Readers of American literature increasingly already know something about the career of Cherokee writer and editor John Rollin Ridge. In the preface to his 2018 breakout novel There There, Tommy Orange offers readers his version of Ridge’s claim to fame: “The first novel by a Native person, and the first novel written in California, was written in 1854, by a Cherokee guy named John Rollin Ridge.”1 The novel Orange references is Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, a semifictional story of a Mexican war veteran driven to vengeance by the cruelty of white settlers. Although it did not sell well in Ridge’s lifetime, Penguin Random House’s new addition suggests that Ridge’s importance to college syllabi and American literary scholarship will only deepen in the years ahead. As Ridge’s biographer notes, while it failed to provide Ridge with the financial security he desired, the novel birthed a public interest in Joaquín Murieta’s story that has been with us ever since.2

This introduction lays out the primary contributions of the volume as a whole, loosely organizing the essays under the umbrella of three themes: form and genre, networks, and methods for living. The introduction also charts major shifts in the composition of nineteenth-century American literary studies, including changes in major methods, archives, and historical foci.

The first chapter claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic, and by extension, questions the English novel’s complicity in propagating that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire, surfaces to the diegetic level in a classic instance of a thematization of the device and becomes available for critical contemplation. Drawing from Max Weber, Mary Poovey, and Georg Lukács, I attend in particular to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve’s recasting of Sutpen’s life as a debtor’s farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a transnational fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the discovery of original forms with which to express the modern transnational world order.

The introduction sets down the blueprint and specifies how the argument builds upon existing understandings of the novel. Taking as my starting point the critical reluctance to acknowledge Defoe as the first English novelist, I trace the interdependence of Enlightenment thought, accounting practices, and literary realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also offer an overview of how theories of the novel have depended on the conceptual scaffolding of the antinomy. Long deployed by philosophers to structure unwieldy abstractions, the antinomy functioned also as tool to grasp the most diffuse of literary forms. Hence theorists as various as Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Michael McKeon, and Frederic Jameson all posit that the novel is built in the tense field opened between opposing forces. By contrast, Adorno’s model of the Leibnizian monad asserts that art is always already tainted by the outside world, partly constituted by empirical logic. Over the more popular antinomic construction, I follow Adorno’s conception of art as absorptive monad . I further explain the book’s focus on select Anglophone writers and the three prerequisites for aspiring to speak for the world.

What does Aquinas mean when he speaks of ‘spiritual’ change in explaining sense perception? This chapter is partly exegesis of that notion, partly explication of the author’s own previous invocation of ‘spiritual’ change to characterise the way perception for Aristotle takes on sensible form without matter, and partly explanation of why in philosophy since Descartes it is so difficult to understand how for Aristotle and Aquinas perception is both physical and mental. For both thinkers, it is an ‘unordinary’ physical alteration. That does not make it a ‘mental’ event in any sense that contrasts with ‘physical’. In sight the eye is coloured by the sensible form of red conceived not as a natural form, but as what Aquinas calls an intentio. The notion of intentio here expresses the idea of cognitive awareness, or of sensible form causing knowledge in a being which has the power of cognition. Aquinas calls sight the ‘most spiritual’ of the senses because, whereas with the operation of the other senses ordinary natural processes are required either as causal antecedents or concomitant effects, in sight there is no similar natural change at all. In its power of cognition alone we reach the end of explanation.

This is a close scrutiny of De Anima II.5, led by two questions. First, what can be learned from so long and intricate a discussion about the neglected problem of how to read an Aristotelian chapter? Second, what can the chapter, properly read, teach us about some widely debated issues in Aristotle’s theory of perception? I argue that it refutes two claims defended by Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Sorabji: (i) that when Aristotle speaks of the perceiver becoming like the object perceived, the assimilation he has in mind is ordinary alteration of the type exemplified when fire heats the surrounding air, (ii) that this alteration stands to perceptual awareness as matter to form. Claim (i) is wrong because the assimilation that perceiving is is not ordinary alteration. Claim (ii) is wrong because the special type of alteration that perceiving is is not its underlying material realisation. Indeed, there is no mention in the text of any underlying material realisation for perceiving.

Chapter 7 explores voices at the margin of society in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. To the extent this novel on seafaring is autobiographical, it also explores Conrad himself as a marginal subject. The novel is one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a class of people frequently considered to be marginal: a multinational group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh and deadly conditions, executing their menial jobs heroically (with notable exceptions). To move from the margin to the center, take up the pen and write a compelling story about this life for the middle-class literary establishment – first published in the conservative W. E. Henley’s The New Review in 1897 – is the part of Conrad’s achievement I focus on in this chapter. The chapter explores how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor – like the heroism of serving coffee, which the novel discusses.

The short story is not just a story that is short: the short story generally differs significantly from the novel in terms of scope, timeframe, number of characters and locations. How details acquire priority in short fiction. The relationships between the short story, flash fiction and poetry. The challenges and pleasures of short and very short fiction. The usefulness of short form writing to the developing novelist in the scope it offers for experimentation with narrative voice, characterisation and dialogue, as well as its value in its own right.

‘It is a complexity of afterthought, a psychological or emotional residue, that we seek to leave with the reader following the intense experience of consuming a short story.’

Chapter 4 provides the fullest discussion to date of the range of formal devices employed in the Tour. It suggests that Defoe enlists these to build up a regional scheme that will unify his picture of the nation, parallel in some ways to the zones into which modern British highways are divided, with a map to illustrate the process. A table and a map show the larger towns in Britain around 1700, with a population of 5,000 or more, as a basis for discussion of Defoe’s coverage of urban settlements. Further, the chapter provides a comparison with the methods used in previous travel writing, such as antiquarians (John Leland, William Camden) and subsequent authors of literary journeys (for example, Celia Fiennes, John Macky, William Cobbett). It defines the originality of the work within the history of this genre by means of a semiotic square, adapted from the schema developed by A.J. Greimas.

