bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Anatomy of Judgment
Authors: Farber Daniel A , Sherry Suzanna
Published: October 2023

To be nonarbitrary, a decision must do more than cite text, history, precedent, and values: The decision maker must also offer some explanation for how he or she arrived at the decision. The decision itself must result from a reasoned (and reasonable) application of the factors considered. Judgment is obviously called for. What can be said about this type of judgment and how to evaluate it? It has been said that at one point, aeronautical engineers had proved that it was impossible for bumblebees to fly. Critics today seem to think it is impossible for judges to make reasoned decisions without the benefit of strict legal formulas. But the bumblebees kept on flying, and judges have been engaging in the exercise of reasoned judgment for centuries. If the theorists cannot account for these phenomena, so much the worse for their theories.
Professionalism and the Selection Process
Authors: Farber Daniel A , Sherry Suzanna
Published: October 2023

The institutional structures we have identified are not the only source of indirect judicial constraints. Oliver Wendell Holmes had it almost right: The life of the law is logic and experience. If the institutional structures sharpen the logic, a life lived in the law provides the necessary experience. In that life, the legal culture and professional norms discourage radical, politicized, or idiosyncratic decision making. The judicial selection process ideally should reinforce these professional norms, but today it sadly fails to do so. Inculcation of these norms begins in law school. Law professors expose law students first to the common law, with its slow and incremental development. We also teach them about process: that how a decision is reached—under what procedures and with what inputs—often matters as much as the substantive result.
The Role of the Legal Academy
Authors: Farber Daniel A , Sherry Suzanna
Published: October 2023

Contemporary studies suggest that public confidence in the judiciary is considerably higher than confidence in other parts of the government, and that this confidence derives in large part from the perception that judges decide cases on the basis of law rather than politics. The theory of adjudication that we have described in this book comports with the public perception. We have described constitutional adjudication as similar to other types of adjudication: based on the rule of law, and requiring both principled decision making and good judgment. More and more, however, the conventional academic wisdom seems to be that constitutional adjudication is simply politics by another name. The problem is that to the extent that this academic misconception seeps into public and political consciousness, it invidiously begins to influence judges and thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Terrorism
Authors: Farber Daniel A , Sherry Suzanna
Published: October 2023

Before turning to our case studies, a brief reprise may be helpful. We have argued that except in easy cases, judges find themselves faced with leeway in applying constitutional provisions, but that they have an obligation to give reasoned accounts for how they resolve the cases. We have emphasized the need for transparency and candor in judicial decisions, as well as the obligation to provide a reasoned elaboration. Where relevant, decisions must take account of text, history, and precedent. Where these fail to provide sufficient guidance, there is a need for the judiciary to make value judgments, rooting those value judgments as much as possible in American constitutional traditions and contemporary norms.
Anesthesia Crash Course
Authors: Horton Charles N
Published: October 2023

Anesthesia Crash Course is uniquely positioned to address the needs of new trainees in anesthesia. This book is written in a conversational tone, avoiding unnecessary jargon and distilling the key concepts of anesthesia into easy-to-remember tidbits—an approach in increasing demand by medical students and junior physicians. The audience for this book is chiefly new anesthesia residents, interns, medical students who rotate through anesthesia services, and nurse anesthetists. By demystifying the world of anesthesia, it provides a welcome resource to medical students and RNs who are considering additional training in this popular but poorly understood specialty. Surgical residents who feel they’re not up to speed with what’s happening on the other side of the “ether screen” would certainly also benefit from reading Anesthesia Crash Course. New anesthesia trainees face an extremely daunting learning curve. As they progress through training, they will read longer and more detailed treatises on every aspect of modern anesthesia. It is not realistic to imagine that someone might finish such a book in the first week of his or her training! Anesthesia Crash Course wil serve as a bridge between a trainee’s pre-anesthesia experience and more formal training. It can be read in the last month of internship, or in evenings while completing the first few weeks of anesthesia training. It can also serve as a medical student’s accompaniment for a two-week anesthesia elective.
A Heuristics Approach to Understanding Privacy-Protecting Behaviors In Digital Social Environments
Authors: Carey Robert , Burkell Jacquelyn
Published: October 2023

