This Introduction explores what it means to encounter a poem. What is involved when we read a poem in a book, hear a poem at a poetry slam, or translate a poem for readers of another language? What ideas about “the poem” inform such encounters, shaping what readers and audiences want from poems and what they do with them? This chapter examines the conceptual relation between the terms “poem” and “poetry,” as well as the shifting relations between “poem,” “song,” “hymn,” and other related terms. The Introduction considers how ideas about the poem have changed over history and how they differ between cultures. It then addresses several influential ideas about the poem, especially the notion of the individual poem as a unified whole and the notion of the poem as singular, as valuable in its difference from other poems. This chapter concludes that to encounter a poem is necessarily to encounter a work which, whether as object or experience, is always already entangled with other poems and with ideas of the poem as such.

The Introduction to this book offers an overview of the literary culture of the 1830s. It explores existing literary-critical approaches to the decade’s culture, and considers why the decade has proved so resistant to absorption in literary genealogies. This is a consequence of the decade’s own uncertainty about and self-conscious analysis of its literary temporality. The Introduction proposes that the 1830s are uniquely placed to direct the future interests of contemporary literary studies.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical dialogue in the “prosimetric” or mixed form (prose and poetry), has attracted broad literary and philosophical readerships in both the Latin West and Greek East from the ninth century on. The two readerships, however, have not regularly overlapped or engaged with one another in their respective efforts to interpret the work. The purposes of this study are to enable a more informed appreciation of the philosophical implications of its more “literary” books (I–II) and the literary significance of its more transparently philosophical ones (III–V), and to bring its overall architecture into clearer focus. To these ends, a case is made at the outset for the complete state of the transmitted text of the work.

This chapter examines US pulp crime fiction published between the 1920s and the 1960s, focusing on its formal distinctiveness and its development. It shows how the forms of organization taken by pulp labor related to the literary forms found in the stories, exploring how the principles of fungibility and economy, recognizable from the industrial factory system of mass-production, were accommodated or challenged by two key crime writers: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It examines how the rhythms of pulp labor intersected with the stories’ formal composition. Finally, it discusses the interpellation of a white, male, working-class readership by interwar pulp crime fiction, and the way its ideological valences were reconfigured in the postwar period by writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes.

This chapter explores late twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts from theological encyclopaedias to treatises on falconry and cosmetics to argue for more complicated relations in England’s franco-latinate culture than Latin-vernacular binaries. Far from dully derivative didacticism, the large corpus of francophone treatises in this period is an explosion in vernacular poetics and a burgeoning field of experimentation in the forms and modes of knowledge. This argument entails acknowledging the historically situated nature of scientific paradigms and the importance of literary–philosophical textual strategies alongside texts’ social and performative capacities in manifesting knowledge as knowledge. Finally, it is suggested that established francophone knowledge-writing contributes to fresh notions, further developed in later fourteenth-century French and English texts, of narratorial witness as an element of textual authority, whether in instructional or overtly fictional works.

This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.

The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro offers a brief overview of Ishiguro’s remarkable oeuvre. The Introduction touches on the key themes and concerns of Ishiguro’s work as well as on the deceptively innovative formal narrative and linguistic qualities of his works; it offers a brief survey of the author’s career by following the successive ‘turning points’ that he adduces in his 2017 Nobel Lecture; and it considers the ways in which, in focusing so often on the ethics of professionalism, the novels also reflect on the profession of authorship itself – a role that Ishiguro has both embodied and performed with such adroitness and style, and with such admirable literary inventiveness and integrity, for more than forty years.

