Notes on Contributors

The author contends that Leonardo Sciascia's L’affaire Moro is not a work of non-fiction, as Sciascia proposed, but of historical fiction, and that Sciascia's Moro is a literary character, more a spokesperson for Sciascia's political views than a reflection of the historical figure. Sciascia's Moro embodies the same qualities as many of Sciascia's other protagonists, such as a radical individualism and willingness to sacrifice all in order to protect their dignity and liberty. What emanates from the text is a ‘postmodern’ blend that interprets and imposes a narrative hierarchy on events, and conveys a mental reality that need not necessarily coincide with what can be proven with evidence. In fact, Sciascia combines factual information and his own ‘conjectural knowledge’ to convince his reader of the ‘moral truth’ of his argument. Sciascia's is indeed a strong narrative in that it succeeded in shaping how the Italian public views to this day a critical juncture in its recent history.     

Uncomfortable proximity. Literary technique,authorial provocations and dog whistles in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction

ABSTRACT

In 2002, following an interview with the magazine Lire where he described Islam as ‘la religion la plus con’, Michel Houellebecq was prosecuted, and eventually acquitted, for ‘injure raciale et incitation à la haine religieuse’. In discussions of Houellebecq’s case, supporters were quick to invoke the ‘special value’ of the literary space for the free discussion of ideas, however provocative or unpalatable. Houellebecq’s acquittal, and support from figures such as Salman Rushdie, have afforded the writer an unprecedented degree of literary freedom. Subsequent novels such as La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and Soumission (2015) show the author fully inhabiting this freedom in order to undertake a provocative critique of Islam. This article explores how both literary technique and authorial presence endorses the controversial ideas of his texts within Houellebecq’s writing and demonstrates how a movement from ambiguously undermining towards reinforcing those ideas can be observed. In particular, the framing of provocative ideas and assertions expounded in his fiction has become less robust throughout his career. This leads to, I suggest, a greater porosity between Houellebecq’s fiction and that of contemporary right-wing essayists such as Alain Finkielkraut and Renaud Camus.     

Mauna Kea: Two Cultures and the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center

When Snow wrote delivered his lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ in 1959, he considered this to be a phenomenon that had British, Western and global significance. This article looks at how Snow's ideas play out in the setting of Hawai'i from the early contact with Western navigators through to current disputes over the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea. ‘Mutual incomprehension’, identified by Snow as the chief characteristics of his two cultures are clearly seen to be at play in Western-Hawai'ian encounters.

This article places the TMT disputes in the setting of the Hawai'ian Renaissance, a movement that has gathered pace since the 1960s. It looks Gieryn's notions of ‘boundary work’ and that of Star and Griesemer on ‘boundary objects’ as ways of framing the discussion. The final focus of the article is the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo as a ‘place of safe disagreement’.     

Redefining the Republic of Letters: The Literary Public and Mudie’s Circulating Library

In late 1860, Charles Mudie’s plans to expand his circulating library inspired his detractors and competitors to challenge the validity of his ‘right to selection’ – the process by which he chose which texts he would loan from his library. Over the next few months, prominent periodicals featured correspondence and editorials that decried or supported Mudie’s ostensible monopoly over literary exchange. While the initial argument was economic, the dispute extended beyond economics to religion, literary quality and culture. To connect these disparate fields, writers turned to the politics of interpretation: that is, whether specialists should define literary culture, or if a public comprised of individual, ‘common’ readers should determine their own standards for books. Mudie’s opponents advocated for individual readers’ right to read what they liked, how they liked. His supporters argued that the public needed specialists to guide their literary tastes. The resulting exchange about what I call the ‘literary public’ amplified conversations integral to the burgeoning field of literary studies as it was emerging in the London colleges through the 1850s and 1860s. The contributing authors, publishers and critics justified or refuted ideas foundational to the establishment of English literature as an academic study for the common reader. As part of the mid-century confrontation between popular literary consumption and academic culture, the Mudie debate helped to politicize the reception and circulation of English literature.     

A masculinist northern wilderness and the emancipatory potential of literary irony

There has been an increasing body of critical research in modern literary geography claiming that forms of social oppression and injustice can become established through the institution of literature. It has also been stated that literature can equally well act as an emancipatory ‘tool’ through which subjugated histories are rewritten. This article is concerned with the colonialist history of Finnish northern literature, Lapland romanticism, the exoticism of nature and the interrelations of these with masculinism and sexist oppression. It discusses how northern nature is romanticized through literary stereotypes based on masculinist values and a multidimensional social process of sexism, and how the regional marginalization of northern Finland has been justified at the same time. The primary focus is on the emancipatory potential of untraditional northern literature, on a northern female author, Rosa Liksom, who through her unconventional literary irony has functioned as an emancipatory ‘project’ against the masculinist stereotypes of the northern wilderness. Liksom's literary irony serves as a metafictive ‘method’ working in pursuit of revealing its own discursive structure, as a strategy through which literary conventions and their wider social context become deconstructed.     

