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Article

History and Culture of the Bulgarian Book  

Vasil Zagorov

The concept of Bulgarian book (Balgarska Kniga) is inclusive of manuscripts and printed and digital books written and reproduced in Old Bulgarian, Middle Bulgarian, and Modern Bulgarian in the period from the 9th to the 21st centuries. Along with language, due to a number of historical circumstances related to political, cultural, and economic factors, categories of Bulgarian books also comprise literary products created in foreign languages by Bulgarians with a clear Bulgarian national consciousness. Because of the long period of existence of the Bulgarian state (681–2021) and its two periods of political dependence—the Byzantine rule (1018–1185) and the Ottoman rule (1396–1878)—historical boundaries regarding the creation, distribution, and influence of the Bulgarian book far exceed the political borders of the modern Bulgarian state. The cultural influence of the Bulgarian manuscript book can be attributed to Bulgarian rulers and high clergy who were the first to successfully apply, develop, and disseminate Glagolitic and Cyrillic written systems, thus helping to build an independent Slavic Christian culture in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. This influence accounts for the Bulgarian book’s wide distribution as early as the Middle Ages and explains its 21st-century presence in a number of foreign libraries and museums. As a material object and a cultural phenomenon, the Bulgarian book can be studied in five main periods: the manuscript book (9th–19th century); the printed book in the period of the Ottoman Empire (1508–1878); the printed book in the period from the Liberation of Bulgaria to the imposition of the socialist centralized planned model of book publishing (1878–1948); the printed book during the socialist period (1944–1989); and the book in the postsocialist period (1989–2021).

Article

Immigration and Asian American Autobiographical Writing: An Unstraightforward Story  

Theresa A. Kulbaga

Asian American autobiographical writing about immigration—from the earliest available examples to the contemporary experiments with genre and form—does not tell a straightforward story. Rather, Asian American autobiographies trouble the sustaining myths of American exceptionalism, the American dream, meritocracy, and belonging and therefore challenge narratives of immigrant striving and success. Immigrant narratives examined in this essay by Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, Kathleen Tamagawa, Carlos Bulosan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kao Kaila Yang, and Shailja Patel, among others, show the contested and constructed quality of national borders. They show that the nation has always been constructed transnationally, through relationships with other countries and cultures and flows of migration that exceed straightforward definition. Examining narratives from various historical periods and cultural traditions brings into view the connections and contradictions among them and shows how each text intervenes in immigration discourse and exercises autobiographical agency. Rather than straightforward stories, then, Asian American autobiographical narratives illuminate the various entanglements of self-representation, family, identity, and agency with imperialism, racialization, nationalism, and global capitalism. Nor does autobiographical writing merely document experience or history. Instead, it actively constructs self, identity, and nation even as it draws on the culturally available narratives that enable and constrain the stories writers tell about their lives. As it does so, it creates new, unstraightfoward narratives and forms.

Article

Incarceration in Contemporary Asian American Literature and Culture  

A.J. Yumi Lee

Asian American immigrant communities have been shaped by encounters with state surveillance, policing, detention, and deportation, and contemporary Asian American literature reflects this history. Many foundational Asian American literary texts narrate experiences of policing and incarceration related to immigration, and contemporary Asian American literary works frequently comment and build on these stories. Such works also recall the creative tactics that immigrants have employed to protect each other and elude the state, including adopting or inventing different names, identities, and familial affiliations. Another body of Asian American literature addresses experiences of encampment linked to war, occupation, and militarism that have both preceded and followed Asian American immigration to the United States. In particular, the internment of Japanese Americans in the western United States and Canada during World War II gave rise to numerous creative works, including fiction, poetry, memoir, art, and film by internees and the generations that followed. Asian American literary texts about post–World War II US wars in Asia, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the Global War on Terror, depict transnational wartime carceral spaces such as prisoner-of-war camps and refugee camps as sites that have generated Asian diasporic migrations. Post-9/11 Asian American works have responded to the militarized policing and incarceration of Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians, both domestically and globally. Finally, contemporary narratives of Asian American incarceration in the United States frequently address the connections between the policing of immigrants and the larger prison industrial complex, asking readers to situate Asian Americans comparatively in relation to other vulnerable groups, particularly other communities of color who have been targeted for abuse and incarceration by police and the state historically and in the 21st century.

