“So much living with so little life.”thus did henry James, writing to Mrs. Humphry Ward, describe H. G. Wells, or so I remember it. (I should look this up, and probably will not. My research/scholarly instincts have atrophied, except in instances— more common in old age than formerly—when I cannot remember the source of some haunting phrase or fact.) James's words are perfect for those of us coping with retirement and old age (I am of the “call a spade a spade” school), “living” less and seeking more of life. I have, in this mood, reread Henry James's The Ambassadors.

Theories of grief based on Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia“ typically portray mourning as a disembodied process. This essay investigates the literary portrayal of grief in the context of phantom limb pain, a literally embodied, neurological response to loss. By comparing Derrida's image-based discussion of mourning with theories of embodied habit by Merleau-Ponty and of disability by Lennard Davis, this essay investigates the physical apprehension of loss caused by our habitual engagements with the bodies of our loved ones. Virginia Woolf, Mark Doty, Alfred Tennyson, and Donald Hall portray the physical confusions and discomforts of grief that occur when the griever takes up a habitual position in relation to a lost body. Embodied grief emerges in tangible illusions that, like the phantom limb, memorialize the lost beloved through misperceptions of material presence.

When poisoned or fatally wounded, characters in Marlowe's plays often develop an uncanny knowledge of what is happening inside their bodies, including the precise anatomy of their injuries and the physiology of the onset of death. In effect, they conduct their own autopsies. These moments of peculiarly physical self-knowledge pose a useful challenge to our conventions for the representation of pain, embodiment, and interiority. Marlowe's wounded speakers deploy these anatomical selfdescriptions in a metatheatrical competition: in a struggle for the attention of the audience, describing one's wounds can be a powerful strategy.

The most famous of Henri Beyle's pseudonyms is Stendhal, but it is only one of hundreds adopted by Beyle. I argue that his pseudonyms fall into three categories: those used in personal correspondence to strengthen affective bonds, those used for publication and thus for entry into the literary market, and those developed in the creative process and reserved for private use. The pseudonym Stendhal belongs to the second group, which is characterized by Beyle's attempt to co-opt the prestige of particular predecessors (in this instance, the art historian J. J. Winckelmann, from the village Stendal). The pen names Mocenigo and Dominique are significant examples of the third group, which most closely resembles the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms and heralds a modernist vision of authorship.

'Biyi Bandele's Oroonoko, in its textual and performance history, bridges eighteenth- and late-twentieth-century forms of transnationalism. The Oroonoko story has always been an improvised text. Bandele's play relates to earlier versions of the Oroonoko story by Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, and John Hawkesworth. Three issues in Bandele's Oroonoko have special relevance to a transnational reading of the play: the deployment of an African setting as a strategy for counteracting a pseudouniversalism; the place of anachronism, especially in the representation of gender relations; and Bandele's use of English as a means of conveying Yoruban culture. His play raises the question of what it means to “sell” Oroonoko to a wide audience today.

This article claims that much of the contemporary scholarship on Nella Larsen's Passing attempts to correct the delusional apprehensions of the novel's main character, Irene Redfield. I suggest that this corrective effort ultimately places critics in the paranoid orbit they aim to diagnose. Critics are unable to escape the logic of paranoia primarily because they read Irene's paranoia according to a conventional tropology of paranoia, homosexuality, and delusional jealousy. The paranoid gesture tries to prove that Passing is “really about” homosexuality and simply passing itself off as a novel about racial passing. I work through the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and paranoia to show how the novel incessantly thematizes the processes by which race and sexuality are substantialized in the scholarship. Ultimately, it is because Passing rigorously drains identitarian categories of substance that the novel is available to the paranoid substantializing of critics.

It is often said that a century ago the author and the reader occupied the same space. I am told that much of modern literature is the result of a separation in that sense of space. It could also easily be said that a century ago archives and history occupied the same conceptual and methodological space. This sense of partnership in the study of the past has undergone a variety of stresses and strains over recent decades, to the point that what constitutes the archive has become a question fundamental to how our knowledge of the past is acquired and shaped. History and archives now occupy very different spaces, a condition that has conceptual, technical, and practical causes. Among the many consequences of this intellectual divide is the need for a new understanding of the archive apart from its historical roots.

It was a foreign critic, ironically, who grasped the insurmountable national challenge that alessandro Manzoni posed to himself and to Italy's future authors with his monumental novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed [1827, rev. ed. 1840]). Manzoni's basic theme, Georg Lukács writes, is “much less a given, concrete, historical crisis of national history” than it is “the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole” (70). This eternal plight—distilled into the story of the courtship and separation of two peasants in seventeenth-century Lombardy during plague, riots, and Spanish occupation—encompassed Italy's perpetual struggle against foreign rule, its lack of a unifying language and polity, and its reticent modernity, especially its tensions between religious tradition and secular progress. According to Lukács, the universality of the text combined with the abiding, unchanging nature of the problems it fictionalized essentially exhausted the genre of the historical novel that it introduced to Italy. Posterity has vindicated this assessment. Manzoni abandoned the genre soon after I promessi sposi to dedicate himself to historical writing proper, and his novel remains ensconced in the Italian public imaginary, just behind Dante's Commedia, as the towering, mythic work that helped occasion Italy's belated unification in 1861.