The grant by letters patent which restored the Isle of Man to the earl of Derby and the ensuing private Act of Parliament which confirmed it marked the beginning of a period of forty years during which the Stanleys devoted far more attention to the exploitation of their estates in the Island than at any time since the early fifteenth century. This was in effect merely continuing the determined policy of Earl Henry in the later sixteenth century to reassert the rights and prerogatives of the lord of Man which were perceived to have been somewhat eroded over time and to maximise his income from the Island, but it was given added impetus by the financial burdens which followed from the protracted legal dispute over the Stanley estates and the relentless rise in prices which affected all landowners in the century after 1540. Indeed, the earls of Derby pursued much the same estate policy in the Isle of Man as on their estates in England and Wales in their efforts to offset the effects of inflation and in this they were acting no differently from other competent landlords. After James, Lord Strange, effectively became lord of Man in 1627, he continued this vigorous policy of enforcing his rights and husbanding his revenues in the Island and when the circumstances of civil war in England dictated that James had to take up residence in Castle Rushen in the 1640s, it was a policy which he was able to oversee in person. The exceptional pressures of the civil war period, especially the loss of the Stanley estates in England and Wales, compelled him to resort to financial measures to pay for the defence of the Island as well as his expedition to England in 1651 in support of the Royalist cause and, not surprisingly, these exactions were highly unpopular.

In a2021 piece for the online forum The Conversation, BogdanCostea, management expert and translator of ErnstJünger's 1932 visionary fas¬cist tract The Worker: Domination andForm, argues that the Soviet Hero ofLabor Alexei Stakhanov, ironically, lies at the coreof the contemporary work ethic promoted by Westernmanagers.1 Tracing Stakhanov's legacy in thesocialist world, Costea notes: “Stakhanov became theembodiment of a new human type and the beginning ofa new social and political trend” in the USSR. Thelegendary Stakhanovites of the 1930s, “a new people,people of a special type,” as Stalin referred tothem, “became a symbol burdened with meanings,” notonly an example of national heroism but “one with amodern, rational, progressive mind which couldliberate the hidden, untapped powers of technologyand take command of its limitless possibilities.” Asa “Promethean figure, leading an elite of workerswhose nerves and muscles, minds and souls, wereutterly attuned to the technological productionsystems themselves,” the Stakhanovite was the figureof a “new humanity,” whose “specialness,” forStalin, lay in “surpassing the present technicalstandards, surpassing the existing designcapacities, surpassing the existing production plansand estimates.”

Karla Taylor's philology, as Elizabeth Allen describes it in the previous essay, has what may at first seem an uncanny resonance with recent methods of literary study that orient critical reading toward greater attention to the linguistic “surface” of a text. From a different disciplinary vector, it may also open a question about the relationship between literary studies and sociolinguistics, which has recently made space for research on self-consciously literary texts. Beyond celebrating Taylor's contributions to Middle English studies as a scholar and a teacher, this volume launches from the example of her scholarship to pursue a disciplinary question and an interdisciplinary one: first, why have the methodological similarities between philology and some recent critical practices not been recognized and, second, how might we rethink the relationship between literary studies and linguistics through their shared methodological interest in the linguistic “surface” of literary texts. The rubric of “philology” as claimed by Karla Taylor, that is, may encourage us to attend to the histories and affordances of current language-oriented approaches to literature.