This chapter defines ‘criticism’, adapting John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, as a judicative, explicative, and appreciative encounter with literature. And in doing so, it sorts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘essay’ into three rough groupings: (1) digressive essays in the manner of Montaigne; (2) treatise essays like Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie; and (3) periodical essays like The Tatler and The Spectator. Following a thread of allusions to Cato the Younger through the works of Montaigne, Addison, Pope, and Elizabeth Montagu, I show how an important feature of modern close reading, the grammatically integrated quotation, grows out of the eighteenth-century critical essay.

British literary criticism and theory have always been primarily focused on meaning and on value, that is, on the interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. Equally characteristic are their strong sense of having a social mission and their interest in the social value of texts. On the continent, criticism and theory developed in a wholly different, ‘scientific’ direction. The Russian Formalists tried to define the ‘literariness’ of literary texts, the Prague Linguistic Circle introduced the notion of ‘structure’, phenomenologists were concerned with the ontological status of the literary work, and the structuralists of the 1960s and after analysed that narrative and its presentation, with interpretation and evaluation always playing a marginal role. The advent of poststructuralism – whose reception in the UK was markedly different from that in the United States – brought the two traditions substantially closer to each other, but there has not been a real convergence.

This volume reflects on modes of scholarship in Latin literature: what texts do we read? How do we read them? And why? The introductory chapter first surveys the tools of the trade in the twenty-first century, then asks how ‘classical Latin’ is defined. We reflect on the exclusion of Christian Latin texts from the Oxford Latin Dictionary, try to quantify the corpus of surviving classical Latin, and uncover striking continuities between the canon of authors prescribed by Quintilian and modern teaching and research in classical Latin; commensurately, we draw attention to the neglect suffered by most surviving classical Latin authors and still more by the pagan and Christian texts of late antiquity. In the process we set an agenda for the volume as a whole, of ‘decentring’ classical Latin, and offer some first points of orientation in the late antique, mediaeval and early modern eras. Third, we look afresh at relations between Latin and fellow sub-disciplines in Classics and beyond. How much do we have in common, and what problems stand in the way of more successful communication? We close with some reflections on ‘close reading’ and on the possibility of evolving ‘distant reading’.

This chapter considers the shift towards artisan production in comic books, a process that has led to the elevation of its creators to the status of auteurs. While acknowledging the continued relevance of the term graphic novel, Section 2.1 argues for the adoption of graphic narrative as a scholarly designation. This section also introduces a representative corpus of graphic narratives and reflects on sampling and digitization processes. The author shows how existing scholarship focuses on a remarkably small percentage of an increasingly diverse field, preferring titles created by single authors, published originally in book form, and within the subgenre of the graphic memoir. Section 2.2 argues that the growth of this publishing category has been driven by a complex pattern of appropriation, differentiation, and the reinvention of popular form. Demonstrating how formal features interact with the demands of the literary marketplace, the author traces the evolution of brightness and color – features that have rarely been the focus of sustained consideration.

Douthwaite selects the television series Inspector George Gently as an exemplification of critical crime fiction in order to lay bare the ideological workings of that sub-genre and of the linguistic techniques it employs to position readers/viewers, offering an overview of the constructional techniques deployed together with close readings of the texts to bear out the arguments. A continual comparison is made with Graham’s novels and the Midsomer Murders television series to demonstrate how differences in constructional techniques and the use of linguistic devices aiming to position viewers constitute a clear difference between the goals of conservative and critical crime fiction.

Douthwaite takes Graham’s novel Written in Blood and the Midsomer Murders TV series as a prototypical representative of conservative crime fiction to lay bare the ideological workings of that sub-genre and of the linguistic techniques it employs to position readers/viewers, offering close readings of the texts to bear out the arguments. In so doing he deploys all the analytical tools stylistics offers the analyst.

This chapter examines what is arguably Cavendish’s most famous publication, her proto-science fiction novel The Blazing World, from a textual bibliographical perspective, for the purpose of showing that textual bibliography and more traditional literary interpretive analysis can and should be brought together in Cavendish studies. The printed volume in which Cavendish’s novel was originally published, the 1666 collection, printed in London, includes both a treatise and the novel together. I establish a collation formula for this book, and examine the binding, signature marks, pagination, running titles, and systematic hand corrections. These textual bibliographical details demonstrate that the original intention was for Blazing World to end with what we now call Part I, and that Part II was hastily sent to the printer after Part I and the Epilogue had already been printed as a completed whole. The essay ends by showing how this bibliographical fact might change our reading of the narrative itself, and might also prompt us to ask new questions of Cavendish’s writing methods.

