This book places the larger autobiographical projects of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other for the first time, drawing on a range of previously unanalyzed works. It argues that the structurally layered, word-and-image form of comics is particularly well-suited to negotiate complex filial inheritances and manage identity in the face of transgenerational trauma. Each chapter is organized around a different formal trope that highlights an aspect of the visual language of comics and its material processes: boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs. From Jewishness to gender, from high modernism to lesbian feminist communities, Filial Linesshows how the comics form is capacious enough to accommodate the push–pull of inheritance and invention, enabling both creators to negotiate their place in (or beyond) various lines of familial, cultural, and artistic descent. Integrating formalist and psychoanalytic frameworks, and parsing alignments and differences with different forms of practice, the book situates today’s graphic memoir canon as an unexpected outpost – and expansion – of avant-garde formalism long after the modernist moment of form.

Material inference opens up an exciting prospect for pluralism in reasoning: because the conceptual content of descriptive language is open-ended and variable, legitimate inferences can take unlimited forms. How many forms of legitimate reasoning are there, and how is legitimacy determined? Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom recognise that practices can be legitimate by virtue of their material forms – that is, with respect to their specific vocabularies. Pluralism also finds a foundation in the work of William James and John Dewey. It will be interesting to examine the diverse styles of reasoning found in the history of science, following the models of A. C. Crombie, Nicholas Jardine, and Ian Hacking. A key observation is that historically generated forms provide the standards for reasoning rightly. It is always a social judgement when something is deemed incorrect, even when prompted by external impulses. Legitimate reasoning is constrained by the rules of a community. Intersubjective assessment provides the required and sufficient objectivity. Unfortunately, Brandom is not fully consistent on this point, as he allows for a user-independent means of determining correctness.

The Introduction examines the emergence of the psychopath, situating his literary, scientific, popular, and legal representations within a conceptual genealogy of monstrosity in order to frame the interanimating relationship between the form of persons and the form of novels. As a hitherto unrecognized extension of this genealogy, the psychopath marks the impact of a historically specific set of anxieties about white masculinity on more abstract conceptions of the human. The chapters of the book pair masculinity’s others – women, children, black men, queer men, and white men themselves – against a variety of mid-century representational debates about the novel.

The perambulatory boundary clause form entered the English imaginary as a tool of colonization, when the West Saxons began writing charters that claimed British land using the textual forms of the Celtic British people. This relationally oriented landscape description—“from Ida’s creek to the long ridge, and from the long ridge to the wolf pit”—became standard in early medieval English land charters. The landmarks are not in themselves unique, but together, when “walked” by the reader or literally perambulated, combine to produce a unique spatial and legal entity. They were also in flux; over time, landmarks like “Ida’s creek” would have shifted and changed, requiring local, lived experience to navigate the physical, social, and chronological features of the described landscape. As a result, a form designed to stabilize legal boundaries also became a textual and epistemological model for navigating unstable relational identity in the centuries of English literature that followed. Understanding the development of this form in the Old English boundary clauses allows us to see how and why it is operating in Old English literature.

At the end of his life, the titular hero of Beowulf asks his young kinsman Wiglaf to build a mounment, hoping that his presence in the landscape will defend and preserve the memory of the people he leaves behind. Put another way, Beowulf seeks to remain a conceptual landmark by becoming a literal landmark. But in his desire to be reiterated, Beowulf is not alone. Navigating Landmarks of Identity shows that, across early medieval English literature, relational reiteration stabilizes relational identity when a subject’s relationships are uncertain or under threat—whether that be in riddles, catalogue poems, elegies, or charter boundary clauses. Such textual reiteration takes place not only when a boundary is transgressed, or a person is exiled, but throughout Old English literature when an author is confronted with the problem of “who” or “what” something is.

Abdulla Goran (d. 1962) was an eminent promoter of, and contributor to, the modernization of Kurdish poetry. In his own time, Goran was hailed by many contemporary writers, critics, and poets as the leader of this endeavor. While describing his project in modernizing Kurdish poetic forms, for instance, Goran mentions only two achievements, both of them on the grounds that they were motivated by a patriotic sentiment: the replacement of classical quantitative meters with syllabic meters, and the “purification” of the language from non-Kurdish loanwords. However, we know that Goran was not the first modernist to dabble in syllabic meters or to attempt to “purify” the language of poetry. This chapter focuses on the main reasons for his immediate popularity. It argues, first, that, unlike many of his peers, Goran publicly identified as a modernist from the outset; that he greatly contributed to the expansion of Kurdish poetic forms and the promotion of Kurdish free verse; and that he played a major role in the internationalization of modern Kurdish poetry.

As the accentual and highly alliterative meters of pre-Christian poetry came in contact with Latin hymnody, they incorporated forms of syllabic versification. These nùa chrutha [new forms] emerged from an ecclesiastical setting and were initially resisted by the filid, but they were then slowly folded together with native compositional tendencies on the way to the highly formal dán díreach style (syllabic, stanzaic, complexly rhymed) that would dominate professional Irish poetry until the seventeenth century. This chapter will look at the development of early Irish versification.

Contemporary poets in Ireland have taken a number of formal and stylistic paths, many of which fall somewhere within the baggy ambit of the “well-made poem” and the general bounds of lyric poetry. However, this has not yielded a homogenous or monolithic set of strategies. This chapter offers an account of the particular formal, generic, and compositional forces that impel contemporary Irish poetry.

