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The very existence of truth, let alone its worth, is currently under attack from many quarters. In the wider culture, disinformation and other forms of misrepresenting the truth spread far and wide, as information conduits proliferate. This paper suggests some reasons for the "anti-truth" trend. Mainstream media have played a role, as have theoreticians from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychoanalysis, science, and literary criticism. "Anti-truth" trends are having a serious impact on psychological treatment, affecting its content and the conception of its goals. This paper suggests some problematic outcomes of this phenomenon for practitioners and patients in various forms of psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Mathematics and Literature" deals with the relationships between mathematics and literature. It emphasizes that the study of mathematically relevant literature can contribute to the social history of mathematics. Literary studies use mathematical terms and methods, and mathematics can also help in the creation of new literature. The importance of fiction for the social history of mathematics is discussed, and various examples of mathematicians who were also involved in writing are mentioned. The text emphasizes the importance of promoting interest and understanding in mathematics and shows that mathematicians are not always dry and detached from the world. It also addresses literature about mathematics and mathematicians and discusses the connection between mathematics and literature. [Extracted from the article]

Dreams play a special role in the Joseph narrative. They are arranged in three pairs each and carry the story forward decisively. Joseph's dreams in particular form a narrative framework for the central theme of the story: family conflicts and dominion. Again and again, it has been observed that while Joseph's first dream comes true, his second does not correspond entirely to the events that transpire within the narrative. Contrary to the tendency to make this second dream equal to the first, or to exclude or reinterpret it in terms of literary criticism, this essay proposes that the second dream should be understood within the negative conception of the Joseph character in Genesis 37 as a sign of Joseph's hubris and therefore as an exaggeration or even invention which Joseph himself manufactured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article the authors presented the results of associativeessayistic quasi-experiment, which revealed the modalities of perception, reflection and reception of students' reading of postmodern novels of the famous Ukrainian writer Andrukhovych "The Recreation" (2017), "The Perversion" (1996) and "Moscoviada" (2000). The relevance of the article is determined by the lack of methods for diagnosing professional and amateur reader's reflection in Ukraine and Western Europe. The relevance of the article lies not only in the popularity of Andruchovych's work in Europe (2022 received the Heine Prize) but also in the lack of methods and strategies for forming and monitoring reading competence in the reception of a postmodern work. From the point of view of readerly intertextual communication, Andrukhovych's novels (1996; 2000; 2017) are potentially open to many interpretive strategies. The main reason for this is their being on the verge of postmodernist and new realist paradigms, which implies distancing from the accumulation of citations and the practice of using intertext according to a certain extraliterary intention. Consequently, the purpose of the article is to identify the precedent texts, that form a system of reader's absentee communication when reading the novels of Andrukhovych (1996; 2000; 2017). In order to achieve the goal, the study applied a comprehensive approach. In the article the authors proved the relevance of the phenomena of the town and river timeline and travel timeline in the perception of the professional reader; demonstrated that the nearest textual coincidence of urban chronotopes of novels by Andrukhovych (1996; 2000; 2017) is work by Pidmohylnyi (2008), Gogol (2022) and others. The main of these coincidences is the threefold structure of the city and the pathos of the romantic line. The main conclusion of the article is the orientation of the vector of intertextual interaction in the novel towards the representation of the eternal archetype of the cultural hero, on whom the reader projects his or her Ego. The international relevance of the article is determined by the wide popularity of Andrukhovych's works in Europe and the recent receipt of the Heine Prize (2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer and trans First Nations literatures offer a complex range of perspectives on social media use. In this piece, written as a letter addressing an anonymous brotherboy character called Benny, who is based on a person that catfished and harassed me online, I examine three Indigenous books that present complex, critical, or disillusioned accounts of social media use, exploring the forms of deception, harassment, racism, and creativity enabled by digital media. I engage loosely with the practice of ficto-criticism to produce this article. Ficto-critical writing, a method of anthropological and cultural studies, subverts traditional academic writing; presenting a hallucinatory form of self-narration and anthropological writing. Using this interdisciplinary and experimental approach, this article experiments with the concept of anonymity and privacy, key themes in the writing of queer First Nations authors on the topic of the internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Amber, a