bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Twain: The Twinning Principle in Pudd’nhead Wilson
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

A notoriously unsure judge of his own work, Mark Twain nonetheless recognized that the presence of the Italian twins, along with the embryonic romantic interest they kindle, constituted an undesirable tug of war in Pudd’nhead Wilson. Once he had discovered Sir Francis Galton’s Finger Prints, Twain seems to have decided that his book should center on the plot of the exchanged infants and the fortunes of Wilson, and that it would not accommodate the more exotic material involving the freakish twins. As to the love angle, the infatuation that Rowena feels for the dashing aristocrats, Twain’s reservations seem justified: love has no place in this fiction, and the passages devoted to its emergence are silly. Nonetheless, as every reader knows, Twain did not remove the twins. He merely “altered” them from the original Siamese version—a four-armed, two-headed creature on two legs—to the more usual variant: two separate young men who happen to be twins. And many readers have felt that Twain’s famous “obstetrical” efforts in sorting out his two stores (“I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one —a kind of literary Caesarian operation”) made rather more of a mess than a success of these affairs, leaving odd reminders throughout the novel of the initial joint conception. 1 After all, the twins are still there, and they continue to disturb.
Robert Coover: Fiction as Fission
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

Robert Coover’s work occupies a place of honor in what can now be seen as the American tradition of freedom of speech. His novels exhibit a dazzling, sometimes frantic experimentalism, and they offer, above all, a testament to language as imperialist design, language as not only protean but downright parasitic, not only capable of changing forms but intent on taking over, rivaling all forms of experience and cancerously invading them, adapting them to its own frequencies and modalities. It used to be that one believed in certain fences, certain limits and proprieties, so that the verbal —grand and aggrandizing though it might be—was nonetheless stationed in its own precincts, neither constituted nor equipped to “do” the things done in other fields: film and music and dance, but also, in some crucial sense, experiential realms such as sex and memory; that is, the novelist could write about these things, but one always knew the things themselves had their own different savor and integrity.
Dis-Membering and Re-Membering in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved serves as a virtual culmination to this study of freedom of speech in American literature. Her book on the trauma of slavery, endowed with the kind of searing power that we find in narratives that have come from survivors of the camps in our own age, rewrites a large chunk of our literary history, and she provides thereby a strange second look at much that we think we have seen.
Conclusion
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

A colleague once confided that the central myth shared by all his students is their conviction that they are somebody, possessing a unique identity: a self. Whereas, he added, if there is anything we have learned in the past century, it is the extent to which we are products: of our culture, our genes, our family, our environment, our media, our signs. And who can deny it? Even to use the possessive pronoun “our” is highly misleading, since the salient fact common to culture, genes, family, environment, media, and signs is that they precede us, that they are the potent shaping forces, the veritable force field in which “we” are positioned, of which “we” are made.
The Quest for the Purpose/Life-Situation
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

Nowhere does the emphasis on John ‘s Judaic background find clearer expression than in this opinion. On the basis of the way the gospel refers to the Jews, and particularly the way chapter 9 speaks of expulsion from the synagogue, J. L. Martyn (1968, 1978, 1979) has proposed that the fourth gospel is colored by a conflict with members of a Jewish synagogue. Christians were being forced out, and the gospel reflects the atmosphere of dividedness. W. Meeks (1972) has taken this further by proposing that the gospel in fact reflects a group which is sectarian. Schnackenberg (1:165-67) adds yet another dimension to the picture of division: while granting that the gospel retains some element of trying to speak positively to the Jews, he regards the evangelist ‘s basic attitude to the Jews as one of hostility. This view takes its cue not so much from chapter 9 as from earlier Samaria-related texts, especially from John 4:1-42 (cf. esp. Buchanan, Then, in the next major section, there is a partial investigation of the way in which a firmer foundation may be established-by tracing John ‘s mode of composition, specifically his use of sources (Part II: Towards Establishing a Partial Guide to History: John ‘s Composition [Use of Sources]). Finally a summary is given of the way in which the mode of composition effects the main aspects of the quest for history (Part III: The Quest Resumed: Initial Conclusions).
The Quest for Sources: The Central Problem
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

It is generally agreed that the fourth gospel is based to a significant extent on some form of predecessor, an older document which contained a basic narrative concerning Jesus and which acted as a backbone or foundation for the present text. There is deep uncertainty however concerning the identity of that predecessor. Some would say that it was the gospel of Mark (cf. esp. Barrett, 42-54; 1974), others that it was the evangelist ‘s own first edition (cf. esp. Brown, xxxv), and still others that it was some form of a document which put a special emphasis on Jesus ‘ miracles or signs (the “signs source” or Gospel of Signs). Taken in isolation, Brown ‘s idea of an earlier edition is quite possible, but it remains vague, and it is part of a larger theory which, as Schnackenburg implied (1977, 23-24), is difficult to verify. Furthermore, as one begins to appreciate the unity of the text, such claims about processes of redaction seem unnecessary and inappropriate. The shape attributed to the signs source varies greatly. In particular there is not agreement as to whether it contained a passion narrative. Earlier researchers (e.g. Bultmann, Nicol, Schnackenburg), despite their considerable differences, generally contended that it did not (for references, see von Wahlde, 1989, 194-96; Becker, 112-13; Bois mard ‘s “Document C,” 1977, 16-19, is exceptional).
The Ancient Context: A World of Literary Transformation
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

