bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Auden in the Polis of the Absurd
Authors: Yu Christopher
Published: November 2023

Auden’s notorious dictum that “poetry makes nothing happen” can be construed as the motto of a self-excusing complacency, a readiness to accommodate bourgeois philistinism that to some eyes may make the poet look like a “licensed jester.” Such a reading fastens to the exclusion of all else on his efforts to debunk Romantic illusions regarding art’s prophetic authority and, dismayingly, does so with his frequently expressed approval.2 This assessment, however, risks missing a larger point behind Auden’s insouciance, which becomes clearer if we restore the assertion from the poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” to its original context:
Introduction The Bible And Eros
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

The Bible. Sexuality. What word next comes to mind? Few people I know would say “spirituality.” Yet, in this book I will be arguing that the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, can help us bring our sexual and spiritual lives together. Biblical garden texts will be our orientation points. Starting with the paradise garden in Eden and continuing to the New Testament, we will examine often overlooked sensual aspects of the Biblical tradition. Many Biblical texts testify to how love can go wrong. Yet I will be arguing that we can read the broader Bible as a call to a life of erotic passion: passion for others, passion for God, passion for the earth.
The ‘‘Rules’’: Biblical Sexual Morality
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

Judging from the “family values” platform of religious conservatives, one might assume that the Bible condemns all forms of premarital or extramarital sex and all forms of homosexual sex. Actually, at least with regard to the Hebrew Scriptures, the Biblical perspective on sex is far from what any political party would want to endorse now. Some rules are harsher. Many things are not covered. In either case, as soon as we take a closer look at Biblical “shalt nots” and permitted behaviors, it quickly becomes apparent that “we aren’t in Kansas any more.”
Unromantic Eros: Divine-Human Gender Terror, Religious Exclusivism, and Love Gone Wrong
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

Theepigraph to this chapter comes from a woman who survived the cycle of spousal abuse. Unlike the prophetic polemics of the last chapter, we hear from a woman here. She is the human counterpart to the “vineyard” of Isaiah’s song. There, Isaiah’s “beloved,” a vintner, prepares to expose and starve a female vineyard for suspected infidelity. The beloved turns out to be God. Ultimately, in Isaiah (and in Hosea 2), God turns to woo his wife back to him. In the epigraph, however, a woman who has been wooed back describes her wait for a new cycle of violence. The abuser here is her human husband.
Epilogue: The Erotic Word
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

At the outset of this volume, we saw how the Bible has been used to suppress sexuality, but by now we have seen how the Bible-read through the lens of its garden texts-can be read to evoke eros, including sexual eros. From the garden of Eden story to the Song of Songs, the Bible can be used to cultivate a passionate life, one infused with eros for God, others, and the world. Where the Bible has separated sex and spirit, these garden texts can join them. Where advertising aims to warp human desire, these texts can root our diverse passions in love of God. Amidst the massive sexual shifts in our culture, the Eden and Song of Songs garden texts envision a sexuality grounded in intimacy and mutual desire. They neither endorse all forms of sexual exchange nor do they conform to the Victorian rules that have been used to police many nonmarital relationships.
Teaching Freud, Teaching Freud’s Values: A Graduate Course
Authors: Gay Volney
Published: November 2023

How can we teach Freud after Time magazine not long ago asked, “Is Freud Dead?” and many people responded “Yes, and about time, too!” As some wags noted, Time asked “Is God dead?” in the late 1970s and the answer to that query is still unclear. While Freud’s mortality is assured, the meaning of his work and his intellectual heritage is not. As someone who has written a lot on Freud and is a practicing psychoanalyst, I believe Freud is worth teaching-Freud died, but his values live. Whether this is a good answer for others is the concern of this paper.
Rethinking Freud: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Production of Scientific Thought
Authors: Jacobs Janet Liebman
Published: November 2023

Teaching Freud poses a number of challenges to those of us who view the academy as a site of intellectual resistance. Each year as I introduce the study of Freud and psychoanalytic theory in my courses, I tell my students that at best I have an ambivalent relationship to Freud, whose work embodies a particular kind of genius that is representative of the misogynistic thinking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As I seek to legitimate my own fascination with Freud and the necessity for understanding the psychoanalytic mind, I remind my students that as a clinician working in Vienna, Freud was often a “healer” of last resort for women who were deeply troubled by fears, anxiety, and painful emotional memories. In reading Freud’s case studies, one is left with the impression that, as an analyst, Freud had a certain empathy for the women in his care and that the “talking cure” created an atmosphere of trust at a time when psychosis in women was rarely taken seriously. That being said, it is also painfully clear that Freud used the most intimate details of his female patients’ lives to construct theories of development and personality that reinforced notions of female inferiority and weakness within a gendered understanding of human psychology.
Teaching the Hindu Tantra with Freud: Transgression as Critical Theory and Mystical Technique
Authors: Kripal Jeffrey J
Published: November 2023

