Hamlet, Mahmoud Darwish’s Palestinian poetry, and Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Mapping the politics of anger and despair onto Shakespeare’s play, he suggests that terrorism from Palestine to the United States is rooted in colonialism and Western military interventions in the Middle East. Hamlet is a jihadist, Horatio becomes a British Arms Dealer and Ophelia, a suicide bomber. This article explores the politics of representation in the body of Ophelia, who is anatomised as she detonates herself under the palace orange trees.

Utopias of the text are the moments of the emergence of a new and radical concept of the text as overflowing all limits and boundaries. Here these utopias are traced in the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. They often emerge at the margins of these texts, in fragments or boundaries at which the utopia can be glimpsed before disappearing. These utopian moments can be reconstructed as a form of thinking the post-literary and its limits. They can also be traced to the explosion of speech during May 1968 and Maurice Blanchot is a key figure who links together this political moment with the ‘neutral’ form of writing. This article explores the fading of these utopias of the text alongside this draining of political energies. These processes of critique and waning suggest the inversion of utopias of the text into dystopias of the text. Now the sign or signifier appears dispersed or even insignificant compared to the powers and forces of post-literary domination. In this situation, however, the article suggests, the persistence of the utopias of the text as a critical horizon that can still inform how we grasp the equivocations of our post-literary moment.

This article provides an outline of some key recent developments in the study of the materiality of Shakespeare’s stage, taking that term to refer to writing sensitive to theatre as performance – as a located medium, anchored in a particular place and moment in time, employing the properties of bodies, gestures, things and spaces in relation to language. Three main areas are explored: the staging of objects, research into the materiality of stage space, and the influence of ideas of embodiment on our understanding of the holistic experience of plays as events produced by those on and off the stage. In the context of these three areas, issues of skill and lived theatrical experience are addressed, and questions of evidence and disciplinary collaboration are raised. The essay ends with a brief discussion of the possibilities that materiality offers for intervention in the tensions between historicity and presentism in Shakespeare studies.

This essay approaches the cultures of reading anthropologically, drawing on my ethnographic research with the Henry Williamson Society to excavate the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson’s novels. It places Alex Woloch’s literary analysis of minor characterization in dialogue with the anthropological theory of “distributed agency” developed by Alfred Gell in order to examine the idea of the reader as someone who “gives” and may in turn “receive” attention. The essay asks whether it might be more helpful to conceive of readers’ activities as a form of reading without “culture”—whether plurality, if it must be invoked, might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person. Postprint

The relationship between Shakespeare and prison was brought into sharp focus during Shakespeare’s recent quad-centenary with a succession of works exploring Shakespeare’s value for the prison population. In this paper, we take this spike in activity as a point of departure for examining the discourse of Prison Shakespeare. This discourse, we argue, is underpinned by several intertwining and some- times paradoxical accounts of social being: (i) psychoanalytic accounts; (ii) postmodern accounts; (iii) humanist accounts bound up with the idea of cultural unfolding; (iv) neoliberal accounts that champion heroic individualism. In our analysis, we respond to Pensalfini’s call for critical debate over the assumption that Shakespeare's plays have the power to both teach and liberate prisoners. We note how Prison Shakespeare is always in a struggle to escape the institutional power of both Shakespearean drama and the prison context itself, and the tendency of this work to provide a model of socialization into, rather than resistance against, what Bristol describes as the mode of subjec- tivity of the bourgeois political economy.

Through a consideration of her career as both editor of Atalanta and a short story author regularly featured in the pages of numerous periodicals including the Strand, this chapter explores and assesses L. T. Meade’s position as both a promoter and innovator of the short story form in the period of its rise to popular prominence. The chapter argues that, by regularly featuring short complete works of fiction in Atalanta and through her methods of encouraging, inspiring and challenging her girl readers (who included Virginia Woolf, Evelyn J. Sharp and Angela Brazil) to become writers and modernisers of short fiction themselves, Meade was among the earliest and most important advocates of the female-authored short story as a potentially ground-breaking and inventive fictional genre.