The literary study of the NT has generally been carried out in a vacuum. NT introductions cover almost every significant aspect of ancient background-religion, philosophy, politics, economics, social setting, transport, language, and so on-but not literature. Modem literary critics apply a wide range of sophisticated and useful tools-but usually neglect the literary world of biblical times. There have indeed been important specialist studies: examinations, for in stance, of the way in which some extra-biblical literary device is found also in the NT. And, particularly in recent years, there have been significant contributions-for instance by David Aune (1987, 1988) and Fran cis Martin (1988)-towards setting the gospels and epistles against the background of similar-looking documents of the first century. But what is missing is a sense of the center, a sense of the way in which the greatest writers of the ancient world, Jewish and Greco Roman, set about composing their works, particularly a sense of the way in which they employed bold procedures of transformation. One hears perhaps of the editing process which is implied in some presentations of Wellhausen ‘s well-known documentary theory concerning the Pentateuch-but very little of the central dynamics through which many of the biblical texts were generated, interpreted, and rewritten.
A Test Case: John 9 as a Dramatization of the Vision Theme in Mark 8:11-9:8
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

Before attempting to give an overall view of how John used Mark it is useful first to look closely at just one section of John, the story of the man born blind (chap. 9). It is an appropriate test case, for as well as being colorful, it seems to reflect the heart of the gospel: it is physically at the gospel ‘s center; and, as is suggested both by the work of Martyn (1979) and by further analysis, it appears to provide a window on what is going on in the gospel. The appropriateness of examining the story of the man born blind is heightened by the fact that it is one of the pillars of the idea of a signs source-at least insofar as it turns up in every formulation of the theory. The amount of it, which is said to have existed in the signs source, varies from author to author (cf. Becker, 115; Schnackenburg, 1:66; Boismard, 1977, 17; von Wahlde, 1989, 190-96; Fortna, 1988, 109): But what is missing is a sense of the center, a sense of the way in which the greatest writers of the ancient world, Jewish and Greco Roman, set about composing their works, particularly a sense of the way in which they employed bold procedures of transformation.
John’s Systematic Use of All of Mark
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

The most essential clue to unravelling John’s way of using Mark is provided in broad terms by Brown (45): “One of John’s techniques is to show that themes occurring in one place in the Synoptics had a reality throughout the whole of Jesus ‘ ministry.” This observation was meant in a general way rather than as a statement that John actually used the synoptics, yet it encompasses a key insight: generally speaking, John does not reproduce the Markan episodes one by one; instead he divides them into aspects and disperses them so that they occur in a number of places. Elsewhere Brown (1961) has articulated this idea more clearly; he speaks of “incidents that are units in the synoptic gospels but dispersed in St. John.” An example of this procedure has already been seen in the reworking of the various episodes of Mark 8:11-9:8 (cf. John 9). John did not reproduce the Markan episodes one by one; instead he divided them according to varied aspects or viewpoints and then dispersed them throughout the chapter. Thus the actual healing, instead of being a single brief event (as in Mark 8:22-26) is referred to a number of times throughout the chapter. Likewise the Pharisees: instead of being initial background (cf. Mark 8:11-13) they are woven in and out of the whole story.
John’s Systematic Use of Ephesians
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

Thus far John 17 has been linked, at least in passing, or through the appendices, with a wide variety of texts-the predeath prayer in Gethsemane (Mark 14:32-42; cf. Matt 26:36-46), the Our Father (Matt 6:9-13), the shepherdlike care for the little ones (Matt 18:10-14), the Zacchaeus incident (Luke 19:1-10), and Moses ‘ final discourse (Deut 29-30). But despite the apparently genuine contribution of each of these component parts, John’s climactic chapter appears to depend even more on yet another source-the epistle to the Ephesians. Ephesians is concerned with how Christ brings the fragmenting world back to God. It is as though God ‘s creation had come apart, riven by dark demonic sin, yet through an age-old plan of God-an eternal love, which comes front within God and which is manifested in Christ ‘s self giving-there is at work, even amid the world ‘s darkness, a greater force for unity. Through this unifying power-a power which shows itself in the holiness and unity of the church-Christ is bringing creation to a new fulness. This picture of God-as working through Christ to bring everything back to a greater unity-is central to John 17. When Jesus prays, his prayer implies a spiritual ascent which, even amid the world ‘s evil, draws people towards holiness (17:6-19) and thereby towards unityunity in God (17:20-26).
Questions About the Reality of the Johannine Community: Towards Seeing the Evangelist as Primarily an Integrated Member of the Larger World-Oriented Christian Community or Church
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

