The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay occupies an immense historical space, extending from the streets of Nazi-occupied Prague to a solitary base in Antarctica, to pre-World War II Manhattan and its post-war suburbs. The novel’s main protagonist, Josef Kavalier, traverses nations, genres, and ideologies in an attempt to find a stable home and a defined Self. He and his cousin, Sammy Clay, help bring about the golden age of comic books with their fantastical creations and innovative designs, only to become disenfranchised with the figures they created.

In “The Future of the Novel,” D.H. Lawrence lamented the “self-consciousness” of the modern novel, complaining of characters “absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel,” and dismissing such work as “awful” and “childish” (152). To Lawrence, the then-fashionable stream-of-consciousness experiments of other early modernists, namely James Joyce, lacked a vitality that only engagement with the objective—the real, physical world—could provide. Two years later, however, Virginia Woolf expressed a seemingly opposite sentiment.

In early modern London, rising consumer culture and rising tension about gender roles generated a heated discourse around the commodification of beauty, its definition, and the gendering of its production and consumption. The conceptualizations of beauty at the time privileged the male gaze and revealed cultural anxieties about the legibility of gender and the female subject/body.

What is this soul then? Whence

Came it? It does not seem my own, and I

Have no self-passion or identity

—John Keats, Endymion (IV: 475-477)[1]

Poetry without egotism comparatively uninteresting.

—Coleridge, Notebooks (v. 1: 62)[2]

“one cannot help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth,—the one altogether poet; the other essentially a Wordsworth, with the poetic faculty added—the one shifting from form to form, and from style to style […] the other remaining always the individual”

Arguments regarding the potential for a representational model to approach or achieve reality date back to Plato and Aristotle, yet become increasingly relevant given literature’s preoccupation with assimilating and deciphering the impact of technological advancements and online communication. Written pre-Internet, thought experiments such as Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” argue for a distinct difference between the model and the reality on which it is based, presenting the former as inevitably failing in comparison to the latter.

In 1936, American expatriate writer Djuna Barnes published her fifth book, Nightwood. Set throughout Europe and America, Nightwoodfollows the lovers of Robin Vote as they attempt to comprehend the otherworldly woman and their attraction to her. Meanwhile, the transgender doctor Matthew O’Connor provides intermittent philosophical monologues detailing the nature of love, sleep, and death.

Introduction:

“Telling a half that has hardly ever been told.” (“Kei Miller”)

On May 15, 1918, Henry Johnson, a private in the all-black 369^th United States Infantry Regiment, armed with only a knife, protected both himself and a wounded comrade from a German attack on the Western Front of World War I. On June 2, 2015, nearly eighty-six years after Johnson’s death, President Barack Obama awarded him the Medal of Honor (“Medal of Honor: Sergeant Henry Johnson”). This award raises two questions: why was Johnson, the first American to receive the French Croix de Guerre (Nelson 107), not given military honors by his own country sooner?