The greatest master of the “Gothic smile” was not one of the anonymous visual artists who made saints and angels beam in the mid-thirteenth century; rather, it was Dante. Smiling is the hallmark of the presumably “sage and serious” poet and a sign of his distinctive originality as a Christian theologian. While this is true as early as La vita nuova and the Convivio, the Commedia shows how Dante journeys toward the beatific vision of God through the smile (on the faces of Vergil, Beatrice, and others). Sorriso/sorridere and riso/ridere–as noun or verb, and apparently interchangeable in meaning–appear over seventy times in the poem, in a wide variety of contexts: twice in Inferno, on more than twenty occasions in Purgatory, and double that number in Paradiso. As he develops the poem, Dante uses the smile to express the unique individuality not only of the human being but also of the triune God. (PSH)

For most readers of Milton's late prose and mature verse, his positive depictions of the human body deeply inform his monism and antimonarchical politics. This essay argues that Milton's perspectives on mind and body are more ambivalent than the critical consensus allows: that the poet equally needs and does not need the body. I demonstrate that Milton's shifting perspectives on mind and body, spirit and flesh, emanate from his opposition to dynastic kingship. They also shape his emerging modern nationalism, which is marked by contradictions and liminality. By focusing on the fallen Adam's soliloquy, I show how Milton's equivocal body politics appropriates and disembodies Hebraic traditions and the concreteness of the Hebraic past (and other histories of others), as well as the very matter of cultural memory. (RJT)

Founded on the dualism elaborated in Descartes's early metaphysical writings, such as the Discours de la méthode and the Méditations, most studies of corporeality in Descartes delimit the alienated body according to its mechanical functions. His later writings on ethics and the passions reappropriate the body for the subject and emphasize the sensible or “aesthetic” functions of corporeality. By analyzing Descartes's correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia during the last five years of his life and his late treatise Les passions de l'âme, this study examines the construction of the Cartesian aesthetic body and explores the ways in which that body, rather than the mechanical body, produces the ethical individual in society, a subject–body. Displacing the Aristotelian concept of sensus communis ‘common sense,’ Descartes turns the body into the source and target of affective ethical habit. I argue that Descartes's ethical doctrine is based on the cultivation, development, and deployment of that aesthetic body. (ERK)

In “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Henry James locates the uncanny in the servants' quarters at the top of the house, where the genteel protagonist finally corners his ghostly double. James thus prompts us to reread Freud's “The Uncanny” (1919) with a pair of questions in mind. First, how does class identity bear on the uncanny; and, second, how in turn does the uncanny bear on class identity? Steering well clear of servants in his discussion, Freud apparently dodges the issue altogether; a closer look, however, reveals that he cannily represses the social value of the uncanny so as to hold it in reserve. James, on the other hand, documents how and why psychoanalysis converts bourgeois anxiety about servants into “the uncanny,” an abstraction that floats freely across the twentieth century from séance to academic circles, where it continues to function as a ghostlier demarcation of class. (BMcC)

In Thomas Hardy's fiction, the human body is the untranscendible foundation of putatively ethereal interior entities such as mind and self. The emerging sciences of physiological psychology and evolutionary biology, with which Hardy was familiar, provide a context in which to understand his bodily materialism. Hardy explores these interests in The Return of the Native through a striking emphasis on the faces of characters and landscape and particularly on sensory perceptions–primarily associated with organs located in the face–as means of bringing the world into the human interior and of dissolving distinctions between subjects and objects. Reading Hardy's materialism with the tools provided by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of faciality elucidates both the fiction and the theoretical model, for the writers share an idea of depsychologized character. For Hardy, as for Deleuze and Guattari, experience of the self and the world is fundamentally corporeal, and perceptual experience makes landscape inextricably contiguous with the human. (WAC)

