This essay argues that William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams uses a familiar gesture—the handshake—to contest both radical and conservative responses to the French Revolution. Instead of merely fictionalizing the arguments of his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, as critics have argued, Caleb Williams, through Godwin's representation of the repeated failure of this socially and politically significant gesture, traces an episode in the history of manners. The handshake thus points to a historical development, the emergence of commercial society, that complicates the novel's political stance by undermining the conception of politics that underwrites it.

In Ben Jonson's Epicoene, the misanthropic Morose pathologically seals his home against the “common noises” of London, “turning Turk” against his neighbors. What opens up the queer space of Morose's home, ironically, is his equally queer marriage to a cross-dressed boy, a travesty of marital domesticity that parallels the urban travesty of spatial isolation. While the eventual breaching of architectural and gender facades seems to reinscribe social norms, Jonson's play profoundly questions how we construct the space of home, the space of self. Indeed, by setting Epicoene near the Whitefriars theater, where the play was first performed, Jonson adopts chorographic techniques to represent “home” to viewers drawn from that social and spatial milieu. Through a reconsideration of Plato's chora, this essay explores how a vengeful community wrenches open Morose's closet-cum-home, forcing him to renounce his manhood and reducing him to a nonsubject.

Performance as a genre allows for alternative mappings, providing a set of strategies and conventions that allow scholars to see practices that scripted genres might occlude. Like other genres, performance encompasses a broad range of rehearsed and codified behaviors, such as dance, theater, music recitals, sports events, and rituals. A performance lens allows scholars to look at acts, things, and ideas as performance. Looking at America as performance might explain why it is difficult to approach it as a disciplinary field of study. What might the shift in genres—from the scripted genres associated with the archive to the live, embodied behaviors that are the repertoire of cultural practices—enable? This essay proposes that an analysis of the performance of America might allow scholars to rethink not only their object of analysis but also their scholarly interactions.

John Ruskin's Modern Painters V (1860) and Charles Baudelaire's “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) are contemporaneous texts that both champion modern painters. Yet the two have rarely been considered together; while Ruskin's work is usually taken to represent a moralistic Victorianism, Baudelaire's essay is a foundational text of aesthetic modernism. This article compares the two texts in order to arrive at a more accurate, descriptive sense of nineteenth-century aesthetics, especially at the mid-century moment when “the modern” emerges as an aesthetic value in both England and France. Ruskin and Baudelaire are shown to propose surprisingly similar aesthetic theories, in part because they negotiate the same traumas of modernity, such as the derailment of religion and the commodification of the material world. Positioned on the ruins of Romanticism, each text intimates an idea of the modern that is not quite modernism but is, in fact, eminently Victorian.

Shortly into Werner Herzog's South American film Fitzcarraldo (1982), the Peruvian rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy) asks the eponymous protagonist (Klaus Kinski) if he has ever seen a shrunken head. This paper argues that Fitzcarraldo's short, fumbling response (“Yes. I mean, no. Sort of …”) calls into question both the European tradition of representing the New World and the very status and nature of the film image. Close analysis of a single visual from the film also demonstrates the difficulty of constructing images endowed with what the director has called over the years “ecstatic truth.” Though critically praised for his unique vision, Herzog affiliates himself through Fitzcarraldo, however unknowingly, with a constellation of texts and practices having colonialist aims, extending all the way to Warhaftig Historia (1557), the controversial captivity narrative of the would-be German conquistador Hans Staden.

Though she has long been considered a pioneer of black women's writing, there is no evidence to suggest that Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, author of Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City, was African American. This author considered herself racially white, as did every recorded member of her family before her. Instead of simply asserting her whiteness to correct the “mistake” of her racial categorization in the scholarly reception of her novels, this essay explores the uses of authorial racial identity in critical practice. Reading the obsessive concern with skin color in Four Girls at Cottage City demands not only further consideration of Kelley's work alongside African American literature but also attention to issues of white racialization at the turn of the century. However we identify Kelley, the critical history and continued interpretation of her work provide a rare opportunity to observe the consequences of destabilizing an author's identity or, more precisely, recognizing identity as unstable.

