Woolf called Orlando a “joke,” an “escapade,” and critics have taken her at her word. Although an enormous amount has been written about Woolf, the novel that celebrates her love for Vita Sackville-West tends to be ignored, dismissed as an anomaly, or explained as something other than what it is. But the things we joke about are often the things we care about too much to risk seriousness. The bold and dazzling achievement of Woolf's “joke” only becomes clear when Orlando is set in the context of the love that inspired it and seen against the social, historical, and literary background in which it was conceived.

Is the fetish the only way to understand glamour, especially when it comes to the glamour of racialized women? How do we talk about agency and embodiment for a mediated figure? How does celebrity affect a subject whose body has been overembodied yet depersonalized? This essay suggests that the unlikely conjunction among celebrity, glamour, and racial difference may be the place where we are compelled to confront the intimacy, rather than opposition, between person-hood and objectification. Turning to Anna May Wong, an iconic “race beauty” in the early twentieth century, this essay argues that Wong's glamour is achieved neither through her apparently racialized performances nor through her uncomplicated assumption of female agency but rather through a paradoxical staging and erasure of her own body and skin. By asking how a celebrated body might operate subjunctively rather than materially, we can begin to question the imperatives of personhood that drive both celebrity and race studies.

A century separates us from an iconic moment of aesthetic metamorphosis: 1914 witnessed the appearance of James Joyce's Dubliners, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Mina Loy's “Parturition,” and the vorticist journal Blast. It was the year Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, aided by Ezra Pound, started the literary review the Egoist in London and Condé Nast and Frank Crowninshield launched Vanity Fair in New York. Arnold Schoenberg's atonal symphonic works assaulted classical sonorities; Wassily Kandinsky elevated the purity of geometric form above the functional work of visual representation. Most crucially, 1914 saw the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the subsequent outbreak of the First World War. Cutting a bloody, four-year swath across Europe, the war took almost forty million lives and rendered all subsequent formal innovation inseparable from cultural devastation: thus the intricate, ruptured literary architectures of The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses (1922), and To the Lighthouse (1927).

Why the Baroque? Why now? As many have argued, the general aesthetic trend of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, often called postmodern, can perhaps more usefully be labeled neobaroque. Is the neobaroque turn of the twentieth century something akin to the neoclassicism of the sixteenth century, or the neo-Gothicism of the nineteenth? Or, on an even more condensed scale, is it similar to the rapid returns of previously dismissed fashion decades, as evidenced by the proliferation in the early years of this century of those beads and bellbottoms associated with flower children and the age of Aquarius?

In his correspondence, Keats refers more than once to the difference between himself and Byron. In a letter to Charles Wentworth Dilke, dated September 21, 1818, he distinguishes jokingly between: “1. superfine rich or noble poets—ut Byron. 2. common ut egomet—.” A few months later, on February 18th, 1819, he tells George and Georgiana Keats: “Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative—Shakspeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it—.” Perhaps one might better read “Keats,” or at least “Keats as he liked to picture himself,” instead of “Shakespeare.” Just seven months later, in a letter written on September 18th of the same year to the same recipients, there occurs the celebrated, and utterly unconvincing, axiom: “You speak of Lord Byron and me—There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task. You see the immense difference.”

“Flash,” the slang of the criminal and boxing subcultures, illuminates Byron's Don Juan more than critics have recognized. This slang was devised to hide meanings from most listeners, and the flash language in the scene in which robbers attack Juan exemplifies discursive encryption in general. Such encryption is not always evidence that the speakers need to conceal their meaning, but it reminds us that in Byron's Britain many groups of people needed to communicate in secret, most often because of illegal activity, including illegal sexuality. The poet's most dangerous secret was sodomy, a capital crime, and the form of flash he had needed most was the coded language on which sodomites had to rely. The robbery scene bestows darker connotations on the polyglossia that runs throughout Don Juan: such diversity can reflect not just emancipation but also constraint.

Among the most historically fixed of art historical and literary concepts, the Baroque arises at the intersection of early modern classicism, imperialism, and science—that is, out of the high Renaissance—to become a kind of antiprogram of resistances: to the absolutist state, the rise of empirical science, the pressures of empire, and other sixteenth-century signs of the gathering regimentation of knowledge. With a flourish of forms and a play of perspectives, the baroque embodies the recoil from such regimentation and the gathering sense that all these systems for organizing human experience fall short in the face of disorder, contingency, and death. Seen from certain vantages, the specimens of the baroque often seem complicit with the projects of absolutism, empire, and late humanism; but regarded in all their dimensions, such works are often complex reactions, critical and compromised, to those projects.

