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This article questions the extent to which interpretation explains literature, arguing that interpretation and explanation are not the same thing. It first engages with recent critical discussions of method and explanation in literary studies, finding that they are not much about method at all. It then offers a methodological framework that goes beyond various \"method wars\" over \"critique\" and \"postcritique,\" and toward ways of explaining literature that are not reducible to matters of interpretation.

[...]even as ideas of the global or transnational valuably enhance the scope of Victorian studies, they can do so without necessarily troubling those spatial and temporal solidities that cohere in the name of “nation” (which tends to conflate “British” with “Victorian”). [...]the terrain of empire, where the “nation” itself is in various stages of making, unmaking, and nonmaking (and we tend to forget the latter two because of the nationalist teleology that the hindsight of the twentieth century gives us) provides a more apt lens for studying beneath, above, and beyond the nation. [...]an implicit assumption of lag precipitates a culturalist disavowal of the non-West, a disavowal that interrupts otherwise putatively continuous political identities (for instance, after 1858, Indians were subjects of the British Crown, notionally on par with Britons).

James Joyce’s “Circe” episode in Ulysses , by way of its closet drama form, raises questions at the center of ongoing debates on reading practice and method. Joyce uses the closet drama genre, whose name and tradition call attention to depth and concealment, to examine the relationship between surfaces and depths. Instances of free indirect discourse and interior monologue within the “Circe” episode’s stage directions renegotiate reader receptivity and accessibility. Ultimately, “Circe” is not only a consideration of surfaces and depths but also the relationship between action and contemplation. Honoring the closet drama’s historical function as pedagogical and philosophical apparatus, “Circe” is an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between theory and practice in literary studies.

Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies continuities between past and present celebrity cultures, this essay provides a new way of interconnecting Dickinson's complex response to nineteenth-century celebrity and her twenty-firstcentury celebrity status. It argues that examining Dickinson's appropriation of her era's celebrity discourse to create her defiant authorial identity helps illuminate aspects of her representation in recent biopics that foreground her queer iconicity. Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's correspondence reveals her fascination with celebrity and exemplifies the ways in which in her lifetime she constructed her notability among a coterie of admirers by defying expectations determining public success and failure and conventions separating public and private figures. Originally outside the public view, Dickinson's defiance as a poet and person has subsequently become a signature aspect of her posthumous reputation, with recent films such as A Quiet Passion (2016) and Wild Nights with Emily (2018) and the Apple TV+ series Dickinson (2019-2021) developing the insights of biographical and critical studies that emphasize her gender and sexual non-conformity. These visual works highlight a rebellious Dickinson's availability to endorse queer lives and experiences and her growing status as an LGBTQ+ icon. Viewed in the context of Dickinson's negotiations with nineteenth-century celebrity culture, these works can also be said to grapple with her queer celebrity: her position as an anomalous figure whose twenty-first-century popularity stems from her shunning of nineteenth-century mass-media attention and her disordering, or queering, in her writings of its distinctions between publicity and privacy to curate her circumscribed renown.

According to Sedgwick, paranoia works to anticipate and to ward off negative feeling, in particular \"the negative affect of humiliation\" (145). In this sense, the image of the paranoid person is both aggressive and wounded, knowing better but feeling worse, lashing out from a position of weakness. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters and creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.

It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (2018), edited by Carolyn Williams; The Drama of Celebrity (2019), by Sharon Marcus; and Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.

Best and Marcus’s surface reading urges scholars to embrace descriptive reading practices. I argue that they misread both de Man when claiming that texts need no readerly intervention and Jameson in their account of symptomatic reading. I also take issue with their claim that we are post-ideological.