This essay examines early modern commercial drama’s capacity to make people public—that is, to introduce to large crowds of people vividly embodied representations of individuals both real and fictional, actual and virtual. My focus is on Falstaff, who occupies a peculiar place in early modern mediascapes and, crucially, in theories of character from the eighteenth century on. Falstaff is, like all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic characters, an intermedial creature fashioned out of written and printed texts and embodied performance. But he is also exceptional in his multiplicity. Even his name is doubled (Falstaff and Oldcastle). I ask, What happens to persons when they are “characterized” onstage? What are the limits, and possibilities, of being made into (as the playwright-turned-antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson puts it) “a by worde”? How might such work help scholars rethink associations between “roundness” and “liveness” in their assumptions about how character is produced and felt to matter?

This essay follows the translation history of the Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar’s novel The Vale of Cedars (1850) from London through central and eastern Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Conjoining world literature, translation studies, diaspora studies, and Jewish literary studies, it argues for two interventions: a rethinking of world literature vis-à-vis diaspora, and a global, multilingual, and translational approach to the literature of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Aguilar’s novel, a work of minor literature about crypto-Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, was originally intended as a refutation of English conversionists. By the end of the century the novel had inspired multiple free translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic, refashioned to instill readers with pride in historical Jewish nobility and martyrdom. Mapping the book’s multilingual, transcontinental journey and elucidating the linguistic and cultural markers of its rewritings, the essay shows how diaspora connected such diverse translations and offers a new perspective on world literature.

The dedicatory preface to Francisco Balagtas’s 1838 Tagalog poem, Florante at Laura, introduced a new conception of time to Philippine literature by referencing mortality as “búhay ma,i, mapatid,” or “life with a cut.” Mapatid, meaning “cut,” contradictorily has the same root word as the Tagalog word for sibling, kapatid. Zeroing in on the term’s simultaneous connotation of cessation and relation, this essay seeks to better understand the specificity of time’s emergence as an object of representation in Philippine literature through mapatid. It examines Lope K. Santos’s 1906 Tagalog socialist novel, Banaag at Sikat (Soft Glimmers before Dawn), for its omission of a representation of US colonial rule. I argue that this omission is a development of Balagtas’s notion of time and that cutting the historical context of US colonialism allows the novel to criticize colonialism.

Scholars of Black studies have long noted the impossibility of repairing the harm of racial slavery: not only is the injury unquantifiable, but certain versions of reparation risk affirming rather than contesting the existing structure of racial capitalism. This essay places the writing of Phillis Wheatley within this history by reading her poems and letters in relation to two seemingly disparate but interrelated notions of repair: reparative reading and the reparations movement. I argue that Wheatley turns to the neoclassical forms of theodicy and georgic—modes often taken to exemplify social resignation—to register a critique of images of a universe that depends on structural inequalities and to demand redistribution and transformative change. She invokes the odd temporality of repair, caught between recursiveness and possibility, to imagine and advocate for a better world, even if it is made up of the broken pieces of her current one.

The enduring influence of Mao Zedong’s classicist poetry worldwide is a fascinating phenomenon, especially because this ostensibly conservative genre is marginalized in institutionalized modern Chinese literature. This article examines a curious case of fake Mao poems that enjoyed supreme ideological authority during the Cultural Revolution. By tracing the cultural policies of the Chinese Communist Party toward the Chinese literary legacy, I argue that revolutionary classicism was the logical offspring of revolutionary nationalism when literati and folk traditions were mobilized to serve a totalitarian cause; that the institutionalized lyric voice of Chairman Mao was collectively created and appropriated; that classicist poetry, combining sounds, words, and imagery, was the chosen medium for the masses to create an intimate relationship with the purported inner subjectivity of the chairman; and that, by ventriloquizing this voice, the Chinese revolution was finally embodied. Classicist poetry thus represents a neglected aspect of Chinese literary modernity and nation building.