fossil tree resin, due to its specific physical properties has a genuine aura that has made it popular both as a gemstone and as a magical-religious amulet to this day. The supra-regional – 'global' in ancient terms – distribution of Baltic succinite is also reflected in the Eastern Alps. The central communication corridor along the Salzach and the Tauern transit in particular features a high density of amber objects during all epochs. The region therefore serves as a model case for investigating temporally variable aspects of the appropriation, use, symbolic significance and dissemination of amber. In addition to very rare Bronze Age objects and more frequent use in the Early Iron Age, the Dürrnberg near Hallein, along with the adjacent salt district at Hallstatt, is one of the main European centres of amber use during the Late Hallstatt and Early La Tène periods. Here, new quantitative and qualitative analyses provide evidence for changing patterns in the fashion of wearing, use and symbolic-magical meaning of amber jewellery. In the later La Tène period, there was a gradual decline in amber use both regionally and in other areas of Europe. This trend continued in the Roman Empire in the area of the municipium Claudium Iuvavum (Salzburg), before a final but short-lived revival of amber jewellery began in the Early Middle Ages. In a diachronic perspective, time-specific patterns in the use and integration of the strange raw material into the indigenous material culture and magic ideas become evident. Amber, however, does not only appear as a 'by-product' of purely economic communication along trans-regional trade and transport relations of the so-called 'Amber Roads'. Rather, qualitative and quantitative analyses show that amber was consciously chosen and rejected as a medium of social communication at different times and that specific meaning was variably attributed. In processes of intentional cultural appropriation, the exotic material thus reveals differentiated decision-making and agency of indigenous communities in Central European pre- and protohistory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the ancient figure of speech, paradiastole, and its varied interpretations and applications in rhetoric. Topics include the historical understanding of paradiastole as distinction-making rather than redescription, the misrepresentation of the figure in current scholarship, and its significance for literary criticism.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses history and evolution of MFS Modern Fiction Studies, which has been a prominent literary criticism journal, including its adaptation to changes in literary and cultural studies and its efforts to address issues such as neoliberalism.

This review essay considers the edited collection American Literature in Transition: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1770–1828 , in relation to current shifts in the field of early American literary studies away from New Historicist methodologies toward a concern with topics such as form, genre, and networks. Seeking to interrogate longstanding critical assumptions about the danger of "grand narratives" and "bounded wholes," it asks whether potentially progressive alternatives to concepts of transition and contingency are possible. At a moment when early Americanist scholarship, and the institutional and political contexts for it, are in a heightened state of flux, what emerging lines of inquiry are likely to have an ongoing influence and to what degree are critics working on the long eighteenth century engaged in a shared project? [T]he still-dominant academic rhetoric of rupture, unsettling, liminality, et al. may sometimes be a barrier to practically arriving at reconstituted models of the social order[;] there is a delicate balancing act to be achieved between recognizing resistant specificity and knitting individual perspectives together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgender autobiographies have been a subject of narratology since the 1990s. Most of these studies have focused predominantly on twentieth- and, later, twenty-first-century texts, guided by the increasing availability of primary sources and the temporal limitations of transgender history. And yet, as Jay Prosser argued in his influential 1998 work Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Sexuality, “even without the official discourse of sex change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transgendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contemporary transsexuals” (133). This article expands the chronology and geography of narratological analysis of this genre through reading Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy] (1836) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783–1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, as a transgender autobiography. This reading brings into consideration new forms, affects, and narrative structures as constituent elements of trans narratives and has the potential to expand anglophone trans imaginaries past the confines of their current locations and temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussing similarities between antimimetic and queer/trans narratives, as well as interlacing subjects of interest in the respective fields of unnatural and queer/trans narratology, this article suggests the importance of experimental texts for theorizing trans narratives. It presents its arguments by focusing on one case study, a mixed genre manuscript written in 2004 and published in 2015, succubus in my pocket by the late trans poet kari edwards (1954–2006). My approach mines queer narratology (Susan Lanser), trans poetics (Trace Peterson), unnatural