bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Curriculum and Style in the Collegiate University: Classics in Nineteenth-Century Oxbridge1
Authors: Stray Christopher
Published: November 2023

The aim of this paper is to compare two institutions which are in many ways similar but in others strikingly different: nineteenthcentury Oxford and Cambridge. It focuses on the content, organization, and status of their classical curricula, and explores the links between these and the social and intellectual styles characteristic of the two universities. These styles are identified both in the comparisons made within the universities, and in the fictional accounts which transmitted them in stereotyped form to a wider public. Such a comparison has the advantage of highlighting the extent to which transmitted knowledge is shaped by specific institutional contexts: academic politics, organizational structures, ideological traditions, and patterns of teaching and learning. In looking at Oxford and Cambridge from this point of view, we need to remember that in the collegiate university a layer of activity—pedagogical and political—has to be allowed for which is absent in most other such institutions. The Oxford battles between the advocates of collegebased tutorials and those of a research-oriented professoriate—i.e., between the followers of Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison—are well known. In the nineteenth century both universities had professors, but these were not the powerful founders and controllers of seminars, the patrons of pupils who followed their style and their commands which one finds in Germany in this period.2 In the first half of the century, indeed, many Oxbridge professors did not lecture, and some did not even reside. The university was beginning to take back the original authority which had been usurped by the colleges several centuries before, but the process was by no means complete.3
Portrait of the orator as a great man: Cicero on Cicero
Authors: Steel C E W
Published: November 2023

IN the previous three chapters I have looked at the three different kinds of speeches that Cicero delivered about empire and offered interpretations which relate his strategies of persuasion to the attitudes and opinions of his audience. That is, I have considered how the speeches attempt to persuade their audience to do whatever Cicero is advocating: which might seem to be the most important function of a speech. But whenever Cicero speaks he is also engaged in creating or maintaining his own persona as an orator and as a public figure. It is of course impossible to separate these two aims completely. The character which a Roman orator projected was an important factor in his success. Cicero himself laid great emphasis on the importance of ethos in his mature rhetorical theory. But for any orator with political ambitions, there are wider implications for his career as a whole, which make his image a matter for continuous attention.
Plautine Elements In Plautus
Authors: Fraenkel Eduard , Drevikovsky Tomas , Muecke Frances
Published: November 2023

Eduard Fraenkel was one of the most influential classicists of the twentieth century. His Plautine Elements in Plautus (originally published in German in 1922) revolutionized the study of Roman comedy. It is still essential reading for students and scholars of Plautus. This translation makes it accessible to an English-speaking readership for the first time. All Latin and Greek is translated, thus making the work available to a wider audience consisting of all those interested in Roman drama. The book includes a translation of the Addenda to the Italian translation published in 1960. The English translation is prefaced by an essay which gives an introduction to developments in Plautine scholarship since 1960.
Introduction
Authors: Fraenkel Eduard , Drevikovsky Tomas , Muecke Frances
Published: November 2023

Until well into the nineteenth century, Plautus’ comedies were in general viewed not very differently from any other primary literary work. Of course it was known that they were adaptations of Greek dramas; after all, the prologues said things like Demophilus scripsit, Maccus vortit barbare (‘Demophilus was the author, Maccus turned it into Latin’). But no real use was made of this knowledge.1 A typical example of the predominant attitude of the time is the ‘layperson’s homage to Plautus’ comedies, written down by a thinking friend of antiquity for her own edification’, which appeared in Rheinisches Museum in 1851. The author, as she stresses expressly, was ‘not of the philologists’ guild’. This essay, actually stylish and astute,2 was recognized by professional philologists, and Ritschl, who reprinted it in his Opuscula,3 stresses that he had found in it, for the most part, the essentials of his own opinions. In this little study, no Greek writer is named even once, although admittedly it deals only with the poetic invention, composition, and overall mood of the plays. There is no hint of how one was to conceive the relationship of the individual comedies to their originals. [2] Ritschl himself, who was no stranger to Greek drama, had worked on the identification of the Greek models in the early parts of his immense work on Plautus; so he discovered (in 1836) that Menander’s Twice a Swindler was the basis of Bacchides, and generally pursued the connections of Plautus’ plays to New Comedy, particularly in the essay (1841) on the Plautine didascalia.
The Nature and Origins of the cantica
Authors: Fraenkel Eduard , Drevikovsky Tomas , Muecke Frances
Published: November 2023

