Milton's Samson has long been a character about whom readers are irreconcilably divided. Current anxiety over terrorism has made it all the more inviting to see Milton's dramatic poem as a criticism of Samson's slaughter of the Philistines, a sentiment emphatically expressed in John Carey's recent claim that “September 11 has changed Samson Agonistes, because it has changed the readings we can derive from it while still celebrating it as an achievement of the human imagination.” This paper interrogates the association of Milton with present-day antipathy to religious violence and seeks to sophisticate the position of critics who now find terrorism an inescapable presence in the field of literary interpretation. The brand of reading most necessary in current discussion is one that avoids the reactionary temptation to cleanse literary texts of sympathy with religious violence and to view such violence as the province solely of the Other.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Irish peasant was a figure encoded with literary, social, and political meaning, and to speak or write about that central image of Irish identity in the context of the time was to participate in a special kind of cultural discourse, far removed from the changing realities of rural life. The portraits of the peasant generated by different Irish poets, dramatists, fiction writers, and antiquarians were often radically opposed to one another; in fact, each writer undertook to rewrite or to reconceptualize the peasant characters imagined by predecessors and contemporaries. Thus W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde created portraits that not only rivaled each other but aimed primarily at overturning the prevailing English colonial stereotype reflected in the stage Irishman. These portraits were in turn rewritten by John Synge, even as Yeats's, Hyde's, and Synge's were reworked in divergent ways by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Patrick Kavanagh.

If Reading were used exclusively to designate human engagement with symbolic codes, then it would be relatively easy to dismiss distant reading as an oxymoron—unless it were referring to mystical scrying from dizzying heights or deciphering printed matter from across a room. Debates about what constitutes human reading are as varied as the many hermeneutic traditions and pedagogical or cognitive approaches on which they draw (Bruns). But reading has been used to describe many mechanical processes and sorting techniques. Punch-card rods, slotted light triggers, Jacquard looms, and many other devices were reading encoded information long before the standard MARC (machine-readable cataloguing) records became ubiquitous in library systems in the 1970s. Outmoded mechanical reading devices have a seductive, steampunk fascination. Many mimicked human actions and behaviors. In addition, these older technologies were embedded in human social systems and exchanges whose processes the machines' operators could partly read. The machines' actions were encoded and decoded by individuals' cognitive intelligence even if the machines functioned automatically.

How do we talk about racism, which we must, given its pervasiveness, without erasing significant changes that distinguish the present from the past and, even more important, without contributing to further racialization of the language of social and cultural analysis—and, by implication, to racist discourses? Much has changed over the last half century in the consciousness of racism and in efforts to overcome it. It is obscurantist to overlook these changes and speak of racism today as if it were the racism of earlier times. On the other hand, recent decades have witnessed the globalization of racism, the racialization of social categories, and the proliferation of race talk, which contributes to the reification of race. This article seeks to evaluate the ways in which race talk finds expression in discourses of political economy, labor migration, biogenetics, and neoliberal attacks on the idea of the social, as well as in putatively antiracist arguments in cultural and postcolonial studies that nevertheless contribute to the pervasiveness of race talk. It suggests that contemporary issues of race are best grasped within a condition of global modernity and sees in the restoration of the social a precondition for overcoming political and cultural racialization.

Novalis' fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais displays in its composition a degree of purpose and coherence with which it has never been credited. A close examination of the text reveals a carefully constructed schema that unites the seemingly disparate elements of speculation and poetry into a meaningful and uniform statement on the relationship between man and nature. In the first section, entitled “Der Lehrling,” Novalis defines the ego's binary direction into an outer realm and an inner realm as the dual approach to the reality of nature; he outlines these dialectically opposed paths according to a pattern of alternate juxtaposition that reflects their opposite trends while it allows, at the same time, for their fundamental unity by linking one alternative to the other. The initial object of Novalis' exposition in the second section, called “Die Natur,” is the range of man's power of knowledge; he employs its various aspects as points of perspective from which nature may be examined, a fact that becomes fully obvious only after the underlying pattern of composition has been recognized as one that follows Kant's systematization of the human intellect, in particular his system for the categories of understanding.

The term “dramatic monologue” was not in use when the great Victorian dramatic monologues were being written. They were sometimes called “monodramas,” which Tennyson defines as works in which successive phases of passion in one person take the place of successive persons. This agrees with the form as invented by Rousseau in Pygmalion (1763) and as practiced in Germany from about 1772 to 1815. It is related to other forms, e.g., the “attitude,” in which virtuoso performers attempted to portray rapidly shifting roles through pantomime. Monodrama was introduced into England by William Taylor of Norwich, Dr. Frank Sayers, Southey, and “Monk” Lewis; and Tennyson’s Maud, “Locksley Hall,” and “CEnone” have some characteristics of the genre. The form arose partly out of the prosopopoeia and should be distinguished from the Browningesque dramatic monologue, where the “drama” is normally between the speaker and the reader rather than between different phases of the speaker’s soul.

I'm not a science fiction expert. Nor am i an academic, although i used to be one, sort of. Although I'm a writer, I'm not primarily a writer of science fiction. In this genre I'm a dilettante and a dabbler, an amateur—which last word, rightly translated, means “lover.” I got into hot water recently on a radio talk show in Britain: the radio person said she'd just been to a sci-fi conference there, and some people were really, really mad at me. Why? said I, mystified. For being mean to science fiction, said she. In what way had I been mean? I asked. For saying you didn't write it, she replied. And I having had the nerve to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction.

