bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Parry D L L , Girard Pierre
Published: November 2023

It took France just over a thousand years to take its present shape, from the end of Charlemagne ‘s empire to the heyday of Napoleon III. Its boundaries gave it the shape of a hexagon, which has since become a nickname for the country. Yet creating the Hexagon was only half the battle: the other half is uniting it. A thousand years of history laid on top of geographical variety has produced tremendous diversity within the Hexagon, with the result that it can be cut up in myriad ways, from the ancient north/south divide between the France of butter and the France of olive oil to the present east/west divide between supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen and of his opponents. Since the French Revolution began in 1789, no fewer than a dozen regimes have tried to rule the country before being swept away by war, revolution, or coup d ‘état: the Convention, Directory, Consulate, First Empire, Bourbon monarchy, Orléanist monarchy, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic, Fourth Republic, French State, and Fifth Republic (not counting provisional governments). Each polit-ical regime was tangled up with a mass of other divisions, social, religious, economic, and anthropological. Squaring the Hexagon— getting France to live in peace with itself—may be as impossible as squaring the circle.
The new regime:1800–1824
Authors: Parry D L L , Girard Pierre
Published: November 2023

Napoleon Bonaparte was only just born a Frenchman. Though the island of Corsica had been held by many diﬀerent Mediterranean powers over the centuries, it had never been French until 1768, when Louis XV bought it from the Republic of Genoa. An expedition sent later that year ﬁnally defeated the last Corsican resistance on 8May 1969. Neither Corsica ‘s harbours nor its rocky soil oﬀered much reward for its conquerors—but its children were to remake France, Europe, and even the world. On 15 August that same year, Napoleone Buonaparte was born into a family of minor Corsican nobles who had rallied to the French cause. As a result, he received a military education at royal expense from 1779and became an oﬃcer in the army of Louis XVI in 1785. A few years later, the French Revolution and its wars overturned the old order in France and Europe, and enabled Napoleon to fulﬁl what he believed to be his destiny.

Napoleon ‘s personality combined elements of the old regime, the Revolution, and military discipline, and he stamped these three features on the new regime in France. He grew up under the old regime, was educated in schools for the sons of noblemen, and was conﬁrmed as a Catholic. Like many youths of the period, he was entranced by Enlightenment philosophy, and wrote romantic ﬁction badly ( ‘Napoleon began a life of action because of his failure in literature, ‘ observed Goethe).
Ancient Archives and Concepts of Record-Keeping: An Introduction
Authors: Brosius Maria
Published: November 2023

Our oldest archival records originate from the ancient Near East. Systems of archival record-keeping developed over several millennia in Mesopotamia before spreading to Egypt, the Mycenaean world, and the Persian empire, continuing through the hellenistic and Seleucid periods. In mainland Greece of the classical period, however, record-keeping appears to have developed differently. Roman administrative practices were subsequently drawn on traditions derived from both the Near East and Greece. Although extant archival materials are extensive and reflect a range of ancient societies, modern scholars know surprisingly little about the purpose, functioning, and management of these archives. The number of unanswered questions far exceeds those for which we can marshal a convincing explanation.
Introduction: Remembering After Postmodernism
Authors: Copeland Rita
Published: November 2023

Immanent in volume 5 of New Medieval Literatures is a preoccupation with origins or beginnings. This is marked in methodological terms, as a return to certain foundational critical models. We see essays here revisiting Freud, Marx, ‘classical’ Marxist literary criticism, theories of intentionality, and the category of ‘community’, which materialist literary history borrowed from anthropology. The preoccupation with origins is also marked by express thematic concerns with the ‘foundations’ of culture: the founding myth of imperial Rome, the originary force of the pains of martyrdom and of the ideals of virginity (originary because they promise complete identification with the divine source), and the foundational Christian institution of monasticism.
Medieval Death, Modern Morality, and the Fallacies of Intention
Authors: Enders Jody
Published: November 2023

This is the story of two very public deaths which occurred before the eyes of two very different audiences, one medieval and one modern. On 27 March 1380, a Parisian audience went to the theatre to watch the simulated life of Christ in a passion play. Instead, they saw a man, Jehan Hemont, accidentally killed by a special effect gone wrong.1 On 6 May 1998, Los Angeles adults tuned in their televisions to the daily traffic report (and children to their cartoons) only to see their programming interrupted by cameras scrutinizing a distraught man wielding a rifle. After threatening suicide, he proceeded to blow his brains out for viewers.2
The Geography of Genre in the Physician’s Tale and Pearl
Authors: Sanok Catherine
Published: November 2023

