Gilbert White – famed naturalist, clergyman, and sometime-poet – played with the relationship between echoes and poetry in surprising ways in his Natural History of Selborne (1789). White used Latin poetry as an instrument to measure echoes, and he played around with English prosodic ideas about ‘sound echoing’ sense. This chapter’s reading of White’s echo play highlights the ways in which assumptions baked into our category of ‘poetry’ – that it isn’t science, that it is an unlikely instrument for measurements, that it has something to do with expressive subjectivity, that in English it involves feet and substitutions – can obscure what and how people heard in the past. We should be wary of using understandings of lyric forged by Romantic poets and anachronistically instituted as central to all poetry to make sense of how and why someone like White engaged it. We should be wary of assuming even something as basic as how many syllables people of the past heard in particular lines.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night refers to a religious ritual in its title that then is excised from the play. It appears to conform in that way to what Stephen Greenblatt has called “a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out.” Yet the play does not conform to such an antithesis of performance and belief. Rather, it is full of mimetic forms of emotion that embody a sense of ritual that revives and reforms social memory. This chapter examines both social ritual and festive forms (both real and fictional) via analogies with liturgy and masque, on the one hand, and theories of memory and emotion, on the other. In the process, it suggests a rewriting of the boundaries of metaphor and embodiment, as well as the sacred and secular.

Chapter 1 recovers the pastoral precedents for the culture that directly precipitated Cervantes’ first poems within the court of Isabel de Valois (Queen of Spain, 1560–1568), in which literary art forms and forms of cultural practice became intertwined in complex mimetic processes. From Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Sannazaro to Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, the retreat of the pastoral was understood to be a device employed to encode and allegorize the private life and lived experience of the court which made poiesis possible. Drawing on archival records (relaciones) of life in the court, the diary kept by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and histories of Isabel’s reign, Chapter 1 explores the frequent and often improvisational imitation of various literary genres, including the romance of chivalry, by members of the court caught up in erotic entanglements which became the content of pastoral fiction. At the confluence of literary allegory and contemporary history, through the exchange of motes in the terrero, the palace became pastoral.

This chapter considers the place of Ishiguro’s work within the novel tradition. It traces Ishiguro’s dialogue with the novel form, as this extends from Artist of the Floating World to Klara and the Sun, in order to examine the means by which he adapts the tradition to his own ends. The chapter begins and concludes with a reading of Klara and the Sun that focuses on the role of imitation. How far can Klara, the ‘artificial friend’, be regarded as a copy of an existing form of life, and how far does she manifest a new mode of being? And how does Ishiguro adapt the apparatuses of the novel in order to explore the difference, between the imitation of an existing life and the creation, in prose, of an unprecedented one, a fictional life without a model in the world?

Lucian’s Imagines, the literary portrait of Panthea, mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus, offers rich material for resistant readings of the relation between Greek-educated subject and Roman ruler in the second century. Yet the fact that any potential critique of power in it is expressed through means provided by and consonant with Roman power makes any resistance in it difficult to pin down. This chapter compares the Imagines with another second-century literary portrait of power, the self-portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Verus’ co-emperor, in Book One of the Meditations. These portraits of fragmented identities are executed with the same combinatory technique: Panthea’s body and soul are the sum of the best picks from Greek paideia, and the emperor’s self is the sum of the exempla provided by the people in his life. But this commonality highlights, by contrast, the irreconcilability of the respective models and purposes, which makes the Imagines’ neglect of its contemporary world stand out more sharply as a sign of resistance.

Chapter 3 launches with Pseudolus’ opening scene which revolves around a letter. I explore Phoenicium’s epistle to discern how it determines Pseudolus’ comic course as well as audience expectations about what lies ahead, and consider what a letter composed by a meretrix reveals about literacy and the symbolism of writing on the Plautine stage. Next is the play’s protracted indeterminacy, which flies in the face of its textual exposition. Why is Pseudolus uncertain about how to proceed when he himself recites the letter that so clearly sets out the comic plot? The answer lies in this comedy’s claim to dramatic innovation. Pseudolus tells us that its epistolary interception is new to the comic stage, a nova res which inspires in the schemer a novum consilium that neither he nor we expect. But the play repeatedly undercuts its own novelty, a paradox reified in the element around which its innovation revolves – the stolen letter. I perform a close analysis of the false delivery scene in which this text is put into action, reading for its epistolarity but also laying bare the internal replication it effects and the resultant mise-en-abyme.

