Plato was for Cicero the prince among philosophers. Cicero himself identified with Plato in all his richness and abundance as a writer and thinker, but also as a model for the politically engaged intellectual. This chapter studies first Plato’s presence in Cicero’s letters in the period 54–49 bce, the tempestuous years before the Roman Republic was finally torn apart. Then it turns to consider the three major Platonic dialogues composed at that time: De oratore, De republica, De legibus, in which he articulates grand political and cultural ambitions for the orator and a vision of how a republican polity should and could be conceived and conducted. A brief final section looks at the theoretical writings on oratory and philosophy in 46–44, mostly composed during Caesar’s dictatorship, when Cicero’s voice in the public sphere was almost entirely silenced. His main literary efforts were devoted to the construction of a philosophical encyclopedia, in which the systems of the Hellenistic schools became the main focus. His veneration of Plato and his attraction to Platonic idealism in various aspects remain evident. But the intensity of his earlier engagement with Plato has become a thing of the past.

Animal Figures examines the ways literature and psychoanalysis interact in their deployments of “animals,” while also suggesting how they might address the other-than-human. What might be required of both to think animal subjectivity non-anthropocentrically? In a close reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s Name of a Dog, I demonstrate how the text reanimates animate being (specifically a dog) in linguistic figuration through the literary or the rhetorical and according to analytics resembling psychoanalysis more than philosophy. While thematically Levinas’s chapter addresses the ethical and religious as they pertain to the figure of the dog, the chapter, in its linguistic and rhetorical performance, enacts a relation between language and animal being – elsewhere neologized as animot or animetaphor – more akin to psychoanalysis than to philosophy.

For approximately the last thirty years, Cicero’s reputation as a philosopher has been rising after close to a century of very low esteem. The alleged reasons for this disrepute are numerous and varied. Cicero was Roman, and Romans were thought to be neither scientific nor philosophical. He wrote in Latin, when the genuine language of philosophy was and is Greek. No original thinker, he was not so much a philosopher as translator and compiler, pasting together various philosophical works from the second and first century bce. This he did in his spare time, for Cicero was an amateur philosopher. His main pursuits were politics and judicial advocacy. When he turned to philosophy, he was content to adopt a form of eclecticism amenable to his own changing status in the troubled last decades of the Roman Republic. This short introduction won’t be covering Cicero’s philosophical works and their context (for which the reader should consult Chapter 1); it aims only to present the various and complementary ways in which this Companion, building on earlier studies, may answer these charges and allow us to gain a more accurate and richer picture of Cicero as a philosopher.

Cicero conceives of rhetoric, politics, and philosophy as so interconnected that they are, or at least should be, a unity under the rubric “eloquence.” To be sufficiently capacious to include all three, eloquence means something different to Cicero than to us, with its current meaning of fluent or persuasive expression. Rather than simple (or even outstanding) facility in language, eloquence for Cicero is public speech, especially political speech, rooted in wisdom. Cicero, most especially in his rhetorical masterpiece, De oratore, deems the eloquens, the man of (true) eloquence, to be the perfect orator, who is simultaneously the ideal statesman, articulating his ideas in words so powerful that he can move his audience in whichever direction he so desires. Because of the danger inherent in such forceful persuasion, the eloquent orator must apply his rhetorical skills only after having acquired “all-embracing knowledge.” Thus, Cicero’s orator-cum-statesman is also a philosopher of a sort – a philosopher who is a man of action, who uses his wisdom to promote the common welfare, unlike those philosophers who shirk “politics and its responsibilities on deliberate principle,” and who criticize and scorn the orator-statesman’s practice of speaking.

This chapter adopts, describes, and critiques three complementary perspectives on children’s literature: (1) psychoanalytic studies of and interpretations of children’s books; (2) effects of psychoanalysis on the work of children’s book authors and artists; (3) ways in which psychoanalysis might learn from the wisdom of children’s literature. Among the authors discussed are Bruno Bettelheim, Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter, and Elena Ferrante.

This chapter considers the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to queer theory and literature, using James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a case study. The chapter traces the ways in which queerness – particularly queer love – is haunted by melancholia by highlighting the manner in which melancholia is inextricable from the passionate relationship between David and Giovanni, the lovers at the novel’s core. Yet Baldwin arguably also universalizes melancholia by demonstrating that all of the novel’s characters, including David’s girlfriend Hella, are deeply melancholic. Melancholia, then, is not merely a queer predicament but rather – as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also claimed – a part of the human condition. The chapter consequently draws a distinction between constitutive (existential) and context-specific (socially imposed) forms of melancholia, illustrating that queer melancholia tends to fall into the latter genre of melancholia due to the discrimination, persecution, and shame that often characterize queer lives and loves.

Over the past twenty years, experts on early North America have increasingly turned to comparative and connected modes of study to explain the effects of colonialism on social, political, and aesthetic developments throughout the so-called New World, where English and Spanish empires appropriated and carved up the largest sections of Indigenous territories. Despite notable linguistic, religious, and chronological differences in Anglo and Iberian colonialisms, this critical hemispheric turn recognizes the interconnected nature of lived experience and writing in the region. As part of this volume’s reflection on the history and future of methods in early American studies, this chapter analyzes four major comparative paradigms in the study of the colonial Americas: generic, genetic, appositional, and mediative approaches. As I discuss each of these approaches, I provide examples from primary sources and critical studies published in the past ten years, outlining current modes of scholarship and future directions in the field.

