bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Representations of Melodramatic Performance
Authors: Gerould Daniel
Published: October 2008

Among the reformers advocating a people's theater in the early twentieth century, there were those theorists of culture for the masses, like Romain Rolland and Anatolii Lunacharsky, who realized that to appeal to a broad audience a genuinely popular theatre must not only be uplifting and civic in spirit, but also entertaining. They recognized that such a popular theater already existed in the nineteenth century in the form of melodramatic performance: it had democratized the stage, brought the lower classes into the theatre, reduced the gap between the actor and the auditorium, and enabled the spectator to enter into the action, thereby creating a sense of communion (Bradby and McCormick 15–29). Rather than proposing a return to the sacred rituals of Greece or the religious festivals of the Middle Ages as the basis of a people's theater, they argued that melodramatic performance—purified of its commercialism and crudity—offered the model for a revolutionary new popular art.
Browning and Pre-Raphaelite Medievalism: Educated versus Innocent Seeing
Authors: Shaw W. David
Published: October 2008

If the theory and practice of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism are something more today than historical curiosities, it is partly because critical interest still attaches to a question they explore. This question may be phrased as follows: how far is Ruskin's doctrine of unmediated sense perception, of the so-called uneducated or innocent eye, an artistic possibility? In this essay I shall consider a few of the ways in which Browning's approach to the question differs from the characteristic approach of three contemporaries. I shall briefly compare three of Browning's poems on medieval subjects – “Childe Roland,” “Count Gismond” and “Old Pictures in Florence” – with D. G. Rossetti's “The Blessed Damozel,” William Morris's “The Chapel in Lyoness,” and Gerard Manley Hopkins's “Duns Scotus's Oxford.”
A Precarious Turning: Tennyson's Redemption of Literature and Life from Medievalism
Authors: Buckler William E.
Published: October 2008

Tennyson is not only breaking out of the pedestrian clichés and frozen critical expectations that for so long enshrouded him; he is gradually but steadily emerging as a poet of arbitration, as one of the poet-practitioners by whose work the nature of poetry must itself be defined and against which the work of poets habitually preferred to him will more and more be measured.
Carlyle and Jocelin of Brakelond: A Chronicle Rechronicled
Authors: Georgianna Linda
Published: October 2008

“Salvation lies not in tight lacing,” Carlyle quips in the opening of Book II ofPast and Presentby way of defending the loose structure of his comparative study of English society in the early 1840s. Critics still disagree sharply in their estimates of Carlyle's political argument, but the loosely-laced structure ofPast and Presenthas allowed Book II, with its portrait of twelfth-century monasticism and Abbot Samson, to remain fairly immune to controversy. In fact, most readers, whether they applaud or dismiss the rest ofPast and Present, would agree with A. M. D. Hughes that “it is in virtue of this interlude … that the book belongs among the classics of our tongue.” Several editors have gone so far as to sever Carlyle's tenuous connection between past and present altogether, printing the section devoted to Abbot Samson separately under a new title.
The Ring and the Scholars
Authors: Kincaid A. N.
Published: October 2008

One branch of source study concerns an author's use of events, localities, works of art, and artifacts. We may sometimes ask ourselves whether it matters what porridge had John Keats, which Withens was the original of Wuthering Heights, whether there was a single identifiable Lucy. Yet so fascinated are we by the alchemy which the creative mind performs that we wish to view from all possible angles how it works on its raw material, how it transmutes crude fact into poetic truth, how it changes baser metal into gold. By doing this we deepen our knowledge of that mind. And so we seek for accuracy in our identification.
The Brownings' Correspondence: Supplement No. 3 to the Checklist
Authors: Kelley Philip , Hudson Ronald
Published: October 2008

Once again, we have to thank the directors of the Browning Institute and the editor of Browning Institute Studies for this opportunity to update the information contained in our Checklist.
Melodrama, Pantomime, and the Communist Manifesto
Authors: Lansbury Coral
Published: October 2008

At the heart of all great religion and art there is a mystery that expresses an ineluctable paradox: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, In the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (I Cor. 15:51–52). The bass aria of Handel's Messiah confounds the natural world and all its laws to affirm the divine power that will make the corruptible incorruptible and the mortal immortal. For Marx the transformation of humankind does not wait upon a seraphic clarion; it will be accomplished when the industrial proletariat overthrows the capitalist classes in revolutionary struggle. That in itself is a mystery which has not been demonstrated historically; but that greater mystery conceals another, which required the specific revisions of Lenin. The problem is stated very clearly by the late Alvin Gouldner.
George's Hive and the Georgian Hinge
Authors: Patten Robert L.
Published: October 2008

