bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Decision Markets
Authors: Hanson Robin D
Published: October 2023

The human part of any large intelligent system is by far the most intelligent part. As long as this remains true, the biggest system advancements will come from aids that fill big holes in human abilities, rather than from artifacts that stretch engineers’ abilities. Consider Post-it Notes or, better yet, plain paper notepads. These probably seemed like trivial ideas, but they turned out to be terribly useful. Why? Because the marvel that is the human brain has a horrible short-term memory, which means that dumb-as-dirt memory aids can make people substantially smarter.
Empowering Investors: A Market Approach to Securities Regulation
Authors: Romano Roberta
Published: October 2023

The U.S. securities laws have repeatedly been assailed as burdensome or ineffective. Reform efforts have conversely been attacked for undermining an effective mechanism by which shareholders can discipline management. Moreover, even reformers have been dissatisfied with the effectiveness of their product. For example, after enacting the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995,1 members of Congress became concerned that their efforts to rein in frivolous private lawsuits under the federal securities laws were being circumvented by state court filings and introduced legislation to preempt such action. There is some validity to their concern: In a report to President Clinton on the impact of the 1995 act, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cited preliminary studies indicating a decrease in federal court filings and an increase in state court filings.
Introduction
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

Democracy is everywhere triumphant, yet no one truly believes in its existence. In all parts of the world, the trappings of democracy abound, yet nowhere is it credible to believe that the people rule. Because it possessed a popularly elected legislature, the Soviet Union in its heyday proclaimed itself a democracy. Rightly, no one believed that claim. Today, while the leading nations of the world can with somewhat more justice claim to be democracies-affording freedom, as most of them do, for multiple political parties in addition to popularly elected legislatures-still the claim that the people rule rings hollow. A politician all too often seems a member of an alien breed, not “one of us. “ Instead of ruling ourselves, it is thought, we are ruled by politicians, bureaucrats, and the special interests that hold the politicians and bureaucrats captive. Conversely, those suspicious of officials sometimes suppose that as long as “we “ control them, perhaps by being able to “vote the bastards out, “ that is all we can hope for from democracy.’ Yet, as I will show, there is serious question as to who “we “ are in that formulation. “We “ are certainly not to be identified with the majority in a given election. However one conceptualizes democracy, it is plain that bureaucracy poses a threat to it. The policy-making power held by officials in the large and complicated administrative agencies that are relied on by all modern states- and by both provincial and transnational governments-is difficult to control in practice and to reconcile with our democratic ideals. Given how much discretionary decision-making power rests in executive agencies, it is everywhere a serious question whether we as citizens are subject to the kind of domination that consists in being vulnerable to the arbitrary power of others.2 The reasons for the existence of discretionary administrative power are various. Sometimes the discretionary power falls to bureaucrats because of a considered legislative judgment that matters of a certain kind are better left to experts at some remove from the fray of democratic politics. Central
The Stupidity of the Cost-Benefit Standard
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

The ends settled on by legislatures being often too vague and abstract to provide sufficient guidance for a noncontroversial form of instrumental reasoning to take over, the natural next move for the instrumentalist is to suggest collecting additional information about individuals’ ends in order to help agencies make difficult trade-offs. As I argued in chapter 7, there is no objective basis on which to commensurate the many competing goods and values that matter to us.’ Reaching out to individuals’ preferences about how trade-offs should be dealt with accommodates this fact. By further taking individuals’ views into account, such an approach better fulfills the populist ideal than does agency instrumentalism. With collective, legislative agreement about the ends of policy only taking us so far, the hope is to get further-not by attempting to deepen or extend that agreement by means of further collective reasoning but instead by taking direct account of the disagreeing views of individuals, which are what create trouble for agency instrumentalism. Instead of treating the government as a single macrosocial subject with its own set of values, the approach I am now considering attempts to achieve an ersatz populism within the agencies by aggregating individual preferences. There are various approaches to policy reasoning that take this tack, involving varied ways of conceiving of and gaining access to individuals’ prac- tical commitments. By far the most influential of these approaches, however, is cost-benefit analysis. I shall argue that (M2), the model constraining agency reasoning to follow the standard of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), suffers from a severe intellectual defect that, for reasons I shall explain, counts as a form of stupidity. Now, a stupid way of achieving the ideals of democracy as democratic autonomy is perhaps better than none at all. Hence a final judgment on (M2) must await your verdict on my defense of a more robust rationalist populism in the following chapters. If my defense at all succeeds, however, we must judge (M2) to offer a rather poor “second-best “ form of policy reasoning.2
Deep Compromise
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

