Posthumous Reputation Research Articles

Reading Wollstonecraft after Godwin’s Memoirs: Wollstonecraft in Circulating, Subscription, and Private Libraries, 1799–1842

ABSTRACT Following Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1798, her grieving husband William Godwin made public many of the details of Wollstonecraft’s highly unconventional life. The ensuing backlash seemed to ensure that Wollstonecraft’s major works ceased to be reprinted for a period of roughly forty years. This article contributes to efforts to revise narratives of Wollstonecraft’s early nineteenth century reception by asking how and where readers, in the absence of new editions, might have accessed the books themselves. A survey of 41 circulating and subscription library catalogues dated between 1799 and 1842 reveals that, despite scholarly assumptions otherwise, Wollstonecraft’s works remained widely available. Even when books left the library, they did not necessarily disappear, as a copy of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman that moved from a circulating library into a private collection attests. Placing the information in these catalogues in conversation with what can be gleaned from this copy of the work, this article argues that the durability of the hand-press book complicates the narrative of Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation.

Marrying the radical, the conventional, and the mystical: Mathematics, gender and religion in the lives of William Kingdon and Lucy Lane Clifford

The avowed atheist, evolutionary naturalist and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford is often remembered for his essay, “The Ethics of Belief,” in which he opposed organized religion in any form. As a mathematician, Clifford was an early advocate of non-Euclidean geometry in England. Combining William Rowan Hamilton’s work on quaternions with Hermann Grassmann’s theory of linear extension, he invented an original system of geometric algebra. Breaking with conservative traditionalism in his philosophical and mathematical work, Clifford’s marriage to the children’s writer, novelist, and dramatist Lucy Lane was a relatively conventional, if brief, Victorian marriage. After his untimely death from consumption in 1879, Lucy outlived her husband by fifty years. Raising their two daughters and supporting herself after his passing, Lucy refashioned Clifford’s posthumous reputation to temper his philosophical radicalism. Her collaboration with Clifford’s publisher and editor reveal Lucy’s concern that Clifford not be remembered as someone ruled by passion in his mathematical work. Her efforts to expunge writings suggestive of William’s weakness, excitability, or inconstancy from the public record demonstrates her desire to craft an image of her husband in alignment with gendered expectations of masculinity. This paper argues that Lucy fashioning of William’s memory conformed, rather than departed from, normative parameters of gender as defined by Victorian society.

Robert Lowell's Still Lifes and the Market Economy of the Poetic Profession

ABSTRACT: In the 1970s, Robert Lowell began to feel financially constrained or insecure. He therefore occasionally meditated on poetic art that would cater to consumerist cravings in the fashion of Dutch seventeenth-century still-life artists and French painters of food such as Chardin and Manet. In his descriptions of dishes and laid tables, Lowell toyed with poetry's ability to construct images of pleasure and obscure the work and procurement mechanisms necessary to obtain these commodities. The poet began to wonder about the market value of such poetically constructed comforts. However, Lowell was also aware of his dissimilarity to the classical still-life artists. His own attempts at representing foodstuffs are irresolute. Moreover, they are volatile, easily giving in to various reflective moods such as vanitas or ethical ponderings on labor. Almost never can Lowell's poetic still lifes be experienced purely sensually. His lack of enthusiasm for such a commodity poetics helps explain the decline of Lowell's posthumous reputation in the subsequent decades.

The Making of a Hero and a Villain: Southern Song Literati’s Changing Perceptions of the Memoirs of Li Gang and Wang Boyan

Abstract This article discusses how Southern Song literati’s changing perceptions of the three memoirs of Li Gang 李綱 (1083–1140) and Wang Boyan 汪伯彥 (1069–1141) shaped their posthumous reputations. Both men served as chief councilor in the early Southern Song. Literati in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries became increasingly skeptical of Wang Boyan’s memoir, a work that had been considered as authentic decades earlier. Partly driven by their irredentist passion and their disappointment with autocratic councilors, literati identified with the hawkish Li and supported the printing of his works. After Li’s formerly lesser-known personal memoir had a wider circulation in the thirteenth century, daoxue 道學 historians deliberately adopted his overt criticism of Wang to form a new narrative that praised Li and vilified Wang. The posthumous reputations of the two men went into two extremes as a result—Wang was nefarious while Li was an illustrious minister.

