‘Impressions of Weird Fate’: Revision and Crisis in ‘The Lady of Shalott’

Alfred Tennyson disliked the engraving of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ produced by William Holman Hunt for the 1857 Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems, accusing the artist of taking too many liberties in depicting the Lady’s hair and the threads of her weaving as ‘wildly tossing’ around her. This essay traces the histories of both Hunt’s image and Tennyson’s text, arguing that the poet’s objection is grounded in the fact the engraving reproduces the fierce agency that characterizes the Lady in Tennyson’s 1832 original but not his 1842 revision. That pattern of revision, I suggest, reflects the poet’s distress over the 1833 death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam and is motivated by his new ways of thinking, in the wake of that catastrophe, about the crisis of desire and the perpetual trauma of communication between the living and the dead.     

‘Signs of the still recent war’: Medbh McGuckian and conflict

In a review of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, Christopher Benfey maintained that ‘[t]o scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naïve as to sift Emily Dickinson's poems for references to the Civil War’. McGuckian's work is not often read for its commentary on or critique of violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, in an interview with John Brown, the poet revealed that ‘I never thought of myself as a “Troubles” poet; it was not part of my oeuvre and I couldn't do it simply as an exercise, so I didn't take it on’. This article tests the validity of her self-assessment by examining poems which borrow from sources focused on conflict, particularly the two world wars. The intertexts allow the poet to explore moments of crisis (due to violence, imprisonment and enforced deprivation) without having to deal explicitly with the more immediate conflict in Northern Ireland.     

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa?di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Sa?di’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa?di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Sa?di’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.     

The elusive ‘je’: Language and female subjectivity in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

The most striking feature of the narrative of Simone de Beauvoir's novel Les Belles Images (1966) is the constant shift between the third‐person pronoun ‘elle’ (or ‘Laurence') and the first‐person pronoun ‘je’. The pattern produced by this shift in narrative voice within the text has important implications for the construction of female subjectivity in the narrative, primarily in relation to its central character, Laurence. This article examines the nature of Laurence's relationship with language using arguments offered by the feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray pertaining to the relationship of exclusion binding women to language in patriarchal culture. My reading of the novel examines how far Laurence's problematic relationship with language might be read in terms of a quest to articulate her ‘je’ and make her ‘marginal’ voice heard. Further, it engages with, but ultimately problematises, Toril Moi's notion of an ‘authorial’ reading at work in Beauvoir's fictional texts.     

Fabricating the Thanatopolitical Body in Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Cárcel de Árboles

Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s first novella, Cárcel de árboles (1991), tells the story of a secret politico-medical experiment conducted on prisoners who have been condemned to death by the State. The experiment takes place in a prison camp located in the tropical forest. In this article, I examine the portrayal of power and embodiment in Rey Rosa’s novella, placing the text in dialogue with thanatopolitical theory and outlining the ways it evokes the historical context of violence and economic transition in Guatemala. I commence by discussing the forms of power at work in the novella’s prison camp, before examining the significance of medical science to Rey Rosa’s depiction of embodiment. I then explore the complex aesthetic and ethical questions embedded in the relationship between language, textuality and the body in the novella. Finally, I discuss the post-human dimensions of the text that emerge in the relationship between the human bodies of the prisoners and the non-human terrain. Over the course of this analysis, I contend that Rey Rosa marshals the body to invoke the ways in which the category of the ‘human’ is formed, deconstructed and reconfigured in the face of the destructive power that operates in the modern techno-scientific epoch.     

