This essay proposes a new way of thinking about Dickens's “little” characters in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, referencing Melanie Klein's “play-technique.” Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. Dickensian characterization, often criticized as object-like and lacking complex interiority, can be understood to intuit the developmental dynamics that Klein would locate in interactions between the child and the thing. Dickens's increasingly interiorized protagonists are surrounded and mirrored by toylike figures that problematize the thesis of novelistic maturation, proving as essential to the depiction of a complex psychology as internal monologue or achieved Bildung.

This essay identifies “selling out” as an enduring yet evolving concern in anglophone literary history, from the late nineteenth century's divided literary field to the “program era” to the increasingly global circuits of contemporary literary commerce. It begins with Henry James, showing how his canonical statements on modern narrative form emerged from commercial negotiations—an economic prehistory of “craft.” Selling out becomes a salient concern as intellectuals come to see commercial success as antithetical to modern art. This cultural anxiety changes, however, once creative writing programs begin systematically reconciling craft and commerce. Turning to Nam Le's celebrated short story collection The Boat, the second section shows how selling out came to entail a fear that minority writers might betray group solidarity through reductive or essentialist portrayals of identity. Finally, the essay's third section closes by situating Le within a global market for postcolonial fiction and its attendant concerns over commodifying exoticism.

This essay makes a case for the centrality of premodern Persian literary criticism to understanding Islamic virtue ethics as a world tradition of civility. It argues that this body of criticism took the form of two distinct if overlapping interpretive postures, the charismatic-allegorical and the humanist-philological, and that these two postures assumed and furthered two forms of friendship: a vertical form of Sufi hierarchy and a horizontal form of humanist-philological tutelage. Pointing to the centrality of both kinds of friendship to the urban settings in which Islamic virtue ethics has situated itself, it then sets forth how these presupposed models of friendship conditioned literary commentary by considering representative passages from three Mughal commentaries on Sa‘dī's canonical The Rose Garden of 1258. It closes by expanding on its opening remarks on the relations between metaliterary discourse and virtue, speculating on the ethical limits of this body of Persian literary criticism in relation to the modern practice of critique.

This article considers the way Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls (1963) continually gestures beyond its narrative present, and the consequences this has for the text's interpretation in its future—our present moment of environmental crisis. Bowen's late work is concerned with “late modern wartime”: a period when global conflicts seemed recursive, repetitious, or continuous. But this was also a wartime whose environmental impacts, by the 1960s, became enmeshed with deep geological timescales, when radionuclides were discovered to remain toxic into the far future. Tracing how Bowen grappled with anxiety about the future, from interwar culture to the Cold War, the article answers the critical injunction that we need new modes of reading in the Anthropocene by returning to the mid-century—now considered to be a key “beginning” of the Anthropogenic age. It argues that the posthuman imagination lies at the intersection between the nuclear uncanny and the anthropogenic uncanny.

This essay reads the 1880 Battiste Good Wintercount as a textual conflict zone that brings Indigenous oral and pictographic literatures into dialogue with settler-colonial forms like alphabetic script and books to imagine Native futures after militant resistance. With a timeline that goes back to 901 AD, Good issues a dramatic challenge to Western scholarship on the book, writing, and literary history. He rejects requests for simulations of what Gerald Vizenor calls “tragic victimry” with literary innovation and a narrative vision of survivance. Foregrounding the authority of women, Good invokes new and ancient treaties to insist on Indigenous sovereignty. The essay explores how the literary history of Indigenous pictography informs contemporary Native writers, like N. Scott Momaday, and decolonizing struggles like those identified with the hashtags #NoDAPL and #landback. It concludes with a call to interrogate deep structures of coloniality that organize literary studies through ethnocentric conceptions of literacy, genre, period, and time.