bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Tea Party and Angry White Women
Authors: Rosen Ruth
Published: February 2012

For good or ill, conservative women have moved mountains in America’s past. The prohibition of liquor is just one example. So is the banning of books in schools. Now they have helped organize the Tea Party, and their new political engagement may change American political culture in unpredictable ways. Their assault on the misogyny in the Republican Party, for example, may repeat some of the changes that occurred when feminists challenged the Democratic Party in the 1970s. Perhaps they will build a large base in the Tea Party and elect their own leaders. It is also conceivable, as in the past, that they may disappear into their homes and churches and become a footnote in the history of American politics. Given the current economy, however, that is unlikely.

That the Tea Party panders to fear and resentment is well known. One of the dirty little secrets of the movement, however, is that the conservative movement is, in part, fueled by female members who are angry and resentful at being excluded from Republican and conservative politics.
What Next for the Occupy Movement?
Authors: Walzer Michael
Published: February 2012

Whatever the effects of police repression and freezing weather, I believe that the men and women of the Occupations will still be making themselves heard when you read this. Something new and important has begun in American politics, and we won’t see the end of it soon: a political struggle against the growing inequalities of our common life. Since the inequalities are systemic, the struggle won’t be short or easy. I am not sure what the odds are on winning, but it is enormously heartening that so many people, mostly young people, have at last begun the fight.
Down and Out in the New Middletowns
Authors: Fraser Max
Published: February 2012

Last summer, with the nattering of congressional debt-ceiling debates and reports of ballooning corporate profits making headlines, I went in search of what Middletown has become today. Once as wholesome a symbol of the American Dream as the family breadwinner and apple pie, the very idea of Middletown now seemed a pale shadow of present realities, as the stark prose of unemployment statistics and eviction notices inscribed a very different kind of story onto the lives of millions of Americans.

Which are the Middletowns of our new era of precarious living? Is it Muncie, whose denuded industrial landscape tells a familiar story of Rust Belt decline? Or is it the new industrial landscapes of Smyrna and Spring Hill, Tennessee, where jobs that look a lot like those the residents of Muncie once had have become posts for a downwardly mobile working class? Or is it Sun Belt boom-cities like Nashville, where the promise of postindustrial transcendence has created its own reserve army of low-wage service employment, condemning many to lives of permanent poverty and vulnerability? Or is it some byzantine conurbation of them all, a commons of the American Nightmare—a Middletown of the 99 percent?
More than Greed
Authors: Fraser Steve
Published: February 2012

Elements of rigorous analysis do crop up in Age of Greed, and when they do they are enlightening. But if the book fails to cohere and to rise to the promise of its title, it may in part be due to a profound reluctance to break with the New Deal past. No one could object to more vigilant regulation of the financial system, not to mention the rest of the economy, here and abroad. But a globalized version of the regulatory, Keynesian welfare state seems to circumscribe the far horizon of this perspective; one might call it the reinstatement of civilized capitalism. It is strange that progressives should become a party of the past, preoccupied with the restoration of American capitalism’s golden age. It is not an inspiring vision for those seeking a way out of this killing impasse. Indeed, the pathetic state of resistance to a malignant capitalism has suggested as much. Occupy Wall Street may change all that; at least it has pointed its blunt finger at what Madrick and others have avoided: the system. Meanwhile, the price of auto-cannibalism, already steep, will grow ever more draconian.
Don’t Blame the Workers
Authors: Cobble Dorothy Sue
Published: February 2012

The trade union movement has been flat on its back for some time and shows little sign of resuscitation. Working-class wages have declined precipitously, and U.S. workers clock in longer hours than in any other industrialized nation.

What really gets under my skin, though, is that workers are blamed for this mess. The ideological class warfare my father taught me about in the 1960s not only persists, it has gotten worse. As economic inequality has reached unprecedented, even obscene, levels, particularly in the United States and Britain, an elaborate ideological justification has grown up alongside it, what we could call a new Social Darwinism. Just as slavery needed racism to prop it up, the new plutocracy requires classism. Workers who were once mocked for overreaching and assuming too much power are now ridiculed for their weaknesses and failures. The new Social Darwinism is clear about who does and doesn’t deserve respect. Those at the bottom, white and nonwhite, waged and wageless, are there because of their own personal failings. And those at the top deserve their disproportionate share because of their supposed talent, intelligence, or some other innate quality marking their superior “fitness” for the competitive battle. It’s a post hoc world governed by so-called natural laws and biological drives. Wherever you end up is where you should be. The meritocratic myth is sustained by a culture rife with unrepresentative rags-to-riches tales but largely silent on the diminishing prospects for such mobility.
Educational Movements, Not Market Moments
Authors: Scott Janelle
Published: February 2012

