By dating two newly discovered Conrad drawings, Chapter 3 connects Conrad’s unfinished novel about a painter – The Sisters – to his interest in drawing. The Sisters is a much more complicated fragment than hitherto acknowledged. The text relates to contemporary debates, Conrad’s life and many of his works, both visual and verbal. Written during the advent of modern visual art, The Sisters is of further interest in its portrayal of Stephen as a modern artist. The metaphors on painting Conrad used in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ relate to this discussion: they contextualize and oppose Stephen’s thoughts about what it means to be an artist, and delimit the extent to which Conrad embraced all notions of modernity and the so-called “end of art.”

The chapter explores why there are symbolic depictions of space from above – maps of the fictional environment – in many of Conrad’s manuscripts. I suggest that Conrad constructed and used hand-drawn maps as part of his creative writing process, as if he needed a map to navigate his own fictional world. Three of Conrad’s manuscript maps are linked to passages in his fiction that contain factual mistakes; it is unclear whether the maps led him astray or whether he produced the maps because of the complicated geography. The maps’ existence can be attributed to more than attempts at understanding the coordinates of the fictional environment. Among twentieth-century writers, Conrad was one of the artists most involved with maps and charts, both in his literary and especially in his professional life. However, although Conrad needed maps to write, it is not apparent that we need them to read – unless we seek to better understand the genealogy of the text and the creative process.

This chapter connects Conrad’s delayed decoding with Russell’s logical atomism, arguing that what the latter sought to do for philosophy, the former attempted to do in literature. Both delayed decoding and logical atomism communicate elementary sense-impressions; they construct a truth hierarchy where the particular is above the abstract. The chapter analyses how the language use of each concept corresponds to a host of assumptions about how we experience reality and what constitutes truth, assumptions that aid in explaining their extraordinary friendship. The chapter continues by explicitly calling into question Ian Watt’s concept of delayed decoding using my category, “delayed miscoding.” The chapter contains a lengthy demonstration showing that the most quoted example used to illustrate this hallmark of Conrad scholarship is inconsistent. My reading is not an attempt to discard Watt’s delayed decoding but an attempt to show that there is a discrepancy between what it names and what it explains. Delayed decoding’s binary structure and bivalent logic are limited ways for analyzing a text that is paradigmatically ambiguous.

Like the panoramas, sets of lithographs based on officers’ drawings created new versions of the Arctic imaginary. Such products were too expensive to appeal to the average consumer, but printsellers’ practice of displaying lithographs in their windows and holding exhibitions ensured that this particular version of the Arctic reached far more people than simply those who could afford to purchase them. This chapter observes how the Arctic and the search were represented in three folios of lithographs produced from officers’ sketches (Browne, 1850; Cresswell, 1854; May, 1855). With attention to text and picture, using sketches and written sources, I offer close readings of these materials. This chapter emphasises how the lithographs, from 1850 to 1855, increasingly imply that a battle is being waged against the capricious Arctic nature in an effort to find Franklin. Significantly, the ability of these apparently factual lithographs to continually evolve and multiply, both digitally and on paper, ensures that they continue to inform ways of thinking about the nineteenth-century Arctic, and perhaps the present-day Arctic, into the future.

Beginning with Emily Dickinson’s circumscribed view of her environment, the book introduces readers to the sciences, technologies, and aesthetics of vision that inform a natural history of casualty. The nineteenth century’s declensionist narratives of species, race, and nature corresponds to narratives of a Euro-American expansion of civilization across the American continent. Dickinson’s techniques of seeing comprise what is theorized as a “sketch.” Through a feminist lens influenced by the new materialist turn in ecocriticism, the sketch is defined as an optical-textual apparatus that materially engages with the environment and that apprehends the fragile tenuousness of ecological relation. The chapter positions the sketch as a minor and partial view of nature against the dominant wide-sweeping historical romance of exploration, empire, and nation. Using Harriet Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat” as an example, the chapter lays out the ecological and epistemological stakes of critical sketches whose engagement with the discourse of declining natures nevertheless opens out to a view of their survival based upon precarious environmental relations. Reflecting the sketch’s partiality back onto literary critical methodologies, “partial reading” is proposed as a method that situates its own epistemological limits as an apprehension of the casualties produced by historicizing gestures.

Derrick Spires’s “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment” asks how the literature of citizenship looked for African Americans who simultaneously celebrated a new relation to the state and recognized ongoing white supremacy, both North and South.Using theFifteenth Amendment, Frances Harper’s period literary work, and practices of Black serial publication in Reconstruction as anchors, it theorizes “reconstruction on installment,” individual moments significant in their own right but also constituting a to-be-completed story. Recognizing that Black print called on Black citizens not only to read widely but also to produce African American literature – literature by Black people, about Black people, and for Black readers of all sorts – it reads, in addition to diverse work by Harper, texts by Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, Cordelia Ray, and William Still. The chapter thus develops an interpretive theory of Black Reconstructions as process and practice, a way of thinking about and doing the work of citizenship rather than simply ranking it as achievement.

Chapter 1 puts Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne in conversation with Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village and Jane Austen’s Emma. White’s natural history is the seminal text of English reverent natural history, establishing for much of the nineteenth century a model for reverent observation of the ordinary and local natural world. The chapter considers the formal commonalities and broad theoretical underpinnings of a naturalist, a novelist, and a sketch/prose artist. These three genres – reverent natural history, sketch narrative, novel of English provincial realism – offer sustained and reverent attention to the everyday aspects of their natural and social ecologies. Divided into three sections, the chapter considers White, Mitford, and Austen on their own terms, but also as modes of English realism, with Emma as an important predecessor the mid-nineteenth century novels of English provincial realism.

Is it appropriate to include a chapter on editing Brahms’s music in a book about Brahms in Context? In fact, it is not only appropriate but indispensable because it concerns what Brahms left for the present day: his notated music. Furthermore, from the first compositional idea through to publication, his works existed in the ‘context’ of his contemporaries: friends, acquaintances, copyists, publishers, proofreaders, performers, concert organisers, musicians and critics. Finally, the ‘context’ should not be limited to his contemporaries because we also need to investigate how his now ‘historic’ scores were edited after his death and continue to be edited today in the light of philological and editorial premises and methods. Naturally, the question of ‘suitable’ editing arises, and this must reflect knowledge of current Brahms philology.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.