The “oceanic” works of which Rolland writes here were his famous biographies of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, that “twin-headed, three-volume work” as Freud called them (Parsons 1999, 176), which played an especially important role in the historical genesis of the psychoanalytic theory of mysticism. Indeed, as Parsons has recently taught us, it was the unfinished correspondence between these two men that generated the parameters and general trajectories of the psychoanalytic study of mysticism itself.
The Challenge of Teaching Freud: Depth Psychology and Religious Ethics
Authors: Wallwork Ernest
Published: November 2023

When we teach psychoanalysis, what exactly do we hope students will learn? Is it satisfactory to follow the usual scholarly route and teach psychoanalytic ideas in the abstract, apart from analytic practice and experience? If, as I believe, something more than mere intellectual comprehension is necessary to avoid misconstruing psychoanalytic theories and practices, what should our pedagogical aims be and how should we go about trying to achieve them? For example, should we seek to convey how psychoanalytic ideas are used in practice? And if we do aim for something more than mere intellectual knowledge of psychoanalysis, should we also aim for some change in the way students think and feel about themselves and others? If so, is it really possible to change the lives of students within the constraining context of a graded course in a contemporary college or university? And how do we relate the study of psychoanalysis to that of religion and morality? If religion and morality also require something more than mere intellectual comprehension, how do we invite experiential knowing in an academic context without moving beyond generally accepted scholarly goals? These are some of the disquieting questions that I want to pursue in this paper, by way of clarifying issues with which I struggle every year as I approach the task of teaching a course on psycho-analysis and religious ethics to undergraduates.
The Arranger
Authors: Kenner Hugh
Published: November 2023

A line across the page divides, nine and nine, the first extant list of Ulysses episodes, the one Joyce sent John Quinn in September 1920 (Letters I, 145). Correspondingly, the words “End of First Part of Ulysses” appear on the last page of the Rosenbach fair copy of episode 9, “Scylla and Charybdis.” If we append to this half its coda, “Wandering Rocks,” we have a ten-episode block, homogeneous in its style1 and reasonably self-contained in its themes and actions. It is instructive to linger on this fragment. What should we make of Ulysses if it had ended with “Wandering Rocks”? We should have, by contrast with the book we know, a moderately orthodox novel of under 100,000 words, its ten chapters each of fairly normal length. The interior monologue, tactfully introduced, would be its striking technical feature: that and a certain penchant for abrupt scene shifting (and both have precedents in Meredith). It would follow, contrapuntally, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from 8 a.m. till midafternoon, when the ostensible business of each is done for the day.
Book of Many Turns
Authors: Senn Fritz
Published: November 2023

Joyce ‘ s Works Can Be Seen , with equal validity, either as one great whole or as a series of self-contained units. Seemingly contradictory statements can make good sense: Joyce kept reshaping the same material in more complex ways—he never repeated himself. The reiteration, even permutation, of some fundamentals is striking. We can trace the terminal actuality of Finnegans Wake from the germinal potentiality of Dubliners; but conversely we are also tempted to emphasize the unique whatness of every single work. Joyce kept repeating himself in metempsychotic succession—but if we highlight the individual incarnations, each of his major works is essentially and unpredictably different from its predecessors. In coming to terms with Joyce’s particular other world of words, we can choose between two different sets of terminology. Taking up Joyce’s own, or Stephen Dedalus’s, insistent metaphors, we can see literature as a process of conception and parturition.
The Female Body, Technology, and Memory in “Penelope”
Authors: Ziarek Eva
Published: November 2023

My Reading Of The Female body in “Penelope” starts in fact with the last, unanswered, question of “Ith aca”: “Where?” Providing a transition of sorts to Molly’s monologue, this suspended question problematizes the discursive location of the female body. Indeed, where is she when she is at home—seemingly in the most familiar and intimate space? Where is the meaning of the female body, and by extension, of sexual difference to be found? In what discursive space? An inquiry into the discursive position of the female body in the context of modernity involves rethinking not only the public and private distinction but also the problem of a specific rhetoric through which this distinction is expressed. My reading of “Penelope” focuses on the contrast between the private space, intertwined with the pronounced rhetoric of organicism, and the public space, associated with the equally compelling, though much less frequently discussed, rhetoric of mechanical reproduction.
Ulysses, Narrative, and History
Authors: Nolan Emer
Published: November 2023