The last few chapters’ emphasis on how to conceive of the rational constraints that should apply to agency policy-making, while moving us toward a broader understanding of democratic reasoning, may have given the impression that democracy as democratic autonomy would be as civil as a proverbial gentleman’s club, as free of intractable internal conflict as a herd of sheep, and as disinterestedly rational as an academic seminar.1 It is time to correct this impression. Citizens in any democracy will have deeply conflicting interests that unavoidably lead them to argue in self-interested ways. The depth of their conflicts and the depth of existing injustices may rightly call for angry protests, unrestrained verbal attacks on opponents, and ways of trying to combat the entrenched powers that exercise domination. The conception of democracy that I am pursuing has not forgotten these facts. The republican insistence on dispersing power among a number of different institutions so as to reduce the possibility that the government itself dominates or is captured by one dominant social force is what motivated my looking into the structure of agency decision-making in the first place. Accepting the need for the republican device of dispersing powers, I turned away from a unitary conception of democracy and from an idealized, monistic conception of popular sovereignty. The need to rely on majority rule to bring closure to political debates has not been forgotten, either: I will discuss its place in due course. We will not und<::rstand its place aright, however, unless we recognize how democratic deliberation can begin to cope with the many kinds of disagreement that divide us. Democracy has a dual role with respect to disagreement; one is to lessen it so that we can come to decisions that are workable, the other is to accommodate us to disagreement so that we can recognize as legitimate even decisions we disagree with. While different theorists of deliberative democracy have laid the emphasis more on one of these roles than the other, I am not aware of any who have wholly neglected either.2 Who seriously thinks that democratic deliberation can remove all disagreement, and what theorist
The Dirty Work
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

The Shamali Plain north of Kabul, nestled in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, was once Afghanistan’s breadbasket. A broad expanse of shimmering green lushness set against white-shrouded towers of rock, the Plain was famous for its beauty as well. As recently as the 196os-a relatively rare interval of peace for Afghanistan -it had a sylvan loveliness reminiscent of Japanese rice fields, says the author Rod MacLeish, who visited there during the reign of Zahir Shah, the lately returned king. Babur, a seventeenth-century descendent of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane who became the first Moghul emperor and, by the end of his life, master of south-central Asia, kept a villa in those foothills. A poet and devoted diarist, Babur once wrote that in all his vast domain it was this region that he pined for most. “If there is a paradise on earth,” he exclaimed, “this is it! This is it! This is it!” But the Shamali’s golden age was the age of empire, and this is the age of failed states and political dis-integration. If you are one of the sour skeptics who still believes that history has no forward progress, don’t invoke Europe in 1914; better to compare the Shamali Plains of Babur’s time to what they look like now.
Superimposing Democratic Inclusion On Forgotten Exclusions
Authors: Marx Anthony W .
Published: October 2023

The end of the eighteenth century would see greater national cohesion in support of more democratic state authority in France and England. And as historians have long argued, such popular solidarity was indeed expressed in terms of inclusion and greater religious tolerance, and for France even in the rejection of all official connections to faith. Amid consolidated images of the nation’s civicness, elites and followers purposefully dismissed and forgot past sectarian foundations, finally asserting secular authority supposedly free of a prior religious crutch. And as religious fanaticism had forged cohesive identity then indirectly bolstering allegiance to the state, the denials of a direct connection were plausible. Representative state power was then reinforced by popular cohesion, projected and legitimated as inclusive, and the earlier attempted tolerance in state-building was revived, this time with more persistence. But even these assertions of civicness were not so freestanding. Projections of inclusion would be possible only because past religious antagonisms and exclusions had built sufficient solidarity and unity; intolerance had provided the foundation for civicness. Secular allegiance had been forged on the basis of religious sectarianism. Liberal inclusiveness was consolidated on the basis of prior illiberalism. But by then, the work of building national cohesion had been more fully completed or at least provided a strong enough foundation on which to build further, with state strength and reach consolidated in its varying forms.
Crowded Spaces in The House of Mirth
Authors: Kaplan Amy
Published: October 2023

The House of Mirth opens in a crowded train station when Selden glimpses Lily Bart in the midst of the afternoon rush. In the “act of transition between one and another of the country-houses,” the main character does not first appear ensconced in one of their interiors along with the other ladies of her class. Instead, she stands out as a “highly specialized” product against a throng of “sallow-faced girls in preposterous hats and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans” (5). Although Lily remains “apart from the crowd,” her relation to that crowd is enigmatic. On the one hand, it forms a background that outlines her brilliance: “her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room” (4). On the other hand, the passers-by constitute an audience of spectators, “who lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train” (4).
“The Word Which Made All Clear”: The Silent Close of The House of Mirth
Authors: Benstock Shari
Published: October 2023

