Reading Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant's fiction has been steadily undergoing critical reassessment since the 1990s. The advent of the Selected Works from Pickering & Chatto testifies to the growing significance of this great novelist within the scholarly community. The inquiries of several researchers, especially Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock, have transformed our understanding of this prolific author's achievements. Yet the larger proportion of Oliphant's novels await the critical attention they deserve. The present discussion focuses on the main reasons why her seemingly minor works of prose fiction possess a psychological understanding that is as great as that which we find in her more famous narratives, such as Miss Marjoribanks (1866). The recognition of divided minds, of the games the mind plays, and her dramatization of them, is part of what gives her novels power that general critiques of her work often miss. This point becomes clear when we broaden our perspective on Oliphant's novels beyond the six fictions that comprise her Chronicles of Carlingford (1862–76). Here the analysis concentrates on The Ladies Lindores (1883) and, more expansively, the little-known For Love and Life (1874).     

An Early Prehistoric Shaft on Cranborne Chase

Continuing field work on Cranborne Chase has examined a unique shaft in Fir Tree Field, Down Farm in the parish of Gussage St Michael. Although shafts are known in prehistoric contexts elsewhere in England in the form of Neolithic flint mines, ritual shafts and even Bronze Age wells (Wilsford), the shaft reported here is particularly early and remains, at present, unexplained. Excavation and augering has revealed a shaft over 25 m deep containing evidence of Mesolithic to Beaker activity.     

Co-becoming with angophora: performing more-than-human belongings in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

Belonging in Australian national parks has long been associated with universal ideas of nativeness or naturalness. However, these delineations have been critiqued as rooted in western, dualistic understandings of nature and culture that do not allow for other ways of conceptualising the world or for the agency of nonhumans. This paper argues for reconceptualising belonging as an ontological co-becoming where multiple contingent belongings co-emerge with bodies, worlds and place. To show how belonging co-becomes, I examine human–tree relations surrounding a special and sacred tree in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, Australia, the Angophora costata. I tell three stories that shed light on the multiple ways performances of belonging are entangled with histories, stories, spirits, and present and absent humans and nonhumans. In doing so, I show how belonging is a more-than-human practice where ideas of native and natural are questioned.     

Margaret Cavendish contre Robert Hooke : Le duel impossible

In 1665, Robert Hooke published his major work in microscopy, Micrographia, a defense of experimental philosophy. The following year, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published at her own expense a treatise and a novel that undermined the basis of this new science. The dispute broke out at the initiative of the Duchess, in the context of a vast controversy about the legitimacy and the efficiency of optical instruments in natural philosophy. All the figures of the dual are used, except one: the counterattack. Cavendish, indeed, was alone on the battlefield. Is it possible to call a dual a battle with only one combatant? This particular case of dispute that stops owing to the shortage of combatants is the subject of this article.     

Interview with Sara Margaret Evans

Born in 1943 in South Carolina, Evans graduated from high school in Dallas, Texas, and received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Duke University and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She began teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1976 and has been Distinguished McKnight University Professor since 1997. Her Personal Politics related U.S. women's liberation to the Civil Rights and New Left movements. Her Born for Liberty: A History of American Women is in its second edition and has been translated into a number of foreign languages. A noted activist, feminist, and teacher, Evans has coauthored books on women's history, consulted on several video productions, participated in national review panels, and served on the boards of various professional organizations. She has a 31-year-old son and a 19-year-old adopted daughter from Korea. This interview was conducted in Evans's office at the University of Minnesota by Roger Adelson in March 2000.     

Barbadian Gothic: The Moving Coffins of the Chase Vault in Socio-Cultural Context

Abstract

The Chase family vault (Oistins, Barbados) is widely known as the setting of a macabre nineteenth-century story of moving coffins. On several occasions between 1812 and 1821, on opening the sealed vault to add a new burial, the neatly stacked coffins were found scattered. This legend has never been examined within its contemporary setting, including the Gothic literary and cultural movement. This article seeks to show that the episode reveals much about the negotiation of power in an island society on the edge of slave rebellion, where the planter class were fearful of the enslaved peoples’ continued practice of the banned spiritual and healing rituals known as Obeah. The article further examines how the story reflects notions of otherness, death, materiality, and memory in early nineteenth-century Barbados, where the ordered Protestant world of the planters clashed with what they perceived as the elemental worldview of the enslaved African and Afro-Barbadian population.