The study of Indirect Discourse in Anglo-Saxon has hitherto received comparatively little attention. We occasionally meet with discussions of this construction in grammatical studies of selected Anglo-Saxon writings. Kühn and Wohlfarht, in their treatments of the syntax of the works of Ælfric, have done little more than to mention Indirect Discourse; Nader, however, has furnished a far more satisfactory account of it as found in the Beowulf. Such studies are as a rule of a sketchy character and are also extremely unsatisfactory owing to the restricted field within which the work has been done.

Everyone knows that the concept of form has outlived its usefulness in discussions of literature, the arts, and media. The word does not appear in the recent handbooks of critical terms in art history and literary studies issued by the University of Chicago Press (Nelson and Shiff; Lentricchia and McLaughlin), and it appears in Raymond Williams's classic glossary, Keywords, only in its derivative (and mainly pejorative) form as an “-ism,” as in the phrase “mere formalism.” Formalists, as we know, are harmless drudges who spend their days counting syllables, measuring line lengths, and weighing emphases (Trotsky), or they are decadent aesthetes who waste their time celebrating beauty and other ineffable, indefinable qualities of works of art. If form has any afterlife in the study of literature, its role has been completely overtaken by the concept of structure, which rightly emphasizes the artificial, constructed character of cultural forms and defuses the idealist and organicist overtones that surround the concept of form.

The poverty of the single-digit sum in my title, I trust, raises a brow. After all, the ubiquity of those we conventionally shepherd into the enclosure of the term animals stands out as a feature of both Shakespearean material and early modern texts generally. The animal footprints in this archive result from the frequency with which early moderns encountered living and butchered animals in their daily routines. Hardly an urban, rural, or domestic scene was painted without them. For illustration, Jan van der Heyden's cityscape of Amsterdam's main public square dramatizes the civic visibility of dogs and horses (alongside the town hall and the New Church) and muddies any distinction between beasts of burden and creatures of leisure—especially beneath that vast early modern sky (see next page). In a prescient intimation of modernity, Thomas More's Utopia imagined a noncitizen, butchering class performing its labors, deemed too brutal for citizens to witness, out of sight (75). Early modern humans had more contact with more animals than most of us now do. For a species with weak ears and a terrible nose, out of sight is out of mind.

The study of allusion has been beset by limiting assumptions, conceptual murkiness, and terminological imprecision; moreover, many poststructuralist theorists regard such study as having been superseded by newer conceptions of intertextuality. This essay seeks to clarify the nature of allusion and the terminology by which it is analyzed and to place it on a firmer footing within poststructuralist literary criticism. I distinguish two forms of allusion often conflated-learned reference and phraseological adaptation–and elucidate the elements of a phraseological adaptation. I distinguish diachronic allusion from synchronic intertextuality, as poststructuralist theorists insist should be done, but then suggest how coordinating the two can enrich the analytic power of each way of conceiving textual interrelation.

In its frequent attention to visual acts, Wuthering Heights explores the sexual politics of the gaze. Not only does Bronte's novel make the gaze important thematically (as both a psychosexual phenomenon and a means of surveillance), it also suggests that narration itself is dependent on and produced by a gaze. But through its treatment of its two narrators and of Hareton and the second Catherine as gazing subjects, the novel suggests that there are limits to the power of the gaze to objectify, appropriate, and control. Thus Wuthering Heights anticipates questions that feminist theory has been asking about a possible “female gaze” and provides a feminist context for thinking about the visual metaphors pervading post-Jamesian theories of the novel.

Recent studies of medieval English literature have queried anew the role of the anthology (medieval and modern) in shaping both historical and current notions of vernacular canons. Here, my examination of two major assemblies exemplifies the theoretical, interpretive, and pedagogical problems raised by this recent work. In British Library manuscript Harley 2253, an early-fourteenth-century collection, and in Sammelbände of printed books put together in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, I discern sequences of texts that take as their theme the idea of the anthology: the languages of poetic expression, the technologies of public literacy, and the cultural values that generate canons. Studying and teaching medieval literature requires us to restore texts to such early compilatory contexts; but it also requires us to reflect on our contemporary fascination with anthologies and with the de-authorizing of the literary in the wake of postmodern theory—a move, I suggest, anticipated in medieval literary culture.

In an undoubtedly misbegotten moment, some months ago i set out to protest widespread disregard or stereotyping of feminism (especially among those the age of my undergraduates) and to do so by means of the humor feminism supposedly dampens. It was to be a Cosmo-like or DailyCandy.com-type questionnaire that readers could fill out in the privacy of their own homes to ascertain whether they were vulnerable to any allegation that they were or could be considered feminists. The higher their score, the more secure they could feel.

The poems called in this study Weaving Songs were in ancient times also known as History Songs, for the first name applied to them was Chansons d'istoire; then, a little later apparently, they were called Chansons de toile or Weaving Songs. By modern critics they have also been termed Romances but this name is not altogether satisfactory. If one glances through the critical edition of these poems published by Karl Bartsch under the title Romanzen und Pastourellen one finds that the Weaving Songs are mixed up with other poems under the loose title of Romanzen. The term Romance, in use since the days of Grimm and Fauriel but first made popular by the collection of old French poems published by Paulin Paris under the title of Le Romancero français, was borrowed from the Spanish towards the end of the eighteenth century and then it designated, as it does still today, poems of historical content like our English Ballads. If the term was suitable enough during the Romantic period when the Romancero appeared, it is a source of dangerous confusion nowadays when the same term is applied to poems so widely different in nature as the Weaving Songs and, to give only one instance, the lament of the young girl in the famous poem of Marcabru, A la fontana del vergier, which is generally termed a Romance.