Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

In 1994, artistic freedom pertaining inter alia to literature was enshrined in the South African Constitution. Clearly, the establishment of this right was long overdue compared to other nations within the Commonwealth. Indeed, the legal framework and practices regarding the regulation of literature that were introduced following the nation’s t…[Read more]

ABSTRACT
The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries.…[Read more]

This essay discusses pedagogical approaches to teaching Austen’s Persuasion as a novel situated at the intersection of literature and philosophy. It focuses on how Persuasion takes up, talks back to, and helps illuminate classic philosophical questions about personhood, sociality, ethics, consciousness, and the space of inner life. It discusses c…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth…[Read more]

This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel’s performative theory of lyric…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of “Euphuism” in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]

The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]

Keats’s poetic thoughts on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism’s most incisive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. This essay is about the ways Keats’s verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons with an imaginative range. Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has “no i…[Read more]

Michael Fried has returned to the distinction between “absorption” and “theatricality” in all of his art-historical criticism since he first introduced the dyad in 1980. This essay argues that the term “absorption” is rich with a philosophical significance that echoes central concerns long at play in philosophy’s thinking about the status of art…[Read more]

A distinctive style of “Scottish Gothic’”emerged, after 1815, in fiction by Walter Scott, James Hogg, and fellow members of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine circle. This chapter introduces this corpus of Scottish Gothic literature, specifies some ways in which the uncanny entailments of Scottish Gothic relate to religious discourse (very muc…[Read more]

A distinctive style of “Scottish Gothic’”emerged, after 1815, in fiction by Walter Scott, James Hogg, and fellow members of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine circle. This chapter introduces this corpus of Scottish Gothic literature, specifies some ways in which the uncanny entailments of Scottish Gothic relate to religious discourse (very muc…[Read more]