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Author's Note: The following review was composed the year after the summer of 2020. In content and tone, the beginning and conclusion to this piece especially reflect the moment of its writing. Instead of trying to update its observations, I have decided to keep everything as is, documenting a singular historical topicality underwriting the review that, paradoxically, still inflects our own ongoing rush, like Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, into a radically uncertain future. Rhetorically, this extends to attentive readers noticing the similarity between my opening line and William N. West's from his Spring 2021 "Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama." By keeping my opening line the same, I intentionally second West's, associating my sentiment with not only a personal but also a collective response to an event or series of events that we remain in the wake of, with "we" being all those invested in the fate of this planet and of a continued critical reflection on literary studies, as well as the exorbitantly incommensurate but nevertheless ineluctable relationship between the two.
THE END(S) OF A PROFESSION
What a year
That was my first less than insightful thought as I stared at my monitor, trying to begin this SEL overview. And then, of course: it hasn't been only a year. It hasn't been only a year or even the length of the previous presidential administration that significant groups of people in the United States and elsewhere in and beyond the Anglophone world suffered racialized state terror as a routine aspect of their lives. It hasn't been only a year since practices of the Anthropocene wreaked havoc on a planetary scale, from global warming to ongoing interventions in nonhuman ecosystems that are the main background story behind COVID-19 and all-too-possible future epidemics. It also hasn't been only a year that the humanities, including nineteenth-century literary studies, suffered a waning of institutional support where, now because of COVID-19, the intensity of that fading feels like a change not only in degree but also in kind.
It is impossible to write that last sentence and not feel a disorientation in scale, between it and the previous two sentences about racial violence and the Anthropocene. But that is the predicament of the nineteenth-century scholar-critic, all too...