bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Poetic Fiction and Truth: William of Conches, ‘Bernard Silvester’, Arnulf of Orleans, and Ralph of Longchamps
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

According to the literary theory which twelfth-century scholars derived from such authorities as Cicero, Macrobius, and Isidore of Seville, there was a clear distinction between history and fable. Historia was the literally true record of actual happenings (gestae res, res foctae) which were removed in time from the recollection of our age, whereas fabula comprised untrue events, fictitious things (res fictae) which neither happened nor could have happened. But it was also believed that certain authors had chosen to convey truths of morality, physics, and even metaphysics under a fictitious veil or covering (integumentum, involucrnm): Macrobius had gone so far as to claim that ‘a conception of holy truths can be expressed under a seemly veil of fictions, conveyed by honourable matter honourably arranged’. The present chapter has as its main theme the different kinds of truth, both literal and ‘integumental’ or allegorical, which were sought by five representative artistae of the twelfth century.
̀Paradise Lost́ and the Romantic Reader
Authors: Newlyn Lucy
Published: November 2023

Was Milton on the side of the angels or the devils? Was he republican or anti-republican, feminist or misogynist? Did he value innocence or experience? Lucy Newlyn shows how the Romantic reader responds, in complex and often paradoxical ways, to multiple ambiguities inherent in the very language of Paradise Lost. She examines ambivalent allusions to Satan and God, in responses to the French Revolution (Coleridge and Wordsworth), in studies of the origin of evil (Godwin, Blake, the Shelleys), in accounts of the creative imagination; and looks at how Eve pervades representations of female sexuality (Byron and Keats). The book culminates in a chapter on Blake̓s Milton, and prose writers such as De Quincey, Lamb, Wollstonecraft, and Hazlitt are also considered. Milton emerges as a poet of indeterminacy, not an authority figure, whose concern with the problematic issues of revolution and religion, sexuality and selfhood, make his writing relevant and accessible.
Louis Macneice
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

Since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's critical standing has risen steadily. This new study addresses the contexts of MacNeice's writings which are of greatest relevance to his place in modern poetry: his problematic, and still controversial relationship with Ireland and his significance for the understanding of the largely English `thirties generation' with which he is often identified. The influence of these contexts upon the nature of MacNeice's poetic development is studied in detail here together with the important questions of his relation to Yeats and Modernism. The book examines MacNeice's conception of parable as key imaginative response to these influences, and it includes the first study of the poet's revealing and little-known early writings. Peter McDonald demonstrates that MacNeice is a central figure in modern Irish and British poetry of greater substantial complexity than is often thought, and suggests that his through his work we should see its contexts in a challenging new light.
Experiment: 1945-1953
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

One of the few points on which there is a significant degree of consensus between MacNeice’s favourable and unfavourable critics concerns his poetry of the immediately post-war years, from parts of Holes in the Sky (1948) to Autumn Sequel (1954). This period tends to be referred to as ‘the middle stretch’, a term supplied, conveniently enough, by MacNeice himself. To claim that the poetry of these years is consistently at the level of his best would be perverse, but although some poems may be, as W. H. Auden suggested, ‘a bit dull’,2 much of what MacNeice achieved in this period was to prove of great importance to the lyric poetry of his last three volumes, and has seldom received serious attention. In particular, Autumn Sequel, which MacNeice himself always defended, has been done a critical disservice which obscures the importance of myth and parable in the poet’s work as a whole. It is important not to judge the productions of this period by primarily lyric criteria; the discipline of writing for radio offers an alternative frame of reference which critics seldom put to use. Without the painstakingly unlyrical poems of MacNeice’s ‘middle stretch’, the modified lyricism of the late poems would have been impossible.
Melodious Tears
Authors: Kay Dennis
Published: November 2023

The funeral elegy is in some important ways the quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book demonstrates how it developed into a kind of laboratory in which writers could put theories of composition into practice. The hospitality of elegy to different styles and modes together with its primary formal obligation to fit the poem decorously to the subject, gave a special value to ingenuity, to virtuosity. Melodious Tears charts the history of the elegy from the time in the mid-sixteenth century when it was exclusively the province of professional writers, the balladeers and chroniclers, up to the 1630s, by which time the fashion for the vernacular elegy had spread throughout the literate classes. Detailed studies of the works of major elegists, particularly Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Milton are combined with full examination of the range and variety of elegies generated in response to the deaths of Sidney (1586), Queen Elizabeth I (1603), and Prince Henry (1612). A series of appendices contains texts of a number of elegies which survive only in manuscript.
The Tragic Sublime
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

