Chinese cosmopolitanism has been the topic of two recent collections of essays. Mingliu Hu and Joan Everskog’s Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600–1950 (2016) presents the efforts of thinkers from the Qing Dynasty and the Republican period to understand their nation and its culture in a regional context; Christopher Rea’s China’s Literary Cosmopolitans (2015) focuses on two outstanding Western-educated scholar-authors, Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu, a wife-and-husband team variously lionized and ostracized in the turbulence of the twentieth century. There were, of course, multiple Chinese cosmopolitanisms, complementing and competing by turns; the aging Qing elite felt allied to the largely Confucian world of their East Asian neighbors, while the post–World War I modernists of the May Fourth movement rejected that tradition and more often found inspiration in a world centered on London, Paris, or New York. While both groups might fit with the definition of being at home in the world, the worlds involved were very different.Nicolai Volland’s Socialist Cosmopolitanism adds a later cosmopolitanism, this one led from Moscow and, initially at least, “personified by the towering figure of Stalin” (22), adhering to a Cold War hostility to European colonialism and US hegemony and assiduously managed by member states as a component of foreign policy. Much as many of the May Fourth generation tried to adapt to the new government’s inclination toward Moscow, their long-standing cosmopolitanism did not always fit comfortably in the new regime and in fact later became untenable.Preeminent in China only between the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the Sino-Soviet estrangement in the late 1950s, socialist cosmopolitanism nevertheless molded Chinese culture in its day and still influences the arts and the media. Volland addresses the socialist “literary universe” (15) of both original and translated Chinese texts in their transnational context.Six chapters explore different aspects of this literary universe: the organization of culture and the establishment of official channels for the circulation of literary celebrities and translated texts (chap. 1); the integration of the Chinese fiction of rural land reform (chap. 2) and industrial development (chap. 3) into the wider socialist imaginary; the reception and indigenization of Soviet science fiction (chap. 4) and youth fiction (chap. 5); and the dissemination of world literature to Chinese readers (chap. 6). Each of the first four chapters features a Chinese contributor to the genre in question: Feng Zhi, globe-trotting poet, translator, and cultural ambassador; Zhou Libo, translator of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned and author of The Hurricane, an account of the land reform campaign in northeastern China that won the Stalin Prize for 1951; Cao Ming, who aestheticized industry and glamorized the working class in her factory novels; and the astronomer turned science fiction writer Zheng Wenguang, whose young heroes visit and then colonize Mars. The fifth chapter looks at the translations into Chinese of the best-selling Soviet young adult novel, Lyubov Kosmodemianskaia’s Story of Zoya and Shura, and the changed emphasis for the new target audience. The sixth chapter reads the journal Translation, later World Literature, the most broadly cosmopolitan project under consideration here, which introduced Chinese readers to writers from the Soviet Union, other socialist nations, and countries of the Third World, as well as works from approved progressive writers in the First World.The grand project of socialist culture was the production of citizens inspired by the rise of their nation to emulate the sacrifices of the communist liberation and exert themselves in the arduous task of realizing the bright future in store. Those whose reading matter extended beyond national boundaries could see the same developments in other socialist states: readers of The Hurricane could find other accounts of peasants taking control of their land in works from the Soviet Union and North Korea and thereby see China as an integral part of the march of progress. These novels, Volland writes, “form a canon, a layering of voices that merge into a larger whole” (42); the task of Chinese writers was to be distinctly Chinese voices in this polyphony, their familiarity with the big picture enhanced for readers, wherever they might be, by the authenticity of their participation in land reform.As part of its effort to nurture the next generation of socialist subjects, the government paid particular attention to science. Hundreds of Soviet works on science were translated in the early 1950s to help educate children in a modern and rational way of thinking. Two chapters examine associated literary production: science fiction and tales of heroic young people. Science fiction contributed by imagining “a technologically empowered future fueled by a superior morality and ideology” (98). Like his Soviet exemplars, Zheng Wenguang’s science fiction used less political rhetoric than other genres, the popularization of scientific knowledge providing sufficient ideological grounds to ensure the legitimacy of his work. As for tales of heroism, the most interesting case is the most popular work of Soviet children’s fiction in its day (more popular even than Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered), The Story of Zoya and Shura, a tale of Soviet youth who sacrifice themselves to defend their nation from German invasion in World War II. The Chinese versions eliminate the happy childhood under the loving eye of the mother (the narrator of the original novel after her children’s deaths) and downplay the impetuous Shura in favor of his disciplined elder sister: what remains for Chinese youth is the story of Zoya, her exemplary character “no longer the product of parental care, but rather a creation of the party and the socialist system” (148). In China it was to be the great family of the state, not the biological family, that raised citizens.This book is a valuable addition to Western studies of the culture of the early years of the People’s Republic, a list that includes Chang-tai Hung’s Mao’s New World (2011) and Krista van Fleit Hang’s Literature the People Love (2013). Volland’s contribution demonstrates the international dimension of Chinese culture, in particular the profound influence of the Soviet Union, in this pivotal period.