Victorian political and social thought was shaped to some extent in response to the French Revolution and the Regency. One widely circulated mid-nineteenth-century emblem of the State is George Cruikshank's The British Bee Hive, which he designed in 1840 during a second wave of Chartist agitation whose origins and program extend backward into the first decades of the century (Fig. I). The Bee Hive was not published, however, until twenty-seven years later, on the eve of the second Reform Bill, when Cruikshank's “Penny Political Picture for the People” gave him an opportunity to address his public one more time “with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform” and the constitutional subjects that had preoccupied him “for upwards of fifty years.” As an expression of populous enterprise and the stable class hierarchies of the British bourgeois monarchy, George Cruikshank's beehive embodies in its design and accompanying letterpress not only his notions about the second Reform Bill, but also ideas growing out of earlier political, social, and graphic controversies.
Gender-to-Gender Anxiety and Influence in Robert Browning's Men and Women
Authors: Haigwood Laura E.
Published: October 2008

In their courtship and marriage, the Brownings did not contend for that “mastery” the wife of Bath and other traditional sources of marital wisdom cite as the usual object of competition between the sexes. Instead they struggled over the privilege of admiring and serving the other. Robert Browning won that competition, his victory both symptom and cause of a poetic silence that lasted throughout most of his married life. An important exception to his prolonged inactivity is Men and Women, Browning's successful attempt at bringing his innovative style to full, sustained articulation. In order to achieve the kind of psychological, as well as intellectual, independence that would enable him to speak “in [his] true person” (“One Word More,” line 137), however, the poet needed to alter the terms of his relationship with his wife, who was both the emotional center of his life and a more successful, more popular poet. Browning achieved this separation in Men and Women, particularly in “One Word More.”
Chiarini's Retort to Zanella: Browning's Italian Critics
Authors: Cervo Nathan
Published: October 2008

Giuseppe Chiarini was an Italian poet, translator, and critic. In 1874 he sent a copy of his Poesie to Robert Browning. Among the English poets Chiarini translated were Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Robert Browning. As an example of the liberties he took with Italian metrics in order to render the gusto of Browning's rollicking manner, I cite the first stanza of “Up at a Villa – Down in the City” (“Su in Villa e Giù in Città”):

S' i' avessi denari, se n'avessi

Abbastanza e d'avanzo, la mia casa

Sarebbe al certo alla città, giù in piazza.

Oh dolce vita, oh, dolce vita starsene

Affacciati laggiù alla finestra.

(Poesie 421)

(If I had money, if I had

Enough and cash on hand, my house

Would certainly be in the city, down in a piazza.

O sweet life, O sweet life, to be

Leaning out of a window there.)

[My translation]
Gods of the Lower World: Romantic Egoists and Carlylean Heroes
Authors: Timko Michael
Published: October 2008

A recent work calls the history of Romanticism “a history of redefinitions” (Rosen 16). I have no intention of attempting to define or redefine that movement; rather, in classifying a figure whose career spans the periods generally categorized under both Romantic and Victorian – Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) – I want to raise some questions about certain of his ideas and look closely at his relationship to some of his contemporaries. Neither Romantic nor Victorian, he resists being neatly categorized. Perhaps this circumstance helps to explain the tremendous influence he had on many writers, some of whom seem at some remove from this enigmatic nineteenth-century figure.
On the Origin of Fairies: Victorians, Romantics, and Folk Belief
Authors: Silver Carole
Published: October 2008

In 1846 William John Thoms, who contributed the term “folklore” to the English language, commented inThe Athenaeumthat “belief in fairies is by no means extinct in England” (Merton 55). Thoms was not alone in his opinion; he merely echoed and endorsed the words of Thomas Keightley, the author of a popular and influential book,The Fairy Mythology. For believers were not limited to gypsies, fisherfolk, rural cottagers, country parsons, and Irish mystics. Antiquarians of the Romantic era had begun the quest for fairies, and throughout Victoria's reign advocates of fairy existence and investigators of elfin origins included numerous scientists, historians, theologians, artists, and writers. By the 1880s such leading folklorists and anthropologists as Sabine Baring-Gould, Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Lang, and Sir John Rhŷs were examining oral testimony on the nature and the customs of the “little folk” and the historical and archaeological remains left by them. At the beginning of the twentieth century eminent authors, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, swelled the ranks of those who held the fairy faith and publicized their findings. In all, in a remarkable “trickle up” of folk belief, a large number of educated Romantics, Victorians, and Edwardians speculated at length on whether fairies did exist or had at least once existed.
Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction in French: a usage-based account
Authors: CHEVROT JEAN-PIERRE , DUGUA CELINE , FAYOL MICHEL
Published: October 2008

In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which interrelates a number of different issues: the acquisition of phonological alternations, the segmentation of new words, the long-term stabilization of the word form in the lexicon and the formation of item-based constructions. According to this scenario, children favour the presence of initial CV syllables when segmenting stored chunks of speech of the type word1-liaison-word2 (les arbres‘the trees’ is segmented as /le/+/zarbr/). They cope with the variation of the liaison in the input by memorizing multiple exemplars of the same word2 (/zarbr/, /narbr/). They learn the correct relations between the word1s and the word2 exemplars through exposure to the well-formed sequence (un+/narbr/,deux+/zarbr/). They generalize the relation between a word1 and a class of word2 exemplars beginning with a specific liaison consonant by integrating this information into an item-based schema (e.g.un+/nX/,deux+/zX/). This model is based on the idea that the segmentation of new words and the development of syntactic schemas are two aspects of the same process.
Gesture as a support for word learning: The case of under
Authors: MCGREGOR KARLA K. , ROHLFING KATHARINA J. , BEAN ALLISON , MARSCHNER ELLEN
Published: October 2008