Jerome,Alcuin and Vergil's ‘Old entellus’

In 798, Alcuin quarreled with Charlemagne's court scholars over the calculation of the lunar saltus. In Epistola 145, an important source for this argument, Alcuin called his rivals the ‘Egyptian boys’, because they wanted to follow Alexandrian custom, which began the Easter cycle on 1 September instead of the Roman 1 January. Alcuin expressed his anger with the ‘boys’ over their violation of Roman custom by quoting aptly from Jerome's letters. Jerome's warning to Augustine in Epistola 102.2, to remember Vergil's Dares and Entellus, suggested to Alcuin that his scholarly debate with the ‘boys’ should become a boxing match. Accordingly, Alcuin became ‘old Entellus’, whom Charlemagne's young scholars had hit unfairly with their criticism. In Epistola 145, Alcuin jabbed at the weak logic of the ‘Egyptians’ and satirized their ignorance. Besides revealing Alcuin's literary techniques, Epistola 145 is important for illuminating the tensions in Alcuin's relationship with Charlemagne.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

France - History and Story

Although the career of Thierry de Martel, one of France's most illustrious neurosurgeons, would seem primarily of interest to historians of medicine, his life and self‐inflicted death can be inscribed into different contexts. De Martel can be considered representative of what Jean Touchard calls ‘l'esprit des années trente’, a spirit both of malaise and revolt which prompted many among the First World War generation to seek new political and intellectual alternatives to replace what they deemed the morally bankrupt ones of the Third Republic. Both because of his connections with Parisian literary and political circles, and the paradoxical nature of his ideological itinerary between the wars (encompassing both proto‐fascism and Germanophobia), de Martel's case is particularly interesting. This biographical portrait of a previously unstudied ‘nonconformist’ in turn serves as a prism through which to view the ferment of the interwar period.     

The Greek Communist Party (KKE) and the Greek-Italian War, 1940–1: an Analysis of Zahariadis' Three Letters

Abstract

An analysis of the position of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) during the Greek-Italian war is interesting not only because it involves a hitherto unsolved puzzle – how and why the KKE's General Secretary, Nikos Zahariadis, wrote his ‘three letters’ – but also because, it involves background factors that help explain how the KKE emerged, during the occupation period, in possession of an invaluably useful ‘patriotic’ image. Such an image, obtained from Zahariadis' ‘first’ letter, undeniably facilitated the party's successful efforts to build up the country's largest liberation movement (EAM) and, through this movement, to come close to capturing power during the years 1943–4.     

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.     

Beyond the stereotypes: Mary Lavin's Irish women

This paper discusses Mary Lavin's place within the Irish literary tradition by means of an analysis of her representations of female characters. It argues, first, that Lavin's short stories depart from the short story tradition in general and the Irish short story tradition in particular by failing to subscribe to the cultivation of the romantic outsider and focusing instead on family relations and social responsibilities. Second, Mary Lavin's marginal position in a feminist or female literary tradition is explained through her unwillingness to portray women as victims and through the absence of a clear critique of patriarchy in her work. The paper then tries to characterise the relationship between individual and society in Lavin's short fiction in a more positive way, by focusing on the notions of individual fate and personal responsibility, which turn out to be crucial to Mary Lavin's philosophy. This philosophy is first discussed explicitly in a reading of the story ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Widow's Son’ and subsequently shown to lie behind the oppositions and dilemmas in several other stories. Finally, the article demonstrates how Lavin manages to realise her Nietzschean belief in an Amor Fati in some of her most positive female characters through a clever use of imagery and point of view, without thereby succumbing to sentimentality or cliché.     

Syria: from ‘authoritarian upgrading’ to revolution?

Syria was, until recently, seen as a ‘successful’ example of authoritarian ‘upgrading’ or ‘modernization;’ yet in 2011 the Syrian regime faced revolution from below: what went wrong? Bashar al‐Asad inherited a flawed regime yet managed to start the integration of his country into the world capitalist market, without forfeiting the nationalist card by, for instance, attempting to acquire legitimacy from opposition to Israel and the US invasion of Iraq. Yet, despite his expectations and that of most analysts, his regime proved susceptible to the Arab uprising. This article examines the causes and development of the Syrian uprising of 2011. It contextualizes the revolt by showing how the construction of the regime built in vulnerabilities requiring constant ‘upgradings’ that produced a more durable regime but had long term costs. It focuses on Bashar al‐Asad's struggles to ‘modernize’ authoritarianism by consolidating his own ‘reformist’ faction, balancing between the regime's nationalist legitimacy and its need for incorporation into the world economy; his shifting of the regime's social base to a new class of crony capitalists; and his effort to manage participatory pressures through limited liberalization and ‘divide and rule’. The seeds of the uprising are located in these changes, notably the abandonment of the regime's rural constituency and debilitating of its institutions. Yet, it was Asad's inadequate response to legitimate grievances and excessive repression that turned demands for reform into attempted revolution. The article then analyses the uprising, looking at the contrary social bases and strategies of regime and opposition, and the dynamics by which violence and foreign intervention have escalated, before finishing with comments on the likely prognosis.     

