Book reviews

P. L. Thomas (tr.). Hikayat Panglima Nikosa: The story of Panglima Nikosa, with an introduction and notes by R. H. W. Reece and P. L. Thomas. v, 45, 29 pp. Sarawak: Persatuan Kesusaster‐an Sarawak, [^C1983].

Russell Jones (ed. and tr.). Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim: the short version of the Malay text. [v], 78 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983. (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde. Bibliotheca Indonesica, 24.) Guilders 20.     

HISTORY IN THE SIKH PAST1

This article offers a reading of an early eighteenth‐century Punjabi text—Gur Sobha or “The Splendor of the Guru”—as a form of historical representation, suggesting reasons for the importance of the representation of the past as history within Sikh discursive contexts. The text in question provides an account of the life, death, and teachings of the last of the ten living Sikh Gurus or teachers, Guru Gobind Singh. The article argues that the construction of history in this text is linked to the transition of the Sikh community at the death of the last living Guru whereby authority was invested in the canonical text (granth) and community (panth). As such a particular rationale for history was produced within Sikh religious thought and intellectual production around the discursive construction of the community in relation to the past and as a continuing presence. As such, the text provides an alternative to modern European forms of historical representation, while sharing some features of the “historical” as defined in that context. The essay relates this phenomenon to a broader exploration of history in South Asian contexts, to notions of historicality that are plural, and to issues particular to the intersection of history and religion. Later texts, through the middle of the nineteenth century, are briefly considered, to provide a sense of the significance of Gur Sobha within a broader, historically and religiously constituted Sikh imagination of the past.     

Chronicle for 1993

Abstract

Theory is not a goal in itself but a means of enriching the history of cartography by stimulating new research questions and objectives. In this paper the concept of ‘transparent maps’ (carriers of an image of the external reality of the world) and ‘opaque maps’ is introduced. The notion is approached structurally (standards of graphical representation, drawing, geometry, text); through the sociology of the map (map makers, institutions, the public); and through seeing maps in their cultural and historical context (an approach which raises issues of the definitional boundaries of the history of cartography and which is arguably one of the most stimulating perspectives today as fostered by, in particular, contributors to the History of Cartography). Finally, attention is drawn to three important topics for the research agenda: the links between maps and culture; maps as a language of communication and as instruments of power; and the links between perception, logic and mnemonics.     

Aretos yacni Sevdâ: The Nineteenth Century Ottoman Translation of the ‘Erotokritos’

Abstract

The popularity of Vincenzo Cornaro's Erotokritos among Cretan Muslims is well known. In the nineteenth century even the Ottoman authorities of the Island took some interest in this work, and the then Ottoman Governor General, the Epirot Sava Pasha, allocated 3,000 francs in 1887 to the local scholar Antonios Giannaris who had been assigned by the Cretan General Assembly to prepare an edition of the text.     

SJOT after Twenty Five Years

ABSTRACT

Although it is often assumed that there was continuing conflict between Ishmael and Isaac during their lifetimes, (and therefore, continuing conflict between their descendants as well) the text of Genesis refutes this in-terpretation. Instead the biblical text reveals close connections between their lives. These parallel passages include intersections between the boys’ moth-ers, (Hagar and Sarah); the boys’ births, and early days; threats to each of their lives; the strange behaviors of their mutual father Abraham; events at the time of their greatest danger; and finally additional parallels between the lives of Ishmael and Isaac.     

On Not Reading The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service

This essay focuses on Garnet Wolseley’s controversial war instruction manual, The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service (1869). While the Pocket-book’s contribution to discussions of reading and soldiers’ education has carved out a significant place for it in Victorian military history, in its day it was constantly contested and undermined by contradictory representations, as a book much talked about but little read. This essay is an exercise in tracing these eccentric reception histories, as an acute reminder that books may well have vibrant intellectual lives without actually being read. To examine the literary and material circulation of the Pocket-book in the late nineteenth century, it draws on archival research in the Macmillan Archive and Wolseley’s private papers to discuss the genesis of the text not just as a compendium of information but also as an object that is handled, carried, and exchanged. I juxtapose these considerations with episodes in the representation of the Pocket-book: in an anti-war pamphlet; an anonymous satirical drawing found in Wolseley’s personal scrapbooks; and in Kipling’s short stories about British soldiers in colonial South Asia. In all of these, the Pocket-book is characterized as a dubious, even dangerous text – one that was neither read, nor should be. The examples demonstrate three of the different trajectories through which the Pocket-book emerged as an unread book in the Victorian imagination: through encouragements not to read, rejection, and misappropriation.     