Forty children, aged 1 ; 8–2 ; 0, participated in one of three training conditions meant to enhance their comprehension of the spatial term under: the +Gesture group viewed a symbolic gesture for under during training; those in the +Photo group viewed a still photograph of objects in the under relationship; those in the Model Only group did not receive supplemental symbolic support. Children's knowledge of under was measured before, immediately after, and two to three days after training. A gesture advantage was revealed when the gains exhibited by the groups on untrained materials (but not trained materials) were compared at delayed post-test (but not immediate post-test). Gestured input promoted more robust knowledge of the meaning of under, knowledge that was less tied to contextual familiarity and more prone to consolidation. Gestured input likely reduced cognitive load while emphasizing both the location and the movement relevant to the meaning of under.
Methicillin-resistantStaphylococcus aureusin people living and working in pig farms
Authors: VAN DEN BROEK I. V. F. , VAN CLEEF B. A. G. L. , HAENEN A. , BROENS E. M. , VAN DER WOLF P. J. , VAN DEN BROEK M. J. M. , HUIJSDENS X. W. , KLUYTMANS J. A. J. W. , VAN DE GIESSEN A. W. , TIEMERSMA E. W.
Published: October 2008

We compared the prevalence of human and animal methicillin-resistantStaphylococcus aureus(MRSA) at pig farms in The Netherlands, and related this to individual and farm-level characteristics. More than half of the farms investigated (28/50) had MRSA in pigs or stable dust and about one third (15/50) of person(s) were identified as MRSA carriers. Human carriage was found only on farms with MRSA-positive pigs or dust. MRSA strains in human samples were the samespa-type as found in pigs and all were not typable by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (NT-MRSA). Multivariate analyses showed that risk factors for human MRSA carriage were: working in pig stables (OR 40, 95% CI 8–209) and the presence of sows and finishing pigs (OR 9, 95% CI 3–30). Veterinary sample collectors sampling the pigs showed transient MRSA carriage only during the day of the farm visit. Working in pig stables with MRSA-positive pigs poses a high risk for acquiring MRSA, increasingly so when contact with live pigs is more intensive or long lasting.
The Radicalism ofFelix Holt: George Eliot and the Pioneers of Labor
Authors: Hobson Christopher Z.
Published: October 2008

George eliot'sfelix holt the radicaldiscusses a figure of enormous importance in the social history of Britain and the United States: the labor pioneer, that is, the person who consciously dedicates his or her whole life to long-term activity in the working class. Eliot, I argue, is the first important writer to recognize the significance of this figure and invest it with moral value. In doing so, she upends the tradition bequeathed by earlier “industrial novels” by recognizing, along with the labor pioneer, the permanence of class divisions and the political independence of the working class. Further, in heroizing the figure who struggles for the future of a new social class, Eliot departs from the reliance on “the authority of the past” or the stress on culture in general that have been seen as keys to her work.
Foucault, Dickens, and David Copperfield
Authors: Cordery Gareth
Published: October 2008

Margaret atwood's narrator inBodily Harm, reminiscing about her childhood, says: “I learned to listen for what wasn't being said, because it was usually more important than what was” (55). Making a similar point, inThe History of SexualityFoucault writes that “There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (1: 27). If we readDavid Copperfieldin this way — listening to the silences, as well as attending closely to what is being said — the narrative which emerges from the surfacebildungsromanis very different from the traditional story of David who learns that “there can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose,” and that his marriage to Dora was “the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart” (ch. 45; 733). In this surface narrative David, suitably chastened, is released to marry the boring Agnes by the fortuitous death of the unfortunate Dora. Many critics have commented wisely on David's emotional and psychological development. What I want to suggest is that, while the surface story traces the disciplining of David's emotions, there is another narrative which tells of a different kind of disciplining, one that subjects David to a variety of social norms, rules, and regulations.
Farcical Process, Fictional Product: Thackeray's Theatrics inLovel the Widower
Authors: Horn Anne Layman
Published: October 2008

Although long slighted by critics,Lovel the Widowershould be recognized as the most overtly theatrical work we have from one of the nineteenth century's most theatrical writers. Adapted for the Cornhill Magazine from Thackeray's failed drama,The Wolves and the Lamb, Lovelis narrated by a character who calls himself the “Chorus of the Play” and tells the story of a governess who must hide the fact that she was once an actress. Thackeray published the story to keep theCornhill's readers entertained while he began work on his last completed novel,The Adventures of Philip. As a piece of occasional journalism,Loveltherefore shares a closer kinship with Thackeray's other periodical writings and Christmas books than it does with his mature novels. Not destined to be the newly-launchedCornhill's chief fictional attraction (that honor went to Trollope'sFramley Parsonage),Lovelactually functioned in the magazine as the literary equivalent of a theatrical comic afterpiece.
Speaking of Illness: Nerves, Narratives, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology
Authors: Walsh Susan
Published: October 2008