The investigations into contamination in the last chapter, like the earlier analysis of the monody in Bacch. 925–78, have shown that Plautus was occasionally able to insert into the context of an Attic comedy a single scene from a different play. As is well known, Terence still enjoyed this same freedom. This is clear from the statement in the prologue of Adelphoe about Scene ii.1. Terence will be considered here only in relation to the evidence he gives for the continuation of this strange practice; if we wish to gain insight into the question of how it could have arisen in the first place, we should keep to the older Palliata to which Terence is a successor in this respect, that is, we must base our investigation on Plautus, as we have no other representative of the earlier stage. What we discover about him is probably also true of Naevius, who was likewise condemned for contaminare fabulas (‘mixing plays together’). This ‘filling up’ of one Greek comedy with elements from other plays tends to be explained by one single motive, namely the lack of material, and indeed the authors were induced to insert scenes from other plays into their base-comedy by a desire to enrich the content, and often by their liking for some attractive situation or other. But if they were able to do this without difficulty, then a formal factor must have been an essential part of the process.
Plautus as a Poet
Authors: Fraenkel Eduard , Drevikovsky Tomas , Muecke Frances
Published: November 2023

New Comedy speaks with a subdued voice about the deeper things in life and expresses its own essence in a reserved fashion. A modern ear often misinterprets this; foreign things are easily read into it, insignificant things become the main concern, the real emphasis is not grasped. A study like the present one cannot concern itself deeply with the atmosphere and the content of the Attic works, and yet we must refer to them. There is a danger that the background needed to bring out the actual topic will attract the eye of the reader because of the equivocal light in which it is presented. We must resist the temptation of straying into the kaleidoscopic world of Menander and his colleagues, as we would be drawn too far into it. In this chapter we shall limit ourselves to a cursory look at a few features, with our eyes firmly fixed on Plautus; we cannot do justice to the whole.
Romance And Readership In Twentieth-Century France
Authors: Holmes Diana
Published: November 2023

Romance in modern times is the most widely read yet the most critically despised of genres. Associated almost entirely with women, as readers and as writers, its popularity has been argued by gender traditionalists to confirm women’s innate sentimentality, while feminist critics have often condemned the genre as a dangerous opiate for the female masses. This study adopts the more positive perspective of critics such as Janice Radway, and takes seriously the pleasure that women readers consistently seem to find in romance. Drawing on the social constructionist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, the psychoanalytical theories of Jessica Benjamin, and a range of social theorists from Bourdieu to Zygmunt Bauman, the book uncovers the history of romantic fiction in France from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and explores its place in women’s lives and imaginations. Romance is not defined - as it usually is - solely in terms of its mass-market form. Rather, the history of women’s popular fiction is traced in its full context, as one dimension of a literary story that encompasses the mainstream or ‘middlebrow’ as well as ‘high’ culture. Thus this study ranges from the formula romance (from the pious but popular Delly to global brand Harlequin), through ‘middlebrow’ bestsellers like Marcelle Tinayre, Françoise Sagan, Régine Deforges, to critically esteemed stories of love in the work of such authors as Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Elsa Triolet, and Camille Laurens. Criss-crossing the boundaries of taste and class, as well as those of sexual orientation, the romance has been at times reactionary, at others progressive, utopian, and contestatory. It has played an important part in the lives of twentieth-century women, providing both a source of imaginative escape, and a fictional space in which to rehearse and make sense of identity, relationship, and desire.
Introduction
Authors: Holmes Diana
Published: November 2023

Writing and reading romances is generally thought of as something that women do. The association of women with romance has often been used to confirm gender stereotypes: women are the sentimental sex, by nature more interested in private, emotional matters than in political or philosophical concerns, narcissistically inclined to consume stories that reproduce and embellish their own personal dramas. I have a vivid memory of wanting to distance myself from this demeaning construction of who I was: mid-teens, newly but firmly self-idenified as a serious reader unlimited by mere gender, I was asked by my grandma to change her books while I was at the library. This meant approaching the Romance section, being seen to select amongst the thin pink and blue volumes of the Mills and Boon series.
Love in a Brave New World: Romance in the 1950s
Authors: Holmes Diana
Published: November 2023

The tone is confidently opposed to Vichy’s preaching of submissive, domesticated femininity. But even by 1946, a competing discourse can also be traced in what soon became France’s most popular women’s weekly, at least among younger middle-class women. Marcelle Ségal’s advice column ‘Elle et vous’ (‘Elle and you’) focused relentlessly on the importance of marriage to a woman’s happiness. In February 1948, a series of articles by one Dr Clifford Adams, an ‘expert’ from the University of Pennsylvania, explained to readers ‘Comment trouver un mari . . . et le garder’ (‘How to find a husband . . . and keep him’),recommending voidance of the ‘seven capital sins of the married woman’ which included trying to change a husband rather than accept him as he was, and refusing his sexual advances.
Romance after Feminism
Authors: Holmes Diana
Published: November 2023