The way education reformers misunderstand the history of the civil rights struggle reveals one of the key flaws in the push for market-based educational solutions. The top-down, managerial, single-minded approach pursued by Duncan and his allies ignores the vital, grassroots efforts underway in low-income communities, many of which directly challenge the market approach to schools that embraces competition, choice without equity provisions, and privatization. These local activists are deeply concerned with a range of problems that prevent public schools from giving poor and working-class children a good education: rampant unemployment, the lack of affordable housing, environmental degradation, and a flawed immigration policy. They want the state to distribute equitable and sufficient resources across communities, not simply to individual schools and parents. And they worry that choice stands to further stratify communities by race and poverty.
The “I” in Union
Authors: Abrahamian Atossa Araxia
Published: February 2012

With a post-political, pragmatic message and the promise of affordable, decent group health insurance, the Freelancers Union says its mission is to unite contractors, part-timers, and other nonpermanent employees in order to become recognized as a legitimate and distinct constituency. According to FU literature, the goal is to “build a new social support system that makes sense now and two generations from now.”

The idea of a union for freelancers is seductive, particularly for a group of people whose livelihood often depends on the whims of their clients and whose existence the government has all but ignored in its conversation about jobs. It’s also a big draw for uninsured workers who cannot afford to pay for individual health plans and for unemployed people trying to cobble together a living.

But how does one organize a workforce that is, by definition, unaffiliated? Where do you find members, if not in assembly lines or hiring halls? How do you hold your employers accountable and make yourself visible to government when you cannot strike? And isn’t a freelancers’ union, in all its individualistic self-organization, the ultimate oxymoron?
But Now We See
Authors: McCarraher Eugene
Published: February 2012

In Prophetic Encounters, his survey of religion and American radicalism, Dan McKanan briefly traces Day’s pilgrimage, but he doesn’t examine Day’s claim to have encountered the old Messiah in the new one or other pertinent theological reflections scattered throughout her writings. By neglecting Day’s theology, he obscures the ideas on which she drew to make sense of her turbulent life and encounters, and that elision reflects the pervasive flaw that mars his otherwise invaluable book. It’s an odd shortcoming, as McKanan is one of the foremost scholars of religion and radical politics. A senior lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, he has written extensively on antebellum Christian pacifism, contemporary Christian intentional communities, and the post-Day Catholic Worker movement. Focusing on how Christian radicals have lived, not only with each other but with “the world,” McKanan seeks, as he puts it in one of his books, to “build bridges rather than walls”—to join hands with non-Christians while maintaining enough distance to pose a challenge and an alternative.
Anxious Times in a Rising China: Lurching Toward a New Social Compact
Authors: Shank Megan , Wasserstrom Jeffrey
Published: February 2012

On July 1, 2011, halfway through a speech commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, President Hu Jintao stressed the importance of a people-centered approach to governance. Going forward, he said, the Party must “follow the principle of putting people first…we must consult the people on policies, learn about their needs and seek suggestions from them. We must listen to their views, truthfully reflect their wishes, help alleviate their hardships, and protect their economic, political, cultural and social rights and interests in accordance with the law.” Hu called on officials to develop closer bonds with the communities they serve. Alienation from the people, he warned, “poses the greatest risk to the Party.”

That is true—but it also smacked of irony. For during the preceding four months, the Party had received many clear signals that multiple segments of the country’s population felt that it was ignoring their needs. Made jittery by uprisings in the Middle East that featured rallies demanding an end to autocratic rule and inflation, the Party had overreacted to vague Internet calls for similar demonstrations to take place in the central districts of major Chinese cities. Few people turned out for these rallies, which seem to have originated with scattered postings on websites based outside of China, but this didn’t stop the authorities from lashing out. According to the organization Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the government formally detained twenty-six people (most famously Ai Weiwei, the country’s best known artist), “disappeared” more than thirty others, and put another two hundred-plus under soft detention.
Dilemmas of Foreign Aid
Authors: Roasa Dustin
Published: February 2012

Cambodia’s Curse is a milestone. Although there are dozens of books about the Khmer Rouge, Joel Brinkley’s is the first major one to look at present-day Cambodia, which is finally at peace after three decades of civil war (the last of the Khmer Rouge didn’t surrender until 1999). The traumas of the recent past—1.7 million dead during the Pol Pot years, the savage American bombing campaign of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a decade-long Vietnamese occupation—have produced a society that is, in many ways, fundamentally broken. Brinkley’s book, despite flaws, is an astute look at the debilitating effects of violence and upheaval on a country still finding its way out of the premodern era.
Introduction: Worker in an Age of Austerity
Authors: Kazin Michael
Published: February 2012

