Among the poetic modes to persist since Islam's advent, hijāʾ, or classical Arabic invective poetry, pushes the limits of permissible art while preserving aspects of court culture not found elsewhere in the premodern corpus. The harshest pieces of hijāʾ have jeopardized its very status as a proper art form, its popular appeal notwithstanding. This essay sketches the ethical and aesthetic contours of hijāʾ in postclassical Arabic literature (ca. 1000–1400), including the motivations that occasioned it. It offers as a case study the hijāʾ of the foremost Andalusian minister, Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khat.īb (d. 1375). The poet-politician's terms of abuse shed light on Granada's political strains, and they jar with a tradition that proscribes calumny altogether and calls adherents to unite in virtue and piety, not sin and slander. In practice, Ibn al-Khat.īb's sharp tongue invited physical retaliation, which forced the man to scope the lands, in search of escape.

An Afrisc meowle (“African woman”) appears at the end of the Old English Exodus, a poem ostensibly celebrating religious freedom, migration, and divine justice. Amid the Hebrews’ final celebration, the explicit inclusion of the Afrisc meowle's racial difference from the Israelites exposes the horror and violence of the aftermath of war; a focus on her also invites questions about the poem's early medieval audience and how that audience could have understood her, especially since she does not appear in the source text of the Hebrew Bible. The scant critical analysis of this remarkable figure tends to provide a brief exegetical explanation before moving into more secure critical territory. My analysis of the Afrisc meowle reveals the limitations of source study and exegetical criticism for Exodus and for the field of medieval studies; she thus serves as a case study for this deeper theoretical problem in the field.

This article considers the way Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls (1963) continually gestures beyond its narrative present, and the consequences this has for the text's interpretation in its future—our present moment of environmental crisis. Bowen's late work is concerned with “late modern wartime”: a period when global conflicts seemed recursive, repetitious, or continuous. But this was also a wartime whose environmental impacts, by the 1960s, became enmeshed with deep geological timescales, when radionuclides were discovered to remain toxic into the far future. Tracing how Bowen grappled with anxiety about the future, from interwar culture to the Cold War, the article answers the critical injunction that we need new modes of reading in the Anthropocene by returning to the mid-century—now considered to be a key “beginning” of the Anthropogenic age. It argues that the posthuman imagination lies at the intersection between the nuclear uncanny and the anthropogenic uncanny.

This essay examines the work—fiction and nonfiction—of Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar (one of Turkey's greatest modern writers) in the context of Armenians and the violence inflicted on Armenians by the Ottoman/Turkish state in 1893, 1915, and 1923. It examines the striking absence of Armenians in Tanpınar's work, given his own Armenian friends and experience of teaching for years in Armenian high schools. It also considers the extent to which Tanpınar's own indebtedness to a nationalistic monocultural sublime can be factored into this selective amnesia and explores the possible sources of his nationalism—either the influence of the French writers Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès or equally (and more locally) Tanpınar's own Sufi sensibilities.

This essay examines the Germanophone realist Adalbert Stifter's reception of Washington Irving. Pushing against the traditional narrative of German realism's apolitical provinciality, it argues that media technologies from the British picturesque tradition, transmitted by way of Irving, aided Stifter in obscuring his cosmopolitan and colonialist ideologies. Picturesque observational practices, which emphasized the imaginative and artistic “improvement” of reality, overlap considerably with German realist techniques of transfiguration, and Irving's and Stifter's texts both emphasize the epiphanic experience of life and art, of reality and its mediation. Linking the epistemological dimensions of both periods to early statistical thought and illustrating how the authors’ preferred genres of the sketch and study pull from the same artistic and media-historical discourse, the essay uncovers striking continuities between the Germanophone and American literary contexts, recasting German realism as fully enmeshed within the global context it seemingly disavows.

This essay traces the literary and cultural history of resentment from the word's first arrival in English. It argues that resentment harbors the seeds of a new paradigm of anger, tied to a new sense of anger's social content: where ancient accounts of anger center on the anger of the powerful, this form of anger—embodied most famously in Nietzsche's theory of Ressentiment—addresses the anger of disempowered social agents. The argument unfolds in three stages: first, I use digital tools and a large-scale archive to analyze what early modern writers wrote about when they wrote about resentment; second, I pursue the word into the history of science and new ways of thinking about the nature of anger; and third, I read literary history and the Shakespearean plot of tragic intrigue in particular as an extended imaginative investigation of this changing set of concerns in the sociality of anger.

This essay examines the ceremonies surrounding the 1877 alleged finding of Christopher Columbus's remains in the cathedral of Santo Domingo. The act of exhuming a body believed to be in Spain's possession posed a challenge for the former colonial power, which was in the process of turning Columbus into a national symbol. The Spanish government forcefully denied the legitimacy of the Dominican claim, calling it a “spectacle” contrived by the nation's religious and civil authorities. Building on Diana Taylor's theoretical framework, the essay looks at the 1877 ceremonies as social performances that facilitated the transmission of deeply rooted cultural memories. Whereas the procession of the remains from the cathedral to the church repeated the ritualized gestures prescribed for the discovery and transfer of relics, the performance enacted in the cathedral upended a different “scenario of discovery”—the one enacted by Spanish conquerors when they took possession of a new territory.

This essay reads the 1880 Battiste Good Wintercount as a textual conflict zone that brings Indigenous oral and pictographic literatures into dialogue with settler-colonial forms like alphabetic script and books to imagine Native futures after militant resistance. With a timeline that goes back to 901 AD, Good issues a dramatic challenge to Western scholarship on the book, writing, and literary history. He rejects requests for simulations of what Gerald Vizenor calls “tragic victimry” with literary innovation and a narrative vision of survivance. Foregrounding the authority of women, Good invokes new and ancient treaties to insist on Indigenous sovereignty. The essay explores how the literary history of Indigenous pictography informs contemporary Native writers, like N. Scott Momaday, and decolonizing struggles like those identified with the hashtags #NoDAPL and #landback. It concludes with a call to interrogate deep structures of coloniality that organize literary studies through ethnocentric conceptions of literacy, genre, period, and time.