This study approaches Henry David Thoreau as a model housekeeper whose genderqueer housekeeping generates nonexpansionary modes of relation. I bring together Thoreau’s biography, reception history, queer literary history, and ecolinguistics to resituate Walden within, rather than against, the popular discourse of domestic economy. By restoring Thoreau’s connections with conventional femininity, one can begin to see how his housekeeping, gardening, and animal husbandry in Walden expand his sense of kinship and give rise to a radically social environmental practice. By playing with the boundary between house and habitat, Thoreau frugally expands his affections and comforts without expanding his ecological footprint.

James Baldwin is a thinker of the potential of “the individual” in disenchanted modernity. Drawing on work by Ashon T. Crawley, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, the essay explores this claim by tracing the resonances between the museum scenes found in two of Baldwin's novels: one in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), where characters visit the Museum of Natural History, and the other in Another Country (1962), where they are dazzled by a work of abstract expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art. The echoes between the two scenes actualize Baldwin's suggestion that it is in aesthetic practices, whether within or outside the museum, that diasporic modernity's aborted potential can be resuscitated. In particular, at stake is the actualization of the self-generating diasporic subject, unbeholden, in protest or adaptation, to any preconceived schemas of white epistemology.

One particular effect to which Shakespeare puts the verbal rhythms in his sonnets is to generate a kind of prosodic unrest. To illustrate this effect, this essay first distinguishes and coordinates a set of six or seven forms of syllabic emphasis involved when a reader prepares to voice a sonnet aloud. This prosodic taxonomy allows readers to discern and appreciate a kind of tension Shakespeare generates in the syllables that make up his rhythmic verses, a prosodic tension that underscores the emotion depicted in many of the “dark lady” sonnets and in some of the more angst-ridden of the other sonnets, particularly those where he treats the injuries that the fair youth and he have suffered at each other's hands.

This essay argues that in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, Dorigen develops a selfhood that remains unflinchingly available to others. While the tale’s men pursue a closed selfhood subtended by chivalric expectations for heroic masculinity, Dorigen’s porous selfhood represents a different, vulnerable ideal. Dorigen’s selfhood is open and trusting, and it meets the material world in all its ugliness and danger. Throughout her promise and her complaint, Dorigen maintains a subjectivity that is open to all and bound to none; her difficulties, we argue, arise not from naivete but from the ways in which the buffered, chivalric world disallows and even destroys other formations of selfhood. Although Dorigen recedes by the tale’s conclusion, her boundless, permeable subjectivity is held up as The Franklin’s Tale’s ideal, and the threats to it are clearly exposed as broader harms by the tale’s end.

This article argues that Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War (2017), offers insight into the possibilities of trauma fiction in the twenty-first century. American War is analyzed as a case study for the trauma novel of the twenty-first century—a literary exploration of future and ongoing trauma, rather than a text “working through” a past event. The novel offers as well an unrelenting image of the cost of refusals of care in the early twenty-first century, the last decades in which the impending disaster might be averted. Queer affect theory inflects trauma studies in ways that allow us as readers to describe trauma that is systemic and ongoing; it also allows us to articulate the disproportionate effects of climate trauma on certain human communities, the physical and mental toll of such effects, and the necessity of bearing witness to climate trauma’s causes and consequences in ways that not only create space for but also call forth interventionist action.

Climate-change discourse is suffused with a profound sense of loss, amid accelerating ecological degradation. While some ecocritics consider the elegy an apt means of narrativizing these losses, others call for genres capable of moving beyond mourning. I argue that the Bildungsroman—which typically depicts a protagonist who undergoes a transformational journey following crisis and eventually comes to terms with the world—may narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a changed world. I indicate a corpus of novels that may be termed “climate Bildungsromane,” which envision various transformations following climate grief. Through an analysis of one significant example, Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims, I explore climate Bildungsromane's tendency to narrate the journey from ecocatastrophe to adaptation through a fusion of modern scientific rationality with forms of belief and storytelling commonly considered premodern. I contemplate how and why this seeming paradox surfaces across cultural imaginings of journeys beyond climate grief.

This article asks what might be learned about early modern and modern cultural practices of imagining the self by examining accounts of maritime travel and exploration that (in contrast to the lyric poems, novels, and paintings so often examined by histories of modern selfhood) are narrated in the first-person plural. I use a series of best-selling eighteenth-century British narratives, focusing on the 1748 account of George Anson's voyage, to consider this kind of collective narration. I then turn to William Cowper's 1799 poem “The Castaway” as an example of a text in a genre often imagined as paradigmatically focused on the individual—the lyric—that engages with the maritime narrative tradition and uses it to explore the possibilities of a more fluid and contingent sense of the self.

This essay considers a 2000 production of the Chester Mystery Cycle by the South African theater company Isango Ensemble. Through its use of a syncretic, decolonial aesthetic, Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries functioned as a surrogation of the medieval mystery cycle tradition toward new ends in the context of the collapse of apartheid and the birth of the new South African democracy under the banner of “Rainbow Nationhood.” In tracing its syncretic use of indigenous aesthetics, its creation alongside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and its disparate domestic and Western receptions, I interrogate how phenomenologies of race functioned to reanimate a sense of spiritual efficacy that links the legacy of medieval religious drama with the alterity of black, non-Western subjects under a racialized notion of the unmodern.

Decapitation has captivated artists and writers since antiquity and has been generously theorized, notably in a European framework. As a less analyzed trope of plantation fiction, decapitation conjures both the torture and the revenge of the enslaved. The French Caribbean literary tradition, emerging in the shadow of the French and the Haitian revolutions, is especially haunted by the severed head. Beyond the revolutionary context, decapitation represents crisis—a threat to the plantationocene. Victor Séjour's “Le mulâtre” (1837), Henri Micaux's De nègres et de békés (2011), and Raphaël Confiant's Bal masqué à Békéland (2013)—published more than 175 years after Séjour's short story—cohere in the castrative associations of (white paternal) decapitation. Maryse Condé's Célanire cou-coupé (2000), in contrast, stages a picaresque parody of this Freudian paradigm; this story of recapitation and female survival is fundamentally enabled by the nomadic novel's departure from the plantation and the overdetermined associations imposed by that chronotope.

This article uncovers the fractured and conflicting understandings of sex and gender in early medieval England around the year 1000 CE by exploring the Old English literary biographies of two saints often presented as women disguised as men. Ælfric’s Eugenia upholds binary gender expectations, while an alternative version of Eugenia—changed by a scribe and surviving in the burned remains of a single manuscript—oscillates between acceptance and intolerance. The anonymous Euphrosyne, in contrast, challenges gender norms throughout. This article argues that these characters and the texts’ competing views on sex and gender can be best understood by recognizing these two saints not as women in disguise but as trans men. A trans studies approach combined with philology and source study respects these two figures on their own terms while also uncovering elements of these texts and their cultural context that usually lie obscured.