Project MUSE®: The Yearbook of English Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Yearbook of English Studies.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 31 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: The Yearbook of English StudiesTWOProject MUSE®The Yearbook of English Studies2222-42890306-2473Latest articles in The Yearbook of English Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Foreword
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970697
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Welcome to the 2025 volume of the Yearbook of English Studies published by the Modern Humanities Research Association. The first collection in this series was published in 1971 and the editor was Professor T. J. B. Spencer, who was at that time Director of the Shakespeare Institute and also Head of the Department of English Literature at the Institute. The ‘Assistant Editor’ was R. L. Smallwood. The introduction to the volume specified that this was to be a ‘new annual publication […] devoted to the language and literature of the English-speaking world’. As the editors underlined, the Yearbook had been ‘established because of the continuing rise in the amount of good work in English studies offered for publication
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallForeword2025-10-06text/htmlen-USForeword2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®68512026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970698
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Kat Addis is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex, working on a book about Renaissance European epics and slavery. She has recently published articles in The Spenser Review (2024), Edmund Spenser and Animal Life (2024), English Literary Renaissance (2023; winner of an ISS MacCaffrey Prize for best article on Spenser in 2025), and Spenser Studies (2023). With the support of the International Spenser Society, she devised and produced ‘Occasion of the Season’, a year-long podcast series about Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender.Richard Adelman is General Editor of the Yearbook of English Studies, as well as Reader in English at the University of Sussex. He is the author or Idleness
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2025-10-06text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®113742026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Introduction: English Now
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970699
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This volume of the Yearbook of English Studies serves to reflect on the current state of English as an academic discipline. It uses the history of the Yearbook itself as one prompt to this endeavour. Some of the essays that follow thus reflect on the changing fortunes and preoccupations of areas of specialism within English studies, focusing for instance on the history of ‘rhetoric’ within this field, or on the tensions at play in considerations of early modern epic across the last few decades of criticism. Selected past essays from the Yearbook are reprinted along side these reflections to support and evidence them. But the volume is also attuned to, and reflects on, the status of literary criticism in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallIntroduction: English Now2025-10-06text/htmlen-USIntroduction: English Now2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®253692026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Renaissance Epic Studies: Helgerson on Tasso on Spenser
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970700
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Helgerson’s ‘Tasso on Spenser’, published in 1991 alongside other articles on the theme of ‘Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558–1658’ in the Yearbook of English Studies, is one of a handful of essays I read during my graduate studies that continues to insist on its own relevance in a surprisingly varied set of situations. Its premise, that we can use Tasso to understand Spenser, if not itself new, remains strong. Its argument is deeply satisfying because it offers a clarifying schema for the comparative interpretation of unmanageably long poems. This scheme is further mapped out and developed in the first chapter of Helgerson’s influential book Forms of Nationhood, published in 1992.1 My aim here is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallRenaissance Epic Studies: Helgerson on Tasso on Spenser2025-10-06text/htmlen-USRenaissance Epic Studies: Helgerson on Tasso on Spenser2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®1041622026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Tasso on Spenser: The Politics of Chivalric Romance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970701
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The argument of this paper depends on three dates and their relation to one another. The first is 1580. In that year two small collections of letters between Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser were published in London. These letters contain the earliest surviving reference to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which Harvey had been reading in manuscript and did not much like. The second date comes just a year later, 1581. In that year the first five complete editions of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered appeared in Italy, to be followed in the next eight years by at least six more Italian editions. This enormously popular poem gave literary expression to a debate that had been raging in Italy for some forty years between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallTasso on Spenser: The Politics of Chivalric Romance2025-10-06text/htmlen-USTasso on Spenser: The Politics of Chivalric Romance2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®707052026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Long Eighteenth-Century Matters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970702
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Concluding his essay ‘Burke, Paine, and the Language of Assignats’, published in the Yearbook of English Studies in 1989, Tom Furniss recalls an exchange between the two writers in which each accuses the other of an ‘inflationary’ rhetoric:‘Let us imitate’, Burke writes, ‘[…] [our forefather’s] caution […] Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what they have left; and, standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to admire rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aëronauts of France’.‘Even his genius is without a constitution’, Paine counters; ‘It is a genius at random, and not a genius constituted. But he must say something — He has therefore mounted in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallLong Eighteenth-Century Matters2025-10-06text/htmlen-USLong Eighteenth-Century Matters2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®508172026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Burke, Paine, and the Language of Assignats
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970703
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Adam Smith writes, in Wealth of Nations, thatThe gold and silver money which circulates in any country may very properly be compared to a highway, which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either. The judicious operations of banking, by providing, if I may be allowed so violent a metaphor, a sort of waggon-way through the air, enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures and corn-fields, and thereby to increase very considerably the annual produce of its land and labour. The commerce and industry of the country, however, it must be acknowledged, though they may be somewhat augmented
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallBurke, Paine, and the Language of Assignats2025-10-06text/htmlen-USBurke, Paine, and the Language of Assignats2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®749622026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Notes on the Relationship between Literature and Philosophy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970704