Whether they toil in a declining Indiana factory town or in booming Nashville, the wage-earners Max Fraser speaks with share similar grievances about the present and worries about what will come next. Dorothy Sue Cobble pushes back at her fellow academics who blame workers for conservative gains. Atossa Abrahamian examines both the benefits and limits of unionism for freelancers, whose numbers are surging. In revealing detail, Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein describe the resistance of home-care workers to state cutbacks in wages and hours and foreclosures of their home-based workplaces. Nelson Lichtenstein reviews an authoritative new book on the farmworkers’ union; while Jefferson Cowie critiques an important history of the air traffic controllers, whose defeat in 1981 touched off three decades of attacks on public employees. The needs and interests of the “99 percent” have been much invoked of late. These essays go beyond the rhetoric to understand what work is and how it shapes the people who do it and the struggling nation they inhabit.
The Wheatleyan Moment
Authors: Waldstreicher David
Published: February 2012

Despite the recent profusion of interest in Phillis Wheatley by literary scholars, who increasingly recognize her artfulness and her challenge to slavery, she has not been seen as a political actor in her own time. This essay argues for her canny timing and careful interventions in the politics of slavery from 1772 to 1784. The "Mansfieldian moment" in the politics of slavery can also be called a Wheatleyan moment, when leading whites were forced to respond to the art and politics of slaves and their allies. Wheatley garnered specific and consequential responses from Lord Dartmouth, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. A more interactive approach to the politics of slavery explains much about Wheatley's strategies as well as the range of specific responses to antislavery among participants in the American Revolution—responses that cannot be ascribed merely to racism or the lack thereof.
To Vie with One against Another: Race and Demand for Nonelite White Education in an Eighteenth-Century Colonial Society
Authors: Spady James O'Neil
Published: February 2012

Based on an examination of a variety of published and manuscript resources, some of which have not previously been studied by professional historians, this essay identifies cultural factors constructing demand for formal education in the lower South during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The lower South's racial demographics and rural setting were not merely a hindrance to educational development, as has long been posited by historians. Rather, the rural setting drove a regionally distinctive pattern of demand. Emerging in a frontier and colonial society, educational demand answered perceived imperatives to construct racial-cultural differences as much as likenesses and affinities. Prohibitions against reading by the enslaved, the South Carolina Regulators' educational demands, and early efforts to "civilize" Native Americans all appear in a newly causational relationship as examples of how an eighteenth-century colonial society strove to reconstruct its cultural landscape.
Visualizing Early American Art Audiences: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Allston's Dead Man Restored
Authors: Piggush Yvette R.
Published: February 2012

Scholarship on early American art focuses almost exclusively on the production of art and on the ideas that artists and their elite patrons intended to inculcate by placing artworks on display. This essay explores art spectatorship in the early republic and examines how middle-class audiences influenced the content of art displays created by members of the elite. Using readings of works by Washington Allston, John Lewis Krimmel, and Charles Bird King and print accounts of art exhibitions, it argues that the audiences at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts stimulated a vigorous public discourse about its exhibitions that steered the Academy's purchasing toward historical paintings. The Academy's acquisition of Allston's Dead Man Restored demonstrates that spectators played a more significant role than scholars have previously recognized in the development of the fine arts in the United States.
"I Speak It Well": Language, Cultural Understanding, and the End of a Missionary Middle Ground in Illinois Country, 1673-1712
Authors: Morrissey Robert Michael
Published: February 2012

On early American frontiers, Indians and Europeans made new cultures on the basis of what one scholar has termed creative misunderstandings . Unable to fully understand each other, diverse peoples invented a shared culture by appealing to what they thought to be the values and beliefs of the other. But what happened when people actually learned to communicate their true values and beliefs across the frontier? This article focuses on language learning and linguistic exchange among Illinois Indians and Jesuit priests in the Illinois mission over two generations. As a second generation of priests became masters of the Illinois language in the 1690s, allowing more sophisticated intercultural communication in Illinois missions, Illinois Indians and Jesuits moved beyond the initial creative misunderstandings of the encounter and came to a realistic assessment of their differences. The ironic result of better communication was the end of an optimistic era of religious syncretism in this most remote Jesuit mission in North America.
Thomas Hooker and His May 1638 Sermon
Authors: Besso Michael
Published: February 2012

In May 1638 the Puritan pastor Thomas Hooker preached a sermon that has been accounted as among the most important in colonial New England. According to existing interpretations, Hooker advocated popular sovereignty and popular control of civil government. Furthermore, in line with this interpretation, most scholars have accorded Hooker an important, if not also central, role in Connecticut’s adoption in 1639 of the Fundamental Orders—the colony’s articulation of its design for self-government. Contrary to the accepted interpretation, this essay demonstrates that Hooker’s sermon, based on Deuteronomy 1:13, was actually instruction to his congregation and audience about their religious duties as persons living under a government that God had ordained for them. This essay concludes that this change in perspective about the sermon’s meaning—from “political” to “religious”—has important implications for existing stories of New England political history.
Stillbirth and Sensibility: The Case of Abigail and John Adams
Authors: Barker-Benfield G. J.
Published: February 2012

