Review Article: Europe Yesterday and Tomorrow

GEIR LUNDESTAD. ‘Empire’ by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945-1997. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. viii, 200. $108.00 (CDN); GEIR LUNDESTAD, ed. No End to Alliance: The United States and Western Europe: Past, Present, and Future. New York: St Martin's Press, 1998. Pp. x, 268. $69.95 (US); PETER J. KATZENSTEIN, ed. Tamed Power: Germany in Europe. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 314. $19.95 (US), paper; PETER J. KATZENSTEIN, ed. Mitteleuropa: Between Europe and Germany. New York: Berghahn, 1997. Pp. ix, 292. $49.95 (US); JOHN ZYSMAN and ANDREW SCHWARTZ, eds. Enlarging Europe: The Industrial Foundations of a New Political Reality. Berkeley: University of California, 1998. Pp. xi, 448. $29.50 (US). Reviewed by John Gillingham     

Biogeography Today and Tomorrow

The chairman of Moscow University's Department of Biogeography reviews the various approaches being used in biogeography: habitat studies, the species composition of flora and fauna, the regional approach, the ecological approach and the historical approach. He outlines future research problems of biogeographers: the elimination of natural infection foci of disease, the rehabilitation of expanding areas in tailings, slag heaps and other wasteland, the biological purification of water, the conservation of natural communities and the creation of more productive artificial communities.     

The China of Tomorrow: Japan and the Limits of Victorian Expansion

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the literature on the mechanisms, rhetoric, and limits of mid-Victorian expansion by asking how far late Tokugawa Japan was subject to forms of British imperialism. In September 1862 a British merchant was murdered on the high road between Edo and Kyoto; a year later, a British fleet bombarded Kagoshima in retaliation. By engaging with John Darwin’s concept of the ‘bridgehead’, this article examines the circumstances in which a lonely death on the frontiers of British commerce could be transformed into a Victorian ‘outrage’. It considers what we stand to gain by bringing an imperial history perspective to bear on what remains, for most imperial historians, a largely forgotten conflict. In positing Yokohama as a bridgehead that could gain only fitful purchase in London, it asks new questions about the conduct of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and the fault lines of mid-Victorian expansion; the place of Japan in British political imaginaries; the nature of informal empire; and the discourses buffeting British expansion in the turbulent 1860s.     

Education for Tomorrow: The Vision of Rabindranath Tagore

This article investigates Rabindranath Tagore’s educational vision, which underpinned the three institutions he set up in India – Santiniketan (1901), Visva-Bharati (1921) and Sriniketan (1922). It argues that this vision is still relevant for the world of today and tomorrow, and that it should be taken into account in designing any educational model for the future. Tagore rejected the modern mechanical learning that focuses merely on cultivation of the individual’s mind, in favour of learning that encourages the creativity, imagination and moral awareness of students. He believed that education should be not for mere “success” or “progress” but for “illumination of heart” and for inculcation of a spirit of sympathy, service and self-sacrifice in the individual, so that s/he could rise above egocentrism and ethnocentrism to a state of global consciousness or worldcentrism. In pursuing this argument, I refer to Tagore’s letters, lectures, interviews and essays, both in Bengali and in English, a body of his short stories, his novel The Home and the World and his allegorical poem “Two Birds”. I also explain his awareness of the educational movements of his time in the West, and draw brief parallels with selected Western luminaries in the field, such as Plato, Montaigne, Rousseau and John Dewey. My contention is that although some may dismiss Tagore’s educational principles as “rickety sentimentalism” in a world that is palpable and real, his ideas of human fellowship, unity and creativity, and kinship for nature seem irrefutable with the rise of multiculturalism and the looming ecological crisis threatening world peace.     

乐府古辞与古诗十九首关系考辨

“古诗”之数,不仅十九之限,余见《乐府诗集》所收“古辞”之中,相与援袭,而存在一个共同的模仿对象,即乐府民歌。《乐府诗集》中《西门行》、《艳歌行》、《长歌行》等,当与乐府民歌相去不远,其主题元素广泛影响文人“古诗”制作;《西门行》一首尤为十九首中多篇祖述,而十九首之《生年不满百》为其改写。即此改写的言辞整练、构篇变化与音乐脱离,显见乐府歌辞向文人“古诗”的过渡,体现了后者的共同特点。究之“古诗”之作,并非“作者”的个体“创作”,而是展转相袭的共鸣抒写。