The supreme court of Israel: Formative years, 1948–1955

In seeking to establish a paradigm of a literary “New Jew” for the early twentieth century, we must view the cultural developments of the time on the background of European modernist culture. During this period the European “New Jew” underwent many incarnations, including Max Nordau's muscular hero, Buber's “Renaissance” Jew, Berdyczewski's Nietzschean “new man,” Herzl's “authentic Jew,” and the Hebrew literary talush (rootless person). All the divergent ideas of Jewish renewal propounded in Europe were united in Shaul Tchernichovsky's poetry, either through deliberate reference or as a result of the tenor of the time. This article examines Tchernichovsky's implicit conception of the “New Jew” through two poems: “Lenokhah pesel Apollo” (Before a statue of Apollo, 1899) and “Ani – li misheli ein klum” (I have nothing of my own, 1937).     

Ways of seeing the Scottish Highlands: marginality, authenticity and the curious case of the Hebridean blackhouse

This paper examines popular cultural constructions of the Scottish Highlands during the interwar period. Situating events within the literary and artistic context of the «Celtic Twilight», it traces the establishment, and subsequent links between, two pioneering «heritage» sites which used as their focus the «blackhouse», the vernacular form of habitation in the Highlands. These sites, created under the auspices of the National Trust for Scotland and the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition, are understood as «official» expressions of a romanticized, imaginary geography heavily reliant on ideas of cultural authenticity and marginality. By considering aspects of the «Self/Other» representational dialectic and placing in question popular constructions of peripherality the paper considers how such projects, ostensibly motivated by remembrance and preservation, were also a highly selective means of national identification. Ultimately, the work demonstrates how the modern impulse to differentiate between, and thereby classify, distinctive cultural traditions and forms of knowledge facilitated an obvious Highland bias in what subsequently became Scotland's accepted historiography.     

Structural boundaries that effect the representation of gender and disability in works of fiction from the United States and United Kingdom

Abstract

Discussions of intellectual disability are found in medical journals, published biographies, and disability research. However, outside the realm of medicine or personal reminiscence intellectual disability struggles for spaces of social, historical, cultural and imaginative representation. This article addresses these struggles for space and specifically focuses on the imagined space of narrative fiction. Being imagined spaces they should easily be able to accommodate people with disability, and yet, very few characters with intellectual disability are represented or more importantly have agency in narrative fiction. Drawing on work from feminist geographies and literary geographies this article addresses the limiting narrative structures that have been used against fictional characters who have a disability and ways authors may move beyond these limitations. Reconciling feminist geographies and literary geographies allows new critical spatial knowledge around disability to emerge. It is not enough to write characters with disabilities into narrative fiction if the structures surrounding them remain limiting and prejudiced. This article discusses the three main limiting structures in narrative fiction: character representation, narrative voice and genre. Looking at narrative fiction through feminist and literary geographies reveals how these limiting structures function as power hierarchies, and importantly, shows how these imposed structures can be subverted and changed.     

Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age

This article investigates the implications of the recent application of the term ‘diaspora’ to the overseas settlements of the Viking Age and offers a speculative assessment, based on literary, historical, archaeological, sculptural and onomastic evidence, of how the concept might contribute to our understanding of the cultural dynamics of the period. This exploratory look at connectivity in the ‘viking world’ considers the respective roles of the Scandinavian homelands and overseas settlements in the interplay of cultural forces from the ninth to the eleventh century.     

赵孟頫《松雪斋集》成书的文化史意义

《松雪斋集》是赵孟頫宦游经历、诗文词赋、书画题跋等文艺作品的汇集,反映着赵孟頫个人诗文的风格特色、书画的艺术传统和历史价值;同时,因为其中凝结着元代诸多文人学者、书画名家的声音,因此又成为展示元代文人生态图景的一个窗口。本文拟从《松雪斋集》成书这一动态过程切入,分析赵孟頫文学创作展开的时代背景,考察参与和推动其创作的社会动因,借以认识赵孟頫文化形象树立的动态过程,以及在文化传播机制下《松雪斋集》的历史价值。     

物语的叙述与文化记忆——关于日本古典文学中琵琶"玄上"的故事

一个民族的文化记忆,相当一部分来自于该民族的故事叙述。对日本文学中有关"玄上琵琶"的记述,以及各种派生出来的分枝故事的梳理,有助于理解日本文学对外来文学、文化的受容方法,也有助于把握日本文学中的变容对文化记忆的干预。     