Although live births in America have been the subject of increasingly sophisticated historical study, pregnancy loss has not. This piece presents Abigail Adams’s own account of her pregnancy that ended in stillbirth, one she wrote to her husband, John. It presents, too, his response to her. As was true throughout their correspondence, they both drew on the gendered language of sensibility, which is therefore the other chief subject of the piece. It concludes by placing this language in the general context of its ambiguous value to white American women in the Revolutionary era.
Superfluous Verbiage?: Rhetoric and Law in the Age of Constantine and Julian
Authors: Harries Jill
Published: February 2012

This paper contrasts the assumption of the lawyers who compiled the Theodosian Code, that imperial "laws" can be read solely in terms of ius , or "legal content," irrespective of the language in which they are framed, with the line taken by Eusebius among others that rhetoric was as much a part of the "law" as the legal command or prohibition contained in it. It argues that the integration of rhetoric with ius , explored in Plato's Laws 4, a text which influenced Julian's ideas of the ideal lawgiver, was essential both to emperors' affirmations of their own legitimacy as rulers and to the activity of the legislator as educator in the good life. To demonstrate that our picture of Constantine the legislator is a product of both traditions, this paper analyzes a selection of texts from Eusebius and the Theodosian Code, illustrating the importance of legislation as response, as general statement of policy, and as an exercise in education through moral persuasion.
Bishops and Law Courts in Late Antiquity: How (Not) to Make Sense of the Legal Evidence
Authors: Humfress Caroline
Published: February 2012

This article seeks to reevaluate existing scholarship on the late Roman "bishop's hearing" or "bishop's court" via a reexamination of the nature of the extant legal evidence. Paying particular attention to the original contexts in which the relevant fourth- and early fifth-century imperial constitutions were issued, it argues that, prior to the publication of the Theodosian Code in 438, these constitutions should be understood as specific responses to circumstances thrown up by courtroom practice. Having reassessed the nature of the legal evidence both before and after the promulgation of the Theodosian Code , the article attempts to re-contextualize the episcopalis audientia within a broader late Roman socio-legal landscape, hence challenging the traditional framing of the debate on the episcopalis audientia as a question of "church" and "state."
Religious Violence and Eschatology in the Syriac Julian Romance
Authors: Schwartz Daniel L.
Published: February 2012

This article situates the Syriac Julian Romance in early sixth-century Edessa and sees it as a response to Justinian's attempts to force local non-Chalcedonians into communion with the imperial church. It develops the interrelationship between religious violence and eschatological expectation as key themes used to vilify the reign of Julian and glorify the reign of Jovian. While lamenting imperial violence against Christians, the Romance praises violent acts of Christian resistance in the expectation that a righteous emperor will one day arise to protect the true (non-Chalcedonian) faith. Understanding the Romance 's emphasis on resistance and hope of vindication deepens our understanding of ecclesiastical and political developments in sixth-century Syria.
Colonial Modernity and the African Worldview: Theorising and Historicising Religious Encounters in South-Western Zimbabwe
Authors: Ndlovu-Gatsheni Sabelo J.
Published: February 2012

The Postcolonial and Post-structuralist conceptual and theoretical interventions in African studies in general and African history in particular enable historians to re-read colonial and cultural encounters with a view to liberate them from the inflexible 'domination and resistance' interpretation that was installed by nationalist historiography in the 1960s. This article deploys Postcolonial conceptual and theoretical tools to analyse the complex religious encounters that unfolded in the region that was occupied by the Ndebele nation that was built by King Mzilikazi Khumalo prior to the Anglo-Ndebele War of 1893-4 and the subsequent colonisation of the Ndebele-speaking people by the white settlers in 1895. The religious encounters are read as a terrain of meeting of two worldviews- one informed by Victorian capitalist and colonial hegemonic ethos and the other by African communal but equally hegemonic Nguni ideas of assimilation and incorporation. What ensued was uneasy religious dualities, conversations, contestations, blending, interpellation and transformation of consciousness in which only direct colonial conquest resolved the encounter in favour of Christian missionaries. The Gramscian concept of hegemony and Jean and John Comaroff's concept of cultural and colonial encounters are used to assist in teasing out deeper meaning in the encounter between the Ndebele and the early Christian missionaries prior to inscription of settler colonialism in the area lying between the Limpopo and Zambezi Rivers.
The Urban Poor and Their Willingness to Participate in Community Development: The Case Study of Addis Ababa
Authors: Kassahun Samson
Published: February 2012