Marginalia to a New Aeneis recensa

The text of G.B. Conte's Teubner edition (2009) contains more than 70 divergences from Mynors' edition (1969), apart from a number of orthographica. About 40% of these differing readings can also be found in Geymonat's text (1973/2008 Geymonat, M. 1973/2008. Opera Torino/ Roma [Google Scholar]). Among the rest this reviewer has noted a handful of choices of particular interest and fit to make the new edition a welcome contribution to the long-standing quest for an optimal text of Vergil. Another, more controversial, handful of Conte's preferences is discussed below together with his accompanying information in the app. crit.: 1. 380; 2. 433; 598; 738-739 (with a new conjecture); 3. 685-686; 4. 176; 5. 505; 851; 6. 746; 7. 129; 9. 130; 214; 402; 463; 10. 366 (with a new conjecture); 12. 470.     

Promise and Blessing: Gen 12,1-3

ABSTRACT

Gen 12,1-3 is a text which plays an important part in the dis-cussion about the establishing of the modern state of Israel. The question is, whether this text defends this event in the 20th century’s history or if one should find the defence elsewhere. In order to find an answer to this question three classic German commentaries have been reread. The commentaries, written by Herman Gunkel (GHAT), Gerhard von Rad (ATD), and Claus Westermann (BKAT), are from different periods of the 20th century. The result is that the commentators find that the text is more interested in the blessing and the promise than in the history of the possession of the land of Canaan.     

The Translation of the Unseen Self: Fortunatus,Mercury and The Wishing-Hat

This article examines the popular early German prose text Fortunatus both as folktale and as mercantile myth, concentrating on the hitherto critically neglected Wishing-Hat, which is regarded in this essay as a descendant of the Petasus of Mercury. In the original Fortunatus text dating from 1509, there are many points of contact centred in the Hat, such as its appearance, the themes of speed, secrecy, invisibility, theft, and commerce, between Fortunatus and Mercury. The manner in which these themes were developed in subsequent German revisions of Fortunatus and in seventeenth-century English translations and adaptations of the text is discussed. From embodiment of knowledge to a signifier of multipresence, from being a representation of travel to an accessory to raptorial attack, the uses and meanings of the Wishing-Hat are seen to be many and varied.     

Angelo Zottoli's Cursus litteraturæ sinicæ as Propaedeutic to Chinese Classical Tradition

One of the most impressive landmarks in Western Sinology must be the Cursus litteraturæ sinicæ by Italian Jesuit Angelo Zottoli (1826–1902). This four-thousand page work, presented as a Latin introduction to the written Chinese language, is actually a synoptic guide to the Chinese tradition, encompassing a vast range of texts from the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Songs) to Qing-era examination essays, poetry, and letters. The Cursus was regarded even in its own time as an overly demanding text for beginners, but it remains a useful model for thinking about how scholars of premodern China should approach the linguistic and rhetorical features of texts. Though specialized study is essential, an appreciation of premodern China also demands comprehensive perspective. Conscious reflection on the Cursus and its potential may thus help to clarify some of the challenges faced by Sinology in the 21st century.     

Anna Comnena's account of the First Crusade: History and politics in the reigns of the emperors Alexius I and Manuel I Comnenus

Abstract

Anna Comnena's history the Alexiad has been accorded a high honorary status by Byzantine historians. Her pioneering efforts in philosophy and the thoroughness of her historical methodology are admired, although there is a distinct reluctance to analyse her historical writing. On a superficial level the Alexiad is a straightforward text: an historical panegyric in its organisation, frequently eulogistic in tone, in the manner of court orations, and rhetorically strongly influenced by conventional Byzantine pastiches of Homer. A triumphal mood pervades the biography. A somewhat more careful assessment soon reveals the significant tensions and contradictions which lurk beneath the formalised strength of this epic historical narrative. Ideological and cultural problematics abound. The self-conscious celebratory presentation of Byzantium's cultural elitism is frequently subverted by the author's pessimism. The spatial and temporal terrain of the Alexiad contains many visionary qualities, even though the text purports to narrate the events ‘as they occurred‘. Historical perspectives and idiosyncratic philosophical positions impinge, blend, envelop, and disorganise the text. Among the many themes is Anna's presentation of the ‘Latin West’, and in particular her characterisation of the appearance of crusaders in Byzantine society. A more personalised feature is Anna's self-projection of herself within the Alexiad as ‘a dutiful daughter’ and ‘a loving wife’. Yet the narrative contains elements of gender confusion, for there is an assertive and possessive interest in forms of political power that were usually culturally exclusive to Byzantine men.     