The feminist movement that emerged from the upheavals of May 1968 utterly rejected heterosexual romance as women’s natural and desirable destiny. This wave of feminism insisted on the inseparability of the personal and the political: its goals were not just equal pay and equal rights, but a profound transformation of a culture that it soon defined as patriarchal and androcentric, from the level of political institutions to that of intimate experience. Marriage was seen as the playing out, at a private level, of collective power relations between the sexes. In Beauvoirian terms, the husband in a couple assumed the privileged position of subject, while to be a wife meant to become his socially and sexually subordinate ‘other’. From a Marxist perspective— and the early MLF (Mouvement pour la Libération de la Femme) was largely propelled by women already active in leftist groups — the family’s role in the reproduction of labour made women a social group defined by domestic exploitation. The new feminism saw marriage as an alienated state for a woman: sleeping with the enemy, she was isolated from the rest of her sex and encouraged to see her dissatisfactions as mere personal failures.
Marx’sInfluenceon Shakespeare Studies since1968
Authors: Egan Gabriel
Published: November 2023

Between 1937 and 1955 the social research organization Mass- Observation formed by Tom Harrison, Charles Madge, and Humphrey Jennings produced over 3,000 reports on the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. After the Second World War, increased access to university education by working-class students generated scholarly works of Marxist history, most notably E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), that encouraged a ‘grass-roots’ view of history. In the reformist socialist climate of post- war Britain, working-class life became a subject of reputable academic study and Thompson claimed that English working-class conscious- ness had itself been forged in the nineteenth century by the courageous deeds of particular activists rather than being the necessary outcome of increasing industrialization.
The political world of France, c.1200–c.1336
Authors: Dunbabin Jean
Published: November 2023

The expansion of French power and the consolidation of a sense of identity in France could not easily have been predicted in 1200. By then Philip II had been ruling for fifteen years, but his great triumphs were all still to come. It would have needed prophetic insight to foresee that he would be victorious, not only over the counts of Flanders, since 1191 angry and vengeful; but also over King John of England, who held the duchy of Normandy, the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and, through his mother, Eleanor, the duchy of Aquitaine (which included Gascony). Between them, Baldwin IX of Flanders and King John controlled the whole of the western side of modern France from Ghent to Bayonne, with the exception only of the duchy of Brittany, held by the young Arthur, John’s nephew and Philip’s ally. It is true that the formidable alliance between Flanders and England, forged by Richard I, John’s predecessor, was weakening by 1199. Philip had succeeded in capturing Baldwin’s brother Philip of Namur, which forced Baldwin to the negotiating table.
The crown and the provinces in the fourteenth century
Authors: Jones Michael
Published: November 2023

Although the huge realm over which the later Capetians and early Valois kings ruled had fairly stable external borders—essentially those demarcated as long ago as the treaty of Verdun (843)—internally it was fragmented into a myriad of smaller political units (duchies, counties, viscounties, baronies, lordships). Some (Auvergne and Burgundy, for instance) had histories as long as the crown of France itself. Most can be traced back to administrative arrangements made in the Carolingian or immediately post-Carolingian periods. Certainly by the fourteenth century virtually all had long existed within the general feudal structure of Capetian France. They had formed their own particular legal or institutional ties with the monarchy, whether as simple fiefs or as part of much larger complexes, whose rulers equally owed homage and fealty to the king.
The crown and the provinces in the fifteenth century
Authors: Small Graeme
Published: November 2023

In the course of the fifteenth century the terms ‘crown’ and ‘province’ achieved wider currency than ever before in the history of France. The first, used in the abstract sense, appears already in the work of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis in the twelfth century. The crown subsequently became the supreme embodiment of royal public authority, quite distinct from the king (who was its minister, defender, even husband) and from the kingdom (the geographical extent of the lands which could be counted among its territorial possessions). It was a set of inalienable dominions and rights, a source of continuity from one reign to the next, and a focus for loyalties through difficult times. By contrast the idea of the province, although familiar to Churchmen as a subdivision in ecclesiastical organization and to readers of Roman histories, was a relative newcomer in French political thought.
The king and his government under the Valois, 1328–1498
Authors: Potter David
Published: November 2023

Popular tradition has tended to settle on the idea that the French state was finally consolidated from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, after a lengthy period of chaos, by Charles VII and Louis XI, ‘new monarchs’ ready to sweep away feudal survivals and usher in a new age. This is not how the victories of these monarchs would have been viewed in their own time. In the half-century after the death of Charles VII, after all at times a highly loathed and controversial figure, his reign became a touchstone for good governance, due reliance on wise noble advisers, and, most astonishingly, taxation by consent. For Francis I, Louis XI, feared and hated as he was in his life, may have been the predecessor who got the kings of France ‘out of their leading strings’, but his reputation remained one for tyranny. Like all such simplifications, the notion of these kings as ‘new monarchs’ has a nugget of truth in it, but at the same time it conceals the fundamental fact that both in theory and in practice the kings of the late fifteenth century built on a long process of consolidation which had in some ways been stimulated by the disastrous foreign and civil wars of the period 1340–1450.
The later medieval French noblesse
Authors: Prosser Gareth
Published: November 2023

