The introduction charts the ways in which literary studies and animal studies have formed a mutually enriching dialogue. Starting with a selection of contemporary short stories, and exploring questions of exploitation, anthropomorphism, and metaphor, it demonstrates how animals alter the way we think about, write, and read literature. The introduction includes a summary of the chapters contained in the book.

Regional literature plays a bigger part in the ‘national story’ than is generally acknowledged in Australia; indeed, paying attention to regional writing intervenes in prevailing ways of thinking about national literary history. Regional literature does not sit inside a broader national frame, but instead intersects in dynamic ways in the production of Australian regions that map across local, national and even global coordinates. This chapter engages with the regional novel in Australia as an historic, contemporary and future-making force with diverse community investment. It maps the rich history of regional writing in Australia and assembles an account of regional literary scholarship, from the literary history of the Western Australian Wheatbelt, to Queensland’s mining towns, to Tasmania and the Northern Territory, to Gippsland and the Mallee in Victoria. It considers the scope of different studies of regional literature, and the ways in which regional literature has been conceived and received. While regional literary histories have often sought to highlight neglected or little-known literary works, some have also perpetuated narrow narratives of place through traditional definitions of what counts as regional writing. This chapter advocates an expanded view of the regional novel from the nineteenth century to today, acknowledging the ancient histories of storytelling and extending the coordinates of what ‘counts’ as regional. It seeks to affirm the influence of works of genre fiction which frequently have clearly defined regional settings but are not always included in national histories of literature. Broadening definitions of the regional novel allows a more inclusive account of Australian writing, bringing into visibility more diverse Australian places and texts.

The Introduction outlines crucial intellectual contexts and frameworks for thinking about how Cicero's Brutus is a crucial intervention in the the civic crisis and the writing of literary history. It also surveys the scholarship to date and examines how Cicero's project reflects general trends in academic inquiry and civic government.

This chapter shows how graphic novels have not only become more colorful over the last two decades but also more visually complex. The chapter surveys discussions of the graphic novel’s literary complexity, from Richard Corben’s early Bloodstar to Alan Moore’s Watchmen. This reappropriation of a modernist strategy models itself on the rise of the novel but also reacts to a long-term audience decline for comics. Section 4.2 builds on recent uptakes of complexity in digital literary and digital film studies to advance computational measurements that combine image and text recognition. The final pages return to Moore and Alison Bechdel to assess the relevance of complexity for the popular success and cultural prestige of individual comic books.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

The epilogue draws out some broader conclusions from this study, encouraging us to rethink traditional narratives of ancient literary history. Archaic poets already participated in a sophisticated and well-developed allusive system, and Hellenistic/Roman poets’ ‘footnoting’ habits are not as novel, bookish or scholarly as we might think. The epilogue further asks why these indices have not been identified or studied at such length before; it explores variation in indexical practice across genres and time; and it highlights further avenues for further research.

“Histories” shows how Persian literary histories emerged from modernizing historiographers’ engagement with the tazkirah, a premodern Persianate genre of literary anthology. The contradictions the tazkirahs posed served as an invitation to produce literary history, in opposition to what modernizers saw as deficiencies in the premodern tazkirah tradition. These contradictions and deficiencies included the fact that tazkirah writers did not see history as linear, progressive, and teleological, nor was historical accuracy necessarily a concern of theirs. This chapter examines how modernizing intellectuals changed conceptions of "history," turned premodern Persian literature into national heritage, and transformed premodern scholars into national heroes.