As seen earlier, there is considerable diversity in the various reconstructions of “the history of the Johannine community.” This does not mean that these reconstructions are without value. On the contrary, each captures some aspect of the gospel. Yet the diversity is sufficiently deep that it raises serious questions about the entire undertaking. The most basic question is whether such a community ever existed. Obviously the evangelist lived somewhere and presumably had some friends and acquaintances-but that does not constitute a distinct com munity. Two factors have contributed significantly to the idea of a community which was distinct: the fact that the fourth gospel is distinct-even to the point, some would say, of having an independent historical tradition and the general presupposition, going back especially to Gunkel (1901) and filtered through the early form-critics, that biblical narratives originate, not so much from individual writers, as from the complex workings of communities. These elements need to be examined. John is distinct in several ways, but most of all at the basic level of plot-the level which tells the story of Jesus. John’s story is independent. According to the well-known saying which is attributed to Clement of Alexandria, the fourth evangelist moved gospel
The Ideology of Expediency and Biblical Critique
Authors: Niditch Susan
Published: November 2023

In his study of just and unjust wars, Michael Walzer points to William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous dictum, “War is hell” (1977:32–33; 204n.; 230; 265). This view of war implies that there is no use in contemplating codes or restrictions on the killing, certainly no point in fooling oneself that war can be fought nobly or ignobly, adhering to or ignoringjus in hello. The cause may well be just—surely Sherman believed in the survival of the union—but once war begins, the best one can do is to fight efficiently and pragmatically, to do, in short, whatever is necessary to win as decisively and quickly as possible. If civilians are killed along the way, so be it; if striking terror into the hearts of one’s enemy by barbarism is helpful to one’s goals, so be it. The particular rationalizations for killing implicit in the ban-as-sacrifice tradition, the ban as God’s justice,
Die Flambierte Frau: Sati in European Culture
Authors: Figueira Dorothy M
Published: November 2023

The German Romantic poet Karoline von Günderrode was a woman unlucky in matters of love. She lost Carl von Savigny to Cunegonde Brentano. Her affection for Clemens Brentano could not withstand his extravagant tastes. She then met Frederick Creuzer, a man noteworthy to historians of religion as the author of the light classic, Das Symbolik. He influenced Karoline intellectually, enlarging her knowledge and introducing her to Indian thought. Under Creuzer’s tutelege, Günderrode’s work was inspired by various themes from Indian mythology and philosophy. Works such as Die Erscheinung, Ein apokaliptisches Fragment, and the Geschichte eines Brahminen all express a vague longing for the Absolute, a belief in perfection of the soul through earthly denial, and the vision of death as a surrender to an Elemental Spirit. Not surprisingly, Karoline’s stimulating relationship with Creuzer developed into romance. Unfortunately, the Heidelberg philologist was already married to an older woman, whose wealth enabled him to pursue the life of a scholar.
Playing Along: America and the Rhetoric of Deceit
Authors: Bryant John
Published: November 2023

As a fusion of import and invention, America draws its identity from both foreign traditions and native forms. But more than just the site of cultural fusion, America is the pressure to include and expand. In adapting the tenets of amiability to the experiences of the New World, Americans tinkered with old forms to resolve their comic debate. But with the tall tale and its rhetoric of deceit, they created new forms altogether. The “pressure” was in containing divisive satire within a genial frame of humor so as to foster a national comic voice. On the surface of it, the national inclination seemed contrary to Melville’s individual aesthetic. Whereas the culture promoted the loud voices of local stereotypes—Yankee, frontiersman, and minstrel—Melville sought a voice of silence. But beyond regional characters was a more compatible humor that thrived on deceptive silences; it was the humor of the American tall tale itself, a narrative structure that trains democratic readers in the dangers of belief. No tradition of humor is richer in America than our affection for liars, for no other form of native humor so richly blends our conflicting desires for social subversion and communal integration. Lying was not exclusive to Amer ica, but because the frontier required its denizens to know deception, comic lying became a social and literary art for the nation. Similarly, art forms based on a rhetoric of deceit grew. Writers like Poe and T. B. Thorpe understood the moral effect that tall talk, tall tales, and narrative unreliability had in the democracy, and Melville also adopted the strategies of comic lying to add sting to his genial art. He saw, too, that it was a metaphysical imperative.
The Genial Misanthrope: Melville and the Cosmopolitan Ideal
Authors: Bryant John
Published: November 2023

