UNTIL RECENTLY, LITERARY HISTORIANS BELIEVED THAT OCTAVIO PAZ'S THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE (EL LABERINTO DE LA S0LEDAD)—NOW considered one of the most influential analyses of Mexican culture written in the twentieth century—was ignored by Mexico's intellectuals for several years after its publication in February 1950. The country's most influential thinkers, from Samuel Ramos to Alfonso Reyes, remained silent after the book's release, even though Paz touched on many subjects, from political history to the origins of national identity, that they had explored in their work. The Labyrinth received only a handful of reviews, mostly by minor writers who merely summarized its arguments. The critic Enrico Mario Santf has interpreted this silence as a veiled form of ninguneo, the passive-aggressive tendency to turn one's adversaries into “nobodies” by ignoring their work—one of the vicissitudes of Mexican cultural life analyzed in The Labyrinth (49).

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) is best understood as William Craft's attempt to represent the contradictions and instabilities inherent in white–supremacist thought and culture. I consider race as a complex of various and interconnected social, economic, legal, and political theories and practices. Chaos theory, I argue, offers a useful framework for grasping this understanding of race, in part by discouraging attempts to isolate any discrete concept of race as independent or definitive. Addressing this chaotic reality, Craft approaches his story with a narrative method analogous to fractal geometry–that is, an approach to representation and measurement that accounts for apparent irregularity, fragmentation, and instability. Order and stability do not follow from the successful escape but rather are negotiated through a mode of representation that prioritizes accuracy over a conceptually neat Euclidean order. (JE)

LaЗamon's Brut, from a moment in English literary and cultural history whose sense of tradition is particularly difficult for us to comprehend–a century and a half after the Norman Conquest, at the beginnings of Middle English–has a notoriously complex relation to England's past and traditions. This essay focuses on how The Brut takes a traditional social and literary preoccupation in pre-Conquest England, the lordly gift exchange, and expands it to explore a new range of spiritual gifts (or deceptive claims to them), including professional knowledge, counsel to the powerful, and literary fame. This expansion of the gift corresponds to broad cultural shifts as well as to more topical matters in King John's reign, the probable period of the poem's composition. The poem fashions itself as a gift in these volatile terms, repeatedly embracing an unknown literary future while it accurately limns some fundamental new features of Middle English literature. (AG)

Educated individuals in Qing-dynasty China frequently organized “word-cherishing” societies to collect and dispose of paper with writing on it respectfully. This practice, which was found in Jiangnan-area centers of culture as well as in Chinese communities in diaspora as far removed as San Francisco, reveals a preoccupation among the literati with questions of commensurability between potentially incompatible registers of social meaning. In its emphasis on individual written words (zi) rather than a more general concept of writing (wen), this practice is also indicative of the challenges that literati faced in attempting to compose civil service examination essays in parallel form. It further suggests that the concept of the book and the concept of the fragment of text develop in mutually reinforcing fashion, and it hints at the new significance accorded concrete questions of technique in Chinese literary criticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (AD)

When seen through the lens of the African American freedom struggle, the seemingly minor spaces and places federated by Gérard Genette under the term paratext take on a major role. Entangled throughout the margins and fringes of books and other kinds of texts (especially visual ones), the paratext (e.g., citations, prefaces, typeface) has served as a field through which white supremacy has been transacted indirectly: white-written prefaces to fugitive slave narratives are vivid examples. At the same time, the paratext has also served as a vector through which white power has been resisted. Examining the paratextual issues surrounding Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Without Sanctuary, James Allen's exhibition of lynching photography, this essay explores what is gained and lost when the paratext is used as a means of resisting racialized domination. (BAMcC)

Cognitive psychologists studying the reading process have developed a detailed conceptual vocabulary for describing the microprocesses of reading. Modified for the purposes of literary criticism, this vocabulary provides a framework that has been missing from most literary-critical investigations of the history of literate practice. Such concepts as the production of a coherent memory representation, the limitations of working memory span, the relation between online and offline reading processes, the landscape model of comprehension, and the presence of standards of coherence allow for close attention to general patterns in reading and to the ways that individual readers modify them. The interpretation of Victorian responses to the poetry of Robert Browning provides a case study in the adaptation of cognitive models to the history of reading. Such an adaptation can reveal not only reading strategies used by historical readers but also those fostered by the discipline of literary criticism. (AE)

The publishing house cuadernos americanos has just released a good book, El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude], written by a Mexican author who is already known as a good poet and who now makes his debut as a critic and essayist. The book gives us more than the title promises: it contains the solitude necessary for thinking, but the thoughts are applied to the life and history of the Mexican nation. Octavio Paz, the author, comes from an intellectual lineage: his father was an opposition journalist who became a Zapatista revolutionary—a man of action and ideas, who, in turn, inherited the most salient traits of his own father, Don Irineo Paz, Octavio's grandfather.

I propose a new reading of the intersection of image and text as a site for reworkings of barbarian identity in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's last work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentrional (1617). Through narrative manipulations of the half–barbarian character Antonio el mozo's relation to painting, Cervantes crafts complex interrelations among American pictographic language, European alphabetism, and colonial models of barbarian identity to demonstrate the adaptability and ingenuity of indigenous people. I analyze the function of ekphrastic passages that reflect American pictographic language and demonstrate the influence of Mexican painting on the literature of the Spanish golden age. Descriptions of paintings in the Persiles ultimately provide a metafictional critique of European paradigms of graphic representation and challenge the authority of European colonial rationalizations of power dynamics in the New World. (EB)

Between 1914 and 1933, Ezra Pound edited four anthologies of poetry: Des Imagistes, Catholic Anthology, Profile, and Active Anthology. These compilations arose out of crucial stages of Pound's career in the teens, when he reacted against Victorian poetry, and in the 1930s, when he acted as a spokesperson for the modernist movement. Using the anthology as a vehicle for the presentation of innovative poetry as well as a guidebook on how to read it, Pound experimented with anthology formats to propel readers into the project of modernism through devices such as elliptical prefaces and fragmentary notes. He sought to train readers for the demands of interpreting modernist poetry and to reclaim control over an audience educated by burgeoning university literature departments and the mainstream poetic anthologies they employed. (JGN)

In the space between translators and translated, there are texts that straddle two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation. They participate in the construction of cultural identies from that in-between space and stage many of the concerns of contemporary translation theory. I call such texts translational literature. While all bilingual and multilingual discourse dramatizes the interaction of languages, translational texts lay special emphasis on translation as an essential component of cross-cultural contact. As such, translational literature treats translation in several registers–formal, thematic, linguistic, and discursive–raising questions not only about technical aspects of linguistic transfer but also about cultural (un)translatability, discourses of difference, and ideologies of domination. This essay elaborates the notion of translational literature and offers the exemplary case of Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love (1999). (WSH)

The first few frames of the Belgian comic-strip artist Raymond Macherot's work “Les Croquillards” (1957) provide a shorthand for some of the issues that concern environmentally oriented criticism, one of the most recent fields of research to have emerged from the rapidly diversifying matrix of literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. A heron is prompted to a lyrical reflection on the change of seasons by a leaf that gently floats down to the surface of his pond (see the next p.): “Ah! the poetry of autumn … dying leaves, wind, departing birds…” This last thought jolts him back to reality: “But—I'm a migratory bird myself! … Good grief! What've I been thinking?” And off he takes on his voyage south, only to be hailed by the protagonists, the field rats Chlorophylle and Minimum (the latter under the spell of a bad cold), who hitch a ride to Africa with him. “Are you traveling on business?” he asks his newfound passengers. “No, for our health,” they answer.