Considerations of minimum numbers: a response to Horton

This paper discusses a recent evaluation of bone assemblage quantification methods based in large part upon a critique of our own published work. We aim to show that the critique reveals a misunderstanding of our proposals and of the aims of quantification techniques in this field.     

George VI in cartoons: the king vanishes

ABSTRACT

This article examines the depiction of George VI in cartoons. These important hybrid journalistic/artistic forms reflect a subtle shift in understandings of the monarchy, from emphasising the individual personality of the incumbent (e.g. Edward VIII), towards a focus on the crown as an impersonal institution, symbolic of Britishness. Prince Albert’s low profile prior to his accession continued as a vehicle for the new manner of imagining the monarch in cartooning. Symbols of office, national and imperial allegories of monarchy, became more common in cartoons than depictions of George’s own features. Comparison to non-British cartoons underscores the findings of the research.     

George Sigerson: Charcot's translator

Senator George Sigerson (1836-1925), Dublin's first neurologist, was also a significant contributor to Anglo-Irish literature. His medical career and literary accomplishments are outlined, the focus of the article being Sigerson's friendly relationship with Charcot (with whom he corresponded), and whose Le?ons sur les maladies du système nerveux he translated.     

Going beyond the grid: literary mapping as creative reading

Drawing from the importance of narrative inquiry in contemporary geographical reasoning and teaching, this paper focuses on some practices set around the relationship between maps and literature. Reader-generated maps, maps produced starting from the reading of a literary text, are at the core of a reflection on the potentialities of literary mapping in higher education; relating maps and literature in an educational environment, I suggest creative reading and creative mapping as co-constructive practices that are able to guide students in addressing and internalising the complexity of spatial categories. Reflecting on the students’ literary mappings, I focus on the various ways that the literary map contributes to mobilising the space of the text, guiding students in approaching spatial issues from a different (and creative) perspective. Time, point of view and literary trans-scalarity are the key narrative concepts that guide and inform possible inductive ruminations on literary mapping as a learning strategy. Following the core question of “what literary mapping might be and do in the digital age”, I aim to resituate contemporary discussions on literary mapping in an educational environment.     

Europe in the nineteenth-century American mind: The literary perspectives

This article evaluates Karl Popper's contribution to analytic philosophy, and outlines some of the contradictions in his work which make it difficult to locate in any particular tradition. In particular, the article investigates Popper's own claims to be a member of the rationalist tradition. Although Popper described himself as a member of this tradition, his definition of it diverged quite radically from that offered by other supporters of rationalism, like, for example, Mach, Carnap, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The reason for this was that Popper believed the rationalist tradition, if it were to remain coherent and relevant, needed to overcome the dilemma posed by Hume's problem of induction. Popper believed that this problem rendered conventional understandings of rationalism, science, and inductive reasoning incoherent. This article suggests that Popper's principal contribution to modern philosophy was to reconfigure the rationalist tradition in such a way as to circumvent the problem of induction while preserving the rationalist commitment to reason, rational debate, and objective knowledge. Popper's reconfiguration of the epistemological bases of the rationalist tradition challenged dominant understandings of rationalist and analytic philosophy, and may be appropriately understood as part of a wider move among philosophers like Quine and Putnam to challenge conventional understandings of analytic philosophy, and of what philosophy itself could and could not achieve. It also informed a vision of social and political life (and of the social and political sciences) as rooted in principles of freedom, equality, and rational debate, but which cannot be fit within the traditional ideological landscape.     

包世臣的文论、诗论及文学成就

包世臣认为,为文除要严守文法,做到“其言有序”外,还要做到“其言有物”,而且就“其言有序”和“其言有物”比较而言,后者具有更为重要的意义。他的一个基本观点是认为,“文字之教”的基本功能是“成其俗”。因此,他主张文学家要介入社会,关心国计民生。与此相联系,他主张为文要“崇实”而反对“致饰”。包世臣诗论的核心,是儒家的诗教原则。当然,作为嘉道年间的重要诗人,包世臣也特别重视诗的艺术性。首先,他认为写诗要直抒胸臆,“言为心声”;其次,他主张华实结合,朴质得宜,反对华而不实,尤其反对“侈于声色”;第三,他虽然反对“侈于声色”,但不反对韵律,认为写诗要讲求平仄。基于上述见解,包世臣将诗分成上、次、下三类。包世臣的文学成就,主要表现在两个方面,一是文,二是诗。尤其是他的诗,无论形式的多样性,还是题材的广泛性,以及内容的思想性与艺术性的统一,在嘉道年间的诗人中都是一流的。     

Baudelaire's literary criticism

In the current debate on republicanism the relationship between republicanism and democracy is an aspect whose historical dimension has thus far hardly been investigated. It offers instead also the chance to clear up ambiguities on the opposition between republicanism and liberalism. In this sense, recent research on the radical Enlightenment, on the link between economics and politics, by a new reading of physiocracy as political discourse, and on the foundations of political representation represent some of the most important advances made by historical research over the last few years. This essay wishes to trace these results back to a long line of research on a modern republicanism that had already been investigated many decades ago by a historian of the Enlightenment interested in republican tradition, Franco Venturi, the author of Settecento riformatore and of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, to which John Pocock dedicated the first volume of his recent Barbarism and Religion. By means of a successful integration of three recent essays by John Israel on the uniqueness of Dutch republican discourse, by Richard Whatmore on the economic roots of French republicanism and by Nadia Urbinati on the foundations of representative democracy in Condorcet, it is possible to isolate the characteristics of a democratic republicanism. Among the various threads that have been followed up, the theme of equality has surfaced in various ways in the search for the characteristics of modern republicanism. These highlight the idea of the emergence in the early modern age of an European political culture and of a democratic and egalitarian republicanism that was encouraged by the contribution from various national situations within which it forged its identity, against the model of an Atlantic republicanism.