Scholars have long described Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books as a Darwinian narrative. Overlooked, however, is the way in which the text explicitly discusses Lamarckian evolutionary ideas, especially the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This essay contextualizes Mowgli's narrative within a fierce late-nineteenth-century debate about whether the Darwinian theory of natural selection or Lamarckian use inheritance was the main driver of evolutionary change. Kipling describes his protagonist's maturation to “Master of the Jungle” in thoroughly Lamarckian terms, as an evolutionary process propelled by experience, effort, and conscious adaptation. But some of the conceptual incoherence that troubled the Lamarckian evolutionary scheme when it was applied to human racial difference also troubles Kipling's account of Mowgli's genetic past and the evolutionary issue of his experiences.

This article compares and contrasts how the texts of Greek tragedy thematize ending and how German idealism, especially Hegel and Schelling, constructed a theory of ending in relation to Greek tragedy. In particular, through Hegel's and Schelling's paradigmatic readings of Oedipus, the article demonstrates a deep-seated commitment to a Protestant Christian teleology that continues, unrecognized, to influence modern readings of Greek tragedy.

In the center of the pre-k classroom at the urban day elementary School an easel stood. On the easel a translation poster rested. Above blue lines, the uppercase letters, in manuscript and in cursive, and then the lowercase ones—all through the alphabet.

Early Hollywood horror, and Boris Karloff's portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in particular, must be understood as cultural products of the age of polio. Polio survivors have drawn attention to kinetic similarities between their experiences and Karloff's gait, but horror and polio culture also share interests in experiments on simians, shadowy medical research, and ambiguously paralytic states. As well as locating the origins of some of horror's formal conventions, this essay draws attention to a dangerous gambit played by medical authorities in 1947, when, to energize the public in the fight against polio, they exploited those conventions for an educational horror film.

Literary practice may be more deeply shaped by basic literacy training than we have noticed. This is particularly true for English writers of the late fourteenth century, when the constant movement out of Latin into English in schoolrooms both ensured that translation exercises became a method for making vernacular poetry and demonstrated that English had a grammar of its own. As the most basic grammatical concepts and the simplest exercises of literacy training evolved into resources for literary technique, the style of writers such as Chaucer, Langland, and Gower became “grammaticalized.” For this reason, a more detailed understanding of the forms of pedagogy employed in grammar schools can be equivalent to a genealogy of the important elements of a style.

Accompanying Keith Thomas's account of its defeat by scientific rationality, supernatural magic, which I designate magic1, receives scholarly attention denied the stigmatized magic2—stage magic and the “gulling” practices popularized by Tondon's con artists and pickpockets, who exploited distraction through sleights of hand, body, language, and thought. As Othello's paratheatrical “entertainment unconscious,” competing and collaborating with theater, magic2 informs the play's sensationalism, gull's gallery, source-tale revisions, and transformation of much traditional tragedy into a genre less about epistemology than about perception. Practicing early modern magicians' fundamentals—conveyance (legerdemain, misdirection) and confederacy—and exposing his own tricks, the entertainer-villain Iago's tactics and handkerchief prop illuminate phenomena such as “inattentional blindness,” important for cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and performance. His “helpmeet” wife and apprentice Emilia emulates his misdirecting visual and conversational skills, until their team, echoing a celebrity magician-and-animal partnership, finally implodes. Situated between Montaigne's and Adorno's views on distraction, Othello transforms wonder from tragic affect into the capitalist distraction pleasure of a discursive entertainment revolution. Its hero-dupe himself adopts magic2 technology for a spectacular suicide—arguably the suicide of tragedy's tradition.

A large body of Eliot scholarship is dedicated to the question of human sympathy. My essay moves in a different direction, arguing that Eliot saw literature not only as a medium for intersubjective understanding but also as an amplificatory technology, a tool for sensory enhancement. This technology is embodied by the affective dynamics of character in Eliot's final published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), a collection of character sketches and philosophical essays composed in conversation with the ancient Greek naturalist and sketch writer Theophrastus of Eresus. In Impressions Eliot invokes the descriptive traditions of natural history and the character sketch to suggest that human beings, like other animals, are conditioned by bodily frameworks and habitual responses that allow them to sense some things and not others. A meditation also on the history of characterization itself, Impressions puts pressure on the modern association of character with individual human psychology.

Milton's one venture into the genre of tragedy, Samson Agonistes, has prompted a notoriously divided reception among modern critics, not least because it revives the topos of exemplary violence, which the poet had conspicuously rejected in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. I propose we consider the underlying Samson plot not simply as the triumph or tragedy of a chosen nation and its representative hero but as the tragic collision between a universalizing faith and a nation's claims to exceptionality. Even after the devastating collapse of England's republican experiment, Milton never wavered in his commitment to the communal as well as the private manifestations of faith. The nation, or a nation equivalent, was an indispensable vehicle for continuing Reform, but the conceptual parameters of that nation, its relation to geographic place, and its rights in relation to other nations and to faiths other than its own posed a foundational dilemma for Milton's dramatic poem.

