bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Production of Literature and the Effaced Realm of the Political
Authors: Ueda Atsuko
Published: May 2005

The understanding of literature in Japan underwent an epistemological shift in the mid-1880s, when literature came into being as an ontological category as modern fiction found its identity around the themes ninjō, fūzoku, and setai (emotions, social customs, and manners). By historically contextualizing these three components of modern fiction, first introduced by Tsubouchi Shōyō's Shōsetsu shinzui (1885-86), I argue that they were posited in opposition to what constituted the political at that historical juncture. I do so by analyzing Shōyō's criticism of Takizawa Bakin, which signifies his rejection of the political discourse and ultimately of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement.
Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment
Authors: Wigen Karen
Published: May 2005

The landscape known today as the Japanese Alps is a cultural artifact of the mid-Meiji era. During the decade between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, as imperial competition thrust mountains into new prominence across the globe, central Honshu's ranges came into focus for the first time. The visionaries who produced the Japanese Alps for the Japanese public during
these years, notably Shiga Shigetaka and Kojima Usui, simultaneously imbued the alpine landscape with an exalted purpose. Synthesizing science and aesthetics with practical advice, their writings helped shape a new sensibility toward mountains: one where climbing was yoked to what might be called geographical enlightenment.
Smallpox in Washington's Army: Strategic Implications of the Disease During the American Revolutionary War
Authors: Becker Ann M
Published: May 2005

The prevalence of smallpox during the early years of the American War for Independence posed a very real danger to the success of the Revolution. This essay documents the impact of the deadly disease on the course of military activities during the war and analyzes smallpox as a critical factor in the military decision-making process. Historians have rarely delved into the significant implications smallpox held for eighteenth-century military strategy and battlefield effectiveness, yet the disease nearly crippled American efforts in the campaigns of 1775 and 1776. Smallpox was a major factor during the American invasion of Canada and the siege of Boston. Rumors over the British use of biological warfare, controversy over inoculation, and attempts to control the spread of smallpox all impeded the progress of the war. Recruitment was adversely affected, desertions increased, and commanding officers were forced to proceed with inadequate forces because of smallpox. This frightening disease affected the actions of the Revolutionary army and its generals, reduced the American ability to attract and hold recruits, and influenced the controversial development of preventive medical policies.
"The Magic Touch of Reform": Samuel Francis Du Pont and the Efficiency Board of 1855
Authors: Weddle Kevin John
Published: May 2005

By the mid-nineteenth century the United States Navy's personnel system based entirely on seniority had created an officer corps filled with many old, infirm, and incompetent men, while blocking the promotion of many deserving officers. Commander Samuel Francis Du Pont, along with several other political and military leaders, was instrumental in achieving significant personnel reform that temporarily broke the promotion logjam by removing much of the deadwood from the naval officer corps. This article draws upon previously neglected material to provide a fresh look at Du Pont's role in the work of the United States Navy's Efficiency Board of 1855.
The Military Administration of England: The Royal Artillery (1216-1272)
Authors: Bachrach David Steward
Published: May 2005

It is commonly believed that King Edward I of England (1272-1307) revolutionized the military organization of England and began a new era in military affairs. This article argues that Edward's reputation as a "revolutionary" is exaggerated, because by the time he became king, a large and complex military bureaucracy already existed in England. This study examines one element of the sophisticated military administration that operated during the reign of Edward's predecessor, Henry III (1216-72): the construction, storage, and transportation of the artillery that was so important for the conduct of siege operations.
Determinisms and Other Issues
Authors: Black Jeremy
Published: May 2005

A think piece that addresses how to consider military history for the twenty-first century.
Le Palle di Marte: Military Strategy and Diplomacy in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under Ferdinand II de' Medici (1621-1670)
Authors: Capponi Niccolo
Published: May 2005

Tuscany's geopolitical situation in the seventeenth century was unique and unenviable. The historiography of the Medici Grand Duchy, in particular of the reign of Ferdinand II, has ignored the difficult position that the ruling family faced and has overlooked its diplomatic and military successes. This article addresses three primary challenges facing the Medici: the difficulty of maintaining neutrality between Habsburg Spain and Bourbon France; the need to transform the state's costly defence organization; and the practicalities of defending Tuscany's borders from incursions by neighbouring states. Ferdinand II ably confronted these challenges with skilful diplomacy and an innovative defence policy.
The "Military Revolution," 1955-2005: From Belfast to Barcelona and The Hague
Authors: Parker Geoffrey
Published: May 2005

Michael Roberts launched his celebrated "Military Revolution" idea in a lecture delivered at the Queen's University, Belfast, fifty years ago. To commemorate this event, and to reflect its continuing impact, Geoffrey Parker—himself a participant in the debate—reviews recent "special issues" of two journals, one published in Catalonia and the other in the Netherlands, devoted to the military history of early modern Europe.
Billy Yank and G.I. Joe: An Exploratory Essay on the Sociopolitical Dimensions of Soldier Motivation
Authors: Rodgers Thomas Earl
Published: May 2005

