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In response to trends in criticism in recent decades, this special issue of Modern Language Quarterly contains new essays by prominent literary critics reasserts and refreshes the crucial importance of studying form for a productive understanding of complex issues that have frequently been oversimplified.

It includes Heather Dubrow, answering New Historicist accounts of country house ideology, J. Paul Hunter reclaiming attention to eighteenth-century couplet structures, and Garrett Stewart arguing for the comprehensive import of the local syntactic forms in syllepsis in Dickens. Ronald Levao recovers the ethical urgency behind stylistic individuation in Milton; Frances Ferguson reveals the ideology of character within Austen’s free indirect discourse; Franco Moretti traces the history of the clue as formal device in detective fiction; and Robert Kaufman shows how formal dynamics derived from Kant and Adorno animate some of the most disruptive contemporary poetry. The history of formalism is the topic of Catherine Gallagher’s meditation on the dialogue of form and time since Percy Shelley and of Virgil Nemoianu’s account of the political vicissitudes of form in the twentieth century. These wide-ranging critical interventions are introduced by Susan Wolfson’s reflections on form today and by Ellen Rooney’s polemical appeal to cultural theorists not to defeat their purposes by neglecting form.

Contributors. Heather Dubrow, Frances Ferguson, Catherine Gallagher, J. Paul Hunter, Robert Kaufman, Ronald Levao, Franco Moretti, Virgil Nemoianu, Ellen Rooney, Garrett Stewart

This special issue brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to examine the relationship between cartography and the expression of ethnicity in the Viceroyalty of New Spain from 1521 to 1821. Maps from Oaxaca, central Mexico, and the Philippines, spanning the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, provide important yet understudied illustrations of the social, political, and geographic complexity of the regions. This collection of essays scrutinizes maps made by cosmographers, surveyors, indigenous painters, and scientists. The contributors explicate how ethnicity can inform discussions of colonialism, social memory, land tenure, visual representation, and science and technology, ultimately demonstrating how New Spain’s culture and society were forged during the early modern period.

Essays featured in this issue analyze the use of cartography to communicate the urban form of early colonial Mexico City and the application of botanical and protochemical knowledge to make ink for native maps from Oaxaca. Other essays address the representation of ethnicity and space in seventeenth-century Manila, the construction of spatial boundaries through the use of word and image in central Mexico, and the survival of Nahua place names and social ordering in eighteenth-century Mexico City.

Alexander Hidalgo is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Texas Christian University. John F. López is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago.