bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Early treatment‐related mortality in adult autologous stem cell transplant recipients: a nation‐wide survey of 1482 transplanted patients
Authors: Jantunen E. , Itälä M. , Lehtinen T. , Kuittinen O. , Koivunen E. , Leppä S. , Juvonen E. , Koistinen P. , Wiklund T. , Nousiainen T. , Remes K. , Volin L.
Published: January 2006

Abstract:  Objectives: To evaluate early (<100 d) treatment‐related mortality (TRM) in autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) recipients. Patients: Altogether 1482 adult patients received ASCT in six Finnish centres 1990–2003. The most common diagnoses were non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) (n = 542), multiple myeloma (MM) (n = 528), breast cancer (BC) (n = 132), Hodgkin's lymphoma (n = 86) and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) (n = 63). Results: Forty‐two patients (2.8%) died from treatment‐related reasons <100 d from ASCT. The median time to death was 38 d from ASCT (0–99). The risk of TRM varied according to the diagnoses. The highest risk was observed in patients with AL amyloidosis (24%) followed by NHL (4.4%) and MM (1.9%). No early TRM was observed in patients transplanted for BC or CLL. Infections were the cause of death in 16 patients (fungal 7, bacterial 6, viral 3). Organ toxicity was responsible for early death in 26 patients (heart 9, lungs 7, other 10). Conclusions: This nation‐wide survey indicated a low early TRM in ASCT recipients in general, but higher risks in patients with AL amyloidosis or NHL. In addition to patient selection, also optimization of transplant procedure may be needed in these patient groups to reduce early TRM.
Erythrocyte folate, plasma folate and plasma homocysteine during normal pregnancy and postpartum: a longitudinal study comprising 404 Danish women
Authors: Milman Nils , Byg Keld‐Erik , Hvas Anne‐Mette , Bergholt Thomas , Eriksen Lisbeth
Published: January 2006

Abstract:  Objective: To assess folate and homocysteine status during normal pregnancy and postpartum in a longitudinal setting. Methods: This study, performed in 1995–1996, comprised 404 healthy pregnant Danish Caucasian women residential in Copenhagen County. Women taking folic acid tablets or vitamin B12 injections were not included. Dietary multivitamin supplements containing folic acid 100 μg or vitamin B12 1 μg, taken by 34%, were discontinued at inclusion. Participants had normal renal function. Folate status [erythrocyte (Ery‐) folate, plasma (P‐) folate, P‐homocysteine] was measured at 18, 32 and 39 wk of gestation and 8 wk postpartum when the women were lactating. Results: Through 18, 32 and 39 wk of gestation and postpartum, P‐folate demonstrated a significant fall: median values were 14.4, 10.2, 9.3 and 8.9 nmol/L, respectively (P < 0.0001). The prevalence of low P‐folate <6 nmol/L increased during pregnancy from 0.7% to 19.0% postpartum (P < 0.0001). Ery‐folate displayed a similar, significant fall: median value was 0.84, 0.75, 0.65 and 0.55 μmol/L, respectively (P < 0.0001). The prevalence of low Ery‐folate <0.40 μmol/L increased during pregnancy from 0.5% to 17.2% postpartum (P < 0.0001). P‐homocysteine demonstrated a significant increase: median value was 6.4, 7.0, 7.7 and 10.8 μmol/L, respectively (P < 0.0001). The prevalence of P‐homocysteine >13 μmol/L increased during pregnancy from 0.7% to 20.8% postpartum (P < 0.0001). The prevalence of low folate status (defined as P‐folate <6 nmol/L and P‐homocysteine >13 μmol/L) was 0%, 0%, 1.2%, and 8.4% at 18, 32 and 39 wk of gestation and 8 wk postpartum, respectively. Conclusion: Low folate status occurs among Danish pregnant women, especially in late pregnancy and postpartum during lactation. Despite new guidelines for folic acid supplement since 1997, only 13% of pregnant women followed the guidelines in 2003. The official recommendations for periconceptional folic acid supplement should be reconsidered and reinforced.
Epsin 1 is a Polyubiquitin‐Selective Clathrin‐Associated Sorting Protein
Authors: Hawryluk Matthew J. , Keyel Peter A. , Mishra Sanjay K. , Watkins Simon C. , Heuser John E. , Traub Linton M.
Published: January 2006

Epsin 1 engages several core components of the endocytic clathrin coat, yet the precise mode of operation of the protein remains controversial. The occurrence of tandem ubiquitin‐interacting motifs (UIMs) suggests that epsin could recognize a ubiquitin internalization tag, but the association of epsin with clathrin‐coat components or monoubiquitin is reported to be mutually exclusive. Here, we show that endogenous epsin 1 is clearly an integral component of clathrin coats forming at the cell surface and is essentially absent from caveolin‐1‐containing structures under normal conditions. The UIM region of epsin 1 associates directly with polyubiquitin chains but has extremely poor affinity for monoubiquitin. Polyubiquitin binding is retained when epsin synchronously associates with phosphoinositides, the AP‐2 adaptor complex and clathrin. The enrichment of epsin within clathrin‐coated vesicles purified from different tissue sources varies and correlates with sorting of multiubiquitinated cargo, and in cultured cells, polyubiquitin, rather than non‐conjugable monoubiquitin, promotes rapid internalization. As epsin interacts with eps15, which also contains a UIM region that binds to polyubiquitin, epsin and eps15 appear to be central components of the vertebrate poly/multiubiquitin‐sorting endocytic clathrin machinery.
Molecular Basis of Oligoubiquitin‐Dependent Internalization of Membrane Proteins in Mammalian Cells
Authors: Barriere Herve , Nemes Csilla , Lechardeur Delphine , Khan‐Mohammad Mina , Fruh Klaus , Lukacs Gergely L.
Published: January 2006

