MODERN PHILOLOGY最新文献

{"title":"<i>King Lear</i> and the Irony of Blindness","authors":"James Kuzner","doi":"10.1086/726787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726787","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the irony in Shakespeare’s portrayal of blindness in King Lear. With attention to the play’s “Dover cliff” scene, I show how Shakespeare puts a particular device—dramatic irony—to strange use. Such irony often serves ableist purposes with regard to blindness, such that the latter becomes dramatic irony embodied; being unable to see what others see means being unable to know what others know. Lear’s “Dover cliff” scene can seem an almost parodic instance of this, with a sighted character convincing an unsighted one that he falls from a cliff when he merely falls onto his face. I, though, argue that in this scene Shakespeare enacts a breakdown of dramatic irony, making it impossible to know who knows more than whom. This breakdown, I conclude, opens the question of what blindness can mean and be and in so doing creates another, more salutary irony.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"31 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bad Faith (and Good) in the “Test of Faith” of <i>Paradiso</i> 24","authors":"Henry Weinfield","doi":"10.1086/726722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726722","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on Paradiso 24, which contains the so-called test of faith, this essay argues that Dante is conflicted between his desire to remain faithful to the church of his time and his desire to seek the truth wherever it leads. Insofar as he is aware of this conflict but unwilling to acknowledge it explicitly, the result is a version of what Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness called “bad faith.” In Paradiso 24, to be sure, Dante is making a good-faith effort to glorify faith and to assimilate a theological account of what constitutes faith to the demands of his terza rima; nevertheless, the repressed conflict mentioned above manifests itself in “residues” that offer themselves for analysis. This essay focuses on three: the epithet of “chief centurion” (alto primipilo) that Dante (the pilgrim) applies to Saint Peter; the ambivalent treatment of syllogistic reasoning (not in canto 24, but when measured against two other cantos of the Paradiso); and finally, the metaphor of the coin that Peter applies to faith.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"31 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Authorial Creativity in Interdisciplinary Perspective: The Cognitive-Material Generation of Annie Ernaux’s <i>Les années</i>","authors":"Alexandra Effe","doi":"10.1086/727202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727202","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers an exploration of the creative process of literary authors from a cognitive-psychological perspective. Analyzing Annie Ernaux’s personal diary, her writing diary, and avant-textes and manuscript drafts for Les années (2008), translated as The Years, the article demonstrates how Ernaux innovates the genre of autobiography and the relation between the individual and the collective. The article considers Ernaux’s experimentation with cognitive and material resources in light of and as shedding light on accounts of creativity and writing from psychology and philosophy of mind. In so doing, it contributes to interdisciplinary exploration of creativity and points to new directions for the field of genetic criticism.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"32 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":<i>Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature</i>","authors":"Ray Schrire","doi":"10.1086/726022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726022","url":null,"abstract":"Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEnlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Edited by Eva von Contzen and James Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. 232.Ray SchrireRay SchrireTel-Aviv University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMorethe various tasks of the reeve written in Old-Englishan Anglo-Saxon poem about legendary kings and kingdomsthe names of God in Middle Englisha devotional mnemonic work based on the children of Jacobexegeses on the names of the rivers in paradisethe Middle English tradition of the Trojan War;the dream poetry of Chaucer and Douglascatalogs of trees among Elizabethan poetshumanist textbooks, administrative records, and Protestant playsPolemical, Reformation-era intrasentence inventoriesWhat all these texts have in common (hereafter, list 1) is that they are all discussed in the thought-provoking collection of essays Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. As the authors of this volume show (and as list 1 summarizes), lists—a literary form that has “not received much attention from scholars” (4)—were in fact found everywhere, from the most canonical to most obscure literary works of the Middle Ages and early modernity.What justifies bringing such diverse texts together in one volume is the intention to “offer answers to the question, ‘what are lists capable of doing in medieval and early modern literature?’” (8), as the editors of the volume write in the very helpful and generous introduction. Indeed, reading through the ten essays that comprise this volume, we learn that the lists recorded in list 1 can do quite a lot. They can raise questions of culture, history, and