Cut-up method has been notably applied as an avant-garde form. It originated as a piece of anti-art and its most famous practitioner, William Burroughs, used its fragmentary aesthetic to complement his transgressive subject matter. This thesis explores cut-up method’s relationship with Surrealist painting and its application as a means to the marvellous; the method’s ability to surprise both writers and readers. It addresses the central question: how can the Cut-up method be used to disassemble text and explore how the fragments can be constructed, reconstructed, or deliberately misconstructed to create a new text? I have adopted a cognitive approach to the analytical essays, which draw upon cross-disciplinary material including art history, literary criticism, cognitive science, information theory, computing, and the neuroscience of memory. The theoretical analysis and creative practice are integrated in both process and form. Discourses from the theoretical essays are mapped and remapped onto the creative practice and back again. Associated concepts such as fragments, entropy, confabulation, structure, and entrainment are examined both in the fiction and analysis. Empty your Eyes and Bite the Star identifies how, when viewed as a way of writing, cut-up operates from the bottom up rather than top down as in conventional models of practice; and explores the resulting differences in process and structure. It demonstrates the method’s usefulness as a means of generating original text but also shows how cognition imposes certain limitations on its effectiveness. It identifies areas that may be explored by practitioners to effectively target aleatory methods within new domains of creative practice and identifies how further research into the use of cut-up is possible using a quantitative analytical approach.

This chapter opens with a consideration of the role that the manifesto plays in relation to poetry both in the period under consideration and historically. It outlines romantic and modernist theories of poetry (and the association of the manifesto primarily with the latter) before examining the mainstream and experimental positions that emerge from these inheritances. Considering a range of poets' statements on writing reveals that this distinction is often more apparent than real, with much common ground shared between supposedly rival camps. Issues considered include the relationship between form and content, expression and communication, audience, the social function of poetry, and poetic autonomy.

During the 1790s James Montgomery, editor of the Sheffield Iris newspaper, was twice confined to York Castle Prison on dubious charges of treason and sedition. Whilst a prisoner Montgomery composed a collection of poetry, later printed in 1797 as Prison Amusements. The collection’s stand-out poem was a two part epistle titled ‘The Pleasures on Imprisonment’. The first instalment labours Montgomery’s horror at being locked away in York Castle Prison. He soon finds that his fellow prisoners are neither dangerous criminals nor feared radicals but merely thoughtful men and women of dissenting opinion. This essay presents discrete contextual evidence for the simultaneous personification of York at the end of the 18th century as both an idealistic platform from which London government could be challenged and as a panoptical city associated with punitive surveillance and incarceration designed to protect and promote traditional government hierarchies. The essay explores the extent to which the city can come to stand metonymically for the politics and behaviour of its residents, forced in this instance to signify as a physical manifestation for competing and contradictory ideologies.

A contemporary writer choosing to set a narrative in a different country might find themselves desirous to represent multilingualism (or ‘heterolingualism’, the term preferred by Rainier Grutman) on the page. Bringing a different language into the main language of the text, however, can be a complicated process. Using terminology introduced by Meir Sternberg in 1981, this article looks at three examples of contemporary British novels set partly in Italy: Virginia Baily’s Early One Morning, Adam Foulds’s In the Wolf’s Mouth and Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence. Particular attention will be paid to the different ways in which the narratives integrate Italian language into their English text, and to the different purposes served by intratextual translation strategies, before pointing out some of the limits of intratextual translation as a representational tool.

This paper, part of a long-term programme of research into the forms and functions of the vernacular in late medieval liturgical practice in England, offers a “cultural map” of the Middle English poem known as The Lay Folks’ Mass Book (LFMB). Comparatively little research has been undertaken on LFMB since Simmons’s edition of 1879. However, new developments in the study of manuscript-reception in particular regions of the Middle English-speaking areas of Britain, combined with greater understanding of the cultural dynamics of “manuscript miscellanies” and of medieval liturgical practice, allow us to reconstruct with greater certainty the contexts within which LFMB was copied and used. LFMB survives in nine late medieval copies, but each copy presented a distinct version of the text. This article brings together linguistic, codicological, liturgical, and textual information, showing in detail how the poem was repurposed for a range of different cultural functions. In geographical terms, it seems clear that the work circulated in Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire, in Yorkshire, and in Norfolk, and can thus be related to other texts circulating in those areas. Some versions are likely to have emerged in parochial settings, possibly owned by local priests. There is also evidence that the text could be deployed in monastic contexts, while other versions probably formed part of the reading of pious gentry. What emerges from a study of the codices in which copies of LFMB were transmitted is that a range of shaping sensibilities for these manuscripts may be distinguished; the authorial role in texts such as LFMB was balanced with that of their copyists and audiences. In the manuscripts containing LFMB creativity was negotiated within textually-transmitted communities of practice.