If, as some scholars still assume, Chaucer abandoned his Legend of Good Women as a failed experiment, he did not abandon its central project: rewriting classical narrative according to the formal outlines of hagiography.1 The Physician’s Tale carries this project forward in terms which seem more carefully delineated and therefore more legible to modern readers, for the tale of Virginia—concerned with a young girl who dies in defence of her virginity—has obvious affinities to the virgin martyr narratives that were the most widespread legends of the Middle English tradition. This congruence has spared the Physician’s Tale the charge of irony levelled so often against the Legend of Good Women, but it poses questions just as pointed about the discursive boundaries between hagiography and secular narrative in late medieval textual culture.
Pallavicino’s Retorica delle puttane and Rocco’s Alcibiade fanciullo a scola
Authors: Turner James Grantham
Published: November 2023

These books... open, not fond and common ways to vice, but such subtle, cunning, new, and diverse shifts to carry young wills to vanity and young wits to mischief, to teach old bawds new school points, as the simple head of an Englishman is not able to invent Commonly they come home common contemners of marriage, being free in Italy to go whithersoever lust will carry them.
Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain
Authors: Knights Mark
Published: November 2023

In this original and illuminating study, Mark Knights reveals how the political culture of the eighteenth century grew out of earlier trends and innovations. Arguing that the period 1675-1720 needs to be seen as the second stage of a seventeenth-century revolution that ran on until c.1720, the book traces the development of the public as an arbiter of politics, the growth of a national political culture, the shift towards a representative society, a crisis of public discourse and credibility, and a political enlightenment rooted in local and national partisan conflict. The 'public' acquired a new status in the later Stuart period as a result of frequent elections, the lapse of pre-publication licensing, the emergence of party politics, the creation of a public debt and ideological conflict over popular sovereignty. These factors enlarged the role of the public and required it to make frequent acts of judgement. Yet contemporaries from across the political spectrum feared that the public might be misled by the misrepresentations peddled by their rivals. Each side, and those ostensibly of no side, discerned a culture of passion, slander, libel, lies, hypocrisy, dissimulation, conspiracy, private languages and fictions. 'Truth' appeared an ambiguous, political matter. But the reaction to partisanship was also creative, for it helped to construct an ideal form of political discourse. This was one based on reason rather than passion, on politeness rather than incivility, on moderation rather than partisan zeal, on critical reading rather than credulity; and the realisation of those ideals rested on infrequent rather than frequent elections. Finding synergies between social, political, religious, scientific, literary, cultural and intellectual history, 'Representation and Misrepresentation' reinvigorates the debate about the emergence of 'the public sphere' in the later Stuart period.
Religion
Authors: Clark Christopher
Published: November 2023

Do societies become less religious as they become more modern? According to a view widely held across the developed world well into the late twentieth century, the modernization of human societies necessarily implies the waning of religious allegiances, as the collective affinities of faith are displaced by the new secular identities of class, nation and political creed. The history of nineteenth-century Germany confounds this adage. Throughout the period covered by this chapter, religion was one of the structuring facts of German society, comparable in significance to class, region, political orientation, and the other categorical distinctions we use to understand the experience of past communities.
Classical Inheritances
Authors: Graver Bruce E
Published: November 2023

Literary historians have traditionally drawn sharp boundaries between Romanticism and the neoclassical era that preceded it. In the neoclassical era, writers looked to ancient Greek and Roman models and derived from them precise formal rules of composition to which they attempted to adhere in their literary works. Romantic writers, on the other hand, looked directly to nature, or to the light of their own genius, for their inspiration and created their works without the mediation of books, or the need of neoclassical rules. Or so the story went: a story that bears little relation to the historical evidence, but none the less has had a profound effect on the ways that literary works from both eras have been read.
Romantic forms: an introduction
Authors: O’Neill Michael
Published: November 2023

Romantic poetry reveals a creative concern with form, taking that word to mean both a poem’s genre (or kind) and all that is involved in its design as a verbal artefact. ‘Creative’ is a key word here. In Romantic writing, traditional forms undergo transformation. Part of a movement that is often ‘tameless, and swift, and proud’, to adapt a phrase from Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820; such parenthetical dates refer to the year of first publication, unless stated otherwise), Romantic poets are rarely content merely to imitate a pre-existent model. At the same time, as Shelley’s poem reveals, the wild or transgressive energies of Romanticism frequently house themselves within literary forms of some sophistication.
The sonnet
Authors: Fairer David
Published: November 2023

Why did Romantic poets find the confined space of the sonnet so congenial? The extraordinary popularity of the form during the 1776–1832 period seems something of a paradox—like the sonnet itself. In an age that breathed the spirit of liberty, explored the visionary sublime, and cultivated the incompleteness of the fragment, its poets (with two notable exceptions: Blake and Byron) enthusiastically embraced the fourteen-line sonnet with its emphasis on discipline, tightness, and wholeness. Wordsworth, who wrote more than five hundred of them, suggests in his ‘Prefatory Sonnet’ (discussed in the ‘Reading’ section below) that working within its ‘narrow room’ could actually bring a sense of creative release.
Narrative poetry
Authors: Vassallo Peter
Published: November 2023