Community-based development strategies are gaining credibility and acceptance in development circles. In parallel, the concept of social capital and the role of supportive non-governmental organizations are receiving attention as key catalytic elements in encouraging and assisting community-based initiatives. In this paper, the willingness of the households to participate in community development has been examined. Through a multivariate analysis using 497 households in Addis Ababa, the author assessed how social capital dimensions and socio-economic characteristics of the households are related to willingness of the household to participate in community development. Willingness is highly associated with increased participation in local associations; trust in the community and pattern of reciprocity among inhabitants. These findings provide qualified support that considering these local associations in partnership could bring sustainability in urban development.
Gray’s Ode and Walpole’s China Tub: The Order of the Book and The Paper Lives of an Object
Authors: Calè Luisa
Published: February 2012

This essay tracks the inscriptions and disseminations of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of A Favourite Cat drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” and of Horace Walpole’s china tub. An incongruous element of chinoiserie in the Gothic fabric of Strawberry Hill, the tub marks the intersections between the orders of the collection, the house, and the book. Building on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the orders of things and the unities of discourse, this essay follows the paper-trail of the object and the poem through their inscription and extra-illustration in books that prove unstable repositories in a dynamic order of collecting.
Humphry Davy: The Experimental Self
Authors: Golinski Jan
Published: February 2012

This essay examines the career of Humphry Davy against a background of the development of disciplinary structures in science and the exploration of individual subjectivity in the Romantic period. I show how Davy constructed a charismatic persona for himself as a scientific lecturer and researcher with his deployment of spectacular and powerful chemical instrumentation. Doing so, he both exploited and consolidated new institutional and disciplinary formations. I also show how Davy’s career called for continuous self-fashioning in a changing social milieu, how demands for more thoroughgoing institutional reform sidelined him, and how he was subjected to ridicule in a context of unstable gender-relations. Davy’s case suggests that the establishment of disciplinary institutions had a complex relationship to formations of personal identity, and that the career of a charismatic individual in such institutions could be a precarious one.
Unbending the Mind: or, Commercialized Leisure and the Rhetoric of Eighteenth-Century Diversion
Authors: Domingo Darryl P.
Published: February 2012

This essay opens by asking why the formative period in the “commercialization of leisure” in England (c. 1690–1760) happens also to be the period during which intrusion, obstruction, and interruption first began to thrive as conspicuous rhetorical techniques in commercial literature. The essay answers this question through a series of close readings that reveal the complex reciprocity between what I call “cultural diversion” and “discursive diversion,” between those social amusements which provide relief from the serious concerns of daily life and those linguistic and textual devices which characteristically disrupt so much of the discourse of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century—devices such as extravagant metaphors, rows of asterisked ellipses, and, most pervasively, digressions. Where modern discussion of such devices has tended to rely on the critical touch-stone of “self-consciousness,” this essay restores disruptive rhetoric to what I see as its original cultural context by demonstrating how frequently self-conscious authors associate the form and function of devices like digression with London’s “Reigning Diversions.”
Commanding Correspondence: Letters and the "Evidence of Experience" in the Letterbook of John Bruce, the East India Company Historiographer
Authors: Jokic Olivera
Published: February 2012

This article discusses the centrality of the letter form in the conveyance of the "evidence of experience" from India to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. It examines the Letterbook of John Bruce, which preserves the correspondence between Bruce—the "official historiographer" of the East India Company hired in 1793—and various Company officials in India he was attempting to recruit for a project of revisionist imperial historiography. A study of the Letterbook as a record of the project's novelty for colonial bureaucrats unused to the relationship between historiography and the letter form as "evidence of experience," the article investigates the institutional, historical and theoretical conditions under which these epistolary texts get classified as literary, personal, or historical documents.
Aesthetic Economies of Immasculation: Capitalism and Gender in Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden
Authors: Pollock Anthony
Published: February 2012

Though commonly relegated to the category of personal memoir, Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden belong among her most socially and politically engaged texts. Indeed, the Letters mark a major turning point in the development of Wollstonecraft's gender theory: her experiences working in Scandinavia as a legal proxy for Gilbert Imlay lead her away from the idealization of republican masculinity which characterizes the two Vindications . By inhabiting Imlay's subject-position, Wollstonecraft confronts the ways in which even the most apparently liberating forms of immasculation are conditioned by the discourses of the sublime and the practices of mercantile appropriation, with irretrievably damaging effects.
The Secret History of the Rise of the Novel: The Novel and the Middle Class in English Studies
Authors: Boulukos George
Published: February 2012

This essay examines when and why the middle class entered into histories of the novel. Analysis of histories of the novel from throughout the course of the nineteenth century shows that the middle class only became associated with the eighteenth-century novel at the close of the century. Indeed, before this point, any association of the novel with commerce or with a specific class was seen as undermining the genre's claim to literary and educational value. However, at the close of the century, just as English Studies was being institutionalized at universities in the United States and Great Britain, the early novel was also being claimed both as a worthy genre and as an expression of the values of an emergent middle class. The novel as an art-form reflecting the values of a new middle class, I contend, can be read as a covert account of the position of newly professional English professors, as they try to bring literary culture and humane morality to the "rising" class of aspiring, business-oriented students, while also fending off the "corrupt," exclusive, classics-based educational schemes of the old upper classes, all the while refusing to descend to the coarseness and brutality of mere popular culture. In sum, the novel conceived as a middle-class genre worthy of study becomes a displaced argument for the legitimacy and vitality of the new field of English studies itself.
Vicars and Squires: Religion and the Rise of the English Marriage Plot
Authors: O'Connell Lisa
Published: February 2012

