This chapter introduces the main argument and themes of the book, and positions it within earlier and existing scholarship on archaic and classical Greek literature, religion and philosophy. Particular points of focus include the relationship between Greek tragedy, ritual and theology, and influential mid-twentieth-century research on Sophocles (the ’classics’ of Sophoclean scholarship). The chapter also discusses ancient biographical traditions surrounding Sophocles’ religiosity and piety.

The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) and the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the larger themes addressed by the book, focusing on the question of contingency and how letters can be considered as literary ‘works’. The chapter argues that chance or happenstance itself governs letters and letter-writing both in material and in affective or conceptual ways. It proposes that the ‘radical contingency’ of letters can be said to set them apart from literary works more specifically conceived, in the sense that the latter do not generally and in principle hold a primary or formative connection with the specific events surrounding their composition. The chapter argues that the question of contingency connects with Keats’s governing ideas about life – with what he repeatedly refers to in his letters as life’s ‘circumstances’, ‘chance’, or ‘accidents’.

As late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scientific advancements generated new modes of comprehending life and matter, they also expanded the modalities of sensation, and generated new representations of the senses and of the act of sensing. Touch joined sight as a predominant source of analogies for scientific investigation. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the proliferation of modes of scientific imaging based on transferring the object of observation onto a material subjectile: from anatomical casts to the study of fossil imprints, modes of apprehension involving direct transfer ‘from matter to matter’ flourished, endowing direct contact with a paradigmatic role. What happens, then, to Romantic vision when touch reasserts itself? The creative interactions between touch and sight raises with renewed acuity the question of the modalities of figuration at the heart of Romantic conceptions of imagination. Who or what is sensitive and affected? Who and what envisions?

This book’s Introduction sets out the key intellectual and historical contexts for its argument. It shows that religious belief gained an important cultural emphasis after the Reformation and that it was considered to be distinct from other kinds of belief or assent. Engaging with scholarly discussions of belief, this introduction suggests that the period from around 1580 to the 1650s witnessed an attempt to investigate what was particular about a specifically religious kind of belief. Its certainty and spiritual origin were compared to, and contrasted with, other kinds of assent that were generated by probable forms of argument. An important and widespread way of effecting this comparison involved considering religious belief alongside the kinds of assent generated in legal settings – when witness evidence is evaluated for its credibility. The introduction roots this discursive method in contemporary legal culture, before surveying recent scholarship on literary culture, law and religion.

The book’s Conclusion develops the argument made by earlier chapters. It considers the variety of ways in which probable arguments, structured through imaginative engagements with legal forms of testimony, interacted with convictions and beliefs that were borne out of supernatural, spiritual influence. One key outcome of this discussion is the recognition that literature provided an important venue for comparing different kinds of belief and assent. Literary texts staged highly plausible legal cases, rooted in persuasively credible evidence; they could also qualify the force of these forensic arguments, especially when accounting for the ways in which religious belief was understood to work. This literary evaluation of modes of assent sheds new light on what it means to write a history of belief. The book ends by outlining a methodology that attends to texts and contexts where persuasive and probable modes of argument were afforded only provisional force.

This chapter reviews the principles of evidence-based medicine and evidence-based radiology as they apply to child maltreatment clinical care and research. Common pitfalls and the rise of “predatory publishing” are discussed as important challenges to rigorous medical literature appraisal and its application to clinical care and research. An approach to critical appraisal is given, to help you determine whether a study is of high quality or not. A detailed discussion of the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services (SBU) report is included as a particular example of the misuse of evidence-based edicine principles.

There are many ways to define the “hip-hop novel,” each with its limitations. This omnibus review-essay considers titles from the past half-century of American fiction in which hip-hop intervenes as plot device, as character affinity, as author affiliation, as compositional logic, or as a way of limning the targeted readership. It investigates the culture’s representation in literary fiction, from its undigested appearance in the work of authors like Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Percival Everett, to its deeper integration into novels by Adam Mansbach, Paul Beatty, and Sean Thor Conroe. It also examines the street lit genre initiated by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, with books that count hip-hop artists as authors (C-Murder, Sister Souljah) or publishers (G-Unit Books). Finally, it looks to young-adult novels by Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson as a space where a reconciliation of these threads might be possible.

This article traces the career trajectories, publishing strategies, and intertwining networks of Barbara Strozzi and two of her Venetian contemporaries: the Jewish salonniére and poet Sara Copia Sulam (1592?–1641) and the forced nun and polemicist Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). All three figures were connected to the influential Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a libertine circle of writers, critics, and opera librettists with interests including literature and music. Each woman pursued a career as a public intellectual in an early modern world that often chafed at women’s voices, and each broadcast their ideas by publishing on prominent presses. The experience of Copia Sulam, who was prominent as the Incogniti academy was beginning to coalesce and was forced from the public eye after meeting with a vicious backlash for her intellectual activities, could in the coming decades serve as a cautionary tale to Strozzi and Tarabotti, who had long and prolific careers that were nevertheless beset by controversy. Though the trajectories of these three women varied in significant ways, their shared literary networks and their use of the presses to craft a commanding public persona illuminate the editorial environment for women in seventeenth-century Venice.

This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

The final chapter focuses on the only Belgian who briefly pierced his country’s silence on sexual ‘inversion’ during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In 1899, the internationally acclaimed author Georges Eekhoud published the most daring queer novel of the period. A charge of indecency against his explicitly homoerotic and class-transcending love story caused an uproar among Europe’s literary community. Celebrity authors, including Émile Zola, collectively screamed blue murder over this attempt to curtail the hallowed freedom of artistic expression. The trial that followed ended in triumph and Eekhoud seemed poised to become a standard-bearer of the budding transnational movement for homosexual rights. But at home, Eekhoud soon grew isolated and unhappy as leftists and artists alike shunned him for his association with such an odious issue. While the writer’s autobiographical writings and private diary offer a rich insight into the way sexology shaped his sexual sense of self, they also reveal how Belgium’s stifling culture of bourgeois respectability still buried homosexuality in shame during the early twentieth century, while Eekhoud’s Dutch and German allies were already pushing the matter successfully onto the public agenda.

This chapter is about how William James’s ideas about consciousness can elucidate our understanding of what literature is and does. The thrust of the argument is that James’s psychology, in its insistence on and poetic invocation of consciousness as being nothing outside of the processing of the world as experienced, and the radically experiential and pluralistic philosophy built on this claim, offers a powerful alternative to the psychoanalytical models of consciousness as a mechanism of suppression and censorship that dominate the field of literary studies to this day, with vast implications for our conception of literature’s social function and use. The aim is to show how James’s ideas about consciousness are endowed with a radical openness to sense perception that comes with both an aesthetics of cognition and an ethics of democratic receptivity in tow; and to demonstrate that James fathoms these two strands as mutually engaged in a world-making operation that necessitates a literary imagination.