... . The article risks the claim that in Mailer's conflicted attempts to write the collective form we can not only locate stark evidence of the retreat of class-based models in the American political imaginary but also map the ways in which the novel genre adapts to political change. The paper also attends...

.... Drawing upon a key metaphor in biomedicine, the body as machine, I consider its canonical uses but also its limits and the way it is contested, refuted, and even “poached” by one family in its battle with clinicians. I also explore the relationship between metaphor and narrative as I consider...

... is a deliberate and vital influence, applied to guide the reader's response to the text but also to expose the possibilities for a modern sort of tragedy. Focusing on these works, this essay argues that the bourgeois novelistic universe can also be fertile ground for devastating tragic events, that the conflict...

... with the future, as the historical novel, inheriting from its nineteenth-century exemplars and moving beyond its postmodern incarnations. New York 2140 also proves innovative in its treatment of the relationship between individual and general, particular and universal, which has always been central to critical...

... of the genre as a backward-looking nostalgic form while also opening anew the question of regionalism’s complicated appeal for its contemporary readers. While beginning and ending with Sarah Orne Jewett’s representative remnant figure, Captain Littlepage, the essay also surveys several lesser-known examples...

... exposed to distinct forms of violence, anecdotes that reveal the concerns of the human narrator and her daughter but also highlight other animals, their unfamiliar phenomenologies, and their cautious cross-species partnerships. More specifically, the article tracks individual animals across the novel's...

... discontentment with his community leading to a sense of communal alienation, thus inverting the European journey‐trajectory that typically follows the hero's movement toward social integration. It also deviates from the generic Western rags‐to‐riches storyline that complements that hero's road to social...

... inability to conceive its magnitude. Similarly, by relying on the fantastic power of vision he found in paintings and photographs, Jean-Martin Charcot developed into medical knowledge the gothic sublime, which also aided the detective protagonists of sensation novels. Working to extend this tradition, Woolf...

... recent alliance with the Nietzschean poststructuralism of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, to Lenta ginestra (1987), his massive study of the Italian Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi. Negri finds in Leopardi's work not only a sophisticated philosophy of language but also a materialist ontology...

...Ellen Levy Levy's chosen model for how to read poems is not a literary critic but an art historian, T. J. Clark. Why? To some extent, the author is following a more generalized “visual turn” in literary studies. But Clark is also a skilled and devoted close reader who, like many in literature...

...Cristanne Miller Emily Dickinson's metrical structures were as fully influenced by the ballad as by the hymn, and other elements of her style may also have been shaped by the huge popularity of ballads in the early nineteenth century in the United States. Understanding that the ballad...

... organs, such as the ovaries, contributes to the problem. Metaphors can be reductive, but they can also generate a wide range of relationships between illness and the person experiencing it, as illustrated by examples including Margaret Atwood's short story “Hairball.” Simile, in particular, which...

... or readers back from “the point.” Children, however, often relish the long middle portions of their storybooks, wanting to see how events move forward and back, rather than just how they end. Poets, along with post-modern writers of fiction, also have more tolerance for the openness of narrative middles...

... bind in which Rachel's art depends upon an imperial, exploitative society. Despite this dire view of modern society, Woolf's subversion of the politics of literature not only disrupts her readers' cultural presuppositions but also posits an alternative. In particular, Woolf confronts the view...

..., divinities, and individuals who are also multiplicities. It thus calls for different interpretative strategies than those usual in literary criticism: to read it primarily as symbolic communication is to lose perspective on the structures of thought and language that it grapples with. The article describes...

.... Their correspondence, while full of expressions of love and admiration, also shows them affectionately tussling over the relative merits of nature and transcendence, the sublime and the everyday, with Bloom repeatedly urging Ammons to leave mundane particulars behind and mount higher into the visionary stratosphere...

... essential to her recent books of social witness, One Big Self, Rising, Falling, Hovering , and One with Others. Deepstep teaches us to read these more recent books of Wright's. It also teaches us, indirectly, to read again the larger Romantic and modernist traditions that Deepstep and these recent books...

...Alisa Del Re This essay investigates the present reality of reproduction and the labor it requires. Labor of reproduction, encompassing not only childbearing and rearing but also more generally domestic labor and the care of dependent persons, is usually excluded from political and economic...

... of his labor posted free on the Internet is ironically compared with the collective indignation expressed by anticapitalist struggles in Europe, Africa, and the Arab world. The essay also assesses the contemporary value of Negri's thought, particularly the notions of the multitude and the common...

... and militant organization or action, Buenaventura Durruti and the Spanish anarchists, contemporary forms of alienation and exploitation, the differences between writing Empire and writing drama, typologies of militancy, Brecht's The Measures Taken ( also known as The Decision, Die Massnahme ), and Müller's...