In this chapter, we consider ways that perceptions of harm and risk influence privacy-protecting behaviors in digital social environments (DSEs), with particular emphasis on Web logs and online social networks. By way of introduction, we would like to contrast two incidents from the world of online social networking that demonstrate how such perceptions may provoke very different responses to apparently similar privacy threats. In 2006, Facebook introduced to its site a seemingly innocuous feature called an RSS news feed, which ensured that any changes a Facebook member made to his or her profile would be automatically disseminated to those members listed in his or her network. Since information of this sort was already evident to other Facebook users, the company supposed that the new feature was merely a convenient way to enhance information sharing among its members. Almost immediately, however, many Facebook users began to complain that the new feature was unacceptably invasive: “[T]he RSS feed publicizes potentially embarrassing developments including romantic breakups, friendships going sour, professional setbacks, and the like. Even though this information was available before, Facebook’s active spreading of it via RSS feeds offended hundreds of thousands of the site’s users.”1 Indeed, the feature became so unpopular among users that the company eventually capitulated and made the feature optional.
Core Privacy: A Problem for Predictive Data Mining
Authors: Millar* Jason
Published: October 2023

Data mining technologies are pervasive in our society. They are designed to capture, aggregate, and analyze our digital footprints, such as purchases, Internet search strings, blogs, and travel patterns in an attempt to profile individuals for a variety of applications. Knowledge of the full scope of data mining often leaves people feeling as though it is intuitively wrong. On the one hand, this feeling is written off just as an unreflective expression of unease toward the technology, the potential harms of data mining (assuming any can be identified) outweighed by its potential benefits. On the other hand, the feeling is often explained by an appeal to more academic conceptions of privacy. Built primarily on surveillance technologies, data mining is implicated as a potential violation of individuals’ privacy. People’s unease with data mining might best be understood as the expression of some intuitive understanding that their privacy is at stake.
Identity: Difference and Categorization
Authors: Raab Charles D
Published: October 2023

This paper considers the concept of identity and the two directions that it faces, denoting both the individual’s difference from others, and the individual’s membership of categories and groups. Some implications of this duality are explored, and propositions for further research are indicated. Keeping one’s bearings along the identity trail is a complicated matter. The trail is forked: one path ends in commonality and in identity shared by the person with others as members of certain categories or collectivities; the other ends in individuation or uniqueness, differentiating one person from another. These paths resemble what Hildebrandt, following Ricoeur, articulates as two interrelated concepts of identity: one derives from idem, the Latin word, “meaning sameness, similarity and/or continuity;” the other “refers to the concept of ipse or self . . . the sense of self that is constitutive of the human subject (emphasis in original).”
Anonymity and the Law in Canada
Authors: Lucock Carole , Black Katie
Published: October 2023

Anonymity can be understood as not being named or identified or as not having identity connected with certain pieces of information. Anonymity thus broadly covers the “availability or unavailability of various kinds of information that may be known or identified about persons”1 and includes the ability of others to reveal identity.
Anonymity and the Law in the Netherlands
Authors: Hof Simone Van Der , Koops, Bert-Jaap , Leenes Ronald
Published: October 2023

Anonymity is important in current society. The feeling that anonymity is disappearing has raised the question of whether a right to anonymity exists, or whether such a right should be created given technological and societal developments. In this chapter, we address this question from a Dutch legal perspective. Our analysis of the hypothetical legal right to anonymity in the Netherlands may contribute to the overall research into the status and importance of a right to anonymity in contemporary society. The core of this chapter consists of an overview of relevant areas in Dutch law where a right to anonymity may be found, construed, or contested. Section 2 discusses anonymity in constitutional law. Sections 3 and 4 explore the status of anonymity in criminal law and private law, respectively. Section 5 provides an overview of anonymity in public spaces. In section 6, we focus on anonymity in citizen-government relationships: service delivery, e-voting, anonymized case-law, and naming and shaming. Finally, we draw conclusions regarding the right to anonymity in current Dutch law—something that turns out to be only piecemeal, and rather weak.
Church, State, and Citizen
Authors: Joireman Sandra F
Published: October 2023

The history of Christianity’s relationship to government is long and complex. From the glory days of the Holy Roman Empire, when church and state were virtually synonymous, to the present day’s dizzying array of denominations and forms of government, Christian ideas about the state have varied tremendously. This book will attempt to bring order to the chaos by offering essays on how particular branches of the Christian tradition-Catholic, reformed, evangelical, etc.-view the institution of the modern state. Each chapter begins by discussing the historical roots of a particular tradition, moves on to address the theological distinctives of that tradition, and finally discusses the ways in which the theological beliefs about the appropriate role of the state influence political behavior. The essays will not be limited geographically, but will rather look at each tradition as broadly as possible, from the institutionalized (but not necessarily thriving) churches of Europe, to the independent Christian movements of Africa, to the vibrant religious marketplace of the United States.
Reformed . . . and Always Reforming?
Authors: Skillen James W
Published: October 2023

