Contributing to ongoing debates on the ethical and transnational aspects of Victorian cosmopolitanism, the present article examines the response to the struggle for Italian Unification, better known as the Risorgimento, in the work of Anthony Trollope. The Italian question is a hidden presence in particular novels, and three of Trollope's short stories address it directly. A cross-section of these narratives reveals that Trollope tends to couch this subject in the form of two genres, comedy and naturalism. I would suggest that this peculiarity can be traced to Trollope's concern with liberal foreign policy as pursued by Lord Palmerston and William Ewert-Gladstone, and with the repercussions that their foreign policy had on claims for Irish independence.

In Fires in the Mirror and Twilight Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith works through riots in Brooklyn and Los Angeles to engage an American literary history of representing the collective political subject. Foregrounding politics' aesthetic dimension, she stages the polis as a dramaturgy of dissensus among characters whose monologues present a conflict of worlds. As Smith, onstage, performs the empathy requisite to the repertoire of citizenship, she positions audiences as citizens who must balance empathy and preferential judgment among competing grievances and visions of justice, and who there by discover the role of sacrifice in democratic theory and practice.

This essay identifies how the sentimental novel in the U.S., from early seduction tales to its realist apotheosis at the end of the nineteenth century, articulates a worldview essential for modern commerce. Whereas British literary studies has pursued linkages between the novel and financial discourse, surprisingly few Americanist studies extend this historiography of the novel. Seeking to redress this gap in the literature, this essay reads canonical novels like The Coquette and The House of Mirth alongside the political economy of Alexander Hamilton, Judith Sargent Murray, and Thorstein Veblen to track the novel's complex relation to financialization across the nineteenth century; doing so, I argue, brings forth new financial dimensions to the novel, exposing, in particular, the at times overlapping, at times diverging temporalities of both finance and fiction.

Using archival resources, I outline T. S. Eliot's fascination with the porous borders between science and religion. I show how the notion of a dissociated consciousness developed by the French psychologist Pierre Janet informed the dissociation of sensibility, and how Janet's idea, repackaged as the subliminal mind and used by psychologists of religion such as William James, shaped the account of the creative process developed in Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. I suggest this contextualization of Eliot's penchant for both mysticism and skepticism informs the slippages in tone, at once visionary and moribund, in The Hollow Men.

This essay argues for the haunting presence of Titus Lucretius Carus in Joseph Addison's aesthetics. Two of the ten essays in the series on the pleasures of the imagination present marginal citations from De rerum natura. I use these epigraphs, as well as the discussion of Lucretius in Spectator number 110, to reconstruct the role of Lucretius for Addison's account of the imagination. Inspired by the literary performance of the Roman poet, Addison conceives the imagination as a faculty that naturalizes self-possession. Lucretius thus plays a vital role in Addison's defense of John Locke's fragile invention, the modern liberal subject.

Psychoanalytic criticism renders Ophelia anomalous, no longer Hamlet's erotic object in her own right but a refraction of his cathexis on the Queen. This approach obscures how profoundly Ophelia, the only daughter in William Shakespeare to renounce the lover her father forbids, violates generic norms, and how structurally similar Hamlet's two examples of madness are. Hamlet and Ophelia go mad after sacrificing the independent (and expected) aims of adulthood at the commands of fathers whom the play links to figures of murderous aggression against children: the biblical Jephthah and Seneca's filicidal ghosts. Hamlet is a play haunted by fathers who wish to have no heirs.

