扑不灭的一簇圣火——张琴秋之恋

本文通过张琴秋在西路军兵败祁连、陕北十年和“文革”浩劫等几个历史时期的活动和遭际 ,记述了这位中国现代女中豪杰的三次婚恋和她坎坷而光辉的人生经历。文字朴实无华 ,内容感人至深     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

The Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in Southeastern Central Europe (Czechoslovakia and Hungary)

Southeastern Central Europe is quite rich in finds of progressive Neandertals from Middle Paleolithic contexts and early modern humans associated with evolved Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian and Pavlovian). There are no human fossils that can be related to the transitional Middle-Upper Paleolithic units (the Bohunician and the Szeletian); thus, from anthropology we know only that the transitional period began with Neandertals and ended with modern humans. The archaeological record is more complex. The Jankovichian industries of Hungary differ from the mostly non-Levallois Middle Paleolithic of Central Europe in the presence of some Levallois; they seem to be technologically related to the Levallois-Leptolithic Bohunician industries of Moravia, dated to 43,000–38,000 B.P., which are the first transitional Upper Paleolithic unit. The appearance of the Szeletian before 42,000 B.P. in Hungary and at about 39,000 in Moravia represents a technological variation of the transition, although retaining marked local Middle Paleolithic elements. The date of the appearance of the typical Aurignacian, the first culture clearly related to modern humans, is unclear, but it certainly developed after 36,000 B.P. and has several dates between 35,000 and 30,000 B.P.     

Arthur's refusal to eat: ritual and control in the romance feast

Arthur's refusal to begin feasting before he has seen a marvel or heard a tale of adventure is a recurring motif in medieval romance. Previous comment on this ritual has suggested that the source for such a taboo on eating may be found in earlier narratives in the Celtic languages. This paper argues that, although the ritual almost certainly originates in pre-chivalric society, romance authors adapted and developed it to reflect the courtly-chivalric preoccupations of their own world. Arthur's ritual gesture may be seen as a means of containing and controlling both interior moral threats and exterior physical peril, and is intimately connected to the courtly conception of the feast. This study draws on the evidence of religious writing and courtesy manuals and explores some highly-developed treatments of the motif in romance in order to suggest that literary engagements with Arthur's refusal to eat have much to say about contemporary ideas of ritual and reality as mediated through the symbolically-charged arena of the medieval feast.     

Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith Thompson

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.     

Arthur's refusal to eat: ritual and control in the romance feast

Arthur's refusal to begin feasting before he has seen a marvel or heard a tale of adventure is a recurring motif in medieval romance. Previous comment on this ritual has suggested that the source for such a taboo on eating may be found in earlier narratives in the Celtic languages. This paper argues that, although the ritual almost certainly originates in pre-chivalric society, romance authors adapted and developed it to reflect the courtly-chivalric preoccupations of their own world. Arthur's ritual gesture may be seen as a means of containing and controlling both interior moral threats and exterior physical peril, and is intimately connected to the courtly conception of the feast. This study draws on the evidence of religious writing and courtesy manuals and explores some highly-developed treatments of the motif in romance in order to suggest that literary engagements with Arthur's refusal to eat have much to say about contemporary ideas of ritual and reality as mediated through the symbolically-charged arena of the medieval feast.     

Towards a Byzantine ecocriticism: witches and nature control in the medieval Greek romance

Abstract

Since its rise in the mid-1990s, ecocriticism, the study of the depiction of the built and natural environments in literature, has been deeply engaged with contemporary political and social issues surrounding anthropogenic ecological degradation and climate change. Such an ideological outlook, however, limits the application of the discourse in the case of medieval literature, which lacks such contemporary resonance. Ecocritical and ecofeminist analyses of the three witches with power over the environment in the Byzantine romances and their western analogues will nevertheless demonstrate the connection between nature control, femininity and patriarchal oppression and, as importantly, offer a theoretical framework for the application of an apolitical ecocriticism to Byzantine (and medieval) literature.     

