This chapter considers MacDonald’s work as a scholar and lecturer. From his 1859 appointment as professor of English literature and philosophy at Bedford College, to his (often sold-out) lecture tours in Britain, Europe, and North America, to the publication of his annotated Folio-based edition of Hamlet in 1885, MacDonald’s work as a scholar took various forms over the course of his literary career. What remained consistent, however, was his insistence that the critic should take a generous, affective approach, prioritising strengths over weakness and helping readers to experience the works at an emotional level. Drawing on both unpublished lectures and published scholarly works such as A Dish of Orts (1893) and the edition of Hamlet, this chapter explores MacDonald’s emphasis on the multivalence of texts, which anticipates post-critical approaches. However, the chapter also places him in dialogue with nineteenth-century critics Matthew Arnold and F. G. Fleay in order to draw out the distinctiveness of his critical approach within his context.

This chapter contextualizes Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār’s largely overlooked writings in early twentieth-century periodicals that forged the critical vocabulary for an emerging literary discipline called adabiyāt. It shows how adabiyāt’s institutionalization in the 1930s and 1940s was marked by the erasure of its semantic multiplicity, rendering it a singular and standalone concept. This erasure is the last step in the mythologization of Persian literature as a historical construct. The realignment of adabiyāt as literature entailed discussions and debates about the role of language and literature in a nationalizing society where intellectuals such as Bahār were being socialized in a new national reality. Linking these individuals and conversations were voluntary and state-funded associations or anjomans, which laid the foundation for a modern discourse of literature in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran. The chapter argues that if scholars, students, and admirers of Persian literature are to create more socially responsible and inclusive ways of celebrating and understanding Persian literary works, we cannot afford to romanticize its pasts.

Using examples from Bishop’s letters and diaries, as well as more recent theoretical accounts, the introduction explores various meanings of the word ‘style’ and their pertinence to Bishop’s work. The introduction highlights the predominance of biographical criticism in works on Bishop (and other twentieth-century writers) and instead argues for the importance of stylistic criticism. This chapter goes on to delineate two broader trends in contemporary literary criticism – historicist on the one hand, formalist on the other – and outlines their shortcomings in understanding the nuances of particular poems and literary works. The chapter then outlines this book’s focus on several aspects of style across Bishop’s entire oeuvre, including cliché, simile, allusion, and correctio. The introduction ends by arguing that aesthetic evaluation and judgement are central to the responsible and rigorous practice of literary criticism.

The introduction covers the state of modernist studies within Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures today, with reference to broader scholarship on global, transnational, and planetary modernism. It explains the logic behind the seven sections of the book: Adab, Poetry, Prose, Politics, Aesthetics, Easterlies (about connections to Urdu, Russian, and Central Asia), and Comparison. Most extant studies of modernism and modernity in the field focus on singular national contexts in the Middle East in relation to Europe and the Orientalist hangover that the region continues to suffer. Contributors to this volume instead consider instances of modernist connections in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish that exist beyond Western influence and can be traced back through local channels to Arab Islamic turāth (cultural heritage) rather than to literary and artistic encounters with the West. To flesh out the theoretical underpinnings of the volume, the editor discusses major novels and films in relation to time, modernity, modernization, and modernism to begin defining the parameters of the investigations to follow.

In this chapter, Shir Alon suggests a framework to account for global modernist aesthetics that forgoes a diffusionist model of “traveling forms,” yet still acknowledges European literature’s inevitably hegemonic and influential position on the sphere of literary production. Looking at debates about modernity and literary form taking place in Hebrew and Arabic letters, she extracts a theoretical framework that traces the emergence of modernist prose forms to the lived experience of modernity, an experience that often fails to align with modernity’s promises. Recognizing modernity as singular, happening everywhere simultaneously but experienced differently and unevenly, the chapter undoes the “Europe first” diffusionist model of modernist aesthetic, while still recognizing the outsized effect of Europe’s hegemonic position as the rest of the world’s designated future. Modernism is not simply the outcome of European literature’s influence, but a project that emerges in numerous sites within the modern world system.

This chapter provides an analysis of Amis’s literary criticism. The first main section argues that despite the unsystematic nature of Amis’s criticism it is nevertheless informed by three identifiable critical principles: (1) that literature and life are different things, the conflation of which leads to reductive forms of criticism; (2) that the main aim of criticism ought to be the assessment of aesthetic value and, by extension, the ranking of works according to their relative aesthetic merit; and (3) that aesthetic value results from innovative uses of language and, conversely, the avoidance of cliché. The second section argues, however, that these principles give rise to a number of tensions that Amis is seemingly unaware of. The final section suggests that understanding these tensions helps us to appreciate Amis’s position in the history of criticism and to see his critical stance as that of a belated liberal humanist.