The Afterword begins by reflecting on the form of ecological relation that has been sketched out in the preceding chapters through animating figures of species like the passenger pigeon, coral, or seaweed. These relations are based on a material and metaphorical transport from one to another that joins but also keeps apart. Taking up this conjunctive and disjunctive as a figure of partial relations, the afterword moves on to consider how this defines how things come to matter or mean to one another, whether at the close-reading scale of linguistic significance, at the scale of relations between the fields of literature and science, or at the scale of interspecies figuration. Ending with a reminder of contemporary anthropogenic environmental change, the book concludes by observing the tensions of romantic holism and partial ecology that continue to beset strategies for the survival of species like coral.

This part of the book offers a guide to writing about poetry. It addresses the two main kinds of essay you might be invited to write about a poem – a commentary or close reading, and the more discursive essay – and shows how to manage them, from annotation, to planning, to constructing an argument, to editing and proof-reading.

Chapter 2 connects histories of the English Bible to histories of the English novel. When culture is understood to be a kind of secular scripture, the intellectual problems involved in telling the origins of the English novel – that is, the change that occurs in English prose fiction during the eighteenth century – do not get resolved so much as displaced by other problems, such as the rise of the middle class (Ian Watt) or the twin crises of truth and virtue (Michael McKeon) or the advent of the print-media entertainment industry (William Warner). This chapter discusses a recent exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library commemorating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, two passages from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), and Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory to suggest how we might approach culture differently in literary studies and how we might thereby reassemble the secular at the origins of the English novel in a way that opens up new questions about novelistic realism. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of why it matters to think through the postsecular and the postcritical together.

The introduction begins by articulating the volume’s two main aims: to offer a rich account of the origins of the new modernist studies (part 1) and to suggest possible new paths of inquiry for the field in the near future (part 2). The introduction then surveys key features of the new modernist studies; examines ongoing debates over what the term “modernism” can encompass; and considers the position of modernist studies vis-à-vis recent critiques of contextualist scholarship. Throughout, it recurs to the strong institutional grounding by which the new modernist studies has been shaped. It also highlights how the collection’s individual chapters speak to the new modernist studies’ intersections with other areas of inquiry; to the continuing importance of examining modernist works in relation to non-, anti-, or not quite modernist ones; and to the value of working close analysis of textual intricacies together with elaboration of historical and cultural contexts.

Emotion in close reading is a coil, spring or spiral (labelled Stage V) that comes towards the end of our labyrinthine experience of lines of verse – or so I. A. Richards suggests in the ‘Arcadia’ diagram of Principles of Literary Criticism. For the early practical critics on whom Richards experimented, this coil of feeling was an unfortunate vortex from which little affective intelligence emerged: modernist close reading revealed only inhibitions, sentimentality, stock responses. This chapter explores how practical criticism navigates an unsettling new matrix for understanding the experience of feeling in reading and of ‘tone’ as a critical category. It examines the crisis of affect within literary criticism’s early disciplinary history by focusing on Richards’s understanding of ‘pseudo-statement’ and by tracing his contemporary dialogues (Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot) and later interlocutors, such as Sianne Ngai. The chapter re-considers the figure of the critic as cultural confidence man and challenges the flattening of new-critical ‘tone’ in recent affect theory.

From the 1980s book history has insisted on the material object (rather than the work) as the object of study, together with the collecting and reading of it. Lacking so far has been a strong theoretical underpinning: conceptually tying materiality to the role of readers in a way that would simultaneously answer the central question for literary study broached in Chapter 1: What is the thing read?

Close reading – still the practical basis of literary training – offers no obvious answer. Since the New Criticism no viable defence of it has emerged. Caroline Levine’s 2015 book Forms offers an aesthetic-political formalism but fails to answer the central question.

A fresh definition of the work as regulative idea is put forward. By recognising the dialectically linked dimensions of document and textual meaning at every stage from genesis to production to reception, it incorporates the work’s versions and material forms together with their readers.

Stages of reception (and aesthetic reception in the present) may be studied as indices of the cultural shifts with which the work’s manifestations engage. Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1882–3) provides the case study.