PMLA welcomes essays of interest to those concerned with the study of language and literature. As the publication of a large and heterogeneous association, the journal is receptive to a variety of topics, whether general or specific, and to all scholarly methods and theoretical perspectives. The ideal PMLA essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the kind; addresses a significant problem; draws out clearly the implications of its findings; and engages the attention of its audience through a concise, readable presentation. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000–1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended to the Editorial Board. Articles of fewer than 2,500 words or more than 9,000 words are not considered for publication. The word count includes notes but excludes works-cited lists and translations, which should accompany foreign language quotations. The MLA urges its contributors to be sensitive to the social implications of language and to seek wording free of discriminatory overtones.

A recent wave of commentary on Sophocles's Antigone by critics from Judith Butler to Bracha Ettinger to Simon Goldhill has begun to emerge from the shadow of two paradigmatic interpretations: Lacan's reading of the title character in splendid structural isolation and Hegel's dialectical opposition of familial and political spheres. Even the newer criticism, however, continues the critical elision of Antigone's siblings (particularly her sister, Ismene) and of her relationship to them. This oversight is emblematic of the problematic omission of the sibling from theoretical discourses in general. The neglected sibling is a model that allows us to move beyond both self-other dualisms and the mother-child dyad, which form the only grounds for intersubjectivity in contemporary debates. Sibling logic recognizes the subject as embedded in a transsubjective network of partial others, whose subjectivities are nonetheless partially, though differentially, shared. This article thereby provides a new approach to poststructuralist debates on subjectivity and the political.

From the first publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829 through its incorporation into the contemporary literary canon, readers have recognized it as a fiery indictment of slavery and of the contradictions in Christianity and in the United States' founding. Yet the striking typography of Walker's Appeal has become invisible in our critical focus on the text's relation to African American oratory and even in considerations of the pamphlet's significance in early black print culture. An analysis of this graphic text reveals how it materially registers Walker's impassioned voice and argument and how it visually directs readers to voice his call to the illiterate. Walker attempts to resolve the opposition of the spoken and the printed word by exploiting his text's typography.

The early-twentieth-century Russian debate on the place of tragedy in Dostoevsky's novels included interventions by the leading figure of the symbolist movement in Russia, Vyacheslav Ivanov; by the philosophically minded literary historian Lev Pumpyansky; and by the author of the most formidable analysis of Dostoevsky's poetics to date, Mikhail Bakhtin. From the perspective of a certain widespread vision of modernity, the project of thinking the modern novel and tragedy together is paradoxical. It is thus noteworthy that such a project seemed urgent to major Russian intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s and that it frequently relied on the articulation of an implicitly exceptionalist narrative about Russian modernity and its proper forms. Additionally, staging the three-way debate among Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin allows us to see that Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky as a modern novelist par excellence is conceptually tied to the largely occluded theory of the tragic.

Recent psychoanalytic theories have the historicizing potential to rearticulate discourses relegated to the shadows of institutional and popular psychosocial knowledge. In particular, they can illuminate a shadow discourse secreted in the history of gender politics: a form of masochism that produces political solidarity by mobilizing narcissistic gratifications. Such solidarity derives from masochism's ability to idealize perceptions about collective power—a process legible in first-wave feminism and in the jingoistic imperialist ideals of masculinity that opposed it. This essay argues that feminism has lost sight of a nonsexual form of masochism vital to its own history that could energize its ongoing political projects. Recent relational psychoanalysis emerges as a fertile source for techniques of reading that produce revisionary historicist interpretation. Moreover, reactivating psychosocial dynamics obscured by the historical conflation of masochism with sexuality can reconnect feminism and other political movements with important strategies they may have prematurely disavowed.

Suspended animation emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century as part of the efforts of the newly founded Royal Humane Society to convince lay and medical readers that individuals who had apparently drowned might still be alive, albeit in states of “suspended animation” (a condition we would now likely describe as a coma). The term was quickly taken up by medical and literary authors, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Exploring these Romantic-era approaches to suspended animation can help us understand the reception and formal structures of creative literature, grasp the often counterintuitive links that Romantic-era authors established between “altered states” and “Romantic sobriety,” and articulate why poetry and other slow media remain important in our contemporary new-media landscape.