Noblesse is ancient and international, and the historiography of its origins and trajectory is vast and fissured. Key concepts in the modern study of the European nobility—Germanic origins, the rise and fall of chivalry, class conflict with bourgeois capitalism, domestication by centralizing monarchies—now seem simplistic or ideological. The abandonment of the great edifice of ‘feudalism’ alone might easily monopolize this discussion, and few implications of it for the period after 1300 have been pursued.
‘For poetry makes nothing happen’
Authors: Robinson Peter
Published: November 2023

JOSEPH Brodsky had time for ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, and his paragraphs in ‘To Please a Shadow’ do Auden’s elegy a justice it deserves. They express an almost unreserved love for the poem. Brodsky has been describing how he found Auden’s verses in an anthology of English poems sent by a Moscow friend to the labour camp near the Arctic Circle where Brodsky was ‘doing my own time’:

Brodsky believes he has spotted a suspect trait in elegies, one from which Auden’s poem is happily free.
Pretended Speech Acts
Authors: Robinson Peter
Published: November 2023

One such animal was audibly Robert Frost: ‘The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, | But I have promises to keep’. That word ‘promises’, the only one with more than two syllables in the entire piece, speeds the second line of the last verse on to the point where Frost’s poem confronts a formal crisis. Its rhyme scheme, established and kept up over three stanzas, requires the third line to introduce a new rhyme sound, not answered until the next verse where it is found to foreshadow the triple rhyme in lines one, two, and four.
Archival Record-Keeping at Ebla 2400–2350 bc
Authors: Archi Alfonso
Published: November 2023

The city of Ebla, ancient Tell Mardikh, lies c.60 km. south of Aleppo. The area is peripheral to the region where cuneiform writing began at the end of the fourth millennium bc, when it was used by several palace administrations. The documents from the central archive of the royal palace of Ebla cover a period of c.40 years, corresponding to the reigns of the last two kings of the dynasty, Irkab-Damu and Išar-Damu. It is likely that the archive was already in use at the time of Irkab-Damu because the entire series of monthly and yearly documents from this period were kept there. About 45 tablets dated to the reign of Igris#-Halab, the antepenultimate king, which register the delivery (mu-DU) of silver and clothes to the palace by the highest ocials (lugal-lugal), were transferred from a previous archive. Documents of different typologies of that period are missing.
Archival Practices at Babylonia in the Third Millennium
Authors: Steinkeller Piotr
Published: November 2023

In this paper I first make some general remarks on the nature of Mesopotamian archival materials, such as those which survive from the third millennium bc. I then deal in more detail with the specific case of the archives of Umma in the Ur III period (c.2112– 2004 bc). Let me stress at the outset that these observations are not based on a systematic review of such materials; neither do I have any statistical data to support my conclusions. What I have to offer are merely impressions, which have come to me as a result of my preoccupation over twenty-five years with administrative records. There have been no earlier attempts to give a broad characterization of this body of evidence, and my observations will of necessity remain impressionistic. However, if this paper provokes responses and possibly even initiates a new area of enquiry, its purpose will be served.
Documents in Government under the Middle Assyrian Kingdom
Authors: Postgate J N
Published: November 2023

In about 1450 bc the whole of north Mesopotamia, by which I mean the lowland parts of northern Iraq and of north-east Syria and Turkey as far west as the Euphrates, was under the political domination of the Mitanni kingdom with its centre in the Habur basin. We have virtually no archives which date to this time, but there are two major bodies of cuneiform texts which come from this region somewhat later in the second millennium (fourteenth–thirteenth century bc). These are the Nuzi texts, from a small provincial princedom near Kerkuk on the south-east wing of the Mitannian empire, and the texts from Assur, the capital of the newly formed state of Assyria which by 1200 bc had completely supplanted Mitanni and absorbed the entire north Mesopotamian area.
Reflections on Neo-Assyrian Archives
Authors: Fales Frederick Mario
Published: November 2023

The period of the later Assyrian empire, from the ninth to the seventh century bc, is at present one of the most thriving branches of ancient Near Eastern historical and philological research, owing to a variety of recent archaeological discoveries and to a collective effort at systematization of previously acquired textual data. In conformity with the ‘return to the text’ which characterizes historical methodology at the present time, it seems fitting to attempt a bird‘s-eye view of the written material from the Neo-Assyrian age, in search of elements of archival organization. The objective of this search will be to gain possible insights into the administrative modus operandi of the time, and into the conceptual issues which regulated textuality in its discusion and duration.
Cuneiform Archives in Hellenistic Babylonia: Aspects of Content and Form
Authors: Oelsner Joachim
Published: November 2023