This essay examines a contemporary poetics that implicitly challenges prevailing critiques of lyric as asocial, monologic, and naively self-expressive. Louise Glück practices a lyric mode whose plainspoken surface and emotional immediacy belie its metalinguistic and metafictional complexity. Her poems' illocutionary structures and their attunement to everyday grammatical nuance convey an understanding of language as situational, context-dependent shared action, an understanding that chimes with the insights of ordinary-language philosophy. The perspectives offered by Glück's work can fruitfully complicate dominant models of lyric and binary narratives of American poetic history that set lyric voice against philosophical ambition and linguistic innovation.

The illustrations created by Jörg Breu for the 1515 edition of Ludovico de Varthema's account of his voyage to the Middle East, India, and the East Indies (Die ritterlich uñ lobwirdig Rayss “The Noble and Praiseworthy Journey') were reprinted in other travel narratives published in the mid-sixteenth century, including Hans Staden's Warhaftige Historia ‘True History’ (1557), about his captivity among the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil. As recycled illustrations their presence in Staden's text is usually ignored or derided, but their iconography and placement suggest that they were chosen deliberately and not merely for the sake of economy and expedience. By analyzing the images' relation to the accompanying text and comparing the images with those used in other editions and other travel narratives, the article argues that these traveling illustrations do not merely demonstrate the interchangeability of exotic ”others“ but rather suggest a growing awareness of and interest in ethnographic specificity among mid-sixteenth-century European readers.

This essay presents the discovery that one of Emily Dickinson's least-read poems, “It's thoughts—and just One Heart—,” is an unmarked revisionary reply to a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes that itself is a revisionary reply to a poem that John Quincy Adams wrote in reply to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith. The stakes of this finding are high, for scholars today still understand Dickinsonian intertextuality within the framework of a famous claim that the poet made in 1862, that she “never consciously touch[ed] a paint, mixed by another person” without “mark[ing]” (overtly identifying) her use of allographic material. “It's thoughts—and just One Heart—” renders this claim null and void, even according to the generous terms with which we currently parse it, and is therefore a poem that compels us to reconsider decades of scholarly consensus about how and to what extent Dickinson engaged in her work with the literature and popular culture of her place and time.

The reception of Aby Warburg's first published work, his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli, has overlooked layers of meaning implicit in Warburg's word choice. His study of the afterlife of antiquity relies on the activation of the semantic afterlives of words such as Inspirator (“inspirer”), Stimmung (“mood,” “atmosphere”), and Milieu (“milieu”). Warburg brings out the reference to air in these words, invoking their philological nuances and physiological contexts. The air designated is not only the physical medium in which Botticelli's windblown accessories move but also the quattrocento's cultural atmosphere in which Botticelli's creativity thrives. In addition, air implicitly functions as a disciplinary trope for the cultural history into which Warburg aimed to extend traditional art history.

Scholars have been quick to dismiss Georgian tragedy as mere rant and have thus failed to examine why tragic plays were regularly staged in the eighteenth century. This essay explores the “unaccountable pleasure,” in David Hume's words, that spectators of the genre experienced. Hume compared the feeling of witnessing a tragedy to the sweet misery of watching high-stakes gamblers risk their fortunes. Part of the attraction derived from star actresses who performed the mixed genre of tragedy topped off with a comic epilogue in plays such as Edward Moore's The Gamester, George Lillo's The London Merchant, and David Garrick's The Fatal Marriage. This essay argues that eighteenth-century tragedies portray the struggles of a genre caught between a world ruled by poetic justice and one flung about by uncontrollable economic powers. Further, in its democratization of grievable subjects and its metatheatrical relation to the tragic, Georgian tragedy anticipates modern developments of the genre.

This essay advances a theory of black classicism as a mode of resistance to the dominant narrative of American history, according to which the United States was to be a new Rome, rooted in the best traditions of classical antiquity yet destined to surpass its antecedent through the redeeming power of American exceptionalism. In the late nineteenth century this narrative reemerged as a means of getting beyond sectional conflict and refocusing on imperial expansion and economic growth. For Charles Chesnutt, a post-Reconstruction African American writer, the progress of American civilization was a dubious notion, a fiction suited to the nation's imperial purposes. In opposition, Chesnutt developed an outsider classicism, challenging the figuration of the United States as inheritor of the mantle of Western civilization by linking the nation to the ancient world through the institution of slavery—a very present relic of the past.

Postmodern aesthetics' vaunted hermeneutic flatness is routinely equated with emotional flatness. In large part, it is this equation that underpins postmodernism's fall from favor in the face of the critical humanities' recent turn to the analysis of affect and emotion. Through a close reading of David Cronenberg's paradigmatically postmodern film Crash (1996), however, this essay draws on a long-standing lamination of texture to emotion in order to undertake a radical reappraisal of postmodernism's emotional life—recoding postmodern aesthetics' notoriously flat, depthless surface as a richly textured plane that oscillates between the high polish of the glossy surface and the cragginess of the rough. In doing so, the essay argues not only that postmodern aesthetics is unexpectedly hospitable to emotions but also that an analysis of these emotions may help to reconfigure sedimented scholarly understandings of the relation between surface and depth, true emotion and false, critical “then” and critical “now.”