The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)

This essay reads Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale—a retelling of the popular Constance exemplum—as a case study for thinking about a global Middle Ages. The tale's globalism emerges most pointedly in its depiction of the ocean and, more surprisingly, in Constance's pale face during her trial for a murder she did not commit. By reading these unlikely images together, this essay argues that both operate as oceanic sites of exemplary justice and that the Man of Law frames the Constance story as a call for global justice outside the reach of territorial law. Chaucer imagines a legality that works like exemplarity, conceptualizing witness testimony in particular as a fluid narrative form that can accommodate the needs and expectations of various audiences, cultures, and temporalities. (JKT)

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its colonies that has been the prevailing emphasis of literary criticism about empire. I focus on the eighteenth century's overlooked military men and lowlevel colonial administrators who wrote newspaper verse, travel poetry, and plays. I place their compositions in an institutional chronicle defined by the “cultural company‐state,” the British East India Company, which patronized and censored Anglo- India's multilingual reading publics. In the process of arguing for Anglo‐Indian literature as a local and regional creation, I consider the how the terms British and anglophone should function in literary studies of colonialism organized not by hybridity or creolization but by geographic relations of distinction. (JM)

By relying on Foucauldian panopticism as a universally explanatory theory, surveillance studies has collapsed two separate issues: the power relations between watcher and watched and the visibility or nonvisibility of the watcher. The presumption that the watcher's visibility or nonvisibility is irrelevant is especially dangerous for observers of color, who are already more vulnerable because of racial hypervisibility. This essay examines the simultaneous operation of surveillance (watching from above) and sousveillance (watching from below), both predicated on racial hypervisibility. To demonstrate the continuity of racial hypervisibility across a broad historical period, I compare the risks taken by sousveillants of color making smart‐phone recordings of police brutality in the twenty‐first century with the dangers faced by visible African American sousveillants in nineteenth‐century slave narratives by Charles Ball, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. (KR)

Edgar Allan Poe's poetry and poetic theory maintain an awkward standing in anglophone literary criticism but offer a valuable resource to scholars of historical poetics and, more specifically, historical prosody. In poems such as “The Raven” and “The Bells” and essays such as “The Rationale of Verse,” Poe pre sents prosodic structure as a kind of palimpsest of jostling sound media (e.g., phonetic script, meter, scansion, musical form, nonhuman voices), which obey different prosodic logics when engaged by different readers, both within and across periods. In this way, Poe's poetics challenges both historicist and formalist approaches to prosody, delyricizing poetic voice by demonstrating its embeddedness in media while insisting on the multiplicity of prosodic options available when individual readers verbalize the same poetical text. Rehabilitating Poe's prosodic project helps us see poems as products of both media history and real- time performance. (PM)