This year marks the centennial of Samuel Beckett's birth, and the celebrations around the world have been a wonder to behold. From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa (where Beckett did not permit his plays to be performed until apartheid was ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University, in Tallahassee, to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre, in London, to the Pompidou Center, in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurich to Aix-en-Provence and Lille, from Saint Petersburg to Madrid to Tel Aviv, and of course most notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett's year. Most of the festivals have included not only performances of the plays but also lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions, and manuscript displays. Paris Beckett 2006, for example, cosponsored by the French government and New York University's Center for French Civilization and Culture, has featured productions of Beckett's entire dramatic oeuvre, mounted in theaters large and small all over Paris, and lectures by such major figures as the novelist-theorists Philippe Sollers and Hélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and Israel Horovitz, and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 the Pompidou Center will host a major exhibition of and on Beckett's work.

This essay examines the professionalization of United States literary studies and sociology between the 1930s and 1950s under the aegis of John Crowe Ransom's New Criticism and Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism. These paradigms pulled the disciplines to opposite poles of the professional class: Ransom argued for a less sociological literary criticism, while Parsons distanced sociology from the literary tendencies of the Chicago school. However, both implemented similar professional ideologies that synthesized their disciplines' technical and moral claims, and both paradigms involved fantasies that specialized, disciplinary work within the academy can have a broader, moral significance. These ideas remained fantasies, which contradicted the actual effects of the New Criticism and structural functionalism; professionalism became reflexively oriented toward disciplinary self-perpetuation, isolating literature and sociology from the public they were supposed to reform. Ransom and Parsons thus exemplify the disintegration of publicly responsible professionalism—an event with broad implications for the “new class” of postwar knowledge workers.

Scholars have rightly asserted that the cannibal motif of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is the mechanism by which the author covertly addresses colonialist pillaging in Ireland. Less attention has been paid to an unresolved problem, that of the satire's audience. This article claims that its publication in Dublin at the height of the Irish parliamentary session of 1729 suggests that Anglo-Irish legislators were its target readers. If so, the figure of the cannibal may signify how national debt and the mortgaging of future public revenues needed to amortize that debt metaphorically devoured the posterity of the colonized Irish natives. Given that the famine conditions of 1729 had reduced revenues and produced a crisis in paying Ireland's “debt of the nation,” the satire's calendar for the harvesting and slaughtering of Ireland's babies could be taken as mimicry of the debates over how to raise new taxes and schedule their collection and expenditure.

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.

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.

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.