Translations at the Court of Hákon Hákonarson: a well planned and highly selective programme

This article deals with the translations of Old French works completed at the court of Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway. The first one was probably completed in 1226 and some 40 followed: translations of epic poems, courtly romances and lais, adventure romances and a fabliau. In all cases, we ought to speak of adaptations and not of word-for-word translations.

Together, these literary works form an outstanding corpus, elaborated mainly for didactical purposes and in order to support Hákon Hákonarson's project to build a monarchy à l'européenne. For that, some literary works were selected and – in their adaptations – some ethical and social values promoted while some others were not; and some great literary works were intentionally ignored and remained untranslated.     

From Risorgimento to Il Politecnico: impegno and intellectual networks in the Einaudi publishing house, 1945

The article unveils the (dis)continuities between two post-WWII journals, Risorgimento and Il Politecnico, both published by Einaudi in 1945. By reassessing the publishing history of Risorgimento from a genealogical perspective, the article aims to chart the evolutions of the then current intellectual debate on impegno. Specifically, by analysing the relevant contributors’ correspondence and the essays that were published in the journals, the article examines the journals as sites of networking but also tension between different intellectual habitus. This will illuminate not only how the two editors-in-chief (Salinari and Vittorini, respectively) took different positions in relation to both the literary field and the PCI (Italian Communist Party), but also the opposition of editorial staffs – based, respectively, in Rome and in Milan – in relation to the publisher Einaudi.     

Circean transformation and the poetics of Milton’s Masque

ABSTRACT

Circe’s presence in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) invites readers to read both Milton’s Circe and Milton’s own poetic activity through long and intertwined traditions of theology and literary commentary. Stretching from Augustine and Aquinas to the commentaries and translations of Homer and Ovid by Sponde, Sandys, and Chapman, these traditions use Circe to explore and conflate the possibility, the permanence, and the experience of both human and literary transformation. Taken up by Townshend and Jones in their Caroline court masque Tempe Restored, they become essential intertexts for Milton’s Masque. Milton embeds this discourse in his masque – a genre that places metamorphosis at the heart of its poetics – to examine the nature of Renaissance intertextuality and the authorial self and interrogate his own use of Renaissance practices of imitatio and aemulatio. In Comus’ wood, Circean transformation becomes a touchstone for the virtuous soul and the virtuous poet alike.     

“Did that play of mine …?”: James Connolly,Cathleen Ni Houlihan and staging revolution

Abstract

Despite the crucial position he occupies in Irish history as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, and the political – and emotional – impact of his subsequent execution, while wounded, by the British Army on 12 May 1916, the writings of Edinburgh-born James Connolly have often been overlooked in both Irish and Scottish studies, and not just in accounts of the Rising but also in the wider context of cultural connections, including cultures of commemoration. In particular, Connolly’s surviving literary work, including Under Which Flag?, the drama staged on the eve of Easter 1916, as well as poems and songs, has had limited attention. This article reconsiders Under Which Flag? in comparison with Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan in order to demonstrate the central place the drama holds as a continuation – and complication – of Connolly’s political and journalistic writings. If Connolly is a neglected figure as a writer – as opposed to a political leader and martyr – then the play he left behind (once thought to have been lost, like another of his dramas, The Agitator’s Wife) affords us an opportunity to reassess his contribution to the struggle for independence as part of its literary wing.     

Plotting Jane Austen: heritage sites as fictional worlds in the literary tourist’s imagination

Fans seeking engagement with Jane Austen and her fictional creations seek out heritage locations linked both temporally and geographically to her life and works. This article adopts a multidisciplinary framework that triangulates fan studies, literary criticism, and heritage studies to analyse three Austen-linked fan spaces: Chawton Cottage (Austen’s former home and now a museum), Lyme Park (‘Pemberley’ in B.B.C.’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and two Austen-themed literary walks. I argue that the fan’s desire for connection is by no means an organic or natural quality of the heritage site itself. Rather, creating connections between the revered object (Austen) and the physical spaces that purport to contain her necessitates imaginative work on the part of the literary tourist. That such performative work is necessary in both the ‘real’ (Chawton) and ‘fictional’ (Lyme Park) locations demonstrates the problematic nature of previous critical emphases on the authenticity – or lack thereof – of such spaces. The significance of the fan’s pilgrimage to Austen-linked heritage sites lies not in the author to be ‘found’ there but in how the tourist actively constructs ‘their’ Jane by inscribing her presence – and those of her characters – onto these spaces.     