Narrative poetry in English literature is often associated with the Middle Ages when ‘romances’ were considered to be stories of adventure told in ‘rime’ (compare Coleridge’s ballad ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’). The revival of interest in the medieval world, in ‘golden tongued romance with serene hue’ (Keats’s phrase), was an important aspect of Romantic verse narrative, particularly in its exploration of the exotic and the fantastic. At times the dynamic was a personal one—an attempt to revive lost worlds in the imagination, as in Coleridge’s tantalizingly unfinished ‘Kubla Khan’ where the landscape of the pleasure dome built by Kubla Khan becomes a symbol for the poet’s introspective mind—in effect, a poetic paysage interieur, an inner voyage (compare the reading of ‘Kubla Khan’ in the chapter entitled ‘Formalism’).
Literary criticism and theory
Authors: Perry Seamus
Published: November 2023

For the Romantic poets, F. W. Bateson once said, language was chiefly ‘a device for asking questions and not one for recording answers’; and even when not exactly posing questions (‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’, Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’) Romantic poets are often engaged by questionable speculations, the entertaining of possibilities and second thoughts and half-thoughts (‘If this | Be but a vain belief, yet. . .’, Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’) rather than the placing of settled doctrines on record. Bateson’s observation is true enough for us usefully to keep it in mind if we are drawn to define a Romantic position on art (or on anything else)—something which coherently persists to influence later thinkers and theorists.
Poetry
Authors: Rzepka Charles J
Published: November 2023

British Romantic poets influenced both the poetry and fiction of the century that followed their own. William Butler Yeats’s visionary metaphysics was nurtured by William Blake’s lyrics and John Keats’s odes. Lord Byron’s defiant self-performances inspired the early James Joyce and the mature Virginia Woolf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of ‘organic form’ helped shape the critical theory of early twentieth-century formalists, and both Percy Shelley and Keats influenced American writers as diverse as Wallace Stevens and F. Scott Fitzgerald. William Wordsworth’s impact, if less obvious, has been more profound.
Film
Authors: Hogle Jerrold E
Published: November 2023

The transfer of English Romantic writers and writings to film has produced a dazzling variety at best and a troubling portrait gallery at worst. To be sure, the work of British Romanticism filmed most often has been Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I will not be treating directly. Usually based more on R. B. Peake’s play Presumption (1823) than on Shelley’s novel of 1818, the many screen versions of it have been so thoroughly studied that I need not repeat what is so well known (see further the chapter on ‘The theatre’). 40
The idea of the author
Authors: Bennett Andrew
Published: November 2023

William Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) was written as a defence of the poems collected in those two extraordinary, ground-breaking volumes. In order to defend his often rather odd poems from what he felt had already been a hasty and unjust reception, Wordsworth developed an extended analysis of the nature of poetry itself. Revising the Preface in 1802, he elaborated this point by exploring a related but prior question: ‘Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds’, he says, ‘I ask what is meant by the word poet? What is a poet?’ Wordsworth’s question marks a turning-point in the history of literature and literary criticism and expresses what we might take to be a central legacy of Romanticism.
Romanticism in the electronic age
Authors: Miall David S
Published: November 2023

The computer has a place in the Romantic period. Byron’s daughter Ada was born in December 1815, a few months before Byron left England following the breakdown of his marriage. She grew up to become a competent mathematician, and worked with Charles Babbage on programmes for his Calculating Engines, generally considered the prototype of the modern computer (although they were not built in Ada’s lifetime— she died in 1852).
The Use of Masks 1n Modern Performances of Greek Drama
Authors: Wiles David
Published: November 2023

The appeal of Greek tragedy today stems not just from its content, its handling of themes like women, war, and democracy, but from its formal properties which present a unique challenge to modern actors and directors. Though the most obvious aspect is the chorus (on which see Zeitlin, above, Chapter 2, and Fischer-Lichte, below, Chapter 13), I have chosen to focus this chapter on the mask.
American Jewry
Authors: Waxman Chaim I
Published: November 2023

The development of American Judaism reflects both the experiences of various groups of immigrants and the cultural patterns of American society. Indeed, the latter may be even more important because, in every society and especially an open one such as the United States, the culture of the society influences groups within the society. The first Jewish communities in the United States were created by Sephardim, who arrived to escape the Spanish Inquisitions. The initial communities were in New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and Savanna.
In What Sense are Ancient Ethical Norms Universal?
Authors: Gill Christopher
Published: November 2023