In King James’s reign, Shakespeare was acquainted with a plucky, intelligent, and reputedly beautiful woman known to her family as ‘Jennet’, who was four years younger than himself. Since the seventeenth century she has been seen in a haze of gossip, but there is no need to romanticize her. Jennet was baptized at St Margaret’s Westminster, on I November 1568, as Jane Sheppard. Three Sheppard brothers served the late Tudor Queen before being employed by the Stuart monarch. Her brothers Thomas and Richard were skilled court embroiderers, glovers, and perfumers who served Queen Anna even as the milliner Marie Mountjoy—in whose house Shakespeare lived—pleased Anna by supplying her with hats and headdresses. A third brother, William Sheppard, held an office in the Catery, which procured foodstuffs in bulk for the royal household.
Moral Political Criticism through Saturnalia in Jacobean Drama
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

Both before and after Chapman’s skirmish of 1608 the mock king genre continued to be used for comment and criticism of courts and kings. Similar to the use in Woodstock, corruption in high places was shown as a mundus inversus dominant over order, and against which better forces pitted themselves. The king for the duration of the play led unredeemable disorder which might be finally eliminated, as in Webster’s and Middleton’s tragedies; expelled through theatrical device, as in Pericles and Marston’s The Malcontent, or, more realistically, controlled, as in Measure for Measure and The Tempest. Within the context of disorder, plots frequently contain a contest between good and bad varieties of opposites to order, to determine the outcome. All such features are found in Elizabethan drama, but the difference with later plays is that the misrule has over it a gloss of authenticity. Hypocrisy and self-deception have to be combatted, as well as the inversions they maintain and, frequently, when defeated their potential remains a threat.
Ben-Hur (Film, 1907)
Authors: Company The Kalem
Published: November 2023

Lew Wallace had been dead for two years when, in 1907, Ben-Hur was first adapted for the screen. The film was exhibited commercially in eastern American cities until an injunction, claiming infringement of copyright, was brought against the film-makers. All further showings of Ben-Hur were abandoned, and the film itself was supposedly destroyed in 1912, after the makers, the Kalem Company, failed in their appeal against the Klaw and Erlanger management and Harper Brother publishers before the US Circuit Court of Appeals. Fortunately, not all the film was destroyed. Enough footage survives to provide some indication of the Kalem production and their methods as well as a view into other and earlier toga dramas.
Romances
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

John Barbour calls his narrative of Robert Bruce’s adventures, which were certainly historical, a romance, and the writer of the verse ‘Laud’ Troy Book,* based on the ‘history’ of Guido delle Colonne, speaks of himself as the ‘maker’ of his ‘romance’. It is, in fact, to such classical or pseudo-classical narratives that the term roman is first applied in French: as in the Romand’Eneas or the Roman de Thebes. In such titles it distinguishes the version written in the vernacular (romanice) from the Latin original: Chaucer’s Pandarus finds ladies of Troy listening to the romance of Thebes (appropriately enough, since it concerns a town besieged as Troy was besieged). But (like Barbour’s Bruce) it is also described as a geste (< OF geste, L gesta, ‘events’), a geste being a sub-species of romance; the term indicating that some historical truth is claimed for the narrative. So the narrator of the tale of Havelok calls it a gest (2984), and speaks of ‘gestes’ recited at a royal entertainment as well as of’romanz reding on the bok’ (2327–8).
The Poems of the Gawain Manuscript
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

With the alliterative poem that we call Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, English medieval romance reaches its peak—though that phrase is misleading if it suggests a gradual development to perfection: the gulf between the poem and its congeners is as great as that between the novels that Jane Austen read and her own. Its author has mastered all the poetic techniques and narrative devices of his predecessors, but he has also taken elements from various genres of romance, including chronicle, and welded them to form a vehicle for new values and more subtle suggestions. Love and combat have their place, but in a fresh context and perspective. In its own kind, the Arthurian kind, the work is as refined as the Troilus and Criseyde that developed out of IIFilostrato, and it bears the marks of the same kind of transforming intelligence. The Arthurian hero here takes on a new aspect and a new interest. In some ways the work is more courtly than Troilus and the poet evidently had in mind a courtly audience. Descriptions of rich feasts, of a castle built in the latest style, of elegantly ornamented armour, of choice furnishings in the best contemporary design, of conversations replete with polite phrase and elegant allusion, of hunts conducted in accordance with the elaborate laws of venery: all these show familiarity with the correct French—which is to say European—terms of art that were current at the court of Richard II and in the households of his nobility. On the other side of the picture are scenes of wild and rugged country, winter and rough weather, boisterous humour with some grim touches, plain-spoken comment by characters whose language is localized and colloquial. The combination of the romantic and the real, of humour and high tone, of lyrical delicacy and verbal wit, is one that is hard to find elsewhere.
Prose
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