In 1862 parliament deliberated the Lunacy Regulation Bill, which stipulated that medical testimony keep to the broad road of “fact” and not stray into the crooked alleyways of speculative “opinion.” During its debates, the House of Lords sometimes sounded like a parliamentary annex ofPunch, or of Swift's Academy of Projectors. Decrying how “the very idea of a mad doctor's examination has become a by-word,” the Lord Chancellor (Lord Westbury) and the Earl of Shaftesbury furnished anecdotes pointing to which way forensic madness lies: in the neighborhood of the lunacy expert who pronounced a fashionable lady deranged for sporting a dagger (“Dear me,” she protested, “if I am insane for that reason, nine-tenths of the ladies in Paris are insane too”); the eminent physician who detected incipient madness in a four-year-old whose cranium exceeded the sanity standard by ½″; the learned gentleman who diagnosed “fatuity and mania” in a female defendant because she could not tell “how much £100 a year was a week,” an impromptu sum which also flummoxed its proposer (“Don't be nervous,” coaxed the cross-examining counsel, “how much is it?”). While no one advocated barring the testimony of medical men entirely, many were reluctant to grant too much influence to paid witnesses interested in advertising expertise, and whose professional bonnets, it would appear, buzzed with their own pet-theoretical bees. The legal distinction between sanity and insanity was not to be drawn lightly for in many respects it was a property line, the critical boundary between free agency and economic wardship. The pertinent questions, argued theEconomist, were simply two: “Is A B fit to manage his money? Did A B commit a particular act with … a knowledge that it was wrong, or did he not do it?” As Lord Westbury noted, medical opinion could confuse these issues because doctors and lawyers share deceptively similar terms of art — “lunacy,” “imbecility,” “unsoundness” — but apply them differently and according to incompatible evidentiary procedures. Medicine considers insanity as a matter of disease, he asserted; the law, as a matter of “fact.” In its efforts to serve justice by excluding quackery, the House of Lords burnished its own legislative authority by portraying medicine as self-interested and compromised by multiple interpretive perspectives, and by characterizing the law, by contrast, as reliably linked to empirical fact. What from afar might look like a seamless medico-juridical institution is in truth scored with hairline fractures, if not sizable rifts.
Victorian Art History
Authors: Kestner Joseph A.
Published: October 2008

There has been an intriguing range of material published concerning Victorian painting sinceVictorian Literature and Culturelast offered an assessment of the field. These books, including exhibition catalogues, monographs, and collections of essays, represent new and important sources for research in Victorian art and its cultural contexts. Most striking of all during this interval has been the range of exhibitions, from focus on the Pre-Raphaelites to major installations of such Victorian High Olympians/High Renaissance painters as Frederic, Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Included as well have been exhibitions with a particular focus, such as that on the Grosvenor Gallery, and the more broadly inclusiveThe Victoriansheld at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this last being the most appropriate point of departure to assess the impact of Victorian art on the viewing public in the States.
“Yet Many of These Are Askew”: On Imitation, Originality, and Parody in Swinburne'sHeptalogia
Authors: Lawlor Jennifer A. Wagner
Published: October 2008

Algernon Charles Swinburne'sSpecimens of Modern Poets: The Heptalogia or The Seven Against Sense, a volume of parodic poems published in 1880, is a text that has sparked little modern criticism, and even those few remarks seem to take the volume about as seriously as contemporary critics did, seeing it essentially as a mark of Swinburne's well-known talent for imitation. Andreas Höfele, the most recent critic to mention the work, is perhaps the first to consider the work as more than a literary lark, seeing in it a self-conscious reflection upon the procedures of literary imitation, and upon Swinburne's own artistry. Höfele's valuable but rather general comments lack detailed analysis, and any greater specificity in his article only goes so far as to say that the volume aims its wit at “poetry with a message,” and has particular sport with the more “earnest” of the poets, namely Tennyson and Patmore. Jerome McGann'sSwinburne: An Experiment in Criticismdoes mentionThe Heptalogiain the context of Swinburne's talent for pastiche and imitation — but he places the parody volume outside of Swinburne's primary intentions: “These things [The Heptalogiaand his other literary ‘hoaxes and burlesques’] are much, it is true, but they also seem, as it were, the outlying territories of an ideal center within which he would live” (80). This dismissal, on top of lack of attention toThe Heptalogia, needs to be remedied, and it is the intention of this essay to do so.
Travelers' Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley'sTravels in West Africa
Authors: Ciolkowski Laura E.
Published: October 2008

Victorian travel has always been about the politics of leaving home. And in a twentieth-century critical universe shaped by some of the fundamental questions about the making of “home” and “away” and the invention of “self” and “other,” the field of Victorian travel has necessarily taken its place at the center of a critical discourse about the sometimes fabulous and often sordid details of the colonial encounter. The Western travelers of such encounters are intriguing figures if simply because, despite the multiple voyagers' mythologies that adhere to them, they do not escape the demands of the Victorian world at home or the intricate structures of power out of which this world is made. Rather, the English adventurers who ostensibly left England behind for the mangrove swamps and cannibal villages of Africa regularly reproduced in their travels some of the very same structures of power from which they were purportedly freed. In leaving home, the English traveler also quite literally rediscovered it.
Visual Culture and Scopic Custom in Jane Eyre and Villette
Authors: Kromm Jane
Published: October 2008

Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation. Bronte pursued this end by demonstrating that incidents relating to the production and reception of visual culture were relevant for visual experience more broadly understood by linking these events in the narrative to “scopic custom”; that is, the art experiences of Bronte's characters are presented as occurring in relation to the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society. This strategic interweaving of visual culture with scopic custom allows Bronte to accentuate their interdependence as a socio-cultural dynamic of critical significance, and to illuminate their share in the cultural and social constraints affecting women as producers and objects of representation.
Tying the Knot in the Economic Warp of Jane Eyre
Authors: Dupras Joseph A.
Published: October 2008

A prominent pattern in the weave of Jane Eyre's station, attitudes, and narrative is her finances, skewed by lineage and wont. Jane's fortune and psyche are as warped when she becomes wealthy and a writer as when she was a young, anxious outcast whom poverty demeaned and challenged. Her memoirs critique religious hypocrisy, male chauvinism, and economic degradation, but also expose her pernicious outlook on matrimony and Mammon, in contrast to a proclaimed wedded bliss. “[T]he same catastrophe — marriage” (228; ch. 19) — that she wryly predicts for romances, real and fictional, is a stigma on her character. Jane Eyre records a twisted lesson about an heir straitened by serving too many masters. Jane, knowing she has mistaken wealth for a panacea, not a dangerous pharmakon, is no feminist paragon in a conventional rags-to-riches tale, but rather a disillusioned, haunted woman whose mendacity is a function and mainstay of her knotted, (under)privileged life. When she often wants “a facile word or plausible pretext… to get [herself] out of painful embarrassment” (277–78; ch. 23), candor shades into equivocation. Neither marriage nor writing makes an honest woman of her. Portraying herself as independent and principled, Jane at the end of her narrative rope seems to attain what her cousin, St. John Rivers, calls “the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilized affluence” (417; ch. 34). However, Jane often feigns placidity, and Ferndean is “deep buried in a wood … [an] ineligible and insalubrious site … no opening anywhere” — which makes her think she “had taken a wrong direction and lost [her] way” (455; ch. 37).
The “Surveillance of Désirée”: Freud, Foucault, andVillette
Authors: Hennelly Mark M.
Published: October 2008

Like many other seventeen-year-olds, Miss Ginevra Fanshawe in Charlotte Bronte'sVillette(1853) practices self-reflexive, generic word play as she characteristically “substituted this word ‘chose’ in temporary oblivion of the real name. It was a habit she had: ‘chose’ came in at every turn in her conversation — the convenient substitute for any missing word in any language she might chance at the time to be speaking” (115–16; ch. 6). Ginevra's word choice appears by no means accidental in this text riddled with (often bilingual) word-play substitutions, what Mary Pollack in a different context terms the novel's “rich matrix of conflicting insights about the nature of language” (54). In fact,choseseems a repeated code word for theenigmatic x, orthing itself, “the thing, the spirit, and the secret itself” (557; ch. 38), which Lucy sees in Paul and which lovers, metaphysicians, and literary theorists alike nostalgically, if not narcissistically, long to re-present. The word most often substituted for “thing” in the text is “shape,” like the “dark, usurping shape” (569; ch. 39) of the spectral nun, the problem being, however, that every suchdoubleor “daemonic shape” (Freud 143) uncannily either erases itself or serially forks into other metonymic representations which problematize any homesick quest for origins. Even the “shapes” of the “paving-stones,” which Lucy pointedly re-members a year later at the “very threshold” (305; ch. 21) of the entrance of Madame Beck's Pensionnat, only provide a kind of liminal entrancement, another abyssal signifier uncannily signifying uncertain values.
Robert Browning and “The King is Cold”: A New Poem
Authors: Stauffer Andrew M.
Published: October 2008

By February of 1858, the American abolitionist community had at least twice been exposed to a poem — attributed to Robert Browning — entitled “The King is Cold.” It appeared in January in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published in New York City, and, one month later, it was reprinted in William Garrison's Boston paper, the Liberator. Yet aside from this brief record of publication, the poem has left no discernible traces, either before or since. The oddly one-sided (i.e., American) appearances of “The King is Cold” surely contributed to its being overlooked by generations of Browning scholars and editors, including such modern fugitive-hunters as Broughton, Honan, and Kelley. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, Browning scholarship has been reluctant to extend its efforts across the Atlantic. We still await an analysis of the poet's American transactions that would update the important research done by Louise Greer in the 1950s. For most of his life, Browning was much more popular in the United States than in England, and, as Greer puts it, “Browning must have known more Americans than any other English man of letters” (39). And, although their author never visited the United States, Browning's poems arrived by the 1840s, finding enthusiastic audiences that included such luminaries as Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson, and Thomas Higginson. This Boston intellectual clique — transcendentalist, Unitarian, and abolitionist — recognized in Robert (and, more rapidly, in Elizabeth Barrett) the “brave translunary things that our first poets had” (Lowell qtd. in Greer 14). As the uncatalogued existence of “The King is Cold” suggests, the fruits of this special relationship remain incompletely gathered.
Literature and Science
Authors: Gates Barbara T.
Published: October 2008