There is an important strand in modern thought which links moral rules or norms closely with universality. Moral rules are seen as ones which, necessarily or by definition, apply universally; universality of application is also sometimes linked with impartiality. Moral rules are also sometimes thought to be determined by a process of universalization or to be based on a universal principle. Also, ethical objectivity is often conceived as based on universality.
The Look and Feel of Virtue
Authors: Sherman Nancy
Published: November 2023

On a grey Monday morning in early January, 1997, I pulled into the gates at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. A marine sentinel, with a ‘high and tight’ haircut barely visible under his ‘cover’, saluted me with one hand, and waved me in with another. On that day, I was to begin what would turn into a two-and-a-half-year ‘tour of duty’ as a visiting Chair in ethics.
Thinking Literary Silence: A Theoretical Exploration
Authors: Loevlie Elisabeth Marie
Published: November 2023

The overall aim of this chapter is to develop a theoretical framework that can inform a further understanding of the dynamic of literary silence. I consider this aim to be twofold. On the one hand I shall define a general theoretical framework and on the other hand I shall develop and define a set of theoretical concepts. Primarily this will lead to a vocabulary that can stake out the theoretical direction for thinking literary silence as a phenomenon. My aim is to create associations and nuances that can describe literary silence as a theoretical concept, and that can distinguish and refine our relationship to the phenomenon. I shall draw on numerous theoretical concepts that can shed light on literary silence.
Interlude. From rousseau to beckett: the opening of the ‘third mode’ of language
Authors: Loevlie Elisabeth Marie
Published: November 2023

To move from Rousseau’s pre-romantic Rêveries to Beckett’s trilogy is to approach a fundamentally different context of thought. There is a need, consequently, to pause and consider this shift before moving on to Beckett. Such is the motivation behind this Interlude. The overall intention is to trace the shift in question and attempt to disentangle the relevant consequences for the exploration of literary silence in the trilogy. Emerging in the twentieth century, Beckett’s intellectual, artistic and historical frameworks have undergone dramatic changes that in turn echo through his work and that clearly set him apart from both Pascal and Rousseau. With what can be called the turn into modernism, new vistas of thought opened up that were previously unavailable. More specifically, a preoccupation emerged regarding the dynamics of language itself. Increasingly language becomes a central object of literary and philosophical reflection, and the result is a raised level of awareness regarding the complexities of the symbolic mode. This seems to bring about a similar will to explore the dynamics of silence with renewed awareness. This reflective focus on silence also affects manners of thinking silence in relation to the literary or poetic expression. In the light of literary silence it is therefore the increased reflective awareness regarding silence that characterizes the shift from Rousseau to Beckett.
‘Le plus beau et le plus meschant esprit que ie aye cogneu ‘: Science and Religion in the Writings of Giulio Cesare Vanini, 1585-1619
Authors: Davidson Nicholas S
Published: November 2023

Vanini’s heterodoxy was recognized in his own lifetime. Ascanio Spinola, for example, the minister of the London Italian Church, who met him in 1612, believed him ‘to bee of no religion, but a profane person, a filthy speaker and a grosse fornicatour ‘, and he prohibited Vanini from preaching in his Church. His books were swiftly condemned too: the Sorbonne repudiated his De admirandis on I October 1616, just a month after its publication. His execution as an atheist and blasphemer on the orders of the Parlement of Toulouse at the tender age of 34 confirmed this reputation. The earliest surviving report of his death described his beliefs as diabolical and scandalous, and the vicar-general of the archbishop of Toulouse issued a condemnation of his two published books in the summer of 1620. The De admirandis was added to the Catholic Church’s official Index of Prohibited Books in 1623.
‘The true frame of Nature ‘: Isaac Newton, Heresy, and the Reformation of Natural Philosophy
Authors: Snobelen Stephen D
Published: November 2023

So then ‘twas one designe of the first institution of the true religion to propose to mankind by the frame of the ancient Temples, the study of the frame of the world as the true Temple of the great God they worshipped. And thence it was that the Priests anciently were above other men well skilled in the knowledge of the true frame of Nature & accounted it a great part of their Theology.
Joining Natural Philosophy to Christianity: The Case of Joseph Priestley
Authors: Brooke John
Published: November 2023

In his memoirs Joseph Priestley recalled that, from an early age, he had been ‘much distressed ‘ that he ‘could not feel a proper repent-ance for the sin of Adam; taking it for granted that, without this, it could not be forgiven me ‘. His deviation from orthodoxy was to extend in many directions during his life, but he was never to forget his mortification at being denied communion in the congregation he had always attended. The elders of the Independent Chapel at Heck-mondwike in the West Riding of Yorkshire ‘refused me, because, when they interrogated me on the subject of the sin of Adam, I appeared not to be quite orthodox ‘. He could not think that the entire human race was liable to the wrath of God and the eternal pains of hell on account of that sin only.
Judicial Plaint and Peasant Plaint
Authors: Scase Wendy
Published: November 2023

