With adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the United Nations conscripted, almost by default, the historically Euronationalist forms of the Bildungsroman and natural law to legitimate its vision of a new international order. This essay elaborates the conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vision that normative human rights law and the idealist Bildungsroman share in their cooperative efforts to articulate, normalize, and realize a world founded on the fundamental dignity and equality of what both the UDHR and early theorists of the novel term “the free and full development of the human personality.” Historically, formally, and ideologically, they are mutually enabling and complicit fictions: each projects, in advance of administrative structures comparable to those of the nation-state, an image of human personality and sociality that ratifies (and makes legible) the other's idealistic vision of the proper relations between individual and society. (JRS)

This essay explores the relation between print culture and literary authority in seventeenth-century England, through the career of the rogue author, translator, and autobiographer Francis Kirkman. Barred from traditional forms of authority by his middle-class birth and rudimentary education, Kirkman claimed new forms of self-authorization promised by the press. In his autobiography, The Unlucky Citizen, as well as in his biography of the impersonator Mary Carleton, the self-styled “German Princess,” Kirkman developed strategies of counterfeiting authority to compensate for the traditional entitlements he, like Carleton, lacked. These strategies involved harnessing the press to circulate authoritative versions of his authorial persona that were intended to substitute for his unauthorized status. Kirkman's ultimate failure to “gain some Reputation by being in Print” is instructive for scholars interested in the history of autobiography and in the changing conditions of authorship in the first era of print culture. (JG)

The greatest master of the “Gothic smile” was not one of the anonymous visual artists who made saints and angels beam in the mid-thirteenth century; rather, it was Dante. Smiling is the hallmark of the presumably “sage and serious” poet and a sign of his distinctive originality as a Christian theologian. While this is true as early as La vita nuova and the Convivio, the Commedia shows how Dante journeys toward the beatific vision of God through the smile (on the faces of Vergil, Beatrice, and others). Sorriso/sorridere and riso/ridere–as noun or verb, and apparently interchangeable in meaning–appear over seventy times in the poem, in a wide variety of contexts: twice in Inferno, on more than twenty occasions in Purgatory, and double that number in Paradiso. As he develops the poem, Dante uses the smile to express the unique individuality not only of the human being but also of the triune God. (PSH)

Meetings at the convention are arranged by MLA divisions and discussion groups, individual members, the American Literature Section, allied and affiliate organizations, and committees of the association.

This essay considers a series of questions about the relations between material presentation and poetic meaning that emerge from a simple but under-acknowledged fact about the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets quarto: unlike nearly every other sonnet sequence from the period, Q's poems are broken by a series of nonuniform, seemingly arbitrary page breaks. Arguing that these breaks have profound implications for the interpretation and reception of Shakespeare's poems, the essay suggests that not reading page breaks is itself a reading practice-a historically specific, socially determined act in which certain elements of materiality are granted attention and authority while others are not. Espousing instead an approach to the materiality of Shake-speares Sonnets that would take seriously the matter of Q's page breaks, this essay understands the page and the page break to be units of meaning with particularly urgent implications for the recognition of poetic form and for the interrelations between a history of the book and the idea of literature. (CH)

This essay examines the pre- and posthistory of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Opening with a reconsideration of Vincent Carretta's influential claim that Equiano fabricated an African birthplace, I consider how Equiano's strategies of self-fashioning inform his trailblazing book tour of the British Isles in the early 1790s. If Equiano self-consciously designed his autobiography to become a best seller, his book tour performed the abolitionist manifesto that he was reluctant to put into print, as during his stops at cities and towns across the nation he worked to convert sympathetic readers into active abolitionists. Under the long shadow of the Pitt ministry's suppression of political activism in the 1790s, Equiano formed alliances with working-class and radical figures in Britain and Ireland, drawing on Shakespeare's Othello to develop a familiar public persona he could market during his book tour. (JB)

For most readers of Milton's late prose and mature verse, his positive depictions of the human body deeply inform his monism and antimonarchical politics. This essay argues that Milton's perspectives on mind and body are more ambivalent than the critical consensus allows: that the poet equally needs and does not need the body. I demonstrate that Milton's shifting perspectives on mind and body, spirit and flesh, emanate from his opposition to dynastic kingship. They also shape his emerging modern nationalism, which is marked by contradictions and liminality. By focusing on the fallen Adam's soliloquy, I show how Milton's equivocal body politics appropriates and disembodies Hebraic traditions and the concreteness of the Hebraic past (and other histories of others), as well as the very matter of cultural memory. (RJT)

Definition. The MLA divisions encompass the primary scholarly and professional concerns of the association, with each division representing a major area of membership interest. The divisions are not autonomous organizations but are an integral part of the MLA; they have no corporate identity beyond that afforded by the MLA, and they may not use the name of the association for any project or program unless specifically authorized to do so by the MLA Executive Council.

“What have we who are slaves and blacks to do with Art?” asked DuBois in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” In an era of lynching, art hardly seemed appropriate for political struggle. Nevertheless, DuBois and his colleagues at the Crisis risked making connections between lynching and art by putting aesthetics to democratic use even as the theatricality of ritualized violence gave lynching an aesthetic dimension. Starting with DuBois's manifesto and reading in reverse chronological order every issue of the Crisis to its first issue in 1910, this article re-creates a critical narrative that traces the development of aesthetic theory among African American writers associated with the NAACP's national magazine. Contextualizing DuBois's work in the Crisis with fiction by Jessie Fauset and Walter White, I examine an alternative aesthetics that relies on propaganda to assail the ugliness of race relations. (RC)

Research on the early modern book trades has uncovered a set of steadily reprinted devotional titles, a canon whose popularity challenges conventional notions of English and American literary history for the seventeenth century. My essay attends to these steady sellers as they helped structure the literary culture of early New England. The essay demonstrates that the pious conduct books rely on the performative literacies of sight, sound, gesture, and touch, on the sensory effects of literary expression, and on the cross-referencing collation of discrete passages, in a phenomenon I call–drawing on editorial theory and information history–the thickening of devotional textuality. With evidence from the prescriptive literature and its use in personal miscellanies, the essay revalues the aesthetic experience of devout colonists. Further, it examines the book format as a precursor to the modes of nonlinear reading associated with digital texts, and it historicizes such uses of the book format in the light of devotional sensibilities. (MPB)

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Founded on the dualism elaborated in Descartes's early metaphysical writings, such as the Discours de la méthode and the Méditations, most studies of corporeality in Descartes delimit the alienated body according to its mechanical functions. His later writings on ethics and the passions reappropriate the body for the subject and emphasize the sensible or “aesthetic” functions of corporeality. By analyzing Descartes's correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia during the last five years of his life and his late treatise Les passions de l'âme, this study examines the construction of the Cartesian aesthetic body and explores the ways in which that body, rather than the mechanical body, produces the ethical individual in society, a subject–body. Displacing the Aristotelian concept of sensus communis ‘common sense,’ Descartes turns the body into the source and target of affective ethical habit. I argue that Descartes's ethical doctrine is based on the cultivation, development, and deployment of that aesthetic body. (ERK)