This article provides an explanation of how Union soldiers could fight so effectively in the Civil War with so little training by comparing their prewar socialization experiences with those of infantrymen in World War II. Billy Yank's society inculcated concepts of masculinity, patriotism, and citizenship that were major factors in his ability to function under fire. G.I. Joe's society instilled different concepts of masculinity, patriotism, and citizenship that could not provide him with the same ability as Billy Yank to function on the battlefield. Extensive training and unit cohesion were necessary to compensate for what socialization did not provide G.I. Joe.
Captive Historians, Captivated Audience: The German Military History Program, 1945-1961
Authors: Wood James A.
Published: May 2005

From 1945 to 1961, former German officers, working first as prisoners of war and then as civilian employees of the U.S. government, produced roughly two hundred thousand pages of manuscript histories dealing with nearly every aspect of the Nazi war effort. This essay provides a general historiographical outline of their work and comments on the motivations, aims, and opinions of the authors. Taken together, these manuscripts provide telling insight into the experiences of German officers, both during and after World War II. Motivated by a desire to protect the reputation of the Wehrmacht, their cooperation with U.S. historical efforts produced a significant, influential, and arguably self-serving view of the war.
"Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit": Irish Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865
Authors: Bruce Susannah Ural
Published: May 2005

Historians have lacked a central theme to explain Irish-American service in the Union Army during the American Civil War, due to the varying experiences of Irish immigrants. There is, however, one common thread linking their service: their dual loyalties to Ireland and America. When the Union cause supported their interests in Ireland and America, Irish Americans volunteered for the war and their families supported them. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the federal draft, and a staggering rise in Irish-American casualties, they began to question, and in some cases, abandon, the Union war effort because it no longer protected their interests in both countries.
Two Cultures of Science: The Limits of Positivism Revisited
Authors: Horowitz Irving Louis
Published: May 2005

Were it not linguistically awkward, I would be inclined to entitle these remarks a discourse on what went wrong with the love affair of policy-makers, academic pundits, and hard-core positivists with the world of science. In the nineteenth century, science was as identified with progress as bacon is with eggs. This optimism has given way to a pandemic mistrust of science by all sorts of elites. Popular displeasure became transparently evident in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Mistrust of science has only deepened in the first years of the new millennium. The ease with which scientific products are converted into destructive weaponry only partially accounts for the new skepticism about conventional claims. Unanticipated negative human consequences of actual discoveries in areas ranging from genetic engineering to wireless communication are at least as important an element in popular concerns. Nonetheless, professional assertions about the benefits of science continue unabated. Peter Watson in his fine recent survey,The Modern Mind, in which he asserts science as such “provides a new kind of humanity and a canon for life as it is now lived,” typifies these claims. The limitation in this by no means unusual formulation is that few people are actually involved in the life of science, while many are affected by applications of scientific work that often have indeterminate or, even worse, destructive consequences.
The Voluntary Sector's War on Poverty
Authors: Morris Andrew
Published: May 2005

In 1970, Elizabeth Wickenden, a longtime activist on behalf of public social provision and a broker between voluntary social welfare agencies and the federal government, despaired of a quiet revolution occurring in social service provision. “Virtually unchallenged and undebated,” she observed, “the principle established with the first large-scale federal welfare program, the Federal Emergency Welfare Administration [sic], that public funds should only be expended by public agencies, was quietly repudiated.” Through a series of domestic initiatives, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 and amendments to the Social Security Act in 1967, the federal government had begun to channel a significant amount of money through nongovernmental organizations. To older activists like Wickenden, who had fought hard to build thepublicinfrastructure of the welfare state, such a trend was troubling, as it seemed to indicate a dwindling commitment to public social provision that had informed New Deal social policy.
Bringing the Welfare State Back In: The Promise (and Perils) of the New Social Welfare History
Authors: Hacker Jacob S.
Published: May 2005

The welfare state—the complex of policies that, in one form or another, all rich democracies have adopted to ameliorate destitution and provide valued social goods and services—is an increasingly central subject in the study of American history and politics. The past decade has unleashed a veritable tidal wave of books on the topic, including, from historians, Alice Kessler-Harris'sIn Pursuit of Equityand Michael Katz'sThe Price of Citizenship, and, from political scientists, Robert Lieberman'sShifting the Color Lineand Peter Swenson'sCapitalists Against Markets. Journals ranging from theAmerican Historical ReviewtoPolitical Science Quarterly(and, with less regularity, even theAmerican Political Science Review) now routinely feature analyses of U.S. social policy. And going back just a few years more, the early 1990s saw the publication of several influential works on the subject, notably Paul Pierson'sDismantling the Welfare State?and Theda Skocpol'sProtecting Soldiers and Mothers, each of which won major book prizes in political science. If any moment deserves to be seen as a heady time for writing on the American welfare state, this is it.
Ideology and Public Policy: Antistatism in American Welfare State Transformation
Authors: Quadagno Jill , Street Debra
Published: May 2005

