Liberation and literature: Naples 1944

The arrival of Anglo‐American forces in Naples on 1 October 1943 precipitated the structural crisis which had beset the capital of the south since its integration into the Italian nation‐state in 1860. This crisis had been masked by the reassuringly engaging ethos of napoletanità, encoded in the urban dialect and crystallized in its literary culture from Matilde Serao and Salvatore Di Giacomo onwards. The myth of napoletanità had been frozen under Fascism, but was shattered by the experience of the war years and after, and only factitiously restored under the political hegemony of the monarchist ship owner Achille Lauro during the 1950s. Young literary Americans such as John Home Burns and William Weaver, who found themselves in Naples with the occupying Allied forces, fell under its spell, while the equally young British military intelligence officer Norman Lewis maintained a detached, but sympathetic, objectivity. The older Tuscan writer, Curzio Malaparte, so provocatively transformed the image of Naples as to earn furious rejection by the city's dominant postwar political circles and by Italy's literary circles. Yet, despite brilliant attempts at restoration by the departed Neapolitan, Giuseppe Marotta, and the much‐loved actor‐playwright Eduardo De Filippo, napoletanità was systematically undermined and demolished by younger Neapolitan writers from Domenico Rea and Anna Maria Ortese to Raffaele La Capria as the city's urban fabric was transformed by appallingly irresponsible property speculators. This article focuses on the literary anthropology of Naples in the 1940s. It explores literary texts and contexts, and the way they problematize Naples as a unified subject or object. It addresses the paradoxical issue of the city's need for liberation from itself, and the time scale of a liberation that perhaps has always been and always will be in fieri.     

Languages as Women: The Feminisation of Linguistic Discourses in Colonial North India

This article locates and analyses the gendered discourses of Hindi and Urdu linguistic identity in late nineteenth‐century colonial north India. Using a new concept of language woman, it characterises the multiple discourses of feminisation through three distinctive terms of linguistic femininity, linguistic morality and linguistic patriarchy. These three modes of representation and articulation of feminised discourses over Hindi and Urdu languages are explored using the concept of heteronormativity as a political, ideological and social–cultural construct. The paper argues that language woman established an intimate bond between nationalisation and feminisation of the dominant Hindi linguistic identity in private and public domains as not mutually opposed but complementary and reproducible of each other.     

Woman and Violence in Artistic Discourse of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–1922)

This article examines visual and literary representations of violence against women produced during the period. The image of a woman suffering from violence is presented from different points of view in literary art works of the Revolution and Civil War time. It was created and circulated among Red and White camps mainly in accordance with the task of propaganda bodies. Among the object of violence there are allegoric women's figures, symbolising Russia, revolution, freedom, well‐known heroines from literature, historic personages and contemporary women – ordinary victims of civil confrontation and direct participants of the Revolution and war. Men or symbols traditionally personifying masculine origin were nearly always the perpetrators of violence, and the image of the female victim was exploited for the strong emotions it evoked. In most cases physical violence against women was treated as anomaly. But the control of the regime over the woman's emotional sphere had become a standard everywhere.     

Public reason and private passion

Distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dimensions of human life have traditionally been associated with philosophical distinctions between Reason and other, supposedly lesser, mental traits, such as passions and desires. This paper examines the ways in which these associations have affected character ideals associated with citizenship and our understanding of sexual difference. It discusses, in particular, Hegel's idea, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that female consciousness is constituted through the exclusion of women from the public domain, and relates it to earlier interconnections between the male‐female and public‐private distinctions in Rousseau, Hume and Kant.     

The Poeta Saxo at Paderborn: episcopal authority and Carolingian rule in late ninth‐century Saxony

This paper argues that the Poeta Saxo's epic poem about Charlemagne was composed at the bishopric of Paderborn as part of a wider literary programme that included both the Translatio sancti Liborii and the Vita sancti Liborii. Near the close of the ninth century, when Paderborn's renown and resources were at their lowest ebb, these three works articulated an image of episcopal authority, touted the pre‐eminence of Paderborn, and made a bid for royal patronage.     

