‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain

This paper considers Oscar Wilde's ongoing interest in the image of a single brain cell as a souvenir of human autonomy in a world of matter. Taking a long view of Wilde's career that demonstrates the relevance to his literary work of his college interests in physiology and philosophy, this paper shows how Wilde's socialism can be explained by his uniquely aesthetic take on the brain. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the autonomy of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience, but writers whose work Wilde knew, like Ernst Haeckel, W.K. Clifford and John Tyndall, apply aesthetic vocabularies to their own discussions of cells. Their theories illuminate Wilde's representation of the cell as an aesthetic object. Wilde's art collaborates with science to reject action, as action is conventionally understood, without relinquishing beauty as his ultimate value. His discovery of beauty in matter that is beyond the pale of human experience, yet intimately and strangely constitutive of our experience, directs the senses to a new field of experience that values the molecular life the species holds in common, in which individuals and their actions matter less to the possibility of social change than does the necessity of pleasure.     

The body-mind of Oscar Wilde's reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette

Little is known about the circumstances of Oscar Wilde's employment by the Pall Mall Gazette, and even less is known about his engagement with its editorial policies. His reviews are often neglected, but when examined are considered in isolation rather than as a contribution to a serial format. The Pall Mall Gazette's structure provides a new context in which to understand Wilde's reviews, which were inevitably shaped by the paper's editorial policies. The paper hired reviewers who could help it maintain a balance between politics and light relief. With an understanding of audience affect and cognition, Wilde employed a range of strategies to manage reader response. The reviews analysed in this article show Wilde exploring the material, and psychological aspects of books and reading.     

Oscar Wilde,Music, and the ‘Opium-Tainted Cigarette’: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play

This article shows how the musical references in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are important to the identity of the dandy, especially in relation to the literary-critical work of Matthew Arnold, whose guiding presence in Wilde's oeuvre has traditionally been somewhat underestimated. Wilde's male characters, although famously fond of music, reveal ‘disinterestedness’ in earnest musical pursuits, similar to the ‘Indian virtue of detachment’ outlined by Arnold in his exploration of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864, in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 26–51). Furthermore, the critical attitude of the dandy–aesthete intersects with the implications that we can read into the posture of the lounging opium smoker. Extensive scholarship has already established the relationship between the East and opium in fictional works by Thomas de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Music is an essential ingredient to this literature, too, both in terms of its narrative presence and because it is a key element in an ongoing, nineteenth-century British exploration of how stylistic innovations could be represented as ‘music’. After disclosing the close connections between dandyism and those nineteenth-century composers whose lives and works were often represented as dandyish (Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann), the essay builds from the tradition of opium-inspired fiction. It suggests Wilde's debt to Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), while also showing Wilde's innovations in making shifts in character and narrative voice into indicators of narcotic consumption.     

‘Cleverly Drawn’: Oscar Wilde,Charles Ricketts,and the Art of the Woman's World

This paper offers a new examination of the influential women's magazine, theWoman's World (1887–90), and Oscar Wilde's editorship thereof. Previous studies have focused on the magazine's importance as a venue for promoting proto-feminist writing and for enabling Wilde to boost his professional cachet through editorial work, but the aesthetic aims and execution of theWoman's World merit further analysis. The Woman's World reveals how male artists negotiated aesthetics and Aestheticism between themselves within its pages, as well as how they presented it to the publication's assumed audience of women. This paper particularly centres on the magazine's role in establishing the professional relationship between Wilde and Charles Ricketts, later the designer and illustrator of some of Wilde's most important texts, while simultaneously considering how Ricketts's work furthered the artistic and intellectual instruction Wilde hoped to offer the magazine's readers. Case studies of several of Ricketts's illustrations demonstrate the types of visual reading that the Woman's World seemed to espouse, and which worked in tandem with the textual contents to encourage women to develop critical reading skills.     

A Matter of Judgment: Politics,Law and the Trial of Bishop Thomas Watson

Thomas Watson's controversial expulsion from the bishopric of St David's – and hence from the house of lords – after a long and bitterly‐fought series of legal actions, raised fundamental and difficult questions about the right to control membership of the house of lords and about the relationship between politics and the law, as well as between church and state. This article explores both the local and the national political contexts that prompted Watson's ordeal, suggesting that subsequent demonisation by Gilbert Burnet has obscured the extent to which Watson was the casualty of William III's determination to cow his political opponents. It concludes that Watson was marked out for opprobrium precisely because, like Sir John Fenwick, his political and social insignificance enabled him to be victimised without risking a backlash of opposition from the social and political elite.     