The cuneiform tablets from hellenistic and Arsacid Babylonia which have come down to us are in the tradition of the cuneiform practice of earlier periods. Beginning with the second half of the eighth century bc, a considerable number of such documents are available. From that time till the first century bc there are no significant gaps in the documentation available for Babylonia as a whole. But from place to place the situation may differ. In examining the last period in which the cuneiform script was used, it is necessary to see the connection with the preceding periods: to study cuneiform archives of the hellenistic period one must bear in mind the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods. To date more than 15,000 cuneiform tablets of archival character have been published, from the eighth and seventh centuries to the fourth. Many thousands of clay tablets of this kind, housed in the British Museum and elsewhere, remain unpublished. Most of the Neo-Babylonian and later legal and administrative documents originate from archives of varying size, of which the largestcomprise thousands of documents. They may be categorized as temple, palace, and private archives.
They Did Not Write on Clay: Non-Cuneiform Documents and Archives in Seleucid Mesopotamia
Authors: Invernizzi Antonio
Published: November 2023

When scripts other than cuneiform, such as Aramaic or Greek, and writing media other than clay, such as papyrus, leather, or parchment, became widespread in the Near East, new practical conditions came into being which had important consequences for documentary archaeological evidence, and which directly affect our knowledge based on this type of evidence. For the climate of Mesopotamia preserved perishable materials only in extremely rare cases. It is only as a result of exceptional circumstances that the Parthian parchments of Avroman (Minns 1915) and the Parthian and Roman documents of Dura Europos(Welles, Fink, and Gilliam 1959) have been preserved. In the Seleucid period, in particular, cuneiform tablets are still the basis of our knowledge (Oelsner 1986), and when later, in the course of the Parthian period, the cuneiform script and the clay tablet were finally abandoned, textual evidence was virtually extinguished.
Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable
Authors: Vance Smith D
Published: November 2023

I want to think about what it means to come to terms with death. I want to do it, but death also places terms on me already, limiting what I can say about it because its term is both over and yet to come. It is both my past and my future, my history and my own disappearance into it. It is an event begun and unbegun, an event that determines me without compromising my initiative to act. To come to terms with it means to subject any terms to that double logic of conclusion and immanence, to come to the terms that are already there but whose exact limitations may be beyond the phenomenology of human understanding.
Queering Sponsalia Christi: Virginity, Gender, and Desire in the Early Middle English Anchoritic Texts
Authors: Salih Sarah
Published: November 2023

David Halperin’s classic essay asks the question: ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’ and answers in a qualified affirmative: the alterity of the sex of ancient society is such that the term ‘sexuality’ may not be sufficient to discuss it.1 The study of sexual history thus demands an examination of the possibility that sexuality, gender, and desire may appear in unfamiliar configurations in different historical moments. It is becoming commonplace to observe that medieval sexualities, and medieval sex, are not necessarily identical to the modern versions. The distinction between modern sexuality identities and premodern sexual acts, derived ultimately from Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, has been much debated and qualified, with the result that both periods are revealed to have a range of ways of conceptualizing sexual pleasures.2 Caroline Walker Bynum observes that medieval categories of the sexual appear to have differed from modern ones; that, for example, representations of genitalia may not have primarily signified sexuality.3
Settlements and Structures
Authors: Lemos Irene S
Published: November 2023

Despite the important discoveries of the last twenty years, settlement and architectural evidence from the PG period ·remains sparse. Although two recent studies by Fagerstrom and Mazarakis-Ainian show that our knowledge has increased enormously since the study by Drerup, we still have no PG settlement equivalent to the Late Geometric examples at Zagora on Andros or at Emporio on Chios, both of which had only a short history of occupation. This is mostly because PG settlements lie under the remains of subsequent later occupations. The early history of sites such as Athens, Chalcis, Argos, and Thebes and others with a long continuous history of occupation is still unclear. Nevertheless. the sites we do have. especially those at Lefkandi and Asine, to mention the only two within the areas of the present study, and those at Nichoria and Thermon in western Greece, fill in some of the missing picture.
Sex as Discipline The Idea of Erotic Education
Authors: Turner James Grantham
Published: November 2023

The disciplining power of erotic discourse—the power of L’Escole des filles to ‘inform’ Pepys, the power of Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica to give Casanova his ‘theory’ and to ‘perfect’ Diderot’s worldly hero—obliges us to read it as more than titillating fantasy or withering satire. Without minimizing its priapism and misogyny, I propose to call its bluff by treating it as institution as well as representation. As my Introduction showed, libertine promoters and feminist opponents agreed in regarding these texts as ‘Schools of Venus’ and handbooks of ‘speculative lust’.
The Erotics of Literary Response Chorier and Rochester in the Critical Mainstream
Authors: Turner James Grantham
Published: November 2023

The short and true state of the Case is this: all depends upon the Genius and Art of the Writer, for an obscene Thought, if it be not livelily painted, will have but a small or perhaps no effect upon the Mind of the Reader For a further Proof of this, when [the Critick’s] squeamish Fit is over, I wou’d recommend to his Perusal Aloisia Sigea , or if that be too hard for him because ‘tis writ in Latin, let him read L’Escole des Filles , and if the obscene Words and Descriptions he will meet with there do not raise his Appetite, the World will be apt to conclude it, not only very dull, but absolutely dead; and as bad as his Poetry is, his Reader will be better entertain’d than his Mistress.
Poetical Remains
Authors: Matthews Samantha
Published: November 2023

