08/13/2026:

Anthologizing a Chameleon Poet: An Answer to Roland Weidle

Thomas Kullmann, Connotations, Vol. 35: 113-122.

Abstract

Answering to Roland Weidle’s response to my article on the presence of Shakespeare’s sonnets in anthologies, this contribution suggests that, while Jakobson’s model of communication cannot fully account for the complexities of the communicative situations recorded in the sonnets, it makes certain particularities visible, such as the high rate of “I-and-thou” sonnets in which the conative and emotive mode of communication intertwine. It also contends that Weidle’s approach corresponds to mine since we both argue that sonnets were chosen for thematic reasons and not because they are typical or representative. Moreover, I concur with Weidle in stating that Shakespeare’s sonnets deal with a wide variety of topics and emotional states. My point is that anthologies usually do not do justice to this “chameleon”-like character of Shakespeare the poet and do not show an awareness of the sonnets’ function as both mirrors and instruments of courtly interaction.

08/12/2026:

The Memoir-Novel as Revisionist History: A Response to Katrin Berndt

Eleni Coundouriotis, Connotations, Vol. 35: 103-112.

Abstract

Katrin Berndt’s formalist analysis of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory emphasizes the text’s use of metagenre to convey the entanglement of memory with identity that shows both in constant transformation. This response to Berndt has two key aims. It extends Berndt’s analysis to explore how the novel provides historical insights about Zimbabwe that become available to the reader when the novel is read as metageneric. To do so, the response also situates Gappah’s novel more fully within the Zimbabwean literary tradition as well as in relation to contemporary trends in African writing, particularly novels that deploy innovative narrative techniques to engage with the historical past.

05/12/2026:

Natural Images of Death and Rebirth, and Pastoral Longing, in Milton and Herbert

David V. Urban, Connotations, Vol. 35: 69-102.

Abstract

This essay discusses how various poems of Milton and Herbert use natural images of death and rebirth to reflect the spiritual condition of humanity. The depiction of nature in Milton’s epic Paradise Lost ultimately foregrounds the spiritual condition of humanity as a whole, while Milton’s elegy Lycidas uses nature to illustrate the spiritual rebirth of the poem’s subject. By contrast, Herbert’s lyric poems “Easter Wings,” “Vertue,” “Life,” and “The Flower” portray nature in ways that draw attention to the spiritual state of each poem’s autobiographical speaker. Both authors’ poetry suggests that, in a fallen world, the ideal pastoral is lost in this life, leaving fallen humanity with a longing for that lost Paradise; through Christ’s redemption, however, readers can know a spiritual redemption that looks forward to an eternal state greater than Eden.

03/23/2026:

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” and Its Intertexts

Burkhard Niederhoff, Connotations, Vol. 35: 47-68.

Abstract

“The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” is an early story by Robert Louis Stevenson that has been neglected by literary critics. The present essay makes a case for this tale and its complexity by interpreting it as a rewriting of two other texts. The first is Stevenson’s own short story “A Lodging for the Night.” What Stevenson takes from this story is the situation of a young man exposed to life-threatening danger in the dark streets of a nocturnal town, and a debate between this young man and an old man in whose house he seeks shelter. There is, however, a significant change. In “A Lodging for the Night,” the young man voices cynical views, while the old man upholds honour and morality; in “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door,” these roles are reversed. The second source is Théodore de Banville’s history play Gringoire. What Stevenson takes from this play is the situation of a young man and a young woman unknown to each other who are left alone for a very short time to make up their minds to marry; if they fail to do so, the man will be hanged. Here, too, Stevenson changes his source, rendering the characters and the motives of the young people, who are entirely selfless and noble in Gringoire, more questionable. Compared with “A Lodging for the Night,” “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” is idealistic; compared with Gringoire, it is sceptical.

03/03/2026:

On the Notion of the Counter-Flâneur: A Response to Cecile Sandten

Eva Ries, Connotations, Vol. 35: 32-46.

Abstract

This essay responds to Cecile Sandten’s article “‘Vancouver Walking’: Con­temporary Canadian Urban Poetry” and critically examines the concept of the “counter-flâneur.” Sandten adopts it from Isabel Carrera-Suarez, defines it in opposition to a supposedly unified conceptualisation of the “modernist flâneur” and employs it as an analytical tool in the study of contemporary flânerie texts. The essay challenges this binary framework by arguing that there is no single, coherent idea of the modernist flâneur. Instead, it suggests that the history of the trope is marked by internal tensions and contradictions that have always allowed for practices resembling counter-flânerie. To substantiate this claim, the essay first delineates the heterogeneity present in classic literary descriptions and theoretical accounts of the flâneur. It then examines the relationship between privilege and precariousness in the history of flânerie, before concluding with a re-reading of Meredith Quartermain’s poem “Thanksgiving” that is grounded in the assumption of diverse traditions of flânerie.

