In both her epic poem The Spanish Gypsy and her final novel Daniel Deronda, Eliot drew upon kabbalistic concepts of the heavens through the characters of Jewish mystics. In the later novel, Eliot moved the mystic, Mordecai, from the narrative’s periphery to its center. This change, symbolically equated within the novel to a shift from…[Read more]

This paper examines the voluminous “poetry talks” (shihua) written by Southern Society (Nanshe) members and focuses on two tendencies in these discourses: The general cult of sentimentality and the narrative strategy on women’s poetry. These poetic discourses succeeded the language of traditional literary criticism, but also exhibited ideals of th…[Read more]

This paper examines the birth of classicist poetry by paying attention to the Southern Society’s (Nanshe) diachronic succession of the late Qing Poetic Revolution. It provides a careful analysis on the novelty of Huang Zunxian’s poetry and shows how the Southern Society transformed Huang’s Europeanized innovation into something that was roote…[Read more]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]

In 1949, Montreal poet Louis Dudek circulated a package of poetry manuscripts through a decentralized network of writers working in the U.S. and Canada that he called the “Poetry Grapevine.” In the manifesto-like instructions for the project, Dudek declares that “THERE IS A LOT MORE HAPPENING IN OUR DAILY LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS (NOT TO SPEAK OF UN…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]

This essay identifies four major factors responsible for the use of vernacular in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. Analyses of selected texts by Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Kendel Hippolyte, and DerekWalcott illustrate that these four factors include the representation of working class characters, subversive protests against the imposition of…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

This essay surveys Thoreau’s antislavery writings from across his career and demonstrates the ecological concerns central to Thoreau’s abolitionist commitment.

In a 1972 poem about Vancouver Island, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco wonders, “Acaso fue el Aztlán de las mexicas / De allí partieron siete tribus.” Though Pacheco spent several years living in Vancouver during the late 1960s and early 1970s—and was published in a 1971 anthology of poetry “From Canada’s Unofficial Languages”—h…[Read more]

A contribution to a forum on Martin Delany, Blake; Or the Huts of America, ed. Jerome Mcgann.

Recent scholarship has focused on the flowering of poetry that engaged with geographic and spatial logics in the United States in the years following the Second World War, notably in Lytle Shaw’s 2013 study Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. Alongside such works as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maxim…[Read more]

In the summer of 1864, fourteen-year-old Jacob Stroyer was sent to work in Fort Sumter. He did not go willingly. Stroyer was a slave owned by the wealthy Mrs. Matthew R. Singleton and was sent from the large Kensington plantation outside Columbia, SC to labor for the Confederate cause. The Confederate Corps of Engineers called upon slave owners to…[Read more]

Arrested for treason against the British Crown and deported to the penal colonies of Australia, the Irish revolutionary John Boyle O’Reilly managed to escape to the United States and within a few years became one of Boston’s most prominent political and literary figures, one of the best known Irish immigrants in the United States and one of the…[Read more]

An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

This article explores editorial practice in the British and North American periodicals between c.1800 and c.1850. The article uses a Transatlantic studies approach.