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A collection of essays engaging with digital scholarship and new technologies.

Contributors to this volume engage with digital scholarship in several ways: by creating digital projects, often in multidisciplinary, collaborative environments; by applying digital methodologies and tools to explore research questions; and by speculating about the potential directions that digital scholarship can take to tackle existing research areas that could benefit from new perspectives. Together, the chapters demonstrate how various digital approaches—from network analysis to web mapping, VR and AR technologies, digital editions, databases, and archives—are all contributing in creative and effective ways to expand our knowledge of the past, to help ask and answer questions at a scale that was unimaginable before the digital turn, and to reshape early modern studies in the twenty-first century. 

Examines the political and literary uses of the Trojan legend in the medieval period

England in the late fourteenth century witnessed a large-scale social revolt, a lingering and seemingly hopeless war with France, and fierce factional conflicts in royal politics and London civic government—struggles in which all parties sought to justify their actions by claiming historical precedent. How the Trojan legend figured in these claims—and in competing assertions of authorial legitimacy, nationhood, and rule in the later Middle Ages—is the complex nexus of history, myth, literature, and identity that Sylvia Federico explores in this ambitious book.

As New York and Paris began to modernize, new modes of entertainment, such as panoramas, dioramas, and photography, seemed poised to take the place of the more complex forms of literary expression. Dioramas and photography were invented in Paris but soon spread to America, forming part of an increasingly universal idiom of the spectacle. This brave new world of technologically advanced but crudely mimetic spectacles haunts both Whitman's vision of New York and Baudelaire's view of Paris. In New York-Paris, Katsaros explores the images of the mid-nineteenth-century city in the poetry of both Whitman and Baudelaire and seeks to demonstrate that, by projecting an image of the other's city onto his own, each poet tried to resist the apparently irresistible forward momentum of modernity rather than create a paradigmatically happy mixture of "high" and "low" culture.

A study of the popular but forgotten poetry published in eighteenth-century English newspapers and their overlooked influence on the canonical work from the period.

The first book-length study of its kind, Newspaper Verse focuses on poetry published in English-language newspapers during the long eighteenth century, including odes, couplets, news poems, ballads, and elegies by such famous poets as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Alexander Pope, Elizabeth Carter, and Thomas Gray and also verse by lesser-known or anonymous writers. For John O’Brien, these texts constitute something like the dark matter of eighteenth-century letters: the most widely read poetry in the period and yet unincorporated into existing narratives of eighteenth-century English literature. By engaging with these forgotten poems, O’Brien demonstrates how popular media enabled poetry to thrive and recovers their rich influence on the shape of English literary history.

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

A groundbreaking appreciation of Dylan as a literary practitioner.

The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way to understand his unique and often controversial methods of composition.

Dylan expert Raphael Falco traces the similarities between the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs and what Renaissance writers called imitatio. Although Dylan’s lyrical postures may suggest an avant-garde consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan’s creative process creatively expands methods used by classical and Renaissance authors.

Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan’s previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan’s musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan’s songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.
 

Exploring contemporary literature to expose how post-9/11 counterterror strategies are used to unhome families of color

More than a quarter of a century after 9/11, the global war on terror continues to rage in the name of homeland security. Through literature and archival research, Jay Shelat shows how war, Islamophobia, police brutality, and other state-sponsored legal and social maneuvers are used to revoke and control Brown and Black families and their belonging, and why the empire always starts at home.

By exploring insurgent narratives in fiction and poetry by writers of color such as Kamila Shamsie, N. K. Jemisin, and Dur e Aziz Amna, No Place for Home traces the long history of white supremacy infiltrating family life. Shelat expands this picture to include records, laws, brochures, executive orders, and other forms of documentation to illuminate how domesticity is posited as conditional—dependent on racial permission—in the United States. Woven through this nuanced exploration of radicalized violence in the US since the attacks are discussions of stubborn identity, queer kinship, and community organizing.