Figures In Excess And The Matter Of Inversion In The Discourse Of The Sublime Ian Balfour Technique is the definable figure of enigma in works of art. —Theodor Adorno As one among others in a collective effort to think about figures and about figure more generally, I want in what follows to scrutinize how figures work in the elusive aesthetic mode of the sublime, especially one sometimes held up as paradigmatic, namely inversion or hyperbaton. My topic is circumscribed but there is a tendency for discourse of the sublime to spiral upward and outward, to spill over, to be, at the extreme, absolute, and this might be the case even or especially with figures cut in and by the sublime.1 Much the same might be said for discourse about the sublime: from the Ancients to the British soidisant empiricists, the over-the-top rhetoric of writers on the sublime often make the worst excesses of the French post-structuralism seem tame by comparison. The first great reflection on the sublime, Longinus's On the Sublime (Peri hypsous), is in large measure a rhetorical treatise, aimed at what the author calls "political men" [andres politikoi].2 It defines and gives examples of any number of figures and tropes that characterize and can be enlisted for the sublime, the lofty sort of discourse said to transport and overwhelm like, in Longinus's glosses, a thunderbolt à la Demosthenes or a conflagration à la Cicero (see S, 12.4). One is rendered beside oneself: "ek-stasis" (S, 1.4). Figures are a prime mechanism for the generation of these effects. Longinus contends that figures [σχήματα] are "natural allies" of the sublime, and one glimpses already in the term "allies" something of Longinus's figural nexus of power and violence: the sublime as agon (S, 17.1). The sublime is variously conjured as a domain of great force, danger, and near-death experiences, whose attendant discourse is elaborated in charged figures of speech that both participate in and reflect such danger. One has to be careful how exactly one wields such weapons of rhetoric, as Longinus makes clear in a baldly political passage: [End Page 315] There is an inevitable suspicion attaching to the sophisticated use of figures. It gives a suggestion of treachery, craft, fallacy, especially when your speech is addressed to a judge with absolute authority, or still more to a despot, a king, or a ruler in high place. He is promptly indignant that he is being treated like a silly child and outwitted by the figures of a skilled speaker. Construing the fallacy as a personal affront, he sometimes turns downright savage; and even if he controls his feelings, he becomes conditioned against being persuaded by the speech. So we find that a figure is always most effective when it conceals the very fact of its being a figure. [διόπερ καὶτότε ἄριστον δοκεῖτὸ σχῆμα, ὅταν αὐτὸ τοῦτο διαλανθάνῃ, ὅτι σχῆμά ἐστιν.] (S, 17.1–2) Figures, then, are to be concealed. Or more precisely, the figurality of figures is to be concealed. The best way to achieve this, Longinus suggests paradoxically, is through figurality's very brilliance, through making of it a sort of purloined letter, as in Edgar Allen Poe's famous story, so manifestly visible it escapes notice. This is exemplified in a speech of Demosthenes when his auditors are so taken with the force of his swearing by their compatriots that they overlook the fact that he has invoked a massive military defeat. The sublime figure here, in charged political or juridical scenarios, is extended for figures and art in general; as Longinus says: "[A]rt is only perfect when it looks like nature and Nature succeeds only when she conceals latent art" [τότε γὰρ ἡ τέχνη τέλειος ἡνίκ' ἂν φύσις εἶναι δοκῇ, ἡ δ' αὖ φύσις ἐπιτυχὴς ὅταν λανθάνουσαν περιέχῃ τὴν τέχνην] (S, 22.1).3 Longinus thus draws a remarkably general conclusion about art and nature from the perhaps not-so-typical scenario of arguing one's case in front of a judge or a tyrant. A paradigmatic claim along just these lines will also be made for what I take to be the figure of and for figures in Longinus. Of the many figures defined and exemplified, Longinus reserves the most space not for metaphor, Aristotle's exemplary figure, but the seemingly less central one of hyperbaton or...

“Matter, Form, Idea” argues that Arthur Lovejoy’s history of ideas is far more important to literary criticism than we typically recognize. This essay situates Lovejoy’s approach to ideas in the context of the debate between the New Critics and the Chicago school over what it means to understand poems as things. It argues that for his contemporaries and for us, Lovejoy’s significance does not stem from any sensitivity to the specificity of literary objects, nor exactly for his approach to history; it has to do, instead, with his formal and materialist sense of ideas.

This essay examines the multiplex uses of confession--religious, legal, generic--in Philip Meadows Taylor's 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug. Although Meadows Taylor claimed his novel was merely a recasting of actual criminal confessions, the novel's narratization develops the subjectivity of its criminal protagonist in a way that conflicts with the legal depersonalization of the thug in Anglo-Indian law. Thus the novel works against itself, instantiating the reductive identity of the thug while simultaneously allowing for the development of an autonomous and deeply compelling subject. The essay also considers how the novel's representation of the confessing yet unrepentant thug offers a crucial insight into the colony as a space of exception.

This essay argues that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a metaphysical text whose very preoccupation with the world of physical objects and actions unsettles the determinate structures of being to foster an enlarged sense of possibility and transformation. Defoe dares to imitate God’s infinitely various creation in his first novel, and he takes advantage of the sublime as a compositional mode that shakes up the hierarchy of species and causes. The hallmarks of realist representation--the physical, the particular, the individual, the circumstantial--have for too long been misinterpreted as the ends of Defoe’s fiction. In this essay, I argue that they are the means by which Defoe reveals the infinity of variety, the thinness of difference, and the plasticity of being.