“Erotics” engages questions of homoeroticism and bawdy poetry, two interconnected themes that appear throughout the Persianate literary heritage and the tazkirah tradition but pose problems for modern literary historiographers. While pre-nineteenth-century Persianate writing abounds in frank, unabashed depictions of homoerotic sexuality -- the dominant literary convention for depicting love -- modernizers of Persianate literature adopt a Victorian-influenced approach that emphasized bashful silence about sexuality, particularly homoeroticism. As Persian literary historians were faced with making sense of the ribald erotic poetry at the heart of the tradition they wrote about, homoerotic conventions coalesced as objects of scorn and relics of the premodern world against which modernizing historiographers positioned themselves

The Introduction situates the issues discussed in the manuscript within the existing historiography of Iranian and South Asian Studies and provides an overview of the "Persianate" framework, focusing on Persian and Urdu languages and literatures. The central arguments of the book are presented: that Urdu should be seen as a continuation of the Persian tradition in India, and furthermore that Urdu played a crucial role for Iranians seeking to modernize the Persianate heritage. Therefore, Urdu is vital to the story of the emergence of Persian literary history. This argument disrupts the conventional, dominant view that Persian heavily influenced Urdu, but Urdu had no impact on Persian. The chapter concludes with an outline of the rest of the book.

Wittgenstein did not address the question of history directly or extensively. But his vision of language is pervasively historical and has implications for the way we do literary history. This chapter examines the idea of use at the heart of Wittgenstein’s vision of language, especially how it differs from the question of context, and how it is related to “forms of life.” After exemplifying these concepts in Wittgenstein by revisiting some of the early remarks in the Philosophical Investigations, I explore the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to show how the teaching of the differences in the use of words is at the heart of its practice. Finally, I highlight the work of an exemplary critic, William Empson, who regarded his work as an important corrective to the OED, and whose work is highly attuned to the history of use. The implications of Wittgenstein’s vision of language with its fundamental revision of linguistic agency show that much contemporary historical criticism is not historical enough.

“Reading: John Dryden’s Postsecular Apostolic and the Time of Literary History” analyzes John Dryden’s writings of the 1680s, tracking his move (his literary conversion if you will) from allegory and allegoresis to new concepts of literary history and literary hermeneutics that demand new reading practices. It analyzes Dryden’s mid-career allegories as investigations into how conservative theories of temporality, figured here as the possibility of understanding across time, produce theories of literature and theories of reading that are oriented toward the future but that are necessarily grounded in the past and in material bodies. This chapter argues that Dryden’s writings from the 1680s secularize a ritualized, affective, transformative, and Catholic reading practice. It speculates that a literary conservatism – literary temporality as communion and literary interpretation as committed to a hermeneutics of immanence – constitutes a conservatively based idea of reading that resonates once again in the twenty-first century critical turn to post-critical and post-nationalistic methods.

In the introduction, I analyze visual artists’ depictions of poor white people that were produced in the 1890s and the 1930s—periods of economic depression—in order to make the case that representations of poor white southerners often serve as barometers of the cultural anxieties gripping members of the middle class. Works by two American artists—E. W. Kemble, an illustrator best known for the drawings he produced for the first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Walker Evans, a photographer who collaborated with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—illustrate how unflattering depictions of poor whites act as foils for higher-status white people’s desired self-conceptions. This analysis models the methodology I use throughout this study by establishing how representations of poor white southerners can serve as windows onto the middle-class (and occasionally upper-class) people who create and consume them.

The introduction pursues three aims: it examines the problems of representing beginnings in literary history in general; it explains the value of a literary history that focuses on the beginnings, rather than the subsequent development, of vernacular literatures in medieval Europe; and it describes the advantages of a comparative approach. In respect of the first aim, it argues that we should neither posit a unitary beginning for literature in any language nor think in terms of causes and effects: every literary tradition passes through multiple moments of incipience and opening, and their study reveals conditions of possibility, not mechanistic causes. Second, a concentration on beginning obliges us to define what begins, thereby bringing to light the distinctive features of each vernacular literature. Third, the comparative perspective reveals the matrix of defining characteristics that the nascent European literatures of the Middle Ages all share: their manuscript materiality, their institutionalization in systems of textual practice which confer stability and persistence in space and time, and, finally, their linguistic vernacularity, which defines them over against their respective ‘parental’ literacies in Latin, Greek, or Church Slavonic.