In the early nineteenth century, the antiquarian James Savage produced a print edition of John Winthrop's seventeenth-century manuscript journal. This transmedial reproduction illustrates the differing affordances of print and manuscript as vehicles for connecting to the past. Manuscripts offer a tangible link to long-dead people, but manuscripts' rarity encourages their sequestration in archives. In contrast, print editions make historical content more broadly accessible but provide a less direct material link to earlier eras. Print facsimiles of manuscript, such as the reproduction of Winthrop's handwriting included in Savage's edition, seek to embody the best of both media. But print facsimiles' promise of access to manuscript materiality elides their nature as temporal hybrids and their tendency to distort and damage their originals. The way that nineteenth-century antiquarians negotiated manuscript's and print's temporal affordances and juggled the competing prerogatives of past, present, and future makes those antiquarians useful models for understanding the stakes of digitization projects today.

Walter Pater's writings advance an affective historicism: an embodied experience of the past that Pater conceived in dialogue with Victorian neuroscience. Pater theorized art's freedom from the present by drawing on insights into reaction time, the subject of influential scientific studies in nineteenth-century culture. His slow-moving prose lifts readers out of the now, while simultaneously binding them to material realities. These tendencies fueled charges of sexual deviance against The Renaissance (1873) insofar as medical and religious writers understood belated reactions as a symptom of effeminate ennui. But in Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater reinscribes religious sentiments in terms of postponement. Its hero's sensory education, set in late classical culture, aligns the feeling of postponement with nascent doctrines of resurrection and temporal returns. After elaborating this account, the essay revises Georg Lukács's observations on weak secular heroes, extending queer scholarship to show how, through the feltness of the past, Pater's hero learns to resist incorporation into modern social forms.

The African American author Elizabeth Keckly has garnered signiicant attention in recent decades as a result of renewed interest in her memoir and exposé of the family of Abraham Lincoln, Behind the Scenes; or, hirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868). Meanwhile, the anonymous author who, writing as “Betsey Kickley,” viciously parodied her book in Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis (1868) has remained an enigma. his essay identiies the mysterious author of Behind the Seams as Daniel Ottolengui, a Jewish newspaper correspondent and writer from Charleston, South Carolina. he parody was reprinted in 1945 by another pseudonymous author, identiied here as the Manhattan-based book dealer Charles P. Everitt. he contents and contexts of both editions of Behind the Seams illustrate the enduring inluence of Keckly's challenge to hegemonic narratives of American history.

The history of Edna St. Vincent Millay's long World War II propaganda poem he Murder of Lidice reveals the transmedial logics that affected its publication and the media conditions that shaped its reception. After commissioning the poem in 1942, the Writers’ War Board coordinated a high-profile, strategically sequenced release, in which eight versions of the poem went public during a single week—periodical versions in he Saturday Review of Literature and Life magazine, a live performance featuring Hollywood actors, an NBC radio broadcast of that live performance, globally broadcast radio versions in three languages, and a book issued by Harper and Brothers. Comparing a set of fan letters (written in response to the NBC and Life versions) with a collection of interleaved book versions of the poem (books with newspaper articles stored between their pages) suggests how audiences might have been moved by the media of Murder's distribution as much as by the content of the poem itself.

Pas un jour, the 2002 novel by the French writer Anne Garréta, is a polemic against autoiction, the popular contemporary genre that experiments with the boundaries between autobiography and iction. Garréta lures the reader with the promise of access to some part of her real self and her lived experience by mimicking the conventions and tone of autoiction, only to reveal that the auto in autoiction is an empty concept and to insist that there is no real subject to be found in the iction. Pas un jour's iniltration of autoiction puts this subject into crisis and challenges readers to consider that who we think we are is as ictive as the novels that we read.

Rereading Eugène Ionesco's postwar play La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in the light of the original, wartime Romanian version alongside archival materials concerning his political activity in Vichy France allows us to reconsider his role in the theater of the absurd. Instead of staging the emptiness of language in a conformist world, the Romanian play dramatizes how language and language exchange created meaning but also upheld state violence during the Second World War. Although the French version of the play adapts this theme to the postwar context, traces of state power over language remain. his new approach to a central text of the theater of the absurd invites us to reexamine the politics of language and language learning in wartime and postwar France.

In 1922 Nella Larsen Imes was the first African American applicant accepted to the library school of the New York Public Library; soon she would be a promising novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen's library school application is a rich text that discloses the encounter of a conflicted subject with the norms and values of an institution. Bureaucratic forms do not have readers—at least as literature professors generally use that word—but filling out an application requires cultural competence, and evaluating one requires interpretive activity. Responding to a standard question on the application, Larsen compiled a book list that reflects her pragmatic, aesthetic, and emotional investment in reading. Stylistically and thematically, this ephemeral document anticipates Larsen's best work; it intimates conflicting perspectives on race, gender, and national belonging while exposing the limits of “imagined community” in one culturally typical American institution.

The scenario of someone gazing at corpses plays an important role in the work of three authors representing three generations of Holocaust literature: Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Jonathan Littell. Plato and Aristotle used this scenario to address a key question raised by the concept of poetic vividness, which they defined as putting a described scene before the reader's eyes: If literature shows us gruesome sights that we should not desire to see or enjoy seeing, does this make literature a form of voyeurism? Weiss, Sebald, and Littell evoke corpse gazing in the context of the Holocaust to answer this question and to articulate unique poetic philosophies that respond to the challenge to literature's validity constituted by the Holocaust. The diferent ways in which they use corpse gazing reveal how Holocaust literature has changed and continues to change as the era of survivor testimony wanes.