This paper re-historicises the eighteenth-century marriage plot by shifting attention away from both the history of literary genres and the modes of social history that have generally informed accounts of the rise of the novel. Drawing instead on recent historiography of the period's religious-political currents, I argue that the novel's marriage plot emerged as a cultural agent of the Erastian state, or, more concretely as an expression of two different strains of opposition to the Court Whigs and their policies. In its Richardsonian form ( Pamela ), it belonged to a High Church missionary project that viewed the Anglican wedding ceremony as a tool in the resacrilization of everyday life, and in its Fieldingesque form ( Joseph Andrews ) it inaugurated a literature that placed the country parish, and, more particularly, negotiations between vicars and squires, at the heart of an imagined English nation. I conclude by suggesting that the English marriage plot finds its original conditions of possibility exactly where Richardson's and Fielding's fictions intersect. That is, where English theopolitics produced a Christian literature committed to emulative fictions on the one side, and a literature committed to the parish-based imaginary of a certain nostalgic English nationalism on the other.
Captain Singleton : An Epic of Mitsein ?
Authors: Greene Jody
Published: February 2012

The history of the novel in England is conventionally understood to go hand in hand with the rise of individualism. Ian Watt is only the most influential of critics to link the novelistic form—and above all Defoe's Robinson Crusoe—with the prioritizing of a distinctively modern self freed from social constraints and dependencies. For Watt, this radical and even excessive individualism at the origins of the novel had to be tempered by the marriage plot as exemplified by Richardson, but this paper argues that already in the Defoe canon, in Captain Singleton, it is possible to locate an alternative model, an interrogation of "Being-With" alongside the "epic of solitude" that founds the English novel. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, this piece imagines what might have unfolded had Watt taken Captain Singleton rather than Robinson Crusoe as the revolutionary precursor to the novelistic tradition.
Giving Power to the Medium: Recovering the 1750s
Authors: Lupton Christina
Published: February 2012

The fiction of the 1750s has two characteristics: a high degree of reflexivity about the practices of reading and writing, and a foregrounding of material objects, including paper and print. This article argues that both forms of self-reference are used to underscore the inability of a reader to intervene in an openly fictional world. This connects the themes of the novels and shorter narratives from this time, as well as connecting them to a vein of entertainment that carries on today.
The Air of Tom Jones ; or, What Rose from the Novel
Authors: Lewis Jayne Elizabeth
Published: February 2012

This essay considers Henry Fielding's 1749 novel Tom Jones in light of the rise of "atmosphere" as an aesthetic program within British literary fiction. Both in Fielding's own day and subsequently, from Hazlitt forward, criticism of Fielding's novel has drawn on metaphors of air and atmosphere. Engaging the history of Tom Jones's reception, the essay examines the ways that Fielding himself used the figure of air to build self-reflexive notional landscapes. This compositional strategy is indebted, on the one hand, to contemporary conceptions of the second sight (seeing things 'in the air') and, on the other, to early natural philosophy (seeing the air as if it were a thing). Both developed aesthetically charged vocabularies for describing 'the' atmosphere and reproducing it in writing. As it draws upon these two discourses, Tom Jones helps us to grasp a singularly elusive aspect of the eighteenth-century novel—an aspect which perhaps less contributed to the novel's 'rise' than rose from it to make lexical immersion in fiction count as an order of experience in its own right.
Realism and the Unreal in The Female American
Authors: McMurran Mary Helen
Published: February 2012

The Female American was, until recently, a little-known anonymous novel tracing the transatlantic adventures of a bi-racial, multilingual castaway-turned-missionary named Unca Eliza Winkfield. Critics now see its alternative constructions of individualism and gender as a challenge to canonical novels such as Robinson Crusoe or Pamela . This essay focuses on the novel's many oddities— not least the fantastical island setting with its central oracle statue worshipped by the local natives— in order to demonstrate that The Female American is an ironic pastiche of images and texts about the Americas. The oracle statue, which Unca Eliza improbably uses to convert the natives, mirrors Enlightenment debates about pagan prognostication at a time when ancient and indigenous paganisms were systematically compared. Although Enlightenment writers demystified pagan oracles, they did not renounce the mystical experience that animated them. Similarly, the novel's oracle statue, which is a mechanical object, is never unveiled as such, and thus ironically mediates the immaterial world of spirits. This imbrication with the unreal reveals fissures not only in some of the social aspects of the realistic novel, but in the fundaments of Ian Watt's formal realism.
Dickinson, Blake, and the Hymnbooks of Hell
Authors: Blackstock Alan
Published: February 2012

