Visions of reconciliation: Longley,Heaney and the Greeks

At the heart of myth is negotiation, as the inner world comes to terms with external conditions. Many contemporary Irish poets have turned to mythical material in order to explore how, as Derek Mahon suggested, a good poem could be a paradigm of good politics. This essay explores the ways in which Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley have used ancient Greek myths to bring a hopeful light against seemingly intractable political problems, in line with the principle of third-party intervention, or the deus ex machina that prevents further misunderstanding. Translation opens up entrenched perspectives, forcing the self, in unfamiliar situations, to face the reality of the other, and to consider the other's perceptions and needs. This intervention aims for reconciliation, whether between individuals, social groups, individual and state, or between the living and the dead, and it reveals that reconciliation is always an approximation that must be continually fought for.     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.     

Corporations and commemoration: first world war remembrance,Lloyds TSB and the national memorial arboretum

This paper explores the role of corporations and financial organisations in maintaining a memory of employees who have served during the wars of the 20th century. Focusing initially on memorial schemes devised by finance houses in the commemorative era after the Great War, the paper examines the emergence of a broader approach to organisational memory and the social construction of collective memory. Taking the Lloyds TSB finance group as a case study, the origins of the company’s war memorial in central London are examined, and the recent attempts to re‐locate a number of memorial objects and icons accumulated during the expansion of the group. This case study indicates how the social memory of an organisation might be understood through an appraisal of the monumental furniture that lives, often invisibly, within an organisation. The paper concludes with a number of questions concerning the nature of organisational memory when confronted with a history of merger and acquisition, and the difficulties in finding a commemorative site able to represent and safeguard these histories.     

Individual experience,collective remembrance and the politics of monastic reform in high medieval Flanders

This paper examines why Simon (d. 1148), the chronicler of the abbey of Saint‐Bertin in Flanders, designated all of the remaining evidence for sixty years of the communal past as ‘unmemorable’. An analysis of the chronicler's sources and context of writing reveals that his rejection of these memories was determined both by personal experience and the desire to advocate the legitimacy of the then current reforms. To these factors he subordinated the need to provide his fellow monks with a sense of historical continuity and the opportunity to present a troubled but significant part of the abbey's history.     

Between Memory and Desire: Gender and the remembrance of war in doi moi Vietnam

This article explores how memory and desire narrate the remembrance of war in doi moi Vietnam through gendered representations. Based on a reading of texts, including fiction and a film shown on television, I argue that memory in wartime texts evokes a landscape of gendered desire and longing. Using Judith Butler's theory of gender melancholy, the article looks at how these texts serve a political project cultivated by the state to displace its own ideal authority.

Entre la memoria y el deseo: género y la remembranza de la guerra en Doi Moi Vietnam

Este artículo explora cómo la memoria y el deseo relata la remembranza de la guerra en ‘doi moi’ Vietnam a través de representaciones de género. Haciendo uso de textos que incluyen literatura y una tele-película, argumento que la memoria en los textos de la época de la guerra evoca un paisaje de deseo y añoranza de género. Utilizando la teoría de Judith Butler de melancólico del género, el artículo examina cómo le sirvan los textos a un proyecto político que es cultivado por el estado para desplazar su propia idea de autoridad.     

European national poetry,Islam and the defeat of the medieval Church

The Muslim conquest of the Holy Land from Christendom, the invasion of southwestern Europe in the eighth century, and the Christian struggle, ultimately unsuccessful, to regain the Holy Land from Islam in the Crusades dominated European culture, particularly its poetry, for centuries. From the Old French epic, The Song of Roland (c. 1100) to the Albanian epic, The Highland Lute (early twentieth century), a vast popular culture grew in European vernacular languages in response to Muslim invasions and conquests. This article attempts to elucidate in panoramic form a neglected area of nationalism. It argues that from the medieval period until the fall of the Ottoman empire, poetry was instrumental in the rise of European national identities, partly in reaction to centuries of ascendancy of Islam, which undermined the authority of the Pope, the universal Church, the Gospel and Latin. The defeat of the medieval Church opened the way to narrower, more national and cultural concerns, reflected in a cluster of vernacular European poetic traditions.     

Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture

This article explores how the late-Victorian poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the collaborative pseudonym Michael Field, used fashionable dress to construct and advertise their unique poetic identity. Using evidence from their journal Works and Days, I contextualise Bradley and Cooper's clothing in terms of late-Victorian dress culture, and the major dress reform movements of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate that Bradley and Cooper used fashion as a distinctively feminine way of participating in aesthetic culture, marking significant life events, and to advertise their poetic identity. This self-fashioning also exposed them to aesthetic scrutiny from their peers Oscar Wilde and Bernard Berenson. Finally, I argue that fashion played a crucial role in Bradley and Cooper's desire for one another – and that this desire can be understood in terms of erotic reciprocity.     

The Dark Philosopher and the postmodern turn: Heraclitus in the poetry of Seferis,Elytis and Fostieris

Abstract

Σ?ρμα ε?κ? κεχυμ?νων ? κ?λλιστο? κ?σμο?.

The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.

Heraclitus D.124

This article examines the ways in which the perennial philosophy of Heraclitus becomes a site where the battle between modernist and postmodernist poetics unfolds. Seferis and Elytis exploit the Heraclitean doctrines of change, unity of opposites and the all-permeating logos in a manner that allows them to conceptualize and present what Lyotard calls the ‘modernist sublime’. Fostieris mobilizes the very same doctrines within his poetry, flouting the logical law of contradiction as Heraclitus did. By using and abusing the very concepts he challenges, Fostieris interrogates the modernist quest for master narratives and universal consensus, bringing forward the illusory character of such endeavours.     

The voice of the dead king Chindasuinth: poetry,politics, and the discourse of penance in Visigothic Spain

Around ad 653, Eugenius II, bishop of Toledo, composed a first‐person poetic epitaph for the deceased Visigothic king Chindasuinth (r. 642–53) in which the monarch is made to speak with self‐deprecating candour. This paper offers a reassessment of the poem's language and rhetorical strategy by situating it within contemporary discourses surrounding royal admonition and penance. Rather than interpreting Eugenius's composition as an act of defamation, as the majority of critics have done, it reads the poem as a dignifying literary expression of atonement. This reading corresponds with other specimens of Eugenius's poetry and evidence from a developing literary culture at Chindasuinth's court.