Abstract Students of seventeenth-century French drama offer oddly truncated readings of Jean Rotrou’s Véritable Saint Genest. Fascinated by the play within a play in which the eponymous saint is converted to a Christian martyr’s faith by performing a Christian martyr’s role, scholars focus on acts 2 through 4, where the play in question is rehearsed and staged. However, overlooking the frame in acts 1 and 5, where the subject of the interior play is chosen and the problematic consequences of the actor’s conversion are laid out, obscures Rotrou’s true theme, which is neither of those conventionally ascribed to him: the staging of the martyr drama’s soteriological lesson or, in more secular wise, a baroque celebration of theater’s demiurgical powers of illusion. Rotrou reflects instead on the motives behind period reluctance to stage tragedies that draw on recent events, in particular the religious civil wars of the preceding century. Albeit in the discreetly displaced form of a martyr story set in imperial Rome, the play enacts the violent disorders associated with religion itself and so, by extension, the virtues of the new secular order that theater embodies.

This is William J. Kennedy’s third book on Renaissance Petrarchism. Authorizing Petrarch (1994) dealt with the astonishingly detailed tradition of critical commentary that accompanied Petrarch’s Canzoniere in its printed circulation. Such attention was overdue, but I thought the result a frustrating disappointment, valuable for its scholarship but with a meager yield of insight into the poetry of Petrarch and his international imitators. But Kennedy was just getting started. The Site of Petrarchism (2003) covered similar ground, with the commentaries constantly in play, but also paid detailed attention to another aspect of the tradition that scholars have registered but never studied systematically: its connections to the cultural and political nation building going on around it in which the poets were sometimes deeply enmeshed. The current book, while sustaining both concerns, adds yet another complex body of evidence: the revising that Petrarchan poets did to their poems. Such evidence is surprisingly ample for Petrarch himself, despite his early date, and exists for enough of his imitators to suggest that something central to the tradition might be involved. Kennedy’s books all begin with Petrarch and then proceed through an array of Petrarchan poets in Italy (Michelangelo, Colonna, Gambara, Stampa), France (Du Bellay, Ronsard, Du Guillet, Labé), and England (Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Wroth), with glances at Germany (von Greiffenberg) and New Spain (Juana Inés de la Cruz). Kennedy’s enterprise has become a history of European Petrarchism as a whole, more closely and elaborately contextualized than anything else yet attempted. There may well be more to come.Petrarchan love poetry, at least in the anglophone world, has been mostly out of favor for over a century. Even specialists who recognize its importance have been understandably hesitant to read more of it than they feel they have to. References to it have often been based on limited familiarity with the poems themselves, and there has been a tendency to rely on the abstracted formulas and conclusions of others. Kennedy’s stance isn’t combative, but his books are a rebuke to generalizations not informed by, or not at least curious about, a properly dense experience of the Petrarchan tradition. His close-grained accounting of the work of over a dozen poets is an impressive demonstration, not readily available elsewhere, of what that experience can be like. The quickest takeaways are the local diversity of the tradition (despite the common wisdom that it is somehow inherently inimical to female talent, just over half the poets named above are women) and the intricacy of its diachronic cross-reference. The latter is most evident in the imitativeness that gives the tradition its remarkably clear definition, the way new poets, especially sonneteers, keep taking as a recognizable starting point a poem or poems of their predecessors; the poem being imitated, when you can pin it down, often turns out to have started life in the same way. You might think that traditional scholarship had surely traced and recorded all these lineages, but it hadn’t. Without drawing much attention to it, Kennedy steadily adds to them: blazing, for example, the busy trail from Petrarch’s Canzoniere 248 (“Chi vuol veder quantunque po Natura”). This