From near the beginning of the reign of Edward I comes one of the earliest, fullest, and most intriguing descriptions of complaint in the medieval English courts. The passage quoted above is from the Poem on Disputed Villein Services, an eighty-three-line macaronic poem which recounts how some tenants of Leicester Abbey brought, and lost, a case against their lord in the king’s court. Motivated by ‘a thousand oppressions’, the villagers of Stoughton confidently take their plaint to the king’s court. Once they are at the court, the sergeant warns them that a jury will dispute their claim, while the cost of paying a pleader proves prohibitive.
Caring as Relation and Virtue in Teaching
Authors: Noddings Nel
Published: November 2023

Caring may refer to a desirable attribute of relations or to a virtue possessed by a moral agent. As a virtue, it seems to be more difficult to describe than other virtues. Under what conditions should we credit a person with the virtue of caring? Surely, it is not sufficient for a person to claim— however sincerely— that she or he cares. We have to know something about what he or she does and with what effect. Indeed, when people say, ‘Caring is not enough,’ it is usually because they construe caring as an attitude or expression of concern, and they quite rightly regard this as insufficient.
Environmental Virtue Ethics
Authors: Hursthouse Rosalind
Published: November 2023

Environmental ethics is concerned with the articulation and defence of what I shall call ‘the green belief’— the belief, namely, that a fairly radical change in the way we engage with nature is imperative. Environmental virtue ethics, then, is concerned with articulating and defending the green belief in virtue ethics terms, rather than in the terms of its two rivals, utilitarianism and deontology. This chapter is about what an environmental virtue ethics might be like. I consider two significantly different versions.
Creation and The World OF Science
Authors: Peacocke Arthur
Published: November 2023

A. R. Peacocke’s Creation and the World of Science, an expanded version of his 1978 Bampton Lectures, was widely recognized as a key work on the relation of the sciences to religion, in general, and Christian theology in particular. It has long been seen as a formative contribution to the wide-ranging investigations which now, internationally, constitute this intensely active field. This new reprinting contains the original and influential text and also contains a new supplement containing key references to the literature of recent years as well as indicating the author’s current position on central themes. It constitutes an essential reference and starting point for the contemporary discussion of key issues in the dialogue between the sciences and theology.
No Fool’s Cold: Notes on Illusions of Possibility
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2023

A lot of philosophers are pessimistic about conceivability evidence. They think it does not prove, or even go very far towards justifying, interesting modal conclusions. A number of other philosophers are optimistic; they think it does justify, and perhaps even establish beyond a reasonable doubt, that lots of interesting things arc possible. Nothing very surprising there. What is slightly surprising is that both groups can claim to find support for their attitude in the work of Saul Kripke. Pessimists say: Kripke shows that conceivability evidence is highly and systematically fallible. Very often E seems possible, when as a matter of fact, £-worlds cannot be. So it is, for instance, with the seeming possibility of water in the absence of hydrogen, or of Hesperus distinct from Phosphorus, or of this table turning out to be made of ice.
Quixotic Fictions of the USA 1792–1815
Authors: Wood Sarah F
Published: November 2023

Quixotic Fictions of the USA 1792-1815 explores the conflicted and conflicting interpretations of Don Quixote available to and deployed by disenchanted writers of America's new republic. It argues that the legacy of Don Quixote provided an ambiguous cultural icon and ironic narrative stance that enabled authors to critique with impunity the ideological fictions shoring up their fractured republic. Close readings of works such as Modern Chivalry, Female Quixotism, and The Algerine Captive reveal that the fiction from this period repeatedly engaged with Cervantes's narrative in order to test competing interpretations of republicanism, to interrogate the new republic's multivalent crises of authority, and to question both the possibility and the desirability of an isolationist USA and an autonomous 'American' literature. Sarah Wood's study is the first book-length publication to examine the role of Don Quixote in early American literature. Exploring the extent to which the literary culture of North America was shaped by a diverse range of influences, it addresses an issue of growing concern to scholars of American history and literature. Quixotic Fictions reaffirms the global reach of Cervantes's influence and explores the complex, contradictory ways in which Don Quixote helped shape American fiction at a formative moment in its development.
Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists
Authors: Trigg Stephanie
Published: November 2023

The Institutions and practices of contemporary medieval tourism and heritage culture raise powerful questions for medievalists about the uses and significance of the medieval past. These questions take us far beyond our rarefied discussions of the interpretation and meaning of medieval texts and events, towards an interrogation of our role in perpetuating or challenging general understandings of tradition and heritage for particular communities. This essay takes its epigraph from Umberto Eco as a starting-point for a meditation on the experience of visiting medieval religious sites, in our various capacities as medieval scholars, as pilgrims, and as tourists.
Modernism and Democracy
Authors: Potter Rachel
Published: November 2023

