Category Archives: Wiley: Literature Compass

When the master’s tools fail: Racial euphemism in Shakespeare appropriation, or, the activist value of Premodern Critical Race Studies

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Abstract

As premodern studies continues to develop tools for anti-racist scholarship and pedagogy, this essay establishes the stakes of adaptation/appropriation studies especially committing to these efforts. Turning to the novel The Serpent of Venice, I demonstrate how appropriations that engage with race too often employ what I frame as racial euphemism: palliative engagements with race that sidestep questions of power and inequity. This is especially true for those attempting to maintain distance between Shakespeare and questions of race, and especially racism, often under the guise of historical accuracy. This racially euphemistic approach, therefore, disseminates to especially wide audiences white supremacist approaches to race. Premodern Critical Race Studies provides a vital activist framework, and with it, important conceptual and methodological tools, that help adaptation/appropriation scholars identify racial euphemism in premodern retellings, while at the same time offering appropriators scholarship that can help them craft anti-racist appropriations that resist the idea of a race-neutral past.

Multiply‐translated Chaucer in the Korean classroom

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Abstract

This paper introduces a teaching experiment that uses a set of local translations of a European medieval text—in this case, Korean translations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—as teaching texts in the Korean classroom alongside the original work. Students compare a range of translations dating from all periods of the 20th century, including one from as early as 1915 and others from the 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s. Tracking the variety of translation methods and different linguistic and artistic choices employed by these multiple translations allows even students unfamiliar with Middle English to gain a better sense of the particulars of Chaucer's language and character-making. Treating translation itself as a creative mode, this paper argues that even bad translations and messy histories of linguistic interference can be put to productive pedagogical use. Recuperated local translation archives can be used in the teaching of Middle English literature by helping students understand Chaucer's own positionality as a translator and compiler. Such archives also contribute to the study of comparative literature more broadly as they present case studies of how ideas of world literature are formed over time and space, and encourage a critical engagement with the canon even as it is being taught.

Teaching Chaucer in Tunisia: An interdisciplinary approach

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Abstract

Pedagogies of the premodern in anglophone contexts face many obstacles, like cultural differences, linguistic remoteness, and stereotypical representations. In EFL learning and teaching settings, student motivation, cultural adequation, and historical imagination are also needed. In Tunisia, this was further complicated after the Jasmine Revolution when newly radicalised students of English resented aspects of premodern literature which they considered inaccurate, uninteresting, or inappropriate. In this paper, the author presents a learning and teaching model developed to help post-revolutionary Tunisian learners with diverse backgrounds and orientations better understand and appreciate the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Combining elements of cognitive studies, comparative literature, and digital codicology, this bricolage was used in graduate seminars at the University of Sousse to study digitised manuscripts and texts in Arabic, Latin, and (Middle) English. Informed by active pedagogy and enhanced by audio-visual aids, activities based on this model effectively addressed challenges, helped achieve learning outcomes, and made Tunisians more at home with Chaucer.

Crafting and collecting cyanotypes: Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

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This essay reads Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853) as an example of Victorian imitative art by reading it through the lens of Victorian domestic handicraft. It does so in order to resituate Atkins's work within the history of scientific visualization and to contribute to the increasing complexity scholars of visual culture and of the scientific image have added to prevailing accounts of the rise of the “objective” scientific image in the nineteenth-century. Building on the work of historians of photography, art, science, and literature, it argues that her cyanotypes point toward an alternative history of scientific image as a form of craft and collection that resonates with recent calls in the study of the scientific image and scientific practices to move “beyond representation.”

Reading the museum

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The museum is not a neutral container, a passive collection of art and artifacts. Rather the museum is itself a historical argument, using objects and their relations to write our collective stories. This essay shows how the museum, as it developed within nineteenth-century European imperialism, directs meaning both within and beyond literature. The museum integrates readers into its collections and its narratives, directing them figuratively and literally through exhibits. Nineteenth-century literature, I argue, capitalizes on this dynamic interplay among the collection, the viewing subject, and the museum's ideologies. In both poetry and prose the museum appears as a place, a concept, and a form. For example, William Thackeray's “May Day Ode” shows how the Crystal Palace and the 1851 Great Exhibition facilitate an imperialist agenda. The galleries in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, meanwhile, are not just places the characters go; they also exert control over how characters (and readers) experience and evaluate collections. Across these texts, the museum is setting and theme. But, I argue, the museum also works as form, curating the collections, the characters who visit them, and the readers who access the narrative through museum logics. In conjunction with literary examples and an overview of scholarly conversations around nineteenth-century museum studies, I consider how the museum continues to direct bodies, interpretations, and ideas today by drawing on my experiences using museums in the college classroom.