Ubiquitination induced down‐regulation of cell surface proteins by internalization and lysosomal targeting plays a fundamental role in cell physiology and pathogenesis of diseases. The molecular basis of a single ubiquitin (Ub) as an autonomous endocytic signal, the widely accepted mechanism, however, remains elusive in higher eukaryotes. Using Ub containing reporter proteins without signalling abilities, we present evidence that only multiple Ub moieties, linked either covalently or assembled as oligomers with an intact interface for recognition by Ub‐interacting motifs (UIMs), are recognized by the endocytic machinery in vivo and associate with a subset of Ub‐binding clathrin adaptors in vitro. Genetic and pharmacological approaches show that internalization of plasma membrane proteins harbouring multiple Ub moieties is clathrin‐dependent, but caveolin‐independent. Functional assays demonstrate the cargo‐dependent involvement of eps15/15R and epsin, UIM containing clathrin adaptors, in the endocytosis of model proteins, CD4 and the activated β2‐adrenergic receptor complex, containing polymeric or oligomeric Ub. These results provide a paradigm for the clathrin‐mediated uptake of ubiquitinated membrane proteins in mammalian cells, requiring the assembly of multiple UIM–Ub interactions to overcome the low affinity binding of mono‐Ub to UIM.
Dynamin and Cytokinesis
Authors: Konopka Catherine A. , Schleede Justin B. , Skop Ahna R. , Bednarek Sebastian Y.
Published: January 2006

Animal and plant cytokineses appear morphologically distinct. Recent studies, however, have revealed that these cellular processes have many things in common, including the requirement of co‐ordinated membrane trafficking and cytoskeletal dynamics. At the intersection of these two processes are the members of the dynamin family of ubiquitous eukaryotic GTPases. In this review, we highlight the conserved contribution of classical dynamin and dynamin‐related proteins during cytokinesis in both animal and plant systems.
Clathrin Interaction and Subcellular Localization of Ce‐DAB‐1, an Adaptor for Protein Secretion in Caenorhabditis elegans
Authors: Kamikura Darren M. , Cooper Jonathan A.
Published: January 2006

Growth factors must be secreted appropriately to co‐ordinate cell proliferation, specification and movement during development and to control cell numbers and migrations in adult animals. Previous results showed that the secretion of the Caenorhabditis elegans fibroblast growth factor homologue, EGL‐17, from vulval precursor cells in vivo involves the cytoplasmic adaptor protein Ce‐DAB‐1 and two lipoprotein receptors that bind Ce‐DAB‐1 and EGL‐17. Here, we confirm the Ce‐DAB‐1 requirement for EGL‐17 secretion using mutant animals. In vitro, Ce‐DAB‐1 binds to clathrin and APT‐4, the C. elegans homologue of the α‐adaptin subunit of adaptor protein 2 (AP2), and weakly to the γ‐appendage domains of APT‐1 (AP1γ‐adaptin) and APT‐9 (GGA protein). In tissue‐culture cells, Ce‐DAB‐1 localizes to various compartments, including AP2‐containing vesicles near the cell surface and perinuclear vesicles that contain AP1. The latter also contain Rab8, but not Rab5 or Rab11, as well as proteins en route from the trans Golgi network (TGN) to the surface. In vivo, EGL‐17 secretion was inhibited by depletion of apt‐1, apt‐9 or ce‐rab‐8 and partially inhibited by RNAi of ce‐rab‐5, consistent with an important role for these proteins in the secretion of EGL‐17 in vivo. These results suggest that Ce‐DAB‐1 might co‐ordinate the assembly of endocytic or secretory vesicles in vivo and may mediate EGL‐17 secretion directly, by recruiting clathrin to lipoprotein receptors at the TGN, or indirectly, by affecting lipoprotein receptor endocytosis and recycling.
Anti‐laminin 5 mucous membrane pemphigoid
Authors: Benoit Sandrine , Schmidt Enno , Sitaru Cassian , Rose Christian , Goebeler Matthias , Bröcker Eva‐B. , Zillikens Detlef
Published: January 2006

A 70‐year‐old patient presented erosions on the oral mucosa and skin, predominantly in perianal and inguinal areas. Histopathologically, subepidermal blistering was observed. By direct immunofluorescence microscopy, linear deposits of IgG and C3 were seen at the dermal‐epidermal junction. By indirect immunofluorescence microscopy, binding of IgG autoantibodies to the dermal side of NaCl‐split skin was detected. These autoantibodies were shown to target both the non‐processed and processed α3‐ as well as the β3‐subunit of laminin 5 by immunoblot analysis using extracellular matrix of cultured human keratinocytes. Based on these results, the diagnosis of an anti‐laminin 5 mucous membrane pemphigoid was established. Oral treatment with dapsone, combined with intravenous dexamethasone pulse therapy, led to rapid improvement.
Epidemiology of acne vulgaris
Authors: Rzany Berthold , Kahl Christina
Published: January 2006