Religious prose was produced in abundance throughout the whole of this period; surviving examples of secular prose on the other hand are few, and limited to the latter part of the fourteenth century, with the solitary exception of the work with which we begin our survey. This—the later part of The Peterborough Chronicle—has a direct and interesting relationship with pre-Conquest literary culture, for it is a continuation of that remarkable achievement of Old English learning, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. After the Norman Conquest, a continuation of this was kept up at Worcester, a famous traditional centre of learning, but only up to 1080. At the monastery of Peterborough, however, a text of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was continued over the years from II 21 to II 54, and the events of post-Conquest history were recorded in it. It is usual to distinguish two ‘continuations’ —the ‘first’, covering the years 1122—31, and the ‘final continuation’ for the years 1132—54-both of which are believed to have been composed as well as copied at Peterborough. The value of this part of the text for historians of the English language is inestimable; it affords a wealth of information on changing sounds, inflexions, and vocabulary (it is here, for instance, that the new form of the feminine personal pronoun ‘she’ emerges, spelt sere). Its historical and literary interest is not at first glance so obvious. ‘Disappointingly brief and provincial in outlook’ is the verdict of one modern historian.*:It is certainly true that it cannot compete with contemporary histories written in Latin, such as the Historia Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis, which records the turbulent deeds of the Normans with vivid detail and gives in addition a remarkable panoramic view of Anglo-Norman society and its wider European relationships, or the even more distinguished Gesta Regum Anglorum of the scholar William of Malmesbury, whose erudition is accompanied by a power of incisive analysis and a remarkable awareness of men’s motives and the workings of self-interest.
Milton
Authors: Parker William Riley
Published: November 2023

Parker's life of Milton has long been accepted as one of the great literary biographies of the twentieth century, a unique accomplishment of scholarship based on a vast range of documentary evidence. Originally published in 1968, the biography was immediately acclaimed as `indispensable', `authoritative', as well as `controversial', and Parker himself was described in The Review of English Studies as `a living library and a walking museum'. Gordon Campbell's new and revised edition of Volume 1 forms a complete, self-contained, and wholly accessible account of Milton's life which remains essential reading for the student of seventeenth-century literature, and for anyone who share Parker's enthusiasm for Milton's poetry.
Boethius
Authors: Walsh P G
Published: November 2023

Boethius composed the Consolatio Philosophiae in the sixth century AD whilst awaiting death under torture. He had been condemned on a charge of treason which he protested was manifestly unjust. Though a convinced Christian, in detailing the true end of life which is the soul's knowledge of God, he consoled himself not with Christian precepts but with the tenets of Greek philosophy. This work dominated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages; writers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Jean de Meun, and Dante were inspired by it. In England it was rendered into Old English by Alfred the Great, into Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer, and later Queen Elizabeth I made her own translation. The circumstances of composition, the heroic demeanour of the author, and the `Menippean' texture (part prose, part verse; Boethius was a considerable poet) have combined to exercise a fascination over students of philosophy and of literature ever since. Professor Walsh has included an introduction and explanatory notes which combined with his new translation make the text accessible to general readers and scholars alike.
The Consolation of Philosophy
Authors: Walsh P G
Published: November 2023

These were the silent reflections which I nursed in my heart. 1 My dutiful pen was putting the last touches to my tearful lament, when a lady seemed to position herself above my head.* She was most awe-inspiring to look at, for her glowing eyes penetrated more powerfully than those of ordinary folk, and a tireless energy was reflected in her heightened colour. At the same time she was so advanced in years that she could not possibly be regarded as a contemporary.
Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases
Authors: Rouet Philippe
Published: November 2023

This book concerns the history of the interpretation of Attic painted vases, and is based on a comparative study of the works of Edmond Pottier (1855-1934), the founder and organizer of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, and John Beazley (1885-1970), who carried out the majority of vase attributions. The comparison between the two men involves an examination of two intellectual traditions which run through the history of the study of pottery. The first of these accentuates the documentary value of vases and the need to ensure their global publication, while the second views vases as objets d'art, and endeavours to trace the development of artistic forms by constructing a history of vase-painters. In reality these approaches are not directly conflicting, but represent two poles around which the discipline of pottery scholarship is organized. By showing how both interpretations have gained support in the more recent past, this work aims to provide a better understanding of the issues involved in the study of pottery today.
Poets of Contemporary Latin America
Authors: Rowe William
Published: November 2023