This article surveys May Sinclair’s writing on the Brontë sisters in order to chart her revisionist impulse with relation to their reputation, her anxiety about her own literary reputation, genius in women and intellectual self-sufficiency. I argue that in her insistence on the significance of Haworth and the moors as “background” to the sisters’ lives and her careful portrayal of each sister as either “savage” or “half savage” she is establishing the sisters as Romantic geniuses on the one hand and as dissocialized and self-sufficient elemental figures on the other. I move from an examination of Sinclair’s revisioning of Gaskell’s Brontë myth and her engagement with Clement Shorter and the Héger-Brussels question, to a reading of two of her novels in which Sinclair’s own version of the Brontë myth – the untamed intellect of the genius woman in communion with the landscape – is explored. I will draw on the new materialism of recent feminist ecocriticism to argue that, for Sinclair, the cultural and intellectual work of writing is environmentally and materially informed. Sinclair is at pains to show that the Brontë sisters themselves, and Sinclair’s own fictional writer-heroines, can escape essentially uncompromised from domestic and social materiality, and maintain communion with a different kind of materiality: the sacred materiality of landscape.

The Anthropocene is the new designation for our current geological epoch in which human activity has decisively altered earth ecosystems and the fossil record in ways that will be measurable by the geologists of our uncertain future. This chapter investigates the relationship between feminist thinking and the Anthropocene, establishing the gendered dimensions of environmental crisis, and considering how feminist thinkers have approached a range of ‘environment’ topics, including feminised constructions of ‘Nature’; the masculinism of capitalism, technology, science, and environmentalism; and the colonial erasures of the ‘Anthropocene’. This critical work is part of a long-tradition of intersectional environmental activism, which intersects with wider gender-rights campaigns, including reproductive rights and health, autonomy and equality, representation and participation, struggles against class oppression and racism, and feminist and queer critiques of militarisation, extractionism, and colonialism. Ultimately, new feminist understandings of the Anthropocene investigate and further intersectional ecological activism and seek to improve the material conditions of women’s lives.

In ‘The Dark Ecology of Elegy’ (2010) Timothy Morton suggests a radical notion of incomplete mourning for the planet. That we must mourn, and do mourn, through our literature, before the full loss of environment, a human home becoming increasingly ‘unhomely’. He says, ‘The really difficult elegiac work would consist in bringing into full consciousness the reality of human and nonhuman interdependence, in a manner that threatens the comfortable way in which humans appear in the foreground and everything else in the background.’ (256) In this piece, I aim to explore how this idea can be illuminated by the notion in Freud’s ‘Uncanny’ (1919) that the uncanny impression can be created by an unexpected shift in position, (‘in which one does not know where one is’) in this case the position of the reader or writer in relation by the power of a ‘speculative’ fiction to evoke mourning. I will also draw on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994) in their work on mourning and melancholia and the concepts of ‘introjection’ and ‘incorporation’. I want to propose the term ‘speculative elegy’ in relation to certain kinds of climate change or environmental fictions, including the one briefly mentioned by Freud himself in his essay, the short story ‘Inexplicable’ by L. G. Moberly (1917). Such fictions uncannily project and mourn for a natural world not yet passed and disrupt the comfortable and fantastic separation between human and ‘nature’.

This article explores the “unsettling” qualities of American writer Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams. It explores the book’s engagement with environmental crises and indigenous cosmologies to show how the metaphysical insecurities, common to much of Johnson’s fiction, come in this context to challenge the very concept of American nationhood itself–or as the novella’s title parodies, the “American Dream.” Train Dreams unsettles what I call the narrative infrastructures undergirding the story of the American frontier-becoming-nation-state: the transcontinental railroads, and the colonial property regimes that those railroads both pursued and opened up. In three central sections, the article explores Johnson’s unsettling of notions of property, then empire, and finally race. Through these readings, it shows how the novella finds its way to an indigenous critique of America as a settler-colonial state. While previous critical discussions of the “unsettling” qualities of Johnson’s work have until now meant that word affectively, in this article my aim is therefore to emphasize its decolonizing momentum as well.

This article is a textual analysis that compares features of the 1807 edition of The Book of the Duchess with its predecessors. The Book of the Duchess features, has been chosen for this analysis because, in a practical sense, it is limited enough to be manageable, but more importantly, it is a significant poem in Chaucer’s oeuvre and its authority has never been questioned. Thus, it has appeared in every printed edition of the works of Chaucer, providing this study with extensive points for comparison. The editor of the 1807 edition claims that his work is newly edited—a claim that many editors of Chaucer’s works made, without much effort to see through. In reality, the editor appears to have taken Thomas Tywhitt’s second edition of the Canterbury Tales, and used this as the basis for editing the non-Canterbury Tales texts. It is something of an homage to Tyrwhitt’s editing.