Article

The Latin American Chronicle  

Claudia Darrigrandi

The Latin American chronicle has a rich tradition, yet its status within the academic field remains variable across the continent. The term “Latin American chronicle” encompasses a wide range of nonfiction writings that blend journalism and literature, published in newspapers, magazines, and books. The Latin American chronicle possesses a sense of social importance that renders it an appealing genre, and during the first decades of the 21st century, the genre gained widespread recognition. Several factors contribute to this attribute, including: the genre’s origins and its diverse manifestations since the 16th century; its hybrid nature that blends features from literature, journalism, and the social sciences; its cultural manifestation as a social and cultural practice; the convictions of the chroniclers and their attributed functions to the chronicle; and the growing interest of the reading audience. The appeal enveloping Latin American chronicles is related to a mode of conducting journalism, a perspective of what constitutes journalism and literature, and the attitudes of chroniclers toward their contemporary time and events in the Latin American context. Part of the appeal of this genre has to do with the challenges of providing a clear definition of it. Chronicle and narrative journalism are not synonymous, although in certain contexts, they may appear interchangeable. Narrative journalism, as the name suggests, pertains to the field of journalism. Concisely stated, it involves incorporating literary techniques into journalistic writing, whether in the form of an article, chronicle, column, or reportage. Similarly, the term crónica in Latin America has encompassed various writing genres and journalistic forms, including profiles, interviews, reportages, columns, and articles. Nevertheless, the chronicle is a distinct genre within narrative journalism, and despite the challenge of providing a precise definition, it exhibits its own qualities. A straightforward way to define the Latin American crónica is as a journalistic-literary genre, primarily published in magazines and newspapers from the late 19th century to the 21st century, which explores an event or fact. Since 2012, the Latin American chronicle has captured the attention of publishers, readers, and researchers, prompting discussions about its origin as a hybrid genre. There is some debate as to whether its roots come from the historical chronicle—or Crónica de Indias—or from Latin American chronicle published around the turn of the 20th century (1880–1920). Each choice implies, to some extent, different trends concerning its ethos. While the reference to Crónica de Indias conveys a particular mission linked to showing and exposing what the writer or journalist witnessed, in the Spanish and Brazilian modernist chronicle, documentary writing is less compelling than the style itself. As there is no agreement on whether it is possible to construct a genealogy of the crónica latinoamericana, what it is true is that the term crónica latinoamericana conveys much more than a literary, journalistic, or hybrid genre. Historically, the Latin American chronicle has provided a platform for expressions not typically found in other literary genres, fulfilling a societal and cultural need by virtue of its profound commitment to the contemporary moment.

Article

Latina/o Literature and War: Gendered Combat Zones  

Ariana E. Vigil

Latina/o literary engagements with war include a wide variety of texts that touch on more than a century of US militarism and encompass a broad range of genres and perspectives. This body of work includes memoirs by soldiers and novels set during various military conflicts (often based on the authors’ own experiences), as well as short stories, plays, poems, and essays that reflect on, question, and problematize Latina/o participation in war. Just as Latina/o individuals and peoples occupy a variety of positions vis-à-vis the US nation-state—as conquered and colonized populations, as internal “minorities,” and as migrants and refugees—so, too, have Latina/o texts that take up war reflected a variety of positions. Taking an expansive view of war that includes movements of military-backed annexation and colonization, this literature may include Latina/o literary and cultural engagements with the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), and the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. These topics sit alongside very different perspectives on US militarism such as those that reflect Latina/o experiences within the US armed forces in World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, Central America, and Iraq. This literature, then, covers works that celebrate and oppose US military action. Although factors such as geopolitical setting, history, ethnicity, and nationality affect the ways Latinas/os have experienced and interacted with US militarism, gender, and sexuality have also played important roles in these articulations. Gender is a necessary category of analysis that facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the way individuals and communities experience war. Just as it is best not to assume that military service for Latinas/os has had a singular or constant meaning (such as an experience of bravery or pride), it is necessary to avoid approaching gender as synonymous with women. Thus a gendered analysis facilitates questioning of the way masculinity and femininity shape and are shaped by questions of violence, military intervention, and national cohesion.

