Editor’s Introduction

Lovelands: Affective Territory in English Studies

As I turn to introduce this issue of The CEA Critic, I find myself fixated on the idea of love. Perhaps my attention is drawn to love because I am writing this in the city of Loveland, Colorado, a place through which people from around the country send their Valentine’s Day cards to be stamped with the heart-shaped imprint of the “Sweetheart City” and rerouted. Perhaps it is because I have been persuaded by Seth Reno’s essay in this issue, which explains that love is not merely a synonym for sentiment, but, rather, a concept that shifts with, supports, and in some cases resists, the politics of the time in which it is represented. Love is, in this view, ideological. Thus, in addition to being the topic of some of our most enduring literature, love can also be seen as a serious topic for literary criticism. Indeed, the increased interest in affect theory within literary criticism attests to the complexity of love as a cross-disciplinary force. Love, then, lies not only in the province of greeting card companies but also in the province of the philosophy and politics of representation—in particular, for us, in the variety of literary and cultural representations that we study and teach.

Three of our essays consider the nexus of affect, national identity, and nationalism, and, as one would expect about love, the lyricism of poetry is often crucial. In his “Felicia Hemans and the Affections,” Reno seeks to expand our vision of Hemans, a poet most commonly remembered for her sentimental poem “Casabianca,” which was regularly recited in schools during the Victorian period as a patriotic exercise. By complicating our understanding of how Hemans conceptualized love, Reno shows that Hemans creates a space for affections that are “tethered” to the body but not to the state. Greg Weiss, too, is interested in the complex political nature of love. Weiss shows that Shabine, the speaker of Derek Walcott’s persona poem “The Schooner Flight,” attempts to construct an identity based in nation and race only to reject both in favor of an identity based in individual feeling and the aesthetic imagination. Shabine embraces a strand of possessive individualism, Weiss argues, but only insofar as it incites a moral rejection of totality in the form of collective identification. Finally, Holly M. Wendt’s “‘Breme Beowulf’ and ‘Inclite Pelagi’: Colonizing the Comitatus” analyzes the relationship between affect and nationalism through the medieval concept of comitatus. For Wendt, this reciprocal bond between individual and sovereign can be used to compare colonization during the medieval period in a presumably pagan text, Beowulf, against a presumably Christian text, The Pelagius of canoness Hrotsvit of Gandersheim.

To one degree or another, the remainder of our essays center on how the borders between self and other or individual and collective are represented in prose accounts of individuals who attempt to belong to—or resist belonging to—institutions such as school, church, or nation. The role that nation plays in the construction of individual identity takes on a profound relevance in Robert Lance Snyder’s essay, “Ethnography, Doubling, and Equivocal Narration in Eric Ambler’s The Levanter.” Snyder challenges the notion that Ambler’s novel is merely a “thriller” by pointing to Ambler’s experimentation with a postmodernist conception of the self as hybrid and dislocated. Snyder then traces through the novel’s narration two central questions about the political consequences of non-integrated identity: how complicit is the CEO of a British company in Syria who becomes unintentionally involved in a terrorist assault on Israel?; and, when a coherent self cannot be assumed, how do we negotiate the line between self and other? The relationship between self and other or “encounterer” and “encountered” also organizes Jean M. Filetti’s essay, “Education on the Lower East Side in the Fiction of Myra Kelly: The Failure of the Public Schools in the Education of Jewish Immigrants.” In reading Kelly’s various accounts of immigrant children in turn-of-the-century New York City public schools, Filetti argues that Kelly’s work reflects the failure of the...