This reevaluation of Cervantes's novella “The Two Damsels” argues that the generic hallmarks of romance disguise a minute engagement with pressing social and political concerns. The cross-dressed damsels' search for their truant love, significantly named Marco Antonio, evinces the fraught connection between the vagaries of masculinity in Spain and the potency of Spain's empire. Transformed from romance pageboys to epic Amazons, the damsels champion domestic commitments over imperial concerns, even as they impersonate masculinity. Yet their profound disruption of the gendered social order and the text's insistent references to the literal bankruptcy of Spain's Old World empire cannot be contained by a successful romance resolution, even if Marco Antonio is successfully diverted from his imperial excursion.

The focus of this paper is on The American Scene, which is found to display a deep sensitivity to the spatiality of desire and to be motivated by a complex dynamic of erotic mastery and surrender: subjects assert their self-possession in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force—a force that may be human, non-human, or indeterminate. The desire for literal, physical mastery over the other is here rechanneled into an identification with the scene of desire that can dispense with the erotic object. This complex psychosexual mechanism, which I call oblique possession, thrives on a disruption of the dichotomies of sexuality and identity that queer theory has questioned. In tracing the circuits of oblique possession, the paper articulates a queer perspective on Henry James's work outside any necessary relationship between two individuals.

Lex liaisons dangereuses neither celebrates pure cynicism nor confirms Rousseauesque sentiment. Instead, the problem that this novel traces takes the form of a question: how is it possible to reconcile the desire for power, in the form of seduction, with the desire to overcome power in friendship? The answer to this question is embedded in the relationship between Valmont and Merteuil, who develop a new model for friendship, one that is merged with seduction. Because sex does not turn out to be a sign of conquest in the relationship between seducers, conquest can begin to operate invisibly. Les liaisons dangereuses points toward the emergence of a new representational possibility—that of invisible conquest—in the literary history of seduction.

A long-standing debate over Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns on the question of intention. While defenders of the novel say that Huck's change of heart toward Jim represents a critique of social conformity, recent detractors claim that the novel's celebration of this change of heart represents a form of liberal bad faith. This essay argues that both readings misunderstand the novel, which works not only to highlight Huck's good intentions but also to replace this sentimental model of responsibility with one drawn from the emergent law of negligence. Having effects rather than intentions be grounds of liability, this new legal paradigm made persons responsible for the inadvertent harms they caused others. From the perspective of negligence, Huckleberry Finn is an indictment of post-Reconstruction racism—not because it offers friendship as a model of reform but because it imagines accountability even in the absence of malice.

Marking a narrative break in the twenty-fourth-century writer Knarf's novel about world war II, a novel Knarf recounts orally to his Friend Ord, this passage From Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 342-43), by M. Barnard Eldershaw (pseudonym of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), enacts a scene of collaboration, falling just short of “full and equal” partnership (though perhaps all literary collaboration must thus fall). Knarf is a reader of his own text, a listener to his own story; the writer is continually in conversation—disagreeing and agreeing with—a would-be writer of the text; that conversation inflects, indeed inscribes itself in, the writer's writing, so that the would-be other writer—who is a reader and listener too—becomes inseparable from the text in process. Thematically contained in these relations, but also uncontainably circumscribing them, are “world history” and “community”: those suprapersonal entities both demand and are produced by collaboration(ism), yet they also overwhelm, dwarf, or marginalize “little fishes” like Ally, Ord, and Knarf. But, then again, world history and community are themselves elusive if meant as much more than fictions about and by little fishes, riding on their high horses.

What does it mean to be an author? this question has been interrogated from just about every imaginable angle, as the status of the author has been problematized, deconstructed, and challenged to such an extent that discussions of the author problem now seem decidedly old-hat. Scholars now understand—in theory, at least—that the notion of author (like that of the founding or sovereign subject on which it depends) is a peculiarly modern construct, one that can be traced back through multiple and overdetermined pathways to the development of modern capitalism and of intellectual property, to Western rationalism, and to patriarchy. Foucault's assertion that “[t]he coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences” no longer surprises (141). The author, like the autonomous individual of Descartes's cogito, is, we understand with Raymond Williams, “a characteristic form of bourgeois thought” (192), one that Ralph Ellison parodies, for instance, when his protagonist, in a fleeting moment of self- and cultural integration, proclaims “I yam what I am” (260). The relentless intertextuality of Web culture, the rapid proliferation of multiple selves online, and the development of what Sherry Turkle has called “distributed selves” of postmodernity would seem to have moved us well beyond autonomous individualism (Life 14).