Article

Law and American Literature  

Jeffory A. Clymer

Law and American literature is a subfield of the wider interdisciplinary field of law and literature. Law and literature are socially embedded discourses that rely on narrative and figures of speech to describe events, render them meaningful, and persuade audiences. Even as law and literature each has its own unique rhetorical forms (e.g., the statute, the legal opinion, the novel, the poem), as well as specific techniques and protocols for creating, organizing, and disseminating their narrative products, they share a fundamental commitment to ordering and interpreting our understanding of the world around us. Although the law itself is often thought of as an objective arena to which disputes are brought for adjudication and resolution, law does much more than simply arbitrate preexisting disputes. It is inherently a political and rhetorical practice that has coercive power to shape in myriad ways the most significant and intimate aspects of our lives. Law confers and delimits rights and opportunities, privileges some identities and disadvantages others, and defines acceptable and proscribed behaviors. Unsurprisingly, then, the law and important legal issues have been a constant source of interest and inspiration for American literary authors. Although obviously lacking law’s coercive or normative power, literature alternatively provides ways of thinking and imagines modes of being that help to form readers’ understandings of the world and their places in it. Over the 21st century, American writers’ longstanding interest in the law has been particularly resonant for Americanist literary critics, who often combine a theoretically informed historicist interpretive methodology with an interest in social justice. Scholars of “law and American literature” have provided sophisticated analyses of literature and law’s intersection on a litany of subjects. Prominent among these topics has been scholars’ examination of the many ways that legal and literary works have parsed the racial dynamics of the United States, a nation that has repeatedly used the law to construct and organize racial difference. Significant areas of imbrication between law and American literature over the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries include slavery, citizenship, property, and incarceration.

Article

The Lira Popular in Chile: An Important Latin American Broadside from the Late 19th and 20th Centuries  

Simoné Malacchini Soto

Lira Popular refers to the group of broadsides printed in Chile between 1860 and 1920, a period considered to be “classic,” although reappearing into the early 21st century. In these broadsides, verses written in ten-line stanzas, called originally décimas in Spain (a metric consisting of stanzas of ten eight-syllable verses), that were dedicated to both the human (daily, historical, love, news topics) and the divine (religious topics) were published. Over time, the content of the sheets evolved to become more newsworthy by portraying journalistic events of a criminal nature. Each sheet contained four to eight poems, although they generally consisted of five or six. They were undated and generally contained compositions by a single popular poet (although there are cases of sheets signed by more than one poet). The poet included their name at the end of the paper and sometimes added their address in order to market their sheets, as well as the print shop that often functioned as a place of sale. Although the phenomenon is also called string literature, it has not been confirmed that, in Chile, these sheets were hung for sale. The name Lira Popular is usually associated with the popular poet Juan Bautista Peralta, who titled his sheets in this way, perhaps parodying a literature magazine of the time called Lira Chilena; however, among the popular poets themselves, this phenomenon was already called “popular verses” or “popular poetry,” even referring to the sheet with the term lira.

Article

The Literary Marketplace  

Evan Brier

What is the literary marketplace, and what is the relationship between literature and the marketplace? The decades since the end of World War II have seen enormous changes in the economics of literary production: the book trade has grown, consolidated, and globalized; chain bookstores have replaced independent booksellers; and technological advancements have transformed how books are produced and how readers shop for, acquire, and read them. With these changes, questions about how the literary marketplace has mattered to literary history have been asked with increasing urgency, and the histories of those institutions that engage in producing, distributing, and selling literature have received increasing amounts of scholarly attention. Where the market was once understood to be a kind of implacable antagonist to literature, and literature once defined by virtue of its opposition to, and essential difference from, goods that are mass-produced, today the fields of book history, the sociology of literature, and literary studies itself frequently highlight the marketplace as a producer of modern and contemporary literature and—for better or worse—as a necessary context for it. What caused this shift, and what are its implications for literary study and for the idea of literature itself? How is a marketplace devoted specifically to the rarefied category of literature distinguished from the book trade generally, and how might one distinguish literature from nonliterature when both are produced by the same set of mostly commercial institutions? Answers to these questions depend in large part on the evolving, and surprisingly elusive, concept of a “literary marketplace” itself.