What happens to poets’ genius when they die? The peculiar affinity which was felt to exist between their physical and literary ‘remains’ - their bodies and books - is the subject of this original cultural study, which concentrates on poets and poetry from the Romantic to late Victorian period. Poetical Remains deals with issues such as the place of burial, the kind of monument deemed appropriate, the poet’s ‘last words’ and last poems, the creation of memorial volumes, and the commercial boost given to a poet’s reputation by ‘celebrity death’, focussing in each case on the powerful, complex, often unstated but ever-present connections between the poet’s body and their poetic ‘corpus’.
Poets’ Corner, Browning, and the Hero as Poet
Authors: Matthews Samantha
Published: November 2023

Dean Stanley’s vision of the great names of Renaissance drama symbolically entombing their elegies and pens in the grave of Edmund Spenser (d. 1599)—a gesture, we should note, that did not preclude the elegies’ publication—belongs to a late-Victorian drive to recuperate Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner as a site of national importance, to which the leading figures of the Victorian renaissance must be assimilated. To sustain the myth, Stanley has to negotiate the problematic absence of the remains of the greatest poet; the leap from speculation (‘in all probability’) to awe (‘what a grave in which the pen of Shakspeare may be mouldering away!’) represents Spenser’s grave as the shrine of Shakespeare’s pen (Marcus Scheemakers’s full-length statue is only partial compensation for the Bard’s burial at Stratford).
The Sonnets in Relation to Shakespeare’s Life
Authors: Edmondson Paul , Wells Stanley
Published: November 2023

Perhaps more than any other text in Western literature, Shakespeare’s sonnets have inspired a multiplicity of controversially biographical readings. All of these take as their central assumption the hypothesis that the ‘I’ of the Sonnets ineluctably represents Shakespeare’s point of view and so gives direct access to scenes and events of his life. Any attempt to relate a work of art directly to the intimate, personal life of the artist needs to be treated with caution, even suspicion.
The Sonnets in Performance
Authors: Edmondson Paul , Wells Stanley
Published: November 2023

For those who do not believe that the Sonnets should only be read silently, many audio recordings are readily available either for purchase, or for consultation in library archives; many more exist among long-obscured and rare audio anthologies. Major recordings include Dame Edith Evans reading her own selection, Sir John Gielgud (120 sonnets, Caedmon, 1963), Richard Pasco (complete, Argo, 1979), Alex Jennings (complete, Naxos, 1997), and a team made up of Brian Dennehy, Al Pacino, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Stewart, Kathleen Turner, and others (The Complete Shakespeare Sonnets: Read by Outstanding Actors of the American and British Stage, Airplay, 2000).
Enchanting Modernity: The Invention of Tradition at Two Women’s Colleges in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Cambridge*
Authors: Pedersen Joyce Senders
Published: November 2023

In 1908, Emma List, earlier a student at Girton College, Cambridge, published a volume of verse and essays celebrating the traditions of the College.1 The titular poem ‘Girton my Friend’ recalls the charms of the buildings and the countryside. An essay evokes golden summer days spent with a Girton Reading Party during the Long Vacation. There are poems about ‘Hall’ (where meals were taken), ‘Tray’ (evening cocoa parties in the girls’ rooms), ‘A Fire Alarm’, ‘My Friends’, and ‘The Dons’—‘Friends of our past’s best memory. / Ye the kind and the wise’.
Informing Public Judgement at the Polls
Authors: Knights Mark
Published: November 2023

The last chapter suggested that, through a partisan contest to capture public discourse, petitions and addresses fostered notions of a public will and raised queries about the nature of that public and the rationality of its will.
Consequences
Authors: Knights Mark
Published: November 2023

Preceding chapters have suggested the prevalence of a national political culture that was perceived to be full of passionate rage, irrationality, intemperate language, sophistry, debased rhetoric, lies, name-calling, dissimulation, conspiracy, and hypocrisy. It was a political culture in which forms of representation and misrepresentation seemed entwined.
Political and diplomatic movements, 1800–1830
Authors: Sperber Jonathan
Published: November 2023

At first sight, the late eighteenth-century German political system was characterized by stability and continuity. The institutions of the Holy Roman Empire –– or Reich –– continued to provide a unique political commonwealth in which the various Germanies could co-exist. The Imperial Chamber Court–– Reichskammergericht –– was designed to mediate disputes between the various component parts of the empire; but it was rarely in use because the imperial parliament –– Reichstag –– already provided a forum in which differing political views could be aired and reconciled.
Political trends and movements, 1830–1850
Authors: Barclay David E
Published: November 2023