Acne vulgaris is a common disease with prevalence up to 80 % during adolescence. Twin studies provide solid evidence of a genetic background for this disease. Similarly there is no doubt about the influences of hormones, especially androgens, on the disorder. Less clear, however, is the data on other risk factors as smoking and certain diets.
Tumors associated with nevus sebaceous
Authors: Baykal Can , Buyukbabani Nesimi , Yazganoglu K.Didem , Saglik Ebru
Published: January 2006

Background: Nevus sebaceus (NS) is a congenital hamartomatous lesion, usually involving the scalp or the face. Various benign and malignant neoplasms can develop in association with NS, the most common being trichoblastoma, syringocystadenoma papilliferum, viral warts and basal cell carcinoma (BCC).

Patients and methods: We retrospectively examined the clinical and histopa‐thological records of 15 NS cases with an associated tumor which were diagnosed between 1996 and 2004.

Results: All cases were adults and 3 of them had more than one tumor. Six cases had BCC, which is a higher incidence of malignant tumor association with NS, than that reported in last years. Trichoblastoma was observed in 3 cases and was the most common benign tumor in our series. Filiform, hyperkeratotic, pigmented, pedunculated and/or eroded papulonodular changes were major clinical signs of secondary tumors on NS in our series.

Conclusion: Clinical features are not sufficient enough to make an exact diagnosis of benign or malignant secondary tumors. Though prophylactic excision for NS is done less in last years, especially adult patients should closely be followed for any new changes evoking tumor development on this congenital lesion.
Disseminated Juvenile Xanthogranuloma
Authors: Wollina Uwe , Burgdorf Walter H.C. , Haroske Gunter
Published: January 2006

Juvenile xanthogranuloma (JXG) is the most common type of non‐Langerhans cell histiocytosis occurring predominantly in infants and children. Typical lesions are asymptomatic red‐yellow papules and nodules on the scalp or in the axillae or groins. Multiple lesions are more common in children than in adults. A 2‐year old girl presented with approximately 20 red‐brown lesions, leading to the diagnosis of disseminated JXG. Internal involvement was excluded. Spontaneous regression occurred over 6 months of follow‐up. A wait‐and‐see strategy is recommended for cutaneous JXG.
Excimer laser treatment of vitiligo – critical retrospective assessment of own results and literature overview
Authors: Greve Bärbel , Raulin Christian , Fischer Edda
Published: January 2006

Background: In numerous studies the 308‐nm excimer laser has been described as an effective therapy method for localized vitiligo. Our experience and critical evaluation of the relevant literature lead to a less enthusiastic endorsement.

Patients and methods: A total of 9 patients with localized vitiligo were evaluated in our retrospective study. The sessions took place 2–3 times per week; the energy dose was increased depending on the occurring side effects. The rate of repigmentation was evaluated in 5 grades: grade 0 = 0 %, grade 1 = 1–25 %, grade 2 = 26–50 %, grade 3 = 51–75 %,grade 4 = 76–100 %. Subjective patient satisfaction was rated “satisfied”/“not satisfied”.

Results: In face and neck areas we used a cumulative energy dose of 16.6 J/cm2 and achieved repigmentation grade 4 in 33.3 %, grade 2 in 33.3 %, grade 1 in 11.1 % and no improvement in 22.2 % of the cases. On hands and knees we used a medium cumulative energy dose of 20.8 J/cm2 and did not observe any tendency towards repigmentation. Four of the patients were satisfied, while 5 were not. Side effects (erythema, blisters, crusting and perilesional hyperpig‐mentation) were transient in all cases. Within a medium observation period of 19.1 months, one patient had a relapse.

Conclusions: The excimer laser should be regarded as a treatment alternative in cases of localized vitiligo of the face. The treatment at other sites is clearly limited because of only partial repigmentation, considerable expense of time and money as well as the potentially higher risk of tumorigenesis.
Antimicrobial therapy in Dermatology
Authors: Sunderkötter Cord , Herrmann Mathias , Jappe Uta
Published: January 2006

The extensive and sometimes indiscriminate use of antibiotics sometimes without strict indications has led to increases in both bacterial resistance and sensitization of patients. Systemic antibiotics in skin infections are indicated when a severe local infection occurs which spreads into the surrounding tissue or when there are signs of systemic infection. There are special indications in patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease,diabetes or immunosuppression. Topical use of antibiotics should be abandoned and replaced by antiseptics. The β‐lactam antibiotics are the antibiotics of first choice for many skin infections. They are usually effective, have a well‐defined profile of adverse events and most are affordable. Penicillin G or V are the first line treatment for erysipelas. Infections with Staphylococcus aureus are usually treated with isoxazolyl penicillins or second generation cephalosporins. In mixed infections in patients with diabetes or peripheral arterial occlusive disease,the treatment of choice is metronidazole plus β‐lactam‐/β‐lactamase inhibitor antibiotics, but quinolones or second generation cephalosporins can also be used, once again with metronidazole.