02/18/2026:

Strange Case of Stevenson and Unseen Collaborators: “A Chapter on Dreams” as a Textual Double of Jekyll and Hyde

Gero Guttzeit, Connotations, Vol. 35: 13-31.

Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “A Chapter on Dreams” is his most prominent discussion of how his 1886 novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, came into being. This article situates the essay in the history of the literary autocommentary, analyses its relationship to Jekyll and Hyde as one of doubling, and reads it as a contribution to authorship theory. Unlike the dark, fractured doppelganger in Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson’s reflections on authorship in “A Chapter on Dreams” invoke the Scottish Brownies—as a humorous and invisible version of the Gothic double—to playfully illuminate the sometimes happy, sometimes haunting multiplication of selves in the process of literary composition.

01/27/2026:

Rilke, Richter, and Wallace Stevens's "Chaos"

Clay Daniel, Connotations, Vol. 35: 1-12.

Abstract

One of the puzzles of Wallace Stevens’s “Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion” is how Ludwig Richter could unleash the articulate “brutality” of some of Stevens’s “harshest lines” (Helen Vendler). Much of the poem’s explosive energy can be more readily related to Rainer Maria Rilke. The poem’s circumstances, images, metaphors, and (to a lesser extent) theme(s) readily link with those in Rilke’s exploration of divine relations with humanity as he contemplated an aesthetic embodiment of medieval Christian faith: “L’Ange du Méridien,” from his Cathedral Cycle in Neue Gedichte/New Poems (1907). After examining these intersections, I will link them to Surrealism, whose excesses are sourced, by Stevens, in Richter. And, at least implicitly, “something more / Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter”—the energizing source for Stevens’s own surrealistic poem—is located in Rilke. This aspect, amidst a thick intertextuality, indicates that it is quite plausible, if not likely, that Stevens is responding to Rilke’s poem.

12/07/2025:

A Footnote to Lesley Graham “‘Scott’s Voyage in the Lighthouse Yacht’ and Intertextual Transmission”

Richard Dury, Connotations, Vol. 34: 299-301.

Abstract

This note offers further examples of Stevenson’s awareness of disappearing Scottish culture and his desire to record examples of it in another remote area of the country.

11/03/2025:

For a More Comprehensive Approach: A Response to Thomas Kullmann’s “Anthologizing Shakespeare’s Sonnets”

Roland Weidle, Connotations, Vol. 34: 289-298.

Abstract

Responding to Thomas Kullmann’s model of communicative modes to explain the popularity of why some of Shakespeare’s sonnets have been preferred over others in anthologies, this article proposes expanding Kullmann’s approach into a more comprehensive model that also takes into consideration the sonnets’ thematic, aesthetic, formal, and rhetorical features. After summarizing Kullmann’s main arguments, the response addresses what I believe to be some of the model’s problems in its interpretation of data, its methodology, and argumentation. Based on a more sustainable interpretation of Kullmann’s data, a more comprehensive approach is suggested that also focuses on a sonnet’s thematic concerns, its stylistic sophistication, and whether and how it communicates emotional states and experiences that readers can relate to. Of equal relevance to a sonnet’s popularity is its place in the sequence and the question whether it continues an argument from a previous sonnet or can be understood as a stand-alone poem. Lastly, the degree to which a sonnet exhibits “passionate rationality” (Burrow 91) is also a significant factor in its popular appeal.

10/27/2025:

Approaching Canonicity through a Digital Inventory of Exempla: A Response to William E. Engel

Grant Williams, Connotations, Vol. 34: 275-288.

Abstract

My response offers an alternative to Engel’s metacognitive view by exploring how the rhetorical device of the exemplum illuminates the problem of canonicity. The pitfall of canonicity is, simply put, the exclusion of marginalized voices from a literary collection. When Engel, Loughnane, and I selected the passages for our anthology The Death Arts in Renaissance England, our fear of this pitfall did not arise from expecting ideological lapses, but from the limitations of the inductive method, that which scholars, to some degree or another, strive to implement when selecting texts. I argue that one can avoid such fear of leaving someone out by conducting an inductive inquiry through what I call a “digital inventory.” My reflections are based upon my current death-art project that collects from the EEBO-TCP the exempla of Herostratus, a premodern antecedent of cancel culture. Because a digital inventory transparently sets the parameters around one’s own canon, it can provide visible justification for the contingency and provisionality of one’s selection of texts. It is also a heuristic tool for delving into the EEBO-TCP, neither bound to the traditional canon’s terms of “author” and “work” nor restricted to the notion of the representative—either the popular or the famous.