When Calvinism—the Reformed tradition of Protestant Christianity— comes up for discussion today, one will probably hear reference to sin (total depravity) and/or God’s sovereignty (predestination). For example, part of the explanation offered for America’s constitutionally limited, checked, and balanced government is the need to restrain human wickedness that is so easily and frequently expressed when power is concentrated and not held to account. And one influential explanation of the work ethic and the remarkable economic achievements of people in countries influenced by Calvinism is the doctrine of predestination (God’s foreordination of the elect to salvation). Max Weber (1864–1920) made the latter argument as follows: Calvinism is chiefly responsible for producing the modern entrepreneur—the “worldly ascetic.” How so? “The Calvinist had no priest to stand between him and God or to give him the sacraments that would ensure his salvation,” writes W. Fred Graham, summarizing Weber’s thesis. Thus, the Calvinist could “either assume that he was predestined to glory and battle subsequent doubts to the contrary. Or, says Weber, he could look for evidences of God’s blessing in his worldly calling to prove that God’s attitude toward him was gracious. The result was a human being who strove unremittingly to glorify God in his daily toil.”
Anabaptists and the State: An Uneasy Coexistence
Authors: Joireman Sandra F
Published: October 2023

In any compilation of Christian views of the state, the Anabaptist position stands out as unique or, if one wanted to be less complimentary, extreme. The Anabaptist view of the state is less focused on articulating the division between church and state responsibilities than the Reformed or Lutheran traditions. Indeed, Anabaptists have no assigned role for government beyond the creation of order, emphasizing scriptural interpretations that give primacy to the church in the life of a Christian. As a result, political theology distances Anabaptists from both the Catholic Church and the main-stream of the Reformation.
Concluding Reflections
Authors: Amstutz Mark R
Published: October 2023

The preceding chapters have presented distinctive features of major theological traditions of Western Christianity. The book covers four classical traditions—Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist,1 along with three other influential perspectives: Anglicanism, Pentecostalism, and evangelicalism. The latter two movements have become the fastest growing Christian churches in recent decades, accounting for most of the growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Although estimates of the number of Christians at the beginning of the new millennium vary considerably, we can assume that almost two billion persons, or nearly a third of the world’s population, considers itself part of Western Christian churches.
Location of Roman Civilization and Environmental Setting
Authors: Mcgeough Kevin M
Published: October 2023

An important first step in any archaeological investigation is to understand the physical environment in which the ancient people lived. There are several reasons why this is imperative. The natural environment is the stage on which human action plays. The constraints imposed by and the possibilities made available by certain environments have a fundamental effect on the humans who live in them. For example, Bedouin living in the Sinai and Americans living in New York City obviously would have different access to resources and different environmental constraints. In comparison with New Yorkers, the Bedouins’ resources are scarce, but the Bedouins’ freedom of movement and living space are much greater than that of New Yorkers. The same is true in regard to ancient civilizations. To comprehend an ancient culture, it is important to understand what its environmental constraints were. The environment also affects what is preserved in the archaeological record.
Intellectual Accomplishments
Authors: Mcgeough Kevin M
Published: October 2023

A common theme will become apparent in this chapter: the claim that the Romans were relatively impoverished in comparison with the Greeks in terms of intellectual accomplishment. This belief is widely held by classicists (especially by those who specialize in Greece) but it is not accurate. Although it is easy to disparage the Roman intellectual heritage when comparing gladiators with Plato, it is more difficult to justify this attitude toward Rome when its cultural achievements are considered. If the Romans really were as intellectually deprived as scholars often suggest, how did they build the Pantheon? And how did they manage an empire of such incredible size and diversity for so long?
Simple Timing Options
Authors: Guthrie Graeme
Published: October 2023

In 1974, Sony demonstrated its Betamax videocassette recorder (VCR) to other electronics manufacturers, hoping that Betamax would be adopted as the industry standard. However, JVC subsequently developed its own VCR format, known as VHS, and thus began a classic format war. Sony’s Betamax machines entered the market in 1975, with JVC’s VHS machines entering in 1977. The left-hand graph in Figure 7.1 plots annual production of VCRs using Betamax (the solid curve) and VHS (the dashed curve), measured in millions of units. The right-hand graph plots cumulative production, again in millions of units. Despite the fact that JVC entered the market two years after Sony, production of VHS-format VCRs quickly overtook the Betamax format. Indeed, almost twice as many VHS machines as Betamax ones were produced in 1980 and the ratio of VHS production to Betamax production increased during the entire period. Betamax production peaked at six million units in 1984, a year in which more than 23 million VHS units were produced. One year later, Betamax production had fallen by 44%, while VHS production had grown by 75%.
Compound Timing Options
Authors: Guthrie Graeme
Published: October 2023

