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This article explains a method of analysis called mid-range reading and applies it to the biographies of Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (WNQVR). Mid-range reading draws conclusions about texts by using both data about those texts and close readings of the texts themselves. The data in particular is itself based on human perusals of WNQVR: narratological annotations applied to the biographies, drawing from a schematic system of keywords called BESS. The article shows how these annotations reveal discourses about race, empire, and ethnicity in WNQVR. It suggests that midrange reading can be used to find structural coherences in a book composed of disparate authors and subjects; in this case, it leads us to quantified patterns that represent Victorian racial politics., This essay investigates and demonstrates a method of literary analysis called mid-range reading. This term can mean different things: as described by Alison Booth, mid-range reading sits in a 'just [...]

'Textual Editing and the Future of Scholarly Editions: A Conference on the Bicentennial of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy' AMERICAN antiquarian SOCIETY May 25-26, 2021 (Virtual) By now, it may [...]

This essay analyzes how William Apess's Indian Nullification (1835) articulates a form of belonging that emphasizes inclusivity and communality (affiliative belonging) against settler colonialism's insistence that belonging is anchored in possession and property (proprietary belonging). It draws on recent critical appraisals of Indigenous kinship and community that emphasize the commingling of Native and white practices, but it centers tangible environmental markers—specifically the cutting and carting away of wood as presented in Apess's text—as the loci for a more general argument over how people should live with each other. I draw much from Apess's depiction of the Mashpee Meeting-house, a religious structure made of wood whose retrieval by the Mashpee concurrently pushes to establish their conception of communal belonging with nature and with each other. The Mashpee form of belonging is also incarnate in two other ways in Indian Nullification : in Apess's discussion of his adoption into the Mashpee tribe and in the very structure of the book. By contrasting how the Mashpee treat the management of wood and wooden creations with settler colonial impositions, Apess conceptualizes how Indigenous peoples could create communities and express an alternative idea of belonging in the antebellum United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that scenes and themes of education in Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio deploy the threat of corporal punishment as a means of reincarnating antebellum plantation systems of surveillance and punishment in the postbellum school space. By copiously tracing the logic and references in a commentary on education by a parson early in the novel, the article shows that Griggs's book makes learning, violence, and space inextricable in Black Reconstruction life. Drawing on theorists like Hortense Spillers and Karen Sanchez-Eppler, who argue that violence on the body renders Black bodies legible, I suggest that Black education manifests itself through the same bodily terror that dictated life for enslaved persons. Griggs, I propose, depicts knowledge accumulation and dissemination as harmful to the Black populace not only physically but politically as well. With an eye towards the book's eponymous Black insurrectionary state, this article argues that the plantation's regime of intimidation, which continues to impose itself through the illusion of academic installation, might be overturned through a motivated manipulation of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]