No Place for Home analyzes post-9/11 literature as a crucial informant for our understanding of how the war on terror has evolved into its current state. In doing so, Shelat charts a radical, healing way forward.

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A timely rethinking of the archetypal story of Noah, the great flood, and who was left behind as the waters rose

Most people know the story of Noah from a children’s bible or a play set with a colorful ship, bearded Noah, pairs of animals, and an uncomplicated vision of survival. Noah’s ark, however, will forever be haunted by what it leaves to the rising waters so that the world can begin again.

In Noah’s Arkive, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. They trace how the elements of the flood narrative were elaborated in medieval and early modern art, text, and music, and now shape writing and thinking during the current age of anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, the chapters draw on a range of sources, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s tale of Deucalion and Pyrrah, to speculative fiction, climate fiction, and stories and art dwelling with environmental catastrophe. Noah’s Arkive uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and those excluded and so left behind to die. This book of recovered stories speaks eloquently to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene.

Following a climate change narrative across the millennia, Noah’s Arkive surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. It is an intriguing meditation on how the story of the ark can frame how we think about environmental catastrophe and refuge, conservation and exclusion, offering hope for a better future by heeding what we know from the past.

A collection of field-defining essays on the Victorian novel, taking up a fascinating paradox in literary history: why do we care so deeply about fictional characters who don’t really exist?

n Nobody Comes of Age, Catherine Gallagher explores the Victorian novel by examining its most fundamental building block: the fictional character. Gallagher argues that “Nobodies”—nonreferential, yet realistic, invented personae, usually of middling social status—were the very engine of the genre’s development. Having arrived on the fictional scene in the eighteenth century, Nobody came of age during the Victorian era. The novel achieved cultural hegemony, and Victorian novelists explored these characters’ fictionality in tandem with the great intellectual developments of their time. Readers, knowing well that novel personae were not portraits of actual individuals, nevertheless expected them to yield important insights into the social and cultural changes of the age.

Nobody Comes of Age gathers in revised form a selection of Catherine Gallagher’s classic and still influential essays on the Victorian novel. These essays take up topics such as the relationship between fiction and the decline of religious belief in the period, and how novelists worked the tension between characters who seemed typical and plots that were unpredictable. Gallagher expertly navigates across a range of canonical texts, from the ordinary outcomes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to the archetypal sacrifices in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles. For scholars and students of nineteenth-century British literature, Nobody Comes of Age is an essential companion.

Finalist, 2016 Society for Midland Authors Award for Biography & Memoir

During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922–1998) evaded biographical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didn’t allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Greenwich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market values into every corner of American culture.

By illustrating the interconnectedness of Gaddis’s life and work, Tabbi, among his foremost interpreters, demystifies the “difficult author” and shows a writer who was as attuned as any to the way Americans talk, and who sensitively chronicled the gradual commodification of artistic endeavor. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and masterful, Tabbi’s book gives us the most subtly drawn portrait to date of one of the twentieth century’s seminal novelists.

“Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon,” wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by the twenty-four-hour glow of streetlights in a world that never sleeps. Moonlight, for most of us, is no more.

So James Attlee set out to find it. Nocturne is the record of that journey, a traveler’s tale that takes readers on a dazzling nighttime trek that ranges across continents, from prehistory to the present, and through both the physical world and the realms of art and literature. Attlee attends a Buddhist full-moon ceremony in Japan, meets a moon jellyfish on a beach in Northern France, takes a moonlit hike in the Arizona desert, and experiences a lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve atop the snowbound Welsh hills. Each locale is illuminated not just by the moonlight he seeks, but by the culture and history that define it. We learn about Mussolini’s pathological fear of moonlight; trace the connections between Caspar David Friedrich, Rudolf Hess, and the Apollo space mission; and meet the inventors of the Moonlight Collector in the American desert, who aim to cure all kinds of ailments with concentrated lunar rays. Svevo and Blake, Whistler and Hokusai, Li Po and Marinetti are all enlisted, as foils, friends, or fellow travelers, on Attlee’s journey.