The naive or mythical view of Irish history is important for readers of Joyce, since he uses it throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The fact that it is endlessly interesting to most Irish-men and inifnitely tedious to most Englishmen can be a serious obstacle to the understanding of Joyce’s major works. Toward the end of chapter 15 of Ulysses (“Circle”) Major Tweedy, father of Molly Bloom, and member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who “rose from the ranks” (U 4.63–64) of the British army, confronts the Citizen, a dropsical Irish nationalist: “(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other medals, decorations, trophies of war, wounds. Both salute with fierce hostility)” (U 16.4622–24). “Massed bands,” further stage directions tell us, “blare Garryowen and God Save the King.” Garryowen is the name of the Citizen’s dog in chapter 12 (“Cyclops”) and of a place in Limerick. It is also the title of an Irish drinking song.
Against Ulysses
Authors: Bersani Leo
Published: November 2023

Let Us Approach Ulysses as naively as possible, while admitting that in the case of Ulysses this decision can hardly be anything but a ruse. The ruseful naiveté I have in mind will consist in our pretending not to have any extratextual information about the novel—in particular, information about Joyce’s elaborate scheme of Holmeric correspondences and about the geography and history of Ireland’s capital city. In saying this, I of course expose our naiveté as, precisely, a decision: it is only because we know how important Homer and Dublin are in Ulysses that we can refer to a reading ignorant of that importance as naive. I do not mean that it is natural to read any novel in a state of cultural ignorance. I do, however, want to suggest that it would not be naive to set about reading La chartreuse de parme, War and Peace, and Moby Dick without, in the cases of Stendhal and Tolstoy, more than a fairly general, nonspecialist’s knowledge of Napoleon’s campaigns in Belgium and Russia, and, for Melville’s work, cetological expertise.
Introduction
Authors: Naremore James
Published: November 2023

When it was first released by RKO Pictures in 1941,Citizen Kane enjoyed a spectacular critical reception. American novelist John O ‘Hara, writing for Time magazine, said quite simply that it was the best motion picture he had ever seen. ‘ Other serious reviewers in this country didn ‘t debate whether or not it was unusually good, but whether or not it was a great, even revolutionary, achievement. Meanwhile, Kane was the subject of considerable controversy in Hollywood; it was nominated for nine Academy Awards but received only one, for best original screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, who were booed by detractors at the award ceremony.
The Scripts of Citizen Kane
Authors: Carringer Robert L
Published: November 2023

The Best-Known controversy in film criticism of recent years has been over the authorship of the Citizen Kane script. Pauline Kael first raised the issue in a flamboyant piece in the New Yorker in 1971. Contrary to what Orson Welles would like us to believe, Kael charged, the script for the film was actually not his work but almost wholly the work of an all-but-forgotten figure, one of Hollywood ‘s veteran screenwriters, Herman J. Mankiewicz: Welles probably made suggestions in his early conversations with Mankiewicz, and since he received copies of the work weekly while it was in progress . . . may have given advice by phone or letter. Later, he almost certainly made suggestions for cuts that helped Mankiewicz hammer the script into tighter form, and he is known to have made a few changes on the set.
Citizen Kane: The Sound Track
Authors: Thomas Franccois
Published: November 2023

A Part From A Dialogue Track that had mainly been recorded live on the set, the sound of Citizen Kane was pieced together in a studio. It cannot be attributed to any single contributor because its function was progressively determined during various stages of the film ‘s creation and production. The role played by sound in the transitions from one scene to another was defined during the development of the screenplay (although several of the most striking transitions do not appear in the final shooting script) and took specific form during editing. Most of the dialogue was recorded on the set, whereas sound effects that give atmosphere and dramatic impact to each sequence were added at various points during editing and mixing. Co screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, production mixer Bailey Fesler, editor Robert Wise, and the sound-effects engineers each contributed suggestions at one time or another, as did composer Bernard Herrmann, whose music occasionally acts as a substitute for sound effects.1 Chief among these collaborators was dubbing mixer James G. Stewart, who had been with RKO since 1931 and Citizen Kane enjoyed a spectacular critical reception. American novelist John O ‘Hara, writing for Time magazine, said quite simply that it was the best motion picture he had ever seen. ‘ Other serious reviewers in this country didn ‘t debate whether or not it was unusually good, but whether or not it was a great, even revolutionary, achievement. Meanwhile, Kane was the subject of considerable controversy in Hollywood; it was nominated for nine Academy Awards but received only one, for best original screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, who were booed by detractors at the award ceremony.
Citizen Kane
Authors: Wollen Peter
Published: November 2023

To Write About Citizen Kane is to write about the cinema. It is impossible to think about this film without thinking about its place in film history. Most critics, despite Welles ‘s own unhappy relations with Hollywood, have seen him primarily within the framework of the American narrative cinema. Pauline Kael talks about the 1930s newspaper picture and builds up the role of Herman Mankiewicz, a hardcore Hollywood scribe if ever there was one. Charles Higham talks of a “wholly American work,” Andrew Sarris of “the American baroque,” and they leave no doubt, I think, that where the cinema is concerned, for them Hollywood such as Noel Burch places Welles in relation to Elia Kazan, Robert Aldrich, Joseph Losey, and Arthur Penn and condemns Kane for simply displaying an amplification of traditional narrative codes that it does nothing to subvert.
Out of the Depths: Citizen Kane, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde Impulse
Authors: Arthur Paul
Published: November 2023