The House of Mirth was not the first of Edith Wharton’s nineteen novels and novellas to be serialized. It was, however, the work that first brought her to the attention of a large reading public and established her reputation as a critic and satirist of American society. She was to have a long career in the pages of literary and popular magazines, earning vast sums (in the millions of dollars at today’s rates) from the serial rights to her works. She later said that writing The House of Mirth under pressure of editors’ deadlines and printers’schedules had taught her “the discipline of the daily task” and transformed her “from a drifting amateur into a professional.” Made at thirty years’ remove from the period in which The House of Mirth appeared in the pages of Scribner’s Magazine (January to November 1905), this statement seems disingenuous. Wharton had produced nine books in the eight years preceding 1905, including a two-volume historical novel set in eighteenthcentury Italy (The Valley of Decision, 1902). But there was a difference: during the two decades of her literary apprenticeship she had followed, more or less, her own thematic interests in fiction and had set her own timetable for writing and publication.
Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth
Authors: Kassanoff Jennie a.
Published: October 2023

But what is your story, Lily? I don’ t believe any one knows it yet.” Gerty Farish’s question, coming as it does near the end of Edith Wharton’s 1905 best-seller The House of Mirth, is certainly ironic. In the context of a novel that labors to tell the whole story of Lily Bart, Gerty’s question suggests the absence or concealment of the text’s central narrative. Lily’s response, moreover, is disconcertingly opaque: “From the beginning?” Miss Bart gently mimicked her. “Dear Gerty, how little imagination you good people have! Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose—in the way I was brought up, and the things I was taught to care for. Or no— I won’ t blame anybody for my faults: I’ ll say it was in my blood, that I got it from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress, who reacted against the homely virtues of New Amsterdam, and wanted to be back at the court of the Charleses!” (226) Lily decides that her flaws are not the work of her environment; rather, they are hereditary traits in the blood, passed down from a sybaritic ancestress. Such logic is a prime example of belief in what Laura Otis calls “organic memory”—the idea that “repeated patterns of sensations, whether of the recent or distant past, had left traces in the body, making the individual an epitome of his or her racial history” (3).
The Components of Quality in Health Care
Authors: Donabedian Avedis
Published: October 2023

It is possible to conceive of quality as the product of two factors. One is the science and technology of health care, and the second is the application of that science and technology in actual practice. The quality of care achieved in practice is the product of these two. As is shown in Figure 1.1, that product can be characterized by several attributes that include efficacy, effectiveness, efficiency, optimality, acceptability, legitimacy, and equity. These, taken singly or in a variety of combinations, constitute a definition of quality and, when measured in one way or another will signify its magnitude.
Determining Priorities in Monitoring
Authors: Donabedian Avedis
Published: October 2023

Anyone setting out to monitor the quality of care is likely to be confronted with many things vying for attention; so many that one may not know where to begin. It is important, therefore, to have some guidelines for selection. In this section of my exploration, I shall try to offer such a guide. For convenience of discussion, I shall organize it as follows: importance to patient welfare ... additional institutional interests ... feasibility. These I shall take up in order.
The Balkans in World History
Authors: Wachtel Andrew Baruch
Published: October 2023

In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large as a somewhat frightening but ill-defined space. Most attempts at definition focus on geography (the actual mountain range that gives the area its name and the lands surrounding it) or, more recently, on the set of prejudices attached to the term by local and outside observers. There has been far less concern with attempting to define this space in positive terms, taking as a starting point not geography as such but rather the cultural, historical, and social threads that could allow us to see what might be merely contiguous places as a coherent, though complex, whole. The goal of this volume is to do precisely that. The Balkans should probably be defined as that borderland geographical space in which four of the world’s greatest civilizations have overlapped in a sustained and meaningful way to produce a complex, dynamic, sometimes combustible, multi-layered local civilization. It is the space in which the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, of Byzantium, of Ottoman Turkey, and of Roman Catholic Europe met, clashed and sometimes combined. The history of the Balkans can be seen as a history of creative borrowing by local people of the various civilizations that have nominally conquered the region. Each civilization has thus been hybridized, modified, and amplified by other voices and traditions.
Psychotherapy
Authors: Thase Michael E , Lang Susan S
Published: October 2023

How Do You Know If You Need Professional Help? Consider seeking professional help when you recognize that you are unhappy—lonely, depressed, anxious, agitated, distressed over difficult relationships at work and at home, stuck in your life, losing ground, losing your enthusiasm, giving up more and more often, feeling helpless and passive. A good time to seek professional help is when you wish you felt more vital and alive, more joyful and purposeful, and less down all the time. Before active therapies were available, people didn’t have the opportunities we have today to learn how to change their outlook on life but had to accept their view of the world as normal. This situation is analogous to life before the invention of glasses. You usually could get by, but life was often out of focus and much more difficult to cope with, yet normal. Normal swiftly changed, however, to 20/20 as soon as glasses were invented.
Supplemental Strategies
Authors: Thase Michael E , Lang Susan S
Published: October 2023