temporality (Andrew James Johnston); emphasize the ignorance of their writer (Alexis Kellner Becker); give the appearance of objective truth while at the same time undermine the notion of objective truth (Eva von Contzen); mark what is notable in each item (Ingo Berensmeyer); raise the soul to a state of ecstasy (Suzanne Conklin Akbari); dismantle the sacredness of the ancien régime (James Simpson); break and remake order like a kaleidoscope (Kathryn Mogk Wagner); serve as a mental map (Martha D. Rust); help identify paradoxes in intellectual movements and bureaucratic reforms (Alex Davis); relate a text to the genre of the epic (Eva von Contzen); bring order to the cognitive household (Wolfram R. Keller); help authors participate in a community of poets (Ingo Berensmeyer); destroy the flow of syntax (James Simpson); or lead to a sweet and eternal annihilation (Suzanne Conklin Akbari). As this list indicates (hereafter list 2), the essays in this collection go a long way to displaying just how creative the use of lists was by the texts presented in list 1.In sum, these essays demonstrate that we find lists in many literary texts (list 1) and t","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"34 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136132991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":<i>Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism</i>","authors":"Jacob Risinger","doi":"10.1086/727355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727355","url":null,"abstract":"On the other hand, the alternative offered by Romantic and post-Romantic philologists was hardly an uncomplicated step forward. The naturalization of language might have allowed writers and theorists of language a chance to bypass the colonizing ambit of abstraction, but an organic vision attuned to plants and roots also smoothed the way for racial determinism and the “insidious forms of nineteenth-century race science” (5). As Wolff notes, Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boaz’s later attempts “to re-create the study of language as a social science” was motivated by a racialization of language that is often traced back to Romanticism itself (47). Wolff’s object is to think about Romantic writers who resisted this dichotomy by belaboring a linguistic actualism sustained by broader understandings of time itself.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"75 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136264171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":<i>Assessing Intelligence: The Bildungsroman and the Politics of Human Potential in England, 1860–1910</i>","authors":"Aleksandar Stević","doi":"10.1086/727794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727794","url":null,"abstract":"I am happy to report that I found no serious shortcomings in Assessing Intelligence, as the book skillfully and persuasively intertwines literary and intellectual history and approaches literary texts in a manner that is both incisive and generous: although it notes the many contradictions that pervade the treatment of intelligence in the novels of Eliot, Hardy, James, Wells, and Woolf, Assessing Intelligence has the virtue of not thinking itself cleverer than the texts it analyzes. Among its other virtues are the clarity of writing (which should make it accessible even to those not thoroughly acquainted with Victorian literary and intellectual history) and the quality of close readings: to invoke just one example, Lyons’s treatment of The Mill on the Floss should be thoroughly illuminating even to seasoned scholars of Eliot’s fiction.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135567851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":<i>The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels</i>","authors":"Cynthia Wall","doi":"10.1086/727803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727803","url":null,"abstract":"Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels. Yoon Sun Lee. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 258.Cynthia WallCynthia WallUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIf a body impinge upon another, and by its force change the motion of the other, that body also … will undergo an equal change, in its own motion.(Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [1687])1Newtonian physics is just one of the many new empiricisms employed in learned depth in The Natural Laws of Plot to argue that the plots of novels are as much if not more embedded in their own landscapes, “rely[ing] more deeply and intricately on an environing world to carry along any action” (2), as they are involved with narrative and characters. “Things have shadows and textures, as well as depths and surfaces,” and fictional events are shaped by the “real world of physical forces and laws” (3). Bodies impinge on bodies, motion changes bodies, matter mixes and moves. The real world kept discovering and describing new physical forces and laws, and the well-read British public (and its novelists) kept abreast of and internalized those discoveries as new ways of understanding “how things happen.” The chapters progress through the period, matching up canonical authors’ narrative strategies with natural philosophers and theories: Daniel-Defovian causality and Newtonian physics; the characters of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson and the types and orders of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon; Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and chemistry; a