The aim of this review is to define the indications for antibiotics in dermatology, to highlight their modes of action and adverse effects and to make suggestions for rational antibiotic therapy in cutaneous infections frequently encountered in the practice of dermatology.
Rethinking the Victorian Sage: Nineteenth‐Century Prose and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy
Authors: Budge Gavin
Published: January 2006

The label of the ‘Victorian sage’ has been employed increasingly widely in recent criticism to describe the tradition of oracular rhetoric in nineteenth‐century prose deriving from Carlyle. This ‘sage discourse’ has up till now only been defined in formalist terms, as consisting of certain characteristic assumptions about the use and validity of rhetoric. This article suggests that it is possible to historicize the notion of the ‘Victorian sage’ by linking it to the Scottish tradition of ‘Common Sense philosophy’ that was extremely influential in Britain up till the 1870s.

 The key feature of Common Sense philosophy from this perspective is the importance it attaches to the use of language in philosophical argument. Rhetoric in the Common Sense school's view embodies an implicit form of knowledge, an attitude which the article suggests also underlies the markedly rhetorical forms of argument used by ‘Victorian Sages’. Common Sense philosophy assesses philosophical arguments from an ontological perspective, namely what kind of relationship to a thinker's social environment a philosophy promotes, and this perspective can be seen to underlie the turn to biographical and autobiographical modes of writing in nineteenth‐century prose.
Mapping the New American South: New Developments in Southern Writing and Criticism
Authors: Mackay Polina
Published: January 2006

This essay assesses the continued interest in the American South as a distinct geographical, socio‐political, cultural and literary space. It explores representations of the South in young contemporary writer Poppy Z. Brite, and cross‐references this new imagined South with recent developments in Southern criticism.
Naturalizing the Supernatural: Faith, Irreverence and Magical Realism
Authors: Warnes Christopher
Published: January 2006

Starting from a basic understanding of magical realism as a mode of narration that seeks to naturalize the supernatural, this essay draws a distinction between faith and irreverence in magical realist discourse. It offers a brief account of magical realism's conceptual and literary history, analyses the state of current critical discourse and suggests ways in which nuanced modes of reading magical realist literature can be developed. Drawing from the early theorizing of Alejo Carpentier, the article proposes that one strand of magical realism is characterized by the desire to affirm non‐western world views and cultural modalities. On the other hand, Carpentier's contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, provides the paradigm for an alternative view of magical realism that sees it as similar in key respects to postmodern literary projects. These contrasting approaches are then tested with reference to the magical realism of Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie.
‘To create and cherish a true southern literature’: Genre, Gender and Authorship in William Gilmore Simms's Answer toUncle Tom's Cabin
Authors: Weller Saranne
Published: January 2006

Since its publication in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabinhas challenged its readers to respond to the interlocking rhetorics of gender and genre in the aesthetics of sentimentality. Whilst critical reclamations of the novel at the end of the twentieth century have located the novel in a tradition of female readers and writers, few readings have sought to understand the novel's aesthetics within the specific context of southern male responses and criticisms of the novel. This article interrogates William Gilmore Simms's self‐proclaimed answer to Stowe through his refiguring of established notions of gender and genre in the aesthetic claims of his southern plantation hero Captain Porgy for men of the South. Contextualised within the critical discourses of fact and fiction voiced by leading southern intellectuals published in the southern press and Simms's own developing critical language in the 1840s and 1850s, this article identifies Simms's ‘sensible’ southern man as a model of southern male authorship that sought to reconcile Stowe's antithetical aesthetic spaces of the masculine marketplace and the feminine home.
An Infant Nation: Childhood Studies and Early America
Authors: Duane Anna Mae
Published: January 2006

The child, it has been said, is the last acceptable “other.” While minority scholarship has made us aware of the injustice and inaccuracy of infantilizing colonized and marginalized people, we have only begun to look with a critical eye at the narratives of sentimentality, emotionality, and inferiority attached to children. This article traces at the prevalence of the child‐as‐symbol in early American literature and culture in order to elucidate the stubborn stereotypes attached to children – and the study of children – and to introduce the groundbreaking work that has begun to analyze the complex cultural work performed by the American child. Finally, I argue that attending to the vulnerability and dependence of childhood offers the opportunity to rethink the fictive assumption that any one of us can fully occupy the position of the self‐reliant, wholly independent subject.
Shakespearean Editing and Why It Matters
Authors: Marcus Leah
Published: January 2006

A generation ago, many Shakespearean scholars simply accepted the versions of the play that they were provided with by editors. So long as the label was right – Arden, Oxford, Cambridge, Penguin, Riverside, Pelican – the content was assumed to be reliable. But editing can never be transparent – it is always influenced by the cultural assumptions of the editor and his or her era, however submerged those assumptions may be in terms of the editor's stated textual practices. In the late twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, as a result of feminist and postcolonial critical approaches to Shakespearean texts, we have begun to realize the degree to which our inherited editions are shaped in accordance with assumptions about colonialism, race, and the status of women that are no longer acceptable to us, and that in fact distort elements of Shakespeare's plays as they exist in early printed quarto and folio versions. As earlier disciplinary boundaries between editing and criticism have broken down, Shakespearean critics have increasingly turned to editing in order to undo some of the racist and sexist assumptions behind our received texts of the plays.
Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia
Authors: Vaught Jennifer C.
Published: January 2006