is the ultimate model for the closest imitation of a Continental sonnet in Astrophil and Stella (71, “Who will in fairest booke of Nature know”). The connection has long been recognized, but, as Kennedy notes in The Site of Petrarchism, it is secured by the augelli notturni in Gesualdo’s sixteenth-century commentary on the poem; they become the “night-birds” of lust in Sidney’s sonnet. The new book adds significantly to Kennedy’s earlier dossier on what turns out to have been one of Petrarch’s most imitated sonnets, with examples from Marot, Du Bellay, Scève, Tyard, Ronsard, Watson, Drayton, the elder Giles Fletcher, and, surprisingly, Shakespeare; the dialogue that Kennedy traces between Petrarch 248 and Shakespeare 64 (“When I have seene by times fell hand defaced”) is itself enough to make the listing worth the trouble.This isn’t just a matter of bookkeeping, or necessarily one of purposed allusion; the dense cross-referencing becomes a kind of microclimate, generating its own weather. Petrarch’s Canzoniere 35 (“Solo et pensoso i più deserti campi”), for example, serves Ronsard as a starting point at least three times (“Dans un sablon la semence j’épan,” “Je fuy les pas frayez du meschant populaire,” “D’un solitaire pas je ne marche en nul lieu”). The connection, as the incipits show, is clear enough, but three of Petrarch’s commentators detect in his poem an inexplicit reference to the hero Bellerophon, by way of Cicero’s translation of a line from Homer in the Tusculan Disputations. As the master of Pegasus, Bellerophon is associated with the Muses, but his ultimate fate is punishment by the gods for presumption in attempting to ride his winged horse up to Olympus: within the context of Petrarch’s sequence, he is a figure for the dangers of the poet’s profession. The relevance carries over to Ronsard’s poems whether Ronsard spotted the Ciceronian quotation or not. The Homeric text behind the quotation, moreover, has Bellerophon the victim in the first mention of writing (sêmata lygra, baleful signs) in Western literature, the only such reference in Homeric epic. Ronsard was possibly in a position to know that, Petrarch not; whatever the case, it deepens the sense of all four poems.The value of the present book in such local texture is considerable, and very welcome. But Kennedy also tries for a larger thesis that he can’t bring off. Work and economies in the title point toward an argument about the place of Petrarchism in the developing marketplaces of Renaissance Europe. Kennedy begins with a flourish of witty mythography on Mercury, “quicksilvered and golden tongued . . . trickster, thief, and master of deception,” as the “tutelary deity” for Renaissance art and literature (1)—a very different source of talent from Apollo and the Muses, offering common ground instead with the irresistible powerhouse of mercantile capitalism. The conceit, however, remains largely at the level of analogy—for instance, after a summary of Jean Bodin’s theory of monopolies, “Ronsard displayed similar convictions in presenting his work to the public” (176)—and the main analogy shows strain when asked to be load-bearing. There is some pallid sarcasm, as on Ronsard’s “canny attempts to cash in on a growing reputation by offering new versions of older poems for a public willing to encounter revised editions of his Oeuvres in successive iterations” (173), and under the often fatiguingly complex argumentation (this is not an easy book to get through) a naïveté that Kennedy never quite addresses. The main data driving the argument are those concerning authorial revision: extensive, as I mentioned, for some of those authors, but exiguous for others. For Stampa and Shakespeare (on whom the word at the time was that he “never blotted a line”), it is a matter of three and two poems, respectively, published (we’re not sure why) in slightly different texts separately from the poets’ main collections. Kennedy is sufficiently certain that these are just the tips of their icebergs to affirm that “Shakespeare revised his sonnets in private, withholding them from publication until they took shape” (273). There’s some bullying of the evidence here. But that’s not the main problem; it is entirely reasonable to assume that all poets revise their work in the process of composition, whether they let anyone see it or not (Homer probably revised at every performance), but Kennedy stakes quite a lot on making poets who revise and poets who do not revise firmly opposed categories, aligned with contrasting