Henry David Thoreau's influential essay “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849, began with a ringing declaration of opposition to government: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—‘That government is best which governs not at all.’…the character of the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.” Thoreau's statement summarizes a central thesis in political theory, what has become a historical constant in the minds of researchers seeking to explain the development and parameters of the American welfare state. This thesis is that any power given to the government is subtracted from the liberty of the governed, a concept best captured by the term “antistatism.” Thus, Lipset contends that the United States is dominated by an encompassing liberal culture that honors private property, distrusts state authority, and holds individual rights sacred. Similarly, according to Huntington, Americans live by a creed that views government as the most dangerous embodiment of power. For Morone, American government is a “polity suspicious of its own state.” Hartz, too, asserts that the master assumption is that “the power of the state must be limited.”
Confessions of a Jewish Autobiography Reader
Authors: Horowitz Elliott S
Published: May 2005

Beginning with the author's encounter with Gershom Scholem's "From Berlin to Jerusalem" as a graduate student, this essay compares the autobiographical writings of Scholem and Isaiah Berlin, particularly from the perspective of the portrayal of pivotal figures in the lives of each: S. Y. Agnon in the case of Scholem, and Lewis Namier in the case of Berlin. The essay also compares the errors of biographers with the lies of autobiographers, expressing a preference for the latter.
Roman Contexts in Jewish Texts: On Diatagma and Prostagma in Rabbinic Literature
Authors: Tropper Amram D
Published: May 2005

The importance of loanwords in rabbinic literature may often extend far beyond issues of etymology and semantic range. A loanword may have been employed in a text not merely for its meaning, but by means of a loanword from Greek or Latin, the author of a rabbinic text may have alluded to a specific setting or institution well known to his audience but unfamiliar to the modern reader. As a result, the historian may enhance our understanding of many rabbinic texts with loanwords by interpreting these texts in the light of their loanwords' original settings.
In this article, I discuss rabbinic texts that borrow one of the following two Greek terms for "edict," diatagma and prostagma. In all but one case, diatagma and prostagma are found in Aggadot where they seem to access various associations from the Graeco-Roman world concerning the contents, publication, reception, and popular perception of Roman edicts. Yet not only do these Aggadot reflect the historical context of Roman edicts, they also exemplify the rabbinic use of the legal-political life of the times as a metaphor for religious ideas. In the single appearance of the term diatagma in a Halakhic context, I suggest that the edict under discussion is a specific form of a Roman legal summons and that the proper understanding of this Halakhic pericope is contingent upon a familiarity with the roman edictal summons. Moreover, I suggest that this pericope preserves a record of a legal discussion between a Palestinian amora and a gentile.
Medieval Monasticism and the Evolution of Jewish Interpretation of the Story of Jephthah's Daughter
Authors: Berman Joshua
Published: May 2005

Exegesis, Jephthah, Monasticism, Judges, Karairte
In unanimous fashion, the midrashic exegetical tradition affirmed that Jephthah's vow was a commitment to sacrifice the first creature that greeted him upon his victorious return from battle against the Ammonites (Jgs 11.31). Several medieval rabbinic exegetes, however, posited a different interpretation of the vow: were the first creature to greet him be a person, then that person would indeed be dedicated to God, Not in the form of a sacrifice, but through a life of devotion to God through seclusion. An extensive understanding of monastic practices reveals these exegetes to be highly sensitive to the economic, familial, social, institutional and ceremonial contexts in which women religious engaged the monastic life, and the imaginative, if anachronistic, way in which the medieval exegetes read these insights into the story of Jephthah's daughter. The evolution of exegesis to the story of Jephthah's daughter from its Karaite beginnings through the late middle ages, also sheds new light on Ibn Ezra's use of Karaite legal material in the formation of his biblical commentary. These rabbinic readings are further illuminated when we examine the evolution of patristic and Christian scholastic scholarship to this story in search of lines of mutual fructification.
Survival in the Frontier Zone: Comparative Perspectives on Identity and Political Allegiance in China's Inner Asian Borderlands during the Sui-Tang Dynastic Transition (617-630)
Authors: Skaff Jonathan Karam
Published: May 2005