Staging the Imagined City: Aretino in Rome and London

AbstractThis article explores the theme of ‘cityscapes’, and Aretino as a writer of the urban experience, by focussing on the city as an unknowable and anonymous space, especially to social outsiders. It will first examine how Aretino portrays Rome in his early comedy Cortigiana (1525) as a confusing and socially stratified space when experienced from its peripheries. A key factor in achieving this is in his mapping of the imagined spaces of the city (the ‘locus’) onto the theatrical stage‐space (the ‘platea’) so that the stage represents the street and the back‐stage represents a hidden world from which both Cortigiana's main characters and indeed the audience are locked out. Those desired spaces of the city are often coded in sexual terms, and so the second half of this article will explore the way in which i modi (the ephemeral erotic images which would shape Aretino's posthumous reputation as a pornographer) would become a visual trope used by seventeenth‐century English writers to conjure up the unseen and imagined interiors of London's suburban brothels and aristocratic boudoirs.

Sergei Rachmaninoff by Rebecca Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Sergei Rachmaninoffby Rebecca Mitchell Simon Morrison Mitchell, Rebecca. Sergei Rachmaninoff. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2022. 237 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Further reading. Select discography. £12.99 (paperback). P artof a series of fast-paced, illustrated biographies, Sergei Rachmaninofffocuses as much on Rakhmaninov's posthumous reputation as on his life and music. Rather than describing the composer at work, the performer wowing American audiences as a virtuoso pianist, or the conductor leading an orchestra from the podium at the Bolshoi, Rebecca Mitchell begins from the end, by detailing the downturn in his critical reputation after he died of lung cancer in 1943, age 69. Rakhmaninov has been trivialized as a nostalgic exile who never recovered from the loss of Russia in 1917 and of the estate he called home until the Bolsheviks confiscated it. He supposedly remained a nineteenth-century composer out of sync with modernism, disdainful of decadent rule-breaking, abstraction and formalism, preferring the luxurious harmonies and long-breathed melodies of German Romanticism while remaining more classical (Apollonian) in his formal designs than his immediate predecessors. His critical appraisal has suffered because he appealed to the masses. Music so popular, with such affecting treatments of the flat-seventh scale degree, cannot be serious. There is truth in this received story, but beginning with the negative and assuming a defensive posture is risky. The critiques guide the argument from the start. Had the naysaying come in at the end, its biases would have been exposed. Modernism in music has been defined as much by academics as composers, [End Page 165]including those committed to undermining it. Mitchell is aware of the paradox and she deals with it by patiently correcting the record, demonstrating that Rakhmaninov liked the high life of the 1920s and '30s — automobiles, first-class travel, luxurious surroundings — and proved himself a savvy businessman, notably in numerous successful publishing ventures. Tragedies happened around him, not to him. (An obvious instance: 'the Bolshevik execution of at least 15,000 [starving] peasants' in the Tambov region where Rakhmaninov maintained his estate, p. 142.) According to the construction that Mitchell challenges here, because he was a great artist and 'soul' of his nation Rakhmaninov suffered too, an idea she negates less through polemics than engagement with the scores in their context. She explains how Rakhmaninov's music enriched the Orthodox template for religious expression, rethought nationalism, and addressed trauma, exile and estrangement by surmounting them all (rather than succumbing to them). He overused bell sounds and liturgical chants (though his favourite chant, the Dies Irae, is not part of the Orthodox rite) — like Charles Ives used the sounds of Concord, Massachusetts in his cosmic scores — to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things at the micro and macrocosmic level. His art was contemporary in its turbulence and more aligned with the Silver Age than critics have hitherto noticed. As Mitchell declares at the end of her book, 'By resituating Rakhmaninov's career within a multilayered experience of uprootedness (rather than timelessly drifting outside of it), his stature as a genuinely modern figure becomes clear' (p. 199). Mitchell is an excellent guide to Rakhmaninov's shorter piano pieces as well as the songs, and she includes some amusing information about the enormous fame of the C-sharp minor Prelude. Rakhmaninov profited less from it than its publisher — he received 40 rubles, while Gutheil raked in 500,000 — and insisted that its big chords came out of the blue. According to the composer, the piece represents nothing beyond its own C-sharp minor-ness; it has no secret programme, even if an American listener, a 'young lady' in his thrall, interpreted it as the sound of someone being buried alive (p. 50). She asked Rakhmaninov if that was his intent; he demurred. Other interpretations included the masses rallying to the banner of the pretender during the Time of Troubles. Mitchell features the fiasco of the premiere of his First Symphony, allowing her to demolish the myth that its negative reception sank the composer into a protracted depression and creative paralysis that only a hypnotist could cure. She shows that the chronology is off; he never actually stopped composing, and there...

