This essay traces the ideas underlying Jane Addams’s theory of cosmopolitanism from a variety of her early works. In these works Addams meditates on the generosity of industrial-era laborers to imagine relations of social responsibility that extend beyond familiar ties; she appreciates the precariousness of these workers and their outlook. Her theory has a distinctly literary quality. Across a range of social contexts she uses the figure of Cordelia to trope the idea of answering to the world rather than to local authority. Parable, evident throughout her work, especially in Twenty Years at Hull-House, is one of her favored modes of expression because it so capably conveys the blended generosity and vulnerability of her cosmopolitan outlook.

Although recent scholarship has shown how many twentieth-century African American writers appraised the mixed literary inheritance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Ralph Ellison has been neglected in this regard. This essay excavates Ellison’s critique of Stowe and white sentimentality from unpublished drafts of a book review he wrote of John Beecher’s All Brave Sailors (1945). It then argues that this critique reappears in Invisible Man in the form of a literary pedagogy that simultaneously depends and signifies on some of the central tropes and assumptions of the sentimental novel. Ellison thereby creates a modernist and masculinist sentimental rhetoric that reinforces his novel’s articulation of the ethical and political ideal of e pluribus unum.

This essay offers a materialist reading of the canonical Palestinian novel from the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 to the early 1980s by adapting a Lukácsian periodization to the Palestinian context. The essay connects praxis and historical developments with changes in aesthetic form and delineates the links between Palestinian revolution and realism and between collective defeat and modernism. Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (‘A’id ila Haifa, 1969) and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Abdelrahman Munif’s untranslated World without Maps (‘Alam Bila Kharai’t, 1982), among other texts, are read as symptomatic of a broad cultural and historical shift. While realism registers the knowability and transformability of the present, modernism captures anxiety and the disintegration of agency. As decolonizing and emancipatory hopes shrink in the Middle East, Palestinian modernism emerges — in Adornian manner — to embody defeat and register utopian desire.

It is generally assumed that Marxist revolutionary platforms were, in the wake of Generalísimo Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, fatally eroded by government decentralization, a burgeoning civil society, and a medium-level welfare state. These phenomena made the expression of Spain’s substate national identities less belligerent as they advanced by other means the technocratic and timidly cosmopolitan mind-set that informed Franco’s later administrations. The present essay explores the differential and dissenting sensibilities of key authors who during the period under study wrote in Galician, continued to identify with their homeland’s right of self-determination, and insisted on foregrounding its areas of socioeconomic exclusion and underdevelopment. This discussion centers on Manuel María’s use of his poetry to mobilize popular-democratic politics in the 1970s and takes as its point of departure the contrasting contents found in two important anthologies with deceptively similar titles: J. M. Castellet’s culturalist Nueve novísimos poetas españoles (1970) and María Victoria Moreno Márquez’s politically inflected Os novísimos da poesía galega (1973), which vindicates agrarian communities and vernacular expression.