narratology (Brian Richardson), and the study of narrative poetry (Brian McHale) for conceptual tools to discuss how an extremely antimimetic narrative entwines transgressions of narrative expectations with transgressions of expectations about sex and gender. The work invites narrative interpretations of sequential events based on causal expectations while consistently refuting default interpretive strategies. This article shows how weak narrativity can be deployed as a critique of narrative sense-making processes in general and, more particularly, of conventional progression in narratives about trans lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay critically examines Angarey, a collection of nine short stories and one play by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar, first published in December 1932. Considered a foundational work in Urdu literature which supported the Progressive Writer's Association in South Asia during the pre-partition era and hailed as an act of literary resistance – especially in the context of the nationalist movements for freedom in India – the stories offer a succinct critique of social and religious practices. Because they exposed the oppression against Muslim women and promoted resistance against the colonial state, the text was banned in March 1933 by the British government. The historical account of its censorship characterizes the British colonial state as the rational and neutral arbiter of its presumed emotionally excitable colonial subjects. In observance of the relationship between affective politics of colonial empire and religion in late colonial India, I critically examine not just the text but also the contextual background of its censorship to explore the link between the colonial ideas about Muslim sensibilities and colonial regulations. In this respect, relying on Asad Ali Ahmed's critique of the colonial genesis of censorship ["Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, The Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan's Postcolonial Predicament." In Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur, and William Mazzarella, 172–205. Bloomington, 2009], Talal Asad's insights on the complicated relation between injury and the discourse of blasphemy [Asad, Talal. "Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism." In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, and Ann Laura Stoler's argument about the Enlightenment's relationship to empire "Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire." In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013], this study attempts to understand how the embodied representation of the Muslim self figures in Angarey as an affective attachment, following the context of literary censorship in late colonial South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore Michel Serres' approach to issues of text, writing and language. In a first step, his own textual parasitism—his use of other texts without adhering to the academic conventions of citational practices—shall be assessed on grounds of the notion of intertextuality, comparing his position to Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. It shall be shown that Serres—understanding writing as an act of invention—seems to return to a traditional author position by conceiving of himself in terms of a creative writing subject. A second step of the paper will explore Serres' search for a language of the natural, material world by discussing his critique of the anthropocentrism of language. Serres' own project of reconnecting language with the material world shall be discussed within the context of his own intertextual dependency on other authors and his interest in information theory as connecting different signifying systems. The paper will end with observations on Serres' experimental style of writing, which attempts to bring the body and nature into language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper will challenge normative disaster studies and practice by arguing that thriving communities require the pursuit of imperfection and solidarity. The authors use Lewis Carroll's Looking-Glass World as a lens to critique both how disasters are understood, and how disaster researchers and practitioners operate, within a climate-change affected world where cultural, political and historical constructs are constantly shifting. Design/methodology/approach: The paper will undertake an analysis of both disasters and disaster studies, using this unique (and satirical) critical lens, looking at the unfolding of systemic mistakes, oppressions and mal-development that are revealed in contemporary disasters, that were once the critiques of Lewis Carroll's Victorian-era England. It shows how disaster "resilience-building" can actually be a mechanism for continuing the status quo, and how persistent colonizing institutions and systems can be in reproducing themselves. Findings: The authors argue the liberation of disaster studies as a process of challenging the doctrines and paradigms that have been created and given meaning by those in power – particularly white, Western/Northern/Eurocentric, male power. They suggest how researchers and practitioners might view disasters – and their own praxis – Through the Looking Glass in an effort to better understand the power, domination and violence of the status quo, but also as a means of creating a vision for something better, arguing that liberation is possible through community-led action grounded in love, solidarity, difference and interconnection. Originality/value: The paper uses a novel conceptual lens as a way to challenge researchers and practitioners to avoid the utopic trap that wishes to achieve homogenized