This paper investigates the relationship between identities and political allegiances on premodern frontiers. The first half of the paper is a case study of interactions between Turks and Chinese elites and commoners during the Sui-Tang dynastic transition. The second half compares Roman, mid-imperial Chinese, and early Islamic frontiers. The paper concludes that people in frontier zones tended to forge political ties based on self-interest and personal connections. Solidarities based on ethnic or religious allegiance were rare because premodern state power, transportation, and communications could not spread these ideals effectively.
The Military Superiority Thesis and the Ascendancy of Western Eurasia in the World System
Authors: Thompson William R
Published: May 2005

The military superiority thesis contends that the key to the ascendancy of western
Europe as the world's predominant region was its edge in military technology. Thanks
to intensive regional warfare and a series of military revolutions, military superiority
enabled Europeans to subordinate the rest of the world between 1500 and 1900. At
best, this interpretation gives too much explanatory weight to military technology.
Other factors that were equally if not more important were the variable vulnerabilities
of Afro-Eurasian and American targets of expansion, the need for and availability of
allies, and the evolution of a global political economy in ways that favored increasing
European predominance. As explored in five cases, ranging from Mexico and Peru to
southeast Asia in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, none of these factors
worked entirely independently of the others. Rather, they interacted to promote the
ascendancy of some Europeans for a period of time. Military superiority, and especially
naval superiority, may have been most important for facilitating first the arrival and
then the survival of Portuguese, Dutch, and English forces along the maritime fringe of
Afro-Eurasia.
Expulsion as an Issue of World History
Authors: Kedar B. Z
Published: May 2005

Corporate expulsion—the permanent, government-sponsored banishment of a category of subjects beyond the physical boundaries of a political entity—appears to be a characteristic trait of Western European civilization. Elsewhere it occurred only sporadically. Compatible with the European states system that was taking shape during the central Middle Ages, corporate expulsion became a viable mode for coping with perceived internal threats when, from the twelfth century onward, a preoccupation with the defense of purity converged with the tendency of increasingly more efficient rulers to accentuate their responsibility for the wholesomeness of their realms. With the expansion of European civilization to other continents, this type of expulsion struck roots there as well.
From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran
Authors: Matthee Rudolph P
Published: May 2005

Introduced into Safavid Iran in the late 1500s, coffee and (to a lesser extent) tea soon found their way into the Iranian diet. By the early eighteenth century, however, the prolonged turmoil and impoverishment that followed the end of Safavid rule curtailed the consumption of these drinks in the public sphere. The reemergence of both beverages in the 1800s revealed regional differentiation and social stratification: tea became popular among the elite classes and dominated in the north, while coffee prevailed in the south. During the nineteenth century, tea began to supersede coffee everywhere in a process that involved status perceptions, the influence of tea-consuming England and Russia, and shifting trade routes.
Botany, Chemistry, and Tropical Development
Authors: Headrick Daniel R
Published: May 2005

Two sciences, botany and chemistry, have contributed to the current imbalance between rich and poor countries. In the nineteenth century, to bring the tropics into the world market, Europeans transferred valuable plants and established botanical research institutions. Before 1914 tropical economies kept pace with those of temperate zones. Chemistry had an opposite effect. Synthetic dyes appeared before 1914. During the world wars, chemists synthesized plastics, rubber, and fibers. By reducing the industrial nations' demand for tropical products, synthetics retarded the growth of the tropical economies. Yet Malaysia has shown that tropical nations can compete if they invest in research.
Theory and History of Revolution
Authors: Kroeber Clifton B
Published: May 2005

Theories of revolution formulated by social scientists are imaginative and insightful, but they deal only with some cases of revolution, and they propose incomplete analyses. These theories are largely ignored by other social scientists and by historians, whose many studies of individual revolutions customarily overlook theory. Discussion here of cases of revolution and related issues suggests that theorists and comparative historians need awareness of each other's work and of the many revolutions of millennia past.
The Rise of the Jute Manufacturing Industry in Colonial India: A Global Perspective
Authors: Sethia Tara
Published: May 2005

The rise of a jute manufacturing industry in India presents a case where, with respect to the industrial production of jute and its share in the world market, a colony outstripped an imperial metropolis (Dundee, once known as "Juteopolis"). Ironically, this rise contributed to only limited growth of industrialization and capital accumulation in India. This study underscores the complex connection between colonialism and development by highlighting the interplay of forces that operated in the context of changing patterns of global trade and economy. It also outlines the role played by Indian raw jute in the growth of industrialization and capital accumulation in Dundee and the critical role of Indian jute products in balancing trade in the British empire.
Peripheral Visions: Californian-Australian Environmental Contacts, c. 1850s-1910
Authors: Tyrrell Ian
Published: May 2005

