On Will and Reason in L'astrée

This article sheds light on the technique of amplificatio by which Boccaccio expands the stories of famous women he finds in Valerius Maximus's De fide uxorium. Boccaccio's work on famous women situates itself between the genres of fiction and the historical treatise. It analyzes in philological detail Boccaccio's citation technique and his elaboration of the ancient model, showing how the greatest narrator of the Italian Middle Ages revitalizes and actualizes it and crafts an original literary product.     

Displacing Barthes: Self,Other and the Anxiety of Theory

This article explores the relationship between the other and the writing self in three of Barthes's works and shows how the anxious and changeable state of the ‘je’ unsettles conceptions of ‘theory’ and its analytical object. Barthes attempts to conceptualise cultural otherness in Mythologies, L'Empire des signes and Incidents, and, on one level, his fantasies of encounter serve to displace or unground the writing ‘self’. On another level, however, the theorist's persona in these works turns out to be disorientated and unnerved by these displacements, and he couples his jubilant self-dissolution with a longing for a sense of origin or ground. Barthes as a result remains undecided about his positioning within his own discourse, and his works demonstrate the necessary interpenetration of theories of alterity with the contradictory subjective and affective desires of the writing self. The aim of the piece is ultimately to argue that, for its very flaws and inconsistencies, Barthes's writing about otherness may help us to understand the challenges and deficiencies of postcolonial conceptions of cultural difference.     

Nineteenth-century Irish Anacreontics: the literary relationship of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Moore

The odes of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, celebrating wine, women and song, were made newly popular in the nineteenth century through the efforts of Thomas Moore, a writer whose first volume of verse, a loose translation of the Odes of Anacreon, published in 1800, marks him out today as a poet of Romantic sociability par excellence. I argue that the Anacreontic ode popularised by Moore continued to resonate through nineteenth-century Ireland – albeit in a heavily mediated form – in the work of the poet's successor, James Clarence Mangan, who picked up the cup in the series of drinking songs he wrote periodically throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the decades during which Mangan sank into alcoholism and emotional estrangement. The easy charm of Moore's Anacreontic song mutates in Mangan's verse into a more complex, often allusive and fragmented form, a perverse Anacreontics, which corresponds both to the poet's psychic trauma (his alcoholism and self-alienation) and to a broader cultural and political dislocation experienced by Ireland under British rule. This discomfort is registered in Mangan's verse in the playful refusal of a single authorial voice and in the poet's tendency both to ventriloquise and to distort influence – not just that of Moore but also of the British Romantics, notably Byron and Coleridge.     

Rooms of Their Own: Public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860‐1940

Differences in the provision of public toilets for men and women point to the gendering of citizens. In the later nineteenth century, provision of public toilets in the city of Dunedin centered on the management of male bodies as the meaning of 'public decency' was transformed, while women were catered for as consumers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when provision for women became a public issue, it was debated in terms of women's special character as citizens. The bodily and spatial characteristics of public and private were renegotiated around this issue: as women became more public, toilets became more private. This article draws on debates about the sexed and gendered body in public space, maternal citizenship, the civilising and modernising of landscapes and bodies, and shifting conceptions of privacy and public.     

Home Is Where the Hearth Is: Anthracological and Microstratigraphic Analyses of Pleistocene and Holocene Combustion Features,Riwi Cave (Kimberley,Western Australia)

The manipulation of fire is a technological act. The identification of the archaeological signatures of the controlled use of fire has important implications not only for the estimations of the origins and functions of the first fireplaces but also for our understanding of prehistoric technological development and resource use. At Riwi (Kimberley region, Western Australia), excavations over two field seasons have revealed a discontinuous occupation sequence over the past 45 ka, showing numerous, different combustion features interspersed within the deposit. Anthracological and micromorphological investigations at Riwi Cave indicate that the combustion features at the site can be categorised into three types: flat combustion features (type A), dug combustion features (type B) and thick accumulations of mixed combustion residues (type C). These provide evidence for two kinds of combustion practice: (i) fires lit directly on the ground and most likely not re-used and (ii) ground ovens, the latter appearing some 10,000 years after the first evidence for occupation of the site. A comparison of the wood species identified within these combustion features with those from equivalent scattered context levels, enables an exploration of the potential factors influencing wood selection and fire use through time at the site. A detailed understanding of the relationship between wood charcoal remains and archaeological context yields significant information on changes to environmental context and site occupation patterns over time.     

Book reviews

Bernard Arps (ed.). Performance in Java and Bali: studies of narrative, theatre, music, and dance,xi, 244 pp. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1993. £10.

C.D. Grijns. Jakarta Malay: a multidimensional approach to spatial variation. 2 vols.: xx, 292 pp.; vi, 161 pp., 35 maps. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1991. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde, 149.) Guilders 100.