Orson Welles, who was seldom at a loss for an artistic opinion, complained in a 1965 interview: “I see that there are directors, full of future, sensitive, who explore new themes, but I see no one who attacks form, the manner of saying things.”1 The attitude expressed here is familiar, a combination of bitterness at creative opportunities lost and a disdain for those not seizing their moment in the light to reflect upon the nature of the medium. Admittedly Welles tried on many public masks besides that of intrepid formal investigator. Yet a twinned and on the surface seemingly discordant impulse haunts his public statements, and indeed his creative output, virtually from the beginning. Writing in 1938, at the pinnacle of his trek through the New York theater world, he asserts that the “business” of a director is “to make his playhouse a kind of magic trick in which something quite impossible comes to be.”2 What manner of aesthetic system binds a belief in magic with an “attack” on form? The key, perhaps, is to be found at the crossroads of what is meant by the “impossible.”
Palla-Huarcuna
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

Whither marches the son of the Sun with so great a cortege? Tupac-Yupanqui,1 he who is rich in all the virtues, as the haravicus of Cuzco call him, is proceeding in triumph through his vast empire, and wherever he passes unanimous cries of benediction are raised. The people are applauding their sovereign, because he brings them prosperity and good fortune.
A Heretical Viceroy and a Rascally Bell Ringer
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

The church and the convent of the Augustinian Fathers were at first (1551) located at the site where the parish church of San Marcelo stands today, until in 1573 they were moved to the vast area they now occupy, not without a great legal battle and much controversy with Dominicans and Mercedarians who were opposed to the establishment of other monastic orders.
A Mother’s Love
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

We have considered it advisable to alter the names of the principal characters in this Tradition, a venal sin that we have committed in “The Countess Who Was Summoned” and several others. Names matter little if one takes care not to falsify historical truth, and the reader will readily guess the very powerful reason we had for rebaptizing our fellows.
A Viceroy and an Archbishop
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

The colonial era, rich in events that were providentially paving the way for the day of Independence in the New World, is a source barely tapped as yet by American intelligences. Therefore, and pardon our bold presumption, each time that the feverish desire to write takes possession of us, a demon of temptation that youth can scarcely resist, we evoke in our nocturnal solitude the mysterious genius that watches over the history of the bygone days of a people that lives on, nourished not by memories or hopes but by realities.
The Corregidor1 of Tinta
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

It was November 4, 1780, and the parish priest of Tungasuca, in order to celebrate his saint’s day, which was also that of His Majesty Charles III, had gathered together for a splendid lunch the most important members of the parish as well as friends from nearby towns, who had been arriving since daybreak to congratulate him.
Everyone the Master in His Own House
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

I don’t know in exactly what year of the last century a Mercedarian, a friar of great influence and importance with the title of Visitor General of the Order, came from Spain to this City of Kings. The date doesn’t matter one iota, for even though I am of two minds as to when it took place, my story is nonetheless true.
Three Historical Questions Concerning Pizarro
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

Historical opinions as to whether Pizarro did or did not know how to write vary greatly, and some are contradictory. Intelligent and thorough chroniclers assert that he didn’t even recognize the letter Oby its being round. That is how one anecdote has become common currency. It tells how one of the soldiers who were keeping watch over Atahualpa in the prison of Cajamarca wrote the word God on the Inca’s fingernail. The prisoner showed it to everyone who visited him, and once he discovered that all of them except Pizarro were able to read the word with no difficulty, he had nothing but scorn for the leader of the conquest and considered him the inferior of the least of the Spaniards.
Saint Thomas’s Sandal
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

If you take to reading Brazilian chroniclers and historians, you can’t help firmly believing that Saint Thomas traveled all over South America preaching the gospel. The facts and documents on which these gentlemen base their belief are so authentic that there is no weak point into which to sink one’s teeth. In Ceara, in San Luis de Maranon in Pernambuco, and in other provinces of the empire next to us a number of proofs of the apostolic visit exist. In Belen del Para the one who is writing these lines was shown a boulder, highly venerated, on which the disciple of Christ had stood. Whether this is true or not requires verification that I want nothing to do with, for God did not make me to be an investigating magistrate.
Bolivar’s Justice
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

In June of 1824 the liberating army was spread out in the administrative department of Ancachs, preparing to undertake the operations of the campaign that, in August of that year, resulted in the battle of Junin, and four months later the splendid triumph of Ayacucho.1 Bolivar was residing in Caraz with his staff, the cavalry led by Necochea, the Peruvian division of La Mar, and the battalions Bogota, Caracas, Pichincha, and Voltijeros, that had fought so bravely under the courageous Cordova.
The judge’s Three Reasons
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

On October 27, 1544, the residents of Lima were terrified. And with good reason, I assure you.

