The Introduction offers a rationale for the first general analysis for a number of years of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. It sets forth the distinctive emphasis of the new volume and justifies its focus on Johnson’s “criteria of the heart.” This formulation points to the emotional foundation for many of Johnson’s literary judgments. How Johnson’s emotional demands count as criteria is then explained and the connection between the chapters is spelled out. Each explores Johnson’s critical artistry or aspects of his thought – the application of philosophical rigor to statements of critical opinion. The Introduction stresses the poetical character of Johnson’s critical prose and looks forward to the prose of the Lives of the Poets; a passage from this work has served as the basis for David Ferry’s poetical recreation of Johnson. The introductory excursus suggests that categories commonly employed to explain Johnson’s criticism in historical terms will always strike the wrong note. They make unwarranted assumptions about the nature and progress of criticism and disfigure our sense of Johnson’s place within critical history.

Johnson’s critical relationship with Thomas Warton is the subject of this chapter. The chapter examines their respective approaches to the writing of poetical history. Warton, as antiquarian, brings old poetry into the light; Johnson brings out the present value of poetry already known. Warton reads past societies through their lost literatures and by measuring the rational relation of historical causes to historical effects; Johnson’s concern is poetry as a source of pleasure and consolation. Warton is often highly digressive as a poetical historian; Johnson is frequently condensed, direct and economical. But the two friends also have much in common, not least their focus upon the literary past as such. This is recalled in Johnson’s work on the Harleian Library catalogue; his sense of the history of the language is manifest in his Dictionary etymologies and his glosses on Shakespearean language. As critics and poetical historians, they share a sense of poetry’s improvement over time. Warton’s audience is in the main the curious reader; Johnson’s is the common reader. But this implies no diminution in the curiosity Johnson brought to the poetical past.

This chapter tackles the term “truth” as a criterion of Johnson’s criticism. The central focus is Johnson’s apparent preference for poetical works based on actual events from history. In two exemplary cases from Dryden and Pope there is the implicit suggestion that such an anchorage in history is a merit. But there are many occasions – the defective historical allegory of Absalom and Achitophel and Johnson’s taste for the fanciful imaginings in Shakespeare’s comedies (as against the “Histories”). Here critical judgments cannot be reliably linked to such a preference. Analysis concludes that Johnson sought forms of artistry based in the foundational power of common experience: not the mystical, the occult or the abstruse. This is an emotional need for Johnson: The mind “loves” truth. But such a need in no way excluded the fact that Johnson attached extraordinary value to the poetical imagination; it did not weaken his demand for its presence in poetry.

Mesopotamian metal’, which includes bands like Absu, Agga, Arallu, Bohema, Decimation, Melechesh, Svartsyn or Tiamat, is a sub-discourse and substyle of metal music that deals with the history of ancient Mesopotamia mainly thematically. Crucial here is the reference to ancient times in this region of the Middle East. The first section of this chapter gives an introduction to the concept of Mesopotamian metal. The most relevant bands are introduced, with Melechesh serving as the paradigmatic example. The next part focuses on the role of history, analysing how the construction of history is undertaken in Mesopotamian metal. It is shown that this discourse promotes a certain brand of historical politics to help solve problems in the present, most of all in the conflict-ridden region of the Middle East. The third part deals with the regional and global contextual linkages of Mesopotamian metal. Summarising this argumentation, the conclusion argues that possibly we can from the past through metal music.

The Blanc casinos were marketed through the cultivation of an impression of honesty and mechanical universality. The study of probability, which arose historically in relationship to the calculation of gambling odds, provided a way to measure the honesty of a casino. Probability, as it was expressed in the context of nineteenth-century resort casinos, was the object of renewed interest among professional mathematicians and amateurs seeking to understand the logic of the games they played. There are three avenues through which this amplified interest in probability was expressed in the nineteenth century: the analysis of “runs” (a long sequence of identical results), the systems that gamblers developed for beating the odds, and the casino as an experimental space for mathematicians in the nineteenth century. Together, these developments suggest that the nineteenth-century casino provided a novel opportunity for inquiry into areas such as the nature of time, the limits of causation, and the science of probability.

