Project MUSE®: ELH - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in ELH.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 60, no. 4 (1993) through current issueLatest Articles: ELHTWOProject MUSE®ELH1080-65470013-8304Latest articles in ELH. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Feelings of Expectation: Consolation and Sentimental Allegory in the Contemporary Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984170
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In debates about sentimental literature, it would seem that consolation is everywhere discussed and nowhere felt. The shape of the argument is by now familiar: on one side, a claim about the deadening ideological work of consolation, which promises affective solutions to real material problems; and the counterclaim, that to accuse solace of being critically impoverished is to impoverish solace, which need not preclude an understanding of structural injustices, but rather opens up more nuanced, multivalent ways of representing extreme suffering. Rather than rehearse this back and forth, I want to turn away from categorical questions about the political uses of consolation as a feeling or experience produced by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallFeelings of Expectation: Consolation and Sentimental Allegory in the Contemporary Novel2026-03-03text/htmlen-USFeelings of Expectation: Consolation and Sentimental Allegory in the Contemporary Novel2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1069422026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Alternative Geographies and Urban Parks: Duse Mohamed Ali and Yoshio Markino in Imperial London
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984171
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Around 1910, a young man was asked by the proprietor of the Bloomsbury hotel where he was boarding to alter his mealtime to accommodate some "Euro-Americans" who objected to his presence. The young man, A. B. C. Merriman-Labor, an aspiring writer from Sierra Leone, refused, asserting that as a "permanent lodger and a British subject, I had a better right to that hotel and better right in this country than any of them."1 "That was the end of the matter," he concluded in his account of the incident, adding only that the visitors altered their own mealtime, "which, of course, they had a perfect right to do."2 No further details were recorded, but the moment speaks volumes about the casual racism encountered by people
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallAlternative Geographies and Urban Parks: Duse Mohamed Ali and Yoshio Markino in Imperial London2026-03-03text/htmlen-USAlternative Geographies and Urban Parks: Duse Mohamed Ali and Yoshio Markino in Imperial London2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1339272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Worldbuilding in Clarissa
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984172
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It is a striking feature of the current state of entertainment that our most dominant narratives rely upon expansive fictional worlds. Given this fact, it is no surprise that "worldbuilding" has been increasingly taken up as a significant analytical category within popular discourse and cultural criticism. However, in most treatments of the subject, "worldbuilding" tends to be understood in its straightforward sense as might be used in reference to Lord of the Rings or Star Wars—that is, as something like the process of inventing overtly fictive environments, geographies, species, races, political relations, etc., and doing so by means of explicit exposition (detailed visualization in film/TV and mapmaking and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallWorldbuilding in Clarissa2026-03-03text/htmlen-USWorldbuilding in Clarissa2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1003102026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Brave New World and the Rise of the Factory Farm
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984173
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In 1913, the Ford Motor Company plant in Highland Park, Michigan, became the first automobile production facility to incorporate the moving assembly line, within months reducing the twelve-hour pre-mechanization build time of the Model T to just over ninety minutes.1 Ten years later, in 1923, Celia Steele—a housewife in Ocean Park, Maryland, who had been raising small flocks of chickens to sell for meat—accidentally received five hundred chicks instead of the fifty she had ordered; deciding to gamble, she tried and succeeded at raising the birds indoors through the winter, thus becoming the mother of the American poultry industry and launching what Jonathan Safran Foer evocatively terms "the global creep of factory
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallBrave New World and the Rise of the Factory Farm2026-03-03text/htmlen-USBrave New World and the Rise of the Factory Farm2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1099012026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Rhetorical Materialism: Karl Marx and the Nineteenth-Century Writer as Weaver
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984174
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In Western literature from antiquity through the Romantic period, weaving served as a standard metaphor for the noble labor of the poet. But in the nineteenth century, the grounds of the weaver figure, both vehicle and tenor, underwent profound transformation. Weavers were among the first and greatest victims of industrialization in Britain, bringing them to the forefront of industrial discourse with significant implications for the weaver as a literary figure. Having long signified a gilded art, the weaver now emblematized a degraded trade. At the same time, authorship was undergoing its own process of industrialization, with new printing technology and modes of publication creating mass markets for literary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallRhetorical Materialism: Karl Marx and the Nineteenth-Century Writer as Weaver2026-03-03text/htmlen-USRhetorical Materialism: Karl Marx and the Nineteenth-Century Writer as Weaver2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1341692026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03"We Should Be Colliers": Coal, Contagion and the Elizabethan Theater