If one of the most prominent features of early America was the collision of peoples from two hemispheres, much of this collision found expression through different expectations of how men and women should behave. Because participants in these encounters saw that what they thought of as natural attributes of men and women were not consistent across the lines of culture, and because printed descriptions of those encounters expanded the audience for those encounters, it is not an exaggeration to say that early America as a site of contact did much to provoke widespread contemplation of what in the twentieth century came to be known as the distinction between sex and gender. Texts such as John Marrant’s account of his captivity in a Cherokee town and Amerigo Vespucci’s letters illustrate how understanding early America in all its complexity requires accounting for the intricacies of gender as they were performed in intersection with other identity categories such as race. The history of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade also shows how gender became an instrument of domination. Finally, the stories of figures like Catherine Tekakwitha demonstrate that occasionally individuals found new lives in early America in part by adopting foreign performances of gender.

How do you get to grips with an early American poem? A good toolbox of critical approaches and perspectives will include formal analysis, material texts, cultural work, race and gender, reception and reading practices, together with an inquisitiveness about the various ways in which a poem makes connections. It also helps to know some of the key uses to which poetry was put by English-speaking colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Worn pages show Puritan readers using devotional poems to support their daily piety in early New England. Manuscript elegies offered consolation to bereaved family members, and published broadsides shaped the values of the wider community. Commemorating a public figure could enable a socially marginalized writer, such as Phillis Wheatley, to find an authoritative poetic voice. Epistolary exchanges of poems among coteries allowed some educated eighteenth-century women to pursue their friendships and intellectual development despite being barred from public careers. Throughout the period, allusions ranging from homage to parody, illustrate the transatlantic adaptation of British genres and styles to American circumstances. In the revolutionary period, anonymous and ephemeral newsprint poetry whipped up patriotic feeling, while a handful of poets published their work in elegant volumes.

Although English settler colonialism was ascendant in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americas, its literature was often written as disaster. This chapter considers three modes of catastrophe – accident, disaster, and trauma – to argue that the violent forces and harsh conditions of life in the New World fragmented former identities and that coloniality emerged from that shattering. The story of accident is told through Jamaican creole Jonathan Dickinson who, along with his small crew of family, friends, shipmen, servants, and slaves, were shipwrecked en route from Port Royal to Philadelphia in 1696. They landed in Florida, where their accidental arrival led them to impersonate the Spanish, to provoke enmities with Indigenous people over both their feigned and their real identities, and to desperately improvise their way over 230 miles to rescue. The story of disaster is told through early Jamestown, a site where extreme suffering and violence compounded to guarantee dire outcomes. For the small number of settlers who survived, their Englishness did not survive within them. From the Starving Time to the First Anglo-Powhatan War, their coloniality took shape in a space of abjection and aggression, marking settlement as a theater of brutality and horror. Trauma is recounted through the narrative of the Pequot War and the life of Mary Prince. These stories of unbridled warfare against the Pequot of New England and the un/common trauma inflicted on enslaved people of the Caribbean bear testimony to the radical dispossession white colonials inflicted upon Native and enslaved people, and the struggle to maintain identities in this context. Together, attention to accident, disaster, and trauma ruptures any smooth accounting of colonial “development” and instead testifies to the tearing, sundering, and shattering that make this history remain uneven, unsteady, and unresolved.

Scholars used to view “early American literature” primarily as little more than a rustic precursor to what American literature would become in its maturity. For many years as well, it was the cradle of the “New England Mind,” that place where America’s religious origins might be found and established. In recent years, however, the study of early American literature has expanded in several intriguing directions. From the perspective of temporality or period, scholars now consider “early America” to extend back into the fifteenth century and as far forward as the 1830s. Linguistically, the archive “early America” now speaks and records in a number of languages other than English. Socially and culturally, we consider the literatures of enslaved persons, women, and Indigenous persons formerly forgotten by such histories. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a single book or perspective adequately capturing the proliferation of the field’s recognition, which is why this multivoice volume is so needed as this point.

The period of exploration of North America by various European nations manifested an intense moment of cultural, political, economic, and environmental change. Often marked by violence, Europeans failed to understand the gendered practices of the Indigenous population, which often liberated women from the confines of marriage and allowed for a spectrum of sexual identities and practices. European explorers, endowed with a sense of masculine dominance, given their role as captains or brave soldiers, confronted not only a vastly different gendered terrain and site of sexual fluidity but their own masculinity struggles with Indigenous men. As Europeans imposed religious mores and situated European customs as civilized and superior, explorers and settlers disrupted Native identities and power structures. This chapter asserts that the various conflicts and challenges encountered within the landscape of the New World can and should be considered through the lens of eroticization, sexuality, and gender. Often these contests of power disadvantaged women and sexualities that failed to conform to Christianity. These literal and psychological sites of struggle laid the foundation for future colonization and dramatically impacted and altered understandings of the colonial experiment.

Americans know the story of democracy: how the Framers built a government with branches that would check and balance, that would derive its authority from sovereign citizens, filtered and refined by their elected representatives. Americans may refer to our system as “democracy” but the representative republican framework provided by the Framers ensured the safe democratization of our country over time. This well-rehearsed story frames American democracy as a bequest from the Framers. Yet this powerful founding story is a victor’s tale, designed to erase from collective historical memory a very real battle with a robust alternative model of democratic theory and practice that was flourishing – much to the Framers’ consternation – in the early nation. This alternative democracy originated in the daily practices of ordinary colonists. Their vernacular democracy generated and motored revolution; and though the political elite embraced this participatory and equalitarian practice, they later pulled away, seeking in their words to “tame” the democratic enthusiasm and power of ordinary American citizens even as they drew on that power (renamed “sovereignty”) to authorize the representative federal republicanism they offered as a containment device. Knowing about vernacular democracy enables readers to see its record in the literature of the early United States.