In addition to learning better coping strategies, combating negative styles of thinking, taking medication, exercising as often as possible, and perhaps taking herbal or nutritional supplements with your doctor’s approval, you can help yourself in other ways as well. These self-help strategies include Relaxation and stress management Seeking social support Sleep and light Other strategies that involve treatment by professionals include biofeedback and acupuncture. An area for which there is little scientific research but appears to be safe is homeopathic remedies. Let’s discuss these strategies in more detail.
The Religious Prospect
Authors: Bonomi Patricia U
Published: October 2023

The skylines of our eastern cities in, say, 1760 were in their way just as striking as they are now, perhaps more so. But what drew the eye then, and gave the horizon its definition, was a very different sort of edifice from those that mark it today—not skyscrapers but church spires—and beneath that contrast lies a fundamental shift in the spiritual perspective of the American population during the more than two centuries that have intervened. The seaboard cities of colonial America, though relatively small, were amply supplied with places of worship. You walked no distance at all, in any of them, without passing a meetinghouse, and you were never beyond earshot of church bells. The sights and sounds of today’s cities are not primarily symbolic of religion. But in eighteenth-century America—in city, village, and countryside—the idiom of religion penetrated all discourse, underlay all thought, marked all observances, gave meaning to every public and private crisis. There was hardly a day of the week, to say nothing of the Sabbath, when colonial Americans could not repair to their churches for some occasion or other, all of which gave a certain tone to everything they did in their collective and communal capacity.
The New Heavens and the New Earth
Authors: Bonomi Patricia U
Published: October 2023

There have emerged two fairly distinct ways of looking at religious developments in the seventeenth-century American colonies. The older approach explores religious life and institutions from the traditional perspective of the civil magistrates and churchmen who provided leadership for the early colonies. The newer scholarship takes a more popular position, seeking to understand the religious perceptions and practices of men and women at every level of colonial society. Because the two approaches start from different points on the social scale, each contributes important insights about our religious beginnings, but they do so in terms not always easy to reconcile or combine.

According to traditional history, colonial leaders were concerned above all with creating stable New World communities, and it was an axiom of early seventeenth-century political thought that a strong church was the handmaiden and bulwark of a stable state. The church’s guardianship of morality and public behavior made it an ally of orderly government, an interdependence that statesmen acknowledged by granting official status to one church only.
The Churchgoers
Authors: Bonomi Patricia U
Published: October 2023

Churchgoing, which was strong in most parts of provincial America, must be seen as one gauge of religious feeling and belief. In the colonial era, however, churchgoing was subject to a number of variables, such as community cohesion, family tradition, geography, and various others already referred to. Such variables were in turn affected by the kinds and classes of people involved; whether male or female, young or old, rich or poor. Thus a closer look at who went to church in colonial America may be of some help in discovering why they did so.

Recent estimates suggest that a majority of adults in the eighteenth¬ century colonies were regular church attenders. Though the worship of God was no doubt the primary motive for churchgoing, eighteenth-century worshipers, like those of today, found that church attendance served a number of non-spiritual needs. The quest for community, long recognized as an incentive for churchgoing, must have operated with particular force among inhabitants Historical thinking about the colonial clergy is at present in some flux, a consequence of two long-term problems of interpretation.
The Formation of American Religious Culture
Authors: Bonomi Patricia U
Published: October 2023

Whatever may have been the fluctuating fortunes of religion over the past two hundred years, religion to this day seems, somehow, to occupy a larger place in American culture than it does in the life of most western societies. If elsewhere religion is seen mostly at the surface of things, in ecclesiastical ceremonies and feast-day rituals, in the United States it breaks through the confines of church and congregation to influence civil, social, and other aspects of the national life. This blurring of religion’s normative boundaries began with the earliest settlements. Indeed, it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the mold was set in which American religious institutions have developed ever since. Religion permeated early American life in part because religious institutions had to be built anew in the colonies, a task that incorporated the laity into the very fabric of the churches at the same time that it built the churches into the structure of civil society. Over the years, commentators, especially foreign ones, have been repeatedly struck by two aspects in particular of American religion, one being the social dimension of American religious practice, and the other, the latitudinarianism that resulted from the voluntary character of American church life.
Sitric Silkenbeard
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: October 2023