theories of poetry: “a Platonic aesthetics (focused on visionary furor) and an Aristotelian poetics (focused on the art or craft of writing poetry)” (2), inspiraton versus craftsmanship, Apollo and the Muses versus Mercury. Kennedy’s enabling but hardly examined assumption is that the latter is what decisively marks a poet as a creature of the capitalist marketplace.As opposed to what, exactly? The strong version of Kennedy’s argument would be that the category of inspired poets is a null set; he is unforthcoming as to how he would identify such a poet if he saw one. The argument he does make is largely indifferent to a common experience of writing. He almost touches on it a couple of times: on Shakespeare 128 (extant in one text), “The poem may have started out as an early composition but then benefited from being licked into shape in a skillful, carefully considered revision” (229). You don’t have to be a poet to know what that’s like, the sensation that in reworking something you discover what it was you really wanted to say. Craftsmanship doesn’t have to mean moving away from your initial inspiration; it can be a way of uncovering what that inspiration was. Discounting that possibility from the start is not a good way to build an argument about literary and cultural history.

Abstract Revolution as an act of turning is a crucial yet overlooked feature of Milton’s conception of historical periods. This essay, by examining Milton’s imagery of revolution, seeks to challenge conventional associations of Milton and periodization with teleological culmination and inaugural disruption. In Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained the phrase much revolving becomes iconic of revolution as period-defining movement. Milton’s characters pivot, roll, twist, contort, resist, and return. In doing so, they show, and not simply describe, the lived experience of periodizing change. The poet dismisses understandings of historical periods as closed cycles or linear progressions that are defined by renowned individuals and monumental events. Milton reveals periods to be open-ended and helical and makes immediately sensible the quotidian events, no less apocalyptic for their familiarity, that generate history.

A history of literary prestige needs to study both works that achieved distinction and the mass of volumes from which they were distinguished. To understand how those patterns of preference changed across a century, we gathered two samples of English-language poetry from the period 1820–1919: one drawn from volumes reviewed in prominent periodicals and one selected at random from a large digital library (in which the majority of authors are relatively obscure). The stylistic differences associated with literary prominence turn out to be quite stable: a statistical model trained to distinguish reviewed from random volumes in any quarter of this century can make predictions almost as accurate about the rest of the period. The “poetic revolutions” described by many histories are not visible in this model; instead, there is a steady tendency for new volumes of poetry to change by slightly exaggerating certain features that defined prestige in the recent past.

Abstract Emphasizing the crucial role played by the bodily medium in Racinian theater, this essay challenges the long critical tradition that has reduced Jean Racine’s dramaturgy to the poetic effects of its language, and French neoclassical tragedy to a transcoding of royal ceremonies. The omission of Racine’s tragic corpus is a gaping hole in Louis Marin’s discussion of the seventeenth-century theory of representation. Marin sees a perfect correlation between Pierre Corneille’s theater and the theatricality of power, conceived of as a force constructed through a dialectic between the hidden and the shown. Quite the opposite, Racine’s plays dramatize and reflect on two opposing regimes of theatricality. Each in its own way, Bérénice, Mithridate, and Phèdre contrast the political force of the “portrait of the king” and the emotional efficiency of theater as an art of the body. In resonance with the period’s debates in the visual arts, and within the overlapping contexts of the developing culture of galanterie and the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, Racinian drama calls attention in a striking and unprecedented reflexive manner to the opacity of the theatrical body, whose effects reveal themselves to be both stronger and more unruly than those of monarchical representations.