On getting up out of bed and opening their doors wide to allow God’s grace free passage, they were confronted with the heart stopping news that Francisco de Carbajal, without being heard by a soul, had slipped into the city with 50 of his men, imprisoned a number of the leading citizens said to be friends of Viceroy Blasco Nunez, and hanged, not a couple of poor devils as would have been desirable, but Pedro del Barco and Machin de Florencia, men of great importance because they had been among the first conquistadors, that is to say, those who captured Atahualpa in the main square of Cajamarca.
The Witches of lea
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

Limefi.os of old called lea a land of good grapes and renowned witches. In our day it was the scene of the miracles of the venerable Friar Ramon Rojas, widely known as Father Guatemala, whose canonization is being carefully considered by Rome. I do not believe in any magic charms save those that a pretty girl’s face naturally comes by. Every good-looking woman has a pair of familiar little devils in her eyes that make us men fall into more than one temptation, followed later by heavy-caliber renunciations.
Canterac’s Bugler
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

The battle waged by the patriot and royalist cavalries at Junin was a hard-fought one. A single pistol shot (for at Junin no powder was wasted) and a half hour of brandishing lance and saber. A combat of centaurs more than of men. Canterac, followed by his bugler, scoured the camp, and the bugler incessantly sounded the order to put the enemy to the sword.
The Major’s Calf
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

My dear fellow countryman and comrade: I am taking the opportunity to write to you afforded me by the departure of Pedro Uriondo with letters from the viceroy to General Valdes. Uriondo is the most entertaining native of Malaga that an Andalusian mother has ever brought into the world. I recommend him most highly to you. He has a mania for betting on anything and everything. In heaven’s name, brother, don’t give in to the weakness of accepting any bet with him, and for charity’s sake pass this warning on to your friends. Uriondo boasts of never having lost a bet, and he is telling the truth. So, then, keep your eyes open and don’t allow yourself to be trapped.
The Liberator’s Three Etceteras
Authors: Palma Ricardo
Published: November 2023

At the end of May 1824, don Pablo Guzman, the governor of what was then the small town of San Ildefonso de Caraz, received an official letter from the chief of staff of the Army of Independence, written in Huaylas, in which he was advised that since one of the divisions would be arriving two days later, he should ready, without delay, cattle for the troops’ mess and forage for the horses. He was further ordered to make ready for His Excellency the Liberator comfortable and decent lodging, with good food, a good bed, etc., etc., etc.
Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent
Authors: Brantlinger Patrick
Published: November 2023

In heart of darkness, Marlow says that Africa is no longer the “blank space” on the map that he had once daydreamed over. “It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. . . . It had become a place of darkness.” Marlow is right: Africa grew “dark” as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light, because the light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of “savage customs” in the name of civilization. As a product of that ideology, the myth of the Dark Continent developed during the transition from the main British campaign against the slave trade, which culminated in the outlawing of slavery in all British territory in 1833, to the imperialist partitioning of Africa which dominated the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
Joseph Conrad’s First Cruise in the Nellie
Authors: Hop E G F W
Published: November 2023

Iarranged A cruise in the Nellie for Joseph Conrad who had just arrived from Australia, where he had been for about two years in command of the Otago, owned by Simpson & Co. of Adelaide. He was at the time waiting for his passport into Russia to visit with his Uncle. As he had nothing to do for a few days, I asked him to come down to spend a few days with me, and as he hadn’t seen my boat, to undertake a cruise in her with two other friends of mine. I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce Conrad to Keen and Mears. The Nellie had accommodation for four—two in the main cabin and two in the ladies’ cabin. She had a lead keel. This made one feel safe in her as she had a small beam for her length.
Introduction
Authors: Ammons Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Uncle Tom’s Cabin has always stirred debate. When the novel came out in 1852, it enraged white Southerners, who called it libelous and Stowe a liar. In the Southern Literary Messenger, George F. Holmes accused her of vilifying Southern whites and planting “seeds of strife and violence” (Holmes [1852] 631), a charge he escalated the next year when he reviewed A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), the book Stowe published to defend her novel. Holmes exclaimed: “The woman’s rights Conventions, which have rendered the late years infamous, have unsexed in great measure the female mind, and shattered the temple of feminine delicacy and moral graces; and the result is before us in these dirty insinuations of Mrs. Stowe.” Most outrageous in Holmes’s view—and he was not alone—was a Yankee woman’s presuming to tell men what to think. He blazoned across the page these words from the New Testament: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (Holmes [1853] 322–23). No less incensed, William Gilmore Simms wrote of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Southern Quarterly Review: “Mrs. Stowe betrays a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table” (Simms 226).
Letter to William Lloyd Garrison
Authors: Stowe Harriet Beecher
Published: November 2023

DEAR SIR,—After seeing you, I enjoyed the pleasure of a personal interview with Mr. Douglass, and I feel bound in justice to say that the impression was far more satisfactory than I had anticipated. There did not appear to be any deep underlying stratum of bitterness; he did not seem to me malignant or revengeful. I think it was only a temporary excitement and one which he will outgrow.