The recent development of multiethnic approaches to literary analysis has excited new interest in an old question: What is an American? As for any immigrant nation, the answer necessarily evolves with every new repositioning of power among its peoples; accordingly, to be American is to be culturally unstable. America itself is not “One culture out of Many” but rather “One culture and Many.” Thus Amer icans, no matter how far removed in the generations from their initial immigrations, discover an identity in the fusion of their allegiance to an ethnic past with a desire for a transcultural attachment. The repose of self-worth in multiethnic life teeters on the fulcrum of a hyphen, whether to lose that hyphen or to wave it like a flag. In Melville’s day the problems of ethnicity were expressed primarily in the idiom of the cosmopolitan ideal, wherein all cultures, races, and creeds would be afforded equal footing. Established in late-eighteenth-century Europe, the ideal nevertheless had its best hope for fulfillment in early-nineteenth-century America, where achieving political and cultural coherence depended upon the harmonizing of factions. America was in potential if not full reality the ultimate cosmopolitical state.
Ishmael: Sounding the Repose of If
Authors: Bryant John
Published: November 2023

Moby-Dick is a tragedy staged within a comedy, and a drama contained by a meditation. Just as Ishmael projects Ahab out of himself, and Ahab projects the white whale, so does Ishmael’s redemptive geniality frame the demonic impulse that informs Ahab’s dramatic conflict with Moby Dick. This framing technique, which draws upon gothic and tall-tale formulas,1is most directly felt in the rhythmic alternations in the narrative between disintegration and coherence, the pulse of Ahab’s “unsmoothable … seam” (MD, 488) and counterpulse of Ishmael’s “one seamless whole” (492). With these alternating periods of tension and repose, we feel wrapped in the tides of the author’s unfolding consciousness, in which seamless vision and fracturing realities enact a circular discourse. For Ishmael that circu larity—and circles more than whiteness are the novel’s dominant symbol—is a comfort; for Ahab, despair. Melville gives the more solid beat in this rhythmic give-and-take to Ishmael’s repose, and finally this recurring comic beat is the narrative’s organizing principle.
Melville’s Comedy of Doubt
Authors: Bryant John
Published: November 2023

The reviews of Moby-Dick were mixed, and given the months of composition, Melville had every right to be discouraged. Still, he could take comfort that jour nalists were learning how to read him. What impressed them was Melville’s style. The reviewer for Graham’s captured the essence of Ishmael’s “careful disorder liness” (MD, 361) and genial desperation when he wrote that “the style is dashing, headlong, strewn with queer and quaint ingenuities moistened with humor, and is a capital specimen of deliberate and felicitous recklessness, in which a seeming helter-skelter movement is guided by real judgment.”1 Moby-Dick was also a “capital specimen” of a verbal picturesque. The reviewer for The Leader wrote, “The book is not a romance, nor a treatise on Cetology. It is something of both: a strange, wild work with the tangled overgrowth and luxuriant vegetation of American forests, not the trim orderliness of an English park” (D, 26). The Boston Evening Traveller summed up Melville’s mixed style in deliberately provocative words: It is “a sort of hermaphrodite craft” (D, 32), drawing upon the beautiful and the sublime, and yet occupying a middle ground distinct from either contributing “sex.” Melville walked Simms’s “Al Sirat,” the thin creative line between two aesthetic realms. His style was “strange,” said the National Intelligencer in Wash ington, in its “power to reach the sinuosities of a thought” (D, 68). All agreed Melville’s “moral chiaroscuro” had “charm.”2
The Tall Tale as Theme and Structure in Roughing It
Authors: Wonham Henry B
Published: November 2023

Frustrated with his urban existence in New York, Charles Stanley, the young hero of Emerson Bennett’s The Trapper’s Bride (1848), contemplates life on the western frontier. Like the tenderfooted narrator of Mark Twain’s Roughing It, Charles derives his initial impressions of western life from an exceedingly safe distance.
The Disembodied Yarn Spinner and the Reader of Huckleberry Finn
Authors: Wonham Henry B
Published: November 2023

Toward the end of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Mark Twain explains that the river pilot of the 1840s and 1850s was to be envied because, unlike even a king, “his movements were entirely free.”The river pilot before the war was “an absolute monarch,” the one man on earth who answered to no higher authority, who was “absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words” (91).
Introduction: Studying Cognitive Processes in the Classroom
Authors: Penrose Ann M , Sitko Barbara M
Published: November 2023

Alan is speaking aloud into a tape recorder as he reads his task directions and begins to work. He hesitates not a bit in responding to this assignment. He reads the three-page article from beginning to end, pausing for comment after each sentence or two: “ah, it seems like the key clue” … “underline that” … “key dates.” Then he rereads the task directions, decides there are “two key issues here … the definition of a hurricane, the history,” and proceeds to write his paper by stringing together the facts he’d highlighted under these two headings. Alan churns this one out easily, pausing during the writing process only to complain about the tedium of the task and the poor quality of his own text: “this is a terrible intro” … “this is bad” … “this paper is not making too much sense” … “this is so trivial … I hate this … nothing to it.”
Decision-Making During the Collaborative Planning of Coauthors
Authors: Burnett Rebecca E
Published: November 2023