Slote’s chapter addresses the issue of the multitude of new editions of Joyce’s works using an intersection of translation studies and editorial theory, understanding various translations as new textual entities. Slote draws on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Task of the Translator,” in which the mission of the translator is presented as a mimetic one in that it requires both creation and imitation. Translation, according to Benjamin, aims not at fidelity but at strangeness, not at singularity but as the mapping of a maximum of possibilities. Likewise, editing is a mimetic activity in that – as with translation – it involves transposition from one textual instantiation into a different and new textual instantiation in order to further propagate the text in a new manner, to a new audience. The chapter then looks at various translations of Joyce’s works as new textual entities that also happen to be in different languages. The burgeoning library of Joyce editions will be thus examined not as a continuum of more-or-less precise versions but as an exploration and multiplication of possibilities.

This chapter describes how much of early African American literature takes shape within competing demands and analyzes how early Black writers negotiate it. Indeed, many early African American writers produced their works within a literary double bind that pressured them to be truthful, to write with the highest level of exactitude, to imitate reality precisely, and to produce perfectly mimetic texts; and at the same time, to use their imagination, to create something beautiful, and to produce an aesthetically valuable text. I explore how George Liele, David George, Boston King, and Venture Smith negotiate this literary double bind at the end of the eighteenth century, a time that saw significant historical transitions including the Zong massacre, the American Revolutionary War, the ratification of the US Constitution, and the French and Haitian Revolutions, all against the backdrop of transatlantic slavery and efforts to eradicate it. In these narratives, although white editors, amanuenses, and interlocutors claim that these texts tell the “simple truth,” each exceeds and problematizes the description that emphasizes the texts’ transparent mimetic exactitude by creatively utilizing literary structures of expression, rupturing what Christina Sharpe describes as the episteme of racial slavery.

Book X of the Republic does not ban more mimesis than Book III, nor operate with a different concept of mimesis, two claims often made. It surveys the same territory from a higher, more philosophical perspective, illuminating it particularly by reference to the theory of Forms and the psychology of soul parts that were introduced in sections of the Republic subsequent to Book III. Indeed, its arguments are directed to the philosopher, or someone sympathetic to Plato’s philosophy, not to any and every potential reader. Where they go beyond Book III in scope of what is banned is in pronouncing an anathema upon any poetry oriented towards pleasure rather than to what is beneficial, or upon what Socrates refers to as ‘the honeyed Muse’ – leaving only hymns to the gods and encomia of exemplary, heroic citizens. We endanger our souls and our grip on truth if, in watching tragic drama, we allow ourselves to enjoy grieving over suffering, and to some extent to believe, against our better judgment, that ups and downs of fortune are much more significant than they really are. Book X speaks to us from the viewpoint of eternity, from a position of deep spiritual elitism.

It is often said that in the Republic Plato proposes to ban art and poetry from his ideal society. The truth is that poetry – the right sort of poetry – will be a pervasive presence in the life of the warrior class whose upbringing and education are discussed in Books 2 and 3 of the Republic. What Plato develops here is a systematic anti-democratic programme for reforming music, i.e. musical poetry, incorporating dance as well as song. There are four stages in the programme: first, purging poetic content; second, placing severe restrictions on the manner of performance and on those permitted to engage in it, and particularly on the extent of mimesis or impersonation deemed allowable in performance, on account of its influence on character; third, placing similarly severe restrictions on musical technique, particular on the musical modes composers are allowed to employ in constructing melodies; and fourth, ensuring that the material and social settings in which musical poetry is performed are also designed with a gracefulness and beauty that will work their appropriate effect on the performers, providing the ideal conditions for them to fall in love, homoerotically conceived.

