This article asks what might be learned about early modern and modern cultural practices of imagining the self by examining accounts of maritime travel and exploration that (in contrast to the lyric poems, novels, and paintings so often examined by histories of modern selfhood) are narrated in the first-person plural. I use a series of best-selling eighteenth-century British narratives, focusing on the 1748 account of George Anson's voyage, to consider this kind of collective narration. I then turn to William Cowper's 1799 poem “The Castaway” as an example of a text in a genre often imagined as paradigmatically focused on the individual—the lyric—that engages with the maritime narrative tradition and uses it to explore the possibilities of a more fluid and contingent sense of the self.

Scholars of Black studies have long noted the impossibility of repairing the harm of racial slavery: not only is the injury unquantifiable, but certain versions of reparation risk affirming rather than contesting the existing structure of racial capitalism. This essay places the writing of Phillis Wheatley within this history by reading her poems and letters in relation to two seemingly disparate but interrelated notions of repair: reparative reading and the reparations movement. I argue that Wheatley turns to the neoclassical forms of theodicy and georgic—modes often taken to exemplify social resignation—to register a critique of images of a universe that depends on structural inequalities and to demand redistribution and transformative change. She invokes the odd temporality of repair, caught between recursiveness and possibility, to imagine and advocate for a better world, even if it is made up of the broken pieces of her current one.

This essay considers a 2000 production of the Chester Mystery Cycle by the South African theater company Isango Ensemble. Through its use of a syncretic, decolonial aesthetic, Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries functioned as a surrogation of the medieval mystery cycle tradition toward new ends in the context of the collapse of apartheid and the birth of the new South African democracy under the banner of “Rainbow Nationhood.” In tracing its syncretic use of indigenous aesthetics, its creation alongside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and its disparate domestic and Western receptions, I interrogate how phenomenologies of race functioned to reanimate a sense of spiritual efficacy that links the legacy of medieval religious drama with the alterity of black, non-Western subjects under a racialized notion of the unmodern.

This essay draws on a range of theoretical, sociological, and creative texts—including two books by John Rechy and a film by Frank Ripploh—to theorize the perceptual phenomenology of cruising, or the practice of seeking out and engaging in semipublic sex with strangers. I argue that cruising involves a haptic mode of looking, one that facilitates a kind of erotic contact at a distance. This understanding of cruising helps to explain certain aspects of the phenomenon that are often overlooked in scholarly work on cruising, such as its connection to the erotics of the gaze, its association with compulsivity, and its potential to foster selfish forms of sexual experience. I suggest that an attention to the optical mechanics of cruising might not only help to cultivate a clearer understanding of the phenomenon itself but also push back against the prescriptivist tendencies of much cruising scholarship.

Narratives about the rise of English prose fiction will remain incomplete if not incoherent without recognition of a historical breakthrough: first-person prose narration represents a deliberate innovation of Tudor prose fiction. One cannot simply run the I voice together with accounts about the eighteenth-century rise of individualism. When William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (ca. 1553)—a text well known among Shakespeare’s contemporaries—introduces three first-person narrators into Tudor fiction, it does so as a marked turn away from third-person conventions. Baldwin’s work effectively contends for first-person structures in the face of a succession crisis and broader ethicopolitical uncertainty. Formal inventiveness thus meets a set of pressing historical needs: first-person narration functions, in Baldwin’s novel as elsewhere, as a formal device—an aperture and filter—fitted to minoritized and marginalized points of view.

The enduring influence of Mao Zedong’s classicist poetry worldwide is a fascinating phenomenon, especially because this ostensibly conservative genre is marginalized in institutionalized modern Chinese literature. This article examines a curious case of fake Mao poems that enjoyed supreme ideological authority during the Cultural Revolution. By tracing the cultural policies of the Chinese Communist Party toward the Chinese literary legacy, I argue that revolutionary classicism was the logical offspring of revolutionary nationalism when literati and folk traditions were mobilized to serve a totalitarian cause; that the institutionalized lyric voice of Chairman Mao was collectively created and appropriated; that classicist poetry, combining sounds, words, and imagery, was the chosen medium for the masses to create an intimate relationship with the purported inner subjectivity of the chairman; and that, by ventriloquizing this voice, the Chinese revolution was finally embodied. Classicist poetry thus represents a neglected aspect of Chinese literary modernity and nation building.

This article uncovers the fractured and conflicting understandings of sex and gender in early medieval England around the year 1000 CE by exploring the Old English literary biographies of two saints often presented as women disguised as men. Ælfric’s Eugenia upholds binary gender expectations, while an alternative version of Eugenia—changed by a scribe and surviving in the burned remains of a single manuscript—oscillates between acceptance and intolerance. The anonymous Euphrosyne, in contrast, challenges gender norms throughout. This article argues that these characters and the texts’ competing views on sex and gender can be best understood by recognizing these two saints not as women in disguise but as trans men. A trans studies approach combined with philology and source study respects these two figures on their own terms while also uncovering elements of these texts and their cultural context that usually lie obscured.

Decapitation has captivated artists and writers since antiquity and has been generously theorized, notably in a European framework. As a less analyzed trope of plantation fiction, decapitation conjures both the torture and the revenge of the enslaved. The French Caribbean literary tradition, emerging in the shadow of the French and the Haitian revolutions, is especially haunted by the severed head. Beyond the revolutionary context, decapitation represents crisis—a threat to the plantationocene. Victor Séjour's “Le mulâtre” (1837), Henri Micaux's De nègres et de békés (2011), and Raphaël Confiant's Bal masqué à Békéland (2013)—published more than 175 years after Séjour's short story—cohere in the castrative associations of (white paternal) decapitation. Maryse Condé's Célanire cou-coupé (2000), in contrast, stages a picaresque parody of this Freudian paradigm; this story of recapitation and female survival is fundamentally enabled by the nomadic novel's departure from the plantation and the overdetermined associations imposed by that chronotope.