Julian Wolfeys is Professor of English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, where he is also Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature. He is author and editor of more than 40 books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature and literary theory. Most recently he has published Dickens’s London and The Derrida Wordbook, both with Edinburgh University Press. He recently published his first novel, Silent Music.

• Introduction: New Critical Thinking, to Read so as to Become AcquaintedJulian Wolfreys　1. Turnings and Re-TurningsMary Ann Caws2. ‘Peering into the dark machinery’: Modernity, Perception, and the Self in John Burnside’s PoetryMonika Szuba3. Modernity’s Sylvan Subjectivity, from Gainsborough to GallaccioCatherine Bernard4. Little Did They Know: Toward an Experiential ApproachSarah Pardon5. ‘The Heart cannot forget / Unless it contemplates / What it declines’: Emily Dickinson, Frank Ankersmit, and the Art of ForgettingPáraic Finnerty6. Reading Microhistory: Three Layers of MeaningAnton Froeyman7. Writing Fiction, Making History: Historical Narrative and the Process of Creating HistoryChristine Berberich8. Witnessing, Recognition, and Response EthicsKelly Oliver9. A Norwegian Abroad: Camilla Collett’s Travelogues from Berlin to ParisTone Selboe10. Alfred Jarry’s Nietzschean ModernismJean-Michel Rabaté11. On First Looking into Derrida’s Glas, J. Hillis Miller12. ‘A very black and little Arab Jew’: Experience and Experimentation or, Two Words for Jacques DerridaJulian Wolfreys

New Critical Thinking is positively alarming, a ‘call to arms’. In the remarkable range of its quite brilliant essays, it arms and disarms us at once, shocking us with the serious unpredictability of research, forging a critical attitude that is always an opening to what might come about: essaying as becoming, as possibility. Utterly outstanding.