This chapter starts off by discussing the roots of historical anthropology in ‘people’s history’ before the linguistic turn. It then traces the journey from the history workshop movements of the 1960s and 1970s to historical anthropology, focusing on European and Indian groups (the Subaltern Studies Group). It highlights the work of Ann Laura Stoler as an example of how historical anthropology led to new and exciting perspectives in historical writing with deep implications for the deconstruction of historical identities. Historical anthropologists brought with them a concern for the everyday, diversity, performance and resistance and they raised an awareness of the undeterminedness of the past. They also emphasised how collective identities were rooted in constructions of culture. Relating cultural values to practices, diverse theories of the everday examined different structures of power and the agency of ordinary people in resisting and re-appropriating these structures of power. Treating culture as fluid, plural and changing, it also contributed to the de-essentialisation of human identities. Emphasising mimetic processes and the interrelationship of diverse mimetically produced images, historical anthropology also contributed to the decentring of Western perspectives.

This chapter investigates the relation of style to the emergent poetics of the novel in the Victorian era. It considers the proximity of 'style' to 'craft' and the way that representations of making in three Victorian novels address the principles and the practices of craft – though rarely are the principles and practices in perfect unison given the 'makeshift creativity' discussed here. What is at stake in these representations is a question about representation itself: namely, whether style is mimetic or whether it may be more excessive, improvisatory or haphazard than that.

Responding to critics who argue that telegraphy is an analogy for style (or at least for realism) in Victorian fiction, in this chapter David Trotter argues conversely that it is in fact inimical to style. Telegraphic communication, while hard to represent, or distasteful in its crudeness, could not be ignored. The novelists understood that it could be essential to human intercourse and, on occasion, oddly romantic. Daniel Deronda is the example par excellence.

Dickinson’s inability to tell the story of slavery is contrasted with M. NourbeSe Philip’s lifework Zong!, a book that attempts to listen to the missing, those who have been obliterated from the judicial archive or murdered in the Black Atlantic. Zong! is derived from a set of procedural constraints, using a legal summary of the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision – a case that determined whether slaves thrown overboard could be claimed as insured goods – to produce sequences of dispersed poems, associated texts and performances. Philip compares these procedural constraints to entering the hold, and her acts of linguistic selection and discarding to those of the slave masters. This radical attempt to restage the violences of history and recover the lost are complicated by her contention that the lyric poet must act as a bridge between the individual and the group. This chapter consider how Philip’s practice moves from page-based experiments with formal constraints, through an antagonistic relationship to the colonial lyric, into collective performance. It considers the significance of re-enactment and ritual in Philip’s work to channel the voices of the ancestors and disrupt the silences of the archive.

Catullus‘ polymetric poems often show a keen interest in the book-roll, its appearance and significance. The book as an object becomes a way of thinking about the nature of representation, and about what the relationship is between the individual poet and the work that he produces. This is a topic only in the polymetric section of Catullus’ corpus; we do not see references to books in the elegies, and in only one of the longer poems.

Against those who say that the ancient world never developed a theory of fiction, the chapter argues that a concept of fiction is operative already in Homer and is articulated in Aristotle’s Poetics, and explores the relationship between ancient and modern theories of what kind of assent audiences and readers give to what they are reading or seeing on the stage.

This chapter concerns itself with the fulfillment, or carrying out, of the work of art according to Gadamer. The chapter takes a cue from Gadamer and uses lyric poetry as the paradigm for such fulfillment. The experience of art is a hermeneutic experience that is a linguistic phenomenon with a speculative dimension. Poetic language is representative of language use in general, as it achieves a certain ideality. This chapter argues for the positive ontological stake of poetry. The essay considers the poetry of Rilke and Mallarme in relation to Hegel’s speculative thought and relates this to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The concepts of contemporaneity and aesthetic nondifferentiation are explicated.