This article offers a comparative and transnational study of environmental contacts between California and Australia. It analyzes "peripheral visions" of the ideal society, shaped by isolation, distant markets, and climate similarities, using staple, world system, and cultural landscape theories. Key exchanges of plants, irrigation policy, and biological control emerged from acclimatization sentiment and ideas of a garden landscape of small-scale yeoman farmers centered on horticulture. The exchange was used to control environmental damage in a form of landscape "renovation," combining rational resource conservation and preservation. First fashioned in California, it spread to Australia and had reciprocal effects in the United States.
The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth's Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe
Authors: Headley John M
Published: May 2005

In the contexts of Venetian cartographic primacy and the publication of G.B.Ramu-sio's unique collection of travel accounts, this article examines the implications of the growing recognition of the entire earth's navigability, accessibility, and hence habitability--a recognition that shattered the traditional classical notion of zonal, partitioned confinement, in which three zones were too cold or too hot for human habitation. The ringing confidence of Ramusio and his circle regarding the total habitability of the earth, expressive of a new global consciousness on the part of Europeans, depended at least as much on Platonic philosophy and its belief in the universalizing plenitude and goodness of a rational creator as upon cartographic, geographic precision and empirical exploration.
The "Civilizing" of Indigenous People in Nineteenth-Century Canada
Authors: Francis Mark
Published: May 2005

This article explores the nineteenth-century concept of "civilization" that was used to direct policies toward indigenous peoples in Canada. In Canada attitudes towards native "civilization" as material culture, which was seen as independent from, and superior to, other aspects of culture. This article analyzes Victorian concepts of "civilization" as represented in the writings of John Stuart Mill, E. B. Tylor, John Lubbock, Daniel Wilson, and missionaries. It then traces the ideas of Canadian officials and politicians concerned with Indian administration to show how these ideas reflected similar notions. Official language is seen to have formed part of a general Victorian discourse of "civilization" that excluded Indians from both self-governance and participation in the European community.
The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. A.D. 1100-1800
Authors: Gommans Jos J. L
Published: May 2005

This article aims to situate medieval South Asia in the broader taxonomy of frontier types and to identify it as a region that was neither wholly sedentary nor wholly pastoral but rather a place where internal frontier zones existed between these two ecological types. From the twelfth century onward, these zones were invigorated by the growing resources of mobile warriors, pastoralists, and merchants. Hence, state-building increasingly hinged on spanning the divide between arid jungle and humid arable land.
The Imperialism of Cultural Assimilation: Sir George Grey's Encounter with the Maori and the Xhosa, 1845-1868
Authors: Gump James O. (James Oliver)
Published: May 2005

As governor in New Zealand (1845-53 and 1861-68) and in South Africa (1854-61), Sier George Grey was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the most successful colonial administrators in the British empire. Grey's reputation rested in large part on his celebrated "native policy," which he characterized as a program of "amalgamation." This article examines the implementation of Grey's amalgamation strategy between 1845 and 1868 and evaluates its effects. The immediate legacy was the advent of a spirited resistance, a cultural rejection of colonial domination by the Xhosa and the Maori. At the same time, Grey's policies helped pave the way for white supremacy in South Africa as well as the alienation of millions of acres of Maori land in New Zealand.
The Vision-Quest Motif in Narrative Literature on the Buddhist Traditions of Silla
Authors: McBride Richard D
Published: May 2005

IryÅn's Samguk yusa preserves several accounts of Buddhist monks of the ancient Korean
state of Silla encountering supernatural beings in what may be termed vision-quests.
Information of this kind has hitherto been understood by scholars as evidence of the persistence
of ancient Korean shamanism. As context, this article problematizes the idea of
shamanism and its relationship to Tantric Buddhism and provides evidence for the visionquest
motif in Sino-Indian Buddhist literature. It focuses on examples of this motif in
the Samguk yusa to suggest that connections between ancient Korea, China, and India
are closer than previously believed. The motif does not demonstrate the rapprochement
between indigenous shamanism and Buddhism so much as attest to an ancient approach
to religious experience.
Lexical Exceptions in Stress Systems: Arguments from Early Language Acquisition and Adult Speech Perception
Authors: Peperkamp Sharon Andrea
Published: May 2005

Some, but not all, languages with fixed stress exhibit lexical exceptions to their stress rule.
Under the assumption that lexical exceptions can occur in a language only if its native speakers
can perceive stress contrasts, I argue that the presence of these exceptions depends on the age at
which infants discover the stress rule of their language. If the stress regularity is easy to infer
from the surface speech stream, then it will be acquired very early, and stress will not be encoded
in the phonological representation of words in the mental lexicon; as a consequence, stress contrasts
are not well perceived by adult speakers and lexical exceptions are excluded. If, by contrast, the
regularity is difficult to infer, then it will be acquired relatively late, after the format of the
phonological encoding of words has been fixed. That is, stress will be redundantly encoded in
the mental lexicon, and lexical exceptions can thus be perceived and stored by adult speakers. A
typological survey concerning the occurrence of exceptions in languages with fixed stress supports
this proposal. A comparison with a metrical approach to exceptional stress is made, leading to a
proposal about the division of labor between psycholinguistics and theoretical phonology.
Genevieve Taggard's Sentimental Marxism in Calling Western Union
Authors: Allego Donna M
Published: May 2005