As both a teacher and researcher, I want to understand the nature of the collaborative decision-making process that coauthors use. My interest comes in part from recognizing the benefits of classroom collaboration, which can give students experience and insight into their own thinking and problem solving. Students also gain emotional support, dialectical opportunities, and mutual commitment (Gebhardt, 1980) as well as preparation for academic and workplace collaboration as they work with the conventions and language of a discourse community and receive feedback (Higgins, 1988). My interest is also understandable given the prevalence of collaborative writing activities in classrooms. For example, nearly half of the respondents (46.5%) in a national survey of university and college business communication teachers indicated that they use collaborative writing in their classes (Bosley, 1989). The use of collaboration is increasingly widespread in many other writing courses as well (see detailed review in DiPardo & Freedman, 1988).
Using Conferences to Support the Writing Process
Authors: Bowen Betsy A
Published: November 2023

Conversations between students and teachers about writing are not new, but in the past twenty years they have gained considerable attention as an effective tool in teaching writing. Researchers and theorists, such as Murray, Moffett, and Graves, have argued that students need to talk about drafts in progress with skilled, attentive readers. Recently, research on cognitive processes has begun to consider writing conferences as sites where writers may reveal something about the goals and decisions that influenced their writing. As a result, writing conferences, with teachers or with peers, have become a prominent part of new approaches to teaching writing.
Theology And Narrative Selected Essays
Authors: Frei Hans W
Published: November 2023

Hans W. Frei (1922-1988) was one of the most influential American theologians of his generation. Early in his career he drew attention to the importance of biblical narratives, he helped make Karl Barth once again a creative voice in contemporary theology, and he served as a model of what his colleague, George Lindbeck, has called “postliberal theology.” This volume collects ten of Frei’s lectures and essays, half of them never before published. Addressing audiences of theologians, biblical scholars, and literary critics, Frei explores the implications of his work for hermeneutics and Christology, and discusses Barth, Schleiermacher, and his own teacher, H. Richard Niebuhr. William Placher has provided an introduction to Frei’s life and work, and the volume ends with an essay by George Hunsinger on Frei’s significance for theology today. This collection provides an unrivaled introduction to Frei’s work.
Sketch of the Present Situation of America, 1794
Authors: Harris Sharon M
Published: November 2023

That melancholy pause, and extreme dejection, which at this present so apparently pervades every order of citizens among us, is, methinks, rather derogatory to the American character. The question, relative to opening the temple of Janus,1 seems to be agitated with unbecoming warmth; and a zeal, not properly tempered by knowledge, is, I conceive, strikingly exemplified by every party.
A Theology of Behavior: Communio Sanctorum and The Use of Sources
Authors: Heffernan Thomas J
Published: November 2023

The narrative conventions of the medieval saint’s life are indebted to religious ideals which laud antifraternal, solitary, and ascetic practices. Such ideals shaped the way medieval sacred biography illustrated both the public and the private character of sanctity. By the mid-fourth century, these austere ideals had formed a congeries of complex beliefs rooted in the church’s theological and philosophical teaching and can be seen complete in Athanasius’s Vita Sancti Antonii. These ideologies make up the conceptual skeleton which girds the narrative, and as such they inform the crucial antinomian dialectic, exemplified throughout the breadth of medieval sacred biography, of the conflict between the civitas Dei and the civitas hominis.
Blues Notes on Black Sexuality: Sex and the Texts of the Twenties and Thirties
Authors: duCille Ann
Published: November 2023

Jazz. Blues. Boogie-woogie, black bottom, shimmy, shake, and mess around. Black bodies moving by the millions from southern shacks to northern slums, moving to the beat of the New Negro in a new world. Freud. Sex. Speakeasies and bootlegged gin. Marcus Garvey. Victory in Europe. Breadlines. Unemployment. Race riots and mob violence. Rent parties and literary salons. Detroit. Chicago. Home to Harlem. Nigger Heaven. The “authentic,” “real colored thing.” Josephine Baker. Ma Rainey. Bessie Smith. “Love Oh Love Oh Careless Aggravating Love.”
The Bourgeois, Wedding Bell Blues of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen
Authors: duCille Ann
Published: November 2023

It is only through a disturbing twist of literary fate and intellectual history that Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen have been criticized for not measuring up to the sexual and textual liberation of their blues-singing sisters. At another time, in another context, these two women authors might have been praised for their roles in advancing literary discourse toward a moment where black female desire could be boldly sung on the printed page as well as on the nightclub stage. Perpetually measured against Bessie Smith, on the one hand, and Zora Neale Hurston, on the other, however, Fauset and Larsen have rarely been read in terms of their own particular contributions to modernism, to American and African American literature, and to the development of the woman’s novel. In contrast to the raunchy lyrics of the blues and the graphic portraits of “low-class Negro life” painted by such male writers as Claude McKay, the fiction of Fauset and Larsen seems to some readers sexually stultified and anachronistically reticent. In the wider continuum of a womancentered literary history, however, Fauset’s and Larsen’s forays into the forbidden realm of female sexual desire appear progressive, counterconventional, perhaps the most courageous, if tentative, literary efforts to explore sexual politics from a female perspective since Kate Chopin published The Awakening in 1899.
Stoning the Romance: Passion, Patriarchy, and the Modern Marriage Plot
Authors: duCille Ann
Published: November 2023

If Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen are transitional figures whose novels form a bridge between the literary passionlessness of the 1890s and the sexual openness of the modern t:ra, Zora Neale Hurston is a pivotal point whose texts traverse the terrain between concern with the politics of sexuality, often covertly expressed in the fiction of black women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the openly scathing critiques of erotic relations as the root of female oppression which characterize the contemporary black feminist text. But while critics have privileged Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as the premier black feminist novel, in part because of its critique of the institution of marriage, few texts in the entire history of African American women’s fiction depict matrimony and childbearing as woman’s ruination more dramatically than Larsen’s Quicksand. Helga Crane, the novel’s troubled, sensual heroine, ultimately surrenders herself to and satisfies her sexual hunger through what seems the only legitimate outlet for that “nameless, shameful impulse”: marriage.
The Place of the Oedipal: Gide Writing Home From North Africa
Authors: Lucey Michael
Published: November 2023

In particular, I will be observing Gide’s relation to the oedipalizing narratives so familiar to many “Freudian” accounts of the arrival at “homosexuality.” My impression is that Gide perceives many of the ways such narratives deny, or at least work to dampen, many of the political complexities, much of the political potential, of sexuality; my impression is also that the Gidean text struggles in various ways against this dampening effect, against this possible denial. This struggle is what interests me in this chapter. I will be building on some of the considerations as to the confused temporality of sexuality from the last chapter; I will also be trying to elaborate the discussion of Gide’s relation to North Africa, though from a rather different angle. The main new departure here, one that plays an important role in making the analyses of future chapters possible, is my discussion of Gide’s ambivalent relation to female figures in the construction of his sexuality: ambivalent in that he finds certain things he might feel loyal to in the marginal status of certain female sexualities even as he feels an often violent urge to define himself over against the feminine. Si le grain ne meurt can be read as a form of self analysis, a place in which Gide tries to construct in narrative form an explanation of his own sexual development, or perhaps we should say a place where he confronts the difliculties that kind of explanatory effort inevitably involves. It is in the context of such difficulties, for instance, that one feels drawn to read the following scene, described by Gide on only the second or third page of his hook. The Gides are on a visit to his father’s side of the family in Uzes, and on this particular day they are visiting “!es cousins de Flaux”: Gide passes on immediately without comment, hut the scene resonates with many others in the book in which he writes as if to come to terms with his relationship to female sexuality and to his mother in particular. l would like here to draw a group of these scenes together in order to find out what precisely Gide thinks he can explain about his homosexuality-his struggle to fix on, accept, and account for a particular 01lject choice-by writing (often very obliquely) about his mother’s sexuality and his own relationship to it.
Without Delay: Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Lacan, And the Onset of Sexuality
Authors: Lucey Michael
Published: November 2023

Now if all that Gide was doing was letting people know about his sexuality, there would, of course, be no real reason to concern oneself overlong (or at all) with the homosexuality present in his novel. Indeed, one of the more startling things about the bulk of the criticism since written on Les Faux-Monnayeurs is its consistently demonstrated ability to avoid mentioning homosexuality, or, if it should mention it, to avoid including it within the frame of the critical discussion of the novel, as if the subject had a relation only to the author, had only an inessential relation to the novel’s project. But finally the presence of homosexuality in Les Faux-Monnayeurs needs to be understood as more than an oblique and glancing form of personal confession. Like Si le grain ne meurt and Corydon, Les Faux-Monnayeurs is a text in which sexuality comes to he theorized. That the criticism demonstrates an insis­ tent inability or unwillingness to come to terms with this, as if it wanted to thwart at least the theoretical import of Gide’s effort at publicness, need not, though it often could, he understood as a conscious intention of an individual critic. It is more a product of the categories in which critical discussions of the novel tend to run, categories that function to marginalize any consideration of the novel’s theorization of sexuality, and that therefore need to be examined in their own right in order to understand how they allow or encourage a phobic distanciation from questions of sexuality in this novel. Take, for example, Alain Goulet’s Andre Gide, ‘‘Les Faux-Monnayeurs,” mode d’emploi (1991). In his opening biographical overview, Goulet positions Les Faux­ Monnayeurs quite clearly next to Corydon and Si le grain ne meurt: This passage is typical in many ways. First of all, by being included in Goulet’s opening biographical overview, and constituting in all its brevity one of the most substantial discussions of homosexuality in this “user’s manual,” this passage licenses the near complete exclusion of any discussion of homosexuality from those sections of Goulet’s book devoted to analysis or criticism.
Introduction
Authors: Moore R Laurence
Published: November 2023