Texts,topoi and the self: a reading of Alfredian spirituality*

Challenging the allegation that Alfred's spirituality as Asser presents it is no more than a string of textual fictions, this article outlines a context for understanding Alfred's spirituality as a functional process of living texts, or of ‘textualizing’ the self. The discussion first draws support for this view from the history of early medieval spirituality and then demonstrates the theme's relevance both to Asser's representation of Alfred and to the king's own writings. Attention is given especially to the congruence between Alfred's depiction in the Life and Gregory the Great's teachings on the ideal rector as propounded in the Pastoral Care, a text carefully read and famously translated by Alfred himself. The comparison suggests that the main spiritual models for Alfred's kingly piety may be understood to reside in, and to involve assimilation of, this work of Gregory, making it possible to conceptualize the king's self‐presentation in terms of a conscious project to ‘live’ Gregory's text by bringing the ideals of the Gregorian rector to life in his own person. Such an argument helps to explain Alfred's interest in Gregory, to account for his concern to translate the Pastoral Care, and to legitimize the predominant images associated with the king's spirituality as indicative of a kind of functional piety grounded in the reading of texts, rather than simply reflected, perhaps falsely, in Asser’s Life.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

Didactic translation: The first Scandinavian translation of the Eclogues: Peder Jensen Roskilde,Bucolica (1639)

The very first translation of the Eclogues into a Scandinavian language, Peder Jensen Roskilde's Bucolica (1639), is concerned with interpretative closure. Following the tradition of reading Virgil's poetry allegorically the translation supplies names and circumstances where the text is unspecific. More than that, however, the translation also includes glosses, thus making the translation a hybrid between a commentary and a translation, a didactic translation. This article offers an analysis of this translation with a special focus on the relationship between the historically oriented allegorical interpretation and this unusual format.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

Sex,Fashion, Work: James Joyce and the Late-Victorian Actress

This article considers the presence of three late-Victorian actresses (Mrs Patrick Campbell, Eleonora Duse, and Sarah Bernhardt) in the work of James Joyce. The first appears in Joyce’s short story ‘A Mother’ (Dubliners). The strong influence of the other two is also detectable in the characterization of Ulysses’ heroines, Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom, and in a seminal text of late modernism, Finnegans Wake. In ‘A Mother’, Joyce’s attention to the importance of fashion on the stage and to poor working conditions for female performers calls to mind the career of Mrs Patrick Campbell. In Ulysses, Gerty’s performance in ‘Nausicaa’ recalls the techniques of the Ibsenian actress Eleonora Duse, known especially for her blushing; I argue that, given this famous skill and Joyce’s fascination with her, Duse directly informs Gerty’s characterization. Finally, Molly Bloom’s repertoire of dramatic references, including Trilby, Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt, publicity photographs, and Pineroticism, suggests Joyce’s immersion in a late-Victorian dramatic world. After sketching these connections in detail, I show that his interest in these actresses encourages scholars to continue to question the validity of traditional periodization boundaries. I end by arguing that the appearance of these actresses in these examples of early, high, and late modernism indicates the cultural richness of the long nineteenth century for Joyce, which continues throughout modernism’s successive phases.     

Meaning in a Changing Context: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach to Authorial Revision

Summary

In this article, I seek to develop a genetic/diachronic approach to the phenomenon of authorial revision, and to the interpretation of texts that exist in multiple versions. In all such cases, the reconstruction of textual meaning cannot be separated from the reconstruction of the process through which the text in its ‘final’ form came into being; furthermore, an understanding of the author's intentions in (re)writing cannot be entirely separated from an understanding of his/her motives for (re)writing. This article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I consider recent trends in editorial and literary theory that aim at characterising texts in terms of processes rather than products, in order to uphold the equal dignity of each version without losing sight of its connectedness to other stages in the history of the text. In the second section, I discuss how Quentin Skinner's views on meaning and context apply to cases of authorial revision, and I suggest that some key aspects of Skinner's contextualism need to be reconsidered. In the concluding section, I focus on a case study in order to demonstrate the operational value of such a genetic and motive-based approach to authorial revision: more particularly, I seek to show how a close examination of Jean Bodin's rewriting practices in the Methodus (1566–1572) and the République (1576) can throw new light on his shift from a concept of limited sovereignty to one of absolute sovereignty.     