Crisis in consciousness: The thought of Ernst Troeltsch

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobetti's thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italy's failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobetti's views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.     

British Perceptions and Responses to Sultan Ali Dinar of Darfur, 1915–16

This article illustrates how British perceptions of Sultan Ali Dinar of Darfur, in the context of the First World War, led to the downfall of his sultanate in 1916. It shows how the paranoia of the ‘imperial mind’ amplified the threat of militant Islam, personified by Ali Dinar, through the conviction that he was involved with outside enemy forces. British certainty of Ottoman and German complicity in the sultan's belligerence was presented with great intensity by officials, a conviction which formed a central justification for this extension of British rule in Saharan Africa. British officials actively propagated the idea of outside forces having a pernicious influence on Ali Dinar's bellicosity. Through their dogged insistence on this interpretative trope, the British elided other complex factors that informed the sultan's defiance, and misunderstood the internal divisions and stresses in Darfuri society that limited the effectiveness of his jihad. This article goes beyond existing studies by presenting a close analysis of the colonial record to examine in greater detail these two perceptions of Ali Dinar as ‘Muslim fanatic’ and ‘Turco-German co-conspirator’. In a new departure from existing works, this article analyses British views of Ali Dinar after Darfur was occupied, explores the sultan's motivations for his declaration of jihad against the British, and sheds light on the responses of ordinary Darfuris to their sultan‘s doomed defiance of the region's dominant power.     

Mountbatten and India, 1948–64

This article brings to light Lord Mountbatten's continuing links with India after 1948 - a neglected aspect of his life and career. It probes his involvement and influence in Indian affairs through his personal relationships and professional experience. In doing so, it presents Mountbatten as the personification of the change in Indo-British ties from those of empire to dominion and beyond. On the three key issues of Hyderabad, arms sales, and Kashmir, this article evaluates his role as a ‘friend of India’ in the West as well as a conduit for the British government(s) of the day to reach out to Nehru. Considering the scope and limits of ‘influence of friendship, it shows that Mountbatten remained characteristically involved in India after his departure and this was appreciated by both Nehru and his British counterparts. Mountbatten epitomised the old ties, which continued to bind India to Britain, after the empire and through the Commonwealth. His views were offered and sought; how much they influenced remains a matter of emphasis, but that he was involved cannot be denied. The weakening of Mountbatten's involvement and influence after Jawaharlal Nehru's death in 1964 represented the wider, generational weakening of Indo-British association.     

Ten years on: Obama's war on terrorism in rhetoric and practice

Ten years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long‐term struggle with what George W. Bush termed the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘war on terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the Bush administration policy, conducting a counterterrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective—smarter, better, nimbler, stronger. This article demonstrates, however, that those expecting wholesale changes to US counterterrorism policy misread Obama's intentions. It argues that Obama always intended to deepen Bush's commitment to counterterrorism while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush's institutionalized construction of a global war on terror, the continuities in counterterrorism can be explained by Obama's shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US. The article assesses whether Obama has pursued a more effective counterterrorism policy than his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantánamo Bay and torture, the uses of unmanned drone attacks and domestic wire‐tapping, this article argues that Obama's ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last ten years but also that it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.     

Yellowstone embodied: Truman Everts' ‘Thirty-seven days of peril’

In September 1870, explorer Truman C. Everts, a member of the Washburn-Doane expedition to the then little-known region of the Upper Valley of the Yellowstone River, became separated from the main party and found himself without his horse and supplies alone in the ‘wilderness’. Everts spent 37 days struggling to effect his escape from his life-threatening predicament before being rescued by a two-man search party. The news of his separation, conjecture as to his possible fate, and reports of his subsequent rescue caused a sensation both locally and nationally and consequently earned celebrity for Everts and, crucially, for the place where the calamity occurred. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and non-representational work in cultural geography which explores the relation between self and world, body and landscape, this article revisits Everts' 1871 account of his ‘perilous’ misadventure to consider how his encounter with Yellowstone was embodied and, through its retelling, ultimately became inscribed on the place itself.     

Tzvetan Todorov,the ‘Responsible Intellectual’, and the new world disorder

This article assesses Tzvetan Todorov's intellectual evolution from structuralist literary critic to ‘responsible intellectual’. It contrasts his notion of the responsibility of the intellectual with traditional definitions of commitment, and analyses why for Todorov figures such as Camus, Aron, and Tillion are exemplary, whereas Communist intellectuals are not. The article examines Todorov's positions vis‐à‐vis current crises and controversies, including the bombing of Kosovo, the validity of the ICT, and America's war in Iraq. Finally, it discusses Todorov's ideas for a stronger and more independent Europe as articulated in his most recent book, Le Nouveau Désordre mondial.