Abstract: Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse poses a challenge to the movement of thought as a matter of identity, community, and biopolitics. The crucial question here, which this article reads as an opening for reimagining the terrain of gender and publicness, is how to grapple with Mrs. Ramsay's meditation on the "wedge-shaped core of darkness" into which she retreats from her communal life. The article dwells with Mrs. Ramsay within this space and in doing so exposes life's banal, daily surface to the dark otherwise lurking within the realm of Mrs. Ramsay's thinking, an otherwise that, when thought as an ethics in its own right, has the capacity to reach beyond the novel and its history by remaking gender, race, species, and the terrain of the public—and life—itself.

This article draws on critical trans studies and queer archival practice to propose a book historical mode that extends what we know about the premodern trans experience beyond the recovery of individual biographies. Instead of turning to textual sources for the identification of transness, the author looks to Susan Stryker's call for the "recuperat[ion of] embodied knowing as a formally legitimated basis of knowledge production." Bibliography, he suggests, makes claims of objectivity that engender a particular reluctance to respond to such calls. But the lived reality of archival research is one of affective embodiment. Affect theory is an area that, as yet, has seen little methodological uptake in bibliographical research. This article lays the ground for a trans book history that takes affective embodied response seriously as a source of trans connection to and through the past.

This article discusses the process of creating an artist's book on Mary Ann Waters, a Black trans woman and sex worker in Antebellum Baltimore. In addition, informed by the author's experience of making the artist's book, he proposes a process of critical fabrication—which brings together Saidiya Hartman's method of "critical fabulation" with Natalie Loveless's articulation of "research-creation"—as a method for critical bibliography.

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA's inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine's bestsellers' list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of the conversation.

Reconstituted Narratives Catherine R. Peters (bio) A Review of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States by Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2020. Pp. 232. $100 cloth, $25 paper. In An Archive of Taste, Lauren F. Klein carefully considers the meanings of taste elaborated by an elite group of white men who founded the United States alongside the enslaved Afro-diasporic individuals whose skill and knowledge made it possible. Examining archival materials, such as personal papers, published tracts, cookbooks, and autobiographical accounts, as well as poetry and painting that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Klein constellates a range of methods to understand how eating "came to matter" (2). While Klein's attention lingers upon some of the most well-known figures of the early republic, she simultaneously seeks to locate the enslaved Afro-diasporic tastemakers whose voices do not typically form part of the official historical archive. An Archive of Taste reads like a series of experiments toward thinking together philosophies of taste as well as eating and bodies, culminating in an especially lucid account regarding how computational methods demonstrate the centrality of enslaved labor to the making of the early United States. Klein's monograph confronts the predicament of studying a historical object, like food, that no longer exists. How did historical subjects living upon the eastern shores of the United States encounter and taste ingredients, recipes, and dishes? How did these experiences illuminate or exceed their [End Page 111] subject positions? To approach these and related questions, Klein employs close reading and historical analysis, in addition to what she calls "speculative methods for theorizing and even visualizing large amounts of text" (9). Her citations traverse established scholarship in the fields of nineteenth-century literary studies and food studies, including the idea that particular forms of taste informed early nationalism (which Klein glosses as republican taste). Additionally, the text embraces contemporary conversations, led especially by Black feminist scholars, that seek to name and confront the limits of the archive through what Klein terms "reconstituted narratives" (2, 10). Taste, Klein reveals, has a long lineage in Western philosophical traditions. As a term, it has been variously deployed to suggest encounter, experience, and evaluation. Sometimes, it has signaled an innate sensibility or, alternatively, a cultivation of the senses toward judgment. Furthermore, different theorists of taste have selectively deployed the term toward varying ends. For the white men who led the early republic, taste meant moral judgment, even as it more literally referred to rituals and decisions at their tables. Klein frames five chapters through categories that she both explores and challenges. Chapter 1, "Taste," introduces the four men whose respective taste conditioned the early republic: enslaved cook James Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; enslaved valet Paul Jennings and James Madison. Demonstrating the importance of enslaved tastemakers to republican taste, Klein asserts that Jefferson penned terms of emancipation in 1793 that required Hemings to train a "replacement cook" before he could be emancipated himself. Furthermore, Klein juxtaposes Jefferson's philosophical claims regarding the alleged intemperance of Afro-diasporic people with his reliance upon Hemings's precision in measurement at mealtimes (31). That the elite white men who developed racialized notions of restraint failed to abide by them contrasts significantly with enslaved men's household labor. For example, as Madison grew increasingly infirm, Jennings was tasked with cutting Madison's food into pieces small enough to eat, a situation highlighting that the actual regulation of everyday meals fell, not to white republican men, but rather upon enslaved Afro-diasporic individuals. Beyond consumption, associations between civic virtue and eating in the early republic extended to the production of food. In particular, Klein discusses Jefferson's and Madison's experimentation with agriculture, both as a model and metaphor for the cultivation of taste (35). These are important insights, but I also perceive [End Page 112] a missed opportunity to contend with the structures of settler colonialism embedded in agriculturally inflected writing, which, for example, allowed Jefferson and Madison to describe education as the engrafting of "a new man on the native stock" (37). Chapter 2, "Appetite," close reads three different writers' respective orientations toward taste through appetite. Following...

Abstract: Asking what were women writers—to themselves, to those they denigrated or dominated, and to "us"—is another way of asking who "we" were and are as feminist critics. White feminist critics—writing in a moment when violence against Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and trans women has become more visible than ever—have a responsibility to our nonwhite, non-Christian, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming students and colleagues who may find it impossible to identify with early modern women implicated in discourses that we now recognize as anti-Black, anti-Semitic, or homo- and transphobic. Accordingly, this essay argues that we must historicize early modern English women writers' own self-identification as such in the context of the racial, colonial, and imperial projects from which many materially benefitted and whose hierarchies many instrumentalized. This history complicates assumptions that women's writing is necessarily politically radical—or even necessarily feminist in the fullest sense of that term. English women writers in all their guilt and complexity must be studied more closely than ever if early modern scholars are to better understand the past that has helped produce our current discriminatory norms and systemic injustices, both within and beyond feminist criticism.

Abstract: This introduction to a special issue on "The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Writers" provides a thumbnail sketch of this subfield's history in order to pinpoint its successes and failures. While scholars have located, edited, and analyzed a robust corpus of works by early modern women writers, these texts have yet to be fully integrated into the canon of early modern literature. A genre of "marginalization lit" has consequently arisen in which feminist critics seek to identify and remedy the factors behind this exclusion. Arguing that pervasive structural issues are actually to blame, this essay notes that the anti-hierarchical, idiosyncratic canon of early modern women writers offers a glimpse of a more egalitarian model for literary study. From that vantagepoint, the future of early modern women writers is the future of early modern literature itself.

This essay takes Hutchinson, Cavendish, and Milton as case studies in gendered paradigms of authorship. Domestic contexts of literary production have been treated as far more central for understanding Hutchinson's and Cavendish's writing than Milton's, though Milton was no less dependent on the aid and support of members of his household. This difference in emphasis is a symptom of the fact that the study of early modern women's writing has long fostered a recognition of the essential sociability of literary creation. The emphasis on the contingency, social situatedness, and plurality of authorship found in work on early modern women's writing can productively be applied to a wider array of texts and authors. In readings of Paradise Lost and early biographies of Milton, this essay posits that attending to the social situations of Milton's writing brings the poet's ambivalence about collaboration into sharper focus.