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This article aims to reflect on the relationship between literature and philosophy by considering their proximity and concurrent disjunction, and how these can be utilized to establish a reciprocally enhancing relationship. As there is mutual trespassing on the topics they explore, there is also a coterminous diversity in the methods, processes, and forms of writing they employ. With limited space to inquire into this topic comprehensively, I will seek to direct the reader’s attention to their points of conjunction rather than divergence. While acknowledging literature’s often hesitation, if not reluctance, about philosophy, I will endeavour to delineate the intersections between the two disciplines and some
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallNotes on the Relationship between Literature and Philosophy2025-10-06text/htmlen-USNotes on the Relationship between Literature and Philosophy2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®402442026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06English Studies and the Study of Rhetoric
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970705
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The Yearbook of English Studies serves as a mirror for what its current custodian Richard Adelman calls the ‘spectrum of vibrant and evolving practices, preoccupations and methodologies that constitute our discipline’.1 It also reveals its blindspots. For much of its history, the journal has reflected the dominance of literary analysis, privileging the study of fiction, poetry, and drama. Yet scattered throughout its pages are articles that quietly advocate for another somewhat distinct approach centred on the politics of persuasion and perspective.Consider two pieces that bookend the journal’s history. In the inaugural 1971 volume, David McCracken’s ‘Rhetorical Strategy in Burke’s Reflections’ analysed the Irish
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallEnglish Studies and the Study of Rhetoric2025-10-06text/htmlen-USEnglish Studies and the Study of Rhetoric2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®506092026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Early Modern Declamatory Practices and the Aesthetics of Dramatic Retelling: A Case Study of Lucian’s Tyrannicida and Thomas More’s Declamatio Lucianicae Respondens
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970707
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The declamatio was one of the favoured forms of expression in early modern humanism and gained particular momentum as an independent genre in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Its roots can be traced back to the fifth century bc and are strongly connected to the rhetorical practices of the Sophists, who sought to twist arguments in their favour by using a plethora of stylistic devices, such as paradoxes, and by redirecting the expectations of the audience. From their beginnings, ancient declamations delighted in hyperboles and implausibilities, pushing the reasonable and the conceivable to new limits. However, the genre was more than a playfield for demonstrating one’s verbal dexterity, as it gradually
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallEarly Modern Declamatory Practices and the Aesthetics of Dramatic Retelling: A Case Study of Lucian’s Tyrannicida and Thomas More’s Declamatio Lucianicae Respondens2025-10-06text/htmlen-USEarly Modern Declamatory Practices and the Aesthetics of Dramatic Retelling: A Case Study of Lucian’s Tyrannicida and Thomas More’s Declamatio Lucianicae Respondens2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®827942026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Creative-Critical Practice
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970708
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— I wouldn’t be caught dead using the phrase ‘creative-critical practice’. Still, it has undeniable parlance, like ‘post-truth’ or ‘alternative facts’. The compound ‘creative-critical’ is an instance of the ongoing industrialization of culture and the academy.1 The hyphenation suggests a neat harnessing, a pleasing symbiosis, while the ‘practice’ parades a sense of activity and agency. Become a creative-critical practitioner! There is a sort of unspoken presupposition that ‘practice’ has to do with some material production or productivity. In the context of English studies, it’s about writing, it’s not about reading. It sidesteps any thought that, as Will Self recently proposed, ‘there’s nothing more inventive than
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallCreative-Critical Practice2025-10-06text/htmlen-USCreative-Critical Practice2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®545332026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Global Literary Studies: An Institutionalized Field?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970709
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While the very existence of global literary studies as an institutionalized field is not yet fully established and comparative literature is still an umbrella term that refers to a set of theoretical and methodological approaches including world and global literature, the global turn in various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences has gained traction in recent years.1 Debates around literary transnationality, the circulation and reception of forms, genres, and textual patterns in different regions of the world, and the growing constellation of agents in the international literary space all speak to the need to examine complex systems and increasingly interwoven realities. This paper will briefly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallGlobal Literary Studies: An Institutionalized Field?2025-10-06text/htmlen-USGlobal Literary Studies: An Institutionalized Field?2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®1278442026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06What to Do for English Now
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970710
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This is not a usual chapter for the Yearbook of English Studies, because this has not been a usual year for work in our discipline. The chapter does not contain much about intellectual matters or the typical ‘whither English?’. Instead, it is about practical things to do with ‘English Now’, shared work for English studies.This is because, in the UK, it has been a year of increasing crisis: one of several years of inter locking crises, with, almost certainly, years of crises to come. These threaten the discipline and will certainly change how (‘if at all’, as we write in exam questions) English and its several cognates continue to exist. It was a year in which many university departments of English were shut down
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallWhat to Do for English Now2025-10-06text/htmlen-USWhat to Do for English Now2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®582722026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06Rhetorical Strategy in Burke’s Reflections
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970712
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Although Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is most often read as the fullest and best statement of Burke’s political wisdom, his aim in writing was above all to persuade an audience rather than to express a credo. In considering Burke’s ideas as well as his literary merit, we cannot afford to ignore his expertise as a rhetorician, especially with respect to two important rhetorical elements — the ethos of the speaker and the appeal to an audience. Some of the most curious and memorable qualities of the Reflections stem from Burke’s handling of the speaker and audience: the fact that it is in the form of a volume-long letter, that the correspondent is never identified, that it is presented not as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/824/image/coversmallRhetorical Strategy in Burke’s Reflections2025-10-06text/htmlen-USRhetorical Strategy in Burke’s Reflections2025-10-062025TWOProject MUSE®232172026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-10-06