‘A book is a book,all the world over’: New Zealand and the Colonial Writing World 1890–1945

The idea that literary expatriation was a prevalent and often necessary phenomenon for early twentieth-century Antipodean writers is well established, as it is widely believed that New Zealand and Australia were places not conducive to the nurturing of literary talent. In order to succeed, writers were forced to leave for places with developed publishing infrastructure and sympathetic communities of like-minded people like London, choosing expatriation over failure or mediocrity at home. This study, which is based on an empirical investigation into the lives and publication records of New Zealand authors, questions this long-held assumption by emphasising the transnational elements involved in literary production. New Zealand writers were able to remain in New Zealand and still be successful because of the existence of the ‘colonial writing world'—a system of cultural diffusion, literary networks and personal interactions that gave writers access to all the cultural capital of Britain (and other hubs of empire) through the lines of communication established by colonial expansion. The opportunities provided by international connections have been largely overlooked or dismissed until very recently because of the persistent nationalist framework within which New Zealand literary history has been written.     

“Northern Girls”: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the cultural politics of agency, and explores the relationship between cultural form, migrant experience and social change. It traces the emergence of a range of literary forms in south China and how these new cultural forms provide hitherto unavailable space to contest the state- and market-driven narratives, which tend to link dagongmei’s (rural migrant women’s) sexuality with inexperience and vulnerability on the one hand, and criminality, immorality and incivility on the other. The paper suggests that these newly emerging cultural forms present alternative perspectives on the practical circumstances, moral rationalities and emotional consequences that condition and shape migrant women’s sexual experience, and for this reason, they constitute important points of intervention.     

李大钊论历史知识普及问题

李大钊从对历史学功用的重新定位与全新阐述,指出史学"最要紧的用处,是用他来助我们人生的修养"。因此,历史学的功用不能只强调政治性而不重视文化性;只关注社会而不顾及人生。这是历史知识需要普及而且能够普及的社会基础与广阔前提。在如何普及历史知识的问题上李大钊认为:首先,只有把历史看成"活的东西",才能把历史写活;只有把历史写活,才能引人入胜。其次,需要"历史研究的本身亦含有艺术的性质"。要"把历史研究的结果用文学的美文写出来"。第三,充分利用一切可以利用的机会与手段进行历史的普及。     

地理的空间与文学的意象——以贾平凹小说创作为例

人地关系对文学创作具有深刻影响。贾平凹其人其文在创作理念、叙事方式、人物形象等方面都具有鲜明的地域性特征。本文以贾平凹代表性小说作品为例,考量了商州的地域文化地理要素对贾平凹小说创作产生影响的机制。论文认为,自然地理环境能够构成文学创作的自然意象,人文地理环境能够生发文学创作的民俗文化意象、丰富其地域文化意象,并促成便于营造意象的艺术风格及其嬗变。     

Kommentar: The Economic or the Economy? – Reflections on the Objects of Historical Epistemology

In the recent decade the perspectives of historical epistemology have turned economic practices into a novel object of study: the focus lies on how discourses, techniques of measurement and valuation produce economic facts. 1 The research on the historical epistemologies of economic facts belongs to a broader scholarly endeavor that takes place in cultural anthropology, social theory, literary studies, political theory and history. This interdisciplinary work brings to light how deeply economic issues are constituted by intermingling a set of cultural, political, technical and legal distinctions, which distinguish what counts as properly economic from what does not. 2 In this perspective, the very definition of economy becomes a hybrid and contentious affair. The central theoretical question for the historical epistemology and cultural anthropology of economy is currently how to conceptualize the link between epistemic practices and acts of ‘doing the economy’. This special issue on the Historical Episte mology of the Economic pushes us to think about this crucial link. Monika Dommann, Daniel Speich Chassé and Mischa Suter explore different modes of approaching the interlacing of epistemology and economy. These modes can be discussed under the following headings: 1) Pragmatics and Poetologies of Knowledge, 2) Economic Discourses and Epistemic Techniques, 3) Boundaries of Economy. On the basis of the richness of the historical material and the finely grained arguments that these papers bring forth, I will elaborate on the conceptualization of these linkages between epistemology and economy. My discussion culminates in the attempt to clarify an analytical distinction that is freely used in this special issue but that deserves further discussion: the distinction between the economic and the economy as an object of historical epistemology. My question is, does it matter if we write a historical epistemology of the economic or of the economy? What distinction do we wish to make by juxtaposing these two?     

