Project MUSE®: New Literary History - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in New Literary History.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 26 (1995) through current issueLatest Articles: New Literary HistoryTWOProject MUSE®New Literary History1080-661X0028-6087Latest articles in New Literary History. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Fanon's Typewriter
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988542
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Must the woman always be not only the poet's servant but the poet's translator as well?Frantz Fanon is known for his blistering written critiques of racism, colonialism, and empire. And yet, what goes barely noticed is that he did not, in fact, write most of his works. More exactly, he did not hand- or type-write any of his major essays or clinical reports. Instead, Fanon dictated his works to his human typewriters—most notably, Josie, his wife.1 From Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to Towards the African Revolution (1964), Fanon voiced out his thoughts to his amanuensis, who would sit in the corner and type away as he discussed everything from interracial desire to the Algerian Revolution.2This article is motivated
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallFanon's Typewriter2026-04-23text/htmlen-USFanon's Typewriter2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1147162026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Strange Revolution: Viktor Shklovsky and the Formalism of Feeling
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988543
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Искусство в основе иронично и разрушительно. Он оживляет мир.Art is fundamentally ironic and destructive. It revitalizes the world.In 1922, in the famine-stricken and war-ravaged rubble of post-revolutionary Petrograd, amidst the collapsed ruins of the former Russian empire, Viktor Shklovsky proclaimed the destructive potential of art. His polemical statement echoes the provocations made throughout his generically recalcitrant set of revolutionary reflections, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922 (Sentimental'noe puteshestvie: Vospominaniia 1917-1922), a formally vertiginous collection blending theory and memoir. If the destruction notable in the context of civil war is due to an encounter with art, rather than
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallStrange Revolution: Viktor Shklovsky and the Formalism of Feeling2026-04-23text/htmlen-USStrange Revolution: Viktor Shklovsky and the Formalism of Feeling2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1026652026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Situated Poetics and Land Stewardship: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kamau Brathwaite
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988544
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What meaning does a poem make when its very composition draws materially on an environment, incorporating "bits of 'the actual,'" to quote Scottish poet and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay?1 How does poetic form work when it develops sculpturally from and through an unusually close material relationship to its surrounding environment and that area's territorial predicaments?2 For example, in "Liberation of the Chinook Wind" (2018–2024), Tania Willard makes poetry from the wind's gusts by retooling maritime windsocks and installing them along the shores of Lake Ontario. By way of an algorithm, the wind passing through the socks composes poems by dispersing the textual residua of Canadian settler colonial land
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallSituated Poetics and Land Stewardship: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kamau Brathwaite2026-04-23text/htmlen-USSituated Poetics and Land Stewardship: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kamau Brathwaite2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1290842026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Theory of the Novella?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988545
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Despite its longstanding reputation as the scourge of official culture—as a form that is, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, "by its very nature, not canonic"—the novel over the last century has indeed been canonized, and its consecration has taken place under the gleeful supervision of the most traditional literary authorities.1 In this cultural environment, theories of the novel abound. The novella's institutional reception, in rather glaring contrast, has been subdued, and theories of it are scarce. How do we account for this scarcity?I will argue in this essay that the dearth of novella theory in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century US is symptomatic of the form's own non-canonicity, its peculiar resistance (far
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallTheory of the Novella?2026-04-23text/htmlen-USTheory of the Novella?2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1158862026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Light Labor in the Eighteenth-Century Georgic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988546
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Everything in the world is purchased by labour, and our passions are the only causes of labour.There is a brief moment in James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane when he stops addressing The Planter and turns instead to the enslaved person:
Tho' doom'd to toil from dawn to setting sun.
How far more pleasant is thy rural task,
Than theirs who sweat, sequester'd from the day,
In dark tartarean caves, sunk far beneath
The earth's dark surface.1
The lines are as merciless as they are long-winded, wrenching out a list of the Scottish miners' pain and letting it loose like proof that Caribbean plantation work could be worse. The experience of reading it physically takes your breath away; the assonant sounds relentlessly roll
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallLight Labor in the Eighteenth-Century Georgic2026-04-23text/htmlen-USLight Labor in the Eighteenth-Century Georgic2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1020992026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Fatherless Children: Anonymity and Namelessness in the Sixteenth Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988547
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Complaining to the ghost of Geoffrey Chaucer in his Vision, published in or soon after 1590, Robert Greene refers to the attribution to himself of a collection of scurrilous tales entitled The Cobler of Caunterburie (itself dated 1590). "Now learned Lawreat" (Greene says to Chaucer) "heere lyes the touch of my passione: they father the booke vppon me, whereas it is Incerti authoris, and suspitiouslye slaunder me with many harde reproches, for penning that which neuer came within the compasse of my Quill."1Greene is given to sprinkling his work with Latin phrases, and his use of incerti authoris here might seem to be an unnecessarily obscure way of signalling the anonymity of The Cobler of Caunterburie while showing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallFatherless Children: Anonymity and Namelessness in the Sixteenth Century2026-04-23text/htmlen-USFatherless Children: Anonymity and Namelessness in the Sixteenth Century2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1055732026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Perplexed Insight
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988548
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in a sense perplexed that my mind does Things which amaze me even in its chaosArguments about critical style often turn on the problem of coherence and confusion, lucidity and perplexity. On the one hand, we like to think the best writing should be clear: "know your argument," I find myself telling my students. But on the other, we're also suspicious of writing that is too straightforward or presentable. We feel that authentic difficulty or confusion can reflect serious engagement with a subject—and, worse, that unresisting straightforwardness can occlude it. "Coherence is not necessarily good," writes Iris Murdoch in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, "and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallPerplexed Insight2026-04-23text/htmlen-USPerplexed Insight2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1072102026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Birth of Oil: A Planetary Poetics from Slavery to Fossil Power
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988549
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Oil is a historical phantom. Unlike silver or gold, it names a diversity of compounds—everything from sludgy bitumen and heavy asphalt to lightweight petroleum, naphtha, and jet fuel—misunderstood as the same substance. Historians usually trace the birth of oil to an 1860s transition from dwindling whale oil to "rock oil" in industrial nations, particularly the United States. Incredible hydrocarbon reservoirs, stockpiled from millennia-old algae, began traveling to the surface in a fraction of geological time, thus inciting fantasies of limitless growth and accelerating biospheric ruin. Oil is the name for this circuit of geohistorical returns, at once omnipresent and usually unseen. But the term "oil" itself is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallThe Birth of Oil: A Planetary Poetics from Slavery to Fossil Power2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Birth of Oil: A Planetary Poetics from Slavery to Fossil Power2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1157812026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Fictions of Queer Attachment: Sirk, Fassbinder, Puig, Hagedorn
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988550
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Most urban Filipinos and Filipino-Americans probably suffer from cultural schizophrenia, like I do. Hopefully, we will use this affliction to our advantage, for this post-colonial condition has its positive aspects. We need to turn the negative inside out, use it to enrich ourselves and our visions—for where would our extraordinary voices be without the outlaw rhythms of rock n'roll, the fractured lyricisms of jazz, the joyous gravity of salsa, the perverse fantasies of Hollywood, and our own epic melodramas?A handful of fictional characters have marked my life more profoundly than a great number of the flesh-and-blood beings I have known.Audiences are promiscuous in their affections.What are the powers and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/144/image/coversmallFictions of Queer Attachment: Sirk, Fassbinder, Puig, Hagedorn2026-04-23text/htmlen-USFictions of Queer Attachment: Sirk, Fassbinder, Puig, Hagedorn2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1290002026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23