Chapter 13 provides a chronological examination of Clarice Lispector’s nine novels, situating each work within its pertinent historical and biographical context. Covering the period from Perto do coração selvagem (1943) through to the posthumously published Um sopro de vida (1978), the chapter offers plot summaries that conscientiously avoid spoilers while critically engaging with the central themes and stylistic features distinctive to Lispector’s oeuvre. The analysis is further enriched by attention to notable details that shed light on the novels and their characters. For example, Macabea, the protagonist of A hora da estrela, transcends the literary domain, having been reimagined across diverse artistic formats, including film, musical theatre, and opera. Overall, the chapter functions as a vital reference for both readers newly encountering Lispector’s complex works and established scholars seeking nuanced and original perspectives on her novels.

Chapter 3 explores Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s Memórias de um sargento de milícias, published in 1852–53. It explains the novel’s political messages, which were subtly shared with its original readers, allowing modern audiences to interpret Almeida’s story similarly. The chapter highlights the use of a trompe l’œil effect that recreates the political scene from the “time of the king” (1808–21), offering a sharp but indirect critique of Brazil’s social and political situation in the 1850s – as one era reflects the other. While earlier studies mostly focused on the novel’s social aspects, this chapter uncovers a clearer political meaning grounded in real events rather than guesswork. Regarding race, although Memórias de um sargento de milícias includes non-white characters, its satirical style prevents it from directly tackling racial issues, especially slavery.

The Coda takes stock of the book’s argument for the distinctiveness of persuasion among its lexical and cognitive others in Romantic writing. It responds to some common misconceptions about the malleability of persuasion and considers its implications for our lives among others today, in political and professional community. The chapter suggests that one response to our civic polarizations, as well as to professional anxieties about the methods and future of literary studies, might well be the self-conscious and flexible mode of persuasion countenanced by Romantic writers at a moment of comparable entrenchments and attacks on the value of a creative and critical imagination. Rather than assume synonymy between persuasion and conviction, in other words, and dismiss them both as either so much domineering or else so much boundless subjectivism, we might consider the continuing value of the kind of judgment under uncertainty characteristic of persuasion as it was reimagined in Romantic writing.

This chapter offers a history of critical and theoretical writing about the literature of Southern California. Docherty argues that the origin point for LA literary criticism is not, as often supposed, Edmund Wilson’s The Boys in the Back Room (1941) but USC MA student Margaret Climie’s 1925 thesis. Early critical responses to LA’s literature, including those of Climie, Wilson, and Franklin Walker, at least acknowledged that literature existed in Southern California, but largely dismissed its quality. Docherty identifies David Fine as the critic who embodied LA literary studies’ coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, but argues that Fine contoured an LA canon subject to certain limitations of form, period, and social perspective. Since the turn of the millennium, the chapter shows, increasing numbers of scholars have offered multiethnic and multiformal critical approaches to LA writing commensurate with the kaleidoscopic diversity of the city’s contemporary literature and indeed the city itself.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the larger themes addressed by the book, focusing on the question of contingency and how letters can be considered as literary ‘works’. The chapter argues that chance or happenstance itself governs letters and letter-writing both in material and in affective or conceptual ways. It proposes that the ‘radical contingency’ of letters can be said to set them apart from literary works more specifically conceived, in the sense that the latter do not generally and in principle hold a primary or formative connection with the specific events surrounding their composition. The chapter argues that the question of contingency connects with Keats’s governing ideas about life – with what he repeatedly refers to in his letters as life’s ‘circumstances’, ‘chance’, or ‘accidents’.

This chapter explores Elizabeth Bowen’s career as a literary critic, which is a significant but often overlooked aspect of her writing life. Focusing on her two published essay collections – Collected Impressions (1950) and Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (1962) – as well as a series of uncollected book reviews and articles that appeared in a wide range of British and American newspapers and journals, this chapter examines Bowen’s distinctive approach to criticism and traces the development of her public persona as a critic, particularly from the late 1940s onwards. While it is well documented that Bowen’s prodigious critical output was driven in part by financial necessity, her writing in this domain demonstrates a sensitivity to atmosphere and a deep interest in better understanding the craft of writing. A reviewer who kept the common reader in mind, Bowen above all else conveyed to her readers the sense of being a reasonable judge with varied taste. This chapter assesses Bowen’s enduring critical legacy and argues that her contributions to literary journalism merit sustained attention within the broader histories of twentieth-century criticism.