molecular Jane Austen; Maria Edgeworth, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Humphry Davy, and “mechanical objectivity”; Walter Scott, Erasmus Darwin, and vertigo. Throughout, the originally mingled concepts later identified as “objectivity” and “subjectivity” get disentangled, both historically and ideologically. In every historical, scientific, and narratological shift, the “external world” is always, like my uncle Toby’s map of Namur, “far more than an inert backdrop to action. It provides the laws that are then twisted into plot and pinned to the ground” (60).The first chapter, “Novels, Novel-Theory, and the History of Objectivity,” argues that objectivity is not “a way of telling the story with a certain detachment or from a third-person point of view” but “something that has to be built into the plot of the novel” (1) and that will change its appearance dramatically over time, in rhythm with the changing contours of natural philosophy, from the necessary subjectivity—the reliance “on their own accumulated experience, their knowledge, skill, and instincts” (9)—of the early empiricists to the active suppression of the self into the nineteenth century.2 “The novel emerged in tandem” (11) no","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135551726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":<i>“Genial” Perception: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Myth of Genius in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>","authors":"A. W. Lee","doi":"10.1086/727691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727691","url":null,"abstract":"Next article FreeBook Review“Genial” Perception: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Myth of Genius in the Long Eighteenth Century. William Edinger. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2022. Pp. ix+287. Hope: A Literary History. Adam Potkay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. vii+422.A. W. LeeA. W. LeeContributing Editor, The Scriblerian and Kit-Cats Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreAdam Potkay’s latest monograph more or less picks up from his 2007 The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. Winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the best book in literary history between 2006 and 2008, The Story of Joy culturally and philologically excavates “joy” from the Hebrew Bible through Yeats and beyond. In the present volume, he provides a similar service for the concept (or emotion or virtue) of hope. Potkay begins with the ancient Greeks—Hesiod, Aeschylus, Pindar, and Thucydides—and carries his survey through modernism—Kafka, Camus, Ellison, and Beckett. Throughout this process, he combines a probing historical imagination, a sharp critical discernment, and a deft eye for textual explication, along with the gifts of a good storyteller, to provide a thoroughly accessible yet intellectually engaging account.Each of the five chapters takes up a distinct cultural episteme: classical, Christian, Augustan, Romantic, and modernist. In each, Potkay elucidates the antinomies both positive and negative—and many complexities in between—that philosophers and literary artists have discerned and developed in their deployment of “hope.”The first chapter, focusing upon Greek and Roman antiquity, exhibits the limits and restrictions these two intertwined worlds imposed: hope as deceptive, as irrational, as productive of fearfulness, as distracting from the present moment, and as squandered on things devoid of authentic value. A good example of this layered dialectic may be found in Potkay’s handling of the texts by the Greek poet Hesiod, whose only surviving authentic writings, Theogony and Works and Days, feature the myth of Pandora’s jar. Zeus, enraged at the trickery of Prometheus, creates a beautiful woman whom he sends to earth with a container full of mortal ills, such as care, toil, and disease. After Pandora opens the lid, they all escape, leaving only hope (elpis, ἐλπὶς) in the jar. While the standard interpretation holds that hope is a comfort to humankind, Potkay explores other possibilities—especially the notion that Zeus intended it to be an additional torment. Prometheus’s presence in the story adduces further complexities, such as the Titan’s gifting mortals ignorance of their final fate, as well as fire. This constitutes a sort of “blind hope,” allowing people to undertake future-oriented endeavors, occluded from their possible failure of futility.In Works and Days, Hesiod admits tw","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135551731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":<i>Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age</i>","authors":"David Wylot","doi":"10.1086/727616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727616","url":null,"abstract":"Next article FreeBook ReviewFree Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Timothy Bewes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii+315.David WylotDavid WylotUniversity of Leeds Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWhat is the novel’s relation to thought? For Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, the answer does not lie in the novel’s capacity to represent thought, nor in the novel’s capacity to communicate an authorial subjectivity. Rather, the answer involves comprehending a kind of thought that is intrinsic to the novel, which the novel is the subject of rather than vehicle for, and a kind of thought that is at odds with form or ideological claim. Drawing on the work of