As I purposed to make a considerable stay here, it gratified me to learn that there is no longer the want of harmony between the townspeople and pilgrims Many passengers stop to take their pleasure or make their profit in the Fair, instead of going onward to the Celestial City. Indeed, such are the charms of the place, that people often affirm it to be the true and only heaven; stoutly contending that there is no other, that those who seek further are mere dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of the Celestial City lay but a bare mile beyond the gates of Vanity, they would not be fools enough to go thither.
The Spoken Word, Stage Performance, and the Profits of Religious Spectacle
Authors: Moore R Laurence
Published: November 2023

Indeed, what with their anxious seats, their revivals, their music, and their singing, every class and sect in the states have even now so far fallen into Catholicism that religion has become more of an appeal to the senses than to the calm and sober judgment.
Christianity Before 200: Invisibility and Adaptation
Authors: Finney Paul Corby
Published: November 2023

We now turn to the material side of the discussion. In the present chapter the major fact that needs explaining is the absence of Christian art before the year 200. Previous efforts to explain this fact have varied in details, but one of the abiding temptations is to view absence of art as a sign of principled early Christian opposition to pictorial representation. In light of the discussion set forth in the previous four chapters, this explanation is no longer convincing; hence, we must seek a new interpretative paradigm that will make better sense of the material record as we have it.
The Earliest Christian Art
Authors: Finney Paul Corby
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of the third century (circa 190/200–210/220) a small group of Roman Christians commissioned and oversaw the execution of fresco paintings for the walls and ceilings of ten underground burial chambers1 within a catacomb complex situated on the Appia Antica (Figure 6.1 no. 44) southeast of Rome and named after Callistus,2 an ex-slave who also was bishop of Rome in the years approximately 217 to 222. Most of the paintings in these rooms have perished. Of those that survive, a few illustrate biblical subjects inspired either by the Hebrew Bible or the Gospels.
When Brothers Dwell Together
Authors: Greenspahn Frederick E
Published: November 2023

Although primogeniture is commonly assumed to have prevailed throughout the world and firstborns are regarded as most likely to achieve success, many of the most prominent figures in biblical literature are younger offspring, including Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, David, and Solomon. Adducing evidence from a wide range of disciplines, this study demonstrates that ancient Israelite fathers were free to choose their primary heirs. Rather than being either legally mandated or a protest against the prevailing norm, the Bible’s propensity for younger offspring conforms to a widespread folk motif, evoking innocence, vulnerability, and destiny. Within the biblical context, this theme heightens God’s role in supporting ostensibly unlikely heroes. Drawing on the resources of law, anthropology, folklore, and linguistics, Greenspahn shows how these tales serve as complex parables of the relationship of God to his chosen people, also reflecting Israel’s own discomfort and confusion about the contradiction between its theology of election and the reality of political weakness.
The Last Shall Be First
Authors: Greenspahn Frederick E
Published: November 2023

The pervasiveness of younger siblings throughout so much of biblical literature demands an explanation. However, the lack of conclusive evidence demonstrating the practice of either primogeniture or ultimogeniture in ancient Israel precludes interpreting this as either a reflection or a rejection of actual norms governing inheritance and succession. Fortunately, the biblical accounts do not need to be treated as an isolated phenomenon. The success of younger children is a common feature of popular literature around the world. Particularly in folktales one finds youngest sons succeeding at tasks their older brothers are unable to achieve, defying the odds to kill dragons or marry princesses.1
The Son God Has Chosen
Authors: Greenspahn Frederick E
Published: November 2023

The stories of younger childrens which so fill the pages of Genesis have been woven together into a common work with values similar to those found in several other biblical accounts, including those devoted to rival wives and the various hero narratives which comprise the book of Judges. Nontheless, it is reasonable t.o expect the younger sibling stories to have their own unique focus. The nature of that can be inferred from the prominent role accorded national concerns in so many of these accounts, such as the Jacob-Esau cycle, with its dominant characters standing for Israel and Edom.
Geography and the Sacred: Establishing Power Across the Roman Oikoumene
Authors: Edwards Douglas R
Published: November 2023

Defining space plays a significant role in human society. How a people interpret their geographic surroundings illuminates how they perceive their world and their place in it. Territories (whether a site, a city, a region, or even an empire) were not neutral entities in the Graeco-Roman world. Often they were viewed as “having a relationship with the cosmos, religiously oriented and pervaded with sanctity. “
Cosmic Power Brokers: Human Agents and Divine Emissaries
Authors: Edwards Douglas R
Published: November 2023

The divine world played an important role in the plethora of symbolic discourses between groups and individuals throughout the Roman Empire. Such activity needed interpreters and some system within which such agents could properly broker the power of the divine for the less informed. These agents were seen by groups as possessing special connections to the divine and sometimes were viewed as divine themselves. “That is why we even worship those persons as gods; for we consider that what has power to confer the greatest advantage is divine” (Epictetus 4.1.61). The particular power and special attributes of such emissaries depended on the history of the group, the circumstances in which an emissary worked, and the particular potent symbols operative for that group or that age.
T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane
Authors: Bromwich David
Published: November 2023