George Crumb and the Power of First Hearing

The American composer George Crumb died on February 6, 2022. He was 92. Predicting the posthumous reputations of composers at the time of their death is hazardous, particularly if the key measure of reputation and standing is the presence of the composer’s music in the active repertoire of the future, on stage, on recordings, and through broadcasting. I think, however, that Crumb’s music will remain a regular part of our active musical culture. It deserves to be. Many composers have entered the history books as figures of significance and influence only for a limited time, often as distinguished representatives of trends and fashions of a distinct era. The music written by most such figures has failed to sustain interest among future musicians and audiences, with the possible exception of one work, as in the case of Pietro Mascagni. Sometimes all music by a once famous composer vanishes. Consider Louis Spohr. When he died in 1859, Brahms considered Spohr the last in a line of great masters that began with Haydn. No account of music in Europe in the nineteenth century fails to mention Spohr (mostly for supposedly being the first to use a baton to conduct). Aspiring violinists may still encounter some of his works during their training. But Spohr’s music has drifted to the margins of the active concert and operatic repertoire. Only a very few works appear on rare occasions in concert, despite the fact that Spohr once occupied a central place in Europe’s musical culture.

The Imperial Afterlife of Warren Hastings, 1818–1947

ABSTRACT This article examines the ‘afterlife’ or posthumous reputation of Warren Hastings, one of the most important and controversial figures in the foundation of British India. Exploring a wide range of sources, it argues that Hastings was a symbolic figure through which generations of imperial commentators vented the political and moral concerns of their own day. Accordingly, it uses his afterlife as a key indicator of the rise and fall of imperial sentiment and confidence in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. Hastings’s afterlife can be divided into three distinct phases. In the first, between 1818 and 1890, the image of Hastings as a flawed hero – an empire-builder who committed crimes – was propelled into popular memory. In the second, between 1890 and 1915, Hastings was transformed into an untouchable imperial icon. Driven by contemporary concerns, a group of ex-Indian officials attempted to vindicate Hastings’s actions and exculpate his ‘crimes’. The third section explores the apotheosis of Hastings’s reputation amidst the growing uncertainty over the future of British India between 1915 and 1947. Following the elevation of a deeply controversial figure into an imperial hero, this article explores the methods and motivations behind the propagation of heroic reputations, demonstrating that our understanding of imperial figures has been mediated through the vagaries of contemporary politics.

Jane Gray’s Framing of Asa Gray through Autobiography, Biography, and Correspondence

Jane Loring Gray, wife of celebrated and renowned Harvard botanist Asa Gray, helped to build up the work and the posthumous reputation of her husband as a leading scientist, an advocate of Charles Darwin, and a popular proponent of science in the nineteenth-century United States. Jane left Asa the scientist for others and wanted to create a portrait of Asa the person. This article discusses the Grays’ partnership in science, places that relationship in context, and stresses the contribution Jane made to Asa’s legacy, including the way she framed her husband’s work and reputation after his death. The emphasis is on the literary, historical, cultural, biographical, and autobiographical dimensions of the Grays’ work, on the implications that work has for botany and science, and on the challenges that Jane Gray had owing to her gender, to family and social roles, and in the face of delicate health.

Reassessing Joseph Bonomi the Elder: The Hawksmoor Prize Essay 2021

ABSTRACTIn the early nineteenth century, Joseph Bonomi the Elder (1739–1808) was one of the best-known architects in Britain — so much so that he figured in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) — but his reputation subsequently declined and diminished to the extent that, in the current literature on British architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, he is little more than a footnote. In a circular process, this excision directly contributed to the demolition of some of his most important work — above all, Rosneath House in Dunbartonshire — on the grounds that it was designed by an architect of little importance, which in turn makes it all the harder to recapture and appraise his architecture. The article explores both the reasons for the excision and the nature of Bonomi’s work. Drawing on the limited available evidence as well as hitherto unused construction drawings of Rosneath, the article repositions Bonomi as an Italian architect working in London — first for the Adam brothers and then on his own account — and examines the qualities of his designs and the factors that led to him being excluded from the inner circle of the artistic establishment, most notably the Royal Academy. In doing so, it sheds new light both on developments in neoclassicism in the period, specifically the ‘stripped down’ style that Bonomi espoused, and on the xenophobic and anti-Catholic currents in London at the time, which appear to have continued to influence his posthumous reputation.

