This essay addresses the question of whether the Spanish epic was composed orally or was a literary creation using the oral techniques of bards but composed in writing. Oral dictation played an important role in even the most literate works of the time. Theme was an important compositional aid employed by bards during performance, and its presence is evident in passages of the Cantar de Mio Cid and the Mocedades de Rodrigo. A new tool of analysis is introduced, the intonation unit, which leads to an understanding of Spanish epic narrative as orally composed and governed by the cognitive constraints of speech. Oral composition eventually included literate individuals whose contributions are linked to the social and political circumstances under which these poems were preserved on parchment.

Reunified Berlin's ubiquitous examples of architectural citation—such as the Reichstag, the plans for the Stadtschloß, the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, the new Hotel Adlon, and the FriedrichstadtPassagen—variously inscribe contemporary architectural styles with allusive reinventions of previous forms and cultural discourses, incorporate remnants of older edifices, or use partial reconstructions for new social purposes. In the process, these projects problematize conventional principles of architectural restoration by dramatizing a productive tension between past and present, between authenticity and simulation, between genuine nostalgia and the sometimes cynical manipulation of historical memory. Relying on the synchronicity of (seemingly) nonsynchronous styles, architectural citation goes beyond postmodern pastiche; such citation signifies Berlin's renegotiation of its identity as the new-old capital by recycling half-obliterated and yet irrepressible traces of urban history within the parameters of international capitalism, Europe-directed national politics, and the rampant tourist industry.

This essay takes up the issue of chaste intentionality in John Milton's A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle and Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity. Each of these narratives presents a female protagonist who simultaneously embodies and theorizes sexual virtue, creating a problem of will: when women intentionally participate in the ideological structures that constrain their acts, whose agency is at stake? The essay locates this question in the context of early modern conduct manuals and other prescriptive codifications of feminine sexuality, in which the performance of chastity, even as it is idealized, often involves actual or potential acts of violence against patriarchal structures and the male subjects who inhabit them. Milton and Cavendish raise the stakes by creating characters whose chastity is militant even as it tends toward marriage, identifying intentional virtue as a profoundly social problem.

Taking issue with associations between American literature and identity politics, this essay argues that to remap the culture of the United States in global terms is to problematize its exemplary and exceptionalist qualities and recognize inherent transnational frictions. As an example of this, the writings of Emerson and Thoreau in the 1840s are situated in relation to conflicts over the Oregon Territory, so that their textual designs come to seem less abstract or Neoplatonic than aggressively nationalistic. To restore a sense of the spatial problematic to American literature is to interrogate its more traditional integration within a temporal dimension of prophetic destiny. The essay concludes by suggesting that reexamining American allegories of interiority through pre-Romantic theories of spatial formation effectively produces a different perspective on texts that have become naturalized as examples of liberal self-reliance and institutionalized as types of classic American literature.

Shakespeare's Henry V explores historiographic moments—relations among past, present, and future in memory, writing, and action. Advantage, Shakespeare's early capitalist term for highest return from least outlay, links historiography to war work, theater work, and love, theorized as “affective labor.” The play figures history not so much as fiction but rather in Walter Benjamin's terms as an achievement depending on the epistemic reliability of disadvantaged historians in danger, who rescue or recruit the dead and maximize affect. Falstaff's reported death reveals, through his friends' dispute about his dying words, Elizabethan and contemporary issues of history and shows lowliest characters with an unofficial authority appropriated also by Shakespeare's epilogue. In the controversial final scene, in which Henry woos the defeated French princess, circumstances and subtle conversational play show the labor of potential love—or hate. Henry is less successful, Catherine less victimized than they are usually interpreted to be, as she becomes the underdog Henry was before his victory, her body as mother in potentia constituting a dangerous future counterhistory and means by which domination may be dominated.

This essay considers one of the most underexamined characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: Augustine St. Clare's effeminate manservant, Adolph. I evaluate Adolph's critical elision to illustrate how the success of critiques centered on race and gender unintentionally permits other minority identities (and stereotypes) in the book to continue unremarked. While revisionist readings of Stowe's novel complicate racial and gender stereotypes, they nevertheless accept stable (even conventional) categories to describe minority identity. Such formulations foreclose the possibility of seeing other minority identities in the book that intertwine race and gender in ways different from normative standards. In examining Adolph's character, this essay considers how intersectional analysis reveals important representations of social difference—including differences not always acknowledged in present-day culture.

