Susan Howe's recent collage poems—an intricate, sui generis form—are the flowering of her editorial theory, which I describe as “intimate editing.” I challenge scholarly assumptions that sideline Howe's engagement with the field of textual criticism from accounts of her poetry by showing how her unique approach to texts puts avant-garde poetry and textual editing into conversation, introducing reciprocal possibilities for both. Poems can model new forms of editing, and editorial debates can expand the reach and resonance of innovative poetry. Drawing on The Birth-mark, Howe's collection of creative-critical essays that probe the motivations and ethos of textual criticism, I show how intimate editing expands the typical, often rigid, values of traditional editing and contributes to growing discussions about what a feminist textual criticism might look like. Then I discuss the collage poems, particularly those in Concordance, as whimsical manifestations of Howe's textual approach.

Science fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.

Robert Lowell challenged the mid-century canonization of the eighteenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. He objected to the way the influential historian Perry Miller instrumentalized Edwards to buttress support for US imperialism, exceptionalism, and Cold War politics. Challenging received views about the Puritan rhetoric of the most recognizable of postwar poets, this article contrasts Miller's captivating thesis of the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” with Lowell's implication of Edwards in acts of colonial expansion and slavery. Lowell's Edwards emerges as a contradictory figure who, in Lowell's 1962 poem “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” is brought into discourse with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosopher-scientists Francis Bacon and Blaise Pascal. Lowell fashions a Puritan genealogy within which Edwards is a cosmopolitan interlocutor and forebear of confessionalism; however, the theologian's flawed moral self-scrutiny occasions the poet's self-reflexive satire, as well as his model for a faltering, self-correcting rectitude.

While completing his national service from 1951 to 1952, John le Carré served as an intelligence corps officer whose duties included the interrogation of refugees; as a member of MI5 and MI6 between 1958 and 1963, he interrogated defectors from Soviet bloc countries to test their sincerity or duplicity. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People, The Secret Pilgrim, The Mission Song, and le Carré's other novels, interrogation scenes contribute to the total soundworld of the audible state. As a way to gather information through extorted speech, interrogation occurs in extraterritorial nonplaces or undisclosed, deniable locations. Drawing on historical documents, this essay positions interrogation in terms of torture, human rights, and the capacity of the state to inflict harm or to extend protection to individuals under its authority. In le Carré's novels, characters not only listen like states—comprehensively, omnisciently—but also begin to think like states.

Besides the neologism négritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aimé Césaire's celebrated long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939–56), is perhaps the most contested and ambiguous signifier in the poet's corpus. This essay reconsiders the much-debated question of verrition and its poiesis. Contra a long-standing tenet of Césaire criticism—that verrition was a pure neologism—and further to René Hénane (Glossaire des termes rares [2004]) and Carrie Noland (Voices of Negritude [2015]), I identify several textual antecedents to and possible sources of this supposed neologism that have implications for how we read the final stanza of the Cahier. Critical focus on Césairean neology has had a somewhat obfuscatory effect on thinking through subtler dimensions of Césaire's decolonial poetics, especially how the poet frequently reinvests and rearticulates existing terms in French, redirecting them toward antiracist and anticolonial ends.

Albeit widely cited, the 1598 engraving known as Elizabeth I as Europa is something of a mystery: little to nothing is known of its authorship or of the circumstances of its production and circulation. Tracing the print's origins to one of Europe's earliest news periodicals, I argue that Elizabeth I as Europa is not about Elizabeth but about Europa—which is to say, about the construction of an early modern public that could understand itself as European. The print participated in this construction in two interrelated ways: as an intervention in Europa Regina cartography, it thematized Europe as a shared (if highly contested) space of discourse that could cut across national, linguistic, and confessional differences; as a piece of transnational reportage meant for broadscale circulation, it helped conjure up the public on which that space of discourse depended.