Many early critics found affinities between William Blake and Emily Dickinson in their radical disruption of poetic language, their penchant for gnomic utterance, and their cryptic imagery that hinted at a complex private mythology, all of which contributed to a view of Blake and Dickinson as mystics or poet-prophets with a message accessible only to initiates. Later twentieth-century scholarship, however, turned toward a closer investigation of the cultural milieu in which Dickinson and Blake produced their poetry—in particular, their relationship to the Protestant hymn tradition exemplified by Isaac Watts. Scholars have examined the ways in which Dickinson and Blake individually appropriated this tradition only to subvert it, but none has undertaken a synoptic examination of works in which both writers perform this subversion. Since there is no evidence of Dickinson having read Blake, the point of inquiry into the relationship between his writings and hers is to examine the ways in which their common sources—the Protestant hymnodists—inform both their poetics and their social consciences. Setting texts by Blake and Dickinson alongside those of Watts allows for an assessment of congruences and divergences in the ways in which these poems and their authors challenge the theological, educational, and stylistic hegemonies the hymn tradition advanced.
Dickinson’s Hummingbirds, Circumference, and Chinese Poetics
Authors: Kang Yanbin
Published: February 2012

This essay reads Dickinson’s two hummingbird poems, “Within my Garden, rides a Bird” (Fr370) and “A Route of Evanescence” (Fr1489) together, highlighting the hummingbird’s effects of slowness in one poem and effortlessness in the other and tracing the trajectory of the development of Dickinson’s poetics through their embedded wisdom and aesthetic consciousness. This discussion illuminates Dickinson’s exploration of “Circumference” as re-conceptualized in relation to the idea of non-action ( wuwei ) propounded by Daoism. In this framework, Dickinson’s idea of non-possession (which entails an aesthetic attitude toward life by effacing the acquisitive ego), her preferences for both idleness or non-action ( wuwei ) over action and retreating over pushing forward, as well as a negative tendency resembling Daoism, are explored in relation to her image clusters. Dickinson’s poetry achieves a non-mediating effect, manifesting the essence of Daoism’s non-action ( wuwei ) by both effacing the speaker’s “I” (which promotes the ego) and by creating a purity of image. Her aesthetic trajectory makes her later work akin to the spirit of Daoism and classical Chinese poetry that expresses Daoist ambience, which the shift of poetics in her two hummingbird poems registers. My reading of these poems proposes that Chinese philosophy, or a transcultural perspective, can aid us in understanding both these particular poems and Dickinson’s poetry in general.
Dickens Performs Dickens
Authors: Ortiz-Robles Mario
Published: February 2012

This essay offers a new reading of Charles Dickens's prefaces, a surprisingly neglected area in Dickens scholarship. It argues that the prefaces offer a particularly rich site for reexamining the role of the modern author as both literary creator and public conscience. The peculiar structure of address of a Dickens preface makes visible the cultural and linguistic forces involved in the institution of literature and of the author as its primary agent and thus serves to instantiate the acts literature performs in the world.
"The World Runs on Wheeles": John Stow's Indescribable London
Authors: Deneault Benjamin
Published: February 2012

John Stow's Survey of London (1598, 1603) has been read one of two ways. Prevailing opinion holds that Stow (1524/5-1605) surveyed the early modern city for its medieval past. Lawrence Manley has argued, contrarily, that Stow confronted differences in the cityscape. In this essay, I contend that while Stow confronted early modern London in the Survey, he did so through medieval means of urban description, which presuppose an ahistorical, supra-personal city. By addressing spatio-temporal change through intractable means, Stow purposefully generated an elaborate failure of description. His Survey means to reproduce the impossibility of perceiving rightly early modern London.
"On Different Levels Ourselves Went Forward": Pageantry, Class Politics and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf's Late Writing
Authors: Harker Ben
Published: February 2012

This essay focuses on questions of class, politics and narrative form in Virginia Woolf's late writing, in particular her posthumously published novel, Between the Acts. The novel is frequently discussed by critics in relation to the Second World War; this essay pushes an overlapping but critically overlooked context into view. It reads the text in the light of late 1930s leftist cultural production, particularly those discourses about national history and cultural traditions that loomed large during the popular front period. The essay argues that Woolf's last novel is the conflicted location of a search for a more inclusive narrative form.
"The Interval of Expectation:" Delay, Delusion, and the Psychology of Suspense in Armadale
Authors: Tondre Michael
Published: February 2012