THE UNSKILLED SAILOR will frequently find himself shipwrecked,” Dudo of St. Quentin sagely warns, “just as the merchant who is not skillful at purchasing or bargaining will be ruined:’ This little observation in the midst of a panegyric on the Norman dukes illustrates the increasing importance of commercial aptitude in the equation of political success. What was true along the banks of the Seine was equally applicable farther north, on the shores of the Irish Sea. The years around the first millennium witnessed an increasing prosperity throughout northern Europe. Villages and ship forts were developing into towns, and these towns were becoming economically important. The expansion of commercial activity around the North Atlantic benefited from changes in the climate since the ninth century. The improvement was pronounced by the beginning of the eleventh century. Winters were milder and the growing season was extended. Ships had more time to sail to lands around the Arctic Circle with less danger from drift ice, a particular worry for Icelanders. Agricultural productivity grew as farms were established up to the utmost limits of arable cultivation, and cereal cultivation increased to feed an expanding population with more wealth to spend on goods.
From Dublin to England and Norway
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: October 2023

IN BOTH lR1sH and Viking literature, Clontarf was more than just a battle, it was a meeting of this world with the supernatural. Cocad Gaedel re Gallaib has witches, goblins, and demons howling and gibbering when the armies clashed. Even the champion of Christianity is included, and on the night before the combat a banshee visited the high king Brian to tell him that he would die the next day. In the Viking poem Darraoarljo, the atmosphere is almost entirely pagan. As a man looks into a window, he sees Valkyries/witches chanting verses while they work at a loom. Human heads are the weights, a sword is the beater, and an arrow is the shuttle. The Valkyries chant that they move through the battle with drawn swords, deciding who will live and who will die.
The Brief Ascendancy of the Haraldssons
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: October 2023

BY THE TIME of his death in 1042, Sitric Silkenbeard could have offered some interesting comments on a favorite medieval theme: the wheel of fortune. From an unsteady beginning to mature survival, Sitric had a career of extremes. Then, in a final turn, after a decade of economic prosperity, ecclesiastical progress, and military success, he was forced into exile. With Sitric’s abdication, for the first time since the mid-tenth century, the family of Olaf Cuaran did not rule Viking Dublin. The new lord of the town was Echmarcach Ragnallsson from the rival dynasty ofHaraldsson. Henceforth there was direct competition between the Olafssons and Haraldssons, first for Dublin and then for the kingdom of the Isles.
The Contest for Supremacy in the Irish Sea
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: October 2023

THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION around the Irish Sea that had been disrupted so severely by the Viking raiders of the ninth century was very different by the end of the eleventh century. Small kingdoms and political fragmentation had given way to a few powerful families controlling vast empires. Ironically, this had repercussions for the descendants of the Viking settlers, as the Olafsson and Haraldsson dynasties were diminishing in influence under pressure from the great lords. The capture of Dublin by Diarmait mac Maelna mb6 might have been seen by contemporaries as a temporary occupation due, in part, to the intrusion into its kingship by an interloper from the Isles. The Irish conquest of the Isle of Man starkly illustrated the real danger to the Viking families; the sea was no longer their refuge. Twenty years later, after Diarmait’s death in 1072 and the seizure of Dublin by his protege Tairdelbach ua Briain of Munster, the permanence of the Irish domination of the Viking settlements was clear. The dynasty of Olaf Cuaran had been unable, or unwilling, to reassert its independence. Less and less were they the masters of their fate. The temporary seizure of the town late in the eleventh century by Olaf Cuaran’s descendant Godred Crovan and the efforts by the Irish to recapture it emphasize the importance of the commercial center as a revenue generator for the princes who controlled it.
Asset-Based Policy in Historical and International Perspective
Authors: Midgley James
Published: October 2023

Social welfare is a contested field in which very different ideas about human well-being are expressed. Divergent beliefs about the importance of individual responsibility, the contribution of markets, the support of family members, the role of charities and religious bodies, and the intervention of the state all compete to shape welfare policy. These beliefs are accompanied by different views about which policies, programs, and approaches are the most effective in promoting human well-being. While some contend that nonmaterial interventions such as professional counseling are the most useful, others believe that the transfer of cash benefits are a highly desirable means of addressing social needs. Yet others are critical of the provision of benefits and services to passive recipients and believe that steps should be taken to enhance the self-sufficiency and autonomous functioning of those in need.
Toward Progressive Pensions: A Summary of the U.S. Pension System and Proposals for Reform
Authors: Orszag Peter , Greenstein Robert
Published: October 2023

