Abstract Revolutionary romanticism has been one of the twentieth century’s most influential literary modes, particularly within the genealogy of socialist aesthetics. Its importance becomes particularly clear when we look beyond a Eurocentric approach to romanticism. If we take a pluralist view of romanticism as cutting across cultural traditions, then the romantic cultural nebula must also include China, where a revolutionary-romantic sensibility arose from Maoist and post-Maoist aesthetics. Significantly, Chinese revolutionary romanticism thrived in the second half of the twentieth century, after its popularity had already waned in the West and in Soviet Russia. This article examines the Chinese rendering of revolutionary romanticism during the Mao and post-Mao periods. In particular, it focuses on Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s 1986 short story “Revolutionary Romanticism” and Yan Lianke’s 2003 short story of the same name. Forms of revolutionary romanticism that appeared as a subdivision of socialist realism early in Mao’s era invoked the figure of the sublime; by contrast, Mo Yan and Yan Lianke’s engagement with revolutionary romanticism emerged in the post-Mao era and involved a rebuttal of established discourse. Through their incorporation of the absurd and uncanny, they challenged the existing order by undermining the idealistic world promised by Maoist aesthetics.

Abstract Before alighting on his vocation, the poet W. H. Auden grew up among doctors and went to Oxford University to study not literature but the natural sciences. This article pursues the ramifications of that background through the development of Auden’s career, focusing on his biographical and intellectual adjacency to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Several close readings illustrate the resonance between Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt and an epistemological shift at the heart of Auden’s poetry, wherein the idea of the self is reconfigured in terms of the embodied experience of inhabiting a place. In this way, a new perspective takes form on the transdisciplinary scope of literary history, its broader cultural relevance, and the mutuality between the poetic and the scientific imaginations of our own day.

Abstract This essay considers the relation between lyric utterance, dramatic irony, and intellectual disability in King Lear, particularly in Lear’s famous address to Cordelia—which begins with “Come, let’s away”—just before Edmund sends both to prison. Reading “Come, let’s away” alongside early modern prison literature, the essay argues that the speech’s work as lyric within tragic drama erodes dramatic irony, removing the audience from the superior knowledge position that such irony affords and that enables ableist perspectives to begin with. In shifting attention from tragic action to lyric power, Lear’s speech renders the ability and willingness to understand one’s situation, and to act efficaciously in that situation, irrelevant to accessing what is beautiful and true. Shakespeare thus separates the question of mental capacity from that of felicitous choice. The irony of capacity in “Come, let’s away,” then, is this: that when readers focus on the value of mental capacity and on the power over action that Lear lacks, they miss what his speech does, the lyric capacity that it has.