This article traces the complex interconnections between new, neurological concepts of sensory lag and the formal and conceptual concerns of sensation novels in the mid-Victorian period. Concepts of sensory delay developed when scientists first measured the velocity of the nerves in 1850, a startling breakthrough that revealed an interval between physical stimuli and their resolution in consciousness. But while scientific popularizers emphasized the morbid, even emasculating effects of sensory delay, I show how novelists such as Wilkie Collins would insist upon its more positive potentials. In Armadale (1866), Collins conceived an alternative masculinity defined by nervous irresolution rather than rational action--a strategy that was wedded deeply to Collins' ideas about both popular fiction and about the developing vocation of the professional male novelist.
The Dissonant Bible Quotation: Political and Narrative Dissension in Gaskell’s Mary Barton
Authors: Singleton Jon
Published: February 2012

This essay examines the dissonant Bible quotation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) as a case study of the multivalent force biblical language could exert in Victorian society. It argues that Gaskell makes “authoritative” biblical language dissonant through juxtaposition, recontextualization, and the various formal disjunctions of the narrative in order to challenge the boundaries of her readers’ political sympathies. Exploring the contexts surrounding Gaskell’s dissonant Bible use, including the history of sympathy and the effect of intersecting class and religious boundaries on the Chartist struggle, the essay also points new directions for interdisciplinary work on religion and literature.
The Energy of Language(s): What Pound Made of Philology
Authors: Smith J. Mark
Published: February 2012

Ezra Pound, who filled his Cantos with untranslated and untranslatable archaic and foreign words and phrases, imagined a reader who would take up the claims of modern philology in a startlingly energetic way. The eighteenth century language philosophy inherited by Pound helped him to shape a modernist understanding of the energeia of finding and using unfamiliar words, one in which roots and etymologies are less important than current meanings. In 1906, a likeminded philologist, Michel Bréal, theorist of diachronic and synchronic realms, formulated a model of Homeric finding and using that he called “plasticity.” I consider the limits of plasticity in Pound’s Canto 20.
Why Beauty Matters to the Postcolonial Nation's Masters: Reading Narratives of Female Beauty in Pramoedya's Buru Tetralogy
Authors: Saraswati L. Ayu
Published: February 2012

Studies on beauty culture tend to focus on women. Some highlight women's meaningful engagements with beauty culture as they negotiate various beauty norms in their lives, while others detail the ways in which women's bodies become the resilient sites of (oftentimes contradicting) articulations of the gendered nations. The article shifts this emphasis on women in beauty culture by instead focusing on how and why women's beauty matters to men. Here, the article refers not to men as individuals—this is not a study based on interviews—but rather it employs a postcolonial feminist perspective in closely reading a series of novels, the Buru tetralogy, by one of Indonesia's greatest male authors, the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to demonstrate that narratives of female beauty are important for male nationalists as they reclaim their masculinity as the new masters of the postcolonial nation. The article argues that the construction of masculinity relies on processes of signification and regulation of men's, as well as women's, bodies and therein lies its power.
Equity, Power, and Capabilities: Constructions of Gender in a Tanzanian Secondary School
Authors: Thomas Matthew A. M. , Rugambwa Allen
Published: February 2012

This article aims to move beyond issues of access to schooling for girls to investigate the constructions of gender through a macro-level analysis of policy and micro-level analysis of practice at a secondary school in Tanzania. State-sanctioned school texts are examined, as well as classroom discourse and teachers’ understandings of gender, to show how both “gender as equity” and “gender as power relations” perspectives interact in schools. While there have been advances in the recognition of gender as a structuring force within schools and society, this article contends that the capabilities approach adds value to these views by considering how gendered texts and discourses may still be limiting the capabilities of female and male students in Tanzanian secondary schools.
Situating Empowerment for Millennial Schoolgirls in Gujarat, India and Shaanxi, China
Authors: Ross Heidi A. , Shah Payal P. , Wang Lei
Published: February 2012

Comparative findings from girls’ education projects in Gujarat, India, and Shaanxi, China, are used to explore two questions: How and under what conditions does schooling contribute to girls’ instrumental and intrinsic empowerment? What does it mean to become an educated rural girl in contexts where girls are marginalized? A review of scholarship on empowerment, and the role of schools in enabling that process, is followed by an examination of the school/empowerment link in the case study projects, which to varying degrees have succeeded in assisting girls to gain resources, capabilities, experiences, and networks that expand the lenses through which they see themselves and their authority in the world. Three intertwining processes that affect schooling’s potential to enable girls’ empowerment include: 1.) expanding educational access and opportunities; 2.) declining cultures and economies of son preference; and 3.) shifting levels of “trust” in schools as a critical “good” for girls’ futures. Our designation of participating girls as “millennials” refers both to the era in which they are coming of age, and to how their capabilities, aspirations, and identifications as schoolgirls, daughters, and laborers have been shaped by global, national, and local reinterpretations of the world’s Millennium Development Goals.