Anderson, Emily Hodgson. Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss.

Anderson, Emily Hodgson. <i>Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss</i>.

“Amany‐sidedcrystal”: Understanding the manifold legacy ofSilvanus Phillips Thompson(1851–1916)

Was Silvanus Phillips Thompson primarily a physicist, electrical engineer, biographer, or teacher? His obituarists could not agree. I argue Thompson was in fact a polymathic generalist who, as a philanthropic Quaker, worked not to promote his own expertise but rather to ensure the public was swiftly informed of the most important techno-scientific research and applications of his contemporaries. I illustrate this in a comparison of Thompson and his longer-lived friend Oliver Lodge: working in closely-related areas, they had contrasting profiles and commitments. After inspecting Thompson's work as textbook author and bibliophile, I resolve his apparently paradoxical status as both radical critic and figurehead of multiple institutions. Finally, to flesh out his friends' representation of him as a “many-sided crystal,” I analyse Thompson's multi-facetted posthumous reputation, especially in reviews of the Life and Letters written by his widow Jane and daughter Helen exactly 100 years ago.

Tennyson and the Gleam

Tennyson and the Gleam A. J. Nickerson (bio) O young Mariner,You from the havenUnder the sea-cliff,You that are watchingThe gray MagicianWith eyes of wonder,I am Merlin,And I am dying,I am MerlinWho follow The Gleam. "Merlin and the Gleam" (1889) In the spring of 1889, Tennyson was very sick with rheumatic gout. He had fallen ill the previous September and suffered two serious relapses in the subsequent nine months. Tennyson seemed to be dying. Benjamin Jowett wrote in December, worrying that "the hour of hope had passed" and commending his friend to God.1 Robert Browning wrote early in the new year, seeking reassurance that "the danger is, if God please, over" (Memoir, 2: 351). Hallam Tennyson later recalled that his father had "been as near death as a man could be without dying" (Memoir, 2: 354). He would eventually recover. But, as Michael Millgate has described in Testamentary Acts (1992), he became increasingly preoccupied with managing his posthumous reputation as he faced what looked like imminent death during his long illness of 1888–1889.2 He had always been sensitive about how he was represented by the press, but death, he thought, would signal the start of an unrestrained and bruising criticism of his life and work.3 W. G. McCabe, reminding Tennyson of the apocryphal stories that had begun circulating after Thackeray's death, suggested that he might authorize a "Life" that would "forestall the 'free-lances.'"4 Tennyson's response, however, was emphatic: "I don't want to be ripped up like a hog when I'm dead" (Page, p. 160). He feared the press, but he also feared the exposure of biography. As McCabe later reflected: "the truth is that the man was by nature so thoroughly a recluse … and that his privacy had been so outrageously invaded by utter strangers, that he had become morbid on the subject" (Page, p. 160). But [End Page 223] Tennyson's illness of 1888–1889 made him reconsider this position. With his posthumous vulnerability now an imminent prospect, Tennyson set about writing a literary history that would speak for him from beyond the grave, securing the parameters of biographical revelation, critical interpretation, and editorial intervention. This literary history took the form of "Merlin and the Gleam" on the one hand, and, on the other, the copious "notes" which Tennyson with the help of his household assembled as a preliminary to a "Life" that would be "final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies" (Memoir, 1: xii). The priority, however, lay not with the biography but with the poem: in the preface to his Memoir, Hallam Tennyson insisted that "for those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote 'Merlin and the Gleam'" (Memoir, 1: xii). This essay takes its cue from Tennyson. It begins with the assumption that there is some truth in Hallam Tennyson's claim that "Merlin and the Gleam" offers an account of his father's "literary history." It takes strength from Hallam Tennyson's suggestion in the Memoir that this account is peculiarly suited to those careful readers or "friends" who (unlike the critics and gossips who would devour the "Life") are both attentive to the verse and sympathetic to the man himself (Memoir, 1: xv). This is an intimate "literary history" for those who cared to know Tennyson as he himself wished to be known: not as a subject for scandalmongering "free-lances," but as a poet who (as Hallam put it) "gives himself" best "in his own works" (Memoir, 1: xi). As such, my claim here is that "Merlin and the Gleam" offers us a unique insight into the ways in which Tennyson understood his own "literary history." Tennyson's late poem draws our attention to the "Gleam," a figure that is present throughout his mature work and which marks out what Stephen Halliwell calls a "domain of self-conscious poetics"—a strand of thought within Tennyson's verse that is explicitly occupied with the aims and affordances of his own verse writing.5 But first we need to establish how, exactly, we ought to read "Merlin...

Mythologizing the Memory of Gloriana

Consideration of Anne Bradstreet’s poem “In Honour of That High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth, of Most Happy Memory” (1643) draws our attention to the paramount significance of mythical imagery in shaping Elizabeth I’s posthumous reputation. The examination of this poem illustrates the ways in which Elizabeth’s memory is glorified and discusses the elegiac mythical reconstruction of her image by what Schweitzer aptly labelled a “gendered poetic voice” (307). This project shows that the poet makes good use of myth to write Elizabeth’s afterlife image. It scrutinizes Bradstreet’s mythological depiction of the last Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, illustrating how a woman poet rewrites the identity of a female sovereign. A close analysis of various mythical, elegiac images celebrating Elizabeth allows us to evaluate Bradstreet’s contribution to her myth-creation. It examines three mythical representations: Elizabeth as an incomparable leader, a Phoenix Queen, and a warrior Amazonian monarch.

Originality, Plagiarism, and Posthumous Publication: Grace Gethin’s Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699)

Abstract This article explores early modern ideas of originality by reconsidering the critical treatment of one of the first printed female-authored volumes of essays in English: Grace, Lady Gethin’s Misery’s Virtues Whet-stone. Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699). Previous scholars of Gethin’s work have used her unacknowledged intertextual borrowings from writers such as Francis Bacon and Joseph Hall to deride her work as unoriginal, plagiaristic, and uninteresting. By comparing Gethin’s essays to her source texts, this article reads Reliquiæ Gethinianæ’s intertextuality as a revealing insight into practices of commonplacing, the literary tastes of early modern women, and the importance of attending to unexceptional readers. It also attempts to reconstruct the intentions behind newly uncovered post-print editing of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ by Gethin’s mother. Manuscript citations made by Frances, Lady Norton in carefully selected copies of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ demonstrate the complex methods used to cultivate and maintain the integrity of Gethin’s posthumous reputation: highlighting her immersion in prestigious scholarly sources, and tactfully downplaying her reliance on Madeleine de Scudéry’s less reputable epic prose romance Clelia (1654–1660).

Nation building across national borders: a Uyghur hero in three socialist states

ABSTRACT The process of nation building often entails the articulation of communal heroes. This paper argues that the elevation of such heroes is particularly significant for minority nations divided between multiple states. The project of building the Uyghur nation, carried out across the borders of three twentieth-century socialist states, offers a unique opportunity for examining this phenomenon. In particular, the Uyghur case offers insight into the many minority communities whose nation building process was linked to twentieth-century socialism. This paper traces the posthumous reputation of Sadir Palwan, a nineteenth-century resistance fighter against the Qing empire who in the twentieth century was reinterpreted as a Uyghur national hero. Drawing on poetry, fiction, journal articles, and textbooks, the paper demonstrates that the project of articulating a heroic canon allowed Uyghur intellectuals to work across state borders as they shaped an identity for their nation outside the nation-state framework.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Posthumous consecration in rock’s legitimating discourse

This article advances the concept of posthumous consecration. I first draw on previous literature to demonstrate that posthumous reputations are important components of fields before conceptualizing a “posthumous” variant of cultural consecration and then adopting this concept in thematic and content analyses of rock album reviews. Through my analyses of 336 lifetime and posthumous album reviews, I find two salient discursive processes in the album review sections of rock magazines that follow in the wake of the death of a consecrated figure. First, critics revise the categorical boundaries spanned by rock artists after their deaths. I find striking patterns in how critics draw comparisons between rockers who made their recording debut either before or after 1975 that suggest the categorical membership(s) ascribed by critics to living and dead public figures in a cultural field are dependent on the degree of autonomy at the level of the field. I use this finding to develop the argument that death plays a critical role in how cultural fields achieve autonomy. Second, I find that irrespective of whether the field has a high or low degree of autonomy, critics ascribe coherence to an artist’s body of work to a much greater extent in reviews of posthumous offerings compared to reviews of lifetime offerings. I argue that coherence is highly valued within rock’s legitimating discourse and critics are more likely to attribute coherence to the works of deceased rock musicians which contributes to their symbolic advantage over their living counterparts.

