The mode of imitatio enhances the persistence and evolution of genres over time, contrary to the implications of Foucault's concept of epistemes (the idea of discontinuous historical eras). Imitatio, well practiced, awakens extraordinary commonalities of sensibility among poets of different periods (classical, Renaissance, contemporary), including how they understand and manipulate genres, and so raises the possibility of a more unitive view of history, culture, and time. Ben Jonson, with his coherent theoretical view of imitatio, was a crucial poet for Thom Gunn, who self-consciously imitated the mode of imitation, producing in “An Invitation” a re-creation of the country-house poem as embodied by Jonson's “To Sir Robert Wroth” and in “Lament” (his great AIDS elegy) a response to seventeenth-century funeral elegy, in particular Jonson's “Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet.”

The metaphor of the cidade partida (fragmented or broken city), which has been used to characterize Rio de Janeiro's darker aspect—its stark inequality, its class conflicts and violence—is not new but has gained, in the last couple of decades, widespread circulation. Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, when formal democratic practices such as free speech and open elec–tions were reestablished, it has become more obvious than ever that equal citizenship rights for all, de facto rather than on paper, are still an elusive ideal in Rio and in Brazil as a whole (as in many other places). The neoliberal economic policies of recent decades, with curtailed social spending and privatization of state-owned property, have increased poverty in Rio significantly. The arrival of the large-scale commercialization of cocaine since the late 1970s has deepened urban divisions and intensified violence. The retail end of the drug business often takes place in poor neighborhoods, or favelas. But the violence that prevails in Rio is not limited to warring drug factions or their conflicts with the police. It also inheres in unemployment and inadequate education and health care for the poor, as well as in severely flawed security, judiciary, and penal systems. All in all, the urban experience is fraught with violence and the fear of violence for all residents—though here too there is inequality, since this violence and fear affect some segments of the population far more than others.

Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World, by the Anishinabe author Gerald Vizenor, shows how people can come to form a profound relationship to a place even in sites of (in this case, American Indian) displacement and relocation. I argue that Vizenor's text reflects a complete formation of an urban community in its reclamation of landfills and sewers as integral and religiously significant human spaces that must not be ignored. The community in this novel is not only multicultural but also interspecies, as Native ties to physical place and plant and animal species are reinforced. Moreover, I show the importance of this portrayal of urban community and belonging in a Native context, considering that over two-thirds of all Native people in the United States live in urban settings.

The drug autobiography emerged as a genre in the United States primarily through imitations of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). For De Quincey, the intoxicating consumption of opium and print was linked to imperial mastery. Texts such as Fitz Hugh Ludlow's Hasheesh Eater (1857) adapted this association to suit the westward expansion of the United States and its accompanying ideology of manifest destiny. Under the influence of hashish, Ludlow explored his inner psychic space as if it were the United States frontier. As nineteenth-century Romantic models of intoxicated dreaming gave way to early-twentieth-century theories of addiction, drug autobiographies such as D. F. MacMartin's Thirty Years in Hell (1921) readapted the genre, representing the disappointments of manifest destiny as addicted exile. While drug autobiographies accrued countercultural authority, appearing to signify the irrational underside of Enlightenment modernity, their fantasies of esoteric exploration derived from broader cultural ideals of imperial power and knowledge.

Moving beyond ecocriticism, this essay argues that an ecosocial reading of narratives of the Atlanta child murders (1979–81) is better able to examine the sometimes functional, sometimes broken interactions between sociocultural circumstances and particular urban ecologies. Far from latching onto an idealized, utopian sense of a restorative natural world, the ecosocial approach introduced here focuses critical attention on the traumatized and traumatic social and cultural histories that play out in particular natural as well as built environments. In various ways, child-murders narratives by Toni Cade Bambara, Tayari Jones, and others bear the conflicting burdens of memory and forgetting, of old and new and never–changing and ever–changing Souths. They do so in large part by acknowledging ecosocial dysfunctions as one way of moving, however provisionally and problematically, toward a more grounded, more communal idea and practice of interrelatedness.

Genres travel in multiple directions. This article maps the evolution and movement of two lyric genres in Georgia, a small nation situated south of the Caucasus mountains, between Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The mukhambazi arose from a polyglot urban culture rooted in Near Eastern traditions of bardic performance and festivity, while the sonnet was imported around the time of the Russian Revolution as a marker of European modernization. The brief coexistence of these two genres allows for a reexamination of the foundational opposition between East and West. Moving beyond the familiar dichotomy of tradition and modernity, this essay explores the texts and debates of more than a century, reconstructing the discrepant cosmopolitanisms and multiple modernities that typified the Caucasus region. In doing so, it seeks both to make available a literary archive unknown to American readers and to contribute to ongoing debates on the relations between the local, the national, and the imperial as cultural formations.

CAPE TOWN, A GLOBAL CITY IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN POSTCOLONY. The emancipatory or transformative moments signaled by the prefix post are often incomplete, unfinished, haunted. This essay is about the human bones on which the foundations of Cape Town are built. It is a story about the human cost of the city's development, which led to the resurfacings of disavowed histories of violence. It is a recounting of a slowly unfolding reckoning with the haunting claims of the dead as they return, in their time and on their terms.