REVIEW ESSAY: THE FRAGILITY OF CHILDHOOD: GABRIELLE ROY'S CES ENFANTS DE MA VIE

Both Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence have named L.M. Montgomery’s work— particularly her books about Emily—as childhood readings that are central to their development as writers. This essay explores how Montgomery’s three books about Emily—Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily’s Quest—provide a persisting imaginary that The Diviners by Laurence and Who Do You Think You Are? by Munro reflect.     

Mary Shelley’s ‘Romantic Spinozism’

ABSTRACT

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelley’s reception of Spinoza begins with the fragment of the otherwise lost translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) on which she collaborated. It extends through her journals, letters, poetry, and her second great work of speculative fiction after Frankenstein (1818): a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2100, The Last Man (1826). Through a creative synthesis of Spinoza with Plato, Cicero, Wollstonecraft, and Glasite Christianity, Shelley developed an anti-apocalyptic conception of love as apocatastasis: a cyclical restoration of an ethical attitude of stewardship toward the whole world and its necessity. Through this recovery of a vital chapter in the history of European ideas, Shelley emerges as a central figure in Spinozan philosophy, especially the ethics and political philosophy of love.     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.     

Compassionate Protector of America: The Symbolism of Old Hickory in a Jackson Woman's Mind

Serving as America's only female newspaper editor during the election of 1832, Anne Royall became possibly the first public “Jackson Woman” by supporting the chief executive's bid for re-election in her sheet titled Paul Pry. A closer look at Royall's recollections from her travels in Alabama from 1818 to 1822 shows her to be a blooming “Jackson Woman” developing before the Jackson party was even conceived. In 1828, Royall's Black Books produced a scathing indictment of American society. Both the Adams and Jackson campaigns actively recruited her for their mud-slinging contest but she declined. Three years later Royall started printing Paul Pry. The Black Books and Paul Pry gave Royall a public voice, and she was not afraid to use it. Between 1818 and 1832, Anne Royall went from being a Jackson admirer to being a public Jackson woman.     

‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard's She

This essay examines the nineteenth-century debate about an imagined matriarchal past, arguing that it raised significant questions about gender and history. It scrutinizes the interdisciplinary nature of the debate, demonstrating that anthropology and literature intersected in a fraught investigation of ‘mother-rule’. The essay contends that H. Rider Haggard's novel She (1887) engages in complex ways with anthropological visions of a matriarchal past. The work of the major matriarchal theorists, J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, and L. H. Morgan, often seen as triumphalist accounts of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, was beset by tensions about gender, power, and temporality, caught between evolutionary meliorism and nostalgia, between a defence of patriarchy and recognition of cultural variability. Haggard's She, the essay argues, exposes and deepens the tensions at the heart of the anthropological narrative. Critics have conventionally read She as a matriarchal dystopia, yet the novel offers an ambivalent dramatization of matriarchy, and is attracted as well as repelled by the matriarchal past embodied in the white African queen Ayesha and her people, the Amahagger. More than a femme fatale, Ayesha is sorceress and scientist, harbinger of life and of death; even her violence unsettles assumptions about gender and power. Haggard's evocation of the Amahaggers’ marriage practices works to question the anthropologists’ hierarchical cultural evolutionism, moving towards an appreciation of plural cultures. The narrative's insistence on cyclical temporalities also disrupts a linear narrative of progress from matriarchy to patriarchy, conveying the potent attractions of a resurgent female past.     

The Case of Beatrice Brooke: Fictions of Law and Marriage in Caroline Norton's Lost and Saved (1863)

In comparison with her influential political essays on matters of child custody, divorce and marital property settlements, the novels of Caroline Norton remain relatively under-studied. The purpose of this article is to revisit one of these novels, Lost and Saved, published in 1863, and to do so more particularly as an exercise in literary jurisprudence. It argues that the story of Beatrice Brooke, the unfortunate heroine of the novel, is shaped in considerable part by the law; first, by the peculiar terms of a probate settlement which serves to preclude her marriage to her ultimately duplicitous lover Montagu Treherne, and then second, by the broader terms of matrimonial law in nineteenth-century England, the construction of which serves to delude Beatrice into thinking that an ‘irregular’ marriage to Treherne enjoys some residual legal force. Though the medium is very different, the critique of marriage presented in Lost and Saved is just as urgent as that engaged in Norton's more famous political essays.     