Beginning with a reconsideration of the symbolic ending of “The Heroic Slave,” where Madison Washington and his compatriots find themselves in the Bahamas and not the United States, this article works through Frederick Douglass's understanding of national affiliation. Taking two specific problems in his imagination–the rhetoric of democracy and transnationalism–I reassess the concept of national affiliation for African Americans when political citizenship is denied. Through its protagonist, Washington, who is thoroughly versed in the vocabulary of United States nationalism, “The Heroic Slave” discloses the incongruence between the rhetoric of nationalism and its materialization as a failure of democratic enactment. The text also intimates Douglass's increasing recognition of transnationalism as an affective system of imagined belonging based on either a shared belief (in democracy) or racial contingency. By deterritorializing cultural belonging, “The Heroic Slave” depicts the liminal position of African Americans, suspended between the nation-state and the black diaspora. (IGW)

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) is best understood as William Craft's attempt to represent the contradictions and instabilities inherent in white–supremacist thought and culture. I consider race as a complex of various and interconnected social, economic, legal, and political theories and practices. Chaos theory, I argue, offers a useful framework for grasping this understanding of race, in part by discouraging attempts to isolate any discrete concept of race as independent or definitive. Addressing this chaotic reality, Craft approaches his story with a narrative method analogous to fractal geometry–that is, an approach to representation and measurement that accounts for apparent irregularity, fragmentation, and instability. Order and stability do not follow from the successful escape but rather are negotiated through a mode of representation that prioritizes accuracy over a conceptually neat Euclidean order. (JE)

Cognitive psychologists studying the reading process have developed a detailed conceptual vocabulary for describing the microprocesses of reading. Modified for the purposes of literary criticism, this vocabulary provides a framework that has been missing from most literary-critical investigations of the history of literate practice. Such concepts as the production of a coherent memory representation, the limitations of working memory span, the relation between online and offline reading processes, the landscape model of comprehension, and the presence of standards of coherence allow for close attention to general patterns in reading and to the ways that individual readers modify them. The interpretation of Victorian responses to the poetry of Robert Browning provides a case study in the adaptation of cognitive models to the history of reading. Such an adaptation can reveal not only reading strategies used by historical readers but also those fostered by the discipline of literary criticism. (AE)

The first few frames of the Belgian comic-strip artist Raymond Macherot's work “Les Croquillards” (1957) provide a shorthand for some of the issues that concern environmentally oriented criticism, one of the most recent fields of research to have emerged from the rapidly diversifying matrix of literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. A heron is prompted to a lyrical reflection on the change of seasons by a leaf that gently floats down to the surface of his pond (see the next p.): “Ah! the poetry of autumn … dying leaves, wind, departing birds…” This last thought jolts him back to reality: “But—I'm a migratory bird myself! … Good grief! What've I been thinking?” And off he takes on his voyage south, only to be hailed by the protagonists, the field rats Chlorophylle and Minimum (the latter under the spell of a bad cold), who hitch a ride to Africa with him. “Are you traveling on business?” he asks his newfound passengers. “No, for our health,” they answer.

Within or alongside the larger field of print culture, a new area for scholarship is emerging in the humanities and the more humanistic social sciences: periodical studies. This development is being driven by the cultural turn in departments of language and literature, by the development of digital archives that allow for such studies on a broader scale than ever before, and by what the producers of the Spectator Project have called “the special capabilities of the digital environment” (Center). Literary and historical disciplines engaged with the study of modern culture are finding in periodicals both a new resource and a pressing challenge to existing paradigms for the investigation of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and modern cultures. The forms of this new engagement range from Cary Nelson's suggestion, in Repression and Recovery, that periodicals should be read as texts that have a unity different from but comparable with that of individual books (219) to the organization of groups like the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, founded in 1968, and the more recently established Research Society for American Periodicals. Every year new books are appearing that emphasize peri–odicals and investigate the ways in which modern literature and the arts are connected to the culture of commerce and advertising and to the social, political, and scientific issues of the time.

Thus does Denis Diderot express his skepticism about whether it was actually the Marquis de Croismare, an Ostensibly Innocent player in the machinations leading to the composition of La religieuse, who replied to letters to him by Diderot and company or whether Frédéric Grimm and friends tricked Diderot into believing it was Croismare. Counterbalancing the philosophe's questioning volley is Grimm's assertion in the “Préface”: