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Like the working class of nineteenth-century Britain, we should take practical actions like unionizing, actively supporting adjuncts, fighting for post-docs and other support for students having a tough time on the job market, gathering allies from across the disciplines to save ourselves from extinction, and finding ways of making our knowledge useful to those groups challenging neoliberalism in the world beyond the academy. [...]we have had a shifting and various canon: one that includes Chartist pamphlets and three-decker novels; songs of shirts and idylls of kings; poetry by an author who consisted of an aunt and niece in an amorous relationship; domestic, industrial, and imperial novels; adventure and detective stories; the first science fiction; travel writing; sanitary reform tracts; and political economy.

Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book , published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “ the book”—that is, about early modern Britain ( Nature ). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History , “ the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

Denotative, literal, and technical language—transparent and lacking in resonance—seems to be the opposite of literary language. A vigorous reading of the former, we argue, should seek to realize its opacity and difficulty, its nonidentity with itself. To do so requires a revised and expanded sense of denotation, a rethinking of reference, the dereification of writing, an appeal to more expansive and heterodox archives, a historicism that forestalls or delays the figural, and more reading. Unlike recent literary critical attempts to restrict the field of reading, the practices sketched here seek to remove all limits to that which can be read, researched, and made into meaning.

Ghostly reference is a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the free play of belief and the production of worlds—two necessary conditions for the formation and sustenance of the liberal subject. In various fictions and one historical circumstance, this essay tries to take ghosts literally, to ask what they are as well as what they mean.

Does the novelist, like the philosopher, need her “poor”? In this essay, Elizabeth Gaskell's is the test case for the idea that narrators (and, by extension, novelists) need their characters to be poor—intellectually, physically, spiritually—that narrators might remain rich. Certain formal aspects of the novel, including free indirect discourse and omniscience (which is regarded as a ubiquitous discourse outside the novel as well), are held responsible for this state of affairs, which may extend well into postmodern forms of fiction.

[...] the anomalous novel is finally the formal and generic partner of its canonical counterpart: both realize the work of the mainstream realist novel, which is to provide us with reference that can always be returned to the fictional realm in which it is enclosed-materially, ontologically, and by the self-referential and unrealistic fictions that surround it on all sides. [...] the anomaly of the nineteenth-century novel: its always-realized promise of reference; its guaranteed option to return apparent factuality to fictionality.

What if in the final minutes of your heavying descending the landing strip kept lying changing you back into the air the way a white backs away in anger when you approach with the directions you've been asked? —Ed Roberson, “The Aerialist Narratives” The fate of the nation is foretold in the arcs of birds, in the flight patterns of the ruling class, in the strip of runway hard to see in the fog. Only through the scrutiny of all such lines will our fates grow clear. —Joseph Donahue, “Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson”

The nutmeg-grater seller whom Prizel writes about uses what she calls his disability to make his poverty deserving: he is upright though on his knees (he cannot stand); he engages us with dignity, looking straight ahead, but not at the camera. Because he does not beg, but rather offers nutmeg graters for sale on his deformed arms, he performs the deservedness necessary to a political economy in which charity is based on a strict moral calculus, although profit is not. Prizel left the image of the nutmeg-grater seller up on the screen for a large part of her talk: we had to contend with him, to look at his knee pads, lovely hair, fine-featured face, and shriveled arms.