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984175
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Both colliers and the coals they carried were a familiar feature of life in early modern England. Mined coal and manufactured charcoal fueled a significant proportion of contemporary domestic and industrial activity, including theatrical production. Most early modern players and playwrights almost certainly relied on coal to heat their homes and prepare their meals, as many playgoers would have done. In addition, playhouses and companies are likely to have used coal in various pyrotechnic effects, continuing and adapting methods for the theatrical production of fire that were inherited from medieval works such as the Coventry Corpus Christi cycle, which was itself staged regularly for much of Elizabeth I's reign.2
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmall"We Should Be Colliers": Coal, Contagion and the Elizabethan Theater2026-03-03text/htmlen-US"We Should Be Colliers": Coal, Contagion and the Elizabethan Theater2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1726262026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Situational Awareness in Emma
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984176
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Emma Woodhouse has the well-known distinction of being the only Jane Austen heroine whose name appears in the novel's title. What has so far eluded critical attention is that she is also the only one to be introduced as inhabiting a particular "situation."1 While the "evils" of that situation are plainly stated ("the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too highly of herself"), its exact nature is only implied.2 Austen's narrator assumes we know what is meant by the term, but here and throughout the novel, a character's situation can be both self-evident and subject to speculation and debate. In a narrow sense, the word denotes Emma's station in life, secured by the state
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallSituational Awareness in Emma2026-03-03text/htmlen-USSituational Awareness in Emma2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1055182026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03"Not a Matter of Any Importance": The Parentheses of Virginia Woolf
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984177
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"Let us not take it for granted that life appears more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."1 So Virginia Woolf declares in "Modern Fiction," her manifesto for a new kind of novel. Her own fiction is an application of this principle, continually subverting traditional notions of the "big" and the "small," the important and the trivial. In perhaps the most influential piece of Woolf criticism ever written, Erich Auerbach calls attention to one such subversion: "In Virginia Woolf's case exterior events have actually lost their hegemony; they serve to release and interpret inner events, whereas before her time (and still today in many instances) inner movements preponderantly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmall"Not a Matter of Any Importance": The Parentheses of Virginia Woolf2026-03-03text/htmlen-US"Not a Matter of Any Importance": The Parentheses of Virginia Woolf2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®946902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03The Absence of Allegory: A Brief History of Misreading the Structural Dynamics of Paradise Lost
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984178
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Like all reception histories, the critical tradition surrounding Paradise Lost (1667) includes a significant number of interpretive errors gradually discarded once the trends and assumptions supporting them proved unsustainable.1 Yet the fashion of dismissing or diminishing the role of literary allegory in Milton's great epic has proved remarkably persistent. Its resilience seems particularly anomalous at present given allegory's positive reevaluation over the course of nearly a century of critical commentary and debate.2 Although somewhat modified from Anne Davidson Ferry's "Romanticized horror" of the mode—her highly influential tactic of limiting Milton's use of allegory to fallen scenes and personas such as Sin
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallThe Absence of Allegory: A Brief History of Misreading the Structural Dynamics of Paradise Lost2026-03-03text/htmlen-USThe Absence of Allegory: A Brief History of Misreading the Structural Dynamics of Paradise Lost2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1288932026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Becoming Christopher Okigbo: Aestheticism, Teleology, History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984179
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How do you solve a problem like Christopher Okigbo? Although long canonized as a crucial voice of West African poetry in English, Okigbo remains a source of anxiety for sympathetic and hostile critics alike, a figure difficult to place. In the early 1960s he burst onto the Nigerian literary scene as an intensely private poet whose hermetic and learned verse was simultaneously steeped in Igbo folklore and heavily indebted to the legacies of French symbolism and Anglophone Modernism. He also publicly adopted a broadly aestheticist stance and openly celebrated the European sources of his work while simultaneously attacking not only the notion of littérature engage in general but also the distinctly African varieties
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/58/image/coversmallBecoming Christopher Okigbo: Aestheticism, Teleology, History2026-03-03text/htmlen-USBecoming Christopher Okigbo: Aestheticism, Teleology, History2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1304532026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03