The Last Man, Mary Shelley's novel of 1826, describes the extinction of humanity by a plague that leaves only one man alive. The plague exerts pressure on the idea of national community by forcing a reevaluation of the number of people needed to continue a nation. It also increases human mobility, severing all local attachments as its survivors seek safety. By considering these issues, The Last Man engages with contemporary sociopolitical debates, reflects on the consequences of those debates for literary production and readership, and meditates on the possibilities for cultural memory in a peripatetic world. This essay introduces a neglected historical context for the novel: the debates over emigration, especially state-aided emigration, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Shelley's novel aligns itself, in a strikingly pessimistic way, with those who opposed any encouragement of emigration.

The self-abnegating, even self-flagellating, virtue promoted by the protagonist of Diderot's Le fils naturel is a function not of the text's incest plot, as critics have traditionally asserted it to be, but of the drama's colonialist subtext. This essay highlights the involvement of the play's aging patriarch, Lysimond, in the slave-based commerce of the West Indies and suggests that the old man's son, Dorval, preaches a strict and selfless brand of morality in order to overwrite this shameful aspect of his family history. If, in the end, Dorval and his kinfolk prove unable to commemorate and celebrate their supposedly virtuous birthright, this result is due to the abiding, irrepressible specter of Lysimond's colonialist transgressions.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's meditations on artificial society's perversions of natural sentiment, specifically on the theater's contribution to societal degeneration, provide a historical context for the dialogue between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine about the nature of the French Revolution. Much of the debate over the political rights of man consisted of an analysis of his affective rights. It was in many ways a controversy over what could be considered a moral method for attaching an individual's sympathies. The problem of affective liberation stands behind Paine's quarrel with Burke's Reflections and with the victim Burke offered for the world's consideration in that text: Marie Antoinette. For Burke the emotions aroused by theater and by the tragic representation of historical events could liberate the spectator into constructive action. Exposing Burke's own affective imprisonment by the spectacle of revolution, Paine demanded instead a liberation through rational inquiry.

The term transnationalism is used frequently in reference to the rapid circulation of “capital, labor, technology, and media images” in the global economy governed by postindustrial capitalism (Sharpe 110). When incorporated into such phrases as transnational capitalism, the term implies a critical view of historically specific late modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and consumption for neocolonial ends. By the same token, transnationalism is often used to suggest counterhegemonic practices prompted by or accompanying the migrations and diasporas occasioned by these new economic processes of globalization. Thus, Homi Bhabha's privileging of “cultural hybridity” as a way to resist global homogenization is often traceable to his emphasis on “migrant workers,” who are “part of the massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world” and thus “embody […] that moment blasted out of the continuum of history” (8). If these new, exploited cosmopolitans experience every day their dislocation from the familiar boundaries of nation, first language, and citizenship, they may also be particularly able to comprehend how to negotiate transnational situations, even in some cases turning such circumstances to their advantage.

In February 2001, Knopf Publishing Company, a division of Random House, reportedly purchased the rights to publish two novels by Stephen L. Carter for $4 million. As the Daily Variety Gotham stated, “Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter emerged from the ivory tower last week and shook the book world from its February doldrums” (Bing 43). And the New York Times wrote, “The advance is among the highest ever paid for a first novel and is all the more unusual because of the author's background. Mr. Carter, 46, is an African-American who has written several works of nonfiction, including ‘Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby’ and ‘The Culture of Disbelief‘” (Kirkpatrick, “Knopf”). Whether this purchase is considered “unusual” because it is a first novel or because the author is African American, it is part of an important shift for American literature: the jacket art, prepublication publicity, and sales materials shape this novel as a mainstream, blockbuster, best-selling legal thriller, not as an African American novel per se. The mainstream feel of Carter's novel brings up pertinent questions about race, literature, and the marketing of ethnic identity in the United States. Looking at the positioning of this novel allows us to understand how the publishers, newspaper reporters, and marketers have planted seeds that will influence the reception of the text by reviewers and readers.

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.