Volume 140, Issue 1

In comparison with other Old English poems, “Deor” is unusual both for its stanzaic structure and its refrain. Furthermore, close to the end of the poem, the narrative voice shifts from one that appears to be comfortably heterodiegetic to a homodiegetic voice giving expression to a deep sense of loss. It is through that sense of loss, the article claims, that we witness the construction of an anguished sense of the ‘Now’. This article investigates the poem’s remarkable narrative, aesthetic and temporal features through the prism of a ‘global modernisms/global modernities’-approach as has been developed in the context of the world literature debate. The central argument unfolding here is that by opening itself up to the notion of an unknown future, “Deor” stages a complex, ‘modern’ entanglement of different temporalities. “Deor’s” specific modernism consists in the way in which it performs aesthetically, through an act of poetry, the mutually constitutive relationality of a past and a radical present. 1

Co-authored by the English dramatists Beaumont and Fletcher, Love’s Pilgrimage (c. 1615–1616) is a stage adaptation of Las dos doncellas ( The Novel of the Two Maidens ) (1613), an exemplary novel penned by the renowned Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. Produced at a time when Anglo-Spanish relations were marked by an ambivalent state of religiopolitical hostility and cultural fascination, the play offers a bitterly farcical representation of the perceived ethos and social norms of the source culture. At the same time, it engages with the target culture’s political and ideological matrix, offering – oblique – commentary on the authors’ own society. This article provides a comparative study of both works, to assess both the playwrights’ representation of Spain and their stance on certain political and ideological contingencies that shaped Jacobean England.

This essay argues that the collapse of Empire in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is troped as the erosion of textuality. Five key instances of this textual collapse occur in the novel: the maps Marlow reads as a child, the accounting books, the seaman’s manual, the Kurtz Report and the Company papers. There are also a few minor instances of similar textual collapses, which also come to attention here. The essay notes that in each case the text’s significance is lost or altered in specific ways, and this contributes to the erosion of the authority of the text.

This essay examines the narrative conflicts in the cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon and the neo-gothic novella The Body. The theoretical assumption of the analyses is that narrative conflict can serve as an indicator of aspects of a text’s implied worldview: more specifically, narrative conflict is presumed to be indicative of an implied value conflict. Resorting to a spatial conflict model based on Jurij Lotman’s concept of border crossing, the essay argues that both texts differ substantially regarding the values they negotiate despite both deploying the transhumanist concept of body swapping. Whereas Altered Carbon places a socio-economic conflict at its core, The Body negotiates a metaphysical conflict. Accordingly, Altered Carbon discusses the construction of self-worth in view of an economically and socially overpowering opponent, whereas The Body emerges as a search for a value which can fill the void created by the dwindling relevance of religious notions of eternity in a secular world.

In Homo Ludens Johan Huizinga defined play as a free activity outside “ordinary” life, viewed as “not serious”, “connected with no material interest” or possible “profit”, “proceed[ing] within its own proper boundaries” by “fixed rules”, and fostering groups shrouded in “secrecy stress[ing]” their separateness “by disguise or other means” (1949: 13). He audaciously argued that human culture originated in play and to some extent remains play. His analysis illuminates how Dickinson approached aspects of culture like language, religion, war, law, politics, love, education, and art. Nourished by affluent gentry privileges and prejudices, Dickinson’s detached playfulness strikes some as socially irresponsible. Does defending her seriousness validate Huizinga’s claim that “solitary play is productive of culture only in a limited degree” (1949: 47), or should we challenge Huizinga here? Did her privately circulated works have any impact on culture, and if so, how? Strategies of withdrawal, inconclusiveness, and depersonalization ultimately turned her playful poetry into high culture.

Scholars in ecocriticism have frequently argued that the environmental crisis calls for an overhaul of the realist novel, which is inadequate at conveying the global scale and ramifications of climate change and related anthropogenic disruptions to the Earth system. In this article, I explore how a centerpiece of nineteenth-century realist fiction, the omniscient narrator, may be reimagined to speak to the imaginative challenges of climate change. As the future becomes fragmented in a multiplicity of alternative scenarios (ranging from local disasters to societal collapse), personal and collective anxieties come to the fore. In my case study, Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel Leave the World Behind , the narrator’s apparent omniscience stages the uncertainties of our climate future through an ironic device: knowledge of the catastrophe experienced by the characters is displayed but also withheld from the reader, leading to an ambivalent, and largely unreadable, narratorial stance. Omniscience is thus used to undermine the possibility of affirming human mastery and control over the unsettling events that are playing out in the storyworld. In this way, Leave the World Behind demonstrates the realist novel’s ability to open itself up to the weird realities of the climate crisis. 1