prominent contemporary novelists that include J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Zadie Smith, Free Indirect argues that the contemporary novel stages this thought in the context of a period that has seen an erosion of the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, narrator and character, and novelist and critic. Bewes terms this work “postfiction” (9) and names its thought the “free indirect” (5). With these, Free Indirect offers an expansive account of the “enigma of the novelistic utterance” (83) that explores the novel’s potentiality and concludes at the limits of criticism.Free Indirect begins with discussion of a logic intrinsic to the novel’s form, that of “instantiation” (25). Holding a great deal of force in literary criticism, “instantiation” describes a connective logic “according to which an entity (a person, an object, a linguistic sign, an encounter, a fictional description, a character trait) is asserted as a case or instance of a larger category, property, or concept, to whose reality it attests” (188), and which provides the novel with a basic structural relation that connects the literary work to the social world. Bewes recruits Catherine Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006) and its claim that fiction is founded on a nonreferentiality that paradoxically indicates a more generalized reference to argue that the “instantiation relation” (27) trains readers to infer a connective idea that underpins the novel’s communicative act. Literary criticism extracts an ethical or normative standpoint from this relation and judges the work’s “social significance” (25) accordingly. Yet, whether shaping accounts of the novel’s social form or its communicative purpose, this logic, Free Indirect argues, establishes a principle of relation that obscures the ways in which the contemporary novel seeks the dissolution of connection through a staging of thought “without a communicative function” (141).To define the “free indirect,” Bewes turns to free indirect discourse, the means through which a narrator renders a character’s thoughts available to the reader, to argue that t","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"229 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135828602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":<i>Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States</i>","authors":"Vivian Delchamps","doi":"10.1086/727617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727617","url":null,"abstract":"Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWriting Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Thomas Constantinesco. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 288.Vivian DelchampsVivian DelchampsDominican University of California Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreSomething that is “generative” has the power to produce and reproduce, create and recreate. In Thomas Constantinesco’s exciting book Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States, the author emphasizes that pain is not solely destructive (as many tired frameworks suggest). The book’s framing of pain in the context of nineteenth-century history opens new avenues for understanding pain as a generative, active force that catalyzes creative experiments with literary form, narrative, and genre. Specifically, Constantinesco demonstrates that literary texts engage with and veer away from the dominant form used to understand pain in the nineteenth century—sentimentalism. Literature generates new knowledge about pain precisely because it does not merely use pain to foster empathy. Rather, literature complexly theorizes the problems of selfhood, identity, and language that emerge in pain’s wake.With this argument, Writing Pain contributes to historical literary scholarship and to pain studies—an interdisciplinary field that explores pain’s cultural and social contexts. Elaine Scarry famously argued in The Body in Pain (1987) that pain is unnarratable, unspeakable, and untranslatable. Constantinesco builds on and challenges Scarry’s ideas, asserting that pain is not merely a hindrance to language but is rather a fertile ground for the emergence of poetic expression. Like Michael Snediker, who deploys figuration to explore chronic pain in his wonderful book Contingent Figure (2021), Constantinesco argues that pain can transform language even when the resulting figures resist complete understanding. While Constantinesco and Snediker develop complementary ideas about pain, Constantinesco differs slightly from Snediker by asserting that literary texts perform formal work that is not only theoretical and philosophical; it is also historical. Thus, Constantinesco embraces the methods of Lauren Berlant (“The Subject of True Feeling” [1999]) who carefully attends to American history while analyzing the politics of pain. Constantinesco’s book similarly, and elegantly, invites theoretical perspectives while tracing pain’s histories and literary topologies.The book’s argument is evidenced in six chapters that interrogate pain’s paradoxical dimensions. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the rest of the book, analyzing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sentimental framing of pain as something that will someday be exchanged for spiritual ecstasy. Emerson’s economic understanding of pain has much to do with Emerson’s relationship to white masculinity, as Constantines","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135828215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}