ABSTRACT R. F. Kuang's work of speculative fiction, Babel, Or, The Necessity of Violence, and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho's poetry collection, If I Do Not Reply, offer very different representations of protest movements led by Cantonese activists that bookend the long period of British colonial history in China. Ho has recently described the practice of reparation as not a “fix, but a reckoning. Not a rollback, but a restoration of meaning. To repair, we must return-not to the past, but to attention, to responsibility, to the slow, hard, beautiful work of saying: this matters”. Ho’s description of the practice of cultural reparation offers a vision of literature as a discourse and practice that enacts the attention and responsible reading necessary for reparative work around restorative justice. These works demonstrate how different literary genres complement each other in beginning the imaginative work of reparation. The article argues that Kuang’s Babel and its rendering of the “necessity of violence” can only take us so far in its deliberations. Placed alongside Ho’s collection of poems infused with testimony and bearing witness, the two works offer an expansive intertextual dialogue on the contexts, effects, and aftermath of violence that enacts the reflective practice of reparation.

ABSTRACT The essay argues that Munshi Premchand’s hugely popular short story, ‘The Holy Panchayat’ (1916), casts light on the contemporary debate around surface reading, postcritique, and symptomatic reading. Anticipating some of the issues raised, the theory of reading I identify in Premchand’s much earlier story problematises drawing rigid distinctions between methodological protocols that emphasise a literary work’s affective structure against critical prerogatives that are invested in examining a work’s ideological ramifications. Specifically, by reading the meaning of the story’s prevailing reading – which I suggest has been singularly attentive to the affect evinced by the text – the essay underlines the problems of separating reading practices that focalise ethics and affect, to the exclusion of ideology. The essay thus recovers a latent strain of symptomatic reading or ideology-critique: one that neither reduces its purchase to investigating a work’s conditions of possibility nor limits itself to attending to a work’s historical context, but rather affirms its impetus to reflect on the affect-laden act of reading itself.

ABSTRACT This essay repositions Barbara Guest (1920–2006) as a theorist of modernist aesthetics whose writing develops a distinctive poetics of vitality. Across her poetry, criticism and prose, Guest stages encounter between artworks, their atmospheres, and their perceivers in order to construe vitality as a surplus quality that exceeds any single relation, representation, or interpretive frame. Where earlier criticism has read Guest either as a marginal member of the New York School, or as an ekphrastic writer concerned with female subjectivity, I argue that her fidelity to modernism is best understood as an investigation into the problem of representation. Against both naïve realism and formalist autonomy, Guest insists that objects are vital in so far as they resonate with affective force in new contexts. Focusing on three texts from the 1970s – ‘Roses,’ Seeking Air, and The Countess from Minneapolis – I show how Guest dramatises vitality as at once an intangible shimmer, a resistance to representation, and a force that destabilises subject/object divisions. In this, her poetics anticipates new materialist accounts of ‘thing-power’ and converses with a number of modernist forebears interested in the tension between life and form.

ABSTRACT This article proposes a pluralist empirical-critical framework for analysing interpretive communities in literary studies. I argue that literary scholarship has tended to privilege a small set of academically sanctioned interpretations, while overlooking the interpretative codes that emerge across broader reading publics. Drawing on interviews with humanities scholars and referencing empirical work with digital social reading data, I show how emotional analysis, computational modelling, and close reading can be brought into productive dialogue. I situate this methodological proposal within longstanding disciplinary tensions around representation, canon formation, and the knower-knowledge structure of the humanities. By integrating digital social reading practices with literary-critical interpretation, the article outlines how a pluralist approach can expand the field of literary interpretation, clarify its epistemic foundations, and address structural conflicts within contemporary literary studies.

ABSTRACT Given the recent rise in popularity of feminist dystopias, and the resurgence of interest in classics such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it seems appropriate to return to works such as Kindred that trouble both generic boundaries and readerly frames. Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel draws on the dystopic tradition to complicate and deepen her neo-slave narrative’s call to action, demonstrating how Black women’s bodies have always been tools in service of white supremacist futures. Kindred speaks explicitly to a Black feminist project of re-cognising the past, and simultaneously reclaims the dystopia as a space wherein past injustices might be actively apprehended – even remedied. This paper draws on Lee Edelman’s description of reproductive futurity not only to re-situate Kindred as a central text in the feminist dystopic tradition, but also to illuminate Butler’s attentiveness to the re-inscriptions of the slave past in the present moment. Ultimately, I argue for a new reading of the novel in which Butler’s dystopic vision might continue to inflect our orientations towards history and our own futurity, almost sixty years after its first publication.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how Lewis Carroll thinks about history in the Alice books and how thinking about history opens new avenues to explore the ideas at the heart of his work. It argues that nonsense, hinging on the tension between content and strict form, becomes a formal framework for interpreting history, combining Alice’s observations and the narrator’s organisation and contextualisation. As a hermeneutic framework, nonsense insists on the need to derive meaning from history but simultaneously frustrates understanding. Alice’s observations, paired with her developing historical consciousness, yield only confusion. The narrator, for his part, delineates a chess-based, formalised symbolic system of interpretation – paralleling systems Carroll employs elsewhere: philology, logic, and geometry – which provides the groundwork for the interpretation of history, while denying any conclusions.