The Lost Library of Anne Conway

ABSTRACT

The philosopher Anne Conway (1631-1679) owned a large library, and her reading and book ownership shaped her intellectual life in distinctive ways. Until now, however, almost nothing has been known about the details of her reading or her book collection. Current scholarship assumes that her library, like that of her husband, the third Viscount Conway (c. 1623–1683), was lost or dispersed after her death. This article presents previously unrecognised evidence of Conway’s book ownership, and identifies, for the first time, the only books currently known to survive from her personal library. It traces their path to their current location in the Old Library of Jesus College, Cambridge, through the library of the soldier, book collector, and Cambridge Fellow Francis Sterling (c. 1652-1692). The article demonstrates that the newly identified books reveal previously unknown patterns of intellectual exchange amongst Conway’s family, and argues that they have significant implications for our understanding of her early intellectual development.     

Facing Climate Change: Andrea Juan's Visual Play with Science and the Sublime

Andrea Juan has responded to climate change in her art since 2002, highlighting the potential enjoyment of uncertainty and the pleasure of discovering this ecological crisis. Through an examination of El bosque invisible: Serie Antártica [The Invisible Forest: The Antarctica Series], 2010, this article will examine how Juan represents environmental transformations through her process, aesthetic choices, and work in Antarctica. Antarctica—an emblem of environmental change and advancements in scientific research—serves as one of the main stages for Juan's placement of colorful fabrics and cloth figures that are meant to represent specific natural phenomena connected to climate change. Juan's documentation of these scenes in videos and digital stills quotes the Romantic tradition of the sublime in landscape painting, the artist-traveller, and a heroic notion of scientific fieldwork, which exposes a continued desire for control despite our increasing knowledge of our limitations, as well as two principal means through which we understand climate change: science and the sublime. Furthermore, the pleasing quality of Juan's art, in spite of the crisis to which she alludes, aligns with contemporary trends that favor participation, pleasure and hope. This tendency itself exposes the uncertainty of art's role in the face of such crises.     

Gombrich’s critique of Hauser’s Social History of Art

This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dialectical materialism and his sociological interpretation of art history. Borrowing arguments from Karl Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich described Hauser’s work as collectivist and deterministic, tendencies at odds with his own conception of art history. However, in his readiness to label Hauser a proponent of historical materialism, Gombrich failed to recognize Hauser’s own criticism of deterministic theories of art, especially formalism. This article investigates Gombrich’s reasons for rejecting Hauser’s sociology of art. It argues Gombrich used Hauser as an ideological counterpoint to his own version of art history, avowedly liberal and individualist in outlook.     

Protecting England and its Church: Lady Anne and the death of Charles Stuart

In 1666, the English physician Thomas Sydenham determined that patients with smallpox could remain contagious for 41 days, that apparent health was no indicator of contagiousness, and that children were the most susceptible of contracting the disease. Yet in 1677, when 12-year-old Lady Anne Stuart (later Queen Anne) contracted smallpox, only 21 days had passed when she was introduced to her 1-month-old stepbrother, Charles Stuart, heir to the throne and likely Catholic king. Charles Stuart subsequently contracted smallpox from Anne, and the infant died of the disease at a time of heightened paranoia regarding the succession of a Catholic heir. This paper assesses the motives, means, and opportunity that may have led to Anne’s meeting with her stepbrother. The intention is not to suggest or prove that a deliberate attempt was made to remove the Catholic heir, rather, the purpose is to explore the reasons, implications, and possibilities that such an act may have occurred. In a period that resounded with conspiracies and threats to the Protestant succession, Charles Stuart’s death, regardless of whether the infection was, or was not, caused with intent, demonstrates a reversal of common fears where the Catholic line was extinguished to the advantage of the Protestant succession. This paper examines Charles’s death and its implications against a background of contemporary medical knowledge, and while it does not suggest that there is unequivocal proof linking Anne as an unwitting agent in a conspiracy, the paper nonetheless assesses the body of evidence that links Anne to Charles Stuart’s death.     

“It was like lightning”: the theatrical resonances of Sarah Kane in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

ABSTRACT

In 2013, Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing was published to much critical acclaim. Commentators were quick to highlight McBride’s Joycean influences – but just as McBride is indebted to her Irish literary predecessor, so too is British playwright Sarah Kane a major influence. The strong resonances between the plays of Sarah Kane and A Girl serve to highlight the theatrical nuance of McBride’s original work. This article will investigate the thematic links of sibling love, grief and guilt in McBride’s novel and Kane’s Cleansed (1996), and the linguistic parallels with 4.48 Psychosis (1998). McBride’s experience as a trained actor encouraged a form of “method-writing” which I contend contributes to the inherent theatricality of her writing. This article ventures to uncover a small part of the huge scholarly potential which lies in the works of Eimear McBride, whose writing brings a uniquely theatrical style to Irish modernism.     