There is a continued fascination with all things monster. This is partly due to the popular reception of Mary Shelley’s Monster, termed a ‘new species’ by its overreaching but admiringly determined maker Victor Frankenstein in the eponymous novel first published in 1818. The enduring impact of Shelley’s novel, which spans a plethora of subjects and genres in imagery and themes, raises questions of origin and identity, death, birth and family relationships, as well as the contradictory qualities of the monster. Monsters serve as metaphors for anxieties of aberration and innovation (Punter and Byron, 2004). Stephen Asma (2009) notes that monsters represent evil or moral transgression and each epoch, to speak with Michel Foucault (Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–75, 2003, p. 66), evidences a ‘particular type of monster’. Academic debates tend to explore how social and cultural threats come to be embodied in the figure of a monster and their actions literalise our deepest fears (Gilmore, 2009; Scott, 2007). Monsters in contemporary culture, however, have become more humane than ever before. Monsters are strong, resilient, creative and sly creatures. Through their playful and invigorating energy they can be seen to disrupt and unsettle. They still cater to the appetite for horror, but they also encourage us to feel empathy. The encounter with a monster can enable us to stop, wonder and change our attitudes towards technology, our body and each other. This commentary article considers the use of the concepts of ‘monsters’ or ‘monstrosity’ in literature, contemporary research, culture and teaching contexts at the intersection of the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

« Le bréviaire du mouvement décadent »: ainsi Arthur Symons qualifiait le roman de J. K. Huysmans À rebours. Cette description, que les critiques citent souvent, eut une influence significative sur notre compréhension de Huysmans et, plus généralement, sur les différentes histoires du mouvement décadent. Cet article examine les vicissitudes de l’histoire textuelle de cette expression telle qu’on peut la trouver dans les écrits journalistiques de Symons. A travers l’étude de divers périodiques, l’article retrace les préoccupations littéraires et sociales qui sous-tendent la réaction de Symons à Huysmans durant les années 1890. Ce faisant, l’étude permet de révéler un ensemble de motivations et de formes conflictuelles qui peuvent être reliées aux contradictions et complexités de la Décadence comme concept et comme mouvement. La comparaison proposée par Symons entre À rebours et le bréviaire catholique est exemplaire à cet égard. En effet, bien qu’il ait formulé cette comparaison en 1892, il ne parvint pas à la forme qui eut le retentissement que l’on sait avant 1908, date à laquelle il renia le Décadentisme comme équivalent du Symbolisme. Sous l’égide des travaux récents de Vincent Sherry, l’article suggère que le cœur de ce problème textuel a de lourdes conséquences sur notre compréhension des qualités intempestives du Décadentisme, surtout dans la forme sous laquelle elle fut découverte par les lecteurs britanniques. Enfin, il montre comment, dans ses écrits et ses critiques, la réponse de Symons à Huysmans synthétise la nature insaisissable du Décadentisme. Arthur Symons’s description of J. K. Huysmans’s À rebours as ‘the breviary of decadence’ is widely cited by critics. It has had a significant influence on our understanding of Huysmans and upon histories of the Decadent movement more generally. This article examines the complex and changing textual history of this phrase as it is found in Symons’s journalistic writings. Across various periodicals, I trace the literary and social concerns that underlie Symons’s response to Huysmans during the 1890s. In the process, I uncover a set of conflicting motives and forms that can be traced to the contradictions and complexities of Decadence as a movement and concept. Symons’s comparison of À rebours to the Catholic breviary is exemplary here: although he first formulated this during 1892, he did not arrive at the familiar form in which it has been so influential until 1908, at which point he had disavowed Decadence for Symbolism. Drawing on recent work by Vincent Sherry I argue that this textual crux has broader consequences for our understanding of the untimely nature of Decadence, especially as it was encountered by English-speaking British readers. I show how Symons’s response to Huysmans epitomises the elusive and difficult nature of Decadence within the form of his writings, as much as his critical pronouncements.

How does the work of the Nobel Prize novelist J.M. Coetzee bear on the question of the relations between philosophy, literature and education? This paper extends recent discussion of the ways Coetzee's literature can speak to a broad range of philosophical questions by showing how the novelDisgrace is open to exploration in relation to education. Working through some early scenes in Coetzee's novel, I suggest thatDisgrace points us towards forms of degeneration that can be understood in the light of certain conceptions of language. Yet consideration of flickering moments of optimism found in later parts of the novel shows also thatDisgrace reveals the possibilities of grace. Grace, as we shall see, is to be understood not as a matter of elegance and refinement, but rather in relation to language and to ‘what gives’ in the word. This reveals something about the role of literature in education, providing means to test the prevalent view that literature is a moral or cultural enclave.\ud \ud

Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966), who belonged to the mystical wing of German Expressionism, developed his existing interest in Blake when he was forced to leave Germany in 1939. It is during his exile years that Meidner’s new style matured, and this was partly due to his new appreciation of Blake. The article examines the British context of Meidner’s engagement with Blake and outlines how he understood Blake in a cultural setting dominated by Neo-Romanticism as well as the existential fear of exile experience.

The Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the First World War, serving on wards for several months before she left to nurse her wounded husband. Using previously unpublished archival material, this article argues that Mitchison’s experience as a nurse contributed to her career in crucial ways, by encouraging her to develop empathy towards others across barriers of class and nationality, and by drawing her towards fictions of estrangement (from historical novels to fantasy and science fiction). The paper argues that the trauma of the war encouraged the estrangement of Mitchison’s debut novel The Conquered, a historical novel, and that this trend in her writing continued as she turned to science fiction later in her career, questioning the extent to which social pressures such as inequality and the class system shape bodies, their health care, and their horizons of thought.

This work was supported by a Queen Mary University of London studentship and a Queen Mary University of London Central Research Fund Scholarship. W. T. Stead, the journalist and editor, is known primarily for his knight-errant crusade on behalf of women and girls in the sensational investigative articles ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (1885). The controversial success of these articles could not have been achieved without Stead’s study and adoption of American journalistic techniques. Stead’s importance to nineteenth century periodicals must be informed by an understanding of Stead as a mediating force between British and American print culture. This premise is developed here through exploration of the terms ‘New Journalism’ and ‘Americanization’. Drawing from every stage of his career including his amateur yet dynamic beginnings as an unpaid contributor to the Northern Echo, I will examine Stead’s unofficial title as the father of New Journalism and the extent to which this title is directly attributable to his relationship with America, or, to use Stead’s term, his Americanization. Postprint

The ‘dramatic rise’ of Titus Andronicus ‘among critics and directors’ in the 1990s was primarily linked to ‘the growth of feminist Shakespeare criticism’.1 Its recent stage popularity, however, lies in its responses to the new geopolitical realities and the shifting physical and mental borders of the European Union. This article examines four European productions of Titus Andronicus in their engagement with political change, migration, rising nationalism and xenophobia, which, I argue, refocus attention onto this play’s position in the Shakespeare canon.

In today’s economies the role of marketing cannot be underestimated, just the sole amount of media communications is astonishing not taking in consideration the different marketing and PR strategies involved. The most well-known tools include advertising, public relations, sales promotions, direct marketing and personal selling. There is an increasing number of advertisements that reach our attention by the presence of vulgarity, nudity or moral offenses. The aim of the article is to extensively review the literature of shock advertising namely shockvertising and to pinpoint its evolution in case of Benetton fashion brand. Shockvertising focuses on the idea of selling products through evoking terrifying and repulsive emotions. This type of advertising is used to sensitize people to religion, racism, war, poverty and other taboo topics. The descriptive method is used in order to describe such complex phenomena. The research is conducted in the form of a retrospective qualitative case study focusing on the historical events that are connected to the communications at Benetton. Through the following research a better understanding of shockvertising and its dynamics is reached and emotional reactions of a range of individuals is presented. In addition, the question of ethical considerations and the shock advertising effectiveness is analyzed.

William Sampson’s 1636 play The Vow Breaker presents us with what looks like generic confusion: a cat (of all the creatures the least likely to stick to the script) seems to offer us comic relief in a play which, though intended as tragedy, descends into melodramatic sub-Kydian fustian. This essay discusses how the genre of early modern drama is affected by the employment of cats as actors, focusing on Sampson’s play which seeks to consolidate tragic effect by emphasising the parallels between a persecuted or helpless animal and the tragic protagonist, in the person of Ann. The cat in the original production was almost certainly real (though we can’t prove this), and the essay will argue that tone and genre are crucially influenced by this casting decision. The play is rescued from its fustian, made more troubling, by the uncomfortable stage effects resulting from its feline performer. The essay interacts with Nicholas Ridout’s reading of the ‘affect’ of real animals on the stage, arguing, though, that the early modern stage cat resists a clash between semiotics and phenomenology by not conforming to Ridout’s competing binaries. Ridout argues – following Vidal-Naquet – that ‘sacrifice is intrinsic to tragic form’. In The Vow Breaker neither sacrificial victim accepts her fate willingly, and it is this return to the pre-tragic, ‘known of old’ as Freud might have it – holy, wild, live, phenomenal, magic – which Sampson struggles to contain. The final act of the play seeks to restore the ritual of tragedy, disturbed by the various uncontrollable variables in the main plot, by means of ritual animal disguise and by the effacing of the pre-tragic and the feminine.