The challenge of revolution and the recovery of popular politics, 1830–1840 . On the evening of 7 September 1830, the ducal palace in the central German city of Braunschweig burned to the ground. It had been set alight by a large crowd of handicraft workers and members of the city’s ‘lower orders’ who were outraged that the arrogant young Duke Karl II had violated what they regarded as the obligations of a ‘just ruler’ to provide work opportunities and grain subsidies in a time of bitter economic crisis. The unloved duke fled to London; and, the next day, a ‘Civic Guard’ commanded by a banker named Löbbecke sought to contain the violence and ensure the return of stable, sober, but non-despotic and non-arbitrary government.
Culture and the arts
Authors: Applegate Celia
Published: November 2023

The history of German culture and the arts in the seven decades before political unification begins with a new and invigorating self-consciousness about art’s importance and ends with a great deal of complacency among art-consuming Germans. If we compare Fried-rich Schiller’s extraordinary essay of 1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, to the speeches at the centenary celebrations of his birth, in 1859, we must conclude that German culture suffered a catastrophic constriction in these decades, abandoning a vision of art as the expression of human wholeness in order to embrace a diminished vision of art as the embodiment of Germanics and its purported unity.
Wissenschaft and knowledge
Authors: Daum Andreas W
Published: November 2023

Scholarship and research –– encapsulated in the German term Wissenschaft, which includes the sciences, social sciences, and human-ities–– developed in such a dramatic way in Germany between 1800 and 1870 that it is tempting to resort to a sort of ‘big bang’ theory to describe this development. In the beginning, so the story would go, there was an explosion. It marked the creative moment when a new type of university came into being, one that promoted research and aimed at the unity of all fields of knowledge. This spectacular starting-shot led to an expansion of matter and it freed energy, which was professional scholarship and specialized science.
Gender
Authors: Rosenhaft Eve
Published: November 2023

The economic and political changes that took place in Germany in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century had a direct impact on the ways in which men and women lived their lives as individuals and in families. At the same time, public discussions about the social order and social change were carried on in terms that invoked stereo-typical notions of gender, giving the force of personality to political or economic phenomena by associating them with qualities of masculinity and femininity.
Sensibility
Authors: Pinch Adela
Published: November 2023

‘Sensibility’ refers to one of the most fascinating literary and cultural movements of all time. It spread across Europe and Euro-America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and its effects persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century, and indeed have endured, in some ways, into our own era. Its epicentre, however, was late eighteenth-century England. The Encylopaedia Britannica of 1797 defined ‘sensibility’ as ‘a nice and delicate perception of pleasure or pain, beauty or deformity’ which ‘seems to depend upon the organization of the nervous system’.1 Sensibility as a literary movement consists of texts from that era which glorify and elicit such sensitive emotional reactions. For example, when one of the heroes of Thomas Bridge’s popular novel of Sensibility, Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770–1), Mr Villiers, encounters a beautiful, sad, young lady, he is so moved that his own face becomes ‘a striking picture of sorrow and despair’:
Europe
Authors: Bode Christoph
Published: November 2023

As early as 1924, the critic Arthur O. Lovejoy argued that there was no such thing as a

European Romanticism: ‘The word “romantic” has come to mean so many different things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign.’1 One should either stop talking about ‘Romanticism’ altogether or at least ‘learn to use the word “Romanticism” in the plural’, since ‘the “Romanticism” of one country may have little in common with that of another, and at all events ought to be defined in distinctive terms’.2 Sceptically comparing the British, German, and French varieties of ‘Romanticism’, Lovejoy concluded: ‘There may be some common denominator of them all; but if so, it has never yet been clearly exhibited, and its presence is not to be assumed a priori [from the beginning].’3
Psychoanalysis
Authors: Roberts Andrew Michael
Published: November 2023

Psychoanalysis and Romanticism seem made for each other. They share many of the same preoccupations: dreaming and waking; terror and desire; childhood; the complexity and multiplicity of the self; the power of the past over the present. These links are a matter of cultural history as well as resemblance. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents that ‘I took as my starting-point a saying of the [German Romantic] poet-philosopher Schiller, that “hunger and love are what moves the world”‘. The critic Lionel Trilling saw psychoanalysis as ‘one of the culminations’ of Romantic literature, a literature which Trilling claimed was ‘passionately devoted to a research into the self’.
Post-colonialism
Authors: Coleman Deirdre
Published: November 2023

In his book Tropicopolitans (1999), the post-colonial critic Srinivas Aravamudan captures the drift of current scholarship on ‘the new eighteenth-century’ by pointing to xenophobia, colonialism, orientalism, and racism as significant omissions from Linda Colley’s influential account of the constitution of national identity in her book, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1832 (1992). Generally speaking, post-colonial critics such as Aravamudan and Saree Makdisi, author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (1998), concern themselves with those areas identified as absent from Colley’s work, areas which reflect a new interest in the cultural effects of colonization and imperialism in the late eighteenth century, as well as their various legacies today.
Letters, journals and diaries
Authors: Deane Nichola
Published: November 2023