I was much gratified with the growth and development both of his mind and heart. I am satisfied that his change of sentiment was not a mere political one but a genuine growth of his own conviction. A vigorous reflective mind like his cast among those who nourish these new sentiments is naturally led to modified views.
Sentimental Power Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History
Authors: Tompkins Jane P
Published: November 2023

Once, during a difficult period of my life, I lived in the basement of a house on Forest Street in Hartford, Connecticut, which had belonged to Isabella Beecher Hooker—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s half-sister. This woman at one time in her life had believed that the millennium was at hand and that she was destined to be the leader of a new matriarchy.1 When I lived in that basement, however, I knew nothing of Stowe, or of the Beechers, or of the utopian visions of nineteenth-century American women. I made a reverential visit to the Mark Twain house a few blocks away, took photographs of his study, and completely ignored Stowe’s own house—also open to the public—which stood across the lawn. Why should I go? Neither I nor anyone I knew regarded Stowe as a serious writer. At the time I was giving my first lecture course in the American Renaissance—concentrated exclusively on Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—and although Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written in exactly the same period, and although it is probably the most influential book ever written by an American, I would never have dreamed of including it on my reading list.
Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Authors: Brown Gillian
Published: November 2023

Dinah’s kitchen in Little Eva St. Clare’s New Orleans home “looked as if it had been arranged by a hurricane blowing through it.” In Dinah’s domestic arrangements, “the rolling pin is under the bed and the nutmeg grater in her pocket with her tobacco— there are sixty-five different sugar bowls, one in every hole in the house” (I, 304); she “had about as many places for each cooking utensil as there were days in the year” (I, 297). This promiscuous housekeeping scandalizes the St. Clares’ Northern cousin Ophelia, offending her domestic propriety as much as slavery disturbs her moral sense. Ophelia finds that Southerners not only neglect their “awful responsibility” for the souls of their slaves but also let their households operate “without any sort of calculation to time and place” (I, 255, 297). In Ophelia’s New England home “the old kitchen floor never seems stained or spotted; the tables, chairs, and the various cooking utensils never seem deranged or disordered” (I, 227). There, “everything is once and forever rigidly in place” (I, 226).
Topsy and the End Man: Blackface in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Authors: Meer Sarah
Published: November 2023

The first reviews of Uncle Tom’s Cabin lingered not only over the weepy deathbeds of Eva and Uncle Tom but also over comic aspects of the novel. Unlike later critics, nineteenth-century observers were particularly struck by the humor in the book, which was attested to by reviewers from both the North and the South in the United States as well as in Britain. The National Era, a Washington antislavery paper, noted Uncle Tom’s “drollery,” while a letter to the New York Independent from New Orleans reported that readers had been both “moved to tears” and “convulsed with laughter.” An article in New York’s Putnam’s Monthly implied that the novel inevitably produced these two extremes, relating the story of a man sleeping in a strange house: “Being annoyed by hearing somebody in the adjoining chamber alternately groaning and laughing, he knocked upon the wall and said, ‘Hallo, there! What’s the matter? Are you sick, or reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin?’”
Foundations of Tort Law
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

The fundamental notion of a private action for a wrong done by one person to another in the absence of a contract between them is called a tort in the common law. Regardless of the name used, the tort systems of the West follow the same basic structure: They all recognize intentional torts, negligent torts, and cases of high-risk activity that generate strict liability. In French law, the three categories of torts are grounded in a few basic provisions. Sections 1382 and 1383 require compensation for harm caused intentionally or negligently. Section 1384 imposes liability for high risk activities under the rubric: damage caused by des choses que l’on a sous sa garde (“the things under one’s control”). The German code is slightly better developed. The categories of damage are enumerated in BGB § 823: “life, body, health, freedom, property or other right of another.” Any intentional or negligent violation of one of these interests generates liability if the violation is “unlawful.” The French code does not expressly recognize that the invasion of a protected interest might be justified and therefore lawful. (Recall our discussion of this question in Chapter Two.)
The Right and the Reasonable
Authors: Fletcher George P , Sheppard Steve
Published: November 2023

