Editor's Introduction

The articles in this issue of Soundings explore concepts with some familiar elements to deepen our sense of the ambiguity and complexity located around the nodes of race and metaphysics in the late eighteenth century and around the concept of metropolitanism as it has developed across centuries. These pieces use close contextualized readings of significant works and words to offer a richly layered understanding, often leading to more questions instead of straightforward answers.

Steffen Ralf Lösel's "Monostatos: Racism in Die Zauberflöte" reads the opera's depiction of its moor character in the context of depictions of Africans in Enlightenment Europe and the historical traces of Angelo Soliman, an African living in Vienna and known by Mozart. Lösel's careful reading of the libretto alongside theatrical, anthropological, and historical writings of the time situates the portrayal in a richly detailed context. His interpretation avoids definitive answers about artistic intention (since these answers do not survive in the textual documentation) while clearly recognizing the racial stereotypes perpetuated in the creative product.

A similar attention to eighteenth-century historical context and textual complexity marks Allen Dunn's "Spirits of Satire." This piece mines the ambiguities in satires written by Immanuel Kant and William Blake about Emanuel Swedenborg's mystical writings to explore the ongoing philosophical question of how we can claim metaphysical truth. Complications abound in Swedenborg's scientific and religious writings and in Kant's and Blake's satirical reactions to them. Dunn notes how Kant and Blake both draw on and deviate from the satirical tradition to build their conflicted responses to Swedenborg and to cast the artistic and poetic imaginations as truer paths to reveal some experiences than the discourse of scientific certainty.

Sophia Basaldua focuses her attention on a particular word, "metropolis," to trace its conceptual significance over the centuries and through recent articulations across several academic discourses. She brings etymological and historical lenses to bear on the task as well as the specific disciplinary conceptualizations from postcolonial studies, literary studies, and urban studies to stress the shifting emphases on centrality, governing control, urbanity, and culture. Instead of identifying a uniform or correct interpretation of the term across these uses, she hopes to encourage more scholarship that recognizes and builds upon its alternative and conflicted histories.

Our review section features books that similarly seek complex and multi-faceted re-assessments of familiar concepts or figures. Carter Neal discusses Caroline Winterer's project in American Enlightenments of arguing against the "bicentennial consensus" of the American Enlightenment depicted in three significant histories published around 1976. In addition to tracing the complexities of Winterer's argument, Neal also contextualizes it through a miniature review essay in footnotes, within the ongoing historiographical reassessment of American slavery. Linda Simon traces a similar search for complex re-readings in Paul Croce's Young William James Thinking; Croce draws connections between the thinking of the older and younger James that are generally overlooked in treatments of his life. Finally, Piotr Gwiazda provides an engaging overview of Amanda Golden's edited collection of essays: This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton. From the diverse essays, written by literary scholars and creative writers, Gwiazda highlights the ambiguities and contradictions that characterized Sexton.

While varied in subject, these pieces demonstrate the careful, layered analysis through and of contexts that bring these conceptual lenses into focus rather than taking them for granted.