ABSTRACT In an exploration of the problems of writing autobiography and biography articulated by Laura Marcus, I show how Yeats, Wittgenstein and Woolf, identify the note as the form that keeps alive the life that autobiography and biography are always paradoxically in danger of making absent. The promissory note written for autobiography’s impending realisation suggests that the past is best retrieved by means of a structure of permanent postponement for the future. Proust’s invocation of memory through the device of sliding metaphors, analogies and comparisons, by contrast, involves a translation of moments of the past through deliberate paramnesia, operating according to the translational structure of displacement articulated by Freud in his analysis of dreams. Once put into narrative form, an autobiography will never tell the story of the self alone, of the individual life, for to write an autobiography will always mean to fabulate one’s own ‘family novel’ (Freud’s ‘Familienroman’) in the terms of a romance in which the writer acts out their own desires as a character within a drama whose script has already been written by others.

ABSTRACT Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently ‘literary’. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre’s most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as ‘tedious’. Focusing on Thomas Coryate’s eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise.

ABSTRACT This article investigates institutional forces that maintain the focus on canonical authors in Middle English studies, despite the ubiquity of anonymity in the Middle English corpus, and despite the extensive critique of the canon that the field has witnessed. It provides a snapshot of the current Middle English canon, surveys publication patterns in sample academic journals in the twenty-first century, examines the ways authorship serves (and anonymity does not) as a critical tool, and shows what anonymous texts might offer to the ongoing assessment of the literariness of Middle English texts. Analysis of the scholarship of two Middle English scholars over the first two decades of the current century demonstrates the challenges and opportunities in developing methods that discern the literariness of anonymous, non-canonical texts. Work in New Formalism and object studies offers possibilities for recognising the literariness of anonymous texts not traditionally considered in terms of their aesthetic or formal features.

ABSTRACT Costumbrista literature has been repeatedly analysed as a strategy as well as an expression of the process of nation formation in nineteenth-century Latin America. However, it is also a powerful lens for exploring and interpreting the urban visions of literate elites during the turbulent period of liberal reforms and expansion of a capitalist market economy. Largely dismissed as picturesque and inconsequential, in its apparent simplicity, Costumbrismo casts light on how liberal and conservative elites attempted to capture the daily effects of the market economy, and express their anxieties about the increasing commodification of everyday life, the growing obsession with money, and the changes in their own experience of time. As I argue here, Costumbrista literature helped place the new economic order in the local imagination. But it was also a contested ground where writers shaped partisan distinctions and, in the process, established themselves as political elites.

ABSTRACT The scientific laboratory is often construed as a space in which laboratory animals are sacrificed on the altar of biomedical progress. However, this understanding of nonhuman animals raises significant ethical concerns and appears complicit in the anthropocentric and colonial violence that creates sacrifice zones in Naomi Klein’s sense. In this article, we argue that contemporary literature can work towards an imaginative and affective reframing of the lab, which is no longer seen as a sacrifice zone but as a contact zone—a space of relationality and entanglement across the human-nonhuman divide. To explore this shift, we offer close readings of two contemporary narratives that centre on the lab: Tania Hershman’s short story ‘Grounded’ and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird. In both of these texts, animals refuse to be made data through sacrifice and instead affirm, if in a limited sense, their own autonomy and vitality. Literary experimentation on a stylistic level plays a key role in this process: our readings highlight how both narratives evoke embodied (and more specifically haptic) connectedness with animals by deploying literary strategies that deconstruct the visual language associated with scientific objectivity.

ABSTRACT The ‘sacrifice zone’ as a concept and a form pervades contemporary literature and literary studies. The sacrifice zone is premised on expendability, on the idea that one part can be expended for the good of another, and yet, in the waning days of the Great Acceleration, expendability has proven to be remarkably expandable and the zone of sacrifice seems only to grow. At its heart, the sacrifice zone is a relational concept: it names a relation between the human and non–human world and among different human societies under various colonial regimes, a relation that has been fundamental to capitalist extractivism. The remainders of extractivism pervade our modes of perception, our bodies, and our ways of knowing, and in this sense the sacrifice zone is the medium of modern literature as well as of modern life itself. Undoing habits of simplification, diminishment, objectification, separation, and unidirectionality, and instead building habits for recognizing complexity, interdependency, immersiveness, and reciprocity, contemporary literature and art can be forces for repair in the face of the sacrifice zone.