The uses and abuses of ‘secular religion’: Jules Monnerot's path from communism to fascism

From starting his intellectual career as a surrealist, communist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, Jules Monnerot (1911–95) ended it as a candidate for the Front National in 1989.In this article I offer an explanation for the unexpected trajectory of this thinker whose work is little known in the English-speaking world. Without overlooking the idea that the infamous College encouraged such tendencies, I argue that the notion of ‘secular religion’, as Monnerot developed it in his Sociology of Communism (1949), goes some way to explain his gradual radicalization from Cold Warrior to fascist, a path that otherwise seems unlikely for a French intellectual after World War II. In order to emphasize the unusualness of Monnerot's case, I contrast it with that of his erstwhile collaborator, Georges Bataille. I show that accusations of fascism often levelled against Bataille should be more accurately directed at Monnerot, indeed that the fascism inherent within the College of Sociology was brought out not by Bataille but by Monnerot. Monnerot's case is unsettling first because his definition of ‘secular religion’ contributed to his pro-fascist stance; and second, because it forces us tore think what is meant by ‘philosophy after Auschwitz.’ This term usually brings to mind scholars such as T.W. Adorno, Emil Fackenheimor Emmanuel Levinas. Monnerot provides a rare example of a thinker whose fascism only developed after the Holocaust, a shocking response that demands the attention of all those interested in the relationship between religion and politics.     

The Meanings of Lesbianism in Post-War America

I had been a closet gay before I got married, about 1948, which means I had a relationship with a woman, and I'd been in love with her but I thought I was the only person in the world. There was no others in the world. I had never read a gay book. I didn't even know the word ‘gay’… I didn't know the word ‘lesbian’… And I really believe that women used to dress mannish simply to get you to know who they were … In those days it was very important.¹     

“SEEING” THE PAST: TEXT AND QUESTIONS OF HISTORY IN THE RĀJATARAṄGIṆĪ

Traditional scholarly opinion has regarded Kalha?a's Rājatara?gi?ī, the twelfth‐century Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmiri kings, as a work of history. This essay proposes a reinvestigation of the nature of the iconic text from outside the shadow of that label. It first closely critiques the positivist “history hypothesis,” exposing its internal contradictions over questions of chronology, causality, and objectivity as attributed to the text. It then argues that more than an empiricist historical account that modern historians like to believe it is—in the process bracketing out integral rhetorical, mythic, and didactic parts of the text—the Rājatara?gi?ī should be viewed in totality for the kāvya (epic poem) that it is, which is to say, as representing a specific language practice that sought to produce meaning and articulated the poet's vision of the land and its lineages. The essay thus urges momentarily reclaiming the text from the hegemonic but troubled understanding of it as history—only to restore it ultimately to a more cohesive notion of historicality that is consistent with its contents. Toward this end, it highlights the concrete claim to epistemic authority that is asserted both by the genre of Sanskrit kāvya generally and by the Rājatara?gi?ī in particular, and their conception of the poetic “production” of the past that bears a striking resonance with constructivist historiography. It then traces the intensely intertextual and value‐laden nature of the epistemology that frames the Rājatara?gi?ī into a narrative discourse on power and ethical governance. It is in its narrativity and discursivity—its meaningful representation of what constitutes “true” knowledge of time and human action—that the salience of the Rājatara?gi?ī may lie.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

Feeding fears: competing discourses of interdependency,sovereignty, and China's food security

Following the release of the 1994 report ‘Who will feed China?’ by the Worldwatch Institute, there has been much debate over the implications of China's growing demand for grain. The question of China's food production has elicited a variety of responses. While for some it raises the specter of regional and global instability as China becomes an environmental threat, for others the entrance of China into the world market promises increased trade and profits. In this paper I explore the responses in China and the US to the different notions of interdependence which have shaped the debate. I first turn to how concerns over China's food supply have, despite appeals to the concepts of global environmental and economic interdependence, become linked to classical state-centered geopolitical concerns such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘containment.’ I then look at how the debate has also been actively distanced from national security concerns through the invocation of an alternative interdependence founded on the logic of commerce. I conclude by arguing for the need within critical geopolitics to further examine the circulation of strategic texts between and within states, particularly in the analysis of texts that map worlds beyond the boundaries of North America and Europe.     