Article

Literature and Olfactory Modernity  

Hsuan L. Hsu

Olfactory experience has been relatively marginalized in literary studies, and in Western aesthetics more broadly. Deodorization, as both a “civilizational” project and an ideology that stigmatizes people and communities on the basis of smell, is thus reflected in core values and methods of literary criticism such as critical distance, close attention to the play of language, and a historical orientation toward tasteful, bourgeois sensibilities. Yet many writers have critiqued the use of smell to reinforce distinctions of race, class, and gender. Literary engagements with smell range from 19th-century critiques of deodorizing discourses to genres—such as detective fiction and naturalism—that deploy smell to represent the unruly, subtle influences of modern urban environments; more recently, they include incisive critiques of smell as a tool of colonialism, environmental violence, cultural genocide, subaltern collective memory, queer intimacies, and speculative world-building.

Article

Literature and Photography in Italy  

Giorgia Alù

Since its invention in 1839, photography—its aesthetics, practices, and product—has incited, inspired, and occupied Italian literary writing. Both literature and photography in Italy have responded to social and cultural changes occurring in the country from photography’s first arrival and since Italian unification in 1861. Literature’s relation to photography, therefore, can be understood by looking at the country’s connection to modernity and to its interlinks with the powerful aesthetic and visual perspective typical of Italian culture. Through photography, fiction, non-fiction prose, and poetry have dynamically and often ambiguously engaged discourses and reflections on reality, authenticity, and subjectivity. Such a relationship has offered a multitude of imaginary, emotional, and stylistic possibilities that have implied a challenge to literary realism as well as to photographic claim of truth and objectivity. Early daguerreotype plates of classical ruins, architecture, and landscapes were central to the first creative stage that joined photographic images and written words. At the end of the 19th century, during Italy’s transition from a pre-industrial age to an industrial one, photography appeared to embody the ideal model of that objective relationship to reality longed for by Positivism. The potential power of the camera to record the world also enchanted the veristi writers who established a relationship between resistance and acceptance with photographic image and practice. Concerns about the power of photography to alter the human perception of reality persisted into the 20th century. Nevertheless, the interrelation between literary texts and photography offered further viewpoints that multiplied or expanded perceptions of events, places, and people. Writers and artists also creatively and subversively exploited this relationship, especially thanks to modern printing techniques. During the Fascist period, at a time of crucial cultural transformation and modernization, photography became particularly instrumental in promulgating the regime’s ideology. Through mass circulation of popular illustrated periodicals, photographs also entered sophisticated photo-textual collaborations that developed further in postwar Italy. The documentary nature of the photographic image was challenged during the neorealist period and in diverse post–World War II literary works. At the same time, especially since the 1950s, Italian literature amplified earlier patterns of fictional investigations, and photography entered more dynamically into discourses and reflections on subjectivity, memory, and language. Following the emergence of international theoretical approaches to photography in the 1970s and 1980s, Italian literature engaged more critically with theory to investigate the social and political impact of photography, as well as its historical and artistic significance. The creative pairing of the photograph’s capacity to offer precise details of the real and simultaneously provoke a significant degree of referential uncertainty, in particular through digital technology, has continued to inspire Italian writers and bring changes in contemporary imaginative reproduction.