Polemic,Parliament and History: Michael Foot versus David Owen

Michael Foot had good reasons for resenting Dr David Owen, who played a prominent role in the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP) while Foot was Labour's leader. In Loyalists and Loners (1986), a book of political pen‐portraits, Foot duly delivered a blistering attack on Owen, focusing on two charges – that Owen was consumed by personal ambition from an early stage of his career, and that he was an ideological turncoat who had wilfully misused the word ‘socialism’. The present article examines Foot's allegations in the light of various historical sources, including the private papers of both protagonists. It is argued that, though Foot's charges seem devastating at first sight – and have never been refuted by Owen or his admirers – they cannot be sustained after an impartial review of the evidence. This reappraisal provides new insights into Owen's remarkable and controversial career at two pivotal stages – his initial rise to ministerial office, and his decision to leave Labour.     

Papadiamandis and Homer: A Note

Abstract

Meaningful allusion to the classics in Papadiamandis's work is not a matter of the text's being stuffed with overt classical references. In his early novels we find a large number of, as it were, classical one-liners: essentially undigested – or at best opportunistic – allusions. The technique is a less focused form of Roidis's in Pope Joan; perhaps a closer comparison is Kalligas's Thanos Vlekas, which is replete with Homeric allusions and puns, none of them integral to the narrative. Similarly, we find in early Papadiamandis a disorderly collection of allusions: Byron, Milton, Aesop, Sophocles, Juvenal, Homer et al.; and sometimes we see his allusiveness to be a mere tic of style rather than fully purposive. In other words, .it is as true here as elsewhere in Greek literary tradition that we need to sift meaningful from more or less chance allusion.     

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.     

Missionaries,Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia: A Scottish Evangelist in Ambrym Island,Vanuatu

Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of Charles Murray, the main argument unfolds around his involvement in the realm of men's ritual powers, how he himself played his part as a highly knowledgeable magician and how his downfall came about by challenging a manly realm of knowledge and power and his wider inclusion of women and lesser men in his church.     

Trump: Transacting trickster

Donald Trump's recent election victory has been greeted with horror and disbelief by many. In particular, the glaring inconsistencies and open self‐contradictions that marked his campaign should have rendered him unelectable by the standards of conventional reasonable political practice. But rather than being a problem to be explained away, it is Trump's open embrace of contradiction that explains much of his appeal. By holding contradictory trends and opinions simultaneously, he presents himself as being capable of embodying seemingly mutually exclusive social trends, such as an intensification of economic competition on the one hand and a radical denunciation of that competition's effects on some of the losers from that process on the other. By doing so, he presents himself as a powerful figure with charismatic abilities to contain such contradictions within himself – abilities that are not available to ordinary career politicians, but that are strikingly reminiscent of the powers attributed to so‐called ‘trickster’ figures in anthropological literature.     

Conference report: 'L'età dei totalitarismi. Silone e la cultura letteraria e politica degli anni venti-trenta'

Giovannino Guareschi, author of the immensely popular Don Camillo stories and editor of the weekly newspaper Candido, spent 14 months in a Parma prison from 1954 to 1955 for having libelled the former Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi. To this day, he is the only Italian journalist since the founding of the Republic ever to have served actual, behind-bars jail time for libel. This study examines several aspects of Guareschi's life in prison – the ways he coped with boredom and loneliness, the attempts he made to understand his fellow inmates and how he defiantly tried to buoy his spirits. In particular, it focuses on both his correspondence with his wife Ennia, a collection of 44 letters, and his personal musings kept in two prison diaries – all documents that have never been published. The analysis rectifies common misinterpretations as to why Guareschi purposely refused to appeal his guilty verdict and chose to go to jail, considers how Guareschi presented himself in his writings and contemplates Guareschi's place in the history of Italian prison writing.     

