Coleman Hutchison

Breaking the Book Known as Q

This essay considers a series of questions about the relations between material presentation and poetic meaning that emerge from a simple but under-acknowledged fact about the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets quarto: unlike nearly every other sonnet sequence from the period, Q’s poems are broken by a series of nonuniform, seemingly arbitrary page breaks. Arguing that these breaks have profound implications for the interpretation and reception of Shakespeare’s poems, the essay suggests that not reading page breaks is itself a reading practice—a historically specific, socially determined act in which certain elements of materiality are granted attention and authority while others are not. Espousing instead an approach to the materiality of Shake-speares Sonnets that would take seriously the matter of Q’s page breaks, this essay understands the page and the page break to be units of meaning with particularly urgent implications for the recognition of poetic form and for the interrelations between a history of the ...

After the Eruption: Melville and the Cultural Memory of the American Civil War

A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 145 the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance” (v). For theorists like Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Marita Sturken, such variability and variance is at the heart of any experience of collective memory. Thus, by charting Melville’s interest in and infl uence on cultural memory, the panel put literary studies in closer conversation with recent work in Civil War history that has emphasized contested memorial practices. In “Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand”: The Liminal Dedication of Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War Robert Arbour Indiana University This paper begins and ends with an often overlooked aspect of Battle-Pieces. However ordinary Melville’s dedication may seem, it invokes not “three hundred thousand” soldiers who died in the Civil War, but their “memory,” framing the sui generis book as a self-conscious memorializing project that interrogates from the start the production of cultural memory. Artfully nebulous, the dedication draws on several contemporary strategies for commemorating the war even as it resists each of them. Its impersonal yet conventional rhetoric converses with the dedications of popular sentimental poems in 1866. Its typography braids together the permanence of the epitaph and the volatility of the newspaper poem and the telegraphic bulletin. Its lapidary form suggests the monuments in the national cemeteries where the Federal dead were identifi ed and reinterred while its anonymity evokes the mass graves that housed Confederate corpses or the inevitable blankness of the customizable memorial lithographs marketed to American families during the war. An index of the poetry it precedes, the dedication also indexes Melville’s literary career, reaching back to the ironic dedication of Israel Potter to connect the work of the aspiring poet to the anxieties over popularity and public memory in his forgotten prose. The dedication of Battle-Pieces is a liminal pastiche that challenges precisely the unitary memory it addresses and reveals any cultural memory, of war or of a writer, to be a collage of diverse cultural texts, as fl uid as it is incomplete. Melville and the Shaping of the Civil War Canon Timothy Sweet West Virginia University This paper considers Melville’s place in the Civil War’s literary canon, focusing on the centennial of the war as a key moment, particularly as canon-building

Step Right Up, Come On In . . .

Over the past decade some very exciting things — and some very queer things — have been happening in U.S. southern studies. Invigorated by a wholesale reassessment of the region’s place in the world, the “New Southern Studies” offers novel approaches to the U.S. South’s histories and mythologies. Part and parcel of this reassessment has been an increased attention to “sexual otherness” in southern lives and letters.1 Michael P. Bibler’s superb new book, Cotton’s Queer Relations, makes a significant and deft contribution to these scholarly conversations, in no small part because it addresses forthrightly same-sex intimacy in one of the South’s most important and most troubling cultural institutions, the plantation. Too long steeped in the sentimental muck of “moonlight and magnolias” (think Gone with the Wind’s opening, prewar scenes at Twelve Oaks), the southern plantation is, Bibler helps us to see, a more complicated imaginative space, one whose perverse logics may paradoxically give rise to progressive social ends. At the heart of this earnest book is an argument about power differentials. Bibler reads a series of mid-twentieth-century texts as refashioning the plantation “into an intrinsically queer cultural space — a space where queer southerners appear to live, sometimes freely and openly, as central players in the story of the South” (2). Over some three hundred pages, Bibler posits and pursues three figurative models of same-sex intimacy: among white men of the planter class, among plantation mistresses and African American maids, and among black revolutionaries. Because such intimacies subvert the “heterosexualized, paternalistic