Once More With Feeling

The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture by Lauren Berlant. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.Pp.353. $84.95 cloth,$23.95 paper.

Emily Dickinson’s Teenage Fanclub

This essay explores the 1882 publication of “Success is counted sweetest” in the Amateur Journal, a newspaper edited by eighteen-year-old Albert E. Barker of Judsonia, Arkansas. The Amateur Journal was part of a fad that swept the United States after the Civil War, when thousands of teenage boys began publishing their own newspapers on diminutive printing presses. At its height in the 1880s, amateur journalism linked boys across the country into tightly knit virtual communities with their own distribution methods, literary conventions, social customs, and vernaculars. Barker likely reprinted “Success is counted sweetest” from the anonymous anthology A Masque of Poets, which had appeared four years before, and Dickinson was almost certainly unaware of her distant adolescent fan. But Barker’s adoption of the poem—and, in a series of intriguing editorial interventions, his adaptation of it—transforms its paean to failure into a manifesto for amateurdom, networking Dickinson into one of the earliest teenage subcultures

Solomon Northup’s Singing Book

This essay examines the musical score included at the end of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), a setting of a song called “Roaring River” that Northup earlier recounted enslaved people singing as they patted juba. I argue that “Roaring River” stages questions that the narrative itself cannot ask about how to represent the experience of slavery once one is outside of it. In particular, it asks how to love what’s made in the shadow of slavery—the intimacies forged, and especially the music borne of them

The Perils Of Authorship: Literary Propoerty And Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

This chapter examines the perils associated with American authorship during the early nineteenth century, with particular reference to issue of intellectual property and copyright. It begins with an analysis of the impact of intellectual property rights on publishing and the culture of reprinting, along with the influence of copyright on the American novel. It then considers the problem concerning the definition of “American authorship” and how the unstable nature of American authorship subjected writers who wished to promote it to charges of fraudulence. It also explores the question of originality among writers before concluding with a discussion of the radical expansion of publishing in the post-Civil War era and its effects on literary property and literary nationalism

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)1.

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field

Half a century of amyloids: past, present and future

Amyloid diseases are global epidemics with profound health, social and economic implications and yet remain without a cure. This dire situation calls for research into the origin and pathological manifestations of amyloidosis to stimulate continued development of new therapeutics. In basic science and engineering, the cross-ß architecture has been a constant thread underlying the structural characteristics of pathological and functional amyloids, and realizing that amyloid structures can be both pathological and functional in nature has fuelled innovations in artificial amyloids, whose use today ranges from water purification to 3D printing. At the conclusion of a half century since Eanes and Glenner's seminal study of amyloids in humans, this review commemorates the occasion by documenting the major milestones in amyloid research to date, from the perspectives of structural biology, biophysics, medicine, microbiology, engineering and nanotechnology. We also discuss new challenges and opportunities to drive this interdisciplinary field moving forward. This journal i