This chapter puts forward the thesis that fictional forms, and the imaginative reach they bring to thinking, serve as a kind of philosophical method for Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. It explores how the original use Wittgenstein makes of fiction and stories revitalizes conversations in the space between literature and philosophy. For Wittgenstein’s commitment to fiction as method, distinctively, allows him to sound out actualities and realities in the world. It is a uniquely truth-capable use of fiction that also highlights what novels, stories, films, performances, and other fictional forms are intrinsically capable of. The chapter begins by developing a contrast between Wittgenstein and Plato on the use of story. It continues into readings of central characters, figures, circumstances, and events in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations. The discussion concludes with reflections on two novelists, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, whose interest in giving everyday life narrative form illuminates the stakes of Wittgenstein’s commitment to story. The chapter more broadly asks central questions about how fictional forms put us in contact with consequential parts, pieces, and aspects of the world and how Wittgenstein’s philosophy paves a new path into this connection between fiction and life.

Expressly political literature in the period of the Revolution and early republic attempts to balance, synthesize, or overcome the contradiction between the language of universal freedom and the nascent and evolving national institutions of domination, exploitation, and general unfreedom. In the early republic’s modern, specifically capitalist form of national law, the literary vehicle is inseparable from the emergent institutional form, and this essay argues that the early republic thus initiates a considerably new phase in the nexus of rhetorical expression and social power. Through readings of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and key texts from the ratification debate, the essay traces the invention of a state machinery uniquely suited not primarily to overt domination over citizen-subjects, but rather to their exploitation by private actors formally extrinsic to the state – an apparatus writ small, in the grammar, syntax, and distinctive diction of the primary political texts.

The Introduction examines the process of “sympathetic collaboration” – drawing from manuscript marginalia, notes, journal/diary entries, and correspondence – and the influences of that process on poetry, drama, and fiction. Guided by the current trend of literary studies around sympathy, emotion, and affect, it demonstrates the long reach that eighteenth-century moral philosophy has on later literature and artistic thought by investigating the writing and creative processes to understand the ways in which communal relationships are inscribed within the literary product. Collaboration is necessarily rooted in the ideals of Victorian liberalism: It is derived from a representation of sympathetic identification and emphasizes human sociability. In a broader sense, this book provides a fresh understanding of literary collaboration necessarily informed by the mechanics of the writing process and illustrated in the formal elements of literature, as well as textual or marginal traces within the manuscripts. Nineteenth-century artistic creation is, I propose, rooted in sympathetic identification. This philosophical approach to life (seen in the lived attempts at community for each of my case studies) has larger implications for literary history: I suggest that these sympathetic communities are mutually implicated in formal experimentation and innovation.

To enter the world of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, the greatest and most influential Greek poem of the fifth century CE, is to enter an echo chamber of Greek literature and engage with a swirling repertoire of mythic narratives. The erotic narratives of Dionysus and his entourage have to be read through this formative poetics – and so it is here, with poetics, that I will begin my travel towards one of ancient poetry’s most bizarre scenes of lustful, fondling, inappropriate desire in action. If any writer of late antiquity reforms the form of epic, from within, as it were, it is Nonnus, whose forty-eight books add up to the forty-eight books of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, but whose narrative discourse, narrative structuring and even verse forms radically disrupt and remould what is understood by the tradition of epic.

In this chapter I take up two texts from the 1880s to demonstrate how evolutionary theory mandated formal experimentation in fiction. In both Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884 but not published until 1903), that experimentation appears most clearly in idiosyncratic narrative point of view: Schreiner narrates a section of her novel in first-person plural, while the whole of Butler’s novel is narrated in what I call first-person omniscient point of view. Arguing for a return to and reinvigoration of the study of relations between evolution and literary form inaugurated by Gillian Beer and George Levine in the 1980s, I also broaden the scope of that study beyond Darwin. Not Darwinism but Herbert Spencer’s universalist progressivism stands behind Schreiner’s first-person plural point of view, while Butler’s narration takes shape in connection with his own peculiar brand of Lamarckism. Finally, each of these novels of the 1880s elaborates a theory of historicity derived from the same evolutionary thinking to which anomalies in point of view can be traced, a theory that requires us to interrogate the view of history encoded in the phrase ‘of the 1880s.’