Written over a period of five decades (1973–2013), Peter Maxwell Davies’s ten symphonies occupy a central position in his output. Having established a reputation in the 1960s as the ‘enfant terrible’ of British music, chiefly as a result of a number of radical music-theatre works, the appearance of a ‘Symphony’ in the following decade surprised critics. Yet Davies was long attracted to the abstract qualities of the genre – an interest deepened by his move to Hoy, Orkney, in the early 1970s. This chapter considers how landscape, place and the natural world, issues of form and genre, the symphonic legacy of Sibelius and Mahler, and architecture – especially the works of Brunelleschi and Borromini – shaped these symphonies. It argues that acknowledging and appreciating the symphonies from these multiple musical and extra-musical perspectives can illuminate the richness of the composer’s symphonic imagination.

This chapter shows how Percy Shelley moves from taking negative positions on others’ beliefs to exploring how to hold and encourage hopeful beliefs without absolutes. The first section examines Shelley’s developing argument, in his philosophical prose, for the value of the malleable mindset he calls “persuasion” within the framework of necessity. The abiding appeal of rigid convictions, and of literary genres that might impose them, comes to the fore in his “Satire upon Satire” and Julian and Maddalo. The chapter then shows how, in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley reimagines persuasion as a matter chiefly of craft: of rearranging what we think we know or leaving it open-ended. Shelley’s main graphic, rhythmical, and rhetorical instrument for this, it is argued, is the ellipsis, serial dots that perform the same disruptive function as the vacancies that he describes in his prose as the most important sites of cognitive and collective reform.

Four load-bearing concepts delineate the specificity of wantonness in eighteenth-century Britain: motion, causality, selfhood, and form. This Introduction defines the literary sensorimotor as an array of ancient and modern theories about how words conjure vivid kinetic and proprioceptive imagery for readers. The critic John Dennis argued that powerful motor imagery depended on a reader not being able to pin down the causes of their intense and immersive reading experience. Johnson’s Dictionary defines movement that does not spring from clear causes or intentions as “wanton” motion: neither beautiful nor terrifying but nevertheless vibrant and irregular. Historically, legal wantonness fell somewhere between negligence and recklessness on the spectrum of intentionality. In opposition to the notion that deportment “discovered” a person’s true self, Landreth’s theorization of vital impersonality embraces non-normative embodiment and resists narrative norms of literary interiority. How a character or plot moves might be more important than why.

The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor suggests that the ancient Greeks, despite possessing various linguistic devices for reflexive self-reference, did not have a way of making “self” into a noun. This nominalization of the self is, in his view, characteristic of the modern sense of selfhood. In fact, Aristotle does nominalize autos, the intensifier that functions in Greek much as “self” does in English, in three passages in Nichomachean Ethics IX where he describes a friend as another self. Taylor cites one of these passages in a footnote, commenting that “this doesn’t have quite the same force as our present description of human agents as ‘selves’”, but does not elaborate. This chapter considers what force it does have, exploring three senses of self in Aristotle. Two of them are familiar – the social self expounded in the first nine books of the Nicomachean Ethics and the more contemplative self emerging predominantly in EN X and in De Anima III. Much less familiar is the bodily self that can be discerned at various points in the De Anima and Metaphysics, and that is rather prominent in the Generation of Animals. This conception of the self has its source in the intimate connection between a psuchê and the particular body of which it is the form.

The 1810s saw a flurry of poems published in the Italianate form of ottava rima. This chapter focuses specifically on ottava rima poems that reflect on the role of expectation and anticipation in listening. This includes episodes of mishearing, which show how anticipation sometimes distorts perception. We hear what we expect or want to hear. The form of ottava rima, with its interlocking rhymes and closing couplet, presents an exaggerated example of the role of expectation at work in rhyme. The brief popularity of ottava rima in the 1810s also offers a neat marker for periodisation, which raises questions about how a given form was read at a given time and addresses the challenges of exemplarity and historical poetics.

Metametaphysical reflection is nothing new. Avant la lettre, Aristotle’s attempt to lay out a science of “being qua being” and its first principles – the scientific discipline that came to be called “metaphysics” – involved an attempt to justify his methodology as well as to develop responses to skeptics. Contemporary metametaphysics has revived some of these discussions. Whereas all metaphysicians roughly agree on the sorts of problems that count as “metaphysics,” and generically that the subject matter concerns the nature and structure of reality, not all metaphysicians agree about what constitutes the form of an answer to such problems. Some contemporary metaphysicians focus on existence questions – listing what exists – whereas others focus on “grounding” or dependence relations of some kind – what depends on what or is fundamental. These differences tend to appear in responses to skeptical challenges to metaphysics.

The naturalism of Alvar Aalto is set against the philosophy of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. There is a discussion of what a ‘thing’ is, prolonged by a foray into the concept of Mingei and its refinement and transformation in the hands of Theaster Gates. The chapter goes on to to discuss aesthetics, form and the philosophy of Amercian pragmatism, coupled to the ongoing debate between digital and analogue in media philosophy.

The short story is a young art’, Elizabeth Bowen declared in her introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Stories; ‘as we know it, it is the child of this century’. The contemporaneity of the short form allowed Bowen to argue that it was free from many of the conventions that tether more established literary modes – exposition, for instance, as well as unwieldy segues, and what she termed the ‘forced continuity’ of longer prose narratives. It also encouraged her to conceptualise the short story in relation to other types of writing, particularly poetry and the novel. This chapter explores Bowen’s aesthetics of short fiction through an analysis of a selection of her stories and non-fiction. In essence, she believed that the structural economy of the short form meant that stories are defined by obliquity and concision. She also considered the form – or rather, the forms – of short fiction to be productively uncertain, and understood that the same story can be simultaneously concise, expansive, and wonderfully strange. This chapter examines the complexities of this stance, and its implications for reading Bowen in the twenty-first century.