What came after Neruda and Vallejo? This is the first book to answer that question, presenting the new movements in Latin American poetry since 1950. Eight poets are selected, with substantial excerpts from their work and parallel translations in English: the test for inclusion is whether their writing expands the possibilities of poetry. Some - for example Juan L. Ortiz, Nicanor Parra, Gonzalo Rojas, Ana Enriqueta Terán - reached maturity well before mid-century, but have continued to explore new poetic expression in the decades since; the younger generation of poets chosen includes Ernesto Cardenal as well as lesser-known figures: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Carmen Ollé, and Raúl Zurita. Together they display the new forms and languages of poetry which have been emerging in contemporary Latin America. Revealing the freshness of the poems, as they invite new perceptions of the world and of language, is paramount in this study. Its method is to bring together poetics with cultural studies, presenting detailed readings of the work of each poet, as well as exposition and discussion of their poetics, especially where they grapple with the tensions between the inner self and history in the later twentieth century.
Introduction
Authors: Armstrong Adrian
Published: November 2023

The interpreters like to think they’re the aristocrats of this institution, and affect to look down on us selectors. But as you must know, this is pure vanity on their part. Anyone with the least gumption can see that without us here in Selection, Interpretation would be like a mill without any wheat. We’re the ones who supply them with all their raw material. We are the basis of their success.
A Newer Generation
Authors: Perriam Chris
Published: November 2023

The late 1990s saw a considerable promotion of new film action and a sudden growth of interest in potential sstars as the prime producers of meanings for audiences of contemporary Spanish films (Fotogramas 1994b; Castellano and Costa 1995). This came in the wake of the Almodóvar phenomenon, and in a context of rising numbers of multiplexes and ticket sales, and big mltimedia distribution and exhibition deals (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998: 206). In annual upbeat reviews of the state of Spanish cinema in the glossy press, the names of new wave of directors (as partly represented below) are linked to the fame and faces of their actors in a widespread fashion, and the industry is increasingly dependent on key producers (Fotogramas 2000). The public interest, however, is more in groups and generations (that concept so beloved of the Romance languages) of actors than in individuals, at least where film magazines and publicity are concerned (the more general celebrity glossies, leisure, youth, and lesbian and gay magazines continue to idolize the actors one by one).
The Sinfonia da Chiesa, and Salzburg (1766–1767)
Authors: Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

Although in modern musical life symphonies usually serve as the centre-pieces of orchestral concerts, in concerts of the second half of the eighteenth century, they most often appeared at the beginnings and ends of entertainments at the centres of which were characteristically found vocal and instrumental solos.1 They also served as overtures and entr’actes to operas, plays, oratorios, and cantatas, and, indeed, the terms ‘symphony’ and ‘overture’ were used interchangeably. Although overture (or ‘theatre’) symphonies and concert (or ‘chamber’) symphonies arc the only types dealt with in recent histories of the early symphony,2 there was also a third type: the church symphony. As early as 1713 Mattheson wrote on this subject:
Vienna (I): Orchestra Land (1767–1768)
Authors: Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

As the testimony of a well-travelled professional, thoughtfully evaluating music and performances, Charles Burncy’s reports arc especially valuable. The two main theatres in Vienna alternated evenings of activity. Arriving in the Austrian capital on 30 August 1772, Burney learned that the curtain was about to go up at the ‘German’ Theatre (the Kärntnerthortheater), so he proceeded directly there. He reported:
Salzburg III: Serfdom (1779–1780)
Authors: Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

Mozart’s letters between 1775 and 1781 are filled with contumelies against his native city. His bitter harangues are difficult to evaluate objectively, arising as they do out of such emotional subjects as his father’s lack of promotion, his own poor pay, the Archbishop’s policy of treating his musicians as servants rather than professionals (let alone geniuses), and the censorship and factionalism at court. Leopold Mozart, resigned to his plight after years of fruitless struggle, continued to hope for a better position for Wolfgang, who wanted desperately to be done with Salzburg. Wolfgang’s defensive contempt for Salzburg can be understood: a childhood and youth spent as the darling of various courts, opera houses, and cities had prepared him badly for the realities of provincial Salzburg.
Rites of Passage: Cosimo I de’ Medici and the Theatre of Death
Authors: Fenlon Iain
Published: November 2023

From printed descriptions and eyewitness accounts, and just occasionally from survivals, it is clear that music of all kinds, from the pealing of church bells and other characteristic features of the soundscape to specially composed polyphony, was a fundamental element in the many varieties of Italian early modern spectacle and display.
Mantua
Authors: Arnold Denis
Published: November 2023

The visitor to Mantua may find it hard to believe how great was Monteverdi's success. The town today seems rather forlorn, its huge palace a museum, its present raison d'etre a market for the rich countryside by which it is surrounded. In the later years of the sixteenth century it was very different. Although never destined to be one of the greatest cities of Europe, Mantua was no mere provincial centre. The house of Gonzaga had brought the city to a fine prosperity, and encouraged by a succession of dukes who loved all the outward signs of richness, artists and musicians, actors and poets were glad to accept the bountiful patronage they were offered. Rubens, Tasso and Guarini are only three among many famous names in letters and painting that we find associated with the Mantuan court; and to these can be added a group of musicians just as distinguished.
Venice
Authors: Arnold Denis
Published: November 2023

