This essay argues that reading, for Pepys, is a two-person activity, and usually means reading to someone (his wife, his patron, or a friend) or being read to (by his wife, a servant, or a friend). Historians of reading have long recognized the crowdedness of such scenes, but nonetheless have reduced them to one figure: the man of letters achieving, as Roger Chartier puts it, "intimacy with his book," while the servants who do the physical work of reading and writing are written out of the history of reading and writing. The essay focuses primarily on Pepys's reading of pornographic novels and poems, and suggests that these scenes may be collaborative rather than solitary. The essay finally raises questions about the use of Pepys as a representative figure for seventeenth-century history: why should Pepys be typical?

"Mechanical Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology" argues against both New Critical and New Historicist readings of Emerson's idealist aesthetics by contending that he conceived of aesthetics less as a withdrawal into an ideal realm than an attempt to transform society by challenging notions of the self and the self's material relations to the world. In particular, I trace Emerson's allusions to and metaphors of new technologies to suggest how he attempted to figure aesthetic practice in terms of the human capacity to re-make both the material world and consciousness. Connecting this element of Emerson's thought to his anti-slavery activity, I argue that his delineation of the power of aesthetic experience in terms of technologies enables him to imagine aesthetics both as detached from specific political causes and as essential to liberatory practice.

This essay considers the ways in which commentaries on the West Indies, specifically those by Thomas Carlyle and his literary executor James Anthony Froude, used Shakespeare's plays and poetry to advance colonial projects and the racial theories that fueled them. Carlyle's literary aesthetics, which borrowed heavily from Kant, ran close alongside his theories of labor and race, and provided the theoretical foundation for the ideologies of empire in place at the time of the peasant uprising at Morant Bay, Jamaica. Beginning in the 1820s, colonists in Jamaica had noted that lines from Shakespeare plays were turning up in ritual slave "Joncanoe" performances, an unauthorized and unexplained borrowing that provoked both amusement and anxiety. At stake in these borrowings were colonial notions of culture, representation and mimesis, all of which came together in the way Shakespeare's plays were invested with their particular cultural capital. The essay examines the cultural and political force that was generated by Bardologists who thought of Shakespeare as a figure of primordiality, silence and nature, the national poet who both transcended and created history.