Secularism is said to support cultural imperialism by propagating the colonizer's religion in nonreligious guise or by touting a nonreligious worldview that attracts native intellectuals already disenchanted with local tradition. I take a different view. Reading Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī's Arabic translation of Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), published in Egypt in 1911, I argue that secularism attracts the colonized less by presenting itself as an alternative order—religious or not—than by validating an existing religious episteme, but doing so in translation, refracting native religion through an empowered yet seemingly empowering colonial eye. Secularity infiltrates British Egypt as Islam's likeness, not antithesis. Carlyle's alluring Islamophilia moves al-Sibāʿī to prescribe English literature to Egypt against French “unbelief,” eliding the Briton's subordination of the Prophet Muḥammadto Shakespeare. Willing the native Islamic “religious” into translatability with the Western colonial “secular,” al-Sibāʿī reconstructs modern Islam as belief in the human.

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.

In her 1892 study of children's literature, the child and his book, louise frances field complains, “the subject of this volume is one which, from its nature, presents many difficulties as regards material. It is the fate of children's books to be destroyed by children themselves” (v). Of course, the difficulties of children's literature are not only material. Jacqueline Rose's insistence on the “impossibility of children's fiction” has had the salutary effect of keeping scholars warily attuned to how adult desires—from sex to money to politics—structure the genre. Despite the claim of possession housed in that apostrophe, most scholars of children's literature acknowledge that these books don't really belong to children at all (Hunt). My intention in this essay is to use one of these impossibilities to circumvent the other. I am interested in children's own relation to their reading; I strive to understand not just the books adults produced for children—that is, what adults thought about childhood and wanted to say to children—but also what children actually did with these texts, how they took possession of them. I hope to demonstrate that the penchant for destroying books that Field deplores can provide insight into the literary history of childhood. For this brief essay, I take as my archive the book-destroying habits of the children of one affluent, highly literary family in post–Civil War New England: the niece and nephews of the poet Emily Dickinson—Edward (“Ned”), born in 1861; Martha (“Mattie”), born in 1866; and Thomas Gilbert (“Gib”), born in 1875.

In about 1855, three decades before frances hodgson burnett wrote her first best-selling children's book, little lord fauntleroy, she was a child—Frances Eliza Hodgson—and she read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. She found Stowe's novel, like all the stories she encountered, to be “unsatisfactory, filling her with vague, restless craving for greater completeness of form” (Burnett 44). The form the girl craved—that is, the material she believed she needed to complete the narrative—was a black doll. When Burnett obtained the doll, she named it Topsy and used it to “act” out the parts of the novel she found most “thrilling” (53). Casting a white doll she already owned as Little Eva, she played out ever-repeating scenes of Eva laying hands on Topsy, awakening the hardened slave girl to Christian love. Burnett also kept the Eva doll “actively employed slowly fading away and dying,” and in these scenes she took on the role of Uncle Tom (57). At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva's death, casting the white doll as Eva and herself as “all the weeping slaves at once” (58). And at least once she designated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “[F]urious with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll (fig. 1). Throughout the whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, which suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” of being “brutally lashed” (56, 55).

In spite of great obstacles, modern arabic children's literature has seen remarkable developments lately, both in quality of text and illustrations and in breadth of subject matter. Moreover, the intricate question of which variety of Arabic to use in writing for children can now be answered in different ways, closely linked to different conceptions of Arab culture.

In 2002 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson published an essay entitled “what is queer theory doing with the child?,” addressing work in the 1990s by Michael Moon and the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the “protogay” child. Something inappropriate, even scandalous, was their answer, as one might surmise from the accusatory shape of the question. In their reading, Moon and Sedgwick essentialize rather than interrogate the protogay child, such that said child becomes “an anti-theoretical moment, resistant to analysis, itself the figure deployed as resistance” (36). For Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson, queer theory is insufficiently alert to the lessons of poststructuralist theory and especially to the ongoing interrogation of “child” and “childhood.” Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson specialize in childhood studies, and Lesnik-Oberstein is a well-known scholar of children's literature. Her 1994 Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child extends and takes inspiration from Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), which ushered into children's literature studies a powerful and lasting skepticism about “childhood” and “children's literature.”