This essay explores the topic of masculinity and emotion, which has generated a considerable amount of scholarly interest over the past decade, in relation to men who weep and wail in Sir Philip Sidney's New Arcadia (1593). Sidney's romance reflects shifting definitions of manhood toward the end of the sixteenth century when aristocratic men tended to define themselves less as warriors and more as humanists, statesmen, and emotionally expressive courtiers. He alludes to the increasing remoteness of the feudal ideal of the violent warrior by exposing the futility rather than glory of armed violence in some cases and by using the term “armor” in a figurative rather than literal sense. A number of men in the New Arcadia tell stories as well as fight and exhibit a broad range of emotions – desire, rage, pity, and grief. Thoughtful men of action who know when and where to cry are ideal in Sidney's romance.
‘Creating new flesh on the Demon cold’: Blake's Milton and the Apotheoses of a Poet
Authors: Fallon David
Published: January 2006

Traditional readings of the so‐called ‘Bard's Song’, which opens Milton, construe it as a biographical or historical allegory. To counter such interpretations, I place Blake's poem in the context of a Whiggish literary tradition in which Milton's enthusiastic Protestantism is downplayed, producing a cultural icon who is distanced from the militant expressions of ‘mental fight’ in his prose. Likewise, I identify how poetic apotheoses produced an abstract and disembodied Milton in the guise of a God, an angel or a hero. By a commitment to grotesque realism, Blake's Milton reclaims the enthusiastic and tangibly physical metaphors of Milton's prose. Noting the allusions to Milton's works in the ‘Bard's Song’ suggests a reading of Milton in which Blake portrays a self‐divided poet composing Paradise Lost. Blake's grotesque Milton reverses this process of his apotheosis and reaffirms the renewal of a collective and distinctly physical human body.
Cultural Geography and American Studies
Authors: Jarvis Brian
Published: January 2006

The past quarter century has witnessed a renaissance in the geographical imagination. This ‘new geography’, evident across the humanities and social sciences, builds on the pioneering work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault. The ‘spatial turn’ is characterised by cross‐fertilisation between cultural geography and forms of critical theory and it centres on dialectical relations between space, society and the body. The work being carried out in this field often sees space in textual terms – as a system of meaning – and also insists on a profoundly politicised understanding of its subject. This approach is conspicuous in contemporary American Studies. Area studies encourage sensitivity to the imbrications of space and culture and the key words in academic and popular understandings of America have always been geocentric. The coalescence of new geography and American Studies has produced a significant body of work: Marxist mappings, macro‐studies of U.S. cultural imperialism and globalisation alongside meticulous case studies of vernacular localities, diverse cartographies charting the impact of economics and technology, race and region, gender and sexuality on cities, suburbs and nature. The burgeoning interest in cultural geography in American Studies and elsewhere offers vital means of understanding, cherishing and challenging local and global spaces.
A Cursory Consideration of William Godwin
Authors: O'Shaughnessy David
Published: January 2006

William Godwin (1756–1836) was a radical philosopher and novelist whose fame rests largely on his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794). Married to Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, his oeuvre is significant for both its impact on the political and social landscape of the period and its influence on his family and other literary contemporaries.
Recent Critical Approaches to Sidney's Literary Production
Authors: Sillitoe Peter
Published: January 2006

This article surveys recent critical approaches to the life, and particularly the writing, of Philip Sidney during the last three years. As such, the piece reviews the work of a variety of familiar and less familiar critics, whose work spans a multitude of critical positions and schools of thought. Taken together as a whole, modern work on Sidney appears to be rich and, occasionally, groundbreaking, with many critics approaching Sidney's texts with fresh perspectives that sometimes challenge supposed orthodoxies in former studies. Consequently, topics covered here include updated psychoanalytic approaches to the sonnet sequence, feminism and allegory in the Arcadia, intellectual and religious influences on Sidney's life and works, and a particularly interesting utilization of aspects of Elizabethan law in Tudor writing.
Reasons to Remember Sydney Owenson
Authors: Donovan Julie
Published: January 2006

A marble bust of Sydney Owenson (?1776–1859, known as Lady Morgan after her marriage in 1812) is one of the images included in a current exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, running from 9 March to 19 June 2005, entitled ‘Conquering England’: Ireland in Victorian London. Owenson's inclusion in the exhibit recognizes her significant role as part of an influential Irish cultural presence in nineteenth‐century Britain – in her case one that spanned the Romantic and Victorian periods.
The Manuscripts ofPiers Plowman
Authors: Eyler Joshua R. , Benson C. David
Published: January 2006

Piers Plowmanis one of the most highly regarded late medieval English poems, although at times it can also be one of the more frustrating works, in large part because of its existence in three distinct versions (A, B, and C) and its complex transmission history. In this essay we examine the scholarship regarding the manuscripts and the scribes ofPiers Plowman, from W. W. Skeat onwards, and we also explore new tools now available for the study of the manuscripts, such as thePiers Plowman Electronic Archive, which promise to change the way we read, teach, and research the poem.
Short Shrift: Religion and Materialist Criticism
Authors: Benson Sean
Published: January 2006

This review essay examines the upsurge of materialist criticism in Renaissance literary studies over the last 20 years as well as the limitations of such criticism vis‐à‐vis religion. Sensitive to these limitations, two recent authors employ solid historical scholarship to uncover the mundane realities as well as the no less real, though harder to quantify, spiritual aspects of Renaissance religious practice. Ramie Targoff's Common Prayer (2001) examines the Reformation production and distribution of the Book of Common Prayer, paying special attention to how the reformers balanced both economic and devotional considerations. Second, Jeffrey Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe (2002) challenges the prevailing view in contemporary scholarship that Shakespeare's stage was largely secularist, even secularizing. Knapp argues that a considerable amount of early modern drama, including Shakespeare's, was written with the sacramental purposes of uniting religious believers of various stripes and of illustrating by example on the stage many of the precepts of the religious life. Knapp specifically counters materialist accounts in which religion is either a mask for power politics or is simply eviscerated of its spiritual content by representing it on an allegedly profane stage. Implicit in Knapp's argument is the odd coupling of Puritan antitheatricalists such as Philip Stubbes and Anthony Munday with some current scholars who rely heavily on Puritan polemics as an accurate characterization of the Renaissance stage. Finally, I cite Stephen Greenblatt's biography, Will in the World (2004), for its reiteration of the claim that Shakespeare was a secular playwright who invoked the language and trappings of religion merely for comic, commercial entertainment; I suggest that the plays can be read in a more devotional light.
“Nowhere is a Place”: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England*
Authors: Mitsi Evi
Published: January 2006

Travel is an experience of cultural encounters; the account that witnesses and represents that experience is not only a literary text but also a cultural document, involving issues of power, knowledge, and identity. In sixteenth‐century England the popularity of travel accounts, which documented colonial aspirations, quixotic voyages, and mercantile ventures, manifests that the book as an integral part of the voyage has the power to inform and instruct. Narratives by authors such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Dallington, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Dallam, depended on the pun between travel ( journeying) and travail (toil, pain), presenting the adventures and adversities of travelers together with information on geographical areas with their human societies and cultures, linked to questions of nationality, race, and gender.  The written record of the great number of early travels, represented in Richard Hakluyt's and later in Samuel Purchas's collections, attests to the rise of England's colonial and commercial power, as well as to the significance of travel writing in English literary history. Despite the contemporary debate over the purpose of going abroad and representing foreign countries, travel, like translation – a word semantically related to it – functioned as a cross‐cultural process challenging the boundaries of both geographical and ideological insularity.
Early Modern Historiography
Authors: Breen Dan
Published: January 2006

This essay surveys recent work by literary critics on early modern English history writing and attempts to provide a perspective on the relatively marginal status of historiography within early modern literary studies. In associating the emergence of humanism closely with the beginning of early modernity, historians and literary critics have created a division within early modern historiography that elevates the “humanist” history at the expense of the chronicle, often dismissively characterized as a “medieval” literary form and neglected as a focus of study. This division has in turn produced a narrowly specific understanding of the forms of writing that qualify as humanist histories, omitting drama, philosophical dialogues, and much of the period's Latin‐language historiography. Many contemporary critics, however, have undertaken projects that attempt both to broaden current understandings of humanist historical thought and to integrate chronicle texts more fully into the study of early modern literature. These projects include formal analytical studies that survey more and more genres of writing as well as new editions of early modern historiographical texts, produced across a wide range of media.
Marian and Jacobean Literature
Authors: Dunnigan Sarah
Published: January 2006

Literature of the late Renaissance period in Scotland is best understood in the light of the two monarchs, mother and son, who governed the nation between 1561 and 1603. Scottish court culture in this period was alternately shaped, inhibited and nurtured by the political fortunes of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots (1542–87) and James VI (1566–1625). Within four decades, the Catholic queen from a powerful Franco‐Scottish dynasty was first deposed, then beheaded; a succession of Protestant regents reigned calamitously; and the young king, exiled and estranged from his mother, inherited a politically and religiously troubled crown which, after twenty‐four years of relatively successful governance, would find union with England's in 1603. The political vicissitudes of the Marian and Jacobean periods in Scotland charted an erratic path for artistic culture. Perhaps because of this, the idea of a ‘Renaissance’ in Scotland, the counterpart of England's Elizabethan one, has yet to find firm root in the literary historiography of later sixteenth‐century Britain. Yet the conventional meaning of the term, ‘Renaissance’, as ‘rebirth’, accurately sums up the prolific efforts of Scottish poets to create art which had national, as well as aesthetic, currency. This essay begins by exploring literary culture in Mary's reign, suggesting that, despite its relative fragility, the long shadow which it cast over subsequent decades proved the necessary impetus for the ‘Renaissance’ of James VI's reign. That ‘Renaissance’ was relatively short‐lived, since regal union in 1603 dictated the end of Scotland's independent monarchy, and of literary art which had emerged out of the enriching conditions of sovereignty. This survey of the distinctive nature of Scottish literature in the reigns of Mary and James traces the major themes and preoccupations of a culture which was geographically placed at the periphery of Europe but which increasingly sought to prove its artistic centrality in the face of political change.1
Victorian Shakespeare
Authors: Marshall Gail
Published: January 2006

This essay examines some of the main characteristics of the proliferation and reception of Shakespeare during the Victorian period: his adaptation by other writers, the practices of Victorian actor‐managers, and the variety of the ‘Shakespeares’ produced and enjoyed during the nineteenth century.
Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
Authors: Duxfield Andrew
Published: January 2006

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, as well as being one of the most popular and enduring dramatic works of the English Renaissance, is also among its most textually problematic. The fact of the play's existence in two greatly differing and notoriously unreliable texts has long been a challenge for editors, and one that has traditionally been overcome by the production of amalgamated editions that seamlessly blend the ‘best’ elements of both texts. Over recent years, however, the role of the editor has begun to change significantly, and modern developments in textual scholarship have made it very unlikely that this method can survive. This article will examine the influence of post‐structuralist theory on the editing of early modern drama, and the affect that this has had on our perception of Faustus as a single and unified entity.
‘That Every Man May Knaw’: Reformation and Rhetoric in the Works of Sir David Lyndsay
Authors: McGinley Kevin J.
Published: January 2006

David Lyndsay's writings, while often lashing the corruption of the Scottish Catholic clergy, nonetheless engage subtly with the politics of pre‐Reformation Scotland. Lyndsay's attacks on the clergy are not so much religiously motivated as based on conflict between the Scottish Church and the secular authorities. Lyndsay's writings repeatedly urge measures to reduce the Church's wealth and political influence, and shift power towards the Crown and the nobility (and, later, the Parliament). But this underlying political motive is pursued via social, moral and religious arguments, expressed with considerable rhetorical sensitivity to their effects on different audiences. Lyndsay's writing is consequently multi‐layered in voice and significance, opening in different ways for different readerships, addressing both prince and pauper, often simultaneously. The nuanced interaction, on both a formal and thematic level, of different socio‐political interests, moral values and religious debates, illustrates the complex negotiations that characterize the political culture of pre‐Reformation Scotland.
A Sign that History is Happening: Shakespeare in 20th‐Century South African literature
Authors: Distiller Natasha
Published: January 2006

This article makes use of the notion of cultural hybridity as developed by Homi Bhabha in order to come to terms with the ways in which specific writers in 20th‐century South Africa incorporated Shakespeare as an icon and as a collection of texts into their work. I explore how the parameters of, particularly, gender and class impact on the identity positions that are both enabled by and developed in defiance of colonial and apartheid knowledge systems and institutions. In this context, extracts from the work of Solomon Plaatje and William Bloke Modisane are briefly discussed. Shakespeare's putative universalism is invoked by both these writers who, positioned at different points in South Africa's pre‐democratic history, make use of the texts, and the cultural and humanist associations that accrue to “Shakespeare.” The hybrid textual inscriptions that result need to be understood in terms of the local conditions of production, the subject positions they in part enabled, and the changing socio‐political climate which made its own demands on the writers who had access to Shakespeare. I locate this discussion within a post‐colonial framework in order to unravel some of the cultural complexities at work in the presence of Shakespeare in 20th‐century South African literature, and the connections with specific political and social conditions.
Erotics, Aesthetics, Politics: Henry James Today
Authors: Hannah Daniel K.
Published: January 2006

This article surveys important developments in the study of Henry James over the past five years or so. Taking my cue from the recent near simultaneous publication of Colm Toíbín's and David Lodge's biographical novels about James, The Master and Author, Author, I trace areas of current critical dispute and renewed interest in their divergent treatments of James's ‘character’. In particular, I consider recent debates over James's handling of the erotic and sexuality, the resurgent study of James's aesthetics and his place in the literary marketplace of the late nineteenth century, and finally, the place of James studies in relation to cultural criticism.
Reading Toni Morrison Critically
Authors: Terry Jennifer
Published: January 2006

This article offers an overview of the contemporary novelist Toni Morrison's literary career and of the critical response to her fiction. It also considers recent shifts in American and African American studies that allow for intersections with postcolonial studies and transatlanticist approaches. Finally, questions are raised regarding future directions in our reading of black U.S. literature.
Talking Back at the Centre: Demotic Language in Contemporary Scottish Fiction
Authors: Scott Jeremy
Published: January 2006