The three tiers of retirement income and security are Social Security; private savings, accumulated by families and individuals in a variety of forms (e.g., bank accounts and mutual funds); and tax-favored retirement savings. The focus of this chapter is the final tier. Though the government tries to promote pension saving by offering a variety of tax incentives, pension coverage remains unevenly spread, especially among lower-income workers and employees in small businesses. Frustrated by the failure to raise overall coverage rates much above the present 50-percent level and concerned about the implications of inadequate pension coverage of the coming retirement of baby boomers, policy makers included a variety of changes to the pension tax laws as part of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA) of 2001 (Joint Committee on Taxation, 2001).
Canons Afire: Libraries, Books, and Bodies in Don Quixote’s Spain
Authors: Black Georgina Dopico
Published: October 2023

This essay opens in the smoke of a fire, “in a village in La Mancha,” in the early years of the seventeenth century. The scene is a familiar one: a “public trial” presided over by a priest, a barber, a housekeeper, and a girl in her teens, this last, the niece of Alonso Quijano, who dubs her uncle’s books “heretics” and opens his library to the “amusing and exhaustive scrutiny” that will be its undoing. On that very day, as Don Quijote’s books are consumed by flames, another fire is burning, in another village in La Mancha, or perhaps Toledo, Cuenca, or Seville. The smoke that fills the air of this second fire does not carry the distinctive smell of burning books, however, of words and thoughts ablaze, but the equally distinctive smell of burning flesh.
Don Quixote: Crossed Eyeand Vision
Authors: Echevarría Roberto Gonzaá Lez
Published: October 2023

It is well known that Alonso Quijano’s brain dried up from reading too many chivalric romances, but what is much more remarkable is that this fifty-plus-year-old man, who read every night from dusk to dawn, probably by the dim light of a candle, did not actually go blind. In a novel in which the characters, above all the bruised and battered hero, suffer countless injuries and illnesses, it is never once mentioned that Don Quijote might have experienced even the slightest decline in his vision. The knight’s bodily integrity diminishes gradually over the course of his adventures: He loses various molars and part of an ear, his ribs are broken, his wrists chafed, his face scratched; he sustains contusions that leave him unconscious and suffers stomach cramps and debilitating bouts of vomiting. But his eyes remain intact until death closes them. This compulsive reader can see across great distances those who bring him grace and disgrace, and he reads from a book that he finds in an abandoned suitcase while on horseback in the midst of the Sierra Morena.
Introduction
Authors: Ellis David
Published: October 2023

In 1913 D . H. Lawrence was twenty-eight and living in Italy with Frieda Weekly, the German wife of his former language teacher at Nottingham University. Already the author of two novels, he was waiting to see how his third, Sons and Lovers, would be received. That novel had been largely based on his childhood and youth in a small mining community near Nottingham but he was looking now for new subjects, new ways of writing, fresh points of view. In April he began writing about Gudrun and Ella Brangwen and their involvement with two men called Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin. As he decided to ask himself more questions about the likely family background of the Brangwen sisters, Ella was rechristened Ursula and Lawrence found himself imagining not only her parents but the early life of her grandfather. The consequences would have made a very long novel indeed and by 7 January 1915 he had announced his intention of splitting the Brangwen story into two. The first part, which he called The Rainbow, was published at the end of September 1915 and suppressed by court order a few weeks later. The ostensible reason was obscenity but expressions of antiwar feeling in the novel might also have influenced the authorities’ decision. With the publication of Sons and Lovers Lawrence had emerged as a successful young novelist whose future seemed assured but by the time The Rainbow was suppressed, his situation had changed completely. Now married to Frieda, his outspoken opposition to the war that Britain had been fighting against Germany and her allies since August 1914, and the unwelcome official attentions that opposition inevitably provoked, meant that he was being increasingly driven into angry and bitter isolation.
The Dialogue with the Avant-Garde in Women In Love
Authors: Katz-Roy Ginette
Published: October 2023

In his autobiography, Wyndham Lewis evokes the drastic changes that occurred in Europe just before World War I in these dramatic terms: “Europe was full of titanic stirrings and snortings—a new art coming to flower to celebrate or to announce a “new age.” Those were the days when T. E. Hulme, under the influence of Wilhelm Worringer’s theories on primitive art and inorganic forms, advocated a new anti-humanist art in Alfred Orage’s socialist magazine, significantly called The New Age. Those were the days when Ezra Pound proclaimed: “I want a new civilization.
Ideas, Histories, Generations and Beliefs: The Early Novels to Sons and Lovers
Authors: Rylance Rick
Published: October 2023

What gave Lawrence’s work its distinctive character in the second decade of the twentieth century? Reviewers of the first three novels appeared perplexed. There was confusion about the author’s social milieu and gender, and irritation that provincial fiction should be so learned in literary and intellectual allusion.1 His characters moved unpredictably between ‘public-houses and dinner parties’ and had deplorable grooming rituals: ‘among their habits is a trick of messing and caressing and stroking each other’s hair or arms’.2 This zoological sneer loped after Lawrence throughout his career. Behind it lurked worries about evolutionary descent from the apes and, more worrying still, the possibility of degenerate reversion. But amid fretfulness about his carelessness with social and literary form, and his shocking lack of sexual reticence (a charge that began with The Trespasser in 1912), the central issue was bewilderment about his meaning. Few denied his talent; fewer still had a collected sense of where it led:
International Complaint Procedures
Authors: Anaya S James
Published: October 2023

