In posing questions about what is “historical” and what counts as “poetics,” historical poetics cannot separate the practice of reading a poem from the histories and theories of reading that mediate our ideas about poetry. While nineteenth-century verse cultures revolved around reading by generic recognition, a reading of poetry as a form of cognition emerges among later critics like I. A. Richards, who illustrates how a line from Robert Browning is read in the mind’s eye, as if in the present tense. But Browning was already doing a version of historical poetics, in writing “Pan and Luna” as a poem about reading other poems about Pan, among them “A Musical Instrument,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the composition and reception of her poem, we see how Victorian poetry foregrounds its multiple mediations, including the mediating figure of voice. The recirculation of her popular poem through citation and recitation, illustration and anthologization, prosody and parody, demonstrates a varied history of thinking through—simultaneously “about” and “in”—verse.

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.

This essay seeks to revalue repetition in literary studies. Critics have often treated repetition—clichés, rules, norms, mechanization, monotony—as the painful or oppressive backdrop against which their best values emerge: originality, distinctiveness, resistance. But this critical tendency has carried its own repressive effects, including wresting our attention from collectivities and solidarities. A reading of John Clare’s 1820 poem “The Harvest Morning” shows that repetition is crucial to the exercise of political and economic power and that poetic forms, especially rhythm and rhyme, are well suited for theorizing the repetitions of political power through their own intrinsic repetitiveness.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s imperfect rhymes, criticized since the nineteenth century, strangely resemble her blank verse. This essay argues that her experiments in poetic form should be viewed in relation to her reading and writing of literary history, particularly her intellectual engagement with the work of Henry Hallam. Barrett Browning’s remarks in the margins of Hallam’s books and in a historiographical essay of her own reveal a poet thinking about her craft in the context of a transnational history of poetry. Barrett Browning’s idiosyncratic prosody becomes another means of writing literary history.

This essay examines the ways that Lord Byron’s Don Juan engages both the novel’s and the lyric’s claims to truth and virtue, thus setting up the maneuvers that would later be exploited by the Victorian verse novel.

A superversive line is that line in a given poem which most eminently exploits the play between syntactic and metrical segmentation, between an ordinary and a special phonology; which peculiarizes verse as verse. A superversive poetics places composition and technique, not theme and representation, at the center of the historically material practices of poetry. For superversive poetics, poems are not only representations but also quite singular machines, devices for body modification. Here the verse repertoire of Robert Browning’s Fifine at the Fair, in particular its exploitation of bimetricality, is explored from the point of view of such a poetics.

As the world cannot be adequately understood from the vantage point of a single language, the literatures of the world can no longer be trimmed to a single world literature in the Goethean sense. This recognition bodes well for the future of philology and of literary production. Through multiperspectival writing, knowledge of life may be attainable without being reduced to a single political, medial, cartographical, geocultural, or aesthetic logic. As a laboratory for polylogical thinking, literature does not represent reality, as Erich Auerbach put it. Rather, it represents multiple lived, experienced, or relivable realities. Whoever is open to a polylogical reception of the literatures of the world can perceive and experience how life knowledge transforms into lived knowledge and how knowledge for survival turns into knowledge for living together. However, literature can be more than it is only if it stays aware of the void, of lack, of privation, of the interminable: aware of the end that never is an end. Such a planetary concept of the literatures of the world offers valuable opportunities to all those who do not fall into the trap of contenting themselves with a supposed abundance of text.

During the US Cold War boom in area studies, scholars would sometimes innocently support homeland economic and political interests. In Latin America and elsewhere, the fact-finding focus often morphed into the look of love, as objects of investigation turned out to be more charming than alarming. Inevitably, interrogations led to lessons in sociability and wit to derail some missions promoted by private and public Cold Warriors. Ethical quandaries would soon turn new North American lovers of Latin America toward ironies related to the metaphor of cannibalism that Brazil’s Oswald de Andrade formulated in his 1928 “Manifesto antropófago.” “Who eats whom?” they asked. And, “Is it bad?” For humanists, thanks to theoretical contributions in literary studies by Jorge Luis Borges, and for the range of arts by Luis Camnitzer, scholars north and south have been learning that the vital processes of ingestion and appropriation give flesh and blood to art and to life in general. Reformulating ethical questions, scholars now ask about levels of collaboration and mutual admiration. Interest need not disappear when love arrives. That’s why teachers today (through Pre-Texts, for example) can appropriate the art processes they love in the hope of developing student skills and civility.