The deregulation of the US electricity sector at the end of the twentieth century created a new type of firm—the merchant generator. These firms, which did not have their own retail customers, owned plants that generated electricity for sale in wholesale markets. The growth of merchant generation is seen in Figure 8.1, which plots the total net summer capacity of utility-owned power plants (the light gray bars) and of plants owned by non-utilities (the dark gray bars). Approximately half of the growth in non-utility capacity is at the expense of utility-owned capacity, reflecting the latter’s forced divestiture of generation in many states. However, the graph shows that there was also very substantial investment in new capacity by non-utilities.
Capacity
Authors: Mueller John
Published: October 2023

The previous chapter concluded that the evidence that al-Qaeda— the only terrorist group that appears even to want to target the United States and perhaps the West in general—ever had much in the way of an atomic weapons program is quite limited. Moreover, the notion that it ever seriously (or even not so seriously) had a pressing desire to obtain such weapons is equally limited.
Pharmacological management and inhalers
Authors: Berger William E , Currie Graeme P
Published: October 2023

The 2007 National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute/National Asthma Education and Prevention Program of the National Institutes of Health (NHLBI/NAEPP) guidelines state that chronic adult asthma should be managed in a stepwise fashion (Fig. 4.1). Treatment can be started at any of the six steps—largely determined by the severity of symptoms—in an attempt to control symptoms rapidly.
Asthma in special circumstances
Authors: Berger William E , Currie Graeme P
Published: October 2023

Asthma is one of the most common chronic conditions that affect women during pregnancy, with approximately 4% to 12% of pregnancies affected. When asthma is poorly controlled, potentially serious consequences can affect the health of both the mother and unborn child. For example, retrospective studies have found that uncontrolled asthma can be associated with preterm birth, low birthweight, and preeclampsia.

It is often reported that clinical control of asthma improves in about one-third of women during pregnancy, remains the same in one-third, and deteriorates in one-third, although it is more likely to decline in those with more severe disease. The reasons for this and the mechanisms involved still await clarification.
The Threat of Religious Extremism
Authors: Guiora Amos N
Published: October 2023

Freedom of conscience is arguably the most important aspect of a democratic society. This freedom includes freedom of thought, speech, and religious conduct. Such freedom, exercised by individuals within a larger society, can result in positive progression of a society (abolitionists, women suffragists, civil rights activists) but also in movements that would destroy the very freedom that allowed them to exist in the first place (fascists and communists).
The Limits of Freedom of Speech
Authors: Guiora Amos N
Published: October 2023

A critical component of democracy is the value placed on civil and political rights. Foremost among these rights is the freedom of speech. Governments recognize the right to free speech—for example, the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to free speech in the First Amendment— and multi-national agreements such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) recognize it as well. The right to practice religion freely is similarly valued by democracies. These rights are something just short of sacrosanct; all democracies recognize that certain limits may be placed on these rights. For example, U.S. law recognizes a difference between protected speech and unprotected speech (libel, obscenity, incitement, fighting words).
The Role of the Media Regarding Religion
Authors: Guiora Amos N
Published: October 2023

Today more than ever, the media can affect the opinions of innumerable portions of the population. The manner in which the media covers religion and its effects on society can directly lead to shifts in the general public’s attitude of extremist ideas and actions. This chapter examines how the media portrays religion, religious extremists, and religious violence.
I680-I780: The Dislike of Dubiety
Authors: Lennard John
Published: October 2023

In the eighteenth century there emerged a group which came to be called the ‘(hiality’, defined in this sense by Johnson as “Persons of high rank. Collectively.”. 1Vlany factors are implicated in this development, notably the stress which came to be placed upon personal hygiene. Brewer suggests that the modern popularity of the phrase “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” dates from Wesley’s use of it; and if the seventeenth century is taken to display, in the ructions of the civil war, the consequences of Godliness, the eighteenth equally displays the consequences of cleanliness.
I8Io-I9I8: Reassertions of Human Scale
Authors: Lennard John
Published: October 2023

Burke ‘s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) has long been recognized as an influential book. Its importance here is that certain of Burke’s dictates relate to the renewed exploitation of lunulae in the nineteenth century as Wilkins’s dictates in Ecclesiastes relate to the paucity of exploitation in the eighteenth.
In Eliot’s Penumbra: Time and Absence
Authors: Lennard John
Published: October 2023

Eliot pointed out that punctuation mattered, remarking that “verse, whatever else it may be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed”, and annotating, in Four Quartets, “the punctuation (which includes the absence of punctuation marks, when they are omitted where the reader would expect them).” He said of The Waste Land in July 1922 that “I only hope the printers are not allowed to bitch the punctuation and the spacing, as that is very important for the sense ... “2• And Helen Gardner, the first critic to write of his poetic career as a whole, remarked the importance of parentheses.
Warriors
Authors: Makin Peter
Published: October 2023

