In the fall of 2019 I taught my eighteenth-century novel course as an exercise in slow reading, taking a tactic I had used before: putting a canonical work of fiction into the context of the other voices in the literary marketplace, and the circumstances of its making. For such a course, Tristram Shandy is an ideal central text. It was published…[Read more]

Bios and recent work of the participants for the 2022 MLA Roundtable “Recreations of Literature and Theatre in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality” scheduled to take place on January 6, 2022.

This article attributes one of the three “first” editions of Leviathan to the London printer John Richardson (fl. 1673–1703), revising Noel Malcolm’s attribution to a different printer in the recent Clarendon Edition of Leviathan. We lay out the mystery of Leviathan’s so-called “Ornaments” edition and use evidence from damaged type pieces to say…[Read more]

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

The Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript—itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from b…[Read more]

Analyzing trans narratives about the early moderns through the lenses of affective labor and social reparation, this chapter reclaims as trans the Shakespeare films that have been misinterpreted as homosexual. In doing so, this chapter builds a longer, more intersectional history of gendered embodiment. Reparative trans performances—works in w…[Read more]

This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]

This article examines new theories and praxis of listening for silenced voices and of telling compelling stories that make us human. Elucidation of our Levinas-inspired theories of the Other is followed by a discussion of classroom practices for in-person and remote instruction that foster collaborative knowledge building and intersectional…[Read more]

It is my contention that iconic lyrics of this period register a shift in awareness of human psychology that gives them a status equal to that we might grant to major tragedies like Hamlet and King Lear, or novels such as Proust’s masterpiece and War and Peace. The contemporary literary and artistic consequences of this evolution are perhaps more…[Read more]

Describes and provides examples of modules and assignments for a sophomore Brit Lit survey and an upper-division poetics class that responded to student demands for a more racially diverse canon. Includes a brief discussion of Lucius Henry Holsey, enslaved worker on the UGA campus, who claimed to have learned to read from Milton’s Paradise Lost…[Read more]