ABSTRACT Although Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro are rooted in the realist tradition, their realism often appears distorted, imbued with elements of the unreal. It is not flawed for lacking reality but for evading it while borrowing realism's form. While the hysterical label may not fit Ishiguro, the evasive quality certainly does, as he acknowledges an interest in narrators who avoid confronting truths about themselves and their pasts. His realism combines the social precision of Jane Austen with the surreal anxiety of Franz Kafka, creating a tone that has become his hallmark over his long career. Despite the highly held bar and Smith being the junior novelist,her early writing has been characterised as possessing the wit of television comedy, the intensity of religious fervour and the intellectual rigour of postmodern theory, reflecting her own aspirations towards Kafka’s example. Both authors succeed in merging seemingly unmanageable elements of realism and oddity into compelling works, creating narratives that defy expectations while bearing their unique stamp. This article will argue that Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith make use of a non-traditional form of realism in their respective novels. An evasive realism tinged with strangeness and mystery that engages with questions of the unthinkable.

ABSTRACT This essay turns to the internet novel of the 2010s and early 2020s, and in particular Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), to read their engagement with immediacy culture as an exploration of the texture and temporality of quotidian life in the age of social media. The social and historical referents of this fiction are hyper-localised and ephemeral, and its shelf life is admittedly short. These novels are seen as timely but not timeless, embedded in historical detail but not broadly historical in their vision. Their narrative experiments with the forms and pacing of new media do more, though, than represent what it means to connect socially today: they conceptualise the transformation of historical consciousness in a wired world, developing narrative models to articulate the shared experience of immediacy not as a distraction from history, but as a new measure of historical change. This essay argues that No One Is Talking About This takes us inside the internet’s ways of talking and thinking to probe its fundamental reorganisation of human experience and its implications for the novel genre.

ABSTRACT This article proposes a new interpretive framework for reading Ted Hughes’s Wodwo (1967), focusing primarily on the poems ‘Wodwo’ ,‘Thistles’ ,and ‘Ghost Crabs’. Through a diffractive reading that brings Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology and Lacanian psychoanalysis into productive dialogue, I explore how Hughes’s poetry engages with the ecological Real, a concept integrating Lacan’s Real with ecological theory. The ecological Real refers to aspects of the natural world that evade symbolic articulation, resist conceptual containment, and defy anthropocentric intelligibility. In Wodwo rather than presenting nature as symbolically legible, Hughes registers its ontological inaccessibility. In the poem ‘Wodwo’ the poetic voice wanders anxiously through an unknowable world, suspended in ontological uncertainty. ‘Thistles’ stages a vegetal temporality of violent recurrence, while ‘Ghost Crabs’ conjures a nonhuman rhythm that fractures linear time. Together, these poems enact a poetics of nonhuman intensities, where nature appears as an irreducible presence. This approach moves beyond conventional ecocritical readings that, at times, reduce Hughes’s work to thematic environmentalism. Instead, it foregrounds how Hughes’s poetry registers the ecological Real as an anxiety-inducing force that disrupts anthropocentric binaries and temporal frameworks, offering a dark ecological poetics that challenges the stability of subjectivity, language, and representation.

ABSTRACT Beckett’s The Unnamable notoriously destabilises narrative voice, asking ‘Who am I?’ but refusing an answer. Moving beyond existential and linguistic readings, this article situates Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable within ecocritical debates and argues that the narrators in The Unnamable—Mahood, Basil, Worm—function as ‘thing narrators’. These voices construct and deconstruct ‘worlds of assemblage’ through constrained bodies—paralysed, jar-confined, larval—and barren environments, revealing the dynamic between corporeal fragility and spatial determination. Drawing on Timothy Clark’s concept of ‘scale framing’ and Serpil Oppermann’s ‘multiple becomings’, the essay contends that Beckett subverts anthropocentric scales of time, space, and agency: time as reverse evolution, space as territorial entrapment, and agency as passivity as a mode of resistance. In doing so, the trilogy anticipates a central dilemma of the Anthropocene: human cognition cannot grasp the scales of its own undoing, demanding an ethics of humility grounded in ecological entanglement, a call echoed in Jean-Michel Rabaté’s reflection on Beckett.