In recent years, there has been a return of and to Literary Studies in the academy, after what is characterized as its eclipse, since the 1970s, by the theoretical turn across the human sciences and by Cultural Studies in the literary humanities. Scholars and critics of verbal art are revisiting and revaluing their field’s characteristic method of close reading, and there has been a revival of older methods of literary study, seen in strenuous calls for a “New Philology” or a philological turn in the field, which is to say a return and renewal of the historical and linguistic study of texts, more generally (Wakefield 2016; Herrnstein-Smith 2016; Ferguson 2013; Eagleton 2007; Barlow 2007). […]