Studying law in a global perspective has subversive implications. If you are American, you realize that other cultures have other sources of law that are as important to their citizens and lawyers as the U.S. Constitution is to Americans. If you come from abroad and if you are accustomed to thinking history began with the enactment of your civil code in 1804 or 1900, suddenly you find yourself with a new set of historical dates providing points of reference. You have unwittingly absorbed a different history—one that stresses 1776, 1787, 1861, 1868, and 1954 instead of the dates that stand out in your home country’s liturgy of legal turning points. In effect, you have experienced a forced adaptation to a new legal culture—something like a required conversion to a new religion. Your sense of what constitutes a sound legal source now includes the ancient common law, the American Constitution, the Uniform Commercial Code, the Model Penal Code, and a new set of concepts such as estates in land, equity, consideration, conversion, and efficiency. Perhaps you now take cases more seriously as a source of law, at least such doctrinal cases as Marbury, McCulloch, Erie, and Brown.
A Step Ahead A Multifaceted System of Comprehensive Corruption Control
Authors: Ivković Sanja Kutnjak
Published: November 2023

Although in an ideal world a number of organizations in the current corruption-control system — from the mayor and the police agency itself to the prosecutors and courts — should perform their control functions continuously and systematically, the last two chapters show that the real world is very different. In the current setup, most existing mechanisms often operate in isolation, with insufficient resources, and are bound to fail where they are needed most — in profoundly corrupt agencies. At best, an occasional scandal or growing public pressure for change may compel the mayor or other public figures to react and try to address the problem of pervasive police corruption.
“In That Thicket of Bitter Roots”: The Ghazal in America
Authors: Caplan David
Published: November 2023

in 1968 the ghazal entered american poetry. the year 1969 marked the centennial anniversary of the death of Mirza Ghalib, a Persian and Urdu poet and one of the form’s masters. In anticipation of the anniversary, Aijaz Ahmad, a Pakistani literary and cultural critic living in New York, solicited several well-known American poets to work on a pamphlet of translations for the centennial. Because none of the poets knew Urdu, the text’s original language, Ahmad supplied them with literal translations from which they crafted their collaborative versions. Ahmad’s queries generated much more enthusiasm than he anticipated. His project expanded from a pamphlet into a handsome 174-page book, Ghazals of Ghalib, published by Columbia University Press. Several of the translations also appeared in major American and Indian literary periodicals. The book’s contributors included four future Pulitzer-Prize winners who already enjoyed a certain stature in the literary community: W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, and Mark Strand. Moving from translation to original composition, Rich started “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)” in July 1968, only a few months after Martin Luther King’s assassination and less than thirty days after Robert Kennedy’s death.
When a Form Comes out of the Closet
Authors: Caplan David
Published: November 2023

is great love literature still possible? every day people fall in love, but shrewd readers report they no longer take seriously Western literature’s major theme. Why? The experience of romantic love involves the intense feeling of extraordinariness, a sense that the two who share it are uniquely suited for each other, “soul mates,” as the cliché goes. For this reason, one cannot love just anyone. Classic love literature places this desire as the key to self-understanding, to a life passionately lived. Many contemporary readers are far too suspicious to accept such a claim, except ironically. The experience of love, they know, is hardly unprecedented; even when a novel or a poem asserts that the depicted love affair makes the characters extraordinary, the artistic form confirms that the declaration follows a well-established literary convention. The lovers are as ordinary as the emotion they experience. This situation’s awkwardness defines “the postmodern temper,” as Umberto Eco argues: “I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly,’ because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.”
Tinkering with Death
Authors: Kozinski Alex
Published: November 2023

The thought filled my head and gave me a weird sense of relief. But no, it couldn’t be. The execution was set for Sunday morning at seven-long after daybreak. The display on the digital clock showed 1:23. I fell back on my pillow and tried to chase Thomas Baal from my mind.
Women and Wahhabis: In Defense of Women’s Rights
Authors: Delong-bas Natana J
Published: November 2023

Wahhabism in the contemporary era is largely portrayed as misogynist, denying women their human rights, insisting on strict gender segregation, forbidding women access to public space, and subjugating them by considering them inferior to men. Women under Wahhabi regimes are assumed to have second-class citizenship, if not slave status. Critics of Wahhabism point to extreme examples like the Taliban and Saudi Arabia’s requirement that women wear the full burqa’ or abaya covering them from head to toe, leaving barely enough room to breathe; the ban on women driving or being recognized as heads of households; and the Taliban’s forbidding women to go to school, work, or seek medical care as evidence of Wahhabism’s oppression, suppression, and repression of women in accordance with an extremely conservative interpretation of Islamic law. All of these stereotypes and images are assumed to be based on the conservative Wahhabi interpretation of Islam despite the fact that no systematic analysis of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s writings about women and gender has ever been undertaken. In addition, no distinctions have been made between tribal customs, local traditions, and Islamic law in these portrayals.
Novelist
Authors: Ziff Larzer
Published: November 2023