The most striking change in children's culture, including children's literature, over the last few decades has been its commercialization and globalization (O'Sullivan, Comparative Children's Literature 149–52). The children's book industry in the United States, the leading market, is increasingly dominated by a handful of large media conglomerates whose publishing operations are small sections of their entertainment businesses. As a consequence, as Daniel Hade observes, “the mass marketplace selects which books will survive, and thus the children's book becomes less a cultural and intellectual object and more an entertainment looking for mass appeal” (511). The influence of these multimedia giants is immense: manufacturing mass-produced goods for children, they sell their products beyond the borders of individual countries, further changing and globalizing what were once regionally contained children's cultures. As a discipline that engages with phenomena that transcend cultural and linguistic borders and also with specific social, literary, and linguistic contexts, comparative children's literature is a natural site in which to tease out the implications of these recent developments.

Like many other subscribers to PMLA and most of the students enrolled in my literature classes, i first learned that reading could be a pleasure when I discovered Dr. Seuss's children's books. The Cat in the Hat implanted the desire to learn how to read in an entire generation of baby boomers. Dr. Seuss (the literary identity of Theodor Seuss Geisel) helped millions of children learn to read, and his books planted the seeds for a more caring, open, and creative culture.

In 2005 Emer O'Sullivan published the most comprehensive outline to date of a comparative approach to the study of literature and other cultural productions for the young. She presents nine constituent areas of comparative study in relation to children's literature (theory of children's literature, contact and transfer studies, comparative poetics, intertextuality studies, intermediality studies, image studies, comparative genre studies, comparative historiography of children's literature, comparative history of children's literature studies), which she illustrates with examples from around the world. But, although extensive, O'Sullivan's proposal is not without its blind spots, and she acknowledges that it “can only be enhanced by future discussion and modification” (12). With the aim of bolstering the field of children's literature, I here propose an area of comparative research overlooked by O'Sullivan. I also suggest extensions to her conception of comparative literature and to her handling of reception or reader response.

As Roger Sale has wryly observed, “everyone knows what children's literature is until asked to define it” (1). The Reasons WHY this unruly subject is so hard to delimit have been well canvassed. If we define it as literature read by young people, any text could potentially count as children's literature, including Dickens novels and pornography. That seems too broad, just as defining children's literature as anything that appears on a publisher-designated children's or “young adult” list seems too narrow, since it would exclude titles that appeared before eighteenth-century booksellers such as John Newbery set up shop, including the Aesopica, chapbooks, and conduct books. As numerous critics have noted, we cannot simply say that children's literature consists of literature written for children, since many famous examples—Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Little Prince—aimed to attract mixed audiences. And, in any case, “children's literature is always written for both children and adults; to be published it needs to please at least some adults” (Clark 96). We might say that children's literature comprises texts addressed to children (among others) by authors who conceptualize young people as a distinct audience, one that requires a form of literature different in kind from that aimed at adults. Yet basing a definition on authorial intention seems problematic. Many famous children's writers have explicitly rejected the idea that they were writing for a particular age group, and many books that were not written with young people in mind have nevertheless had their status as children's or young adult literature thrust upon them, either by publishers or by readers (or both).

Don Quixote, having shared the goatherds' rustic meal on his second sally, takes up a handful of acorns and launches into his lecture on the Golden Age: “Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados, y no porque en ellos el oro, que en esta nuestra edad de hierro tanto se estima, se alcanzase en aquella venturosa sin fatiga alguna, sino porque entonces los que en ella vivían ignoraban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío” ‘Blessed the time, and blessed the centuries, called by the ancients the Golden Age—and not because, then, the gold which we in our age of iron so value came to men's hands without effort, but because those who walked the earth in that time knew nothing of those two words, thine and mine.’ Bewildering as his harangue was for the listening goatherds, Don Quixote's introduction invites consideration of the location, ownership, and definition of the Spanish “Golden Age.” These aspects illuminate the challenge the period presents to early modern studies and vice versa.