Colonial-era Mexican poetry presents a complex interweaving of several genres; this chapter explores two of its major forms: epic poetry and lyric poetry. The epic, often understood as a propaganda instrument for colonial interests, is also constitutive of colonial historical narrative, as is illustrated by works by Bernardo de Balbuena, Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Arias de Villalobos and others examined in this chapter. Lyric poetry captured the creative virtuosity of colonial Mexico. While past critique has framed this opus in relation to European sources, more contemporary readings focus instead on its interplay with the literary, political, and societal elements of its environment. This chapter explores the scope of this genre and the challenge that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing practices pose to twenty-first-century readers.

What might the medical humanities be capable of doing?’ asked Viney, Callard, and Woods in their 2015 call for a critical medical humanities. This chapter endeavours to answer that question by investigating how ‘the literary’ is mobilized in health-focused projects whose commitment to interdisciplinary entanglement renders them exemplary of the field’s critical turn. We interviewed seven UK-based literary studies scholars about their work in two or more such projects in order to understand how ‘the literary’ (as discipline, approach, and praxis) features within project design and delivery, the roles taken up by the literary studies scholar, and the consequent effects on shared understandings about the functions of the literary text. One of the most striking findings of this exploratory study was the interviewees’ determination for the literary text to be considered in non-representational terms and concurrent commitment to championing novel articulations of the value and ‘use’ of literary endeavour.

This chapter is an overview of the problems and uses that affect theory offers the study of African American literature. Defined as aside from the traditions of thought that made black literary fields thinkable in an institutional context, it is not difficult to surmise, in generous faith, why the turn to affect has been inhospitable to lines of inquiry that presume a racial subject. Meanwhile, questions regarding the transmission of affect have remained central to the project of African American literature since before its advent as literature. This chapter considers how the work of the critic in the field necessarily presumes the relevance of affect, arguing that consciously reading for affect wards off duller accounts of what African American literary texts signify in favor of vivacious dialogue on what they do and how.

This chapter surveys the theory and practice of “distant reading,” the computational textual analysis of large corpora of digitized texts. Exploring descriptive, generative, and predictive modeling, Houston argues that these techniques, by “changing the scale at which texts are analyzed,” serve to “transform the object of study and thereby the kinds of questions that can be explored” in literary studies.

This chapter alerts readers of the shortcomings of a mining approach to Pausanias’ Periegesis as a prime evidence for the study of local religion in ancient Greece. The question of where local specificities are discussed in the narrative is as critical as the actual information conveyed. The chapter speaks to the analytical challenge of interpreting a narrative that is, on the one hand, reflective of the non-linear and essentially decentralised nature of the local, yet on the other filters this nature through the linear rigours of writing. Starting from fleeting experiences of the local, highly subjective to the individual that makes them, Hawes turns to an exemplary discussion of Argos, Thebes, and Messenia that exposes the mechanics of a scripted localism, a literary approximation to place. The discussion of Pausanias’ localistic perspective extends to the narrative technique of cross references and to instances where such connections were deliberately denied: the case in point being Pausanias’ treatment of the notorious problem of the location of Homeric Pylos.

This chapter alerts readers of the shortcomings of a mining approach to Pausanias’ Periegesis as a prime evidence for the study of local religion in ancient Greece. The question of where local specificities are discussed in the narrative is as critical as the actual information conveyed. The chapter speaks to the analytical challenge of interpreting a narrative that is, on the one hand, reflective of the non-linear and essentially decentralised nature of the local, yet on the other filters this nature through the linear rigours of writing. Starting from fleeting experiences of the local, highly subjective to the individual that makes them, Hawes turns to an exemplary discussion of Argos, Thebes, and Messenia that exposes the mechanics of a scripted localism, a literary approximation to place. The discussion of Pausanias’ localistic perspective extends to the narrative technique of cross references and to instances where such connections were deliberately denied: the case in point being Pausanias’ treatment of the notorious problem of the location of Homeric Pylos.

This chapter deals with the concept of the civilian as it manifests in the study of war writing from the early twentieth century onwards. The category of the civilian has particular significance for the development of war literature studies, as both the figure which provides a foil to the hegemonic combatant, and as the repressed or forgotten ‘other’ in constructions of revisionist, non-patriarchal histories and canons. That this is not initially obvious has much to do with the persistent privileging of the combatant subject as a source of, and relay of, testimony about the reality of war. War literature studies, in focusing on the twentieth-century combatant (with the Great War infantryman the default paradigm case), has reproduced explicit and tacit constructions of the civilian. Explicitly, in the rhetoric of protest, civilians as referents of war literature are outsiders, ignorant of war; implicitly, civilians are the audience of war writing.

We know from the ancient epics that war has been entangled with literature since the earliest times. But war has also had a profound influence on the broader field of literary studies. Indeed, numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary theories have been shaped by warfare, while contemporary critical engagements have given rise to several recurring and emerging concepts that together structure the field of literary war studies. The introductory chapter seeks to inscribe war and literature within the larger frame of the history of knowledge. It traces the emergence of the theory and history of knowledge as a distinct discipline from its French origins in Foucault’s archaeology to the contemporary German Wissensgeschichte and it explores the place of war literature within this tradition. The chapter argues that literature serves as an archive of military knowledges and a distinct form of knowledge in its own right. And it examines war as a disruptive and generative force that at once disturbs established concepts and theories and produces new modes of knowing, thinking, and writing.

Material culture “represents” and “re-presents” people, places, other objects, taste, soundscapes, etc., in meaningful ways. Some forms of material culture exist specifically to represent or re-present; other forms involve representation more or less across time and over space and cultures. This chapter surveys how scholars from diverse backgrounds have treated “representation” and “re-presentation” in and of material culture, with a focus on literary representations.

Self-translators are not bound by the same professional code that typically constrains translators. Chapter 4 examines how self-translators balance the need to represent their source accurately and the freedom to recreate it. It describes the differences between self-translation and other forms of bilingual writing and explains how self-translation has been categorized with respect to a range of literary, geopolitical and commercial influences and motivations. Finally, it considers how the metaphor of self-translation is used within literary and translation studies.

Chapter 5 focuses on the changes in the editorial profession that resulted from the rise to prominence of the New Bibliography and shows how the consolidation of editorial authority and the increasingly quasi-scientific method (or mystique) of the New Bibliography worked to exclude women from its editorial ranks. This resulted in a significant decrease of woman-edited editions around the middle of the twentieth century. Continuing previous discussion of male collaborators, it demonstrates that well into the twentieth century, women editors’ successes still relied in part on finding a way into the primarily masculine network of editors via their male colleagues and allies, focusing on the careers of Grace Trenery, Una Ellis-Fermor, Alice Walker, and Evelyn Simpson.

This essay summarizes the renewed and expanded perspectives on Caribbean literature made possible by the three-volume critical project to which it contributes the final essay. It then addresses three of the most pertinent issues facing Caribbean literature and literary studies as it moves further into the twenty-first century: first, how the future of Caribbean literary criticism will be shaped as much by what we rediscover about its past as by what is yet to come; second, how critical models might evolve as we reach the limit point of cascading inclusions; and third, questions of accessing and preserving literary sources (past, present and future), with a cautious appraisal of the promise of digital humanities.