Brjggflatts takes a considerable part of its substance from the Dark Ages: from the lives of St Cuthbert, the Gododdin poems, the Norse sagas, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Of course Bunting is not alone among moderns in turning to the Dark Ages. In 1928 Auden wrote the movement and thought patterns of Old English verse into his fantasy of feud in the modern North: Paid on Both Sides: A Charade. It was an experiment in which Bunting showed great interest; perhaps his own poetic Northumbria was already more than a glimmer in his mind. In 1937 appeared David Jones’s In Parenthesis, each section framed with an epigraph from the Old Welsh Gododdin poems, each page full of reference to the matter of ancient Britain. Ted Hughes has drawn on the ancient kingdom of Elmet; Geoffrey Hill on the Mercia of the eighth century; Seamus Heaney on Viking Dublin.
Development of a Modernist Aesthetic New Languages for Painting and Music
Authors: Butler Christopher
Published: October 2023

The major Modernists have an extremely respectful relationship to tradition. None of them began their careers as confrontational or avant-garde. This innate conservatism, which only arrives at a technical breakthrough after an exploration of the past, is one of the extraordinary strengths of early Modernism. The break with previous assumptions did not depend upon sudden conversion (of a kind which was later to be the aim of the typical avant-garde manifesto), but evolved by making art which shows a startlingly detailed appreciation of previous tradition, in masterpieces which often epitomize the very forms of taste that their makers were later to subvert, as, for example, in Matisse’s La Desserte (The Dinner Table) of 1897. This is a beautiful Impressionist picture, whose subject, as we shall see, he later restates in a Modernist style.
The City
Authors: Butler Christopher
Published: October 2023

The great city demands competition and invention. It disseminates images of the modernization process through newspapers, magazines, and books, and so challenges the citizen’s creativity and desire to dominate. But it also threatens its inhabitants, who feel anonymous within the mass and cut off from the face-to-face relationships which were supposed to be typical of the smaller, ‘organic’ societies, from which so many of them had emigrated in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The peculiar psychology of the city dweller had long been of particular interest to the artist and, for literary intellectuals at least, Baudelaire provided a classic description of it in his ‘De l’heroisme de la vie modeme’.
Introduction
Authors: Otto Peter
Published: October 2023

In working through the wealth of secondary material on Blake one cannot but be struck by the incomprehension with which the major part of Blake’s work was greeted during the nineteenth and even the early twentieth centuries.
Sidney’s Defence and the Collective-Farm Chairman
Authors: Sinfield Alan
Published: October 2023

So Leonid Brezhnev in his Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the XXVI Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1981). He discovers in Soviet writing at once a truthful representation of reality and an incitement to readers who do not match up to an ideal. The proclaiming of ideal images in literature, with the hope that they will move the rest of us to virtue, has characterized not only Soviet realism. Nature has not produced “so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon’s Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil’s Aeneas”: so Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry. And again: “If the poet do his part aright, he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned; in Cyrus, Aeneas, Ulysses, each thing to be followed.”2 Both theorists suppose that truth, right, and goodness are organized in an ideal, universal hierarchy, that this is displayed especially in the works currently recognized as good culture, and that the role of that culture is to incite people to aspire to the ideal.
Cultural Imperialism and the Primal Scene of U.S. Man
Authors: Sinfield Alan
Published: October 2023

This chapter is the product of working visits to the United States, visits marked especially by the generosity, intellectual and otherwise, of many friends. It is the fruit of my distinctive experience of the position of the English professor in North America. I discovered North Carolina; and being unwilling to have my horizons bounded by the question of who was next to be bought in by Duke University English Department, I got a map and set off for the Blue Ridge Mountains. There is a very beautiful parkway, though it is rather strange: it doesn’t lead anywhere, in fact it carefully avoids all human purpose other than uninterrupted experience of the wilderness. I deduced that it was begun during the Depression to stimulate the local economy. Paths are interesting. It occurred to me only recently that the reason the Romans built straight roads is that they were an imperial power: they ignored the existing patterns of life, and with slave labor they did not have to take the easier route. British footpaths (trails) mostly derive from ancient rights-of-way, established perhaps as the route between the village church and a cottage long-disappeared; as these become tourist paths, one set of rural practices remains embedded within another. On the Blue Ridge, there are frequent places to pull off and look at the wilderness, without even getting out of the vehicle, with signs explaining what you’re looking at. Or there should be signs: it being winter, many of them had been taken away for repair, and there was a tiny temporary notice apologizing politely for this. There were just the two upright posts and in between, instead f a sign about the landscape there was—the landscape.
The Fifteenth Century
Authors: Bennett S H
Published: October 2023