ABSTRACT This article explores affective narratives of migrants in a recent Brexit fiction in the context of feanxiety – a critical concept that brings together literary representations of fear and anxiety. The essay focuses on Agnieszka Dale’s short stories collection Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), which represents the social and affective experiences of Eastern European migrants living in post-Brexit Britain. Written after the 2016 referendum, the collection engages with issues of belonging and (un)belonging, national attachments, and postcolonial relations in the United Kingdom. Reading three short stories from the collection, ‘A Polish Joke’, ‘Fox Season’, and ‘A Happy Nation’, this article investigates how through comedy, humour, and distanced attitude Dale’s fiction fights detrimental prejudices about ‘fearsome foreigners’, reclaiming the lost agency of the migrants. This article argues that in Fox Season feanxiety operates as an aesthetic and an ethical mode but also as a political measure that operates within the modern power structures. Examining the experiences of migration through the lens of fear and anxiety not only enables a nuanced reading of the collection’s outlook on negative emotions surging in the UK but also facilitates a furthering of feanxiety as a productive critical framework within the merit of affect studies.

ABSTRACT Contemporary right-wing populism mixes comic performance with authoritarian and reactionary sentiments in troubling ways, as much recent work has observed. We might thus be said to be living in an era of ‘tragic farce’ in which Marx’s famous distinction between genres of historical action has collapsed. To engage with these questions, this article focuses on the clown as a figure in which aesthetics and politics intersect in crucial ways. Through readings of Adorno, Deleuze, Agamben and Žižek, I show how the clown has been an enduring concern for theory. I also analyze Todd Phillips’ 2019 film Joker, including the furor that greeted its release, in order to argue for a mode of aesthetic populism in which the category of ‘people’ remains a virtual or potential category that can drive artistic practice. To describe this, I draw on what Deleuze, in his philosophy of cinema, termed fabulation.

ABSTRACT This article provides an analysis of C. J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake novels (2003–2018), considering the fact that both crime and historical fiction may be used to reconceptualise collective memory in subversive ways, and with important implications for both genres. I will attempt to demonstrate that Sansom’s narrative illustrates the shift in recent crime fiction from the crime itself to the historical conditions of its setting. As a result, Henrician England is presented as a very different context from that foundational time identified by Whig historiography, thereby questioning the very pillars of Englishness / Britishness that were such a central part of the country’s political climate leading up to the Brexit referendum. This is not achieved through the use of any postmodern technique. Instead, the reader perceives a sense of ‘neo-historical’ authenticity in Sansom’s fiction that results from its sensorially approaching the historico-geographical locus of the narrative through the eyes of its anachronistically cosmopolitan stranger protagonist (the lawyer Matthew Shardlake), whose walks and rides through the Tudor city turn the reader into a privileged flâneur, ultimately raising awareness of the subversive power of everyday life.

ABSTRACT This essay addresses the issue of J.M. Coetzee’s political non-alignment by way of his fictional representation of care and solidarity, with a focus on the Jesus trilogy. The argument is that Coetzee’s literary output is consistently suspicious of state provision of care and drawn towards individual responsibility. The essay re-opens a debate that has dogged Coetzee from the start of his literary career regarding his alleged lack of commitment to liberation movements and a corresponding elitist aestheticism. The aim is not to accuse Coetzee of political betrayal, but to understand why and how, despite his trademark subversion of binaries and unwillingness to provide a message via his art, his novels present a powerful case for individuals being held responsible for their actions and adopt a sceptical if not hostile attitude towards state intervention, redefining care as a moulding into a predetermined shape, largely through state-controlled education of the child. The essay will seek to show that throughout his work, culminating in the Jesus trilogy, there is a discernible pattern of acts of solidarity being treated with suspicion as a depersonalised mode of caring, in contrast with acts of caring that offer hope of grace, of spiritual growth, for the individual.