In 2011, Palgrave published The Return of Theory: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, edited by Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds. Three years on, Palgrave brings us The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II, also edited by Cefalu and Reynolds, along with Gary Kuchar. Cefalu, Reynolds, and Kuchar explain Volume II’s origin, observing that Return’s focus on “cognitivism, political theology, and materialism” ignored “equally availing approaches, such as ecocriticism, affect theory, historical phenomenology, and a startling proliferation of work dedicated to redefining what constitutes the ‘human’ both in present and early modern contexts” (1). Volume II was conceived as a “companion” rather than a “sequel” because the approaches it features — posthumanism, ecocriticism, historical phenomenology, and what the editors call “Historicism Now” are not “simply alternative theories and methods that might be added to those in the first volume; they also update, develop, or refine them, in some cases offering expansions or second-generation versions of their predecessors” (1).

This explanation seems unduly complicated, and troublingly speeded up: “second-generation versions of their predecessors”? That said, the essays presented in Volume II, like those in The Return of Theory, address a problem in the current return to theory, one identified by Jonathan Gil Harris in his 2011 review of the year’s work in Tudor and Stuart drama, published in Studies in English Literature. The problem is that the return to theory has been a haunting, the result not just of “dynamic intellectual challenges to historicist orthodoxy,” but also of the employment crisis: “Although there are a number of important younger voices represented . . . a good many of the people responsible for the ‘new’ theoretical turn have been in the academy for some time, and theirs are voices thoroughly versed in the methods that preceded the quarter-century historicist supremacy. Perhaps that is why older methods such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Frankfurt School Marxism are well represented . . . while newer methods — the kinds more likely to be purveyed by junior professors fresh out of graduate school — are all but absent” (502–03). The editors of Volume II bring us young and even new voices — not scholars like Marjorie Garber or Hugh Grady, among the eminences Harris identifies as fronting this return. Volume II features work by two scholars not on the tenure track (Edward J. Geisweidt and Dan Mills), by three assistant professors (Drew Daniel, James Kuzner, and Matthew J. Smith), and by five associate professors (Joseph Campana, Kenneth J. E. Graham, James A. Knapp, Douglas Trevor, and Julian Yates).

In a review of this length, it is impossible even to sketch the arguments of each of these writers or of the others not already mentioned whose work also appears in Volume II — Ken Hiltner, Julia Reinhard Lupton, and Christopher Stokes. Rather, I stress the significant theoretical agreement among the arguments, especially as it relates to historicism and the employment crisis. Anti-dualism is key here. Whether linked specifically to actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, or New Materialism, three-quarters of the critics in Volume II agree with Yates that we now know “no stable boundaries between kinds of beings: animal, plant, fungus; or between differing states of animation; organic and inorganic; the living and the dead” (16). Flattened, anti-dualistic ontology drives the collection’s voices and their examinations of subjectivity, agency, or the human, in Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Cavendish, and others. Compelling to this reviewer, however, are the outliers here — Kuzner, Graham, and Knapp, especially Kuzner and Graham — who focus on matters political or economic. In an essay about Habermas and Milton, Kuzner necessarily assumes human agents, distinct from nonhuman ones. In an essay about abundance and distribution in economics, religion, and poetry, Graham, too, necessarily assumes human agents who might undertake to solve “the problems of consumption and distribution” (262). Volume II’s outliers make clear the most important point of contention in our return to theory: anti-dualism and what this means for human agency as well as for our understandings of the political and the economic, which also might be to say, of the historical. For this reason, all of us should read The Return of Theory: Tarrying with the Subjunctive and The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II.