The procedures described in the previous chapter provide varying levels of ongoing international scrutiny that encourages state action to implement international norms concerning indigenous peoples. In addition to those procedures are international mechanisms, in some cases involving the same international institutions, that are specifically designed to examine complaints of human rights abuses and, as a matter of course, to lead to decisions or recommendations in response to the complaints. International complaint procedures, which may generate heightened scrutiny on problem situations, are important adjuncts to the compliance-monitoring procedures ordinarily functioning in less contentious contexts.
The General Prologue and Estates Literature
Authors: Mann Jill
Published: October 2023

The meanings of the word “estate” which concern us are defined by the Middle English Dictionary (MED) as follows: “a class of persons, especially a social or political class or group; also a member of a particular class or rank,” and “a person’s position in society... social class.” To these definitions I think it necessary to add a particular reference to the role played by a person’s work in determining the estate to which he or she belongs. It is true that the estates included in estates literature are not classified only in terms of what we would now recognize as their occupation; they can, for example, be distinguished according to clerical or marital status. But clerical and marital status inevitably include some notion of the particular duties and temptations of the work that accompanies them.
Imagery, Structure, and Theme in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale
Authors: Wentersdorf Karl
Published: October 2023

The Merchant’s Tale of January and May is by common consent one of the finest examples of Chaucer’s narrative art. Structurally, the story falls into two carefully balanced and slightly overlapping parts. In the first part (1245–1865),1 we are introduced in detail to the character and marital intentions of the elderly knight, January; the introduction is followed by a debate between his two brethren over the advisability of his plan to marry a young woman: Placebo encourages him, Justinus warns against the marriage. January decides to take young May as his wife; he makes preparations for the wedding, and the first half of the story culminates in a description of the bridal festivities and the subsequent consummation of the marriage. The second part of the tale (1768–2418), beginning just before the Merchant has completed his account of the wedding, starts with a description of the old knight’s young squire, Damian, who is lovesick for May from the moment he sets eyes on her; May decides to take Damian as her lover as soon as the opportunity arises. In January’s walled garden, where the lovers’ first rendezvous is to take place, there is a debate—this time supernatural—over May’s intention of cuckolding her husband, in the course of which Pluto announces his opposition to the adultery and his young wife, Proserpine, decides to take May’s part.
A Reading of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
Authors: Pearsall Derek
Published: October 2023

There has hardly been a time when the Nun’s Priest’s Tale has not been appreciated as one of the wittiest and most accomplished poems in

the English language. Readers have been delighted by its inexhaustible ingenuity and inventiveness and by its irreverent mockery of the solemn apparatus of human learning and rhetoric; they have warmed to its generous portrayal of the all-too-human foibles and weaknesses of its barnyard hero. If one were looking for Chaucer’s most perfect poem—not the one with the loftiest ambitions but the one that most fully achieves the ideas implied in its form—it would certainly be a serious rival to Coleridge’s choice, the Miller’s Tale. It is a tale also of hidden depths, shoals for the unwary, unplumbable abysses of multiple signification. The development in recent years of more sophisticated techniques of literary analysis has been notable for the light it has thrown on this most sophisticated of Chaucer’s poems, but it is likely to remain elusive. Elusiveness is indeed its character, and the life and wisdom it contains are of a kind that must necessarily defy formulation. It is not always easy to resist the temptation to substitute an interpretive paraphrase for one’s lived experience of reading a work of literature. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in fact, offers us an explicit invitation to do just that (“Taketh the moralite.. .”).
The Nun’s Priest’s Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse
Authors: Rhodes Jim
Published: October 2023

In his tale, the Nun’s Priest suspends his narrative in order to address a specific theological problem that arises within it. In the familiar and oft-cited passage on free will and predestination (3215–50), theological and literary interests converge on the meaning of philosophical truth. The passage opens with the Nun’s Priest wondering if Chauntecleer is destined to perish in the jaws of the fox because whatever God foresees “moot nedes bee,” a view he immediately qualifies by adding the comment, “After the opinioun of certein clerkis.” The earlier debate between Chauntecleer and Pertelote over the meaning of dreams nicely anticipates and parodies these clerkly debates in their infLexibility and their self-canceling appeals to authority and precedent. Through the parody, the Nun’s Priest puts the reader on the alert to his own artful manipulation of language and intellectual distance from the emotions of this debate. When he turns to the aforementioned clerks for an authoritative resolution to the question of Chauntecleer’s freedom, he encounters a bewildering welter of opinion.
Introduction
Authors: Michie Elsie B
Published: October 2023