Shaped by a history of mobilities, displacements, and creolizing processes, the Caribbean is a significant testing ground for theories concerning the circulation and remapping of genre. Taking Patrick Chamoiseau's theory of generic wandering as my point of departure, I argue that his Solibo Magnifique exemplifies the principle of generic creolization. This is evident in the novel's intermixing of the detective novel, film noir, the spaghetti western, the comic book, the hard-boiled crime novel, and creole storytelling techniques. By manipulating the conventions by which the classical detective, the hard-boiled police officer, and the private investigator are characterized, Chamoiseau's narrative turns from an investigation into one man's death to an interrogation of Martinique, its history and the workings of its neocolonial psyche. Through the example of Solibo Magnifique and its radiating influence on other postcolonial crime writers, I conclude that this principle of creative creolization is increasingly relevant to understanding a world in which genre's radiating and rhizomic web of mobilities involves local and global confluences.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is adolescent in the sense provided by Julia Kristeva–it offers critical insight into the breakdown of categories that support representational and ethical certainties. The ethical stance of its author, Daniel Handler, is complicated–urgent, resonant, distressing–caught in the devious irony endemic to metafictional play and to the sensibility of Generation X. Such irony casts light too on literary criticism's changing treatment of the critical subspecialty of children's literature as well as on its renewed but uneasy interest in ethics as revision of past humanism. A Series offers an ethics of practice, one that recognizes its dependence on the impulses it critiques. Just as the books' postmodern orphans improvise in the face of menace that doesn't stop, Handler's irony pictures a world where ethics can never be more than a provisional entente negotiating impossible ideals.

Using archival sources, interviews, and memoirs, this essay documents the surprisingly extensive connections between London's extant modernists and West Indian writers during the 1950s. With the support of Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, T. S. Eliot, and other luminaries, a vibrant group of Caribbean artists quickly established themselves as known literary commodities. Such forms of collaboration between metropolitan intellectuals and their colonial counterparts were structured by shared interests in high culture. London's modernists feared English culture was faced with terminal decline; West Indian writers exploited that fear by insisting that the metropolitan culture industry badly needed an infusion of colonial talent. The brevity and fragility of these bonds, however, led to the emergence of postcolonial literature as a distinct but marginal cultural niche. London's postwar identity as center of global cultural production, I suggest, was intimately connected with the recruitment and assimilation of colonial intellectuals.

This essay explores Venice's recurrence as an implicit structure in Ezra Pound's Cantos, arguing that the built archipelago provides a model for the modernist text, created through engagement with recalcitrant objective dynamics opposed to their containment by an imperious subject–and proffering the canalized republic as a counter to Pound's eventual fascist city of man. The rigorous empiricism of Ruskin's Venetian histories supplies a founding set of tropes through which the fluid, fractured cityscape becomes a taunt to find material ground for historical meaning. Pound, taking up the multiple construction of Venice that haunted Ruskin, locates in it a utopian–and site–oriented–poetic structure valorizing the interstitial and thus the relational, the differential. The Venetian complex that emerges intermittently in The Cantos literalizes the unsettling of Pound's attempt to monumentalize the body politic, remaining unassimilated–and challenging to efforts to transfix any totality construed as part of the project of modernity.

This essay provides an analysis of “Tibaq,” an elegy written in Edward W. Said's honor by the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Noting that the poem exhibits aspects of a number of genres and demonstrates Darwish's generally innovative approach to traditional literary forms, I consider how he has transformed the marthiya, the elegiac genre that has been part of the Arabic literary tradition since the pre-Islamic era. I argue that Darwish used the elegy-writing occasion to comment on Said's politics and to make respectful use of his critical methods, particularly his interdisciplinary borrowing of counterpoint, a concept typically used in music analysis. By reworking the conventional marthiya to represent Said's life in exile and his diverse body of work and by putting his contrapuntal method into practice in the conversation depicted in the poem, Darwish elegizes a long-lasting friendship and shores up a shared political cause.

The study of allusion has been beset by limiting assumptions, conceptual murkiness, and terminological imprecision; moreover, many poststructuralist theorists regard such study as having been superseded by newer conceptions of intertextuality. This essay seeks to clarify the nature of allusion and the terminology by which it is analyzed and to place it on a firmer footing within poststructuralist literary criticism. I distinguish two forms of allusion often conflated-learned reference and phraseological adaptation–and elucidate the elements of a phraseological adaptation. I distinguish diachronic allusion from synchronic intertextuality, as poststructuralist theorists insist should be done, but then suggest how coordinating the two can enrich the analytic power of each way of conceiving textual interrelation.