This article attempts a survey of a common trend in contemporary Scottish fiction (1994–2003): a unifying concern with issues of ‘voice’ in narrative. The survey proceeds from an assumption that many Scottish writers make use of so‐called demotic voices within their work (i.e. sociolects and dialects from everyday situations, or ‘street language’). Very often, this concern with the demotic arises out of ideological standpoints peculiar (arguably) to Scotland: attempts to create a distance from Standard English, a nationalist position, or the ambition to reassert the primacy (or, at least, the equivalency) of oral over written forms of language. The conclusion must be that choices made with regard to narrative technique are ideological choices, and that the demotic method is not without its pitfalls. This assertion is demonstrated through an exploration of three writers: James Kelman, Alan Warner and Anne Donovan. All of these demotic techniques are aided and abetted by the writer's intense identification with place, with Glasgow (for Kelman and Donovan) or with Scotland as a whole, and the intrinsically ‘polyphonic’ conditions which exist there, i.e. a range of dialects and voices standing as ‘other’ to Standard (colonial?) English. The writers’ goal is to exploit the particular cultural and linguistic conditions peculiar to the country in order to produce a narrative art form which could adequately aspire to represent them; in other words, to create a distinctive literary voice the better to represent a particular regional or national constituency. The pitfalls need to be addressed too: a tendency towards the mundane and repetitive in demotic narratives, a certain belligerence which can alienate readers and the essential question of who this writing is written for. Can it be read with true engagement outside of its target constituency? If not, is such writing open to the charge of parochialism?
The Old Aestheticism and the New
Authors: Shrimpton Nicholas
Published: January 2006

Aestheticism, the literary theory that dared not speak its name, has started to come back into view. Both as an object of historical study (the late‐nineteenth‐century ‘British Aestheticism’ of Rossetti, Swinburne and Pater, as American scholars carefully label it), and as a mode of contemporary critical thought, an unfashionable body of artistic and philosophical assumptions is being rediscovered. The nineteenth‐century Aesthetic Movement has been the object of lively attention, not just from conventional literary historians, but also from critics working in such fields as cultural materialism, gender studies and deconstruction. And a review, in 1993, of one such book, Jonathan Loesberg's Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida and de Man, suggested the need for ‘a new aestheticism’. Since 1993 that movement has been rapidly gathering strength. In the hands of art critics like Dave Hickey, philosophers like Alexander Nehamas, and literary scholars such as Andrew Bowie and Susan Wolfson, the ‘New Aestheticism’ and ‘New Formalism’ have been reasserting the importance for modern critical practice of concepts associated with the creed of Art for Art's Sake.
John Clare and Revaluation
Authors: Houghton Sarah
Published: January 2006

Beginning with a brief biographical outline, this article emphasizes the extraordinary range of John Clare's literary output. Describing the relatively strong tradition of biography in the field, the article offers an overview of critical approaches to Clare, delineates the attitude of Clare's contemporaries to his work, sketches the long period of critical neglect which has marked Clare scholarship, and moves on to survey the areas to which modern critics have tended to be drawn. The article identifies some areas which remain neglected and which deserve attention, and, asking if Clare's resistance to conventional categorization might lie at the heart both of his neglect and, now, his new popularity, concludes by emphasizing the necessity for criticism to continue to integrate different approaches to his work.
Shakespeare in the Restoration
Authors: Clark Sandra
Published: January 2006

This article considers the role and status of Shakespeare in the period from 1660 to 1700, a liminal period when the adaptations of his plays had many cultural functions to perform, not only in providing a ready‐made repertoire when the theatres re‐opened, but also, in their adapted forms, articulating the political concerns of these troubled years. Because Shakespeare, though increasingly venerated by critics, was not regarded as sacrosanct as he was to become from the mid‐eighteenth century, it was possible to rewrite his plays in radical ways that responded to the new mood of the times as well as to new aesthetic standards. Some of the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, more popular than Shakespeare's for much of the period, were also adapted, but to a lesser extent, and in much less radical ways, suggesting that the extraordinary cultural flexibility of Shakespeare's plays had already been perceived. Towards the end of the century the concern to distinguish his own text from that of adapters began to appear, leading to the production of many editions of his complete works in the eighteenth century. This marks another stage in the construction of Shakespeare's identity as author and national icon.
Legal and Familial Recordkeeping: Chancery Court Records and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House
Authors: Nixon Cheryl
Published: January 2006

Emphasizing the Romantic period's new legal recordkeeping practices, this essay traces Charlotte Smith's reliance on and critique of legal records in The Old Manor House (1793). Smith's novel connects legal structure to family structure, depicting a family misshapen by legal misrepresentation. In order to understand Smith's use of legal records, this essay focuses on the family “account” and examines late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century legal commentaries, treatises, and case reports. Extending this exploration to the manuscript legal record, this essay also uncovers account journals and ledgers held in the Chancery Court archives. As these materials reveal, both Smith and the law are united in imagining an ideal left unachieved: both seek an organized record of the family, as such a record offers the promise of organizing the family itself
Ten Questions for Shakespeare
Authors: Bruster Douglas
Published: January 2006

What questions could William Shakespeare answer for us in person? This essay begins by imagining that we could ask Shakespeare any ten questions we wished. Acknowledging the imperfect, always incomplete nature of writers’ relation to their works, this essay nonetheless poses questions that could clear up small mysteries concerning Shakespeare – while of course creating even other questions to ponder. Among the ten are queries concerningHamlet, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare's early years.A rationale for each question is given, as well as comment on what the answers to these questions could tell us about Shakespeare's life, writings, and times. The essay closes with additional questions we may wish to have answered, and provides a list of suggested readings on a variety of topics connected with Shakespeare's life and art.