Letters and journals of the Romantic period have an uneasy status. They may in some respects be regarded as marginal texts. Until quite recently, Romanticism was thought of as a movement of a few (male) poets and philosophers, and the letters and journals of these few writers and those of their circle were used, by biographers and critics, to show just how essentially Romantic these canonical writers were. Letters and journals were seldom studied for their own sake. Whether or not they were ‘ Literature’, with a capital ‘L’, had scarcely been discussed let alone decided.
Unity of Scripture Constituted through Jewish Traditions of Interpretation
Authors: Sagi Avi
Published: November 2023

Throughout its history, halakhic tradition established a unique relationship with scripture, which it viewed as reflecting the original word of God, and therefore sacred. The biblical text was interpreted and understood within the boundaries of this tradition, which reread the text and determined its meaning based on halakhic parameters. Given the assumption about the sacredness of this text, we would expect Halakhah to develop a disposition of careful attentiveness and subservience towards scripture when attempting to decode its meaning. Instead, we find an active disposition and readiness to create the text through interpretation.
Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture
Authors: Carey Sorcha
Published: November 2023

One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History, completed shortly before its author died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This important new work argues that the Natural History offers a sophisticated account of the world as empire, in which art as much as geography can be used to expound a Roman imperial agenda. Reuniting the 'chapters on art' with the rest of the Natural History, Sorcha Carey considers how the medium of the 'encyclopaedia' affects Pliny's presentation of art, and reveals how art is used to explore themes important to the work as a whole. Throughout, the author demonstrates that Pliny's 'chapters on art' are a profoundly Roman creation, offering an important insight into responses to art and culture under the early Roman empire.
The Problem of Totality: Collecting Greek Art, Wonders, and Luxury
Authors: Carey Sorcha
Published: November 2023

Collecting is a theme with special reference for the Natural History. The Natural History is the collection par excellence, a collection, in writing, of everything the world contains. It was clearly recognized as such by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century creators of curiosity cabinets and Wunderkammern, who looked to Pliny, not only as a model of what to include in their collections, but also how to arrange them. Pliny himself draws on the image of collecting to describe his work in the preface. Quoting Domitius Pisa, at Pref. 17, he likens his work to a treasury or storehouse: ‘it is storehouses (thesauros) that are needed, not books.’
Dionysus in 69
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I
Published: November 2023

Here I am once again. Now for those of you who believe what I just told you, that I am a god, you are going to have a terrific evening. The rest of you are in trouble. It’s going to be an hour and a half of being up against the wall. Those of you who do believe can join us in what we do next. It’s a celebration, a ritual, an ordeal, an ecstasy.
Greek Tragedy in Cinema Theatre, Politics, History
Authors: Michelakis Pantelis
Published: November 2023

Two decades have passed since the publication of the pioneering studies on cinema and Greek tragedy by Marianne McDonald (1983) and Kenneth Mackinnon (1986). Their work has helped establish film adaptations of Greek tragedy as an autonomous study focused on a body of films aesthetically diverse but the matically related (Mackinnon), best represented by the work of two directors of international renown, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michael Cacoyannis (McDonald).
Greek Notes in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre Art
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

The title Dionysus since 69, referring as it does to the fortunes of classical drama over the last three decades, also points to the only modern playwright whose work is discussed in this volume. 1969 was the year when Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Voices We Hear
Authors: Wertenbaker Timberlake
Published: November 2023

The question I hear again and again is-Why has there been such a resurgence in Greek drama, or drama inspired by the Greek plays, in the last twenty-five years or so? There have been various answers proposed, but I want to put forward a suggestion that I have not heard before. I am going to start not with the Greeks but with Shakespeare.
A national home
Authors: Ottolenghi Emanuele
Published: November 2023

Zionism was born in the midst of a prolonged struggle for the reinterpretation of Jewish identity which the Enlightenment, emancipation, and the rise of modern antisemitism had triggered. Emerging as an alternative for Jews seeking cultural renewal and escape from antisemitism in nineteenth-century Europe, Zionism culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Essentially, Zionism has been defined as: ‘An ideology pertaining to the idea of a return to Zion and its restoration as a homeland for the Jews that not only transcended the messianic idea but also produced extensive social results and a continuous social development.’
Post-Zionism
Authors: Ottolenghi Emanuele
Published: November 2023

Post-Zionism encompasses many disciplines, including history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, and even archaeology, to challenge Israel’s Zionist foundations through scholarship and public advocacy. As a study of the field asserts, ‘postzionism is a term applied to a current set of critical positions that problematize zionist discourse, and the historical narratives and social and cultural representations that it produced’. Questioning what it considers a partisan view of the past, serving Zionist interests, post-Zionism seeks to challenge what it calls ‘the Zionist narrative’ regarding the study of Israel’s past.