Article

Literature and Science  

Michael H. Whitworth

Though “literature and science” has denoted many distinct cultural debates and critical practices, the historicist investigation of literary-scientific relations is of particular interest because of its ambivalence toward theorization. Some accounts have suggested that the work of Bruno Latour supplies a necessary theoretical framework. An examination of the history of critical practice demonstrates that many concepts presently attributed to or associated with Latour have been longer established in the field. Early critical work, exemplified by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, tended to focus one-sidedly on the impact of science on literature. Later work, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts, and on Mary Hesse’s and Max Black’s work on metaphor and analogy in science, identified the scope for a cultural influence on science. It was further bolstered by the “strong program” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, especially the work of Barry Barnes and David Bloor. It found ways of reading scientific texts for the traces of the cultural, and literary texts for traces of science; the method is implicitly modeled on psychoanalysis. Bruno Latour’s accounts of literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation have precedents in the critical practices of critics in the field of literature and science from the 1980s onward.

Article

Mixed Race Asian American Literature  

Jennifer Ann Ho

Asian American literature was born from two mixed race Eurasian sisters, Edith Maude Eaton and Winnifred Eaton, who wrote in the early 20th century under the pen names Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, respectively. Edith spent her career chronicling, in fiction and non-fiction, the lives of Chinese in North America, and recounted her own multiracial experiences in the autobiographical “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” while Winnifred is best known for her popular fiction about the exotica of Japan, novels and stories that include several mixed race protagonists. More than thirty years later, Kathleen Tamagawa penned a mixed race memoir, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear, describing the difficulties of living as a biracial Japanese-white woman trying to assimilate into the white mainstream of US society. The number of mixed race Asian American authors rose in the mid- to late 20th century due to an increase in mixed race marriages and Asian immigration. The turn of the 21st century saw prominent multiracial Asian American authors writing about Asian American lives, mixed race Asian American authors choosing not to write about multiracial Asian American characters, and monoracial Asian American writers who populate their fiction with multiracial Asian American characters. Among these authors, Ruth Ozeki stands out as someone who has consistently focused her attention on multiracial Asian American characters, illustrating the richness of their mixed race experiences even as her fictional storyworlds shine a light on the environmental issues in a globalized world.

Article

Modern Manuscripts  

Dirk Van Hulle

The study of modern manuscripts to examine writing processes is termed “genetic criticism.” A current trend that is sometimes overdramatized as “the archival turn” is a result of renewed interest in this discipline, which has a long tradition situated at the intersection between modern book history, bibliography, textual criticism, and scholarly editing. Handwritten documents are called “modern” manuscripts to distinguish them from medieval or even older manuscripts. Whereas most extant medieval manuscripts are scribal copies and fit into a context of textual circulation and dissemination, modern manuscripts are usually autographs for private use. Traditionally, the watershed between older and “modern” manuscripts is situated around the middle of the 18th century, coinciding with the rise of the so-called Geniezeit, the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period in which the notion of “genius” became fashionable. Authors such as Goethe carefully preserved their manuscripts. This new interest in authors’ manuscripts can be part of the “genius” ideology: since a draft was regarded as the trace of a thought process, a manuscript was the tangible evidence of capital-G “Genius” at work. But this division between modern and older manuscripts needs to be nuanced, for there are of course autograph manuscripts with cancellations and revisions from earlier periods, which are equally interesting for manuscript research. Genetic criticism studies the dynamics of creative processes, discerning a difference between the part of the genesis that takes place in the author’s private environment and the continuation of that genesis after the work has become public. But the genesis is often not a linear development “before” and “after” publication; rather, it can be conceptualized by means of a triangular model. The three corners of that model are endogenesis (the “inside” of a writing process, the writing of drafts), exogenesis (the relation to external sources of inspiration), and epigenesis (the continuation of the genesis and revision after publication). At any point in the genesis there is the possibility that exogenetic material may color the endo- or the epigenesis. In the digital age, archival literary documents are no longer coterminous with a material object. But that does not mean the end of genetic criticism. On the contrary, an exciting future lies ahead. Born-digital works require new methods of analysis, including digital forensics, computer-assisted collation, and new forms of distant reading. The challenge is to connect to methods of digital text analysis by finding ways to enable macroanalysis across versions.