This article investigates Genevieve Taggard's Calling Western Union (1936), the only volume of Taggard's poetry devoted to class issues. It argues that this work is more complex than its obvious Marxism suggests because Taggard recasts an earlier sentimental ethic of interpersonal bonds and helping others in Marxist terms. Initially, I discuss Taggard's links with earlier sentimental writers and works, especially Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills, in order to establish this ethic. I utilize this philosophical framework to inform close readings of Taggard's autobiographical Preface and representative vocalic poems in which women play key political roles. Taggard develops these poems, in which speakers emulate another voice, more fully than those used in worker's correspondence poems and in Tillie Olsen's "I Want You Women Up North to Know" by representing the entire socio-economic spectrum. Thus, Taggard juxtaposes affluent characters with middle class speakers who empathize with the working class. She also uses a knowledgeable, middle class voice to help readers define the working class and at appropriate moments supersedes this voice with those of the workers. Both middle and working class speakers demonstrate the efficacy of a sentimental ethic by performing functions appropriate to their class.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Narrative
Authors: Blackwell Bonnie
Published: May 2005

This article examines heroin in the 1995 film Trainspotting as a remedy for the literary declivity of senescence. The film's protagonist, Mark Renton, is compared to another literary drug user, Sherlock Holmes, to explain the title. Through his favored form of discourse, litany, Mark Renton finds an escape from the banality which characterizes the speech of his Edinburgh companions. Rather than a facile statement against or in favor of drug use, Trainspotting is an intricate proposal for the resacralization of language outside of tired narrative templates like professional success and marriage.
Of Acedia, Romantic Imagination and Irony Revisited: A Background Note for Readings of Under the Volcano
Authors: La Bossiere Camille R
Published: May 2005

Under the Volcano's rehearsal of the Coleridgean sense of imagination, with its ironic, synthetic grammar figured as "cold fire," seems inconsistent with readings of the novel as something of a para-medieval exemplum for caritas and therefore against acedia. The retracing of that image from Lowry's use of it in the crucial chapter eight to its source in Milton and Dante, where it exemplifies the unreason of Hell, where love has no place, provides an interpretive context more comprehensively founded in intellectual history and more consistent with Lowry's demonstrably ironic handling of the Good Samaritan theme and with the ethical consequences that logically follow from that handling. The Lowry so contextualized is aptly read as a latter-day Romantic indwelling a region where "cold performs th'effect of fire," there suffering the travails of ethical paralysis attendant on fidelity to the principle of self-contradiction basic to his art.
"In the Sinai of Knowledge": Narrating the Old/New Jewish Nation in Shulamith Hareven's Thirst: The Desert Trilogy
Authors: Omer-Sherman Ranen
Published: May 2005

The tension between divine law, the law of nature, the law of the state and the law of the individual (conscience) is of course an enduring one in world literature since at least the moment that Sophocles's Antigone first eruped on stage. With increasing emphasis, Israeli literature has evolved as a counter-narrative corpus focused on the plight of the individual, caught between a dream of justice and the often draconian consequences of state law. In Shulamith Hareven's Thirst: The Desert Trilogy, a gender-critical struggle against canonical interpretations of the original text leads toward a questioning of the stakes of ancient patriarchy as well as contemporary uses of a unified national identity. Hareven's insistence that the sacred text serve the moral dilemmas of the present, offers a compelling meditation on the traumas of a rebuilt Jerusalem.
Postmodernism and Subversive Parody: John Yau's "Genghis Chan: Private Eye" Series
Authors: Zhou Xiaojing
Published: May 2005

This article examines the subversive strategy of parody in John Yau's poetic series entitled "Genghis Chan: Private Eye," by situating Yau's work in the contexts of postmodern poetics, Hollywood films, and Asian American history and culture. While engaging with some major critical views on Yau's poetry, its reading of Yau's "Genghis Chan"series breaks away from those critical approaches to postmodern poetry and minority literature, which assume a false dichotomy that renders agency of the Othered subject and postmodern poetics mutually exclusive.This essay argues that Yau's historically situated and ethnically inflected postmodern poems enact a critical engagement with postmodern aesthetics and poststructuralist theories—an engagement which at once interrogates and reinvents the private self and raced subject. Its close-reading of Yau's poems foregrounds the ways in which Yau deploys postmodern aesthetics to expose the constituent historical, conceptual, and representational elements of ethnicity, and to re-articulate an Asian American Otherness that refuses to be defined.
Diverting the Gaze: The Unseen Text in Women's War Writing
Authors: Acton Carol
Published: May 2005