perfection and instead find an "imperfect" and complex adaptation that moves toward justice. Considering this idea through satire and literary criticism will lend support to empirical research that makes a similar case using data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Devil Finds Work (1976), James Baldwin presents a remarkably generous review of Boris Vian's controversial novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946). Vian's book was exceptionally sensitive to the "rage and pain" of African Americans, Baldwin thought. Baldwin's words seem surprising today: Vian, a white Frenchman, published the work as a protest novel under the false identity of a fictional African American, whom he called Vernon Sullivan. The novel was a hoax, a prank. J'irai cracher sur vos tombes tends to be viewed today in North America, rightly, as an egregious instance of cultural appropriation. The present study argues, however, that the French pastiche of a Black American protest novel baited the reading public into a debate that ignored racism, colonialism, and protest. We argue to view J'irai cracher sur vos tombes and the ensuing scandal it provoked, as an historical archive that allows us to chart a certain ideological climate in France. The public reception of the novel makes abundantly clear that, on the subject of J'irai cracher, Paris wanted to talk about sex, youth morality, and the threats of American cultural hegemony—not racism. Read as an historical affaire, the scandal exposes an extended moment of collective blindness in France. When examined as an historical incident, "the J'irai cracher Affair" reads like a dramatic ironic pronouncement, as if Vian were making a joke only he and a select audience—Baldwin, for one—would understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part of Joaquín Dicenta's large literary production is currently overlooked in Spanish literary history, despite being one of the most unique figures of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century period. He is primarily remembered for his prolific journalistic work and for introducing social drama to Spain—a theatrical genre cultivated by European playwrights at the time. This paper aims to shed light on an aspect of Dicenta that has been relatively neglected by scholars: the genesis of his novel Encarnación (1913). In composing this book, the author appears to have merged stories from Spoliarium (1888) and certain passages from Idos y Muertos (1909), both inspired by biographical events. I focus on several aspects, including the textual transmission of Encarnación, the underlying process of rewriting, the biographical episodes that inspired the novel, and the similarities and differences with the other two works with which it has been linked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the term 'alienation' is frequently mentioned in criticism of sensation fiction, there is a lack of a stringent definition of this term. This article aims to address this gap with a focused examination of the depiction of alienation in three sensation novels, Lady Audley's Secret (1862) by M. E. Braddon, East Lynne (1861) by Mrs Henry Wood, and Basil (1852) by Wilkie Collins. Borrowing a critical framework from contemporary philosopher Rahel Jaeggi, the article sees alienation as an obstructed relation of 'appropriation'. According to Jaeggi, to appropriate is, briefly, to take oneself and one's world at one's own command. The relation of appropriation bespeaks a more profound relationship between the self and the world than ownership. Previous studies of sensation heroines often associate their alienation with their desires for material property. With Jaeggi's critical framework, however, this article moves forward by identifying a parallel between the heroines' troubled desires for material possessions and their problematic relationships in life. Through a Jaeggian lens, all three texts illustrate the heroines' dispossession of the self and dispossession of property as profoundly, even structurally, linked. A Jaeggian reading of the novels also provides new insights into the genre's ideological function, particularly in relation to the limited social roles and precarious hold on the material world faced by ambitious Victorian women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interview has always proved to be a rich source for those hoping to better understand the figures behind a text, as well as any social contexts and writing practices which might have informed their aesthetic sentiments. Over the past two decades, research into the literary interview has made significant strides, both in terms of how this literary genre is conceptualized and how its emergence and development has been historically traced, the form remains somewhat neglected by literary and cultural theorists and scholars. There is also a remarkable absence of distant readings in this domain. With the rise of the digital humanities, particularly digital literary studies, one would expect more scholars to have used computer-assisted techniques to mine literary interviews, which are, in terms of dataset practicalities, somewhat ideal, semi-structured by nature, and typically available online. Such is the question to which this article attends, taking as its dataset seven decades' worth of literary interviews from The Paris Review, and 'topic modelling' these documents to determine the key themes that dominate such a culturally significant set of materials while also exploring the value of topic modelling to socio-literary criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism" by Wendy Raphael Roberts explores the power of "revival poetry" in creating change during the eighteenth century. The author presents various anecdotes and examples of how poetry written by participants in transatlantic revivals had a transformative effect on individuals and society. The book examines different aesthetic theories and formal practices within evangelical literary culture, highlighting the role of poetry in shaping religious authority and mediating questions of salvation. It also recovers and analyzes a trove of early American verse, shedding light on the diverse formal innovations of revival poetry. Overall, "Awakening Verse" challenges traditional narratives of secularization and offers new insights into the intersections of literature, religion, race, gender, and class in the transatlantic world. [Extracted from the article]