In order to appreciate fully the Wife of Bath’s correccioun of clerical teaching concerning marriage, it is necessary to understand what her bourgeois experience was. The legal customs of the bourgeoisie allowed widows and married women rights of contract and property denied to women of other classes. The Wife of Bath was a clothier, not an artisan weaver, whose cloth making was organized in accordance with the entreprenurial practice of the industry in the west country during the late fourteenth century. The economic context that this bourgeois setting gives to Alisoun’s experience makes her opinions concerning marital power less eccentric than has heretofore been believed. Her prologue recounts her growth in practical wisdom, culminating in her marriage with the inexperienced Jankyn. Her tale is a parodic rejection of the ideal pictures of genteel marriage painted by the aristocratic, or would-be aristocratic, writers of medieval deportment books.

This essay provides a historical prologue for theorizing the cinema in postmodernity. The origins of the mobilized gaze are situated in the nineteenth-century flâneur, that paradigm of modernity. As the department store supplanted the arcade, space opened for a new urban subject, a female flâneur—a flâneuse. The mobilized consumer gaze led in turn to an apparatus that simulates spatial and temporal mobility: the cinema. The most profound symptoms of the postmodern condition—the disappearance of a sense of history, entrapment in a perpetual present, the loss of temporal referents—stem in part from the implicit time travel of cinematic and televisual spectation. The shopping mall—the present-day extension of the arcade—has the multiplex cinema and the VCR as apparatical exponents. The title of the essay is thus an appropriative double pun (on fleurs and on mal), locating the flânerie of the postmodern cinema spectator in the shopping mall.

There has never been a great age of science and technology without a corresponding flourishing of the arts and humanities. In any time or place of rapid technological advance, those creatures we would now call humanists—literary commentators, historians, philosophers, logicians, theologians, linguists, scholars of the arts, and all manner of writers, musicians, and artists—have also had a field day. Perhaps that generalization is actually a tautology. Great ages of science are great ages of the humanities because an age isn't a historical period but a construct, and constructs are the work of humanists. Throughout history, there have been many momentous scientific discoveries that simply drift into the culture, are adapted without any particular new social or philosophical arrangements. It is the humanistic articulation of the significance of scientific change that announces a new episteme, a world-altering, even metaphysical, transformation. While scientists and engineers are responsible for the discoveries and inventions, humanists consolidate those experimental findings, explain them, and aggregate their impact in such a way that we suddenly have not just the new but an epoch-defining paradigm shift. (E = mc is an equation; the concept of relativity is a defining intellectual model.) The humanistic turn of mind provides the historical perspective, interpretive skill, critical analysis, and narrative form required to articulate the significance of the scientific discoveries of an era, show how they change our sense of what it means to be human, and demarcate their continuity with or difference from existing ideologies.

During the seventeenth century, the Baroque was exported wholesale to the areas of the world being colonized by Catholic Europe. It is one of the few satisfying ironies of European imperial domination worldwide that the baroque worked poorly as a colonizing instrument. Its visual and verbal forms are ample, dynamic, porous, and permeable, and in all areas colonized by Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to incorporate the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African laborers and artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures. Cultural heresies (and heretics) often entered unnoticed or were ignored for reasons of expediency. Asian influences arrived on the Nao de China (the Manila Galleon) with artifacts from Japan, China, the Moluccas, and the Philippines, destined for Europe but portaged across New Spain, thus joining the diverse cultural streams that over time came to constitute the New World baroque. And, in time, the baroque was also transformed in Europe by New World influences: its materials (silver from Mexico and Peru, ivory from the Philippines), its motifs (fauna and flora from the Caribbean, the Orinoco, the Amazon), and its methods (artistic, doctrinal, indoctrinating).

Initiated in think tanks following world war II, neoliberalism took hold of political imaginaries in the late 1970s and the 1980s as capitalist enterprises vigorously sought to expand their market reach in the face of structural challenges and adjustments, economic and political. Technologies of travel, communication, and information flows became speedier and more sophisticated, further shrinking distances and compressing time. Associated regimes of population management and rule accordingly were pressed into forging novel strategies.

