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Critically engaging the concept of the Mediterranean as a “liquid continent” (Gabriel Audisio), the book argues in favor of a “transcontinental” heuristic model that rests on the transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb within the millennia-old relation that has materially and culturally bound it to multiple Mediterranean sites. Studying a Mediterranean-inspired body of texts from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Gibraltar in French, Arabic, and Spanish, the book delivers provocative analyses that complicate the dichotomy between nation and Mediterranean, the valence of the postcolonial topos of nomadism in the face of postcolonial trauma, and conceptions of the Mediterranean as a mythical site averse to historical realization. The book substitutes a trans-Mediterranean reading of Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma as allegory of the Maghreb’s long-standing plurality for Albert Camus’ colonialist Mediterranean utopia. Through this adjusted Mediterranean genealogy, it reveals the intersection of these Mediterranean imaginaries with Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized. Attuned to both the perpetual fluctuation of the Mediterranean as method and the political imperatives specific to the postcolonial Maghreb, the transcontinental reveals the limits of models of hybridity and nomadism oblivious to material realities. Through a sustained reflection on the potential and limitations of allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean successfully decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and mediates the nomadic subject’s reinsertion into a revised national collective respectful of heterogeneity. These far-reaching adjustments to our readings of the Maghreb and the Mediterranean help us rethink not just the space of the sea, the hybridity it produced, and the way it shaped historical dynamics (globalization, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism) but also the very nature of postcolonial histories and identities along its shores.

Beginning with Kant, German idealist philosophers undertake a radical rethinking of the nature of human mindedness whose ramifications have yet to be fully assessed. At the heart of this project is the claim that the mind is fundamentally active and self-determining. In the wake of this innovation, it becomes difficult to account for the central fact that humans’ orientation in the world depends on culturally transmitted models of acting, feeling, and thinking. If the defining feature of the mind is self-induced activity, how much room, if any, remains for receptive openness toward the world of artefacts and meanings made by our fellow humans? This book shows that the need to avoid an antinomy between the claims of spontaneous activity and the indispensability of cultural transmission was a key driving force of idealist thought. Spanning the period from Kant to Hegel, the book examines the ways in which the German idealists envisioned and enacted cultural transmission. In chapters focusing on aesthetic experience, the historical character of philosophy, textual communication, and literary criticism, the book presents a series of interrelated attempts at understanding the conjunction of receptivity and spontaneous activity in the transmission of human-made models of mindedness. The book combines a reconstructive approach to the idealist legacy with attention to subsequent intellectual developments to argue that we cannot hope to keep our bearings in the contemporary intellectual landscape without the conceptual framework established by the idealists.

Political Magic examines British fictions of exploration and colonialism from 1650 to 1750, arguing that narratives of intercultural contact reimagine political categories such as sovereignty and popular power. These fictions refigure the commoner as a superstitious savage encountering Britons as civilizing sovereigns. Authors of these narratives use the colonial scene as a political allegory; just as the sovereign is in some sense exterior to the legal order, so is the colonist exterior to the colonized. These fictions reveal aspects of political thought in this period that official discourse shunted aside-particularly the status of common folk as political subjects, whose “liberty” was proclaimed even as it was undermined in theory and in practice. Political Magic traces fictional efforts to manage these tensions. These texts repeatedly focalize moments of savage wonder, in which “uncivilized” people stand astonished when first witnessing European displays of technological prowess, particularly gunpowder. This repeated motif--the “first gunshot topos”--performs important conceptual work on ideas of consent and political legitimacy. Wonder induces admiration, and admiration transforms the unruly savage into a docile subject. However, as manifestations of force held in abeyance, these technologies also signal the reliance of sovereigns on extreme violence as the foundation of their authority. By examining works by Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Eliza Haywood in conjunction with political writing and travelogues, Political Magic locates a subterranean discourse of sovereignty in the century after Hobbes, finding surprising affinities between the government of “savages” and of Britons.

The infidel-conversion motif—in which Jews and Muslims convert to Christianity—is a staple of romance narratives by Roman Catholic writers in medieval and early modern Europe. Baptisms and conversions of infidels lead to an important telos of the romance genre: Despite their narrative wanderings and deferrals, romances often contain transformations of identity that lead to the incorporation of the other into Christian community. Uses of the infidel-conversion motif wane in post-Reformation England, however, in the wake of a Protestant theology that deemphasized the power of baptism to create Christian identity. Whereas Catholic theology had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism for salvation and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The Church of England’s baptismal theology transformed Christians and “infidels” into distinctive races. This book examines English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger. Through charting the intersections of race, Protestant theology, and literary form, this book intervenes in critical debates about the relationship between racial and religious identity in early modern England, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance.

Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that high modernism is consolidating its influence and prestige. Countering critical portraits of the era as one of aesthetic stagnation, the book argues that a late modernist sensibility animates postcolonial Irish writing across a range of literary registers running from the Gaelic autobiographies of the remote Blasket Islands to Samuel Beckett’s radical re-imaginings of the modern novel. Continuing, then, to resituate Irish modernism and postmodernism within the contexts of the lively political, intellectual, and cultural debates marking Irish postcoloniality’s distinct phases from the 1920s to the 1990s “Celtic Tiger” era, the book draws on the work of Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt and the Blasket autobiographers to complicate and enhance our assessments of the legacies of Joyce and the Revival and challenge conventional notions of a singular “global modernism” emerging in the aftermath of empire.

Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the eighteenth century's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as “sentimentalism.” It suggests that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic judgment, and obscures the movement's contributions to one of the Enlightenment's most important, and in recent times, contentious norms—the ideal of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the study contends that sentimental judgment complicates long-standing interpretations of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability. As such, sentimental literature and philosophy implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.

The Pain of Reformation examines a constellation of masculinity, vulnerability, and ethics in the tradition of heroic poetry in Renaissance England. While many understand representations of masculinity to be direct reflections of cultural definitions of manliness or the triumphant expression of nationalist and proto-imperial ideologies, for some the discourses of masculinity and virtue provided opportunities to reflect on the ethics of responding to bodily and cultural vulnerability in the wake of the Reformation. This book argues that the most illuminating meditation on vulnerability, masculinity, and ethics in the wake of the Reformation came from Spenser, a poet often associated with the brutalities of English rule in Ireland. The underside, or shadow, of violence in both the fantasies and the realities of Spenser's England was a corresponding contemplation of the nature of the precarious lives of subjects in post-Reformation England. Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene opens with a gesture of disarmament consonant with early modern allegories of peace in which Venus, or Love, disarms Mars, or War. The poem explores the possibility that vulnerability was a solution to, not merely an unfortunate consequence of, real and imagined forms of violence. From this meditation on what it means to be vulnerable to harm emerges a capacious exploration of an ethics emerging from a series of necessary vulnerabilities to affect, bodily sensation, and sympathy for others.

It has become commonplace to claim that, as imagined communities, nations are constituted through the incitement of feelings and the operations of fantasy. But what about the state? Can we think of it as a subject of feeling, as well? This study of late Victorian culture argues that novels certainly did. Revisiting major works by Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Sarah Grand, among others, it shows how novels dramatized the feelings and fantasies of a culture that was increasingly optimistic, as well as increasingly anxious, about the state's capacity to “step in” and help its citizens achieve the good life. In particular, this book tracks the historical emergence of a fantasy of the state as a heroic actor with whom one has a relationship and from whom one desires something. This fantasy can be seen as a psychic response to the nineteenth-century triangulation of sovereignty, discipline, and biopower, the three modes of power that concerned Michel Foucault. While this fantasy radiated across genres, novels became a privileged site for meditating on its more tragic implications. In the novels discussed here, the central tragedy arises from the painful condition of individuals' imagining themselves to be independent of power-bearing institutions, yet knowing, consciously or unconsciously, that they are not, and may not even wish to be. Discussing novels set in the rural, urban, and imperial locations of Britain, The Dream Life of Citizens illuminates this enduring ambivalence at the heart of the liberal subject's relationship to state power.

The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the deceased from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban space, and corpses began to be viewed as terrifyingly noxious substances. The dead had fallen victim to a sustained new reflection on the notions of life and death that emerged from the two new medical fields of biology and hygiene. In large part, the Paris of the nineteenth century, the Paris of modernity, arose, both theoretically and physically, out of this concern over the relations between the animate and the inanimate. But as the dead became a source of pervasive and intense anxiousness, they also became an object of fascination that at once exceeded and guided the medical imagination which tried to control them. This book examines that exuberant anxiety to discover the irrational, indeed erotic, forces motivating the medicalization of death. Working across a broad range of disciplines including history, literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, it seeks to understand the meaning of the dead and their role in creating one of the most important cities of the contemporary world.

This book is a study of the workings of a monolingual paradigm and of multilingual attempts to overcome it. It argues that monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is a recent invention dating back only to late-eighteenth-century Europe, yet has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, their “mother tongue,” while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. The book argues that since reemergent multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, they need to be analyzed as “postmonolingual,” that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism. Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, the individual chapters examine distinct forms of multilingualism: writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the “mother tongue” into another language (Emine Sevgi Özdamar); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoğlu). These analyses suggest that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the “mother tongue” are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.