The death of Chaucer in 1400 deprived England at a blow of her one outstanding author. His successors are to be found in a host of imitators at the head of whom stand Hoccleve and Lydgate; a body of Scottish poets who owe him some allegiance but have their own virtues; a number of anonymous writers of verse whose inspiration is more difficult to trace, and who sang in the remote country-side, and for ‘upland men’ far from Court or baronial halls. The fifteenth century is by no means as barren of poetry as it used to be fashionable for critics to believe; nevertheless, the glory had departed, and the story of fifteenth-century poetry in England is largely the story of ‘the shade of that which once was great’, though momentary flashes reveal the fires underneath.
The Author and his Public
Authors: Bennett S H
Published: October 2023

Before we attempt any detailed survey of the poetry and prose of the fifteenth century we may turn to consider the effects of the changes outlined above on the public for whom they were composed, and the problems facing the writer who wished to get a hearing for his work. To take the latter problem first: readers of Monsieur Jusserand’s delightful English Way-faring Life in the Middle Ages will not need to be reminded of the difficulties of travel in medieval England, and students of our early literature may well pause on reading his pages to reflect upon the results of such difficulties so far as they affected the creation and dissemination of literature. We must, perhaps, be on our guard against exaggerating these difficulties, for when all is said people did travel in medieval England not only ‘from every shires ende. … The hooly blisful martir for to seke’, but also on the more prosaic errands that the king’s officers, the monastic authorities, or the desire for gain commanded. The roads of medieval England were peopled with a motley crew: we may see something of them in Langland’s pages clearly enough, and need only remind ourselves of their existence. Every township and village saw the passing stranger: friars on their rounds, the plausible performing beggar, the haughty king’s messenger, the trader upon his lawful occasions —a variety of men from whom they learned of what was happening in the great world or, at least, that fraction of what was happening which was known to the traveller or that he was willing to divulge.
Fifteenth-Century Verse
Authors: Bennett S H
Published: October 2023

From what has already been said it will be evident that fifteenth-century literature is deserving of far more respectful attention than it has received from literary historians in the past. The qualified nature of its claims we have already admitted, but even such claims have hitherto not been clearly set out. Both verse and prose have suffered, for the extent and variety of a valuable material in both forms has been very inadequately recognized. In verse the emphasis in literary histories has been on ‘courtly’ poetry, and Lydgate and his followers —the so-called ‘Chaucerians’ —have had most of the critical attention, while the whole body of writers of ‘non-Chaucerian’ verse have been fobbed off with a few condescending paragraphs of mild commendation. Dr. A. W. Pollard has been an honou-rable exception here: as early as 1903 he was calling attention to the mass of poetry of a ‘non-Chaucerian’ or ‘non-courtly’ nature that was available, and after quoting some verses from the Nut-Brown Maid declares: ‘to say that English poetry was dead when verse like this was being written is absurd. It was not dead, but banished from court.’
Fifteenth-Century Prose
Authors: Bennett S H
Published: October 2023

Fifteenth-Century prose has not been well treated by literary historians. Indeed, much of it has scarcely received more than a bare mention in accounts which have lavished space upon Pecock, Fortescue, Malory, and Caxton. Pecock and Malory, in particular, have interested critics, yet neither of them had much influence on English prose. While attention has been thus diverted, the main movement of prose writing has been missed. If we wish to know what was done for prose in this century we shall find it best to give only limited attention to the four authors we have mentioned and to concentrate far more than has been the fashion on the many writers —known and unknown —who took over from the fourteenth century an inheritance which they fostered and developed with zeal and success.
Byron
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2023

Byron had an extraordinary heredity. His father, who died when the poet was three, was an incorrigible gambler and spendthrift, the eldest son of Admiral John Byron, ‘Foulweather Jack’, one of the most colourful figures in the history of the eighteenth-century navy. His mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, was a descendant of King James the First of Scotland. She was a passionate, ill-educated woman, and although she tried to do her best for her son he was often to blame her for the tempestuous course of his later life. He was born with a slight malformation of the right foot, and as a result he was slightly lame: a disability which he allowed to prey on his mind. He inherited the title on the death of his great-uncle, ‘the wicked Lord’, who had killed a man in a duel and then retired to live at Newstead with his mistress and a single servant in circumstances that recall the novels of the Brontȅs. There were traces of insanity on both sides of the family and marriages between cousins had been unhealthily common.
Keats
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2023