Anglo-American modernist writing and modern mass democratic states emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Yet writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford were notoriously hostile to modern democracies. They often defended, in contrast, anti-democratic forms of cultural authority. Since the late 1970s, however, our understanding of modernist culture has altered as previously marginalised writers, in particular women such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Mina Loy, have been reassessed. Not only has the picture of Anglo-American modernist culture changed significantly, but the understanding of the relationship between modernist writing and politics has also shifted. Rachel Potter here reassess the relationship between modernism and democracy by analysing the wide range of different reactions by modernist writers to the new democracies. She charts the changes in the ideas of democracy as a result of the shift from liberal to mass democracies after the First World War and of women's entrance into the political and cultural spheres. By uncovering hitherto-unanalysed essays by a number of feminist writers she argues that in fact there was a widespread scepticism about the consequences of mass democracy for women's liberation, and that this scepticism was central to the work of women modernist writers.
Introduction
Authors: Potter Rachel
Published: November 2023

The emergence of modernist literature coincided with the birth of the mass democratic state. Yet Anglo-American modernists are notorious for their hostility to democracy and liberalism. As Ezra Pound put it in 1914, ‘The artist has been at peace with his oppressors for long enough. He has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly … The aristocracy of entail and of title has decayed, the aristocracy of commerce is decaying, the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service.’ Pound’s words announce the political terms of a new literary agenda. He debunks the artist’s enslavement to democracy and literary commerce, and imagines a new legislative role for the famously ‘unacknowledged’ poet legislators of Shelley’s fancy.
‘No artist can ever love democracy’: Modernism
and Democracy 1907–1914
Authors: Potter Rachel
Published: November 2023

In the period of 1909–14, the arts were significantly reshaped in Britain and the United States. The poetic and prose experiments of Anglo-American modernists would culminate in the publication of The Waste Land, Ulysses, and the Later Poems of Yeats in 1922, and the revised Cantos in 1923. In this chapter I will focus on the intellectual context of the pre-war period. In particular, I ask what language was available to writers for understanding the nature of sexual difference during this period when there were wider political debates about the status of liberalism and democracy. Women’s enfranchisement, in particular, became a central political and intellectual issue, and prosuffragists (ranging from pro-suffrage liberal politicians to members of theWomen’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Britain) employed a liberal discourse of rights and equality to argue their case. In the process, they tended to presuppose a highly legalistic and rational account of liberty and female subjectivity.
Conclusion
Authors: Potter Rachel
Published: November 2023

The creation and interpretation of Anglo-American modernist writing, then, involved a number of key oppositions: élitist versus inclusive, classical versus romantic, authoritarian versus democratic, impersonal versus introspective, and male versus female.
Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction
Authors: Knight Mark , Mason Emma
Published: November 2023

Recent scholarship in nineteenth-century literary studies consistently recognizes the profound importance of religion, even as it marginalizes the topic. There are few, if any, challenging yet manageable introductions to religion and literature in the long-nineteenth century, a factor that serves to fuel scholars' neglect of theological issues. This book aims to show how religion, specifically Christianity, is integral to the literature and culture of this period. It provides close readings of popular texts and integrates these with accessible explanations of complex religious ideas. Written by two scholars who have published widely on religion and literature, the book offers a detailed grounding in the main religious movements of the period 1750-1914. The dominant traditions of High Anglicanism, Tractarianism, Evangelicalism, and Roman Catholicism are contextualized by preceding chapters addressing dissenting culture (primarily Presbyterianism, Methodism, Unitarianism and Quakerism), and the question of secularization is considered in the light of the diversity and capacity for renewal within the Christian faith. Throughout the book the authors untangle theological and church debates in a manner that highlights the privileged relationship between religion and literature in the period. The book also gives readers a language to approach and articulate their own "religious" readings of texts, texts that are often concerned with slippery subjects, such as the divine, the non-material and the nature of religious experience. Refusing to shut down religious debate by offering only narrow or fixed definitions of Christian traditions, the book also questions the demarcation of sacred material from secular, as well as connecting the vitality of religion in the period to a broader literary culture.
Pythian 3 Fire and Immortality
Authors: Currie Bruno
Published: November 2023

Pythian 3 was composed for Hieron of Syracuse. Its date and occasion are controversial. A terminus post quem is Hieron’s founding of Aitna in 476/5 bc (69 AItvomv £evov). Moreover, Hieron at the time of the ode was ailing; we know that he was suffering from ‘gallstones’ (?) from at least the battle of Cyme in 474 bc. The actual occasion is not easy to determine.
Plotinus’ Cosmology
Authors: Wilberding James
Published: November 2023