Monks and hermits in medieval love stories

Monks and hermits are frequently mentioned in courtly romances. It is an unresolved problem whether these are real men or the product of literary imagination. The monks and hermits of love literature do evolve over time: whereas in the twelfth century they are predominantly monastic figures, later they are laymen. This article examines the literary image of the monk and hermit, including their role as advocates of marital fidelity, and asks how effective these models were for contemporary Christians, especially in cases where poets abandoned their secular life to become monks and hermits. With the rise of the friars traditional literary images were not abandoned. Emphasis is placed on the role of the hermit as a symbol of the quest for divine love.     

古代小说中的龙宫及信仰文化考述

龙宫原为佛教文化意象,当其以文学意象的身份进入我国古代小说后,成为小说作品中的一个常见文学形象。受时代的小说创作潮流、创作群体以及受众层次变化的影响,唐宋小说与明清小说中龙宫的文化内涵及美学旨趣产生变化。历代小说中龙宫意象即在这种历史的变迁中不断发展丰富,构建起意蕴深厚的龙宫信仰文化。     

A masculinist northern wilderness and the emancipatory potential of literary irony

There has been an increasing body of critical research in modern literary geography claiming that forms of social oppression and injustice can become established through the institution of literature. It has also been stated that literature can equally well act as an emancipatory ‘tool’ through which subjugated histories are rewritten. This article is concerned with the colonialist history of Finnish northern literature, Lapland romanticism, the exoticism of nature and the interrelations of these with masculinism and sexist oppression. It discusses how northern nature is romanticized through literary stereotypes based on masculinist values and a multidimensional social process of sexism, and how the regional marginalization of northern Finland has been justified at the same time. The primary focus is on the emancipatory potential of untraditional northern literature, on a northern female author, Rosa Liksom, who through her unconventional literary irony has functioned as an emancipatory ‘project’ against the masculinist stereotypes of the northern wilderness. Liksom's literary irony serves as a metafictive ‘method’ working in pursuit of revealing its own discursive structure, as a strategy through which literary conventions and their wider social context become deconstructed.     

Monks and hermits in medieval love stories

Monks and hermits are frequently mentioned in courtly romances. It is an unresolved problem whether these are real men or the product of literary imagination. The monks and hermits of love literature do evolve over time: whereas in the twelfth century they are predominantly monastic figures, later they are laymen. This article examines the literary image of the monk and hermit, including their role as advocates of marital fidelity, and asks how effective these models were for contemporary Christians, especially in cases where poets abandoned their secular life to become monks and hermits. With the rise of the friars traditional literary images were not abandoned. Emphasis is placed on the role of the hermit as a symbol of the quest for divine love.     

Time–geography,gentlemen, please: chronotopes of publand in Patrick Hamilton’s London trilogy

This paper considers the time and the place of drinking in modern British life, as represented in Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy of novels set in the publand of London’s West End in the interwar years, through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and with critical nods to Hagerstrand’s time–geography corpus. The chronotopes of pubs and their neighbourhoods, which we term ‘publand’, are discussed initially in their novelistic presentation in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), and then in relation to the ‘character zones’ of the novels’ principal protagonists. The key themes, defined in the paper, are the asynchronicity of personal and social relations, the dialogic construction of heterochronicity, and the presentation of a prosaic chronotope. Though the paper is a contribution to literary geography, we aim to contribute to the cultural geographic understanding of the time–space rhythms and routines of everyday leisure drinking, making claims for the wider significance of chronotopic analysis.     

The immigrant “Other” and artistic expression: (de)bordering via festivals and social activism in Finland

This paper analyses how cultural production and artistic activities can explain the social (de)construction of borders. The study looks at the soft, cultural aspects of bordering, encounters between the immigrants and their host societies, and the conscious and unintentional ways of altering their mental frames. The analysis focuses on the World Village Festival organised annually in Helsinki, and a young literary project titled “Sidelight – is this Finnish literature?” Based on these two case studies, associations between the concepts of bordering, liminality and translation are developed to enable a deeper understanding of the encounters between immigrant cultures and their host societies.     

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.