Since the mid-1980s, lyric has been stigmatized by its association with the New Criticism. This circumstance raises the question whether an ideology can be assigned to a text on the basis of the text's identification with a particular genre or school of critical thought. Observing several recent critical constructions of the ideology of lyric, both hostile and sympathetic, I argue that the act of identifying lyric as either an oppositional genre or a reactionary one encourages oversimplification of the term's history and criticism and desensitizes readers to the ideological diversity of texts identified as lyrical.

When co-opted into certain contexts, postcolonial criticism and antiapartheid rhetoric tend to produce conservative rather than emancipatory effects. In the dynamics of their performance, both antiapartheid discourse (exemplified here by Jacques Derrida's “Racism's Last Word” and by nondomestic stagings of Woza Albert!, a prominent antiapartheid play) and postcolonial criticism in the academy risk invoking the imperialism of those contexts. Drawing on the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber and the postcolonial writer and critic Wilson Harris and on contemporary attempts of ethnology and anthropology to re-create themselves as nonimperialist disciplines, I outline a number of options available to postcolonial critics—specific strategies calculated to counteract the neoimperialist politics of the academic milieu and of race-based literary categorization.

If recent studies of homosexuality in Renaissance literature have helped to challenge the modern idea of an essential sexual identity, I aim to challenge the idea that homosexual desire has its source in sexual “sameness,” in an identity with another. Donne's “Sapho to Philaenis” participates in a common Renaissance discourse of likeness in love; his Sappho appeals to physical identity—the “sameness” of the bodies of two women—as the basis of an idealized passion. But in “Sapho to Philaenis” difference emerges as the only inviolable, invariable feature of erotic experience with another, and sameness is exposed as rhetorical rather than material, a contingency produced by Donne's comparative method. By comparing Sappho to Philaenis, Donne's poem suggests that sameness has to do not with the “nature” of homosexuality but with a cultural “homopoetics” that makes such likenesses and produces sexual identities.

Through the concept of abstraction I examine the relation between female subjectivity and writing in Jane Eyre. In the novel abstraction means a lack of attention or a lapse of will, conditions that permit Jane to realize her wishes. Three other meanings of the term shed light on Jane Eyre and on Charlotte Brontë's career. Through abstraction as a degree of relative disembodiment, both Jane and Brontë avoid becoming female spectacles, Jane by shifting from corporeal rebelliousness to an anonymous advertisement, Brontë by adopting an ungendered pseudonym. Abstraction also involves the alienation of the self into objects and texts, as when Jane and Brontë project themselves into their written products. Finally, abstraction entails the synthesis of the particular into the general: Jane rhetorically enters a professional body of governesses, and Brontë participates in the commercial literary marketplace.

Booths are located in Wacker Hall, Hyatt Regency Chicago.

Postcolonial discussion of culture revolves around the twin poles of authenticity and creolization, which are not descriptions of culture but rhetorical constructs used to win the adherence of the members of a community. These metaphors are valid insofar as they convince community members to adopt a certain identity. Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, a postcolonial novel set in the early colonial era, supports my contention that cultural identity has always been constructed by such appeals. The priest Ezeulu invents the tradition that he upholds, and in so doing he (unintentionally) permits the consensual writing of a tragedy in which an authentic identity is lost. The experience of colonization is configured by the community of Umuaro as a tragedy but by the novel as the writing of a tragedy. I emphasize the community's capacity to write a cathartic narrative.

Critics of sex and gender in Tudor-Stuart theater generally subordinate the polymorphic eroticism of Jonson' plays to the rigor of his finales. But his meantimes and endings are dialectically intervolved. Delay, embodied in boy actors, is vital to his dramaturgy. For example, wooing Celia, Volpone imagines that he is playing young Antinous, retarding phallic threat with feminized display. In Volpone's deferrals and sartorial excitements, early modern spectators beheld a pattern of their own pleasures, in which sexual and social lusts commingled. Proposing that Jonson was more flexible than many have supposed, I analyze the convergence of homo- and heteroerotic desire on the figure of the pretty youth. Arguing that Epicoene's versatile appeal illuminates the charms of boy actors, I suggest that female spectators may have enjoyed boys, and the female roles the boys performed, without disturbing men's territorial enjoyments. In this way boy actors were crucial to the construction of an erotic community in the playhouse.