Reframing belonging: affective localism and the early fiction of Reino Rinne

The early fiction of a novelist and journalist born in the north of Finland, Reino Rinne (1913–2002), is illustrative of the post-war interest in a redefinition of cultural belonging. The aim of this article is to offer a reading of Rinne’s works that throws light on the way they exemplify a post-war articulation of affective localism. What is especially characteristic of the affective localism produced in Rinne’s early fiction is the deployment of certain narrative elements, realism as an aesthetic regime, tropes of spatial belonging and historical myths that are endowed with affective charge. A comparison between Rinne's first novel Tunturit hymyilevät. Kuvaus Lapista 1900-luvun alkuvuosilta ([1945a]. The Fells are Smiling. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava), and his collection of short stories Erämaan omia ihmisiä ([1949]. People of the Wilderness. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava), reveals that there was a change in Rinne’s artistic practice. While Rinne’s first novel revolved around a promise of reciprocity and happiness, the collection of short stories shows the dissolution of the optimism that, according to Berlant [(2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press], is at the core of all attachments.     

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.     

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.     

‘A Still Ecstasy of Freedom and Enjoyment’: Walking the City in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This article situates Charlotte Brontë’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth-century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Brontë contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobility theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Brontë foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Brontë offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Brontë to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Brontë as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Brontë studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.     

An interview with Anne Buttimer: an autobiographical window on geographical thought and practice 1965–2005

Anne Buttimer's 40 years of geographical publications have been influential and international in scope. She has also played an important institutional role within the International Geographical Union, culminating in her presidency 2000–2004. The relative invisibility of women's geographical work in histories of the discipline needs to be redressed and it is hoped that this interview might contribute to that wider project. After a brief biographical sketch, the bulk of the article is devoted to an (auto)biographical interview, which addresses Buttimer's work on social geography, values in geography, the humanist and phenomenological schools, the Dialogue Project, and environmental issues, as well as her own gendered career experience and perspectives on gender issues. While Buttimer does not deem herself a theoretical feminist per se, her work has shown sensitivity to gender issues through her concern for the human perspective on geographical issues and knowledge.     

Fashioning the Domestic Novel: Rewriting Narrative Patterns in Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe,Junior and Dress

This article argues that in her 1876 novel Phoebe, Junior, Margaret Oliphant used fashion and dress as a means to rework and modernize the narrative patterns of the domestic novel. In a volume entitled Dress, written for Macmillan’s ‘Art at Home’ series in 1878, Oliphant developed a mode of dress that privileged the adaptation of prevailing forms and fashions to the needs of the individual body. Oliphant saw such an individualist approach to dress as a modern understanding of fashion that favoured change and the adaptation of prevailing styles over the imitation of dominant social and aesthetic forms. This article links Oliphant’s understanding of fashion in her Dress volume with the revisionary narrative process that she exemplified in her writing of Phoebe, Junior. Returning to her series of novels charting the Chronicles of Carlingford after a number of years, Oliphant marked in sartorial terms the social and aesthetic changes that had occurred since the publication of her penultimate Chronicle, Miss Marjoribanks, in 1866. Revising in Phoebe, Junior her earlier novel, the trope of female creativity that linked the pen with the needle, and the conventional narrative patterns of the domestic novel, Oliphant posits a model of artistry based around the image of scissors and a process of cutting in order to create.     

Challenging the Quimera (Sirena) Negra: Unamuno Reads Pardo Bazán

This article examines the literary relationship of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Miguel de Unamuno by analyzing Unamuno's 1905 review of La Quimera, as well as his tribute to Pardo Bazán on the occasion of her death in 1921. These two critical pieces, together with Unamuno's Dos madres and La tía Tula, reveal that while Unamuno dismisses Pardo Bazán's realism in his discussion of her works, he develops in his own fiction alter egos who struggle with dominant female figures, just as he competes with Pardo Bazán's model of authorship.     

José Zorrilla in Mexico: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Question of Artistic Labour

This article explores the strategic use of literary form in the Mexican writings of José Zorrilla. The article focuses on México y los mexicanos (1856), a letter Zorrilla wrote to his fellow Spanish Romantic playwright, Ángel de Saavedra, the Duke of Rivas. Zorrilla’s México y los mexicanos is a rare piece of epistolary writing in Spanish Romanticism as well as one of the first literary histories of Mexico. Often overlooked in the letter, however, is Zorrilla’s economic critique of the precarious condition of artists in both Mexico and Spain. A conservative moderado, Zorrilla could not air his concerns publicly without the threat of retribution from his fellow conservative colleagues in Spain. Zorrilla thus used the epistolary form, the article argues, in order to surreptitiously introduce the economic plight of artists into mainstream Spanish as well as Mexican political discourse. Read in this context, Zorrilla’s letter makes visible the fundamental role a transatlantic Romantic vision of labour played in shaping nineteenth-century political discourse in both the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.