Empires for Peace: Denis Veiras’s Borrowings from Garcilaso de la Vega

Writing The History of the Sevarambians in the 1670s, the Huguenot Denis Veiras borrowed many ideas from Garcilaso de la Vega, also known as El Inca, whose Royal Commentaries of the Incas was published in 1609. Both works describe the history of an empire and justify it on the ground that it brought peace and unity. While Garcilaso’s book purported to be a history, his selection of facts reflected his goal of improving the treatment of the Incas by the Spanish. Veiras’s story also claimed to be a history, but it was transparently a fiction, even to the point of lifting many elements from Garcilaso’s book. What both works equally emphasized was that empires could aim at, and could be justified by, the benefits they provided their subjects. Both tell stories of benevolent and paternalistic rulers who founded nearly ideal societies in the countries they conquered. These were models of empire for peace and unity rather than merely promoting toleration of differences or concord among differing parties. Veiras’s utopia thus offers an instructive case study of the effects of cross-cultural borrowings of literary and political ideas.     

Henry Mayhew at 200 – the ‘Other’ Victorian Bicentenary

The New Agenda introduction puts forward the case for a much-needed revision of the scholarship devoted to Henry Mayhew – journalist and wit, playwright, co-founder of Punch, educational writer, novelist for children, travel writer, hack, social explorer and author of London Labour and the London Poor. It argues for a more intertextual and contextual reading of his major and minor works, and presents the articles contained in this new agenda special issue. The complex publishing history of Henry Mayhew's work and of London Labour and the London Poor in particular are explored in part one. The second part surveys the scholarship so far devoted to Mayhew and sketches out a new agenda for research based on a wider intratextual and intertextual approach to Mayhew's corpus. It is time, the introduction urges, for Victorianists to revisit Henry Mayhew.     

Two dramatic treatments of the ‘Déirdre’ legend: a case study in Irish betrayal

During the heightened cultural activity of the Celtic Revival, the moral ownership and utilisation of Ireland's literary remains became an important cultural issue. At the same time, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish writers were concerned to ‘retell’ ancient stories in ways which explored their relevance to the modern world. One of the most retold tales from the period was the story of Déirdre and the Sons of Usnach. The story of Déirdre broaches one of the most ubiquitous of human experiences – betrayal – and it does so in relation to both political and interpersonal behaviour. This essay examines two dramatic treatments from the early years of the century: W.B. Yeats's one-act Deirdre (1907) and J.M. Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows, unfinished at the time of his death and finally published in 1910. This essay looks to account for the particular ways in which each author inflects the legend in terms of their own concerns, and in particular how both Yeats and Synge engaged with a discourse of betrayal that – although always significant in Irish cultural history – was moving to a position of centrality in Irish national life in the years leading up to the revolutionary period.     

Guillaume postel — Prophet of the restitution of all things — His life and thought

The article starts from an examination of the authorship of the ‘Geleitwort’, the programmatic statement which appeared in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft when it came under new editors in 1904. Recently scholars have begun to view it as an important text by Max Weber recovered from obscurity, but this is a mistake. Examination of major contemporary works by Weber and Werner Sombart – the obvious co-author – as well as the first public disclosure of an entirely new MS. by Weber, show that in all probability the text was drafted by Sombart and then revised fairly lightly by Weber. This story of a combined, if unequal, authorship leads into two broader seams of intellectual history: the relationship between Weber and Sombart, and the history of the Archiv as a journal. An unusual starting point thus casts fresh and unexpected light on some of the most central figures and episodes in German social science at the beginning of the 20th century, not least Weber's seminal essay on “Objectivity” in social science.     

Sword,Priest and Conversion: On Religion and Apostasy in South Slav Literature in the Period of National Revival

Abstract

This article examines the works of four writers of Croatian, Slovene, Serbian and Bosniak literature in the period of National Revival, in their literary, historical and discursive contexts: Pre?ern’s Krst pri Savici, Ma?urani?’s Smrt Smail-age ?engi?a, Njego?’s Gorski vijenac and Ba?agi?’s Abdullah Pa?a. Three of the four authors were also statesmen, and all four are considered canonical national writers. There is a striking similarity between their otherwise different works, resulting from speeches by priests who either demand and justify conversion, or vehemently oppose it and call for vengeance. In all four works, the enemy is not a foreign conqueror, but an apostate who sides with the conqueror by accepting his faith. Although in all four works the values of the epic and heroic world are pronounced dead, epic action — a ’sword’ — is still very much alive. Though the central act of conversion is accompanied by religious symbolism which gives rise to the impression of a clash of religions, in all four works conversion does not have a religious meaning, it is purely political.     