Using women's war memoirs and poetry from World War One and the Vietnam War, this essay explores how women's gaze on war reveals the trauma of their experience. In particular this discussion focuses on the relationship between what is seen and not seen, examining how the diversion of the gaze and the attendant paradoxical presence of an unseen text is fundamental in understanding the connection between seeing and writing war. The paper begins by examining the gendered question of authenticity that connects "seeing" with "knowing" in wartime. It goes on to look at the extent to which cultural prescriptions and the trauma of the experience itself influence what is seen and not seen and therefore what is revealed and not revealed in the text itself. It argues that in reading war writing we must be alert to the meaning of the traumatic experience that can only be located in what is absent: unseen and unwritten.
The Structural Coherence of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman
Authors: McLuckie Craig W
Published: May 2005

This essay opens with an overview of the extant criticism of Soyinka's play. From the early paraphrases, through Marxist, mythic, and performance analyses, to authorial reflections on the play, Professor McLuckie leads into a new reading of the play centred on the idea of beginnings. McLuckie argues that the play's peritexts are central to our understanding of intertextuality as a structuring device, that structural coherence is dependent on the hybridization of beginnings, and that, as Breytenbach observes, beginnings/origins rejuvenate text and performance for the reader/spectator.
The Remembered Future: Neuro-Cognitive Identity in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
Authors: Wesley Marilyn C
Published: May 2005

This essay demonstrates the utility of a neuro-cognitive approach to literature by way of a consideration of selfhood both in autobiographical memory and in narrative. Memory, shaped by metaphor in James's novella and read through neurological and psychological theories of Antonio Damasio and David B. Pillemer, provides the basis for self-construction understood as having personal and public purpose that links literary narrative to human mindedness. The Turn of the Screw, which, paradoxically, celebrates the achievement of narrative identity even as it tells a tale of autobiographical failure, shows that the self—as a structure of the mind and as a device of fiction—integrates an extraordinary range of information for adaptive use in a challenging world.
Provoking the Ancients: Classical Learning and Imitation in Fielding and Collier
Authors: Dykstal Timothy
Published: May 2005

This essay examines two of the more innovative fictions of Sarah Fielding and her collaborator Jane Collier as experiments in a neoclassical mode. Fielding's (and Collier's) The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) dismisses several philosophical schools and mimics the structure of a Greek tragedy as it displays the essential selfishness of romantic love and the fatuous yearnings of audiences who read for it, and Collier's An Essay on The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) imitates the structure and rhetorical strategy of Ovid's Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) as it dissects just how tormenting love, and other kinds of dependency, can be. What these books have in common is their critique of the concept of romance: they want to demystify it as dangerous for women. They do that, in part, more by provoking than by invoking the authority of the classical traditionâusing it to diagnose some problems of modern life.
Historicizing Communities of Reading in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Report from the Classroom
Authors: Gunzenhauser Bonnie J
Published: May 2005

This essay offers a case study that examines how the history of reading can provide an ideal entrée to doing historicist work in the eighteenth-century literature classroom. Seeking to connect recent scholarly innovations in book history with classroom practice, the author discusses how teaching a set of texts by William Cobbett and Hannah More illuminates both the debate about lower-class literacy in late eighteenth-century Britain and the contemporary student's practice of reading. Manifestly, the texts raise the question of what "literacy" meant in late eighteenth-century Britain, and what the political implications might be if lower-class readers were taught not merely to read, but also to write. But because these texts are less than canonical, they also raise the question of why the debate over lower-class literacy does not constitute part of the literary canon today—a question that helps students to think not just about standards of canonicity, but also about the relationship between those standards and the kinds of reading practices that are privileged in our literature classrooms.
Re-reading Reading in Eighteenth-Century Literary Criticism
Authors: Morrissey Lee
Published: May 2005

By bringing a focus on reading from book history into the history of literary criticism, this essay traces a debate over the definition of reading in the work of influential English literary critics. This approach reveals a persistent Restoration and eighteenth-century concern that the relatively democratic access to the press in the 1640s contributed to the political violence of the English Civil Wars. Consequently, the focus on reading also facilitates reconsidering the Habermasian "public sphere" model through which the history of eighteenth-century criticism is generally understood.
A "Girlboy's" Own Story: Non-Masculine Narrativity In Ma Vie en Rose
Authors: Schiavi Michael R
Published: May 2005