We understand Aristotle’s soul–body hylomorphism better if we first understand the critical discussions of his predecessors which occupy most of the first book of his De Anima.  Given that he regards his view as preferable to all earlier approaches, he must also think that his alternative, hylomorphism, avoids the pitfalls he identifies in those positions. In some cases, it is easy to see why he might think hylomorphism is defensible where they are not: for instance, he regards the reductively materialistic views of the earliest natural philosophers as explanatorily impoverished. In other cases, however, this is far from clear. Aristotle highlights for special consideration the view that the soul is a harmonia (attunement) of the body, a view which, as was noted in antiquity, bears more than a passing resemblance to his own hylomorphism. It proves both difficult and instructive to determine, then, how he supposes hylomorphism avoids the problems he identifies in the doctrine of the soul as a harmonia. The core difference, it emerges, turns on Aristotle’s thoroughgoing teleology: the soul, he thinks, unlike a harmonia, has an intrinsic good toward which the body is orchestrated.

I present an overview of On the Soul, Aristotle’s investigation into how psuchē (soul) explains biological phenomena in a unified way. This principle serves as a final, formal, and efficient cause of living activities. Soul needs specific consideration because it is a unique sort of form. It is responsible not just for giving living things their capacities, but also for when and how they exercise these capacities. Soul orders the ways in which living things grow, reproduce, move, and cognize the world. It accounts for all the more specific capacities and activities of the living thing. Studying soul thus gives Aristotle the opportunity to make some of his most subtle distinctions about kinds of capacity and activity. Aristotle’s discussion of soul as cause also prepares the way for considering how it works together with body, as Aristotle does in the Parva Naturalia and biological works. I then present synopses of the chapters in this guide and discuss how they relate to one another.

This chapter first argues against the widely accepted “mentalist” interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the perception of external objects. On that view, the perception of objects results from an act of synthesis of the diverse perceptual input provided by the different sense modalities. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of perception does not require such mental “construction” of external objects. For him, we unfailingly perceive external objects by way of modally specific perception: perception without qualification is primarily of external 3-D objects, while modally specific perception is of perceptual qualities. As the special senses cannot operate in isolation from the perceptual system as a whole, it follows that we see colors, hear sounds, etc., and thereby perceive the objects whose colors and sounds they are. The second part offers a causal interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of perception as “reception of the form without the matter,” according to which the causal history of sensory affection fixes the content of the resulting act of perception: perception is cognitive in virtue of being the matterless presence of external things’ qualities in the perceiver.

Like any good Aristotelian, Duns Scotus held that human beings share this feature with a large section of the created world. This essay provides an in-depth presentation and assessment of some crucial aspects of Duns Scotus’s contribution to the later medieval debate on hyomorphism, including his views on the existence and nature of prime matter, the plurality of substantial forms in a material substance, and the nature of animate substances.

This chapter is focused on Aristotle’s account of sensibility in De Anima II 12. My thesis is that the account defines sensibility as the standard in relation to which perceptible qualities are the sorts of quality they are. To illustrate, Aristotle holds that some colors are dark, others light; this implies that the spectrum of dark and light is “divided” into two “sides,” one dark, the other light. In the previous chapter I suggested that what it is for a quality to lie on one side of a spectrum – e.g. to be one of the dark colors – is a matter of its relation to the “middle” of the associated spectrum. In this chapter I argue that the claim that sensibility just is “as it were a kind of mean of the contrariety in perceptible qualities” implies that these “middles” are defined by sensibility itself, the form or essence of the primary sense organ. The upshot is that the senses are “forms” or “standards” of perceptible qualities, in that the particular qualities known by their means are the sorts of quality they are (e.g. dark colors or light ones) thanks to their relationship to the form of the primary sense organ.

Thomas Adès has mused on symphonic form in terms of logic and resolution – as ‘something which closes a circle’. Nevertheless, his interest in the symphonies of Jean Sibelius is sparked by their resistance to this trend; the one-movement Seventh Symphony, in particular, is a work he hears as ‘painfully inconclusive’. This contradiction plays out in Adès’s own one-movement symphony, Tevot (2007). In both works, audible developments are underpinned by a carefully managed network of tempos. Recurring sonorities not only delineate this structure but also prompt perceptual shifts, underlining forms that are at once stable and volatile, recurrent and changing, static and dynamic, closed and open. In this chapter, the Seventh Symphony offers a potent lens through which Tevot can be viewed, shedding light not only upon Adès’s navigation of symphonic resolution, but also upon the way in which he – like Sibelius – engages with symphonic traditions at large.

Thomas Adès described his compositions as the ‘organic, necessary’ linking of ‘tiny cells’ into larger structures by a ‘musical logic.’ This chapter demonstrates how successions of dyads in his two recent operas follow the logic of a specific musical transformation, retrograde-inversion chaining. This distinctively temporal process establishes cyclical patterns which can be realised, twisted or broken in various dramatic situations. In The Tempest, the cycles direct the music in ways that express Prospero’s power and Caliban’s resistance. Such logic, applied to different materials, also permeates The Exterminating Angel. On the surface, the retrograde-inversion chains represent the dissipation of the characters’ will. More deeply, though, the logic underwrites the tonality and form in the Act I lovers’ duet, the ‘Fugue of Panic’ and Leticia’s creative exuberance at a pivotal dramatic moment. These observations offer insight into how Adès controls musical time on the very largest scale.