Literature and science: no longer two cultures? Back in the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn headed us toward this conclusion when he emphasized how deeply science was embedded in culture inThe Structure of Scientific Revolution(1962). Since then, both cultural and literary analysts have theorized about just how literary texts actualize cultural assumptions, including those of science (Michael Riffaterre, “Flaubert's Presuppositions,”Diacritics11: 2–11). Science offers but one of a number of competing discourses within a culture (Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989); authors — of all sorts — are free to reconstruct any of them, and both science and literature realize culture. I draw the verb, “realize,” from Gillian Beer, whose bookOpen Fields: Science in Cultural Encounteroffers the occasion for this review. Beer's book reprints fourteen masterful essays that delineate ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific ideas have been realized. Beer chooses her verb carefully. Scientists, she suggests, are no different from other purveyors of ideas; they never know whom their work will influence or whose ends it will serve. Helmholtz can, for example, turn up in a poem by Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. We are always to understand that the cultural encounter between science and society moves in both directions and that any culture can provide striking correspondences. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, scientific hunts for missing links evolved concurrently with the sleuthing of literary detectives.
Turning the Inside Out: Morals, Modes of Living, and the Condition of the Working Class
Authors: Lamb John B.
Published: October 2008

Writing on the Living conditions in Devon and Somerset in 1849, Alexander Mackay set out to discredit the often picturesque depiction of the homes of the poor:

We are accustomed to associate with the idea of a country village, or with a cottage situated in a winding vale, or hanging upon the side of a rich and fertile slope, nothing but health, contentment and happiness. A rural dwelling of this class … makes such a nice pencil sketch, that we are naturally inclined to think it as neat and comfortable as it appears. But to know it aright, it must be turned inside out, and its realites exposed to the gaze of the observer. (qtd. in Lester 320)

It was this turning “inside out” of working-class interiors to the voyeuristic gaze of their largely middle-class readers that Mackay and his fellow journalists on the Morning Chronicle set out to accomplish in a series of “letters” written in 1849 and 1850. But such depictions of working-class houses and their interiors had been a staple part of the discourse on the condition of the laboring population as early as 1832, when the Manchester physician and later Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Kay published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, and they continued to appear throughout the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s in the work of Peter Gaskell, William Alison, Thomas Beames, Hector Gavin, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew, and others. This writing, as I will demonstrate, betrays similar discursive and ideological underpinnings as the workingclass interior becomes the focal point for the assertion of bourgeois value and the maintenance of class distinction.
The Opium Trade and Little Dorrit: A Case of Reading Silences
Authors: Xu Wenying
Published: October 2008

Nationalism and imperialism in nineteenth-century European literature, located within a theoretical framework of Self/Other, have been the subject of much recent interest. Such projects focus chiefly on representations of the Other in descriptions, images, and evaluations. Sometimes, however, the affirmation of the national Self in such literature is achieved by the total or near total obliteration of the Other. In such cases it is on non-representations, or to use Macherey's word “silences,” that one's reading of such texts must be focused if their nationalistic and imperialistic character is to be exposed.
Darwin's “Eye of Reason”: Natural Selection and the Mathematical Sublime
Authors: Willingham-McLain Gary
Published: October 2008

According to charles darwin's subsidence theory of coral reef formation, coral polyps laid the foundation fifty million years ago for a Pacific reef now known as Enewetak Atoll (Wood 12). At that time Enewetak was simply a ring of coral around the fringe of a sinking island mountain. Able to live only near the ocean's surface, however, corals build upon previous generations of coral structure as their land base sinks, and in the case of Enewetak this process continued long after the mountain's peak first submerged. Today Enewetak Atoll rises above the original mountain seven-tenths of a mile (two-and-a-half times the height of the Chicago Sears Tower) before it reaches its apex in a circle of lagoon islands on the ocean's surface.
The Architecture of Empire: “Oriental” Gothic and the Problem of British Identity in Ruskin's Venice
Authors: Ogden Daryl
Published: October 2008

On january 13, 1858 — a few months after the eruption of the Indian Mutiny — John Ruskin addressed an audience at the South Kensington Museum in London with a lecture entitled “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations” (published the following year as Lecture I ofThe Two Paths). Commenting on the dearth of artistic talent to be found in Scotland as opposed to the artistic abundance of India, Ruskin decrees that Indians are a “race rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift of it,” whereas with Scots one is faced with “a people careless of art and apparently incapable of it” (16: 262).
Law, Equity, and Conscience in Victorian England
Authors: Petch Simon
Published: October 2008

