The usual view of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose is that it is a matter of writing fast without reflection, and the story of Kerouac drafting On the Road in April 1951 by typing/composing the whole novel onto a roll of paper in a three-week marathon presumably legitimizes this view. However, this chapter argues that we should understand Spontaneous Prose as a reinvention of textuality rather than simply a matter of writing fast and without reflection, which in turn allows us to understand Kerouac’s responsiveness to modern media (film and analogue recording in particular) to the paradigm of conventional print textuality, bringing into view his development of what might be termed “post-print textuality” in even his seemingly more conventionally written novels. Ultimately, this chapter shows that Kerouac’s experiments with textuality rewrote the standards by which “good literature” in the postwar era was measured.

Ancient literary-historical narratives commonly envisage developments in poetry and music in terms either of gradual technical progress, or of decadence and hyper-sophistication. This chapter argues that Lucretius strikingly combines these two perspectives in the concluding paragraphs of the culture-history at the end of De Rerum Natura 5: the invention of carmina as songs (5.1379–1411) is associated with simple pleasures, emphatically unsurpassed by later refinements in technique which are linked in turn to the insatiable and destructive desire for novelty and luxury; whereas carmina as (epic?) poems are mentioned amongst the refinements listed in the book’s closing lines as steps on the way to a ‘peak’ (cacumen) of artistic and cultural progress (5.1448–1457). The dual narrative adumbrated here may be linked in turn with the dichotomy between text as written artefact and poem as disembodied ‘song’, which has been a focus of attention in recent scholarship on Latin poetry: both models of textuality, like the conflicting models of cultural development that shape the finale to Book 5, are important to Lucretius’ poetics and his Epicurean didaxis. Lucretius’ poem thus exemplifies the manifold ways in which literary-historical narratives may be determined by the discursive demands of the text in question.

In Chapter 1, I explore in detail – through official and personal papers, published translations, letters exchanged between colonial officials, prefaces and commentaries, and so on – how the Company officials, in close collaboration with their local pandits and munshis, produced a tradition of what I call ethnographic recension that anchored an ethnographic world within the very space of a legal or literary text. Coming between the Renaissance humanists such as Politian, Desiderius Erasmus, and Joseph Scaliger on the one hand and nineteenth-century textual scholars such as Karl Lachmann on the other, these colonial administrators introduced a new model of textual authority by combining philology and ethnology that was the first move to mark the newness of colonial knowledge. This ethnographic world was seen as a guarantor of textual authenticity, but its very inclusion set off the dual career of the literary sovereign – its role in defining what is literary, and its participation in political sovereignty.

This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

The conclusion makes the case for Faulkner as an anti-ideological thinker, an artist engaged in attempting to disentangle image-making from propaganda as a key ingredient of his larger Yoknapatawpha project. I interpret Faulkner’s Stockholm Nobel address in this context, as a humanistic counter to modern disenchantment, an affirmation of human interiority in the face of scaling social systems in the process of becoming all-encompassing.

The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

The Introduction has three aims. First, it offers a new interpretation of the Seikilos epitaph, one of the most important musical documents from the ancient world. The chapter shows that we can use the Seikilos epitaph as a model for reading carpe diem. Second, the Introduction offers a short history of the carpe diem motif from Homer to late antiquity, analysing its key features and function. Third, the Introduction lays out the methodological framework of the thesis: it is argued that close analysis of the carpe diem motif can advance our understanding of presence, performance, and textuality. These themes have been central to literary studies in Classics and beyond.

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts, studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them they defended and established themselves as authorities on religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the fuqahā estate. The whole community of jurists became active with discourses on works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of fuqahā estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.

Can novels change the world, or must they merely inscribe, and thereby fortify, its injustices? Throughout a range of critical approaches, including new aesthetics, sexuality studies, book history, affect theory, environmental humanities, critical slavery studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, network theory, the spatial turn, world-systems, gender studies, network theory, health humanities, and more, tensions run high in early Americanist literary scholarship between a realist conviction that worlds create books and an equally resolute commitment to the possibility that books – especially fictions – create worlds. This chapter hopes to honor, rather than quiet, this critical ferment. To explain without explaining away will be its challenge. To create a place for those early American authors, meanwhile, who have not until recently been recognized in literary studies because their textual creations do not meet normative standards for book-length imaginative prose will be its sustaining goal.

In the titles and subtitles of David Jasper’s ‘sacred trilogy’ the word ‘sacrament’ appears only in his third book, but Jasper adopts the language of sacrament throughout to designate the way that transcendent reality becomes wholly immanent and gives rise to silence. Sacrament is thus no longer understood to be a manifestation of the divine through a material thing but as the silence of what Jasper names as “Total Presence”, instantiated in both the textual body of the world and in human bodies that make a journey into the desert place. This sacramental phenomenon comes to a focus in the text of poetry, novels, the visual arts and music. This chapter reflects on the extent to which this refiguring of sacrament might enable us to re-think the boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ which seems to persist in our late-modern age. It does so by developing five themes in relation to sacrament: the death of God and universality; the sacred; inside/outside of the text; participating in Christ; and community.

This introductory chapter examines the scope and range of wonder and the marvellous between Homer and the Hellenistic period, explores the significance of ancient conceptions of wonder in the modern literary critical tradition and outlines this book’s theoretical underpinnings and the scope and content of the subsequent chapters.

This concluding epilogue consists of three diverse case studies which both sum up many of the main continuities and differences in the treatment of wonder in Greek literature and culture from Homer to the early Hellenistic period and simultaneously point towards some further directions for the study of wonder in antiquity and beyond.

This chapter examines the range, scope, generic roots and poetics of Hellenistic paradoxographical collections. The cultural context surrounding the production of the first paradoxographical collections in Ptolemaic Alexandria is thoroughly explored. The relationships between paradoxography, wonder and previous traditions of Greek ethnographic writing and contemporary Peripatetic scientific writing are outlined through the examination of Antigonus of Carystus’ Collection of Marvellous Investigations, Ps. Aristotle’s On Marvellous Things Heard, Herodotus’ Histories, Callimachus’ Aitia and Aristotle’s biological writings.

This chapter explores the complicated relationships between visual, verbal and textual wonder in the Greek literary tradition. Thauma is shown to be an important term of aesthetic response by the beginning of the fourth century BCE. The place of thauma in Greek traditions of poetic ekphrasis is examined. The transition from the conception of a marvel as a purely visual object or as an oral report to the sense of a marvel as something which is written down is explored through texts from Plato, Alcidamas, Homer, Theocritus and Posidippus.

This chapter discusses David Jasper’s notion of theological thinking, as this concept is briefly outlined inthe 1995 text “From Theology to Theological Thinking”. It does so by relating sketchily to an early personal encounter with David Jasper on the part of the author, when he faced Jasper with an idea of writing a dialectical post-Christian theology. Jasper was somewhat sceptical about the idea and suggested that theology should rather be post-Ecclesial. The author was rather perplexed by this comment at the time, but in due course realized that they each had very different emphases, despite a profound agreement on certain fundamental cultural issues. This chapter describes Jasper’s notion of theological thinking and puts it in contact with his later works, which may be seen as a kind of post-Ecclesial liturgical writing. This complex is put in relation to the author's own notion of post-Christian theology. The author aims for a more comprehensive critical theoretical perspective that may open up new horizons in radical theology.