When jane eyre first appeared in 1847, the passionate voice of its first-person heroine took the Victorian literary world by storm. Contemporary reviewers called it “an extraordinary book,” “unlike all that we have read,” full of “originality and freshness” (Allott 78, 79, 87). Readers loved it even more than critics; “the public taste seems to have outstripped its guides in appreciating the remarkable power which this book displays” (Allott 88). An American journal characterized New England as suffering from “Jane Eyre fever” (Allott 97). Queen Victoria wrote in her diaries that she stayed up till half past eleven reading to Prince Albert out of “that melancholy, interesting book, Jane Eyre” (Allott 389). The energy that made Brontë’s novel so compelling also meant it risked being unconventional, irreligious, improper, and revolutionary. One contemporary reviewer criticized it for “moral Jacobinism,” a point expanded by Lady Eastlake, who described it as “pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition” that echoed “the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine” (Allott 109–10). Jane Eyre’s combination of confident selfassertion and rebelliousness has intrigued readers and critics from the time the novel was first published to the present moment.
Romance And Anti-Romance From Brontë’S Jane Eyre To Rhys’S Wide Sargasso Sea
Authors: Oates Joyce Carol
Published: October 2023

Jean rhy’s haunting and hallucinatory prose poem of a novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), boldly tells the story—authentic, intimate, and unsparing, because first-person confession—of Mrs. Bertha Rochester, the doomed madwoman of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Yet Rhys’s novel is more than a remarkably inspired tour de force, a modernist revision of a great Victorian classic: it is an attempt to evoke, by means of a highly compressed and elliptical poetic language, the authentic experience of madness— more precisely, of being driven into madness; and it is a brilliantly sustained anti-romance, a reverse mirror image of Jane Eyre’s and Rochester’s England. Rhys’s sympathy is fully with the innocent Creole heiress who is married off to the visiting Englishman, Rochester, and trapped in a loveless (but not, it seems, atypical) marriage: born Antoinette, she is rebaptized Bertha by her husband, and brought back to England, to Thornfield, to be kept in captivity like a wild animal. When Jane Eyre is surprised by the “Vampyre” in chapter 25 of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Bertha has become a savage, “fearful and ghastly,” and possessed of a “discolored” and “lurid” visage; glimpsed more closely, she is not a human figure at all, but bestial, repellent. (“It grovelled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.”) Yet the first Mrs. Rochester, in Rhys’s novel, is despised by her Englishman husband precisely because she is beautiful, and because, in the frank sensuousness of her beauty, she is aligned with the “magic” of the West Indies which he finds treacherous. One way of life, one vision, makes war upon its opposite; for all of the West Indies is dismissed by Rochester as dreamlike and unreal, just as, by extension, all of the non(or anti-) English world must be dismissed by the English, before it can be conquered and exploited. (Rhys’s novel is set in the 1830s and 1840s.)
New Roles for External Players
Authors: Davis Richard
Published: October 2023

The Supreme Court nomination process today is not one where those involved are merely the traditional, Constitutionally defined players. External forces play significant new roles. Interest groups, the press, and the public now perform functions within the process that are affected by and affect each other’s involvement, as well as the roles of the traditional players—the president, the Senate, and the Court. This chapter enumerates permanent roles now performed by players who only occasionally participated in the past.
General Browsing, Focused Browsing, and Use of Classified Bookstacks
Authors: Mann Thomas
Published: October 2023

The fact that books in libraries are shelved by subject, rather than by accession numbers or by the height of the volumes, gives researchers a major advantage in gaining subject access to their contents—one that, in many cases, cannot be matched by any computer searches. This advantage, however, is nowadays in jeopardy from many library administrators who often assume that the shelving of books by subject is no longer necessary in a “digital age.” Part of this view stems from the library profession’s difficulty in distinguishing the real from the imaginary capabilities of computers, and especially in a willful blindness to the difficulty researchers have in trying to actually read book-length texts in electronic formats. Another part springs from inexperienced theorists who believe that all books relevant to a topic can be identified through the prior specification of uncontrolled keywords, in the complete absence of alternative search mechanisms that enable scholars to simply recognize important texts that they cannot specify in advance. Yet another part of the problem springs from academics in the library field who assert that “all formats of information records are equal.” Their conclusion is that, since audiocassettes and DVDs are never sensibly stored in subject arrangements, books, too, do not merit costly preferential treatment in shelving.