How we read (closely, distantly, symptomatically, against the grain, or on the surface) has been vigorously debated, and PMLA has helped foster the debate. Distant reading as defined by Franco Moretti is the focus of a recent Theories and Methodologies feature in PMLA, and two forthcoming issues will address “cultures of reading.” Whether we define ourselves as English teachers, public intellectuals in the humanities, or literary or cultural studies scholars, this newly energized attention to how we read reminds us that the critical practice of reading is foundational to our work. No matter what else we do (collect interviews, analyze films, pursue ethnographic field-work), attentive reading is our primary method of analysis and assessment. How we do it and to what ends warrant thoughtful discussion.

Reflecting on my experience of teaching British Romantic literature at a Turkish university, this essay addresses the current conversation about global English by exploring the intersections among second-language literary study, translation theory, and Romantic aesthetics. It begins with a reconsideration of orientalism that traces a foreignizing impulse in canonical Romanticism, links this with Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie (“estrangement”), and goes on to propose foreign language study as the exemplary instance of Romantic or Shklovskian aesthetic experience. Turning next to recent accounts, by Emily Apter and others, of Istanbul as the birthplace of “translational transnationalism,” I juxtapose the utopianism of contemporary translation theory with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic ideal of “untranslatableness.” I conclude with a reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, particularly its homage to Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” as a meditation on translatability, before briefly revisiting the Turkish Romantic classroom and its global English futurity.

It has already become a critical commonplace to begin a discussion of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) by invoking its powerful opening declaration:

Although the nature poems of the Jamaican writer Una Marson are usually set against her transnational projects, they are inextricable from the cosmopolitan vision described in her radio broadcasts and journalism. Studies of transnational modernism have brought to the fore Marson's participation in pan- Africanist political and literary networks, her poems' mediation of the black West Indian woman's experience, and her work promoting West Indian literature in the metropolitan institution of the BBC. Analyses of Marson as a transnational igure, however, have obscured aspects of her literary production—speciically, her nature poetry. Placing Marson's West Indian nature poetry that was broadcast by the BBC in the context of the original programs reveals the efects of moving from print publication to radio broadcast. And, along with her editorials for the Jamaican literary magazine The Cosmopolitan (1928–31), Marson's BBC broadcasts (1939–45) make the case for the ongoing relevance of the pastoral tradition to public life.

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (nguyen, sympathizer 179). and so viet thanh nguyen's The Sympathizer invokes Karl Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” although the reference is just as likely to be Edward Said's Orientalism, since Marx was concerned with political representation (608), whereas Said was concerned with discursive representation (21). These words frame the important middle act of The Sympathizer, one that focuses on the filming of The Hamlet, a mash-up of Hollywood's sins against not only Vietnamese but also Asians and Asian Americans at large. Reading like a morality play crossed with a backstage musical, this section draws on thinly veiled references to Francis Ford Coppola (the Auteur), Marlon Brando (the hespian), and Martin Sheen (the Idol), who drag the narrator from his newly formed Southern Californian refuge and round up a bunch of stray boat people milling around in the Philippines to put on a movie about the Vietnam War. From the recycling of American military equipment originally sold to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the reuse of Vietnamese bodies recently shot at and now en route to the United States as refugees, every aspect of the making of The Hamlet illustrates the dangers of allowing oneself to be represented by others. More subtly, The Sympathizer shows how difficult it is to intervene in this regime of representation, especially in the name of authenticity, as it is often deployed by protestors against stereotypes in the media. But if we situate the section on The Hamlet within the overall narrative of The Sympathizer and also in Nguyen's larger critique of memory industries as war industries, we must also understand that the content of the ilm is less important than the dynamics of spectatorship. By linking the narrator's quixotic quest to subvert this film with his repression of his complicity in the rape and torture of a communist agent during the narrator's days as a mole in the South Vietnamese police, Nguyen suggests that watching the Vietnam War is potentially as dangerous as ighting in (or misrepresenting) the war.

This essay traces the history of ideas behind the critical methods of distant reading and macroanalysis, modes of criticism enabled by the rise of the science, media, and technology of aggregation. I situate these methods in the intellectual shifts marked by the advent of modern polling practices, computational census technologies, post-1945 marketing strategies, and other methods of analyzing an aggregated public. Drawing on work by Sarah E. Igo, Mary Poovey, Bill Kovarik, and others, I demonstrate that the ideas legitimated through these shifts in technology and public sentiment are fundamental to the types of claims made in the “big data” digital humanities. This attention to intellectual history raises important problems and qualifications for big data methods like distant reading, particularly regarding their underlying assumptions about the publics of literary history.

East german literary history is a case study of how political and cultural institutions interact. the state's cultural regime mo-nopolized the right to publish within its borders and demanded that the nation's new art describe contemporary life or its precedents. Even authors seen in the West as dissidents understood themselves, more often than not, as pursuing that goal and the broader aims of socialism with their work. During the lifespan of the German Democratic Republic, this political albatross weighed on all literary scholarship. Even now, whatever their feelings toward the socialist state, scholars, critics, and readers are bound to approach a text from East Germany as an artifact of its political culture—and rightly, because the political sphere encroached heavily on the artistic. But since German unification, the rise and fall in the stock of so many East German authors has directly resulted from political revelations, raising a number of troubling questions. Though historical distance seemed to have sprung up as abruptly as the Berlin Wall had come down, to what extent does scholarship from the German Democratic Republic represent only a heightened case of what is always true of literary history— namely, that political motivation colors critical evaluation? Is it possible to consider a work of literature with no recourse to the social and political circumstances under which it was written? And would it even be desirable to do so?

The rebecca tuvel controversy may not seem like an example of the way we write now. my purpose in this essay is to convince you that it is.