This article revisits André Gide's emblematically modernist novel, Les faux-monnayeurs (1925; The Counterfeiters), by reevaluating the importance and significance of the setting at the center of the narrative: the “pension Azaïs-Vedel,” a Protestant educational institution around which all the novel's characters—mostly adolescents—gravitate and all the subplots converge. It shows how Gide's choice of setting responded to the “quarrel of classicism,” which reconfigured the French literary field at the turn of the twentieth century, superimposing the political, the aesthetic, and the religious and connecting the question of literary form with that of the formation of French youth. The article also reassesses the survival of religion in twentieth-century French literature, and in particular the enduring religiosity inflecting both political modernity and modernist aesthetics.

The typewriter—the machine and the human operator at the nadir of the white-collar hierarchy—became associated with white female workers in the American racial imaginary. Although the color line deterred Black applicants from that side of the collar line, the Black typewriter as a literary type came to salience between 1886 and 1930, disrupting what I call the “bureaucratization of the racial imaginary”: the process whereby the exclusionary white middle-class tenets underpinning the bureaucratized office both regulated and were also informed by the imaginative possibilities of race, gender, and labor. Tracing the Black typewriter from Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Charles W. Chesnutt to Jean Toomer and Dorothy West, I reveal how these authors construed white-collar identity as a form of racial passing, requiring the worker's acceptance of racial and sexual segregation. Their innovative narratives about passing as white collar foregrounded the Black typewriter's unsettling experiences inside that system, challenging the theory that economic uplift would inherently promote racial and sexual equality.

Richard Wright is exemplary of an interwar version of world literature, undergirded by the cultural centers of Moscow and Paris, that valorized progressive antiracist nationalism. Influenced by leftist writers like André Malraux, Wright created the masterpiece of this literary Popular Front, Native Son. During the postwar Red Scare, Wright continued his Popular Front–style cultural politics in Paris, helping France resist the CIA-engineered cultural Cold War. His underappreciated The Outsider resists the construction of a politically quietist canon of high modernist world literature. Although Wright himself later advanced an American exceptionalist perspective in the 1950s, the circulation and translation of his early work inspired a generation of anticolonial writers, such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Ousmane Sembène, and Frantz Fanon. Today's globalization-driven world literature models overlook or actively seek to discredit Wright's progressive and antiracist model.

This essay engages with James Baldwin's work on prison rape in the early 1970s: his directing of John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes while in Turkey (1969–70), his nonfiction book No Name in the Street (1972), and his penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Over the course of these works, Baldwin theorized that sexual violence constitutes racial capitalism by mediating between the two state-organized institutions tasked with securing the primitive accumulation and surplus value on which racial capitalism relies: the family (and, more broadly, heterosexuality) and the prison (and, more broadly, policing). In turn, Baldwin helps converge two intellectual traditions that developed after him, the black radical and Marxist feminist traditions, in order to explain how sexual violence expropriates both forced productive labor and unpaid reproductive labor through its production of racialized gender and kinlessness.

The entanglement of colonial power's cultural and material manifestations has been an important topic in anticolonial thinking. I tentatively term this the problem of relating the imperial imaginary and imperial reality. This essay focuses on the imaginary and real geographies of the eighteenth-century British maritime empire, using digital methods (custom named entity recognition and mapping) to compare place-names mentioned in maritime fiction and nonfiction with the movements of British ships. In Edward Said's terms, structures of reference are used to see the structures of attitude underpinning the material power of an increasingly global empire. I present four theses on the convergences and divergences between the imaginary empire of texts and real empire of ships: on the centrality of England in both, a shared colonial geography of fungibility, the imaginary's erasure of environmental and bodily restraints, and the imaginary empire's anticipation of, and even preparation for, real imperial domination.

Ecocritical scholars and environmental scientists contend that the earliest detectable signs of anthropogenic global warming manifested as extreme fluctuations in global weather patterns and can be traced back to the 1930s. While modernist scholars have been hard pressed to find evidence of an ecological consciousness among canonical modernists during this decade, this essay demonstrates that Gertrude Stein left a copious and critical archive of climatic change in Everybody's Autobiography, published in 1937. In this lesser known “autobiography,” Stein recounts spectacular and mundane environmental upheavals while criticizing the West's epistemological dissociation of the weather from world events. Moreover, Stein offers an extraordinary reflection on modernity's “eternal” dependence on fossil fuels. By historically situating Stein's numerous weather reports within the political, scientific, environmental, and media discourses of the 1930s, this essay offers a portrait of Stein as an important cultural actor within the broader historiography of modern climate science.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is part of a global hypercanon of popular fiction and thus a major commercial enterprise. In the translation of these works, the author and translator are joined by a host of shadowy figures—the source language publisher, scouts, literary agents, target language publishers, editors, and proofreaders—who transform the texts for a particular readership. This essay connects the market-oriented metamorphosis of paratext with substantial alterations to literary content itself. It is based on a computational study of the novels in Swedish and English that singled out major alterations to paragraph meaning and length across the three novels. The study showed that about 6.3% of the paragraphs have been cut or shortened by at least 30%. These extensive changes reveal a process of creative remaking, in which published works become raw content to be reshaped by commercial expectations and the demands of high production speed.

This article analyzes how Chinese writers in the early twentieth century translated and appropriated Russian literature through the intermediary of Japanese scholarly and creative writing. It traces how Japan began as the primary—and in some cases only—cultural broker in the Chinese reception of Russian literature during the late Qing dynasty and how its impact diminished as Western European sources became viable competitors. To illuminate Japan's unique mediating role in shaping Chinese understanding of both Russian literature and China's own literary and linguistic legacy, this article examines Wu Tao's 1907 relay translation of Chekhov's “The Black Monk” from Japanese. By probing the Sino-Japanese cultural connections that gave birth to this translation and comparing it with two later Chinese renderings from English and Russian versions, this article reflects on the factors that determine how intermediaries function in transcultural negotiations.