Although Mark Twain’S Literary Activities Extended For Some sixty years, from his newspaper apprenticeship in 1851 to his death in 1910, all seven of his full-length novels appeared in a twenty-one year period within that long span. His first novel, The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, was set in the time in which it was written, an era that has ever since borne the label given it in the book’s title. Almost twenty years later he returned to the same setting and to some of the same characters in The American Claimant (1892), another political satire, while three other novels—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)—were set in the antebellum South of his boyhood, and two were set in an England of the imagined past—historical in The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and legendary in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Twain, however, never followed a novel within one of these groups with another from the same group, but over the years of his novel writing he interleaved them. As a consequence, although the settings place the novels in three distinct groups, their themes connect them in different patterns so that, for example, a boyish craving for high adventure and popular admiration in Tom Sawyer is echoed in the novel that followed, The Prince and the Pauper; the narrowminded mores of village society in Huckleberry Finn are echoed in the behavior of peasant society in Connecticut Yankee. Twain was an avid reader of history. He delighted in visualizing the pageantry of the past and mimicking what he imagined to be the diction of an earlier day. But present in Arthurian or Tudor England, albeit in armor or tights, were the same men and boys and the same flawed patterns of social conduct that characterized the life led in nineteenth-century villages on the banks of the Mississippi.
Humorist
Authors: Ziff Larzer
Published: November 2023

In The Account Given In “Old Times On The Mississippi,” Mark Twain left the town for the river to seek distinction. The town bred in its boys fantasies of the capture of murderers and the discovery of buried treasure, but realistically there seemed no escape from the droning slumber that enveloped all animate beings from the pigs in the street to the clerks in the stores to the people in their homes—except to take to the river.
The Development and Nature of Daoist Institutions
Authors: Kohn Livia
Published: November 2023

In their wake and under growing Buddhist influence, Daoists in the fifth century began to establish community centers that also housed celibate practitioners and functioned as separate institutions within larger society rather than as a semiindependent state. Still, the communal ideas and practices of the Celestial Masters continued to play an active role in Chinese society, and the formal institutions of the Tang inherited their practices as much as the monastic arrangements of the Buddhist-inspired community centers.
Copying Scriptures
Authors: Kohn Livia
Published: November 2023

The Rules say: The scriptures are the teaching as handed down by the sages, they guarantee its smooth and orderly transmission. They encourage and transform [beings in) the various universes and bring forth the host of the sages.
Residences
Authors: Kohn Livia
Published: November 2023

The Rules say: All Daoists, whether male or female, have residences and sleeping places that should be surrounded by four walls and built for single occupancy. There should not be several bunks [in the same room] either in front or behind each other. Whether sitting or sleeping, Daoists should always be alone and one per bed. Failure to comply carries a subtraction of 120 [days of life].
The Noon Purgation
Authors: Kohn Livia
Published: November 2023

As the time [of the ceremony] approaches, wash and rinse, then prepare the presentation of offerings, all as prescribed by the divine law. Then intone, as each participant bows in respect:

With all my heart I knock my head

To the Great Dao of the Highest Nonultimate!

With all my heart I knock my head

To the Venerable Scriptures in Thirty-Six Sections!

With all my heart I knock my head

To the Great Preceptors of the Mysterious Center!
Major Assemblies
Authors: Kohn Livia
Published: November 2023

The [head of the] household joining the Daoist community washes and rinses, then offers a pinch of incense and claps his teeth, just as if he prepared to attend rites to the Dao.
Petitions and Tribal Documents
Authors: Brooks Joanna
Published: November 2023

Throughout his career, Samson Occom used his literacy to help Mohegan, Brotherton, and other Native communities articulate their physical and spiritual needs, defend their traditional territories, and assert their sovereignty. Thirteen petitions and governance documents written in Occom’s hand assert the positions of tribal communities on matters such as the education of Native American children, the right to appoint their own governments, and the defense of their common lands and fishing territories. By adopting the voice of “we” in these documents, Occom subsumed his individual authorship within the collective authority of the tribe. This suggests that Occom and other English-language literate American Indians of his era viewed literacy as a tool to be subscribed in the service of American Indian communities.
Sermons
Authors: Brooks Joanna
Published: November 2023

Over the course of his thirty-year ministerial career, Samson Occom traveled and preached constantly: in England, Ireland, Scotland; in rural Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, as well as Philadelphia and New York City; among the Iroquois, Lenape, Stockbridge-Mahican, Pequot, Montaukett, and Shinnecock nations; to urban whites, blacks, and Indians; to Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Seventh-Day Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Moravians, Shakers, and Methodists, as well as the unchurched and the unbelieving. Except for his assignment to the Montaukett community at Long Island, his wintering seasons at home at Mohegan in the 1770s and 1780s, and his final years at Brotherton and New Stockbridge, he was a tireless itinerant who addressed his message to all comers: white, African American, and Native American. His diary suggests that Occom typically preached extemporaneously, working from a single scripture text and the guiding influence of the Spirit.