Unlike Shelley, Keats was in no doubt what he wanted to do with his life.1 As one of his fellow students tells us, ‘Poetry was … the zenith of all his aspirations: the only thing worthy the attention of superior minds: so he thought: all other pursuits were mean and tame … The greatest men in the world were the poets and to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition.’ The difference between the two poets is brought out clearly by a comparison between their first volumes. It is impossible to imagine Keats’s Poems of 1817 accompanied by the notes on religion, morals, and politics which we find in Queen Mab. No contemporary reader of the volume could have been in any doubt where Keats’s political sympathies lay; but it is no less clear that his primary concern is not with politics or philosophy or natural science, but with poetry. The spirit in which the volume had been written is summed up in one of his letters-’! find that I cannot exist without poetry—without eternal poetry—half the day will not do—the whole of it.’
Peacock
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2023

If it is doubtful whether Waverley should be called a novel, it is certain that Gryll Grange should not. Peacock’s works of prose fiction are best considered as satiric tales. In his essay on ‘French Comic Romances’ he distinguishes between two types of comic tale: that in which the characters are individuals and the events such as happen in real life, and that ‘in which the characters are abstractions or embodied classifications, and the implied or embodied opinions [are] the main matter of the work’. & it happens the two types are illustrated by two books that appeared in the year 1818, Northanger Abbey and Nightmare Abbey. They have a good deal in common. In each an author whose attitude is conservative and ‘eighteenth-century’ satirizes the excesses of modern literature as exemplified in the work of Mrs. Radcliffe and the ‘German’ drama of the day. In each life in an Abbey turns out to be much like life anywhere else. When Mr. Glowry in Nightmare Abbey tells Scythrop that his behaviour might ‘do very well in a German tragedy … but it will not do in Lincolnshire’ we are reminded of Catherine Morland’s discovery that it is not in the work of Mrs. Radcliffe and her followers that ‘human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for’. In Jane Austen’s book a young woman discovers the difference between life in books and life in fact: in Peacock’s a young man makes the same discovery. But there is a great difference between the two. In Northanger Abbey the characters are individuals, whereas in Nightmare Abbey the characters are abstractions and it is their opinions which form ‘the main matter of the work’. Unlike Jane Austen, Peacock is more interested in ideas than in people: his concern is not with what his characters do, but with what they say. He is the great satiric commentator on the age which we are considering, the Aristophanes of the period of which Hazlitt wrote, at the beginning of his essay on Coleridge: ‘The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old’.
De Quincey
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2023

There have been few stranger literary careers. By the age of seventeen De Quincey had decided that his life was to be that of a thinker and a man of letters, and he had jotted down an ambitious list of works that he intended to write: by his late twenties he was even more firmly resolved to become ‘the intellectual benefactor’ of his species, to accomplish ‘a great revolution in the intellectual condition of the world’ which would include in its scope a complete reform of education, philosophy, and mathematics. But since, ‘like all persons … in possession of original knowledge’, he was unwilling to ‘sell’ his wisdom ‘for money’, he seems to have published virtually nothing, except a long note on Sir )ohn Moore prefixed to Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra, until he was thirty-three. He then became editor of a provincial journal of small circulation and less importance, the Westmorland Gazette. By this time he seems also to have decided to contribute to the Reviews, for in August 1820 we find William Blackwood reproaching him with a ‘long bygone engagement to the Magazine’. The following year his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater were published in the London Magazine and he became a celebrity overnight.
History, Biography, And Autobiography
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2023

Although no historical work comparable with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II was published in this period, the work of Hallam and his contemporaries deserves attention both because it illustrates some of the motives that led men to study history in the earlier part of the century and because the books they wrote, combining with the immense influence of the romances of Sir Walter Scott, provided the great Victorians with the material from which they derived their sense of the past. Henry Hallam, the father of Tennyson’s friend, tells us that the aim of his View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) is to give ‘a comprehensive survey of the chief circumstances that can interest a philosophical enquirer’.1 His intention is to avoid mere annals and to concentrate on events ‘essentially concatenated with others, or illustrative of important conclusions’. He is more concerned with ‘modes of government and constitutional laws’ than with battles and the minutiae of. political history, and has no hesitation in passing rapidly over periods which seem to him of little importance: ‘Many considerable portions of time, especially before the twelfth century, may justly be deemed so barren of events … that a single sentence or paragraph is often sufficient.’ The book consists of a series of dissertations, instead of a narrative, and is noteworthy for such chapters as those ‘On the State of Society in Europe’ and ‘On the Feudal System, especially in France’. Hallam insists on the importance of understanding feudalism because of its bearing on the English constitution, and because ‘one of the parties which at present divide [France] professes to appeal to the original principles of its monarchy, as they subsisted before the subversion of that polity’.
Beween, Thru, and Amalgamemnon: Gender and the Discourses of the Human Sciences
Authors: Birch Sarah
Published: October 2023