This paper is concerned with the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 18751 and the controversy surrounding them. The administrative reform of the Judicature was less obviously controversial than some other Victorian reformist legislation, such as the Factory Act, or the Married Women's Property Act, but legal debate about the Judicature Acts brings the law into dialogue with moral debates in the broader arena of Victorian culture. As a response to a crisis of authority in the country's legal institutions, this debate was one significant manifestation of the general conflict between authority and individualism that pervades Victorian discourse. The key terms of the legal debate were law, conscience, and equity, underwritten by the vague but powerful concepts of justice and natural law, and throughout the debate the relationships between legal usage and other forms of language were persistently questioned. The terms were also tested, and the questions asked, in such central literary texts asDaniel Deronda, Idylls of the King, andThe Ring and the Book, and in the writings of such culturally central figures as Charles Darwin and Frederick Denison Maurice.
Poets, Critics, and God-Talk
Authors: Wilt Judith
Published: October 2008

She'd had no end of myths about immortals coming down and taking human bodies, dying human deaths. Helen knew how to interpret that scripture: if gods could do this human thing, then we could as well. That plot as the mind's brainchild, awareness explaining itself to itself.…She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flip side … how body stumbled onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time. (Powers, 319–320)
Contemporary Biographers of Nineteenth-Century Novelists
Authors: Karl Frederick R.
Published: October 2008

A sudden scholarly interest in Robert Louis Stevenson has resulted in a good many publications — his collected letters, a brief life by Ian Bell, a more authoritative life by Frank McLynn, and a very full biography of Fanny Stevenson, the American woman who lived with the writer for the last twenty years of his life. Besides informing us about the Stevensons, this outpouring says a good deal about where biography is now, in the mid-1990s.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Idea of Recollection
Authors: Colley Ann C.
Published: October 2008

Throughout his life Stevenson scanned experience with reverted eyes. His passion for the past captured his attention so that he often stared at the present through the glass of memory. As if still studying the stationer's window where, on Saturday mornings, he and his nurse Cummy attempted to read, through the pictures, the “forbidden” sequels to the stories in Cassell's Family Papers, Stevenson at a later time continued to recapture and sometimes extend the “golden moments” and places of his youth by looking at the remembered images displayed within his mind's eye. These pictures brought him closer to the life he had left behind. They helped him re-embody the absence and break the silence of the glass that stood between him and his earlier years. Consequently, the recalled sight of Tibby Birse, a seamstress who had once come to the Edinburgh house and sewn with Cummy, “sitting with her legs crossed in a masculine manner; and swinging her foot emphatically” made audible the “thin, perpetual shrill” voice of her gossiping (Colvin 4: 264–65) and thereby, nearly forty years later (7 December 1893), breathed life into a detail and resuscitated a moment belonging to an earlier time.
Detecting Esther Summerson's Secrets: Dickens's Bleak House of Representation
Authors: Salotto Eleanor
Published: October 2008

In this essay, I suggest that we may read Esther Summerson's narration in Bleak House through the lens of recent feminist theoretical speculations on mimicry and masquerade. I argue that Esther's narrative is a duplicitous one in that it redeploys masculine modes of discourse, calling attention to the production of women in that discourse. Writing a narrative about her life, Esther, in effect, copies masculine discourse, but she also writes over it imprinting her own signature. Esther's writing sheds much light on the text's obsessive focus on writing and copying; she produces copy, the copy of a Victorian ideal woman, but in doing so she engenders blots that preclude a unidimensional reading of her. I contend that Esther adopts a narrative veil; this then is her secret in the text which links feminine identity to mimicry and masquerade. At the center of the text is Dickens's mordant critique of the legal system and its machinations; similarly, I argue that Esther's narrative participates in the demolishing of the idea of a stable notion of feminine identity.
More Books about Buildings and Food
Authors: Morton Timothy
Published: October 2008

George Eliot lamented the decoration of her and George Henry Lewes's house, for which Owen Jones, the man behind the color scheme for the Crystal Palace, designed wallpaper and chose draperies. At the beginning of his chapter onMiddlemarchinNovels Behind Glass, a detailed historicist study of Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot and the Great Exhibition, Andrew Miller quotes Eliot's lament: “Such fringing [sic] away of precious life in thinking of carpets and tables is an affliction to me and seems like a nightmare from which I shall find it bliss to awake into my old world of care for things quite apart from upholstery” (189). In the Afterword, Miller quotes the deathbed words of Oscar Wilde, whose earnestness about his own wallpapered predicament are quite in contrast with Eliot: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death…. One or the other of us has to go” (221).
Regularity at space-like and null infinity
Authors: Mason Lionel J. , Nicolas Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2008

