This essay argues that two early modern phenomena, the rise of the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem, are interrelated. This argument, introduced through a study of Montaigne's meditation on the ruins of Rome in his Travel Journal, takes on complementary forms. The first is that sublimity motivated skepticism: the sense that a force existed outside the aesthetic categories conventional in the Renaissance (such as wonder) drove authors into a skeptical frame of mind. The second is that skepticism created sublimity: the skeptical mindset offered alternative resources of aesthetic power as authors quarried the fragmentation and distraction embedded in skepticism to fashion a sublime style. These claims revise standard views of skepticism and the sublime, suggesting a mandate for an enriched aesthetics behind late-Renaissance loss of belief and exposing the Renaissance impulse behind the modern career of sublimity.

An enormously popular narrative device, speaking objects were used frequently in eighteenth-century British fiction to express authorial concerns about the circulation of books in the public sphere. Relating the speaking object to the author's status in a print culture, works featuring such narrators characteristically align authorship, commodification, and national acculturation. The objects celebrate their capacity to exploit both private and public systems of circulation, such as libraries, banks, booksellers' shops, highways, and taverns. Linking storytelling to commodities and capital, they convey an implicit theory of culture in which literary dissemination, economic exchange, and public use appear homologous. But as object narratives dramatize, such circulation estranges modern authors from their work. Far from mediating between private and public experience or synthesizing national and cosmopolitan values, these narratives record the indiscriminate consumption that characterizes the public sphere in a print culture.

This essay argues that Thackeray's unillustrated three-volume novel The History of Henry Esmond is shaped by modes of perception and representation nascent in the visual culture of nineteenth-century England and epitomized in the comic strip. Through one of Thackeray's own picture stories, it first describes the ekphrastic basis of his narrative imagination and then contextualizes his visual thinking by relating his journalistic reflections on images in society to recent cultural histories of visual experience. Subsequently, the essay demonstrates that Henry Esmond, a seemingly monumental historical novel, is structured by the fractured syntax of the comic picture story and that the picture story's revisionist impulse decenters the autobiographical subject, Henry Esmond, and highlights the heuristic function of his narrative. The argument concludes by revisiting Thackeray's meditations on the picture story, the railroad, and modernity, suggesting that his texts—both picture stories and this bildungsroman—foreground a transformative vision and thus reveal the contingency of subjectivity.

There is a crisis in drama studies that is reflected in the ways different disciplines understand dramatic texts and performance. Literary studies, absorbed with the functioning of language, often betrays a desire to locate the meanings of the stage in the dramatic text. Performance studies has developed a vivid account of nondramatic performance, which appears to depart from textual authority. Both disciplines, however, view drama as a species of performance driven by its text; as a result, drama appears as an unduly authorized mode of performance. Here, I read a range of critics (Andrew Parker. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler on J. L. Austin; Dwight Conquergood on ethnography; Joseph Roach on surrogation) to suggest ways of rethinking the relations of authority that inform texts and performances. I conclude with a glance at the representation of the text in Baz Luhrmann's recent film William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

“Rappaccini's Daughter” (1844) is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous and most frequently taught short fictions. In it Hawthorne distances himself from what he earlier called “the tottering infancy of our literature”; he boldly attaches his tale instead to the venerable scene of European literary history. Yet despite the numerous references in “Rappaccini's Daughter” to a European literary genealogy, Hawthorne makes no such self-conscious allusion to a crucial source, Frances Calderón de la Barca's Life in Mexico, a work mired in specifically American controversies over colonialism, race, and slavery. This essay examines Hawthorne's literary relation to the Americas by investigating what I call the Mexican genealogy of “Rappaccini's Daughter”: both the story's immediate predecessor, Life in Mexico, and its afterlife in Octavio Paz's La hija de Rappaccini, a dramatic revision that I read as an allegory of Mexican colonial history.

A general reluctance to engage the issue of lesbian identity in Elizabeth Bishop's work has understandably been conditioned by her own longstanding reticence. An approach that theorizes about the nonreferential, hence inarticulable, contours of Bishop's project, however, discloses a more eroticized aesthetic practice—one conceivably enabling the vital exploration of transgressive sexuality that perhaps goes without saying. What arguably forges the link between theory and practice is Bishop's experience of loss. The unspeakableness of mother loss due to insanity, mediated poignantly by the curtailment of Bishop's Canadian childhood, formerly provided the invitation to enclose Bishop's writing explicitly within a lifelong travail of itinerant displacement. Recent psychoanalytic theory, by contrast, foregrounds a more challenging loss that divides her writing between reality and the real and thus implicitly opens it up to a spectral lesbian poetics beyond what her canonical “American” identity readily permits readers to see and to say.