The procurators of St Mark’s had made their choice with great speed. Usually they took their time in choosing a new maestro di cappella, with an interregnum of six months or more. They must have had unusual confidence in Monteverdi’s reputation and demeanour. He was old enough, had experience in administration and was a famous composer. Someone of this stature was very necessary, since Monteverdi’s predecessor had been a failure. Giulio Cesare Martinengo had come to St Mark’s from Udine Cathedral. He left no mark on history as a composer, and worse still, he seems to have had unsatisfactory dealings with the procurators. The account books of the basilica show that he was constantly in debt almost from the moment he set foot in Venice. To pay his creditors he was continually asking for advances on his pay, and eventually died owing the treasurer several months’ salary. To hasten the decline of Venetian music still further, the last of the great older school of composers, Giovanni Gabrieli, had died the year before Monteverdi’s arrival. Given these circumstances, we can understand their welcome of an acknowledged master.
The earlier madrigals
Authors: Arnold Denis
Published: November 2023

The heart of Monteverdi’s music lies in his madrigals. There he tackled and solved what he conceived to be the problems of the composer. It is in his madrigal-books that we can observe his spiritual and technical development from his earliest youth to his old age. Just as Haydn’s soul is laid bare in his string quartets, so is Monteverdi’s in his madrigals; and this fact should make us cautious. No composer works in a medium for fifty years without taking it very seriously. The fact that the madrigal is by its nature a smaller-scale work than an opera or much of the church music does not mean we can dismiss it lightly.
Reputation and influence
Authors: Arnold Denis
Published: November 2023

‘The greatest fame which a man may have on earth.’ With these words Follino coaxed Monteverdi back to Mantua to compose Arianna (see page 17). Was the promise fulfilled? The question is of some importance to a biographer, and the search for an answer has a twofold value. The reputation that a composer had in his lifetime reveals the manner of man which he appeared to be to his contemporaries.
Music and Theatre in France 1600–1680
Authors: Powell John S
Published: November 2023

During the course of the 17th century, the dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development in France; but despite the volumes devoted to the literature and theatre of the ancien régime, historians have largely neglected the importance of music and dance. This study defines the musical practices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama, from the arrival of the first repertory companies in Paris until the establishment of the Comédie-Française. The dynamic interaction of the performing arts in primarily spoken theatre, cross-fertilized by ballet de cour and imported Italian opera, gave rise to a set of musical conventions that later informed the pastorale en musique and early French pastoral opera. The performance history of four comédies-ballets by Molière, Lully, and Charpentier leads to a discussion of the musical and balletic performance practices of Molière’s theatre and the interconnections between Molière’s last comédie-ballet, Le Malade imaginaire, and Lully’s first opera, Les Festes de l’Amour et de Bacchus.
Introduction
Authors: Powell John S
Published: November 2023

Throughout his thirty-year career as an actor, theatre director, and dramatist, Moliere sought every opportunity to introduce music and dance into his stage productions. Even before his first comédie-ballet, Moliére and his company had considerable experience in giving performances accompanied by music, dance, and machine effects.
The Transformed Village: Lucy Broad Wood and Folksong
Authors: Val Dorothy de
Published: November 2023

In his 1999 series of Reith Lectures on globalization, the sociologist Anthony Giddens reforred briefly to ‘invented tradition’. The term has gained currency since the publication in 1983 of a collction of essays entitled The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, in which various writers argue that accepted ‘traditions’ such as the Scottish kilt and rituals associated with the British monarchy are largely inventions of the nineteenth century.’ Giddens went further, claiming that all traditions are invented traditions.
The Nation-State and Global Media
Authors: Price Monroe E
Published: November 2023

The electronic media pervade our daily being, and yet we hardly have a grip on what radio and television mean to the political geography of modern life. Imagery affects loyalties: that has always been known. What has been less clear is that the structure and capacity of communications and the fate of governments are inextricably inter twined. Throughout the world, the organization of broadcasting and the dissemination of television programmers are changing and often radically. The millions of images that float through the public mind help determine the very nature of national allegiances, attitudes to-wards place, family, government, and state. No wonder that in all locales-developed or undeveloped, democracy or dictatorship, transition society or not-the question of the structuring and future regulation of media is so important.
The Public Sphere
Authors: Price Monroe E
Published: November 2023