Etappen auf dem Weg zu einer Geschichte der Pflanzenzüchtung. Überlegungen aus Anlaß eines Buches von Thomas Wieland

Thomas Wieland's book is the first survey on the history of scientific plant breeding in Germany from 1889 to 1945. There are two mainlines of analysis: (1) The transformation of an agricultural practise of peasants into an academic discipline of scientists and (2) the importance of political arguments for this process of scientification. Most of the time Wieland's methods to present his thesis are exemplary: either as biographies or as breeding project histories. So he can write about a great diversity of aspects; but from his point of view – the discipline history as applied science – he cannot show the great importance of economic forces controlling plant breeding. This short article will not diminish the high value of Wieland's book. My aim is only to outline some desiderata for a history of plant breeding which is not yet written.     

Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor: Kwame Nkrumah,symbolic nationalism and the iconography of Ghanaian money 1957 – the Golden Jubilee

ABSTRACT. During his tenure as premier from independence in 1957 until he was ousted by a military and police coup in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah was the living personification of the Ghanaian nation‐state. As the self‐proclaimed Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor– Founder of the State of Ghana – his image was minted on the new national money and printed on postage stamps. He erected a monument of himself in Accra, changed the national anthem to make references to himself, customised the national flag to match the colors of his CPP party, made his birthday a national day of celebration (National Founder's Day), named streets and universities after himself, and amended the constitution whereby he became Life President. Since the coup, many of the symbols of nationhood that Nkrumah constructed have been debated, demolished, reconsidered and reengineered by successive governments to rewrite the Ghanaian historical narrative. This article analyses the contentions of one of Nkrumah's first expressions of symbolic nationalism – that of the national coinage.     

‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

European policy under Gordon Brown: perspectives on a future prime minister

Tony Blair's decision to provide an indication of his departure date from 10 Downing Street has generated interest in the policies and style of his most likely successor, the current UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Brown's ambitions for European policy are considered by a number of commentators to be less clear. This is because so far he has not produced a comprehensive vision of how he sees the UK's future relationship with the EU. However, as this article demonstrates, close examination reveals that his position on many aspects of European policy is actually already well documented.     

Hans Kohn: the idea of secularized nationalism

More than seventy years after its publication, Hans Kohn's 1944 The Idea of Nationalism is still regarded as a ground‐breaking contribution to the study of nationalism. This essay is aimed to highlight a significant theme in this work which has largely gone unnoticed, namely, the pivotal role of religion and secularism in Kohn's account of nationalism, and especially, in his persistent struggle for a ‘perfect’ nationalism. Kohn's conception – and personal experience – of the relationship of nationalism and religion will be examined through several stages of his turbulent life. First, as a young Zionist in Prague, when he parlayed Martin Buber's Zionist creed into an ethnic concept of nationalism. Then, in Kohn's journalistic writing in the 1920s and in his first theoretical works on nationalism in the years 1929–1942. Finally, Kohn's more mature and crystallized account of nationalism in his 1944 book will be revisited from the perspective of the nationalism–religion relationship.     

Tom Paine: The greatest exile

In this contribution, I reassess the opposition between Saint-Pierre's idealism and Rousseau's realism. Rousseau accuses Saint-Pierre of having a defect in his analysis and political judgement which, if he had been consistent, would have led to a revolutionary position in the strong sense – a position of which the author of The Social Contract himself disapproved. In short, not only was Saint-Pierre far from being a convinced absolutist; Rousseau's own writings on the Abbé do not advocate a ‘republican solution’, which he regarded as impracticable for the Europe of his time.     

Conserving Rainforest 4: aural geographies and ephemerality

Works of installation sound art are inherently spatial. Documentation of this form, which dates from the 1950s, involves an engagement with diverse histories of geographical knowledge and oral-historical methodology. David Tudor's Rainforest 4 (1973) is a performed sculptural sound installation which remains the best-known of his pieces. Its durability—when most other of his works remain unperformed, partly because they are too hermetic to decipher or depend on unavailable technologies—belies its “score” which consists of a simple diagram and a few words. Oral history, formal and informal, is not only key to understanding the history of the piece, but is integral to its performance. This paper explores some historical geographies of Rainforest 4 and the aesthetic of ephemerality in live electronic music, for which documentation of performance is secondary. In examining the paradoxes of Rainforest 4's conservation, we explore Tudor's engagement with particular notions of nature and spirituality as well as the social hierarchies and conservative impulse which keep the piece alive.