In this manuscript, I lift Black feminisms as a methodological intervention on a holistic meaning-making theory and its relationship to anti-Blackness. Specifically, I employed a Black feminist literary criticism, which presumes that Black people have cultivated living and survival practices throughout their history in the United States. I analyzed 7 full-length books and essays written by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Additionally, in attending to Black feminist theorizing, I used creative prose to situate myself in the text by locating the curated findings from the literary analysis in my mother's rearing practices. Pointing to the historical ways Black people have lived in the wake of anti-Black structures, I depart from the meaning-making pathways articulated by self-authorship and point to the possibilities of self-defining praxis for Black people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents several letters by Queen Anna of Denmark that are currently preserved in the State Archives of Florence and Venice, and that were written by her foreign secretary, Master William Fowler (Edinburgh 1560–London 1612). Fowler is a well‐known presence in Scottish literary history, as a member of James' VI so‐called 'Castalian band of poets' in the 1580 s and a translator of Petrarch and Machiavelli into Scots. The letters penned by him and preserved in Italy, mostly postdating the move of the Scottish court to London, offer a new perspective on Fowler's career as Anna's secretary, and provide additional information on the internal workings of the Queen's secretarial establishment in London, prompting us to re‐evaluate both Fowler's professional trajectory and the nature and functioning of the Jacobean secretariat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Reflections essay considers antiracist theory and practice and its impact on Romantic Studies today as displayed in a master's-level module aimed at introducing the use of theory to postgraduate students of nineteenth-century studies. Alongside these concerns, the reflection considers what it means to feel "Romantic" today, as well as the role and usefulness of discomfort in postgraduate pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chaucer's Boethian lyrics repay a critical approach that views them not only as court poetry but also as sophisticated responses to their source, The Consolation of Philosophy. This article demonstrates how the lyric Fortune engages ambitiously with Boethius's central arguments about randomness, providence, and human moral action. Spoken by two voices, the poem dramatizes a conflict not between its speakers, but between rational knowledge and emotional experience, building to a climax in which Fortune declares herself nonexistent. This paradoxical moment captures the Boethian insight that although Fortune is not real, it is necessary for humans to invent her. Chaucer's approach in this poem is to heighten the subtle tensions he found in the Consolation between the rational apprehension of higher truth and the emotional experience of life in a contingent world. Fortune thus illustrates Chaucer's approach to Boethius as a source not of otherworldly consolation but of this-worldly wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the suggestions of previous commentators that Elizabeth, Jean, and Margaret Sinclair read Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 and/or oversaw its second scribe's work. It does not advance new proofs in demonstration of these eventualities. Instead, it seeks to establish the place of the Sinclair women in the first audience of the codex and to explore the literary-critical implications of the book's reception in their orbit. This approach facilitates fresh readings of the topic of advocacy in the second scribe's texts—the Letter of Cupid, the Lay of Sorrow, the Lufaris Complaynt, and the Quare of Jelusy. Who, these poems seem to ask, can speak for women? The depiction of marriage in the Kingis Quair—for which the second scribe supplies a 140-line conclusion—is also considered. The argument closes with reflections on speculation, book history, and the interest of reception studies for readers of late medieval literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville's 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of epistemological failure in the recent "return to aesthetics" in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously "willing one's dupery" directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville's novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the "as if" personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb's book, "Auden and the Muse of History," explores W.H. Auden's struggle with the meanings of history in his poetry and prose. Gottlieb argues that Auden resisted reducing history to conclusive narratives and grappled with the impossibility of ignoring a history that included the Holocaust and the Bomb. The book examines Auden's engagement with modernism, modern thought, and twentieth-century history, and highlights his skepticism towards historical narratives. Gottlieb's meticulous close readings of Auden's poetry and prose demonstrate his prosodic gifts and the complexity of his intellectual ends. The book also draws connections between Auden's work and other voices and schools of Critical Theory. Overall, "Auden and the Muse of History" offers a rich exploration of Auden's engagement with history and its implications for contemporary readers. [Extracted from the article]

