This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s André, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrate how early American drama addressed changing concepts of ideal masculinity, republican democracy, and the colonial past.

Since its consolidation as Greater New York City in 1898 (and even much earlier), New York City has served as a setting and subject for a number of literary experiments. These experiments in both fiction and nonfiction challenged expectations about form and content of writing about New York City. The immense variety of texts resulting from literary engagements with New York City has been collected in a host of anthologies and literary histories that have been published throughout the 20th century and in the past decade. Many of these works have offered evidence of how foreign writers have engaged with New York. Foreign literary visitors, especially the British, offered new models for literary transatlanticism through their encounters with New York City which, more often than not, explored aspects of personal and political identity. With all of its attendant anxieties, the theme of identity was at the center of early 20th-century British as well as American writing in which New York plays a significant part such as Henry James’s The American Scene (1907) and Ford Madox Ford’s An English Girl (1907), New York is Not America (1927), When the Wicked Man (1931), some of which I consider here. British and American New York texts serve as meditations on changing notions of ‘Anglo’ identity, in particular, as well as changing notions of transatlantic writing. Only by reading these texts comparatively and historically is this important cross-conversation about ‘Anglo’ identity and transatlantic textual identity revealed. For the British, this type of writing has its roots in works 19th-century travel and social commentary by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and others. Since the early 20th century, however, the models for modern British writers of New York also include those offered by American expatriate writers such as James, who foreground the complex issue of identity in an imperial and post-imperial world in their literary engagements with the city. British New York texts such as Ford’s tend to present the city as a forum for startling and frank fictional and nonfictional discussions about what it means to be ‘Anglo’ in an increasingly transatlantic and cosmopolitan world.

Although scientific literatures by British American colonists have not traditionally been included in studies of early American literature, recent work has begun to pay closer attention to the literary elements of natural, medical, and cartographic texts produced in the long 18th century. New approaches have expanded Eurocentric and nation-based paradigms by positioning colonial science in an imperial and Atlantic World context that focuses upon transatlantic exchanges between the British Americas and England. These studies have investigated colonists’ efforts to obtain credit for their scientific contributions in England and the strategies with which colonists resisted metropolitan biases regarding their knowledge. Studies of the literature of place show how natural histories, cartographies, and nature writing rendered the New World familiar, even while establishing colonists’ relationship to and possession of the land. Meanwhile, an emerging focus on anxieties regarding mental and physical degeneration, spurred by theories of America’s degrading influences, offers new directions for investigating colonial subjectivity and racial theories of difference. Finally, examining the various roles that Native Americans and New World Africans played in colonial encounters may facilitate new approaches to non-European contributions to colonial science.

This essay surveys general trends in book-length studies of 18th-century Scottish literature and culture to examine how moving Scotland from the peripheries to the centre of 18th-century studies has transformed our understandings of the field. It describes three categories or phases of scholarship – canon formation, contextualization and comparison, and methodological reflection – and suggests what kind of work remains to be done in each category. It also discusses how new approaches to reading minor literatures, including those informed by postcolonial theory, Atlantic studies, and devolutionary criticism, have shaped and been shaped by scholarship on 18th-century Scottish literature and culture over the past two decades.

Though scholarship abounds on early modern Europeans’ first encounters with India and its people, any scholarship in general, and particularly in the English language, on their contemporary Indians’ first encounter with Europe and Indians’ view of the West is limited. The article discusses three 18th-century Indian travelers’ travel narratives about Britain, Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 1726-1809 by Joseph Emin; The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, originally in Persian of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765 by Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin; and Westward Bound: Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb by Mirza Abu Taleb Khan to show that a two-way flow of communication and representation existed between 18th-century Britain and India. An analysis of these travel accounts reveals that depending on the shifting cultural point of view and geographical location of the Indian travelers, “home,” and the foreign or “vilayet” as it is called in Persian (Farsi), was a shifting perception for the writers. The writers found that Britons living in Britain had a more positive response to them than the condescending attitudes, a result of power and political dynamics, which the British living in India had toward Indians, thus revealing an important heterogeneity in British attitudes toward Indians in the 18th century. The writers’ exploration of gender and sexual relations and religious attitudes in Britain was both an important means of defining “home” and self identity as well as marking differences from Europeans. Identifying gender and religious differences with British culture through comparison provided the writers a means to assess and critique Indian culture.

As well as describing dishonor itself, the Middle English word ‘shame’ can refer either to the emotion resulting from an awareness of dishonor or disgrace, or to the anticipation of dishonor, the potential for disgrace to be experienced. Late-medieval English literature reveals the interrelation between the personal experience of shame and the way it is produced in relation to others, typically through such kinds of exposure as showing and telling. This essay draws attention to the complex ways in which shame is imagined in late-medieval English literature. It begins by considering the two major focal points of late-medieval shame studies so far: chivalric literature and Christian shame. After surveying the approaches that have been taken to date, it suggests new themes that deserve critical attention in these areas. The remainder of this essay points to other literary contexts in which we might investigate shame more closely. While chivalric and devotional texts are significant areas in which shame was imagined, medical, conduct, and advisory texts also engage with the concept of shame in important ways.

Since the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s Richard II, parallels between its tragic protagonist and Elizabeth I have not gone unnoticed – not least by Elizabeth herself. This essay attempts to move beyond that parallel, examining its implications not only for readings of Shakespeare’s play or Elizabethan imaginings of the queen, but also to the relationship of sexuality and historiography in early modern writing. Richard and Elizabeth both embody a transgressive femininity that exposes, rather than contradicts, the gender norms of monarchy; this exposure becomes, in Elizabethan historical writing, inextricable from the crisis of legitimacy at the heart of Tudor dynastic narratives.

This article examines a growing body of work on the psychology of novel reading in the Victorian period by focusing on how three related fields have recently, simultaneously, turned their attention to readers’ minds: the history of reading; studies of psychology and literature; and, more surprisingly, studies of Victorian sociability. Across these fields, critics have found that Victorian readers were not always expected to pay attention: 19th-century psychologists and observers of literary culture thought that many layers and vagaries of the reader’s consciousness and unconscious mind were at work in the reading process. Newly accessible, first-hand accounts of reading experiences have also underscored that Victorian readers used books in unpredictable ways, often as a prompt for their own associations or to turn inward and reflect on social practice. Partly in response to the Foucauldian emphasis on the coerciveness of novel reading that long monopolized literary studies, critics have been redrawing 19th-century reading history to include not reading, or perhaps not only reading, but also the ways novel reading afforded unique forms of self-knowledge amidst the pressures and worries of the modern Victorian world.

This article discusses the state of ecocritical thinking in Victorian literary scholarship. It proposes a distinctive Victorian ecocriticism, informed by thermodynamics, wherein we may understand the living and non-living, the biological and the physical to be both linguistically and energetically entangled.