By 1940 T. S. Eliot had emerged as the representative English poet of modernism. This was one of those transitions that feel natural after they have happened that can seem to settle a reputation once and for all with a finality mysterious to readers who witnessed the struggle for fame. Of such a moment it is always fair to ask how far the climax it affords is a trick of retrospect, a shadow we mistake for a necessary part of the landscape. What if Eliot’s assimilation had occurred much faster? What if it had occurred more slowly, or on a more idiosyncratic basis? Eliot’s letters and occasional criticism are sown with doubt and wonder at the definitive quality of his triumph. The way a few of his poems joined with a few of his polemical essays to secure a unique place for his poetic achievement is one of those inspired accidents that history casts up from time to time to challenge our determinisms. Of course, this was the outcome Eliot desired all along. But the readers who first cared for his poetry must have seen the possibility of a different development.
Kipling in the History of Forms
Authors: Menand Louis
Published: November 2023

Rudyard Kipling has a role in everyone’s notion of the history of modern British literature, but no one’s notion of the history of modern British literature depends on the role that Kipling plays. This has been the case pretty much universally since Kipling’s death in 1936. Many mighty engineers of critical taste since then have taken Kipling as a topic for serious appreciation, of course: in the early 1940s George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, and Edmund Wilson all proposed ways in which, by shortening the horizon of our critical expectations just enough, we might find rewards for taking an interest in Kipling’s work. More recently, and with a somewhat clearer conscience, Angus Wilson, Irving Howe, and Craig Raine have found admiring things to say about Kipling. But none of these considerations makes a historical claim about Kipling’s importance. What they make are taste claims.
Love, Politics, and Textual Corruption Mrs. O’Shea’s Parnell
Authors: Foster R F
Published: November 2023

Yeats’s preoccupation with Parnell developed quite late in life; and though the Chief was already a haunting presence in the poems of 1913, representing an Anglo-Irish integrity supposedly lost to modern Irish politics, Parnell’s reception into the Yeatsian pantheon was given a more dramatic impetus the following year. For in May 1914 Parnell’s widow, Katharine, once notorious as “Kitty O’Shea” in the 1890 divorce case that shattered Parnell’s career, arrived back in the public eye with the publication of her memoir Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life. Yeats, his father, and Lady Gregory all read the book avidly. I It affected the poet’s view of the private Parnell, of English hypocrisy, of the conflict of passion and will; and it supplied him with images that recur in The Trembling of the Veil and A Vision.2 Nor were the Yeats circle alone in their preoccupation. “Everyone is reading the O’Shea revelations;’ noted Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.3 Sales of the book were gratifyingly large, running into three printings and helped by prepublication serialization and widespread newspaper coverage.
Evangelical Anorexia Nervosa
Authors: Rubin Julius H
Published: November 2023

The evangelical anoretic was a Protestant whose experience of self, other, and world was informed by the vocabularies of an inner-worldly, mystical, pastoral theology. Those who attempted excessive fasting, or even fasting unto death, did so as part of a directed spiritual exercise that was to purify sin in a moment when God had withdrawn his love. The Protestant mystic fully expected that these obsessive rituals of purification would lead the soul through the inward progression of stages culminating in the state of mystical union. Since the unio mystica experience proved evanescent, the Protestant mystic understood religious life to be a continual repetition of these spiritual cycles. Anne Fremantle describes this experience as a journey from the “… dark nights of the senses, of the soul—the purifications, the progress from petitionary prayer to meditation to contemplation, from contemplation to infused prayer, and thence—for the proficient—to unitive prayer, to the mystic marriage, and finally, to a state of union.”1
Concluding Synthesis
Authors: Avery Dulles S J
Published: November 2023

Amid the welter of questions, theories, and controversies about faith the reader could easily lose track of the main stream of concordant affirmation, which has been relatively constant down through the centuries, and may be recapitulated here by way of a conclusion. This final chapter will take the form of a summary of the principal points of this central tradition, viewed in the perspectives of the present author. The following brief, thesis-like propositions presuppose the more detailed exposition given in the previous pages.
Ingredients of Change
Authors: Olivelle Patrick
Published: November 2023

The original āśrama system that we have just examined was subjected to radical changes when it was converted into what I have called its classical formulation. In this chapter I want to examine the historical circumstances that may have brought about or at least paved the way for those changes, including the disparity between the original āśrama theology and the institutions that it sought to regulate, and the increasing links between that theology and other aspects of Brahmai:iical ideology and institutions, especially the rites of passage.
Development of the Classical System
Authors: Olivelle Patrick
Published: November 2023

The āśrama system, we have seen, was primarily a theological construct. On the one hand, the system imposed its own tidy fourfold scheme on a variety of behavior patterns. The classical system, on the other hand, imposed a somewhat artificial sequence for the assumption of the four āśramas, a sequence that did not totally correspond to actual practice, especially in the case of renunciation. In this chapter I examine some further elaborations of the classical system that were intended to address these issues.