Abstract Milton’s elegy for Edward King was widely admired and imitated in the eighteenth century. These imitations tend to celebrate the poem as an ornamental, musical work while suppressing its politics. By contrast, Samuel Johnson recognized that the poem’s prosody and its generic heterogeneity were intrinsically related to its political critique. His objections to “Lycidas” also reflected his view that pastoral depicted an idealized life of rural leisure to distract and entertain city men. This ancient association between pastoral and leisure may have informed eighteenth-century readers’ delight in the poem’s “ease and variety,” but it is also a fundamental misreading of the ethics of labor set out in the poem. In its enactment of the spiritual and writerly work of the shepherd, in Milton’s revisions, and in its monodic form, “Lycidas” offers readers a choice between sensual dalliance and arduous song. Monody was both a collective song, performed during work to relieve its strains, and an individual utterance. This form reasserts the labor idealized by pastoral as a spiritual necessity. The eighteenth-century reception of “Lycidas” reveals how the revolutionary potential of lyric was converted to entertainment, a moment whose legacies may be perceived in some contemporary theories of lyric.

Many who study the literature of the English eighteenth century will know the name of Elizabeth Singer Rowe as belonging to someone—and here it gets vague—who wrote about death. Wasn’t she widowed shortly after marriage, and didn’t she make a small career of writing about it? Well, yes, and the little book that came first, Friendship in Death (1728), was the work by which she was chiefly remembered for the rest of the century. It contained twenty letters from the dead to the living, but, unlike the urbanely cynical shades of that underworld genre in Lucian or Fontenelle, Rowe’s departed spirits write from a Christian paradise on the urgent business of remembrance and repentance: “to impress the Notion of the Soul’s Immortality,” in Rowe’s own prefatory words. She was an accomplished poet, too, her verse, like her prose, often colored by the Nonconformist religious belief and purpose she had inherited from childhood. The success of Friendship in Death led to three further collections of Letters Moral and Entertaining over the next three years, all reprinted in a single volume many times until the early nineteenth century. The letters are short and mostly stand alone, not making a connected narrative, though in some cases a correspondence carries on through several letters. They teach lessons: like Antonio’s letter to the unnamed earl who tried to talk him out of a duel, or Evander’s earnest expostulations to a lordly libertine, or the letter from a guilt-ridden Celadon to Amasia, “who had seduc’d him into a criminal love for her.” But they also trade on the language and themes of romantic adventure even while exposing the emptiness of earthly passion against the eternal life of the soul. Samuel Johnson said that Rowe’s achievement in these epistles was “to employ the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion” (The Literary Magazine, 1756, 282).But Rowe as a novelist? Her four collections of letters fit easily into a period octavo volume with plenty of white space. They do not tell a story or represent everyday experience, and they have little scope for the depiction of character. Paula R. Backscheider argues, however, that Rowe was “a pivotal figure in the history of the English novel” who made “revolutionary contributions” shaping the form of the novel right through to our own time (2, 40). That is not exactly the same thing as writing novels, but this dramatic claim from a distinguished senior scholar ought to make us take a closer look. In the end the claim itself is not made good. Yet it makes for a good result.In introducing her subject, Backscheider brings together various recent stirrings of critical interest in the question of where Rowe belongs in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. Backscheider observes rightly that there is a trend away from seeing Rowe merely as the pious alternative to Aphra Behn or Eliza Haywood, though the critics she cites are not, as I read them, looking “to identify her with characteristics of the novels of Samuel Richardson’s period” (39) so much as to enlarge the canonical repertoire of female authorship to include devotional poetry and meditative moral discourse. Friendship in Death and the three follow-on collections constitute the body of what Backscheider regards as Rowe’s fictional writing, for the purposes of this study. Each chapter offers to contextualize this writing within important literary and social developments: the epistolary novel, the fashion of fairy tales, the “politeness” movement.In chapter 1, “Positioning Rowe’s Fiction,” Backscheider assembles many citations and examples from the work of other writers—Haywood, Mary Davys, Charles Gildon, and others—into a somewhat confusing map of epistolary, amatory, and “patchwork” fiction, all intended to reveal associations