Some anniversaries may seem to deserve to pass unnoticed. Why revive Gustave Lanson (1857-1934), the epitome of justly spurned literary positivism, on the centennial of the publication of his classic Histoire de la littérature française? Lanson's less than glorious reputation (established by 1913 and strengthened beyond correction after 1960) as the dogmatic sponsor of airless academic scholarship—which extinguished the life of literary works under the weight of idle historical fact, biographical and philological minutiae, and innumerable sources and influences—has not inspired a return of the sort that Novalis, August and Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, to cite only the German traditions, have enjoyed in recent years. Yet such a return could be productive and rewarding, for Lanson, a focal point of French criticism at the dawn of the twentieth century, crystallizes significant trends from the past and anticipates crucial tenets of German and American literary reception theory.

Recent antiorientalist and subaltern critiques of colonial and neocolonial historiography elide the interdependence of “true” and “fictive” modes in historical writing. I use Girish Karnad's Tughlaq (1964), a contemporary Kannada play about a fourteenth-century Islamic ruler in India, to chart that interdependence and to demarcate the textual, political, and cultural contexts of postcolonial historical fictions. I show that Karnad's fiction is informed by a complex historical narrative mediated by medieval Muslim historians, who disapproved of Tughlaq's religious unorthodoxy, and by nineteenth-century orientalists, who treated the turmoil of Islamic rule in India as a justification for British colonial rule. The play's ironic representation of history also participates in a dialectic of heroic and satiric discourses that has shaped European and Indian constructions of India since the early colonial period. Using religious difference as its central problematic, Tughlaq develops a resonant parallel between premodern and contemporary Indian political and cultural experiences and reenacts the country's postindependence crisis of secular nationhood.

Historians and literary critics alike have emphasized the obsolescence of the antiusury doctrine in the transition in England from a precapitalist to a capitalist society. Instead of viewing the scholastic opposition to usury solely as an impediment to the development of a capitalist ethos, this essay stresses the continuing relevance of the antiusury tradition to an evolving theory of capital increase in the early eighteenth century. Moll Flanders and Roxana are the central texts for a discussion of how the analogies between monetary and biological generation that the antiusury writers developed to regulate capital increase provide the foundation for the naturalization of capital, for the transformation of capitalism from an external to an internal economy. At the center of this metamorphosis is the figure of the woman, whose body becomes the body of capital.

While the return of queer is usually explained locally as an oppressed minority's positive reunderstanding of a negative word, as the adoption of an umbrella to cover diverse marginal subjectivities, or as a sign of generational difference, the term's reappearance must instead be historicized—systematically and globally—as one of the theoretical, cultural, and social changes that result from the uncritical acceptance (for class reasons) of the premises of ludic (post)modern theory in the dominant academy and the culture industry. By elevating the category of desire (mode of signification) and occluding the category of need (mode of production), ludic theory encourages the notion that in advanced technoculture, mutant subjectivities—such as the “cyberqueer”—occupy a new and freeing virtual reality of desire beyond mere need where they can write their own histories instead of being written by history. In the end, (cyber)queerity is but a new expression of an old class ideology.

T. S. Eliot is remembered as a champion of elite tradition who struggled to rescue an autonomous and uncompromised high art from the encroaching tide of mass culture. However, the essays, poems, and plays of his early career reveal an Eliot who believed that the ever-deepening division between the “high” and the “low” in culture represented a form of social disintegration that threatened to make art irrelevant. Rejecting the sacralization of high art as a stultifying bourgeois misappropriation, Eliot allied himself with the lower class and its participatory engagement with popular culture—an engagement that Eliot himself shared. Despite a complex personal ambivalence manifested in his poetry, Eliot sought to reconcile the dissociated levels of culture by theorizing and attempting to create a new public art form: a poetic drama based on such popular forms as music-hall comedy and jazz.

The Lebanese writer Etel Adnan's novel Sitt Marie Rose tells the story of the title character's execution during the Lebanese civil war and thus questions the gendered body's status within the historical narrative of nationalist thought in the postcolonial world. Through this focus on gender issues, the novel examines what Adnan calls “tribal mentality” without reproducing Western orientalizing assumptions about the Arab world and its “underdevelopment.” The novel's self-consciousness about the problems of postcolonial narration offers a new perspective on Gayatri Spivak's question, “Can the subaltern speak?” In doing so, the novel also reflects my own status as a Western reader.