John Guillory's book, "Professing Criticism," explores the history and current state of literary studies as an academic discipline. Guillory argues that the field has lost its social purpose and compromised its intellectual standards. He criticizes the New Criticism for prioritizing formal interpretation over judgment and claims that the field's reliance on literature as a central object of study is outdated. However, the author of this article disagrees with Guillory's analysis, stating that humanities discourse has gained cultural power and influence in recent years. The author questions Guillory's belief that literature should be recentered in academic criticism and suggests that literary criticism should be integrated into other fields. [Extracted from the article]

Jordan Alexander Stein's book, "When Novels Were Books," explores the relationship between the material qualities of books and the experience of character in Anglophone novels. Stein argues that the size, shape, and organization of a book can have a profound impact on readers' perceptions of character and their own sense of self. The book's argument is of interest to those studying book history and material texts, as it highlights the importance of considering the material aspects of literature. Stein's thesis challenges the notion of authenticity in literature and invites readers to question their own artificiality. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses four recent works of scholarship that challenge traditional ideas about the novel and its role in literature. The authors argue for new approaches to understanding novels, moving away from the dominance of realism and exploring different perspectives. Scott Black suggests centering the history of fiction around romance instead of the realist novel, while Wendy Anne Lee examines the concept of insensibility in eighteenth-century fiction. Anna Kornbluh rethinks realism as an abstract modeling of social space, and Elaine Freedgood challenges the paradigm of realism in Victorian novels. These works contribute to a broader debate within novel studies and invite readers to reconsider their understanding of the novel. [Extracted from the article]

Dustin D. Stewart's book, "Futures of Enlightenment Poetry," challenges the traditional understanding of Enlightenment poetry as solely focused on reason and empirical observation. Stewart argues that there is a neglected tradition of devotional poetry associated with a reactionary Counter-Enlightenment that should be included in our understanding of the period. He explores the themes of afterlife and futurity in the poetry of Edward Young, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Mark Akenside, showing how their meditations on these topics offer insight into the development of eighteenth-century poetry. Stewart's book also examines the influence of spiritualist and mortalist poetics on the works of later poets, such as William Wordsworth, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson. Overall, the book provides a fresh perspective on Enlightenment poetry and its relevance to contemporary debates. [Extracted from the article]

This essay charts the reception of five widely read antislavery poems—Hannah More's Slavery (1788); Edward Rushton's West-Indian Eclogues (1787); William Roscoe's The Wrongs of Africa (1787 – 88); John Jamieson's The Sorrows of Slavery (1789); and James Field Stanfield's The Guinea Voyage (1789)—in contemporary review journals. It argues that these poets' commitment to depicting the "enormous crimes" of British slavery in poetic form clashed with reviewers' expectations of poetic diction, imagination, and representation, a conflict that arose from what I term "literary review culture" in the period. Understanding these responses can help us reassess the history of literary criticism as it was shaped by these poems' efforts to delineate the inhumanities of the slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late Harry Garuba and Biodun Jeyifo are considered to be the most outspoken critics against the generational model of writing the history of Nigerian literature. These academics raised objections against the national-generational framework on the premises that it is ambiguous, unstable, temporally reductive, and uses a rudimentary age-grading system to explain away a complex literary history in which different writers are constantly churning out works of different genres and stylistic compositions at different times regardless of the generation to which they have been constricted. Drawing from their highly antagonistic outlooks, this article further criticizes the disadvantageous character of the generational model adopted in Nigerian literary history by critically examining how twenty-first-century literary developments disrupt historiographically constructed generations in Nigerian literature. The article also subtly proposes that a fourth generation be instituted or the generational model be altogether scrapped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