Escape from the country: the gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance

This study focuses on two marginalized groups in Chinese society: 27-years old (or older) ‘left-over’ (never-married) women and divorced women. Both these kinds of women are subject to discrimination and ridicule by the mass media and even their own families. This essay argues that despite the economic prosperity China has enjoyed over the last thirty years, gender relations in the country are rooted in a patriarchal discourse that reveals a hybridity of old and new ideals – family responsibility and individual self-fulfillment – in which the pursuit of love and marital commitment cannot be divorced from larger social-cultural-economic structures that endorse intergenerational responsibility and obligation, as well as promote gender inequality in the home and workplace. For these two groups of ostracized women, romance with foreign men may seem an alternative to the constraints of this structural framework. Drawing from a pool of evidence, published interviews, media reports, and printed ethnographic studies, this study analyzes the predicaments of leftover and divorced women, the interactions between these women and foreign men, and what their experiences with these men say about gender and racial differences in relation to gender inequality.     

Stirring Resistance from Moscow: The German Communists of Czechoslovakia and Wireless Propaganda in the Sudetenland, 1941-1945

This is a study of the radio propaganda campaign targeted atthe Sudetenland from the USSR from November 1941 to May 1945.Under the supervision of the Czechoslovak communist party andthe Comintern, the broadcasts were composed and conducted bySudeten German communists stationed first in Ufa and then inMoscow. At first, on the basis of limited information, theystrove simply to divide Sudeten Germans at home from the Nazirégime. But from May 1942 they stepped up their appealfor active resistance alongside that of their Czech ‘brothers’in the Protectorate. Through 1943 the appeal remained positive,assuring all German anti-fascists that they would be secureand treated equally in a future Czechoslovak state. By 1944,however, the message subtly altered in tune with Moscow's decisionto expel most Sudeten Germans. The broadcasts failed to spellthis out, but tried to warn their listeners of what might happenif they did not resist. In reality, though many in the Sudetenlandwere disillusioned with Nazism, the level of active resistanceseems to have been small and the broadcasts probably had a minimaleffect. Nevertheless, they alarmed the Nazi authorities andsome of the propaganda arguments certainly matched the growinganxieties of many Sudeten Germans. By 1944 the Sudeten communistbroadcasters themselves were divided over what tone to adopt.Some still felt a certain Sudeten allegiance and vainly resisteda policy line based on presumed Sudeten ‘collective guilt’.The majority bowed before the official, more critical line,accepting that most Sudeten Germans would be expelled afterthe war. The article seeks for the first time to probe the mindsetof Sudeten German communists, and to set this alongside thatof their target audience in the wartime Sudetenland.     

Local Decisionmaking and Management in Czechoslovakia: 1990–19921

This article discusses the local government and decisionmaking system which emerged in the post-communist era in the former Czechoslovakia as a result of sweeping political, economic, and social change. The legal, institutional, and financial framework put in place following on rapid decentralization and deregulation is outlined; also discussed are problems associated with fragmentation, role definition, and uncertainty, as well as lack of management experience, strategic planning stills, training (both of local officials and elected representatives), and money.     

Patronage of the poetic Mélusine romance: Guillaume l’Archevêque’s confrontation with dynastic crisis

In 1400 Guillaume l’Archevêque, the lord of Parthenay, commissioned the Roman de Parthenay (RP), a poetic ancestral romance affirming his family’s descent from Mélusine, the mythic fairy-serpentine matriarch of the Poitevin Lusignan dynasty. Prevailing scholarship holds that Guillaume’s commission was a political response to the earlier patronage of a prose Mélusine romance by Jean, duke of Berry, c. 1392. According to this view, Guillaume was an English partisan who sought to counter the French claims to Poitevin territories embedded in Berry’s romance with a text that proclaimed his own (and therefore English) rights to lands in central France. After exploring textual and historical evidence for this conventional view, the paper argues that clues to understanding Guillaume’s patronage lie in an analytical comparison of passages in the RP with the specific dynastic circumstances confronting l’Archevêque at the end of the fourteenth century. Examination of the romance in conjunction with evidence provided by feudal, financial, and legal sources suggests that Guillaume’s literary patronage was motivated not by contemporary affairs of state but by his anxieties about the imminent extinction of the Parthenay dynasty.