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.     

Topoiesis del espacio textual

ABSTRACT

The concept of topoiesis of textual space addresses an analysis of the spatial elements that tend to provide a meaning to the literary text. Based on textual semiotics where there is an organized relational system of meanings, in this article we propose that it is possible to determine the function of space as a meaning issue from three different literary text instances (event or motive; character; and object). This distinction will permit a deeper interpretation of the sense of space in the literary text.     

Los adioses (1954) de Juan Carlos Onetti: procedimientos para alcanzar la sugerencia y el énfasis en el significado como nouvelle

Based on a presentation of the production of nouvelles in Hispanic America and its current study, in which the permanent academic and critical interest in Juan Carlos Onetti's Los adioses (1954) stands, this article raises and discusses the procedures used by the author to achieve a narrative that by its nature of nouvelle refuses the explicit in exchange for the suggestion. Among such procedures are the character of the narrator, the ellipsis, and a language of conjecture and doubt. With all of those procedures Onetti builds an open and multiple text in which his major emphasis during the writing process lies in the development of the meaning of the text, instead of just narrating the story, as proposed by Henry James in various prefaces to his nouvelles.     

Red Brigades (1969–1974): An Italian Phenomenon and a Product of the Cold War

With the removal of Khrushchev in 1964 the Soviet Union adopted—at the level of the secret service—a more aggressive policy towards western countries, with a more intensive recourse to so-called ‘covert operations’. These operations regarded even western communist parties, such as the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which were close to being viewed as ‘orthodox’ by the Soviet leadership. The so-called ‘active measures’ which resulted were realised through the infiltration of agents, the training of (usually young) extremists, and (through them) the sending of warnings to the PCI leadership about its divergence from the Soviet line. This context helps us to understand better than before three key events of the years 1968–1973: the emergence of the first terrorist groups in Italy (the Partisans Action Groups and the Red Brigades); the bombing of the electric mains line where Giangiacomo Feltrinelli lost his life; and the car crash in which Enrico Berlinguer was involved in 1973 during an official visit to Bulgaria. An analysis of the Cold War context in which Italian terrorism (and specifically the Red Brigades) developed reveals origins and patterns that are different to those usually identified in the literature.     

Getting Acquainted With Alfonso Hernández-Catá

Traditionally it has been considered that Castilian cancionero poetry has hardly preserved diálogos interestróficos, such as the primitive tensón. However, the Cancionero de Palacio contains a very significant sample of the different possibilities of the cancioneril dialogic mold: beyond poetic dialogue forms more common in Fifteenth Century Spanish poetry, through whole texts juxtaposed, the Cancionero de Palacio contains several other more original forms, and as a result it serves as a codex unicus. This article offers, for the first time, an analysis of all the diálogos interestróficos collected in this Cancionero. This analysis contradicts the widely held view about the rarity and scarcity of these texts and confirms the originality of the dialogic schemes and the strong presence of polyphonic texts in this colectánea. The article presents a list of twelve compositions—a very significant number—in which the dialogue articulates all the text, with voices alternating stanza to stanza or even within each stanza. After establishing this body of work, the study centers on a typological analysis based on the voices found in these poems.     

Secular apocalyptic and Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) makes ironically secular use of the imagery of the New Jerusalem and of unregenerate Babylon in the Book of Revelation. His purchase on the text is mediated both by Bunyan's Pilgrim’s Progress, a childhood favourite, and hymns such as ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ translated from Bernard of Cluny's De Contemptu Mundi. Avoiding the traditions of anti-Catholic interpretation, and of explicitly political readings which identify Babylon and the mysterious ‘number of the beast’ with particular historical adversaries and tyrants, Hardy uses the biblical text sardonically to demonstrate the inadequacy of escapist dreams and institutional religion and to explore problems of poverty and ambition complicated by sexuality and its cynical exploitation.