Müntzer,Taubes, and the Anabaptists: Emancipatory History and Political Theology

ABSTRACT

The radical apocalypticism of the sixteenth century mystic and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer has served as an enduring resource for the political left, from early investigations by Engels and Bloch to the recent works of Alberto Toscano and Wu Ming. In one of his lesser-studied works – the 1947 dissertation Occidental Eschatology – Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes places Müntzer at a key juncture in the history of eschatology, first by situating him at the end of the Reformation period, and then by connecting his revolutionary apocalypticism to the critiques of Hegel leveled by Marx and Kierkegaard. This study aims to give a new perspective on Taubes as a philosopher of history, first by showing potentially surprising connections between Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology and the historiography of Anabaptism, and second by making suggestions about how Taubes’ distinctively emancipatory philosophy of history might contribute to thinking about time and history within contemporary political theology.     

Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen,A. E. Waite,and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.     

We are never alone: a conversation on bio art with Eduardo Kac

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America.

Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?     

Tannery and Duhem on the Concept of a System in the History of Philosophy and History of Science

ABSTRACT

This article examines John Toland’s Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714) by placing it alongside other elements of his engagement with Jewish history, Mosaic principles and wider “Hebraica” – specifically, an appendix to his Nazarenus (1718) and his Origines Judaicae (1709). Although Toland’s case for Jewish naturalization shows the strong influence of Locke’s case for political and religious toleration, and also of a general “mercantilism”, it is argued that one of its main characteristics is a philosophical naturalism, shown in its treatment of the human species as a whole. Furthermore, it is also argued that this same naturalism is evident throughout Toland’s engagement with Jewish history and Mosaic thought. Accordingly, when we “fold” these works into each other, we find each enhancing our understanding of the others – not just as examples of Toland’s treatment of “Jewish affairs”, but also as illustrations of a consistent conceptual materialism. To emphasize this, the article concludes by suggesting that the figure of Rabbi Simone Luzzatto, author of a 1638 plea for tolerance, provides an important clue in understanding the links between Toland’s political injunctions and the philosophical foundation on which they are built.     

Israel's intellectuals and political independence

Over the past two decades, a new phenomenon has emerged in secular kibbutzim, in which some members have adopted a religious way of life. Some of these “newly religious” (hozrim bi-tshuvah) choose to leave the kibbutz, but others, who are the subject of this article, decide to remain in the kibbutz, which continues to serve as the framework of their life. Based on observation and in-depth interviews with newly religious members of secular kibbutzim, this article discusses the array of dilemmas created by the transformation of their identity and the response to it on the part of kibbutz society. One of the dilemmas concerns the question whether their choice reflects a break with the kibbutz way of life or rather a link and continuity with this ideal. The article contributes to understanding both the changes in modern-day kibbutz society and the identity issues related to these changes.     

The irreparable and the imprevidible: fathers and failures at Joyce's family circus

This paper reconsiders ideas of the father in Joyce's writing. It does so by examining in detail those ideas as they are elucidated through circus anecdote and imagery. The focus rests decisively on Ulysses (1922), but references to Joyce's earlier writing and to Finnegans Wake (1939) demonstrate the enduring popularity of the circus as image or metaphor for the author. The paper works broadly to contextualise hitherto overlooked circus references within the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular culture – Joyce is here connected to circus clown Johnny Patterson, music hall star Henry Clifton, and artist Jack B. Yeats. Through this history, it appears that Joyce imitates others in placing male authorities within both actual and invented circus rings to question legitimate influence in local domestic and wider social settings. It moves between these two locations to assess disquieting consequences of imagining political authority within this particular performance space in the fraught period of Irish history from 1904 to 1922.     

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.     

Otto Warburg

Abstract

In the ancient world the dividing line between the Arts and the Sciences was not so rigidly drawn as in recenl times. Poets and prose authors alike frequently crossed the boundaries in their literary works. Notable Greek interdisciplinary writers include Hesiod, Aristotle and Theophrastus and, among the Romans, Lucretius, Virgil and Pliny the Elder are the best known. Thus Aristotle wrote the Poetics on the nature of drama and related topics and, in addition to many other philosophical and scientific works, the Meteorologica, a mixture of sciences. Virgil composed the Aeneid, a national epic glorifying Rome and the emperor Augustus, and the Georgics, a handbook of agriculture. Pliny the Elder, the nineteenth centenary of whose death was celebrated on 24 August 1979, had wide-ranging interests. His works include a treatise on the javelin, a history of Rome's wars against the Germans and the unique encyclopaedic Natural History. The present review examines Pliny's career and assesses his contribution to the early history of mineralogy.