In Ennead II.1 (40) Plotinus is primarily concerned to argue for the everlastingness of the universe, the heavens, and the heavenly bodies as individual substances. Here he must grapple both with the philosophical issue of personal identity through time and with the rich tradition of cosmology which pitted the Platonists against the Aristotelians and Stoics. What results is a historically informed cosmological sketch explaining the constitution of the heavens as well as sublunar and celestial motion. This book contains an extensive introduction aimed at providing the necessary background in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic cosmology, the text itself, and a line-by-line commentary designed to elucidate its philosophical, philological and historical details.
Henri Michaux
Authors: Rigaud-Drayton Margaret
Published: November 2023

Henri Michaux is widely recognized as a major twentieth-century French poet and painter. Although his fascination with universal languages has attracted the attention of several of his critics, it has up until now been treated as a marginal concern. Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign argues that his ideas on what might constitute a universal language are central to an understanding of his works. It suggests that both his ambivalent articulation of his relationship to the languages and literary traditions of his native Belgium and adoptive France, and his efforts simultaneously to exacerbate and subvert the differences between words and images, are rooted in Enlightenment theories of the relationship of the self to nature and its language Rigaud-Drayton's study makes a substantial and original contribution to the study of this complex artist, exploring the intricate relationships between word and image in his poetry and paintings, and his quest for a single, unifying language or sign.
How to Write
Authors: Fowler Alastair
Published: November 2023

How to Write is an introductory guide to writing, aimed at people who think they can't write, or for whom writing is an ordeal. Broken down into short topic-based chapters on everything from beginning to revising, it demystifies the writing process by taking the reader through each stage necessary to bring a piece of writing to a decent finish. The book also offers a wealth of invaluable practical considerations, including when and where to write, when to printout and when to edit onscreen, what type of pen works well for revisions, and the hazards of the paperclip. The author is a seasoned writer whose encouraging but uncompromising guidance will delight as well as instruct. Offering practical advice in a lucid, no-nonsense style, How to Write will be ideal for both students and professional people who need to write during the course of their work.
Pen and Computer
Authors: Fowler Alastair
Published: November 2023

You can write only with your brain; but whether to process your thoughts with a computer or pen and paper is your first practical choice as a writer. I suppose it is still possible to ignore the computer and write just with pencil and paper. A surprising number of writers, including Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt, Ted Hughes, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, John Updike, and Edmund White prefer longhand for serious writing.
Sentences
Authors: Fowler Alastair
Published: November 2023

Parts of sentences used to be classified elaborately; and it still helps to know how to take sentence structures apart. But detailed grammatical analysis needn’t be a main concern in writing. If you should happen to dislike grammar for some reason, you can make do well enough with a survival kit of basic information about sentences and their parts.
Word Order
Authors: Fowler Alastair
Published: November 2023

In English, much of the meaning of a sentence is conveyed through the order of its words. We expect the sequence subject–verb–object as a matter of course: ‘dog bites man’ means something very different from ‘man bites dog’. If you are a native speaker, choosing a word order is not usually regarded as a difficult part of writing. All you need do is read a sentence over and you know at once whether the words follow a natural, idiomatic sequence.
Performance and Concurrence
Authors: Fowler Alastair
Published: November 2023

For giving pleasure to the reader, several means are available: you can be lifelike, surprising, witty. But two ways of pleasing stand out, which are commonly neglected: concurrence, or multiple expression simultaneously, and performance, or enactment of meaning rather than merely stating it. Both are common devices, used in many jokes, like the one about a customer who says to the bookseller ‘I want a book about chutzpah—and you’re paying.’
Reducing
Authors: Fowler Alastair
Published: November 2023

So, you thought you could ignore everything said about drafts above; you went straight ahead and wrote the piece without giving any thought to scale. Or else vital new material came to hand late on. Or you went into denial and ‘forgot’ to give the word count command. So now your penultimate draft is far over the word limit, and all that work of composition has turned out to be wasted effort— work spent making occasion for more work. It’s no use pretending the excess wordage won’t be noticed, no use trying to disguise the extra pages by single spacing or a minute font size.
Research: Hard and Soft
Authors: Fowler Alastair
Published: November 2023

Sometimes writing proves difficult because you don’t know enough: reading and memory may not provide all the material you need. Then it may be necessary to extend your knowledge by research, that is, systematic searching for information and ideas. How is research best begun? Many people go straight to the Internet: that must be a sound move whenever speed is an important factor.
How Novels Work
Authors: Mullan John
Published: November 2023

Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, 'Elements of Fiction', John Mullan examines novels mostly of the last ten years, many of which have become firm favourites with reading groups. He reveals the rich resources of novelistic technique, setting recent fiction alongside classics of the past. Nick Hornby's adoption of a female narrator is compared to Daniel Defoe's; Ian McEwan's use of weather is set against Austen's and Hardy's; Carole Shield's chapter divisions are likened to Fanny Burney's. Each section shows how some basic element of fiction is used. Some topics (like plot, dialogue, or location) will appear familiar to most novel readers; others (metanarrative, prolepsis, amplification) will open readers' eyes to new ways of understanding and appreciating the writer's craft. How Novels Work explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist. It is an entertaining and stimulating exploration of that ingenuity. Addressed to anyone who is interested in the close reading of fiction, it makes visible techniques and effects we are often only half-aware of as we read. It shows that literary criticism is something that all fiction enthusiasts can do. Contemporary novels discussed include: Monica Ali's Brick Lane; Martin Amis's Money; Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin; A.S. Byatt's Possession; Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club; J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace; Michael Cunningham's The Hours; Don DeLillo's Underworld; Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White; Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love; Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections; Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Patricia Highsmith's Ripley under Ground; Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell; Nick Hornby's How to Be Good; Ian McEwan's Atonement; John le Carré's The Constant Gardener; Andrea Levy's Small Island; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; Andrew O'Hagan's Personality; Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red; Ann Patchett's Bel Canto; Ruth Rendell's Adam and Eve and Pinch Me; Philip Roth's The Human Stain; Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated; Carol Shields's Unless; Zadie Smith's White Teeth; Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting; Graham Swift's Last Orders; Donna Tartt's The Secret History; William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors; and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road
Literariness
Authors: Mullan John
Published: November 2023

Literariness: it is a clumsy word, but a useful label for the ways in which novels display their attachment to other works of literature. Books remember other books. Listen to a reader describe a striking new novel and you are likely to hear comparison with other novels. Writers are themselves readers and often invite their own readers to hear, if they can, echoes from other books in their novels. In academic discussion, the commonest word for this has, for some time, been ‘intertextuality’, the first of the topics treated below. The relative novelty of the term has sometimes persuaded the unsuspecting that it names a new tendency of fication. In fact, as I try to show, it is a new name for a variety of traditional techniques.
Kenotic Christology and the Nature of God
Authors: Evans C Stephen
Published: November 2023

Christians have traditionally believed that God is most fully revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, understood as both fully human and divine. Because Jesus is fully human, we can attain some understanding of his life; because he is fully divine, this understanding gives us insight into the heart of God. If this line of thought is sound, it follows that our understanding of God’s nature must be closely related to our Christology.
Empson and the Gifts of China
Authors: Harding Jason
Published: November 2023

William Empson cherished ‘our strong and critical curiosity about alien modes of feeling, our need for the flying buttress of sympathy with systems other than our own’ ( EG 32). It was a belief that fuelled a sustained attempt to foster deeper understanding between the cultural traditions of Europe and Asia. However, after seven years as a university professor in China, Empson did not underestimate the difficulties of a rapprochement between two civilizations separated by what he conceived of as a profound difference of theology. John Haffenden’s narrative of the extraordinary years Empson spent in China during the turbulent upheaval of the Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 9) and throughout the Civil War and the Communist takeover (1947 – 52) has transformed the context in which scholars and critics approach the worldliness of the later poetry and criticism, peppered with anecdote and offhand personal testimony. And yet, a decade of ‘attending’ to Asian cultures had taught Empson a tough CP 55, 101.
Coleridge, Christ, and Contradiction in Empson
Authors: Perry Seamus
Published: November 2023

One of the questions that most interests admirers of Empson is the continuity, or otherwise, of his career. What does the intricate textual analysis of Seven Types for which Empson quickly became known (and in some quarters notorious: ‘merely early William Empsonism’ was not a term of praise in R. S. Crane’s book)1 have to do with the boisterous, sometimes knockabout, pugnacity of Milton’s God and the essays on Donne and Marlowe and others, polemically preoccupied by the wickedness of the Christian God and the pernicious effects of neo-Christianity? Empson was quite aware that admirers of the early work thought his later stuff regrettably off-track, as though betraying some loss of due purpose or even magnanimity. Denis Donoghue shook his head (‘an indisputable grandeur of spirit denies itself and becomes, when the theme is Christianity, pinched and nasty’) and scolded the scion of Yokefleet Hall: ‘Undermining a man’s faith is not the work of a gentleman.’² Empson disputed any charge of gifts going to waste, needless to say: a breezy exasperation with such unenlightened times became a hallmark.
Scapegoats
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: November 2023

THE idea of sacrifice is not in the least glamorous these days. It is what mothers do for their loutish sons, harassed wives for their imperious husbands, and working-class soldiers for pampered politicians. Sacrifice is the clarion call of the fascist Fatherland, with its necrophiliac rites and ceremonials of self-oblation. In religious cultures, it is a violent procedure for placating a savage god, offering him bribes in the hope that you will be spared his wrath. It smacks of a morbid cult of self-abnegation, as its victims come to revel in their own powerlessness and rub their meekness aggressively in others ‘ faces.