When I went from being a Bortolotti to being a Hutcheon, my social and cultural interactions within a predominantly Anglo-Saxon environment changed; my ethnic identity became encrypted, silenced, unless articulated by choice—a pointed lesson in the constructedness of concepts of ethnicity. Like me, Cathy (Notari) Davidson, Marianna (De Marco) Torgovnick, and Sandra (Mortaro) Gilbert are crypto-Italian teachers of English. What we do not share, however, is nationality: they are Italian American, while I am Italian Canadian. I therefore may have a somewhat different experience of ethnicity and its encrypting.

Focusing on William Wells Brown's one published play. The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), I address Brown's decision to supplement his antislavery lectures with dramatic readings of original plays. In this effort to challenge the terms of a representative identity as a black antislavery lecturer, Brown presented a conception of social life grounded in what I term multiply contingent identity. By this formulation, one's social identity is always contingent and is always in danger of being undermined as one's performance of selfhood awaits verifying responses in the form of reciprocal performances in the field of social relations. In The Escape, Brown turned his own performance of identity on the antislavery lecture circuit into a commentary on performance itself, especially on performances both shaped and veiled by the ideology of race. In this way. Brown attempted to reposition white northern antislavery sentiment, reconstructing whiteness by emphasizing its contingent relation to a reconfigured vision of African American identity.

Read through Lacan and such new Lacanians as Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, Josephine Hart's Damage (1991) illustrates how an ethics of jouissance founds a tragic action emblematic of postmodern narcissism. New Lacanians stress drive, jouissance, the real, the primordial father, and the femme fatale. Typically, they find these elements in film noir. Transforming noir into love story, Damage foregrounds an unnamed narrator whose sadomasochistic affair with his son's fiancée precipitates the son's death. Beginning with the narrator in the guise of the traditional oedipal father, the affair unveils the fiancée as a femme fatale who constitutes the narrator as what MacCannell would call the destructive, narcissistic brother become primordial father. Enacting an ethics of jouissance because the narrator will not abandon his drive to enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle, primordial father and femme fatale participate in a narrative that must be called Lacanian tragedy.

Recent readings of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which have been concerned primarily with the play's representation of difference, especially that of gender, religion, or race, often leave Jessica out of their analyses. Yet Jessica, as both a Jew and a willing Christian convert, enables the play to resolve the problem posed by the equations of white Christianity and national identity in the emerging discourse of English imperialism: how to render the Jew's difference as a difference of nature and as a difference of faith involving the act of will implicit in Christian baptism? Only by taking Shylock's measure in the light of the gender, racial, and religious ideologies that integrate his daughter into Venetian society can we account for the play's early modern representations of racialized Jews and of the Christians who imagined them.

Scholars have maintained that Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine unites Brechtian and deconstructive strategies in a dramatic form that subverts traditional representations of gender and sexuality. Yet this reception has consistently overlooked the repressive undercurrents that surface in the movement from the text of Churchill's play to a performance of it. Indeed, a fundamental disparity exists between the play's seemingly progressive textual pronouncements and the effects of its oft-celebrated dramaturgical strategies. The use of theatrical techniques like cross-casting harbors surprisingly reactionary attitudes that reinforce heterosexual imperatives by presenting homoerotic desires in conventional, stereotypical forms. Underlying these reactionary attitudes, I argue, is a liberal ideology that restricts the expression of gay male and lesbian desire to terms that reaffirm heterosexual norms. The play thus perpetuates a disturbingly naive and demonstrably repressive notion of acceptance of sexual diversity, a notion in which difference is easy to accept because it is not enacted.

Virginia Woolf in her last novel, Between the Acts, explores fascism from the vantage of the new physics and of information technology. Her knowledge of the new physics is attested to by myriad diary entries; her knowledge of information technology was largely intuitive. In Between the Acts, she uses a gramophone to brew patriotic emotion and thus to transform a group of British pageant goers into a herd. Ultimately, however, she short-circuits the herd impulse by privileging the audience members' interpretative acts. In the novel, patriotic messages of authority are deliberately adulterated by the gramophone's static or noise. The audience members must therefore make meaning out of noise; these interpretative acts break their visceral connection to the sound waves, the rhythm and rhyme, of patriotism. Woolf's intuitive grasp of the concept of noise inherent in information technology allows her to articulate an antiauthoritarian pluralist politics.