This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

This book begins by foregrounding that the material form of Kant’s 1785 essay could be analysed to critique the myth of proprietary authorship that presently prevails across copyright regimes. After reviewing four faces of Kant in authorship and copyright studies, I advance a medial rethinking of Kant by drawing on the intersecting traditions of book history, media theory and literary studies. In particular, Gérard Genette’s poetics informs my paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay to uncover the historical and medial-material conditions of literary production.

This chapter brings into focus mobility as an avenue of spatial enquiry in literary and cultural studies. In recent decades the term ’mobility’ has become increasingly prominent within the spatial turn, coming to constitute a distinct area of study in literary and cultural scholarship, as well as across the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Conceptualisations of mobility have arisen from distinct yet increasingly interrelated disciplinary bases, including postcolonial scholarship, the new mobilities paradigm of social and cultural geography, and transport history. This chapter argues that mobilities scholarship and its attendant scholarship have been productive in advancing critical and theoretical understandings of space. Three key questions are addressed: what does it mean to talk about ’mobility’? How does mobility advance concepts of space? And where next for mobility? The chapter considers the emergence of mobilities scholarship across different fields of study, points of intersection and divergence between space and mobility as concepts, the role that literary and cultural studies have played in wider theoretical advances, and the current and future state of mobilities scholarship.

Colonial-era Mexican poetry presents a complex interweaving of several genres; this chapter explores two of its major forms: epic poetry and lyric poetry. The epic, often understood as a propaganda instrument for colonial interests, is also constitutive of colonial historical narrative, as is illustrated by works by Bernardo de Balbuena, Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Arias de Villalobos and others examined in this chapter. Lyric poetry captured the creative virtuosity of colonial Mexico. While past critique has framed this opus in relation to European sources, more contemporary readings focus instead on its interplay with the literary, political, and societal elements of its environment. This chapter explores the scope of this genre and the challenge that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing practices pose to twenty-first-century readers.

What might the medical humanities be capable of doing?’ asked Viney, Callard, and Woods in their 2015 call for a critical medical humanities. This chapter endeavours to answer that question by investigating how ‘the literary’ is mobilized in health-focused projects whose commitment to interdisciplinary entanglement renders them exemplary of the field’s critical turn. We interviewed seven UK-based literary studies scholars about their work in two or more such projects in order to understand how ‘the literary’ (as discipline, approach, and praxis) features within project design and delivery, the roles taken up by the literary studies scholar, and the consequent effects on shared understandings about the functions of the literary text. One of the most striking findings of this exploratory study was the interviewees’ determination for the literary text to be considered in non-representational terms and concurrent commitment to championing novel articulations of the value and ‘use’ of literary endeavour.

This chapter is an overview of the problems and uses that affect theory offers the study of African American literature. Defined as aside from the traditions of thought that made black literary fields thinkable in an institutional context, it is not difficult to surmise, in generous faith, why the turn to affect has been inhospitable to lines of inquiry that presume a racial subject. Meanwhile, questions regarding the transmission of affect have remained central to the project of African American literature since before its advent as literature. This chapter considers how the work of the critic in the field necessarily presumes the relevance of affect, arguing that consciously reading for affect wards off duller accounts of what African American literary texts signify in favor of vivacious dialogue on what they do and how.

This chapter surveys the theory and practice of “distant reading,” the computational textual analysis of large corpora of digitized texts. Exploring descriptive, generative, and predictive modeling, Houston argues that these techniques, by “changing the scale at which texts are analyzed,” serve to “transform the object of study and thereby the kinds of questions that can be explored” in literary studies.

This chapter alerts readers of the shortcomings of a mining approach to Pausanias’ Periegesis as a prime evidence for the study of local religion in ancient Greece. The question of where local specificities are discussed in the narrative is as critical as the actual information conveyed. The chapter speaks to the analytical challenge of interpreting a narrative that is, on the one hand, reflective of the non-linear and essentially decentralised nature of the local, yet on the other filters this nature through the linear rigours of writing. Starting from fleeting experiences of the local, highly subjective to the individual that makes them, Hawes turns to an exemplary discussion of Argos, Thebes, and Messenia that exposes the mechanics of a scripted localism, a literary approximation to place. The discussion of Pausanias’ localistic perspective extends to the narrative technique of cross references and to instances where such connections were deliberately denied: the case in point being Pausanias’ treatment of the notorious problem of the location of Homeric Pylos.

This chapter alerts readers of the shortcomings of a mining approach to Pausanias’ Periegesis as a prime evidence for the study of local religion in ancient Greece. The question of where local specificities are discussed in the narrative is as critical as the actual information conveyed. The chapter speaks to the analytical challenge of interpreting a narrative that is, on the one hand, reflective of the non-linear and essentially decentralised nature of the local, yet on the other filters this nature through the linear rigours of writing. Starting from fleeting experiences of the local, highly subjective to the individual that makes them, Hawes turns to an exemplary discussion of Argos, Thebes, and Messenia that exposes the mechanics of a scripted localism, a literary approximation to place. The discussion of Pausanias’ localistic perspective extends to the narrative technique of cross references and to instances where such connections were deliberately denied: the case in point being Pausanias’ treatment of the notorious problem of the location of Homeric Pylos.