...J. Burke Severs KEATS’S “MANSION OF MANY APARTMENTS,” SLEEP AND POETRY, AND TINTERN ABBEY By J. BURKESEVERS In a rambling letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, written May 3, 1818, dealing in part with Milton...

...Jesse Matz The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel . By Alex Woloch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. ix + 391 pp. © 2005 University of Washington 2005 Jesse Matz is associate professor of English at Kenyon College. He...

...B. Venkat Mani This essay addresses a major gap in the recent scholarship on world literature: the neglect of libraries and print cultural institutions to determine world-literary circulation and reception. Mani makes a case for the dual role of libraries as instrumental to and as instruments...

...Wang Ning Although the term world literature encompasses texts composed in multiple languages, translation makes possible a body of literature from many linguistic and cultural backgrounds that circulates in international critical discourse and is broadly recognized as world literature. Thus...

...Shirley Lau Wong Abstract Literary settings are often celebrated for richly representing the many details of a particular place. The close association between detail and setting stems from the realist presumption that detail constitutes what Roland Barthes calls an “index of . . . atmosphere...

...Michael Modarelli The founding of the United States brought with it many conceptions of Englishness, among them the historical connection to an Anglo-Saxon past. To explain the importance of Anglo-Saxonism in the American nineteenth century, Modarelli argues that the northern American states...

...Caroline Levine Many scholars have embraced world literature as a project to understand literature’s role in a large-scale story of global inequality. Yet critics have paid remarkably little attention to one of the most unevenly distributed of the world’s resources: literacy itself. For most...

... educational levels, and he did so for many decades. Less known are his early work as a Browning scholar and his attempt to steer readers of Browning in a “poetical” direction based on close textual study. The history of Alexander’s 1889 Introduction to the Poetry of Robert Browning provides a point of entry...

...Christopher G. Diller Although recent scholarship has shown how many twentieth-century African American writers appraised the mixed literary inheritance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Ralph Ellison has been neglected in this regard. This essay excavates Ellison’s critique...

...Kent Puckett This essay follows several changes in the dating of “The Darkling Thrush” to ask what the number 1900 might have meant to Thomas Hardy. Although Hardy did not make many edits to the poem itself, he did change the way that it was dated at every opportunity: in manuscript, the date...

...Nancy Glazener Robert Browning had a powerful following in the United States among readers who came of age during and after the Civil War, but caricatures of the Browning Society have obscured the terms on which he was admired. For many of those readers, a taste for Browning marked a generational...

... professor of literature at the University of Sydney (and a figure central to the direction of the humanities academy in Australia), taught Victorian literature, including Browning, from the 1890s. MacCallum’s public lectures, like his pedagogy, aimed to convert a primary obstacle for many readers...

... less common in modernist and experimental fiction. None of these claims survives scrutiny. A rereading of Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) should reveal the many shortcuts a narratologist has to take to celebrate open endings as liberating and should also disclose some of the ideological purposes to which...

...Leigh Dale Nobody wants an embarrassing ancestor. What to do, then, with the Victorians in writing the history of the teaching of English in universities? Many have solved this problem by mounting arguments that propel the reader swiftly past the second half of the century—“nothing to see here...

... at Makerere in 1962 shows that many African writers were drawn to modernist principles of intellectual freedom and writerly detachment. Figures such as Rajat Neogy, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka, all strongly associated with these emerging cultural institutions, repurposed modernist versions...

...Robert D. Hume Abstract Verdicts concerning a work’s worth, “good,” “bad,” or “great,” vary wildly at any point and change radically over time. Much depends on what didactic or aesthetic rules are imposed and what modes of reading hold sway. Many critics see the purpose of literature as didactic...

...-Hegelian historiography illuminates the original stakes of early modern periodization and their radical deformation over time. In the process, his work not only facilitates a reassessment of many of the conventional claims made for the Spanish baroque but, more important, establishes a theoretical...

... many of Hawthorne's early tales first appeared, suggests that to read ekphrasis attentively in Hawthorne is to read the idiom of the interpersonal realm. Ekphrasis thus emerges not as a timeless figure to be cherished only by formalists but as a powerful tool for the historian, a moment that compresses...

... to be framed as a choice between symbolic economy (Casanova's “universal” literary capital) and political economy (the focus of many Latin Americanist scholars on hegemonic constructions of modernity). Yet the unique circumstances of Mundial —published in Paris by Spanish America's most famous poet, composed...

...Daniel Javitch This essay challenges the view that the last part of Orlando furioso takes an “epic” turn and abandons many of the “romance” features that characterize its first half. The essay does so by considering (1) the anachronism of projecting onto the Furioso a desire on Ariosto's part...