Article

The Modern Swedish Book Business, 1800–2000  

Ann Steiner

The Swedish book business began as a poorly developed market with serious economic, social, and infrastructural issues, but transformed over the course of two centuries into a well-functioning, albeit small, market with strong international ties. The 19th-century book market was hampered by poor infrastructure and underdeveloped publishing and book sales. Technological innovations in printing techniques and the new wood-based pulps for paper, in combination with better infrastructure, improved matters. The book business was increasingly professionalized at every stage, and by the turn of the 20th century could fairly be described as industrial and modernized. Access to forestry (and hence inexpensive pulp), inexpensive hydroelectric power, and strong industrial growth have been important factors in the advances in the Swedish book trade: they contributed to making printing cheaper and faster and thus paved the way for the low-priced books that were to dominate the business throughout the two centuries. Regardless of the era or the ideologies and purposes involved, cheap books have always driven the industry and have also been one of the most important factors in breaking down the social and cultural barriers to reading. Developments in Sweden’s book trade generally followed the same course as socioeconomic history, with the notable exception that Sweden’s book trade has always been more liberal and commercial than other forms of trade and industry. The book market was regulated through trade agreements between 1843 and 1970. These created a stable, but strictly controlled, market. A deregulation of the trade in 1970 saw the pendulum swing far back. In comparison with other Western European countries since 1970, Sweden has had fewer restrictions and regulations and thus a highly commercial and price-conscious market. A further notable aspect of the Swedish book trade is that despite the smallness of the country in terms of population and language, exports and imports have been far larger than most comparable countries. The international ties in terms of business-to-business relations, translations, and foreign rights sales remain strong, with the Swedish book trade very dependent on the international trade.

Article

New Orleans and Asian American Literature and Culture  

Marguerite Nguyen

New Orleans has long been a city vital to the American imagination, known for its deep colonial and cultural history while, at the same time, evolving into the post-Katrina “city that care forgot.” Shaped by Spanish, French, and British imperialisms and situated at the edge of the American South, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean, New Orleans is a geography distinguished by transnational crosscurrents and intense meteorological activity; an economically and politically strategic port town, it is a below-sea-level city continuously vulnerable to environmental disaster. Typically neglected in dominant mappings of the city, however, are the area’s Pacific ties that have also helped to make New Orleans. Ever since the mid-19th century, various Asian and Asian American groups have populated southern Louisiana as immigrants, workers, traders, and refugees. After the Civil War, thousands of Chinese and Filipinos arrived in the region as a supposed replacement for slave labor. In the mid-20th century, the US government dispersed numerous Japanese Americans to the area after internment, while since the late 20th century, New Orleans has been home to one of the densest populations of Vietnam War refugees in the country. These migrations spurred the creation of ethnic enclaves and cultural practices that have directly and tangentially defined New Orleans, providing significant labor pools and offering illustrative narratives of post-disaster rebuilding. Given the region’s rich Pacific history and daily environmental vulnerability, engaging New Orleanian culture compels an Asian Americanist ecocritical approach, or one that engages the relationship among space, matter, culture, and critique, and attends to regional details as well as Pacific contexts. Some of the more prominent portrayals of Asian Louisiana, such as those by Lafcadio Hearn and Robert Olen Butler, have tended to exoticize their subject. By contrast, examining works by Bao Phi, An-My Lê, and Anna Kazumi Stahl reveals alternative ecologies of Louisiana that contribute to a stronger understanding of racial relations in the region, further specifies the Gulf Coast’s transnational dynamics, and foregrounds the value of Asian American studies for ecocriticism (and vice versa). These artists’ portrayals of disaster-oriented landscapes show how attention to overlooked Asian American ecologies reveals the fundamental spatial, economic, and environmental precariousness of our times for marginalized communities.