Rethinking the nineteenth‐century museum via the Ottoman imperial museum

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Most accounts of the Ottoman Imperial Museum view the museum primarily as a Westernization project for the Ottoman Empire. In such readings, the museum follows a teleological trajectory toward the European norm. This article reads several of the early practices of the Ottoman Imperial Museum (such as interactive museum displays and the sultan's casual gifting of museum holdings to other European monarchs), not as hiccups on the way to Westernization, but rather as a distinctly Ottoman vision of museology and imperial power. Seen in this light, the early history of the Ottoman Imperial Museum challenges the standard account of the nineteenth-century imperial museum as a site where imperial subjects are molded and where the empire displays its might. Instead, in the case of the Ottoman Imperial Museum, the scientific and orderly organization of the museum artifacts become a testament not to imperial power, but to imperial powerlessness.

Toward an immunological turn in nineteenth‐century studies

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This essay surveys the evolution of scholarship that embodies what (Anderson and Mackay [2014], Intolerant bodies: A short history of autoimmunity. Johns Hopkins University Press) have called the “immunological turn,” an interdisciplinary critical movement that takes immunity and vaccination as its primary critical objects. While interest in the relationship between immunology as a field in the life sciences and immunity as a cultural discourse has existed since the 1980s and 1990s, this piece traces the development of this thinking over time across the fields of political theory, anthropology, sociology, the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, as well as literary and rhetoric studies, that together articulate and critique the centrality of immunity to Western society. This article considers how the immunological turn models an approach to the nineteenth century that draws together the humanities and the sciences in both carefully historicized and deeply theoretical ways. This survey of the field concludes with speculations on new directions for the immunological turn that interdisciplinary scholars in the nineteenth century might take up to intervene in ongoing debates over vaccine hesitancy and refusal.

Tobacco for the flower garden: Plant collecting and plantation crops in nineteenth‐century Britain

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This essay analyzes the understudied practice of collecting, marketing, and displaying colonial plant commodities as garden ornaments in nineteenth-century Britain. From the early modern period onward, British garden writers discussed tobacco, sugarcane, coffee, tea, and other colonial crops in their books and magazines, often citing colonial agriculture as a point of interest to curious gardeners. As I will argue, this mode of collecting and aestheticizing plants discloses the deep ambivalence of the British horticultural press toward the realities of plantation agriculture. Building on previous analyses of plants and empire, I show how the cultivation of tobacco in nineteenth-century flower gardens contributed to a broader mediation of Britain's colonial past in horticultural literature. Paying attention to this collecting trend will not only recover an overlooked chapter in the history of British horticulture, but also show how nineteenth-century garden writing operated as a space for transmitting (and manipulating) narratives about colonial agriculture.

Semblances of truth: The Romantic lyric revisited

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The ‘Romantic lyric’ as an idea or critical entity finds itself doubly maligned in contemporary lyric studies. As a perceived product of New Criticism, it finds itself accused by historicists of bringing about the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry in twentieth-century criticism, and, as a mimetic model of subjective expression, it’s disfavoured by lyric theorists who view it as a stepping stone towards the currently common misconception that lyrics are a species of dramatic monologue. Yet returning to the Romantics themselves, we discover other models of the lyric that sit outside the expressive model or the paradigm of lyricisation, and which may well be of use to contemporary lyric studies. This essay offers a reading of one such model in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the form of lyric’s semblance character: Coleridge is peculiarly and persistently concerned with the way the world appears to be (which is often not how the world really is), and his lyric poetry figures as a kind of seemingness in its own right, and one that reflects on the nature of appearances themselves. Before making a case for lyric semblance, this essay offers an overview of the state of lyric studies today, taking as exemplary the work of Virginia Jackson and Jonathan Culler; it places emphasis on the role of the ‘Romantic lyric’ in both accounts, and teases out some of what’s at stake in the tension between historicism and formalism that is at the centre of lyric studies today.

Romantic objects, Victorian collections: Scribal relics and the authorial body

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Over the course of the nineteenth century, literary manuscripts came to be seen as tangible evidence of the creative process and as a key to the personality of the author. The material traces of writing were understood to outlive their creators and promise to resurrect the authorial body through the magic of the relic. This article reconstructs how authorial script gradually transformed into a collectible object pursued as a memento and a commodity. Letters, drafts, and fair copies by major modern writers found their way into the collections of British aristocrats and American industrialists at the same time that hunting for literary autographs diversified into a middle-class pursuit. Surveying recent scholarship on nineteenth-century collecting and material culture, the essay offers a condensed cultural history of the literary manuscript as a collectible and draws attention to how collectors and collecting feature in fictional texts of the period. It focuses on the artefactual mobility and custodial afterlives of Romantic papers in Victorian literature and culture, exploring a form of collecting which crossed boundaries between periods and national literary traditions.