Defining interdisciplinarity and indentifying Research directions in Jani Christou’s Strychnine lady

Jani Christou was a major Greek composer, whose unusual, yet promising career was brought to an end after his untimely death in 1970 at the age of 44. His challenging and speculative output has intrigued generation of young music scholars; however, J. Christou’s work remains imperfectly and only patchily known and understood, especially outside Greece. This is partly because of the interdisciplinary nature of his late works which reduces the possibility of potential researchers who will academically establish J. Christou’s distinguished output. The aim of the present paper is to present and analyse parts of Strychnine Lady, a work composed in 1967 in order to propose research directions in an effort to confi rm J. Christou’s posthumous reputation.

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace ed. by Ralph Clare

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace ed. by Ralph Clare Vernon W. Cisney CLARE, RALPH, ed. The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 284 pp. $89.99 hardcover; $29.99 cloth; $24.00 e-book. This outstanding collection, edited by Ralph Clare, offers a welcome addition to the rapidly growing world of David Foster Wallace Studies. One of the aspects of Wallace’s work that makes it so difficult to compile a comprehensively focused collection of this sort is the sheer range of Wallace’s skills as an intellectual and creative virtuoso. Not only was his development deeply informed by cutting-edge trends in literature and literary theory (trends which he sought to incorporate and transcend), but his writerly comportment was also shaped by his background in academic philosophy. In addition, Wallace’s writing functioned both emotionally and intellectually, with the result that his works have not only connected with professional authors and academics, but have attracted a wide popular audience as well. Finally, while many authors limit themselves to a few primary modes of expression, Wallace was accomplished in a wide array of outlets, from his maximalist Infinite Jest to his work in philosophy of mathematics and his popular essays and short stories. This multifarious breadth makes the excellence of this Cambridge Companion that much more impressive. To address this virtuosity, Clare, taking a lead from philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, describes his editorial approach as oriented by the desire to construct a “Wallace-without-Organs” (6). Taking as his inspirations the collaborative construction of Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, as well as Wallace’s expressed desire to create works that are, by nature, dialogical, Clare’s collection aspires to the constitution of a “Wallace in flux” (6), or, even better, Wallaces in flux, as opposed to the would-be “authentic” Wallace—Wallace as a consciously and collaboratively constructed, multifaceted assemblage, with potentialities constantly emerging and reaching into new directions, rather than Wallace as a unified regulative ideal to which scholarship draws ever nearer. To that end, Clare has assembled a stellar cadre of fifteen accomplished scholars, and together they pull off the difficult task of engaging, with an agile blend of breadth and precision, the majority of Wallace’s corpus. The collection is bookended by a thorough chronology of Wallace’s life, works, and posthumous reputation in the front of the book and a helpful bibliography of secondary literature in the back. The collection itself is broken into four major sections. The first part, focused on “Historical and Cultural Contexts,” contains pieces by Marshall Boswell, Andrew Hoberek, and Lee Konstantinou. Boswell’s piece situates the development of Wallace’s [End Page 344] writing from the perspective of his generational moment, the late 1980s and early 1990s. This moment is marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama’s famous declaration of the “end of history”—the “triumph” of global capitalism. Unlike his contemporaries, Boswell argues, Wallace’s early work embodies the apolitical aimlessness of this moment, allowing him to explore the barrage of “information, entertainment, and the pursuit of pleasure” (30) that accompanies adolescence. Hoberek’s piece examines Wallace’s position as a uniquely American author—“a late exponent of the romance tradition described by Richard Chase as the American answer to the European realist novel” (37). Part I ends with Konstantinou’s piece, which surveys the development of Wallace’s reception in the decade since his death— from the demiurgic “Saint Dave” and the icon of the so-called “lit-bros” to the vilified manipulator decried by critics such as Amy Hungerford. Konstantinou’s piece explores a multitude of ways of conceptualizing the relationship between Wallace-the-person and Wallace-the-author, ultimately siding with Jennifer Egan in viewing Wallace’s contribution to modern literature as monumentally important, but as one among others, acting as a powerful inspiration but nevertheless an object of honest criticism, avoiding the Scylla of beatification and the Charybdis of demonization. Part II is titled “Early Works, Story Collections, and Nonfiction.” Of the four major sections, Part II appears to be the least cohesive. This likely derives from...