Article

Obscenity Trials and American Literature  

Jordan Carroll

While obscenity is notoriously difficult to define and the test for determining obscenity has shifted over time, typically the term has referred to the crime of publishing prohibited, sexually explicit material. Obscenity has always been a criminal offense in the United States. Citing English common law, judges in the early republic and antebellum periods maintained that obscenity threatened to degrade the nation’s character. Nevertheless, obscenity law was not strongly or consistently enforced throughout the United States until the Comstock Act in 1873. Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, targeted Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass along with publications by advocates for feminism, free love, and birth control. American courts adopted the test put forth by Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn in Regina v. Hicklin (1868), which held that obscenity was defined by “the tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Obscenity became a battleground not only for debates about gender and sexual politics but also about the nature of the public sphere. During the 20th century, American literary presses and magazines became increasingly willing to challenge bans on sexually explicit speech, publishing controversial works including The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Ulysses by James Joyce. Modernist authors transgressed the legal bounds of propriety to explore the unconscious, fight for erotic pleasure free from heteronormative restraints, or claim aesthetic autonomy from moral and legal restrictions. United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (1933) struck a blow against the Hicklin test. Affirming Judge John M. Woolsey’s not guilty verdict, Judge Augustus Hand proposed a new test for obscenity that anticipated many of the themes that would emerge when the Supreme Court took up this question with Roth v. United States (1957), which defined obscenity as “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient [i.e., sexual] interest.” The Court liberalized obscenity law even as it maintained restrictions on pornographic literature, setting off a wave of censorship cases including trials on Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. After Roth, lawyers defending borderline obscene publishers pushed for courts to hold that a work could not be obscene if it possessed any redeeming literary or social value. Free speech libertarians succeeded with Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966) and Redrup v. New York (1967). Although Miller v. California (1973) clawed back this ruling by stipulating that a work must possess “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” to be cleared of obscenity, in the 21st century obscenity convictions for publishing textual media have been limited to a handful of cases concerning pornographic depictions of child sexual abuse. Obscenity remains on the books but largely unenforced for literature.

Article

Orality  

John D. Niles

The human capacity for oral communication is superbly well developed. While other animals produce meaningful sounds, most linguists agree that only human beings are possessed of true language, with its complex grammar. Moreover, only humans have the ability to tell stories, with their contrary-to-fact capabilities. This fact has momentous implications for the complexity of the oral communications that humans can produce, not just in conversation but also in a wide array of artistic genres. It is likewise true that only human beings enjoy the benefits of literacy; that is, only humans have developed technologies that enable the sounds of speech to be made visible and construed through one or another type of graphemic representation. Although orality is as innate to the human condition as is breathing or walking, competence in literacy requires training, and it has traditionally been the accomplishment of an educated elite. Correspondingly, the transmutation of oral art forms into writing—that is, the production of what can be called “oral literature”—is a relatively rare and special phenomenon compared with the ease with which people cultivate those art forms themselves. All the same, a large amount of the world’s recorded literature appears to be closely related to oral art forms, deriving directly from them in some instances. Literature of this kind is an oral/literary hybrid. It can fittingly be called “literature of the third domain,” for while it differs in character from literature produced in writing by well-educated people, the fact that it exists in writing distinguishes it from oral communication, even though it may closely resemble oral art forms in its stylized patterning. Understanding the nature of that hybridity requires an engagement not just with the dynamics of oral tradition but also with the processes by which written records of oral art forms are produced. In former days, this was through the cooperative efforts of speakers, scribes, and editors. Since the early 20th century, innovative technologies have opened up new possibilities of representation, not just through print but also through video and audio recordings that preserve a facsimile of the voice. Nevertheless, problems relating to the representation of oral art forms via other media are endemic to the category of oral literature and practically define it as such.

