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Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and images, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, instead engineering conceptual clashes between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene, arguing against the omnipresence of Earthrise-like globes in attempts to think at planetary scales, and shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, this book pleads for an alertness to the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Divided into three sections (“Terra Global Circus,” “Welcome to Mineland,” and “Hiding in Exterranean Matter”), each of which approaches this entanglement from a different perspective, this book gives shape to a sense of the exterranean via readings of authors from France, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere as well as via discussion of mines, objects, engravings, and architecture. In dialogue with Michel Serres, the recent thought of Bruno Latour, and the interdisciplinary turn to the Environmental Humanities more generally, both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Biography has played an important role in the canonization of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise wasted in indolence; with reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world; and with stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—preserved by circles and then sometimes circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus. Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still, willy-nilly, trigger associations with biographical detail in a way that sparks pathos and produces intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even in readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus “posthumous” in Keats’s evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. This book takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the posthumous lives of the prematurely arrested figures of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry’s allotted period, biographical fascination opens us to poetry’s modes of survival from the time of the romantic period, when it began to receive the first of its many death sentences, into our own present.

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. It tracks the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. To track these practices it performs an interpretive method Seitler calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of, and see in a new light, their connections, challenges, and productive frictions.

Should a writer work in former colonial language, or in a vernacular? The language question was once one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation for being a dead end of narrow nationalism. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, this book studies the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the chapters follow the emergence of a politics of language from colonization into the early independence decades and through to the era of neoliberal development. Chapters explore the works of well-known francophone authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked vernacular artists with whom they are in dialogue. Pushing back against a prevailing view of postcolonial language debates as a terrain of nativism, this book argues for the language question as a struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they produce literary commensurability by suturing vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, this book models both a new understanding of translation and a different approach to literary comparison.

We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term “fanatic,” from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable term. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics and turns to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasant Revolts of the 1520s to the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. This book traces two entangled approaches to fanaticism in the long Reformation: the targeting of it as a political threat and the engagement with it as an epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke positioned themselves against fanaticism to dismiss dissent and abet theological and political control. In the second, the poets of fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical self-annihilation—the process by which one could become a vessel for divine violence—and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic’s claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to know and depict the origins of fanaticism. This crisis led these writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanaticism’s tendency to unsettle the boundaries between reason and revelation, human will and divine agency.