The politics of the public and private spheres: the High Court’s decision in Monis and the gendered privileging of free speech

The High Court of Australia’s decision in Monis v The Queen and Droudis v The Queen concerned whether Monis and Droudis’s use of the postal service to send offensive letters warranted the constitutional protection of the implied freedom of political communication. The outcome was a split decision: the three men judges found for Monis and Droudis, and the three women judges against. We argue that this decision was significant because it draws attention to the law’s key role in framing political understandings of the nature of and demarcation between public and private spheres. The Court’s interpretations concerning how we should understand and apply the foundational relationships binding the state, the individual, and the public and private spheres in the twenty-first century highlights the gendered complexities of the politics shaping those relationships. It also highlights the gendered privileging of what sort of speech should be exempted from the law’s immediate purview, and in so doing, further reveals the masculinism upon which Australia’s constitutional framework rests.     

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

从视觉史料到文学图像——文学史的图像学研究刍议

发掘图像的文学史意义成为文学史研究取得突破的重要途径。图像的文学史意义主要表现为两方面:一、文献学意义上的视觉史料,图像作为印证相关社会历史知识的可视证据;二、阐释学意义上的视觉文本,图像作为文学的视觉化形态,成为文学史的基本构成之一。文学图像成为重新理解和阐释文学史的重要视角。图文互释是图像的文学史意义更为本质的体现。     

Suffragettes and Shrews: Unruly British Women in the Early Chinese Press (1900s–1910s)

This article examines the image of the British suffragettes in the early Chinese press up to the 1910s. By widely surveying newspapers and magazines, it shows that the common adoption of the shrew trope in depicting the suffragettes went beyond a reductive translational interaction between the West and the East. People's Stand, The Eastern Miscellany and other periodical publications present different ways in which diction, images, literary legacy, gender tradition and cultural demands all came into play in reconfiguring the Chinese shrew and her connections to the Western suffragettes. The shrew–suffragette linkage debunks notions of selling strategies and editorial ambivalence underlying the gesture of the press. Yet it was precisely this ambiguity that rendered the shrew image so polysemic and fruitful, eventually allowing this traditional character type to be positively associated with the new woman models in Chinese progressive discourses.     

Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the boundaries of public and private spheres

Many scholars have examined the implications and effects of a putative dichotomy between public-as-masculine and private-as-feminine spheres on community activism, and suggest that women's community activism blurs this ideological divide in numerous ways. This article draws on a case study of a siting conflict in St. James Parish, Louisiana, to examine how, in the process of blurring boundaries between gendered spheres of interest and activity, predominantly women environmental justice activists contended with differently gendered contexts. Concepts of performance and performativity shed light on how gendered hierarchies of public and private sphere activism both constrained and enabled the protest group's political practice.     

Lying and deception in the Biblical and post‐Biblical Judaic tradition

Abstract

A great variety of cuneiform texts have been found within the precincts of the high priest's building complex in ancient Ugarit. Some of the texts are letters, others are lexical texts and others again are ritual texts. The great epics of aqht and krt are best described as literary texts. Some of the texts, however, do not unambiguously belong to one group only: Some scholars would construe the Baal‐cycle as a ritual text or at least a text somehow connected with the cult performed in the temples; others would describe the Baal‐cycle as pure literature. Similarly the enigmatic text about Shachar and Shalim (abbreviated SS) apparently contains cultic and literary elements. Is this text then a cult‐text or a piece of literature? The aim of the article is to investigate if from the archaeological evidence we can add an argument to the on‐going debate about the Sitz im Leben of the Ugaritic Baal‐cycle: Were the clay tablets in the high priest's building distributed according to their content? The answer seems to be yes. The Baal‐cycle was in fact stored with other literary texts in the high priest's building whereas SS has been kept in the room of the ritual texts. This fact might give us a hint as to how to interpret these two texts.     

The Unstable People of a Tumultuous Land: Persia Through the Eyes and Feet of Hajji Baba of Isfahan

For the English interested in Persia in the nineteenth century, James Morier's Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isfahan was a crucial text, as it also was for Iranians who read its groundbreaking Persian translation almost half a century later. The text provided a persuasive understanding of Persia that has endured in the western imagination. This paper begins with the framing narrative and shows how the frame story sets the stage for a convincing literary portrait of Persia and Persians. Then it analyzes the image of Persia constructed in this book through the characterization of Hajji Baba as representative of Persians, and the geopolitical portrayal of the country that emerges from the account of his travels.     