F. R. Leavis, the leading literary critic at Cambridge from 1930 to 1960, recounts the time when his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein told him to 'give up literary criticism!' The remark came as a surprise to Leavis, and it remains somewhat puzzling to anyone who reads of the encounter, for there are few contextual clues as to why Wittgenstein would say such a thing. But there are clues in Wittgenstein's many remarks on literature, music and other art forms scattered throughout his writings. In this paper, I will present what I think Wittgenstein's concern was with the sort of literary criticism Leavis practised, contrasting it with the sort of reading, and the sort of reader, that Wittgenstein (and others) would consider a literary way of reading; the sort of reader he thought was 'a better sort of reader'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a hybrid magnonic-oscillator system based on the combination of a spin transfer auto-oscillator and a magnonic waveguide to open new perspectives for spin-wave based circuits. The system is composed of a spin transfer oscillator based on a vortex state which is dipolarly coupled to a nanoscale spin-wave waveguide with longitudinal magnetization. In its auto-oscillating regime, the oscillator emits coherent spin waves with tunable and controllable frequencies, directions, and amplitudes into the waveguide. We demonstrate the principle of this method using micromagnetic simulations and show that reconfiguration of the system is possible by changing the chirality and polarity of the magnetic vortex. Spin waves are emitted into the waveguide with high non-reciprocity and the preferred direction depends on the core polarity of the vortex. In contrast, different vortex chiralities lead to different amplitudes of the emitted waves. Our findings open up a novel way to design an agile spintronic device for the coherent and tunable generation of propagating spin waves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the enduring appeal of Charles Dickens's works to various readerships. Topics include the emotional and intellectual engagement with Dickens's characters and narratives, the impact of adaptations on different audiences, and the integration of personal experiences into scholarly discourse about Dickens's literary legacy.

This research delves into the intricacies of the "Buddha Story Stele" in Cave 133 of the Maiji Mountain Grottoes, China, examining the sculptural combinations and conceptual nuances rooted in Buddhist culture from the 5th to the 6th centuries CE. The research focuses on discerning the identities of the "Two Adjacent-Seated Buddhas" and the Cross-Legged Bodhisattva carved on the stele, concurrently delving into the embedded symbolic significance within its structural composition. Our investigation posits that the upper, middle, and lower segments of the "Buddha Story Stele" respectively symbolize the post-Nirvana Dharmakāya Shakyamuni, the Bodhisattva Shakyamuni, and the Buddha Shakyamuni of Sumedha. Advancing scholarly discourse, it reevaluates the Cross-Legged Bodhisattva's identity and the configuration of the "Two Adjacent-Seated Buddhas", elucidating the interplay of imagery and conceptual themes. This study provides pivotal insights into the sculptural arrangement and religious thought transmission in the Maiji Mountain Grottoes, contributing significant academic and cultural value to preserve this unique heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sees post–World War II wartime incarceration literature as a multigenerational corpus and reassesses the handling of this material in Asian American literary criticism and cultural analysis. As a way of addressing the expanding corpus of wartime incarceration literature, which includes generations of descendant writers, the article proposes a cognitive mapping of the ten major spaces of Japanese American Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA) mass incarceration sites, which were built in spatial overlap or in geographic proximity to Native American historic sites of violent conflict and confrontation throughout the nineteenth century. It argues for the centrality of this intergenerational Japanese American corpus in Asian American and US literary and cultural studies, anchored as the body of work is in the historical trajectories of US imperialism and settler colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This close examination will reveal profound differences but also common characteristics between Derrida, Barthes and Foucault on the concept of the death of the author. All of these theorists want to free the semantic process from the authorities who are supposed to give it the final word, and they highlight the role of intertextuality. However, whereas in Barthes and Foucault’s accounts it arises from purely literary or discursive considerations, where death is an inescapable fact of the literariness of specific discursive occurrences, in Derrida’s work it has broader implications, where it is identified with the process of différance, and where it becomes the death of each speaking subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent genre of contemporary Salafī literature consists of critical editions of texts from the Middle Period with editorial introductions and footnotes. These editions allow Salafī editors to reinforce their views on various subjects, sometimes by criticizing the text's author. This article analyzes Salafī editors' critical engagement with medieval ḥadīth commentators by focusing on the problem of divine attributes in the ḥadīth commentary literature. It argues that Salafīs seek to rebut their opponents—particularly Ashʿarī ḥadīth scholars—utilizing different discursive strategies. These include rejecting mutashābih, majāz , and taʾwīl as hermeneutical