Kamapim gutpela man: Papua New Guinean and Chinese refinery workers' changing understandings of becoming a good man

This article adds to research on emerging masculinities in the Pacific by analysing how Papua New Guinean and Chinese male employees' intercultural work experiences impact their perceptions of becoming a good man. The idea of a good man acts as a benchmark for assessing the adaptability of Papua New Guinean employees to new work environments and determining if Chinese colleagues are their desired partners. I illustrate this point by first considering ‘becoming’ as an alternate framework to the binary framework reflected in earlier research. I next describe how Papua New Guinean workers impress their Chinese supervisors through negotiations and concessions about industrial and subsistence farming time, as well as how working with Papua New Guinean workers alters Chinese employees' perceptions of work. Finally, I demonstrate how employment practices foster Papua New Guinean workers' evolving perspectives on becoming a gutpela man (‘good man’) and Chinese employees' evolving perspectives on becoming a good person, a vital route to becoming a chenggong man (‘successful man’). This article proposes characterizing emerging masculinities as hybrid identities that are context-dependent, interculturally exchanged and temporal by presenting two parties' new thoughts on becoming a good man. This article demonstrates modulatory power dynamics in the Chinese refinery based on a two-way narrative as opposed to portraying Chinese management as the dominating force.     

‘La rue du 19 mars 1962 c'était la rue de la liberté’: Personal and Collective Memory Spaces in Rachid Akbal's Commemoration of Peace

Rachid Akbal is a French-born Algerian playwright, director and actor whose company, ‘Le temps de vivre’, took up residence at the Théâtre de Belleville in Paris in 2012 to perform his Trilogie Algérienne (three plays with a loosely autobiographical element: Baba la France, Ma mère l'Algérie and Alger, Terminal 2). On 19 March 2012, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first day of the ceasefire between Algeria and France, Akbal held an open evening at the theatre. The first half offered a run-through of the history between France and Algeria. The second half was a more personal, lyrical narrative of what the date represented for Akbal; unpublished elsewhere, Akbal has given permission for it to be reproduced here. In its hour-long performance, the narration was accompanied by sounds (natural elements, gunfire and sirens, and music), and at the end the lights went up and Akbal took a seat on stage, to begin a half-hour discussion with the audience. In so doing, Akbal created a discreet space of remembrance which allowed interested parties to come together in collective commemoration. Setting theorisations of cultural memory in dialogue with commentaries published during the commemorative period, this article sets up a framework to interrogate the possibilities of personal and collective remembrance offered by Akbal's event, opening these up via publication of the text and analysis of it as a ‘memory space’.     

DURABLE GOODS

In his thoughtful discussion of what makes some historical texts durable, lasting through time, Jaume Aurell arrives at the conclusion that these works show a balance between antiquarianism and presentism, and that this balance gives them a certain longevity of repute. Because, however, durability is a characteristic of the work, it seems to me problematic. Survival, rather than durability, appears to be the rubric we are discussing. It is not a characteristic of the work, any more than of a historical individual who survives a critical event like the French Revolution or the Holocaust. We identify survivors only retrospectively. A myriad of contingencies—time and chance—will obtain for any text to survive. Historiographical competition is ferocious, and worthy of study. Like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each historical text that fails to survive will have its own history. Why Gibbon and not Volney? We can adduce reasons, of course, but they are looks backward; in the late eighteenth century, no predictions were certain. Both Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit have, each in his own way, suggested the characteristics of the best histories. I believe they are mistaken, if best is to be taken to mean: most likely to survive. This is a characteristic of the ongoing reception of the work. As in an ongoing conversation, the historical work may advance the discourse, or contradict it, or change the subject. Whether it will have influence after the speaker has departed is up to those who remain and are added to the group. This rhetorical survival in the conversation is what is in question here. As such, it is profoundly historical, and not “beyond time.”