and overlap with Rowe’s own work, which, however, never quite emerges in clear focus or position on the map. That work is repeatedly claimed for the territory of the novel on a weak argument of me-too or rather she-too resemblances: the early novel eagerly absorbed “news” and other extraliterary matter, and so did Rowe in her letters (65); Jane Barker developed a representation of women as a political category, and this “is certainly a characteristic of Rowe’s fictions” (72). You can make a German shepherd into a giraffe the same way. The discussion as a whole in this chapter is often genuinely informative and interesting, but does not establish a convincing new place for Rowe on the map of fiction.Chapter 2, “Isles of Happiness,” likewise leaves a blurry impression at the center where you would expect to find Rowe. Backscheider surveys the vogue for fairy stories that began with the Countess D’Aulnoy and carried influentially into the English eighteenth century. These stories represent “strategies” for women as well as amusement for the light-minded, and there is much of independent interest here as Backscheider fills in a rich context of example and critical interpretation on this underserved subject. As for Rowe, the situations and allusions in some of her letters have a fairy-tale suggestiveness, which is the basis of an unpersuasive claim that she was “a key transitional adapter, one of the writers that transformed it [the fairy tale] into novelistic discourse and made them [sic] conform to British demands for both realism and magic stories” (121).Backscheider is on firmer ground in chapter 3, “Toward Novelistic Discourse,” where she devotes more sustained discussion to Rowe’s own work, arguing that the letters are written in effect to the reader, who is projected into the narrative in the fashion described (in an unrelated context) by Roger Chartier. Where earlier novels feature external threats to women from pirates or odious suitors, in Rowe the women run away from intolerable situations or achieve peace through transformation of their circumstances. “Thus, Rowe also moved fiction toward novelistic discourse by taming plots” (154), and her characters typically experience a form of self-discovery.Chapter 4, “The Beautiful Life,” concerns the achievement of self-mastery and of a place in a liberating elsewhere or alternative community such as Rowe often imagines for the women in her letters and enacts by her own “lifestyle,” as it is called here. Rowe assimilates the cultural preoccupation with polite form and creates a world, usually pastoral, in which exemplary female character can flourish. This model, according to Backscheider, shows its influence in novels like Mary Collyer’s Felicia to Charlotte, Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, and Frances Brooke’s Emily Montague. She further claims that it influenced the lives of real women, like the Bluestockings, though acknowledging that there is no evidence of this. “Lifestyle as Legacy,” indeed, is the title of the concluding section, where Backscheider suggests that this personal model of devotedly virtuous, retired, accomplished, and self-possessed female living—the Rowe brand (my term, not hers)—may be as important as Rowe’s influence on the novel.If Rowe really did have a pivotal influence on the shape and course of the novel, or made revolutionary contributions to it, then the only way to make that case is by patient critical analysis of the relation between her work and the work supposedly influenced by it, and by some showing of evidence from the testimony of those who wrote and read the novels she influenced. There is no such analysis or showing here. Collecting resemblances of setting, character, theme, and form without any regime for evaluating their critical significance is not the same thing as demonstrating a meaningful relationship or influence. The constant quotation of modern critical opinion about period literary forms or practices with which Rowe’s work is then associated, without any such association or application intended on the part of the critics quoted, gives a false impression of support for Backscheider’s argument. Rowe’s characteristic achievement does not need to be yoked to the history of the novel, though for most eighteenth-century writers that is the surest path onto the syllabus of graduate seminars. All the same, Backscheider is right to make this full-scale effort to see Rowe afresh and deserves much credit for the stimulating critical imagination she brings to the project, as well as for her generous-minded determination to maneuver this remarkable writer into better light. Indeed, what emerges valuably from this study, in my view, is not the improbable Rowe as novelist among (or in advance of) other novelists but something more individual: Rowe as a unique writer, with genuine links to many contemporary forms and styles. The result, almost in spite of that awkward thesis about influence on the novel, is a compelling new impression of Rowe as an author whose work and creative identity challenge definition in both her own century and ours.