What are we to do with english? Of all the major languages of the world, it causes the most anxiety. Its words seem to want to invade the citadels of other languages, forcing institutions such as the Académie Française to call for barricades against it; in the enclaves of Englishness, a Celtic fringe struggles to hold on to the remnants of the mother tongue; and in most parts of the world those without the ostensibly anointed language often see themselves as permanently locked out of the spring-wells of modernity. Sometimes the global linguistic map appears to be a simple division between those with English and those without it. In the reaches of the former British Empire, a swath of the globe stretching from Vancouver east to the Malay Peninsula, English has come to be seen as an advantage in the competitive world of global politics and trade; in the emerging powers of East Asia, most notably China and South Korea, the consumption of global English is evident in the huge sale of books on English as a second language; in parts of the world traditionally cut off from English, including eastern Europe, the mastery of the language marks the moment of arrival. Most linguistic research on English is carried out in institutions in the Germanic and Nordic zones of northern Europe. In popular books on language and in serious linguistic studies, a powerful myth of English as the global language has taken hold. We are presented not with a world at the end of history but with one in which English sits at the center of a new global community: “English-speaking people and their culture are more widespread in numbers and influence than any civilization the world has ever seen,” claims Robert McCrum (257).

Scholars have long described Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books as a Darwinian narrative. Overlooked, however, is the way in which the text explicitly discusses Lamarckian evolutionary ideas, especially the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This essay contextualizes Mowgli's narrative within a fierce late-nineteenth-century debate about whether the Darwinian theory of natural selection or Lamarckian use inheritance was the main driver of evolutionary change. Kipling describes his protagonist's maturation to “Master of the Jungle” in thoroughly Lamarckian terms, as an evolutionary process propelled by experience, effort, and conscious adaptation. But some of the conceptual incoherence that troubled the Lamarckian evolutionary scheme when it was applied to human racial difference also troubles Kipling's account of Mowgli's genetic past and the evolutionary issue of his experiences.

A large body of Eliot scholarship is dedicated to the question of human sympathy. My essay moves in a different direction, arguing that Eliot saw literature not only as a medium for intersubjective understanding but also as an amplificatory technology, a tool for sensory enhancement. This technology is embodied by the affective dynamics of character in Eliot's final published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), a collection of character sketches and philosophical essays composed in conversation with the ancient Greek naturalist and sketch writer Theophrastus of Eresus. In Impressions Eliot invokes the descriptive traditions of natural history and the character sketch to suggest that human beings, like other animals, are conditioned by bodily frameworks and habitual responses that allow them to sense some things and not others. A meditation also on the history of characterization itself, Impressions puts pressure on the modern association of character with individual human psychology.

This essay presents the discovery that one of Emily Dickinson's least-read poems, “It's thoughts—and just One Heart—,” is an unmarked revisionary reply to a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes that itself is a revisionary reply to a poem that John Quincy Adams wrote in reply to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith. The stakes of this finding are high, for scholars today still understand Dickinsonian intertextuality within the framework of a famous claim that the poet made in 1862, that she “never consciously touch[ed] a paint, mixed by another person” without “mark[ing]” (overtly identifying) her use of allographic material. “It's thoughts—and just One Heart—” renders this claim null and void, even according to the generous terms with which we currently parse it, and is therefore a poem that compels us to reconsider decades of scholarly consensus about how and to what extent Dickinson engaged in her work with the literature and popular culture of her place and time.

This essay advances a theory of black classicism as a mode of resistance to the dominant narrative of American history, according to which the United States was to be a new Rome, rooted in the best traditions of classical antiquity yet destined to surpass its antecedent through the redeeming power of American exceptionalism. In the late nineteenth century this narrative reemerged as a means of getting beyond sectional conflict and refocusing on imperial expansion and economic growth. For Charles Chesnutt, a post-Reconstruction African American writer, the progress of American civilization was a dubious notion, a fiction suited to the nation's imperial purposes. In opposition, Chesnutt developed an outsider classicism, challenging the figuration of the United States as inheritor of the mantle of Western civilization by linking the nation to the ancient world through the institution of slavery—a very present relic of the past.

A century separates us from an iconic moment of aesthetic metamorphosis: 1914 witnessed the appearance of James Joyce's Dubliners, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Mina Loy's “Parturition,” and the vorticist journal Blast. It was the year Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, aided by Ezra Pound, started the literary review the Egoist in London and Condé Nast and Frank Crowninshield launched Vanity Fair in New York. Arnold Schoenberg's atonal symphonic works assaulted classical sonorities; Wassily Kandinsky elevated the purity of geometric form above the functional work of visual representation. Most crucially, 1914 saw the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the subsequent outbreak of the First World War. Cutting a bloody, four-year swath across Europe, the war took almost forty million lives and rendered all subsequent formal innovation inseparable from cultural devastation: thus the intricate, ruptured literary architectures of The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses (1922), and To the Lighthouse (1927).

Maurice Sendak was an artist who not only produced extraordinary art and memorable books but also expanded the range of children's literature, what it can portray. In doing so, he eagerly dealt with his own life, his anxieties and joys, and focused on the importance of art to a child's life.