Government and media are yoked, often tragically, in the architecture of the democratic process. When the curtain went up on post-Soviet society, experts from the West-academics and technicians from political parties-swarmed into the transition states to draft new media laws as part of the shoring-up of the machinery of change. Among their very first steps was the recommendation of specific rules to govern access to the media during elections.1 If democracy was the objective, then its theatrical conventions (how candidates get access to television time, who performs the moderating task, whether debates are man dated) had to be performed well. These experts soon recognized that law and regulation affect not only media’s role in elections, but the entire relationship between broadcasting structures, the modem state, and democratic values. State intervention to establish the infrastructure of modem political life is universal, even though that fact is often denied. What renders the project tragic is the difficulty of properly designing and executing the role of the state so as to render it compatible with the exercise of freedom. For all the brave talk of separating press from the government, issues of state and media are deeply inter twined; and in that intertwining rest the most subtle questions of enhancing opportunities for speech without abridging fundamental freedoms.
Globalism, Television, and Society
Authors: Price Monroe E
Published: November 2023

Any essay on imagery in these times is a journey through the crumbling ideological monuments and scarred political landscapes of the late twentieth century: national dreams in tatters as ‘ancient states vanish like morning mists’;1 the shaky founding of new countries searching for old identities; the trash heaps of articulated principles and statutory formulations; the ravages of modem popular culture; the recurring dreams connected to new technologies; and, everywhere, the unnerving, unpredictable competition between cohesion and dispersal, universal and local, modem and fundamental. The great trans formations in media emerge against a field of hulking wrecks-warring civilizations, vanishing habits, the rusting machinery of old technology from which vast changes emerge. Such a moment couples the sad ness of obsolescence with the possibilities of hope.
Jonson and the Tother Youth
Authors: Donaldson Ian
Published: November 2023

IN a short play for puppets written towards the end of his life, George Bernard Shaw addressed a question that had exercised him on and off throughout much of his career: was his genius equal, or perhaps superior, to that of Shakespeare? Throughout the play two very talkative and opinionated puppets named Shakes and Shav vigorously debate this issue, which Shakes at the outset proposes might be settled by means of a fist-fight. As a young man, Shaw had rather fancied himself as a boxer, having taken instruction from the celebrated Ned Donnelly, Professor of Boxing at the London Athletic Club; yet his puppet-self, Shav, proves rather less competent than his creator, being felled in the opening seconds of the play by a straight left from the untutored Shakes. By the count of nine, how ever, Shav is on his feet again, talking powerfully, scoring a number of mean body-blows, until the play, like a dialectical issue that can never be fully resolved, ends in an exhausted draw. Shaw was entranced by boxing, which he regarded as a sort of paradigm of capitalist enter prise. In Shakes versus Shav he appears to offer boxing also as a sort of paradigm of literary history, in which famous pairs of writers, challengers and defenders, may be ranked in contest against each other, and watched vying for supremacy, thwacking each other to the canvas. In his preface to the play Shaw was at pains, however, to point out that his contest with Shakespeare was entirely a friendly fight, in no way tainted by ‘mere professional jealousy’.
Gathering and Losing the Self Jonson and Biography
Authors: Donaldson Ian
Published: November 2023

IN 1919 Gregory Smith began his study of Ben Jonson in the English Men of Letters series with these confident words:

We know more of Jonson than any of the great writers of his age. There are no mysteries, or at least great mysteries, in his literary career, and the bio grapher is not driven, with the Shakespearians, to conjectural reconstruction from the shards of record and anecdote. Even his personality stands forth fresh and convincing beside the blurred portrait of Marlowe, or Shake speare, or Fletcher. For this fuller knowledge we are indebted to Jonson himself. Half a dozen years later, in the biographical essay that opens the first volume of the Oxford Ben Jonson, C. H. Herford expressed an even stronger belief in the immediate accessibility and legibility of Ben Jonson’s character. ‘The personality of Jonson’, he wrote, ‘detaches itself from the crowd of literary contemporaries with a distinctness by no means wholly due to the fact that our knowledge of it happens to be unusually full and dear.’ For there was also, so Herford believed, ‘something potent and distinctive in the ethos of the man.’ ‘Almost every sentence he wrote, however derivative in substance, carries an unmistakable relish of the man-is, in a greater or less degree, a document of the Jonsonian temperament and the Jonsonian will.,
Saving Lives: Kenneth Tynan and the Duties of Dramatic Criticism
Authors: Stokes John
Published: November 2023

Speaking behind their backs Laurence Olivier would call theatre critics ‘bastards’, though he cared enough about their presence to aim a blow at James Agate when, in 1945, he returned late to his seat at a Vivien Leigh first night. Olivier knew as well as anyone else that without a critical notice a production soon dies. According to Richard Eyre, a successor of Olivier’s as Director of the Royal National Theatre, critics are ‘the only people in our world who pay no penalty for failure’,2 his resentment at their relative security reinforcing his belief that the pleasures and displeasures of critics are fundamentally dissimilar from those of anyone else in an audience.
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Poetry: Some Aporias of Literary Journalism
Authors: Perloff Marjorie
Published: November 2023

Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: as earlier essays in this book have demonstrated, the worlds of literary journalism and literary scholarship have been, for at least the past two centuries, much more closely allied than is commonly thought. But what about the third term in the equation, the literary itself? Specifically, how does ‘literary journalism’ confront the poetry written in its own time, along with the scholarly reception and theorization of that poetry? Writing about poetry and poetics has for a long time occupied an anomalous place in the larger humanistic discourse in which it is embedded. Take, for example, two long reviews that appeared just a few months apart in The Times Literary Supplement. The first is a review by Richard Sennett of four books on contemporary architectural theory (18 September 1992, 3-4), the second, one by Glyn Maxwell of eight books on contemporary poetry and poetics (29 January 1993, 9-IO).
Female Subjectivity in Gary Cooper que estás en los cielos (Miró, 1980)
Authors: Morgan Rikki
Published: November 2023

Pilar Miró already had a reputation as a controversial film-maker by the time she released her third feature film Gary Cooper que estás en los cielos (1980). La petición (1976) had subverted the norms of period drama with its exploration of power and sadism and female sexuality and El crimen de Cuenca (1979) had broached the inflammatory themes of institutional corruption and police torture in bold realist mode. Eager readings of this latter film as a metaphor for the present provoked the threat of a military court martial against which Miró was still battling as she filmed her next feature. Continuing a number of themes which had already emerged in her earlier work, Gary Cooper was another high-risk project, charting unknown territory in a number of ways.
Julio Medem’s Vacas (1991):Historicizing the Forest
Authors: Santaolalla Isabel c.
Published: November 2023

When the 30-year-old Julio Medem decided to put his medical career and psychiatric training on standby and embark on a creative adventure called Vacas (1991), he could hardly anticipate the immediate critical and box-office success the film would enjoy both in Spain and abroad. The film received over twenty international awards, its director was hailed by many as a new promise of Spanish cinema, and his name linked to those of a number of other young directors and actors, referred to as ‘the new crop of Spanish cinema’, whose ‘young flesh and fresh blood’ were making ‘the miracle’ of Spanish cinema in the I99os possible (Cristobal 1994: 20-3; Castellano and Costa 1995: 16).
Ruskin’s Multiple Writing: Fors Clavigera
Authors: Birch Dinah
Published: November 2023

For many of Ruskin’s readers, and also for those who know him largely by reputation, Fors Clavigera is a baffling text. Serially published from 1871 to 1884, and nominally addressed to ‘the workmen and labourers of Great Britain, it is the most substantial publication of Ruskin’s Oxford years—600,000 words of radical and innovative prose. In form, purpose, method of production, and range of reference it is notoriously hard to categorize. Of all Ruskin’s major works, Fors Clavigera has attracted the slightest body of interpretative response. Its early critics were inclined to see it as mental disintegration on an impressive scale.
Introducing Child Victims: The Problem of Child Abuse
Authors: Morgan Jane , Zedner Lucia
Published: November 2023

Since the 1970s there has been a growing interest, both nationally and internationally, in victims of crime. Indeed, the past twenty years have seen the emergence both of victim studies and of services for victims.1 During this period the nature of victimization and its extent have received widespread publicity.2 A great deal is now known about the effects of crime on victims, the needs that may arise from victimization, and the reaction of various agencies to those needs. There has been a growing recognition that the legal response and intervention by helping professions may make a significant contribution to the overall impact of crime. As a result, demands have been made for the criminal justice system to be more sensitive to the needs and rights of victims. In 1990 the government published a Victim’s Charter, which suggests that more should be done to help the victim. It sets out for the first time how victims of crime should be treated and what
Hard Man: Jimmys Story
Authors: Hobbs Dick
Published: November 2023

The day his father died, Jimmy spent the day vomiting. He was in the first three months of a four-year sentence for grievous bodily harm, and his body had yet to adapt to the rigours of prison cuisine. I come off the hospital wing, and the screw says that I’m wanted in the principal’s office. I just tells him that I ain’t going nowhere. I couldn’t fucking move, felt so fucking rank. So he says ‘All right, your father’s dead.’ That’s all he was going to say. That was that. He weren’t having a go, nothing like that. He just thought that was the right thing to do, like telling me last night’s football. Never took it in at first like, I just lie there retching. Then the geezer I’m banged up with comes in with a fucking great plate of some shit they was serving up. Geezer’s out of Watford or Cheshunt or somewhere. Starts whacking this stuff down his neck with a spoon, and all the time he’s talking to me. But I don’t, I can’t, hear him, all I can see is this white stuff ... some fucking slimy shit slobbering all over his mouth.
Buck the Market: Crime, Pleasure, and Gentlemen of Leisure
Authors: Hobbs Dick
Published: November 2023