Article

Pastoral  

Katherine Little

Pastoral refers to any representation of the countryside or life in the countryside that emphasizes its beautiful and pleasurable aspects. Although the term has come to be used broadly to describe paintings, novels, and popular media, it originated and developed in the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome. Poems about shepherds and cowherds, also called bucolic, first appeared in the Idylls of Theocritus (3rd century bce), and these inspired the Roman poet Virgil to write a set of poems called the Eclogues (c. 42–37 bce). Virgil’s ten poems have been immensely influential. Indeed, pastoral’s long and relatively unbroken European history can be traced to the ongoing popularity of the Eclogues. These poems helped establish the defining elements of the mode: shepherds, who spend much of their time in song and dialogue; the topics of love, loss, and singing itself; a leisurely life; and a natural landscape of endless summer. In the Middle Ages, when Virgil’s eclogues were still read but rarely directly imitated, an explicitly Christian version of pastoral developed; this version was based in the shepherds of the Bible, both the literal shepherds who witnessed Jesus’ birth and the figurative shepherds referred to by Jesus or mentioned in the Psalms. In this biblical or ecclesiastical pastoral, authors used shepherds to discuss priestly duties and the state of the church more generally. Pastoral flourished in the Renaissance, when poets brought together Virgilian and Christian traditions, along with topical concerns about court politics and rural controversies, such as enclosure, to invent a new kind of poetry. During and after the Romantic period, pastoral lost its distinctly shepherdly focus and merged with a broader category of nature writing. As one of several possible approaches to nature, pastoral was reduced to its idealizing and nostalgic qualities, and it was often contrasted with more realistic or scientific representations. From the perspective of the longue durée, pastoral is a capacious category that includes many different attitudes toward rural people and rural life, even the realism of labor and exile. Despite this variety, pastoral is recognizable for the feelings it hopes to generate in its readers about rural life: the delight that the senses take in nature, the sadness at the loss of people and places, and the intense crushes of adolescence.

Article

The Photo-Text in the 19th and 20th Centuries  

Caroline Blinder

The photo-text has variously been defined as any interaction in which textual material, whether captions, prose, poetry, quotes, or reportage, is augmented by photographic illustrations. Nonetheless, as a genre distinct from other photo-textual modes of interaction the photo-text took on certain specific qualities from its very inception in the mid-19th century, particularly when it emerged as a book form with a clear agenda and narrative trajectory. The qualities of the photo-text since then have hinged on the importance given to the photographic material, how it is placed and operates vis-à-vis the textual, and on the fact that the interaction between text and photography is intrinsic to the aim and methods of the project at hand. In this respect, the photo-text perfectly encapsulates many of the ideas, themes, and concepts that photographic historians and critics have debated since the popularization of the camera in the 19th century: What is the purpose of photography in documentary terms? Can the abilities of the camera as a realist mode of representation operate as a creative and artistic medium at the same time? To investigate the possibility that there is a distinct heritage of photo-textual work also means thinking more closely about how various tropes and concerns reappear in photo-textual collaborations regardless of decade or century. Across various generic concerns, political or aesthetic, and across various artistic challenges, gendered or class-based, the photo-text remains a medium in which the political nature of representation necessarily comes to the forefront, particularly when we are called upon to consider the ways in which writing affects how we look at photographs and vice versa.

Article

Pornography  

April Alliston

Sexually explicit images are among the oldest known representational artifacts, and yet none of these were ever understood as “pornography” until the word and concept began to emerge in Western European languages during the 19th century. At that time, it was used equally to refer to written texts and visual representations. The word has since entered into much more widespread usage, often referring to any and all sexually explicit material, more often to material that appears specifically designed “to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings” (Oxford English Dictionary). Since the popularization of internet pornography in the late 20th century, the term has even come to be applied to any image considered to emphasize the pleasure and seduction of the viewer over realistic representation (as in “food porn,” “real estate porn,” etc.). Many attempts have been made to define pornography more specifically, but little consensus has been achieved. Courts of law have generally avoided defining the word “pornography,” preferring to categorize sexually explicit or arousing representations in terms of “obscenity.” Feminist scholars have disagreed on the definition of pornography to the extent that the conflict became known as the “Porn Wars” of the last several decades of the 20th century. Sexually explicit or sexually stimulating representations can elicit powerful emotional responses that vary widely, and they are inextricable from questions of social power. Thus, the very act of defining pornography is implicated in political struggles over some of the most fundamental issues of human life: gender, sexuality, social equality, and the nature and power of representations. There remains no general or stable agreement concerning what it is, what effects it may have, or even whether it exists at all.