After the popular Elizabethan writer Robert Greene died in 1592, a series of pamphlets appeared with stories of his ghost’s haunting returns. These pamphlets—Henry Chettle’s Kind-Harts Dreame (1592), Barnabe Riche’s Greenes Newes both from Heauen and Hell (1593), and John Dickenson’s Greene in Conceipt (1598)—played on the striking persona that Greene had fashioned for himself, premised on a mode of self-disclosure at odds with his romances’ fictional surfaces and crafted to remedy the impersonality of print circulation. The ghost pamphlets both appropriated and demystified the charisma of Greene’s persona, their acts of ventriloquism exposing the fiction behind his performance of sincerity. At the same time, they confronted the fictionality at the heart of public discourse itself—the imaginary presence that grounded the increasingly diffuse readerships of the early modern book trade.

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.

Through a reading of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which readers inside and outside the academy have valued for decades, this essay teases out how literary critical value is often aligned with scale: big claims, minutely close readings, and the ability to move gracefully between them. The essay also identifies and discusses four techniques basic to literary criticism: description, interpretation, explanation, and evaluation. A coda speculates about the links between Mimesis and a visual technology introduced into university lecturing a few decades before Auerbach wrote his magnum opus: the slide projector.

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.

How can we relate the quantitative presence of literary artifacts to their ability to make a difference, and how does the problem of scale define public accounts of what can be considered relevant literary value? The idea of a singular space of reception (one literary “marketplace,” say, or one “public sphere”) is unhelpful. Rather, literary artifacts have potentially multiple social lives that differ in their relation to “sacralized” and “everyday” practices. An aesthetic object can thrive in many simultaneous or successive practice spaces that use and value it differently and that embed it in differing sites of authority. Moving from the Romantic period to the present, this article looks at the trajectories of Walter Scott as an earlier and Toni Morrison as a recent candidate for culturally relevant authorship.

This article uses computational modeling and large-scale pattern detection to develop a theory of global textual transmission as a process of turbulent flow. Specifically, it models stream-of-consciousness narration as a discrete set of linguistic features and rhetorical elements and uses this model to track the movement of this modernist technique across generic boundaries (from anglophone modernism to more popular genres) and linguistic ones (from English to Japanese). Oscillating between statistical models and moments of close reading, the article shows how a quantitatively scaled-up approach, rather than reinforcing an image of global textual flows as singular and monolithic, illuminates world literature as a system constituted by patterns of divergence in structure and of difference in sameness.

Scholars of contemporary fiction face special challenges in making the turn toward digitized corpora and empirical method. Their field is one of exceptionally large and uncertain scale, subject to ongoing transformation and dispute and shrouded in copyright. It is, however, possible to produce an illuminating map of the field through statistical analysis of midsize, handmade data sets. On such a map one sees a striking shift in the typical temporal setting of the novel, a shift that corresponds to major rearrangements of the relation of literary commerce to literary prestige. This correspondence between formal and institutional developments in turn lends empirical support to the argument that, where anglophone fiction is concerned, the “contemporary” period begins around 1980.

In recent debates about reading methods, in the field of microsociology, and in the history of the novel, small-scale observations of everyday life tend to be understood as conservative, reinforcing the status quo. Through a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) in relation to documentary lyric and the online genre of microaggressions, this essay argues for the political utility of description at the micro scale.

What does it mean to think of the rise of Amazon.com as an event in contemporary literary history? This essay analyzes the literary practices and programs “organic” to the Amazon digital ecology, including Kindle Direct Publishing, and then asks how the entrepreneurial logic, ethos, and temporality of “customer service” might be taken as the dominant logic of contemporary fiction as such.