He that makes his pleasure be his business will never make his business be a pleasure. But some people can at least try. It is important that we are not carried away with the seductive, and at times hackneyed, tendency to view all serious crime as a highly rational activity, driven purely by commercial imperatives. We should consider carefully the pursuit of pleasure that not only provides the spur to engage in a criminal career, but also drives many individuals to gain sufficient levels of competence and consistency to maintain a life-style which for non criminals can only be aspired to at designated times, within regulated spaces, and with highly restrained moral and material resources.
The American Bankruptcy Preference Law: Perceptions of the Past, the Transition to the Present, and Ideas for the Future
Authors: Shanker* Morris G
Published: November 2023

Many who read this paper will not be familiar with the American bankruptcy preference law. For the benefit of these persons, I have been asked to set out a ‘brief’ overview of that law. This, unfortunately, is a nearly impossible assignment. American bankruptcy preference law is a highly complex matter regarding which volumes (both treatises and scholarly articles) have been and still are being written. So, uninitiated, realize that this overview can give only a superficial idea of what American preference avoidance law is all about; and remember the adage that a little knowledge can be dangerous.
Personal Liability of Directors and Officers for Debts of Insolvent Corporations: A Jurisdictional Perspective (England)
Authors: Sealy L S
Published: November 2023

Every company law student learns in his very first class of the celebrated case of Mr Salomon,1 who was held by the House of Lords not to be liable, directly or indirectly, for the debts of the one person company of which he was the largest shareholder, the chief executive director, and the principal secured creditor. Since that decision there has of course been much scholarly attention devoted to the phenomenon of ‘lifting the veil’, in England as elsewhere, and many instances can be found in which, for one reason or another, a court has decided that it was appropriate in the interests of justice for the separate corporate personality of the company to be disregarded; but one will search the reports in vain for a single English case where the principle of limited liability, as distinct from that of corporate personality, has not been respected statute apart.
Economic, Legal, and Strategic Considerations on Dumping Practices and Anti-dumping Laws
Authors: Marceau Gabrielle
Published: November 2023

Currently there is no world-widebinding agreement regulating commercial behaviour or agreements of firms. Only two business practices are subject to some binding regulation: transnational price discrimination and sales below full cost are indirectly controlled through the provisions against dumping contained in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GAIT) and the GATI Antidumping Code. The word ‘dumping’ always seems to have had a pejorative connotation. Professor Jackson relates that Adam Smith was the first to use the word dumping, but in reference to situations approximating to today’s subsidies. Viner refers to discussions by Alexander Hamilton in 1791 about foreign country dumping. Jackson reports that during the US Congress debates of 1884, the word dumping was used in reference to undesirable foreign goods sold in the American market.
Declining Jurisdiction In Private International Law
Authors: Fawcett J J
Published: November 2023

The subject of declining jurisdiction in private international law is one of enormous practical importance and academic interest. It is also a topic where a comparative approach is particularly revealing. This book contains the 17 national reports and the general report on the subject of ‘Rules for declining to exercise jurisdiction: Forum Non Conveniens, Lis Pendens’. The Reports were held in Athens/Delphi in August 1994. The list of nations for which a report has been prepared is as follows: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Quebec, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and USA. This book by bringing together all the reports on ‘Declining Jurisdiction’ provides a unique insight into this topic, and, dealing as it does with a key aspect of private international law, fits very well into the Oxford series of monographs on private international law.
Auditing and the Politics of Regulatory Control in the UK Financial Services Sector
Authors: Power Michael
Published: November 2023

The early 1990s will be remembered as a critical period for the auditing ‘industry’. A series of ‘failures’ in the UK financial services sector received prominent coverage in the national press, notably the closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in mid-1991 and the collapse of the Maxwell business empire. These events added further fuel to continuing preoccupations with the ‘expectations gap’, understood as the difference between public and auditor perceptions of the role of audit (e.g., KPMG Peat Marwick McLintock 1990; Humphrey 1991). In the UK research has been commissioned to address this problem, and, as an initial measure, a new form of words for the audit report has been proposed (APB 1991), with the intention of bridging this gap by educating the users of audit services. Perceptions of the role of the UK statutory auditor have also been affected by some interpretations of the judgment in Caparo v. Dickman, 1990 which suggest that auditors have little legal responsibility to those third parties who may place trust in their work. In addition, Labour MP Austin Mitchell has been at the forefront of public criticism of the accounting profession and its auditing activities. With each new company failure (British and Commonwealth Holdings, Polly Peck, BCCI, Maxwell Communications), initial reactions have included the question: ‘What were the auditors doing?’ (Mitchell 1990).