Literary critics have long imagined that T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920) shaped the canon and methods of countless twentieth-century classrooms. This essay turns instead to the classroom that made The Sacred Wood: the Modern English Literature extension school tutorial that Eliot taught to working-class adults between 1916 and 1919. Contextualizing Eliot's tutorial within the extension school movement shows how the ethos and practices of the Workers' Educational Association shaped his teaching. Over the course of three years, Eliot and his students reimagined canonical literature as writing by working poets for working people—a model of literary history that fully informed his canon reformation in The Sacred Wood. This example demonstrates how attention to teaching changes the history of English literary study. It further reveals how all kinds of institutions, not just elite universities, have shaped the discipline's methods and canons.

Reading The Faerie Queene is like playing. his article develops an account of three relevant tendencies of play—to change through time, to animate its object, and to remain opaque in meaning—and distinguishes this account from other critical understandings of play. It then introduces a historical analogue to Spenser's playfulness—the giving of formerly holy objects to children as toys during the Reformation—and uses it as a lens through which to read the ending of the first book of Spenser's poem, where the vast dragon not only becomes a posthumous plaything but also displays surprisingly playful propensities of its own. Readers respond both to this moment and to their own responses to it, playing in the presence of the poem's opaquely foregrounded meanings.

What does it mean to be a reader of a novel? he famous scene of Anna Karenina reading on the train takes up this question. Whereas Tolstoy's scene is traditionally viewed as yet another example of the pleasures and dangers of novel reading, from empathic identiication to romantic self-aestheticization, I argue that the scene investigates the phenomenology of novel reading, the nature of readerly subjectivity, and the poetics of the classic realist novel—all in ways that depart from other canonical literary depictions of novel reading. Bringing together the poetics of the realist novel with complex issues of selfknowledge and deliberation, the scene reveals a new form of readerly subjectivity that entails the imagined nonexistence of the empirical reader. Drawing on Bakhtin, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others, I show the implications of this form of readerly subjectivity for not only an original interpretation of Tolstoy's much-read scene but also our understanding of novel reading.

Beowulf confronts the limits of knowledge in various forms: the unknowability of death, the secretive behavior of the poem's monsters, the epistemological distance of the past, and our inevitably fragmentary understanding of the poem itself. In the process, the poem also tells us something important about the methods and possibilities that it imagines for the work of discovery and literary interpretation more broadly. Scholars commonly address the poem as a text whose secrets need uncovering, but the poem's engagement with the mechanics of secrecy can be a cue for thinking through our own methods as literary critics in encounters with texts of the past. If we take Beowulf's treatment of secrecy as a guide for the poem's hermeneutic potential, then we find that the poem invites a kind of reading that rigorously, yet humbly, acknowledges how little we can actually know.

Despite its brief history, Berlin Dada (1918–20) produced a glut of chronicles and memoirs, as if to immortalize its ephemeral insurgency. Its self-appointed chronicler, Richard Huelsenbeck, tried to harness this compulsion to memorialize in the service of Dadaist agitation he hoped would unleash a revolutionary time and redeem the failure of the communist uprisings at the end of World War I. his seditious temporality was based on two incompatible concepts of revolution: a properly political notion aimed at overthrowing an unjust regime and a vitalist discourse aimed at tapping into the circular low of life. he clash of the two modes of revolutionary time is enacted in Hannah Höch's photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (1919). he spectral temporality that sustains both is conjured by the Dada Almanac (1920), a literary compendium that doubles as a quirky inquiry into political normativity and an inluential paradigm of Dada's self-legitimation.

Recent discussions of form have argued that literary forms exist whether or not we pay attention to them. However, formalist criticism often begins with close reading. This essay uses medieval astronomy to consider the relation between form and perception. Chaucer's short poem The Complaint of Mars (c. 1385) presents a conjunction between the planets Mars and Venus as if it were a love affair. his celestial arrangement, wherein two planets seem to move toward each other before parting, reflects the way that celestial motion seems to an observer within a brief period of time. The arrangement disappears when integrated into a fuller account of the regular motion of the planets. Mars generates a similar excess in its literary language. Impressions of form that emerge in the process of reading dissolve against the background of larger, more stable forms when the poem is seen as a whole. These perceived, illusory forms reveal an interdependency between certain kinds of form and the time of reading.

The self-improvement industry has been analyzed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including those of sociology, history, and religion, but its relation to literature has not received the attention it demands. Self-help is inextricable from the history and future of reading around the globe. Using Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859) as a case study, I unearth the overlooked role of the self-help hermeneutic, a practical reading method that collapses period, nation, and genre in the global dissemination of literary culture. I then demonstrate that the pastiche didacticism of Smiles's early readers has become a mainstream conceit of twenty-first-century novels, including Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, and Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?. By putting on hold the standard critique of the genre's homogeneous neoliberal influence, I recalibrate the scales by which we measure self-help's literary and political relevance.

Studying the medieval prosimetrum, a genre that mixes narrative with lyric, could have important ramifications for the general study of poetics. By disrupting transhistorical theories of the lyric, which proceed from a presumed continuity between ancient Greece and modernity, the prosimetrum situates the Middle Ages at the center of our understanding of modern lyric poetry. Instead of beginning with a late-eighteenth-century understanding of lyric poetry as a self-expressive voice, which scholars must then localize in a poem's historical conditions, language, and genres, the prosimetrum begins with a conventional, rhetorical poem in a variety of stated genres and then, by including a narrative frame, stages that poem as a heartfelt song sung by lovesick knights or clerks. In the prosimetrum, the playful game of conventional art, which defines the medieval love lyric in isolation, suddenly becomes a way to imagine fictional subjectivities.