Pulled by the moon like the tide, Attlee is firmly in a tradition of wandering pilgrims that stretches from Basho to Sebald; like them, he presents our familiar world anew.

Praise for Cole Swensen:

"One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry."
---Library Journal

"Engaging and delightful."
---Publishers Weekly
 
 A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Ezra Pound famously said that literature is "news that stays news," but recent experiments in poetry and the sciences allow us to enlarge the statement to bring information theory and biology to bear on the issue---in particular, how the information theory–based model of self-organization from noise offers a way to look at language as an art material as well as a mode of communication. This concept directs these essays on poetry by contemporary poet Cole Swensen.

Noise That Stays Noise covers a variety of subjects relevant to contemporary poetry and will give the general reader a broad notion of the issues that inform discourse around poetry today. Space---the conceptual geometry of poetry and its concrete mise-en-page---is an underlying theme of this collection, sometimes approached directly through the work of other twentieth-century poets, sometimes more obliquely through considerations of the role of the visual arts in contemporary poetry. This question of space and the shapes it includes and acquires offers a different way to look at some familiar writers, such as Mallarmé and Olson, and a way to introduce several more recent writers who may not yet be known to the general public.

Recovering the literary and intellectual history of anticolonial collaborations
 
Preoccupied with developing a multiethnic, postcolonial culture and seeking an alternative to Cold War–bloc politics, socialist Yugoslavia turned to the decolonizing countries of the Global South. It forged political, economic, and cultural links with postcolonial states and anticolonial liberation movements through the Non-Aligned Movement, of which it was a founding member in 1961. NAM spanned political and economic systems, uniting members in opposition to superpower politics and around policies of nuclear disarmament, active peaceful coexistence, anticolonialism, and respect for national sovereignty.
 
Nataša Kovačević reconstructs the forgotten literary and cultural history of this movement, tracing the development of new networks of intellectual engagement and cultural exchange between writers, journalists, and scholars who connected postwar Yugoslavia with 1950s India, 1960s Algeria and Guinea, 1970s Vietnam, and beyond. Nonaligned narratives attempted to reconfigure the understanding of the globe outside Eurocentric tropes and hegemonic political stratifications and to articulate Yugoslavs’ own internationalist sensibility. With Cold War–era rhetoric intensifying again in the twenty-first century, Nonaligned Imagination assumes the urgent task of unearthing a history of engaged writing and cultural diplomacy that imagined alternatives to superpower conflicts and a bipolar vision of the world.

A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than we have classically understood her: rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, the author theorizes how Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Instead, Washington argues, Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel to write a disguised autofiction in which Austen imagines herself as transgender and works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether. In doing so, she establishes a politics that ushers in a future beyond the cisheteronormative binary, one built on plurality and possibility.

Exploring motifs in modern Persian literature and Iranian film that demand new forms of relationality from politics

Assembling an understudied corpus of literary and filmic texts at the intersection of Persian and global modernism, Maziyar Faridi traces a constellation of aesthetic motifs that resist colonially imported constructs of political relationality in order to argue for an intermedial poetics of nonsovereignty. Moving from the poetry of Nima Yushij and Ahmad Shamlou to the ciné-poems of Férydoun Rahnéma and Forugh Farrokhzad, Nonsovereign Styles charts the transformation of poetic language through its exposure to minor ethnic languages and the rhetorics of English, French, and Spanish modernist poetry and alternative film. Faridi centers two key motifs: ezterāb, a trembling rhythm in which the self encounters itself as difference, and mehr, an aporetic mode of relation beyond identity, community, and sovereignty. Against the state’s project of ethnonationalism, these motifs form a poetics that is both transhistorical and transnational, producing a translational link between Iranian and internationalist poets, such as Langston Hughes and Paul Éluard. By situating Persian modernism within the broader map of global modernism, this book invites us to consider what reading these texts can teach us today about styles of relating to the world and the very sense of the political.