Christine Brooke-Rose’s growing interest in structuralist linguistics is evident in her novels of the 1960s in the use of creative juxtaposition and other devices which depend for their effect on the relations between elements rather than on the elements ‘as such’. In Out and Such one discourse is brought to bear on another through metaphor; in Between, Thru,, and Amalgamemnon the same type of metaphor is used to bring a number of discourses together in an increasingly interrogative conjunction. In these novels Brooke-Rose exploits the rhetorical force of the metaphoric technique by employing it to explore, among other things, gender stereotypes as they are manifest in specialized discourses.
Amalgamemnon, Xorandor, Verbivore, and Textermination: Technology and the Novel
Authors: Birch Sarah
Published: October 2023

Amalgamemnon, Xorandor, Verbivore, and Textermination form what Christine Brooke-Rose has tentatively called the ‘Intercom Quartet’. The Quartet picks up the novel where Thru leaves it, dissected and decentred in vitro, and returns it to the social and historical context out of which it arose. The four novels deal with the status of the genre relative to the public discourses of the media and the discourses of specialized expertise in the domain of communications technology, both of which have become contemporary discourses of authority. Each warns of the consequences of failing to recognize the merits of the novel and the fictionality of many of the non-literary forms of representation which threaten to supplant it.
Reading the Signs
Authors: Thompson N S
Published: October 2023

In the first half of this chapter I wish to look further at the viability of the reader response outlined in Chapter 1. Can one see such a sophisticated reader in the fourteenth century? Could the process of such stimulation be imagined at the time? And what was it going to achieve? I suggest that the use of ‘ethical irony’ (see below) is fundamental to both collections and forms part of the ambiguous signs the reader has to negotiate during the course of the text. In the second half, that irony is seen in a reading of the frames and early narratives of the two works, which open with portraits or portrayals of the vices of the age.
The Three Griseldas
Authors: Thompson N S
Published: October 2023

With the narrative of Griselda we come to the centre of the narrative labyrinth, which is also its end, and the focus of much that has gone before in this study. Issues such as false-seeming, the recognition of true virtue (including the ‘gentilezza/ gentilesse’ debate), the range of meanings around marriage, and a literary question about the value of allegory and exemplarity are all subsumed under a narrative which, however much it provides a solution to the path of the individual through life, simultaneously complicates the reading of that solution by generating a more affective response than one which might be deemed necessary for the simple allegory alone. In examining the three great fourteenth-century versions of this narrative by Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer, I wish to explore the excess of meaning in the narrative which is not easily gathered under the cloak of allegory and has given trouble to many commentators. If I tend to emphasize the allegorical reading of the Clerk’s Tale, it is only as a reminder that it is in competition with other readings and that, given the lack of closure, it is up to the individual reader to form an opinion.
Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in Law and Literature
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: October 2023

In his essay Law as Interpretation Ronald Dworkin is concerned to characterize legal practice in such a way as to avoid claiming either that in deciding a case judges find the plain meaning of the law “just ‘there’” or, alternatively, that they make up the meaning “wholesale” in accordance with personal preference or whim. It is Dworkin’s thesis that neither of these accounts is adequate because interpretation is something different from both. Dworkin is right, I think, to link his argument about legal practice to an argument about the practice of literary criticism, not only because in both disciplines the central question is, “What is the source of interpretative authority?,” but also because in both disciplines answers to that question typically take the form of the two positions Dworkin rejects. Just as there are those in the legal com munity who have insisted on construing statutes and decisions “strictly” (that is, by attending only to the words themselves), so there are those in the literary community who have insisted that interpretation is, or should be, constrained by what is “in the text”; and just as the opposing doctrine of legal realism holds that judges’ “readings” are always rationalizations of their political or personal desires, so do proponents of critical subjectivity hold that what a reader sees is merely a reflection of his predispositions and biases.
Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: October 2023

In September 1982 columnist Peter A. Jay of the Baltimore Sun turned from his usual concern with the intricacies of city politics to the absurdities, or so he perceived them, of the academy. His specific target was the world of English Studies, and he began by observing that “Professors, especially professors of literature, have always been fair game.” My purpose here is to inquire into the reason why this should be so, why professors of literature should so often be the objects of criticism and ridicule, and why the source of the criticism is so often the literary community itself. Jay is not a member of that community, but the charges he levels are familiar; we have all heard them, and some of us may even have made them. The bill of indictment contains several particulars, but the basic complaint is that teachers of literature, and especially of English, have abandoned their proper study, “the study of life itself, as seen by writers of skill and vision,” and given themselves over to the trivialities that accompany “specialization run amok,” to topics (the examples are Jay’s) like “Lesbian Feminist Poetry in Texas” and “The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature” or “other ephemera.”