We extend Penrose's peeling model for the asymptotic behaviour of solutions to the scalar wave equation at null infinity on asymptotically flat backgrounds, which is well understood for flat space-time, to Schwarzschild and the asymptotically simple space-times of Corvino–Schoen/Chrusciel–Delay. We combine conformal techniques and vector field methods: a naive adaptation of the ‘Morawetz vector field’ to a conformal rescaling of the Schwarzschild metric yields a complete scattering theory on Corvino–Schoen/Chrusciel–Delay space-times. A good classification of solutions that peel arises from the use of a null vector field that is transverse to null infinity to raise the regularity in the estimates. We obtain a new characterization of solutions admitting a peeling at a given order that is valid for both Schwarzschild and Minkowski space-times. On flat space-time, this allows larger classes of solutions than the characterizations used since Penrose's work. Our results establish the validity of the peeling model at all orders for the scalar wave equation on the Schwarzschild metric and on the corresponding Corvino–Schoen/Chrusciel–Delay space-times.
Klassische Konditionierung als Erklärungsprinzip für klinisch bedeutsame Ängste
Authors: Michael Tanja , Ehlers Anke
Published: October 2008

Zusammenfassung. Hintergrund: In modernen Diathese-Stress Modellen von psychischen Störungen (insbesondere Angststörungen) werden individuelle Unterschiede beim Herstellen von Assoziationen zwischen furchtrelevanten Informationen und unterschiedliche Lernumwelten als zentrale Mechanismen betrachtet. Diese erneute Betonung von klassischen Konditionierungsprozessen beruht auf dem differenzierten kognitiven und biologischen Wissensstand über klassische Konditionierung, der allerdings innerhalb der Klinischen Psychologie noch unzureichend bekannt ist. Ziel: Diese Überblicksarbeit soll daher einen Einblick in die für die Klinische Psychologie relevantesten Befunde moderner Konditionierungsforschung geben. Es wird beispielhaft erläutert, inwiefern Lernprozesse an klinischen Problemen beteiligt sind. Schlussfolgerungen: Assoziationslernen ist ein wichtiger Prozess bei der Entstehung und Aufrechterhaltung von Angststörungen und hilft zu verstehen, warum unterschiedliche Menschen verschieden auf gleiche bzw. ähnliche aversive Ereignisse reagieren. Des Weiteren wird gezeigt, dass neue innovative Interventionsmethoden (z.B. Kombination von D-Cycloserine und Exposition) auf einem umfassenden Verständnis von Klassischer Konditionierung beruhen.
Persönlichkeitsstile und dimensionale Diagnostik bei jugendlichen Patientinnen mit Anorexia und Bulimia nervosa
Authors: Schneider Nora , Frieler Katja , Ehrlich Stefan , Pfeiffer Ernst , Lehmkuhl Ulrike , Salbach-Andrae Harriet
Published: October 2008

Zusammenfassung. Theoretischer Hintergrund: Persönlichkeitsvariablen können bidirektional mit Essstörungsdiagnosen in Zusammenhang stehen: als Risikofaktor für die Entstehung und/oder als Folge der Störung. Gesicherte „essstörungstypische” Persönlichkeitsmerkmale sind relevant für Diagnostik und Therapie. Fragestellung: Es wird der Frage nach Unterschieden hinsichtlich der Persönlichkeitsstile bei adoleszenten Patientinnen mit Anorexia (AN) und Bulimia nervosa (BN) nachgegangen. Methode: 104 konsekutiv erfasste Patientinnen (65 AN – restriktiver Typus, 19 AN – binge-purging Typus, 20 BN; MAlter = 16.4 ± 1.7) wurden mittels dimensionaler Persönlichkeitsdiagnostik untersucht. Ergebnisse: Restriktive AN-Patientinnen tendierten deutlicher zu einem zwanghaften Persönlichkeitsstil, während BN-Patientinnen stärkere Ausprägungen von negativistischen und Borderline-Merkmalen aufwiesen. Schlussfolgerungen: Zwischen den Essstörungsformen bestehen deutliche Unterschiede hinsichtlich der Persönlichkeitsstile. Dies weist auf einen psychopathologischen Zusammenhang zwischen Essstörungsform und Persönlichkeit hin, der für Pathogenese, Aufrechterhaltung und Therapie der Essstörung von Relevanz ist.
Analytical description of tidal dynamics in convergent estuaries
Authors: Savenije Hubert H. G. , Toffolon Marco , Haas Jennifer , Veling Ed J. M.
Published: October 2008

Analytical solutions of the one‐dimensional hydrodynamic equations for tidal wave propagation are now available and, in this paper, presented in explicit equations. For given topography, friction, and tidal amplitude at the downstream boundary, the velocity amplitude, the wave celerity, the tidal damping, and the phase lag can be computed. The solution is based on the full nonlinearized St. Venant equations applied to an exponentially converging channel, which may have a bottom slope. Two families of solutions exist. The first family consists of mixed tidal waves, which have a phase lag between zero and π/2, which occur in alluvial coastal plain estuaries with almost no bottom slope; the second family consists of “apparent standing” waves, which develop in short estuaries with a steep topography. Asymptotic solutions are presented for progressive waves, frictionless waves, waves in channels with constant cross section, and waves in ideal estuaries where there is no damping or amplification. The analytical method is accurate in the downstream, marine part of estuaries and particularly useful in combination with ecological or salt intrusion models. The solutions are compared with observations in the Schelde, Elbe, and Mekong estuaries.