It was not long ago that one prefecture of french culture was reinventing the idea of authorship while another one was trying to kill it off. The New Wave movement and post-structuralism, fundamental opposites in almost every respect, emerged at the same cultural moment. Roland Barthcs's Writing Degree Zero (1953) and François Truffaut's seminal essay in Cahiers du cinéma that instated auteur criticism (the first phase of the New Wave) appeared less than a year apart; the appearance of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) coincided with the triumph of New Wave filmmaking; and in the interval between 1966 and 1970, which saw the publication of The Order of Things, Of Grammatology, and S/Z, Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of the New Wave critic-directors, released fourteen feature films, including four masterworks. In its classic phase poststructuralism was fixated on the written word, involved disciplined thought inflected by mainstream Continental philosophy, took on itself the burden of refashioning modern European history along Marxist lines, and could be uncompromisingly rectitudinous. The New Wave spoke the language of images, involved a loose and—except for its radical stylistics—rather tame avant-gardism, valued an aleatory, free-form aesthetic over political commitment, assailed mainstream French culture, and championed alternative forms of cultural production such as American popular movies. Yet the teleologies were similar: to inscribe a unique place in the history of authorship. To supplant the biographical author from the textual site, one of the primary motives of poststructuralism, was to make the collective space available for a higher entity, the philosopher-critic who is the author not of individual texts but of textuality, the social meaning of texts. In the same way, in claiming the textual site for a film author—a radical conception for the time—the auteur critics scripted a role for themselves that they would subsequently occupy as film directors.

Intercourse means commerce, they told us in school. And we giggled at the explosive word that went off in more than one direction. But the confusion is more than simply a joke of mistaken referents or of metaphoric allusions to intimate contact and interested exchange. It is a tangle of productive sex and enterprising business revealing an adjacency of practices that add up to modernity. In a metaleptic circle of cause and effect, modern desire for family and for wealth seemed to drive those practices, and they helped form the kind of modern subject who desired them. The circularity illustrates what Nietzsche said about the fiction of empirical moorings (279-80). The moorings invented themselves to produce an illusion of stability. This is what happened at the beginnings of European modernity, as Mary Poovey shows in A History of the Modern Fact: truth grounded in empirical facts turns out to be a metaleptic effect of the seventeenth-century fiction of precise accounting, a rhetorical compensation for numbers that could not add up in the precarious conditions of mercantilism. But a century later, precise and transparent accounts were no longer performances that interpreted irregular data; they required proofs of economic and civic credibility. In a broad stroke, we can say that the foundational fiction that followed from honorable entrepreneurship is the dynamic law of desire for development as the natural drive of our particular and collective lives. Laissez-faire was the slogan.

“You claim to be entirely able to do your book selection with only a few suggestions from us here and there—how can that be'?” Thus Professor X to Librarian Y, all over North America. Well, granted, we librarians are proud of the subject know-how that we've acquired, some by earning higher degrees in the subject, others by just having learned our way around the literature of the subject after years in the trenches. We have to admit, though, that approval-plan buying has made a big difference: the vendor allows you to see the book before you decide whether or not to add it to the collection. (People do this when they buy a car or a cabbage; why not a book?) Approval-plan buying is a great deal more reliable than the reading of blurbs, which are all too often deliberately uninformative, or than waiting for reviews before ordering, which takes too long. However, since debate springs up from time to time about whether libraries with straitened budgets can afford approval plans (a red herring, in my view), I thought I'd speak up in defense of them, especially in my area, foreign language book selection.

When asked to write a short piece for the PMLA series entitled “The Book Market,” I muttered to myself, with a nervous laugh, “What book market?” More and more often I and others in academic publishing have been asking ourselves whether there exists a viable book market for literary studies. Almost every university press has a long history of publishing works in literary studies, and yet recently the frustrations of the market have begun to sour the relation between the field and its publishers. I regularly hear of one university press or another declaring that it is “getting out of the field.” Could a discipline with so many strengths, so much talent, and so much sophistication—in fact, the engine of the humanities—find itself for the most part unpublishable?

Written by charles frederick briggs and published in the may 1853 issue of Putnam's monthly while Briggs was an editor there, “Elegant Tom Dillar” mediates a persistent tension in United States culture between working-class nationalism and highbrow culture. As a cofounder and coeditor of Putnam's, Briggs must have negotiated this tension often as he made managerial decisions at the magazine, which promised quality native literature, earned “unparalleled respect” in the literary and publishing world, and delivered some of the best American writing of the century. On the one hand, Briggs was a cultural nationalist. He supported copyright legislation, he repeatedly lampooned Harper's for its use of pilfered English material, and he enthusiastically endorsed the magazine's policy of publishing only original American work. On the other hand, as a former conscience Whig, he condemned annexation and the extension of slavery, valued elite culture, and was wary of jingoistic nationalism that could be used to foment working-class resentment.

Gertrude stein wrote the twenty-five-page manuscript “the modern jew who has given up the faith of his fathers can reasonably and consistently believe in isolation” for a composition class at Radcliffe College in 1896, when she was twenty-two years old. The essay is distinctly occasional and reads like an early work. It is, nonetheless, one of the few known pieces in which Stein treats directly the question of Jewish identity and the only one to link that question to a specifically political description of the public sphere. The manuscript thus sheds a remarkable light on a number of the most contested questions in studies of Stein's life and works—the problem of her later protofascist political allegiances, of her sense of her exiled Americanness, and of her treatment of writing as an asemantic medium for sketching mobile identities.