This chapter reconstructs an anti-imperial popular sovereignty. Via Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay “Beyond Vietnam,” I theorize how peoples are lured to partake in imperial projects that benefit global oligarchies. In response, King proposes a geopolitics of popular sovereignty that calls peoples to position themselves historically vis-à-vis other peoples who are the targets of aggression. This requires the people to differentiate their own popular will from oligarchic projects of outward domination and to withdraw demands for well-being that depend on the exploitation of others and the crushing of revolutionary movements. This tradition of popular sovereignty urges worldliness and historical awareness among western peoples and extends anti-oligarchic discourses of peoplehood to criticize unholy western alliances with elites in the developing world. I juxtapose this account with Frantz Fanon’s writings on postcolonial democracy, national consciousness, and transnationalism, which criticize postcolonial oligarchies that remain wedded to empire and demand a parallel recognition. This reading yields a renewed language of popular sovereignty that identifies potential radical affinities between differently located collectives struggling against global capitalist accumulation violently enabled by dominant states.

The introduction sets out the intent of the book, an overview of the major works in the field, and a view of the arguments appearing in each chapter. Gambling is central to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Studying casino gambling provides a way to see how nineteenth-century Europeans understood their changing world, even as it also reflected those changes itself. In this way gambling was used in an explanatory capacity, one that let contemporaries probe the inner workings of the machine and the creation of knowledge. If we want to understand the intricate dance of society, culture, politics, and ideas, then gambling is a useful tool to pry open these different stories, allowing us to see better large historical transformations.

This essay presents congruities between Sebald’s juvenilia and his major works of prose fiction to reveal a portrait of a budding artist who never wandered far from his personal and literary origins and yet learned his lessons from these youthful ventures into writing. It introduces selections from his unpublished and fragmentary literary writings from the 1960s, which are housed in his literary estate at the DLA. These include the short narratives ‘Wartend’ (‘Waiting’) and the untitled story about Herr G. (Mr G.), along with the six-page play Der Traum ein Leben oder die Geschichte des Fr. v. Sch. (The Dream A Life, Or The Story of Fr. v. Sch.), and the two versions of his untitled novel. In these texts, one finds Sebald’s early critiques of capitalism and consumer culture, his interest in the uncanny, the agency of material objects, the crisis of the artist, the horrors of the past, the influence and violence of the totalitarian personality, the power of images, and the destruction wrought by nature. Sebald’s juvenilia make clear that they foreshadow the philosophical, historical, and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction.

Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. The chapter maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows, who some of the pioneers were, and how exhibition standards have developed over time.

This chapter contextualizes narrative drawing, first identifying the types of drawing that are specific to comics. It proposes that the comics medium intervenes in the long history of drawing, by introducing polygraphy as a recurrent feature of comics. Referring to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony (or multiple voices) in the novel, polygraphy accounts for the techniques of accumulating diverse graphic indices of the labor and ideas of drafters and comics producers and distributors. The chapter shows how polygraphy produces comics, considering the work of William Hogarth, Katsushika Hokusai, Rodolphe Töpffer, Marie Duval, George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Osamu Tezuka. Through this cast of creators, the chapter also foregrounds important moments in comics history such as the boom in periodical print in the nineteenth century, the influence of acting and performance practices, and, later, movie. This chapter equips readers with the necessary tools to understand the fundamental means of visualizing stories in comics – drawing – and offers a comics history contextualized through relevant developments in popular visual and print culture.

Introduces the Volume

Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene has three interrelated agendas: (1) It establishes Thomas Pynchon’s three longest novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day – as an ambitious, world-historical trilogy about the emergence and global spread of European modernity and thus presents a groundbreaking new understanding of one of the most important contemporary novelists. (2) On the basis of the analysis of the trilogy’s profound engagement with global history, it presents an elaborate discussion of Pynchon’s historical methods, which refines our understanding of Pynchon as an author of historical fiction and challenges prevalent notions of his relation to literary postmodernism. (3) It charts Pynchon’s early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including their close connection to modernity’s and globalization’s demand for constant growth. In so doing, it constitutes an important corrective to other recent studies of literature and the Anthropocene, showing how literary fiction is not merely a belated reflection of scientific debates about the Anthropocene, but has taken an early and active part in establishing the contours of the current discussions.

Thomas Pynchon is frequently read as an American author who writes American novels about American reality, but this chapter argues that he can fruitfully be considered one of our leading novelists of globalization, and it establishes the considerable benefits – and perhaps even the necessity – of considering his largest novels, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, one coherent world-historical trilogy about the gestation and global progression of modernity. After positioning this argument in discussions of world literature as well as in the larger field of Pynchon studies, the chapter identifies a number of parallels between the three novels in the trilogy, and it argues that in order to reveal the coherent nature and full scope of Pynchon’s historical project, his three global novels are best read not in their sequence of publication, but in an order that reflects the historical periods they depict. Reading Pynchon’s novels in this order has precedents in the critical work of Samuel Thomas, Sascha Pöhlmann, and Dale Carter, and it paves the ground for the book’s elaborate analysis of the progressive historical narrative in Pynchon’s trilogy.

In his path-breaking 1954 monograph, Nations nègres et culture, the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop denounced Western histories for providing false justification for European imperialism and perpetuating notions of the inferiority of Black peoples. Diop called instead for histories that revalorized the African past and demonstrated Black contributions to world history. By contextualizing Diop’s historiographical interventions in terms of his anticolonial politics and the work of other anticolonial and anti-racist thinkers, this chapter shows how, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, the terrain of history was a key battleground of anti-racist and anticolonial activism. The multiple sites in which anticolonial and anti-racist histories were developed – from museums like the Musée de l’Homme through journals such as Présence Africaine, and organizational initiatives funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiatives – are central to this story.

The third chapter of the book analyzes Pynchon’s portrayal of the complex geopolitical situation around 1900. Against the Day is the longest and most relentlessly globetrotting novel in the global trilogy, and the chapter traces the different literary mapping strategies that Pynchon employs to depict the progress of modernity across the planet and his characters’ restless traverses through this and other worlds. The chapter also analyzes Pynchon’s deft use of various genres from the depicted period, just as it discusses the novel’s curious non-depiction of World War I and Pynchon’s rendering of the defeatist attitude which made the war possible. Finally, through an analysis of the related themes of bilocation and refraction the chapter shows which modes of resistance Pynchon’s longest novel proposes to place against the day, and it undertakes a close reading of the novel’s highly ambiguous epilogue, which leads directly into Gravity’s Rainbow.

Chapter 4 proceeds to the first published, but chronologically last, installment of the trilogy, Gravity’s Rainbow, and begins with an analysis of the multiple temporalities of that novel, which are discussed in dialogue with the historiographical theories of Reinhart Kosseleck. It then examines Pynchon’s both bleak and desperately funny depiction of how modernity reached its dark apogee in World War II, where humanity’s romantic affair with technology was finally fully consummated. In particular, this theme is traced through a meticulous analysis of the theme of immachination, which runs through all three novels but reaches its natural (or unnatural) culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow. In dialogue with important critical work by Ali Chetwynd as well as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, the chapter concludes by revisiting the pervasive metaphor of the crossroads and the related theme of complicity in order to discuss whether the novel – and the global trilogy in general – is as relentlessly negative as they argue or whether it poses possible alternatives to the status quo.

Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene has three interrelated agendas: (1) It establishes Thomas Pynchon’s three longest novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day – as an ambitious, world-historical trilogy about the emergence and global spread of European modernity and thus presents a groundbreaking new understanding of one of the most important contemporary novelists. (2) On the basis of the analysis of the trilogy’s profound engagement with global history, it presents an elaborate discussion of Pynchon’s historical methods, which refines our understanding of Pynchon as an author of historical fiction and challenges prevalent notions of his relation to literary postmodernism. (3) It charts Pynchon’s early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including their close connection to modernity’s and globalization’s demand for constant growth. In so doing, it constitutes an important corrective to other recent studies of literature and the Anthropocene, showing how literary fiction is not merely a belated reflection of scientific debates about the Anthropocene, but has taken an early and active part in establishing the contours of the current discussions.