categories, re-defining the concepts of bi-lā kayf and tafwīḍ , and emphasizing the inconsistencies in the Ashʿarī doctrine of divine attributes. Their footnotes also function to reinforce group identity and tradition, presenting Salafī Islam as the core of ahl al-sunna , and appealing to the Muslim public with a concrete image of God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the integration of digital editions, computational text analysis and digital scholarly editing in the context of an introductory undergraduate course on Italian literature and digital humanities taught at a US university. It offers specific examples of employing the apparatus of several digital platforms dedicated to the study of foundational authors in the Italian literary tradition (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Leopardi), and of gaining familiarity with a suite of digital tools for text analysis and editing, namely Voyant Tools, Recogito, Oxygen, Gephi, Transkribus Lite and OpenRefine. The discussion of digital project interfaces examines the student user experience of different design approaches, while the illustrations of tool exercises explore how these could support the close attention to a text and facilitate the navigation between its micro and macro frameworks of interpretation. The article furthermore suggests that digital text analysis could reinforce student appreciation of the signifying value of textual form and genre, and that the pedagogical method of digital text editing creates opportunities for situated learning. In conclusion, it argues that the academic work of students at the undergraduate level could be harnessed by the scaffolded methods of faculty-led digital research projects and contribute to the creation of public knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might we learn by considering the social and literary forms that makeup neoliberalism, and their relationship to the figurations of anthropological thought and writing? Inspired by tropological work in literary criticism and anthropology, this article considers how two terms introduced into the analytic literature by Karl and Michael Polanyi—embeddedness and tacit knowledge respectively—can give us new insights into important aspects of neoliberal practice. In considering the interrelation of these tropes, we can begin to parse out the relationship among several key aspects of the practice of neoliberalism: marketization, audit culture, and quantification; and how these are intertwined in their opposition to embeddedness and tacit knowledge. This article considers what different forms afford for analytic thinking about our present moment, as well as for formulating various protests and oppositions to neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction sets the essays in the special issue into context, and reflects on Laura Marcus's contribution both to the development of literary criticism over the last three decades, and to the institutional history of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can we learn about unpublished literature—and literature as such—by studying rejected literature? Each of the article's four sections connects an archival document or set of documents to a topic in literary history and theory. In the first, a ledger tracking submissions to Charles Scribner's Sons in 1882 leads to a discussion about recovery projects. In the second, a century of Houghton Mifflin reader reports leads to a discussion about evaluation. In the third, a novel submitted to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in 1930 leads to a discussion about historical counterfactuals. In the fourth, correspondence from the archives of Amiri Baraka and his agent, Ronald Hobbs, from the 1970s leads to a discussion about taste. Together, these sections introduce a resource and exemplify a method: how attention to small, practical decisions can illuminate large, abstract processes. By attending to editorial debates about poetry, we can understand what artistic value meant to specific people in specific contexts—and thus what it might mean in general. Poetry, in other words, promises to illuminate what's literary about literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review critically assesses Niko Kolodny's theory of social hierarchy and its importance as articulated in The Pecking Order (2023). After summarizing Kolodny's argument, I raise two critical challenges. First, I ask whether Kolodny leaves us without adequate account of why social hierarchies are, in themselves, objectionable. Second, I query whether Kolodny's defense of representative democracy is decisive, and suggest that egalitarians should be open to alternative ways of mitigating the threat of hierarchy posed by political rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details three developments of the last decade that have had significant effects on the cultural status and sociopolitical functioning of sport in the United States: (1) an unprecedented wave of sport-based protest and athlete activism; (2) new norms and conventions in the sporting establishment for dealing with athletic protest and social issues, especially with respect to media coverage and commentary; and (3) recent Right-wing ethnonationalist engagements with sport, including targeted criticism of both activist athletes and sport as well as populist mobilizations around sport. I summarize these developments and argue that they have made social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. This new era of contestation and polarization, in turn, has destabilized longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about how lasting these changes will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]