James McNeill Whistler in Chile: Portrait of the Artist as Arms Dealer

The colorful and controversial life of American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler took many twists and turns. One of the most dramatic and least explicable of the turns came in 1866, when he traveled to Valparaiso, Chile. Generations of Whistler biographers have been puzzled by the reasons for this sojourn, but a recently discovered collection of documents provides significant clues for solving the mystery. Whistler, it seems, had become involved in a scheme to provide weapons to the Chilean navy in a war against Spain. The scheme turned into a fiasco, dashing Whistler’s hopes of handsome financial profits, but his weeks in South America significantly shaped his development as an artist.     

A Workshop on European Peasants

Art critics and scholars have puzzled over the behavior of Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke, three important modern painters who have made frequent and abrupt changes of style. In each case, assuming this behavior to be idiosyncratic, the experts consequently failed to recognize its common basis. But stylistic versatility is in fact often a characteristic of conceptual innovators whose ability to solve specific problems can free them to pursue new goals. This contrasts sharply with the practice of experimental artists, whose inability to achieve their goals often ties them to a single style for an entire career. The phenomenon of the conceptual innovator who produces diverse innovations is an important and new feature of twentieth-century art; Picasso was the prototype, and he has been followed by a series of others, from Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia to Bruce Nauman and Damien Hirst. Versatility has furthermore been a characteristic not only of modern painters but also of conceptual innovators in other arts, and of conceptual scholars. Recognizing the common basis of this behavior deepens our understanding not only of twentieth-century art but also of human creativity more generally, for it adds a dimension to the contrast between conceptual and experimental innovators.     

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.     

A Review of “The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government,” and “Adam Smith as Theologian”

Abstract

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has asserted in several writings that present-day democratic governing institutions fail to incorporate beliefs about the common good and deliberation. However, objections can be raised against MacIntyre's characterization based on research from a new field in political science, Deliberative Democracy. Empirical research in that field shows that the common good and deliberation still do have a place in the United States Congress. It also shows that what James Madison argued at the founding of the country still holds, that representative deliberative bodies aid in transforming arguments for private goods into arguments for the common good; they refine and enlarge the public views.     

Ardent Service: Female Eroticism and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers (1900)

Gertrude Dix's socialist-feminist novel, The Image Breakers (1895) has perplexed twentieth-century critics by its brief, short-circuited representation of homoerotic affection between the two female protagonists. In answer, this essay roots the women's relationship in the wider social, historical context of New Life politics and ethics in the 1890s. Members of the Fellowship of the New Life heralded not merely a variety of alternative lifestyles including vegetarianism and co-education, but also extensive discussion about sexual mindfulness and generosity. The charismatic seer and inspiration for the FNL, James Hinton, preached that utopia could be achieved by practicing an erotically-charged altruism. If, as Sharon Marcus has claimed, such female mutual devotion was common and perceived as normative, it was particularly affirmed by ethical-socialist culture. In the novel, Leslie Ardent's loving service to Rosalind is fuelled by her political mission and desire for self-realization. Through this female intimacy, Dix evokes the initial phase of New Life socialism as Hinton and his followers had espoused it. By contrast, the women's heterosexual relationships are more troubling, as male comrades pressure them respectively into heterosexual marriage and free love. In order to discredit heterosexual free love, Dix paints its proponent as a disturbed anarchist, rather than admit that historically some in ethical-socialist circles had advocated polyamoury. Nor does she acknowledge the philosophical convergences between collective anarchism and ethical socialism at the fin de siècle, though she herself was engaged in radical communities. Through her indictment of free love, Dix punctures the utopian vision of a pure, selfless, erotic affection flowing between individuals; figuratively, the novel re-enacts the collapse of Hinton's own reputation from seer to seducer. Echoing scenarios by other female ethical-socialist writers, the early intimacy between Rosalind and Leslie then serves the function of nostalgia, symbolizing a now-lost stage of New Life optimism and association.     

‘A Young Tory’? The Early Parliamentary Career of Charles James Fox 1768–74

This article seeks to redress the neglect, even by his biographers, of Fox's early career, when he made over 250 speeches in the house of commons in six years. The period when young Fox supported government was an inappropriate prelude to his later fame as opponent of Prime Minister Pitt and champion of ‘liberal causes’. He was anything but a ‘man of the people’ in his authoritarian attitude and detestation of popular opinion, and yet there were signs that he would not be an administration man in the mould of his father, Henry Fox.     

A petrified cycad trunk from the Late Cretaceous of the Larsen Basin,Antarctica

Cetricycas antarcticus gen. et sp. nov. occurs in the Late Coniacian to Campanian Lachman Crags Member of the Santa Marta Formation, Marambio Group, James Ross Island, Antarctica. The petrified trunk comprises a thick pith containing thin and thick walled parenchymous cells, vascular traces surrounded by a thin layer of loose secondary wood. Medullary bundles arise inside the wood zone and pass outwards through multiseriate medullary rays. The trunk anatomy indicates assignment to the Cycadales, and the presence of medullary bundles indicates the affinities with a clade comprising Lepidozamia, Macrozamia, and Encephalartos. This clade is presently confined to Australia and Africa, but fossil representatives extend the geographic range to India, South America and now Antarctica.     

Contesting Chivalry: James II and the control of chivalric culture in the 1450s

This article focuses on the reign of James II of Scotland (1437–1460) and argues that the Scottish king deliberately attempted to gain a monopoly over chivalry as part of his assertion of royal power. In seeking to integrate the historiographies of state-building and chivalric culture in fifteenth-century Scotland, what is offered here is an account of the principal strategies employed by James II to establish royal authority throughout Scotland, and an assessment of the various means in which chivalry was being patronised and promoted by the Scottish nobility and the political challenge inherent in this activity. James's response to this challenge is examined through a series of incidents in the 1450s and, in this manner, seeks to rethink the role of chivalry in late medieval Scotland. Far from being a peripheral cultural practice, this article argues that it should be seen as an integral part of James II's state-building agenda.