Behçet Kemal Çağlar's Kur’ân‐ı Kerîm'den İlhamlar (Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān): A Kemalist's Personal,Poetic Response to the Qur’ān

Behçet Kemal Ça?lar, 1908–1969, is the author of a commentary of the Qur’ān, Kur’ân‐? Kerîm'den ?lhamlar (‘Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān’), published in 1966. This work can be described as a poetic reflection on the Qur’ān. It does not adhere to rendering every line or verse, but instead insists on maintaining a rhythmic cadence and end‐rhyme. Although it resembles a translation in some ways, Ça?lar refuses to call his work a translation. This paper begins by introducing Ça?lar and his text, a brief history of Turkish translations of the Qur’ān, then Ça?lar's approach is contrasted with the aims of translators of the Qur’ān. Ça?lar's text is studied in more detail, providing a sample of the Turkish text and a translation of it into English, focusing on Ça?lar's reflection on Sūrat ?aha. Through this study, it becomes clear that as a result of his prioritizing the literary aspects of the Qur’ān in his reflection, Ça?lar's book has an advantage over literal translations of the Qur'an and it can be useful for Qur’ān translation. At the same time, Ça?lar's book is a reflection of a desire to develop a Turkish Islam—a manifestation of Islam that came from Turkey, that reflected its language and culture and that was intelligible to its people.     

Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra in Translation: A Century of Interpretation of a Sanskrit Mahāyāna Text

Many translations of ?āntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra, a Sanskrit Mahāyāna Buddhist text of seventh/eighth‐century India, have been published since 1892. ?āntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra is one of the few Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist texts available in Sanskrit and it was influential in Tibetan Buddhist schools. This article explores how translation of the Bodhicaryāvatāra is no longer the preserve of scholars but has moved to being carried out by Buddhist practitioners influenced by Tibetan schools of Buddhism. It shows how translators’ motives for translating the text have reflected changing attitudes to Buddhism and its texts. ?āntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra has been translated as a source of information, a literary work, an inspirational work and, with the rise of Western interest in Tibetan Buddhism in the late twentieth century, as a vehicle for the transmission of Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, further scholarly investigation of the Sanskrit text of the Bodhicaryāvatāra remains to be done.     

Personal lives: narrative accounts of Irish women in the diaspora

The burst of writing about Irish women in the diaspora after the 1980s, led by Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O'Brien's Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain, coincided with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and literary representation. This paper uses Carol Smart's concepts of Personal Life (2007) – memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and the imaginary – to examine a range of ways in which personal narratives have become central to our understandings of Irish women and their descendants in both written and visual representations. It interweaves disciplines, bringing together a wide range of sources including academic and public accounts in which Irish women appear both as main characters and in walk-on parts. It explores constructions of these ‘fictions’ and their connections with the biographies of authors.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.     

John Toland's Conjecture on the First Invention of Typographic Printing as Inspired by Cicero: Text and Context

This is a translation of a short text in Latin by John Toland (1670–1722), with an introduction and annotations. Toland's text is a conjecture on the influence of a passage from Cicero on modern printing. The translator's introduction discusses the theories mentioned by Toland, and sketches the background of the text. It discusses Toland's interest in Cicero and the context of the text's publication in 1722 by Michel Maittaire, and Toland's and Maittaire's intertwined circles of literary patronage.     

Rape on the Railway: Women,Safety, and Moral Panic in Victorian Newspapers

In the Victorian press, the railway carriage was painted as a site of particular danger for women travelling alone. As a hybrid public and private space, the carriage placed strangers together in an intimate, quasi-domestic setting for which there were few established norms of behaviour. When male and female solo travellers found themselves confined together, it set the scene both for sexual assault and for false charges of assault, which the newspapers played upon; solo female travellers were depicted as either potential victims or potential Potiphar's wives. These representations were prominent in two moral panics that attempted to regulate women's movement. In this article, I examine accounts of sexual assault from the Lancet, The Times, the English Leader, and the People's Advocate from the 1860s and 1870s and consider newspaper reports as a source of erotic stimulation in a late-century pornographic novel, Raped on the Railway. I argue that the newspapers' fascination with sexual violence on trains, while connected to the weakened division between public and private spaces and an association of railway engines with virility, was primarily a response to fears about women's increasing freedom.