At Margaret Thatcher's funeral, in 2013, attendees received a program with William Wordsworth's Immortality Ode printed on the back. This was unsurprising. The ode has always been popular with figures who champion liberal capitalist democracy as the most efective form of governance, one that delivers reform through incremental change and pragmatic policies rather than revolutionary idealism. Framed by the current unrest in Western civic life, this essay paints a darker picture of this reigning political order. Considering readings of the ode by John Stuart Mill, Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling, I suggest that the poem allowed liberal intellectuals to romanticize reformist politics. For these readers, Wordsworth reveals a core of sublime possibility within systems built on routinized order. However, idealizing a gradualist approach to reform allows progress to be pushed into the future indeinitely. Tracing the commitment to practical sublimity may reveal an emergent theory of liberal technocracy, in which citizens are compelled to operate under a vast, incomprehensible array of protocols that never quite deliver meaningful social change.

A family of Shakespearean characters I call “the perverse literalists” takes the figurative language of their interlocutors in the most literal sense. While they make us laugh, these characters' perversely literal interpretations also highlight the physical and experiential grounds of common figures of speech and prod their interlocutors and the reader into a deeper understanding of the conditions of embodiment. his inventive use of the literal is a trope in its own right, one that has already been useful to cognitive linguists, phenomenologists, and new materialists. Metaphors we consider dead are, as others have suggested, merely sleeping, and the act of waking them up can be not merely funny but profoundly insightful. We should reexamine the widespread aversion to the misuse of literally and think instead about what it can tell us about the physicality of such abstract experiences as love and luck, causality and cognition.

Cora Wilson Stewart's Country Life Readers (1915-17), beginning reading primers designed for white Appalachian adults, contain lessons in the social meaning of reading. he formal interplay of the readers’ illustrations, text, and handwriting exercises show how Stewart's primers teach not how to read but rather how to act like a reader. By instructing students in the habits, attitudes, and behaviors that will make them seem “literate” to the wider world, the primers argue that these performances (some textual, many not) are not supplements to literacy but literacy itself. Setting Stewart's primers against other adult primers from the period further shows how these literate performances were circumscribed by race and region. Rather than dismiss this version of literacy as irredeemably “mythic,” I suggest that sources like Stewart's are evocative reminders to attend to the ways in which nonreading is always implicated in reading's meaning.

How might scholars extrapolate from the material evidence of “used books” to build larger narratives that help us make sense of the past, without reducing it again to grand, progressivist theories? The history of reading, and book history more generally, would benefit from an exploration of frameworks that extend beyond those of linear time and discrete periodization, and media and technology studies might help lead the way. his essay juxtaposes two annotations left in a set of cut-and-paste biblical harmonies made at the religious household of Little Gidding in the 1630s and 1640s. The first is a seventeenth-century note left by King Charles I; the second is a cut-up booklet made by an anonymous reader in the nineteenth century. Comparing these two moments of reading reveals the urgency of expanding the historical horizons of literary studies and deepening its engagement with theories of time, media, and materiality.

By examining the episodically shiting gender of the character Farina in Hal Roach's Our Gang series, this article argues that the integrationist fantasy Roach offered depended on a strategy for representing black children that shows the speciically temporal limits to popular entertainment's ability to imagine black adolescence in the early twentieth century. he two prevailing views of the series—Our Gang as integrationist and Our Gang as mired in racist stereotypes—are not exclusive but mutually constitutive, and the tie that binds the two is the strange pleasure audiences found in the black child whose gender changed. By attending to the fact that the integration in the series happened in relation to black boys in particular, we can see Our Gang's episodic treatment of Farina as a formal response to national anxieties about black masculinity and racialized sexuality.

Alan Bewell identifies a newly globalized, consumerist nature in the Romantic period, one aspect of a larger context in which Michel Foucault observed the “dawn of biopolitics.” This historical context, along with Erasmus Darwin's best-selling poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), is brought to bear here on William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion and on traditional readings of it that manifest nostalgia for an idealized past, a past predating enclosure's separation of population and environment, of human being and nature. Correcting the prevalent misidentification of the marigold that Oothoon plucks in Visions, my reading newly envisions an Oothoon whose relation to the life-forms around her replicates the modes of domination and exploitation inherent in capitalist ideology. What have seemed to be anomalies in Oothoon, her curious connections to Bromion and her offer to procure girls for Theotormon, instead reflect central character traits. In the end, a reaccounting of the historicity of Blake's poetic text yields a heroine and a reading population struggling to view themselves as at the center of a reflexive system that governs and exploits the mutual relations of natural and social surroundings but that also is governed and exploited by the same biopolitical apparatus.

Discussions of the relation between drama and performance have been dominated by two symmetrical, emancipatory impulses. Performance scholars have, for the past half-century, sought to liberate performance from the authority of the drama. Literary scholars have, for centuries, if not millennia, sought to distinguish a “literary” dimension of the dramatic text free of the flux of performance. his essay diagnoses in Shakespeare's Hamlet an alternative story about the relation between drama and performance. Paying refreshed attention to the earlier and less famous of Hamlet's statements of dramatic theory—his blurb for the “excellent play” featuring Aeneas's speech to Dido—I find Hamlet bringing drama, especially in its “literary” dimension, crashing back into performance. his collision does not reinstitute the authority of the text; rather, it radically democratizes the scene of dramatic performance by “indigesting” the behaviors of the participants therein.