In terms of references, themes, translations, Percy Shelley’s cosmopolitan poetics presents what is arguably the most sustained and adventurous British Romantic version of “world literature.” And yet at decisive moments, Shelley’s poetry offers a radical “unworlding” that takes leave of the world and, in its leave-taking, withdraws from contemporary notions of a “world literature.” The chapter explores a Shelleyan mode of abstraction that exhibits what in other contexts Edward Said described as “unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies.” Supported by contemporary correspondences with Said, Deleuze, and Radiohead, the essay features a sustained reading of “To a Sky-Lark,” in which the “exilic energies” of Shelley’s “intellectual mission” of are generated not by “loving” the world but by leaving it. The chapter concludes by placing Shelley’s “skylark-image” alongside Ocean Vuong’s “The Bull” (2022) to suggest how two poetic correspondents and their animal addressees propose a aesthetic apprehension of a poetics of unworlding.

U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.

Queer art and literature demonstrate an awareness of how a permanent war culture constitutes the nation’s social fabric, thus defining the unavoidable contingencies informing LGBTQ+ persons’ desires and subjectivities as citizen-subjects. Along with race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship status, war culture operates intersectionally. This essay introduces four new approaches to LGBTQ+ art and literatures’ representation of queer subjectivities’ relationship to war culture: the desire for national inclusion and queer fetishizations of the war-state (Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal); activist-poets’ resistances to war culture as heteronormative and white supremacist (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg); the perceived “terrorism” of queer activist arts’ militancy (Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker); and addresses of globalized queer vulnerability after 9/11 and vis-à-vis the climate crisis (Gloria Anzaldúa, Kazim Ali, Ocean Vuong).