During the colonial period, Spain maintained such close contact with her American possessions that Spanish styles in writing as well as in art and architecture became the standard for the colonists. It is not surprising, then, to find that Gongorism had many ardent supporters across the seas. In Mexico, the poems of Góngora were studied in the same manner as those of the ancient classics, as is attested by Vera Tassis' account concerning Agustín de Salazar y Torres. The youthful Agustín, when less than twelve years old, recited from memory the Soledades and Poliphemo and interpreted some of the most obscure passages at a public examination held by the Jesuit School of Mexico.

Despite the last decade's preoccupations with the pleasure of the text and sexual difference, few of the theories that have addressed the relation of narrative and pleasure have raised the issue of the difference between women's and men's reading pleasures. An oedipal model of narrative whose ideology of representation is derived from male sexuality not only places the female reader in the position of reading from a male point of view but also distorts our expectations for narratives written by women. Reconceiving such issues as incipience, repetition, and closure in terms of an experience of the female body helps to explain a “problematic” narrative such as Frankenstein. George Eliot's Romola thematizes and thereby discredits the oedipal struggle that structures it. Both strategies remind us that the oedipal paradigm's claim to universality depends on its either “forgetting” or actively discrediting issues that would expose its arbitrariness and mitigate its pleasures.

This essay examines the pre- and posthistory of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Opening with a reconsideration of Vincent Carretta's influential claim that Equiano fabricated an African birthplace, I consider how Equiano's strategies of self-fashioning inform his trailblazing book tour of the British Isles in the early 1790s. If Equiano self-consciously designed his autobiography to become a best seller, his book tour performed the abolitionist manifesto that he was reluctant to put into print, as during his stops at cities and towns across the nation he worked to convert sympathetic readers into active abolitionists. Under the long shadow of the Pitt ministry's suppression of political activism in the 1790s, Equiano formed alliances with working-class and radical figures in Britain and Ireland, drawing on Shakespeare's Othello to develop a familiar public persona he could market during his book tour. (JB)

The Gothic novel is defined not by its stock devices—ruined abbeys and the like—but by its use of a particular atmosphere for essentially psychological purposes. Mary Shelley, Maturin, Melville, and Faulkner develop a form crudely forged by Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, and M. G. Lewis. Their Gothic novels attempt to immerse the reader in an extraordinary world in which ordinary standards and moral judgments become meaningless and good and evil are seen as inextricably intertwined. Gothic writing is closely related to romantic: both are the product of a profound reaction against everyday reality and conventional religious explanations of existence. But while romantic writing is the product of faith in an ultimate order, Gothic writing is a gloomy exploration of the limitations of man. The one attempts to transcend the flux of the purely temporal to find joy and security in a higher beauty; the other is mired in the temporal and within it can find only absurdities and unresolvable ambiguities.

In the Fall of 2004, members of the MLA committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada felt that it was time to assess the state of the study of race in literary studies as we approached the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of the seminal collection “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1986), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which contained contributions from some of the most important scholars of race. It may appear that studying race is now largely taken for granted in English departments and that we no longer need to place quotation marks around race to emphasize its constructedness. Many scholars, though, feel a deep sense of anxiety that the situation with regard to race may have been normativized and comfortably compartmentalized but not improved. Intellectual tokenism abounds, as do equivalences between phenotypes and fields of study, with notable exceptions in larger metropolitan universities. For those of us outside English departments, the situation has barely improved. Each discipline has its unique historical baggage, and some are more able to discard their baggage than others, while some have been placed under greater pressure to change. But the truth of the matter is that some are just plain unwilling to acknowledge the significance of race even as they strive to update their disciplines and expand into new areas. In the extensive field of literary studies, it is premature to state that race has arrived, and it is not at all certain that the relation between race and critical theory, so central to the Gates volume, is settled. To a large extent, critical theory continues to see race as exterior to it, transcendent of the theorizations and lived experiences of race. Even though South Asia-based postcolonial theory has geared us to the study of colonialism and its consequent postcolonial complexities, it has also long held a strongly ambivalent relation to race studies.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through disembodied mobility. References to boundless space, unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound. In this heady environment, new technologies promise ever-increasing powers of transformation and transport—applied to information, business, and self—and the benefits of surveillance and tracking. More and more in this context, the concept of a person or of human beings appears to depend on the attenuated possibilities of cyberspace. If the heavy, even immovable, facts of embodied existence can be ameliorated or discharged through the creation of new identities on the Internet, for example, or through new collective personas or communities, then what or who counts as a person becomes transformed.