This essay recovers the newspaper writings of the Omaha journalist Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche as the first Indigenous woman to publish about the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Her eyewitness accounts challenge mainstream histories of the massacre that focus largely on frontier violence and Indigenous death by rewriting Wounded Knee as a place of Indigenous resilience and of an Indigenous community bound together by the rights and responsibilities of kinship. By prioritizing the stories of surviving Indigenous women and girls, Bright Eyes's reporting speaks to and becomes a precedent for ongoing acts and discourses of Indigenous activism, feminism, resurgence, and self-determination.

This essay argues for the primacy of energy as an impetus in the writing of the Sudanese author al-Tayyib Salih. Taking his most famous novel, موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال (1966; Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl; Season of Migration to the North), as a case study, it explores the significance of climatic factors and of changes to energy regimes in the novel's plot, characterization, intertextuality, and postcolonial critique. Through the character of Mustafa Saʿid, it argues for a posthuman impulse in the novel, as Mustafa uncannily transforms from Faustian archetype to a fantastical, nonhuman force. It concludes by shifting to alternative forms of energy within Salih's writing, as the spiritual energy of the Sufi “unseen” meets the unheeding world of atoms, supercharged with new energies in the modern era.

New Woman literature is typically regarded as an Anglo-American invention, but this assessment ignores the contributions of global authors who shaped the genre's rise in the decades before its more familiar Western emergence. This essay demonstrates that in the late nineteenth century, Indian women authors crafted both fictional and nonfictional writings that anticipate, expand, and complicate standard narratives of the New Woman. These understudied texts—by authors like Toru Dutt, Krupa Satthianadhan, Shèvantibāi Nikambé, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain—also centrally shaped mainstream Indian feminism while occluding alternative counterstrains. New Woman literature and the wider feminist movement cannot be understood without analyzing these transnational incarnations; indeed, I argue, both had transimperial origins. The works analyzed here reframe early feminism as an international enterprise—one more diverse and global in scope than most existing scholarship recognizes.

This article argues that a reliance on material texts tied to the concept of improvement—such as picturesque engravings, diagrams, and account books—pushed the early abolitionist movement toward a reforming, ameliorationist ethic that disavowed revolutionary action and immediate emancipation. Although the term improvement had broad social applicability by the late eighteenth century, its original connections to land management made it an especially important concept for the abolitionist debate. Integrating book history with studies of enslavement and abolition, I show how abolitionists’ use of visual-textual forms such as diagrams and account books created an emphasis on gradual improvement. In response, Black abolitionists both emphasized concepts other than improvement and presented their works in different material forms. Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottabah Cugoano adapted the genre of autobiography to demonstrate how their own ostensible improvements did not have the effects anticipated by the logic of white abolitionists, ultimately undercutting the usefulness of improvement as a guiding concept for abolitionism.

We created a relational database that captures every author and work ever selected for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Given this anthology's influence, our database reveals changes in the literary canon over the past half century. We find that the common story of increased diversity is true, albeit truer with respect to race than gender. However, the biggest structural change has been a substantial growth in the number of anthologized authors. We argue that, while that strategy has produced real gains, it also creates a canon that less effectively manages reader attention, affords women and people of color a less valuable position than many white male authors once enjoyed, and tacitly accepts the notion that the new additions do not have greater literary merit than authors on the original roster, whom we show editors too rarely cut.

This essay traces the emergence of Anthropocene fantasy through an analysis of three multivolume series—George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings, and N. K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth. Each of these series repurposes the conventions of epic fantasy to analyze the ideological underpinnings of anthropogenic crisis. Among the most important tropes revised are fantasy infrastructures, which, in Anthropocene fantasy, frequently manifest a problematic division between the human and the nonhuman. Consequently, characters’ responses to these infrastructures often reflect these novels’ ecological politics. The surrender of agency associated with the abandonment of ancient infrastructures further indicates Anthropocene fantasy's interest in reimagining the individualistic mode of human agency that drives so many novel plotlines, fantasy and realist alike. Anthropocene fantasy's revision of its own problematic genre infrastructures thus has implications not only for the epic fantasy but for the novel form more broadly.

The typewriter—the machine and the human operator at the nadir of the white-collar hierarchy—became associated with white female workers in the American racial imaginary. Although the color line deterred Black applicants from that side of the collar line, the Black typewriter as a literary type came to salience between 1886 and 1930, disrupting what I call the “bureaucratization of the racial imaginary”: the process whereby the exclusionary white middle-class tenets underpinning the bureaucratized office both regulated and were also informed by the imaginative possibilities of race, gender, and labor. Tracing the Black typewriter from Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Charles W. Chesnutt to Jean Toomer and Dorothy West, I reveal how these authors construed white-collar identity as a form of racial passing, requiring the worker's acceptance of racial and sexual segregation. Their innovative narratives about passing as white collar foregrounded the Black typewriter's unsettling experiences inside that system, challenging the theory that economic uplift would inherently promote racial and sexual equality.

This essay engages with James Baldwin's work on prison rape in the early 1970s: his directing of John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes while in Turkey (1969–70), his nonfiction book No Name in the Street (1972), and his penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Over the course of these works, Baldwin theorized that sexual violence constitutes racial capitalism by mediating between the two state-organized institutions tasked with securing the primitive accumulation and surplus value on which racial capitalism relies: the family (and, more broadly, heterosexuality) and the prison (and, more broadly, policing). In turn, Baldwin helps converge two intellectual traditions that developed after him, the black radical and Marxist feminist traditions, in order to explain how sexual violence expropriates both forced productive labor and unpaid reproductive labor through its production of racialized gender and kinlessness.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is part of a global hypercanon of popular fiction and thus a major commercial enterprise. In the translation of these works, the author and translator are joined by a host of shadowy figures—the source language publisher, scouts, literary agents, target language publishers, editors, and proofreaders—who transform the texts for a particular readership. This essay connects the market-oriented metamorphosis of paratext with substantial alterations to literary content itself. It is based on a computational study of the novels in Swedish and English that singled out major alterations to paragraph meaning and length across the three novels. The study showed that about 6.3% of the paragraphs have been cut or shortened by at least 30%. These extensive changes reveal a process of creative remaking, in which published works become raw content to be reshaped by commercial expectations and the demands of high production speed.

This article analyzes how Chinese writers in the early twentieth century translated and appropriated Russian literature through the intermediary of Japanese scholarly and creative writing. It traces how Japan began as the primary—and in some cases only—cultural broker in the Chinese reception of Russian literature during the late Qing dynasty and how its impact diminished as Western European sources became viable competitors. To illuminate Japan's unique mediating role in shaping Chinese understanding of both Russian literature and China's own literary and linguistic legacy, this article examines Wu Tao's 1907 relay translation of Chekhov's “The Black Monk” from Japanese. By probing the Sino-Japanese cultural connections that gave birth to this translation and comparing it with two later Chinese renderings from English and Russian versions, this article reflects on the factors that determine how intermediaries function in transcultural negotiations.