Ma Vie En Rose (My Life in Pink) (1997) puts at center-screen a figure never before seen in cinema: an effeminate, cross-dressing, boy-loving, girl-identified, pre-pubescent male. Whether in print or on screen, gay, effeminate, transvestite, and/or transsexual characters seldom receive fully-realized narrative treatment—particularly not in the case of a seven-year old protagonist. Far more typical is the portrayal of such (necessarily adolescent or adult) characters as simple comic relief or readily-dispatched problems. This article analyzes ways in which director Alain Berliner and co-screenwriter Chris Vander Stappen keep their young protagonist's life-narrative, against the vigilance of parents, school, and the medical community, under his own fabulous control. Little Ludo's precocious relationship to spectatorship and feminine performance saves him from narrative oblivion; it also signals to viewers the countless stories yet untold by and about non-masculine boys.
Constrained in Liberation: Performative Queerness in Robert McAlmon's Berlin Stories
Authors: Zeikowitz Richard E
Published: May 2005

In Robert McAlmon's Berlin stories, written and set in the early years of Weimar Berlin, three Americans attempt to construct their homosexual identities. Their constructions are, however, informed by—and limited to—signs of queerness already in circulation. The city that offers all three characters the freedom to be queer thus also "confines" them to a degenerate, self-destructive lifestyle. Drawing on Judith Butler's theory that subjects are compelled to reiterate gender norms, the essay explore how these characters are constrained to repeat queer regulatory norms. Foster, "Miss" Knight, and "Steve" seemingly embrace the denigrated characteristics of queerness—casual sex, gender abnormality, excessive alcohol and cocaine usage, unproductive lifestyle—because the Berlin of McAlmon's text offers no alternative paradigm. McAlmon's stories alert us to the subtle, insidious workings of regulatory norms, whereby queer liberation re-enforces heteronormativity.
Hamlet, Synecdoche and History: Teaching the Tropes of "New Remembrance"
Authors: Acheson Katherine O.
Published: May 2005

In the modern university, giving students a historical understanding of the self in relation to the world is most prominently the responsibility of English Studies. Within English Studies, Shakespeare courses are most often called upon to provide this understanding. This situation is ironic, given that the contraction in offerings in other historical areas is due in part to our desire to diversify the sources of knowledge we present, and displace authors such as Shakespeare from the center of the canon. This article argues that, which we must resist, with Elizabeth Hanson, a "synecdochic Shakespeare," we can make good use of Shakespeare's plays to reveal the complexities, structures and problems of historicism to our students by focusing on the ways in which figurative language works to organize time and meaning. In particular, the essay focuses on synecdoche in Hamlet. Synecdoche—the taking of a part to represent a whole, which has variously been called the trope of "representation" (Burke) and of memory (Baldo)—is one of the more prevalent figures in the play, and is used to express the diverse and unstable structure of historical understanding throughout. Synecdoche in Hamlet therefore provides a tutorial in the compulsion towards, and challenges of, the formation of historical identities. The essays argues that a pedagogical focus on figurative language is not, contrary to what might be expected, a diversion from history (as the absence of discussions of the functions of figurative language from recent, authoritative, collections of essays about teaching Hamlet and Shakespeare would suggest), but instead a way to open up the histories—of power, gender, the self, for example—which are the subjects and matter of the tropes of new remembrance with which the essay is concerned.
Hamlet 9/11: Sound, Noise, and Fury in Almereyda's Hamlet
Authors: Fedderson Kim , Richardson J. Michael
Published: May 2005

What effects does terrorism's moving warfare "into the symbolic sphere, where defiance, reversion, and one-upmanship are the rule" have on the complex codes through which contemporary cultural artifacts are read? The impact of the terrorist attacks on New York City on September 11, 2001 resonated within the symbolic sphere, setting off a hermeneutic shockwave upon any cultural objects that can be implicated in its emerging narrative. Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (released in 2000) is a case in point. We read the film differently now. The events of September 11, 2001 overwhelm the film's attempt to establish a stable and persistent interpretive framework for itself, and the new, now transfigured, symbolism of the New York cityscape inclines viewers to re-read the film's pervasive paranoia, shifting the locus of this Hamlet from the inner, private, and individual to the outer, public and geo-political.
Shakespeare, Soccer, and Spin-doctors: Staging a Contemporary Henry V; Henry V at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales, UK, November 2002
Authors: Hand Richard J
Published: May 2005

Taken as a whole, the history plays are the most neglected of Shakespeare's dramatic works, not least because their animation of "real" history is perceived as potentially alienating for a contemporary audience. In Henry V, however, we find a play that is a thrilling theatrical journey and the use of the play in production from the Elizabethan period to our own time presents fascinating examples of the use of Shakespeare for purposes of propaganda or satire. The University of Glamorgan Henry V attempted to be a production for the twenty-first century, and used Shakespeare's text to explore contemporary ideological issues and political anxieties. The production design utilized the iconography of sport and familiar images from the news media to develop and explore the regional, national, and global concerns that the script of Shakespeare, himself the greatest adapter in the history of English theater, seems able to facilitate.