Arthur's refusal to eat: ritual and control in the romance feast

Arthur's refusal to begin feasting before he has seen a marvel or heard a tale of adventure is a recurring motif in medieval romance. Previous comment on this ritual has suggested that the source for such a taboo on eating may be found in earlier narratives in the Celtic languages. This paper argues that, although the ritual almost certainly originates in pre-chivalric society, romance authors adapted and developed it to reflect the courtly-chivalric preoccupations of their own world. Arthur's ritual gesture may be seen as a means of containing and controlling both interior moral threats and exterior physical peril, and is intimately connected to the courtly conception of the feast. This study draws on the evidence of religious writing and courtesy manuals and explores some highly-developed treatments of the motif in romance in order to suggest that literary engagements with Arthur's refusal to eat have much to say about contemporary ideas of ritual and reality as mediated through the symbolically-charged arena of the medieval feast.     

The Listers of Gisburn: The Fashioning of A Gentry Family In The Early Eighteenth Century

The Lister family of Gisburn, created Lords Ribblesdale in 1797, is an example of a family with yeoman or minor gentry status in the sixteenth century who, by the persistent purchase of land and a number of fortunate marriages, established themselves amongst the county gentry in the eighteenth century. They also acquired a share in the pocket borough of Clitheroe and served in the House of Commons continuously from 1718 to 1780. The paper describes the ways in which successive Listers fashioned the image of the family through their education, engagement in politics (where they were at the least Tories and possibly Jacobites), by their erection of a new house (Gisburne Park) in the decade after 1727 and the creation of a parkland landscape to surround it. This is explored through the surviving documentary materials (which are not exhaustive, but include reflections by Thomas Lister (d. 1745) on his political creed), by the house and landscape of the park and an abortive scheme for the park, but above all through the art they commissioned and the representations of landscape that it contains. Pictures attributed to Robert Griffier, Peter Tillemans and Arthur Devis, all formerly at Gisburne Park, and an engraving by François Vivares of Malham Cove, are discussed.     

Phantoms in Artists: The Lost Limbs of Blaise Cendrars,Arthur Rimbaud,and Paul Wittgenstein

There have been an increasing number of reports of postamputation pain and problems linked to phantom limbs over recent years, particularly in relation to war-related amputations. These problems, which are often poorly understood and considered rather mysterious, are still relevant because they are difficult to treat medically. Functional neuroimaging techniques now enable us to better understand their pathophysiology and to consider new rehabilitation techniques. Phantom limbs have often been a source of inspiration to writers, particularly in the period following the First World War, which was responsible for thousands of amputees. Some artists have suffered from postamputation complications themselves and have expressed them through their artistic works. Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, suffered from stump pain and phantom limb phenomena for almost half a century following the amputation of his right arm during the First World War. He suffered from these phenomena until the end of his life and his literary work and personal correspondence are peppered with references to them. Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), one of the most famous poets in world literature, developed severe stump pain after his right leg was amputated due to a tumor. He survived for only six months after the procedure but left behind an account of the pain he experienced in correspondence to his family. The famous pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961), whose right arm was amputated during the First World War, became a famous left-handed concert pianist. The phantom movements of his right hand helped him to develop the dexterity of his left hand. The impact on the artistic life of these three men provides an original illustration of the various postamputation complications, specifically phantom limbs, stump pain, and moving phantom.     

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF POPULAR CULTURE

The most common definitions of popular culture suffer from a presentist bias and cannot be applied to pre‐industrial and pre‐capitalist societies. A survey reveals serious conceptual difficulties as well. We may, however, gain insight in two ways. 1) By moving from a Marxist model (economic/class/production) to a more Weberian approach (societal/status/consumption). 2) By looking to Bourdieu's “cultural capital” and Danto's and Dickie's “Institutional Theory of Art,” and defining popular culture as “unauthorized culture.”     

Shakespeare's Fault or Yours? Melzer's Maxim: A Guide to Tentative Omniscience for the Congenitally Hyperfallible

Abstract

Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic—Melzer's Maxim, I call it—has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.     

The challenge of the spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the history of the future, 1930–1970

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 essay on ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’ was one of the founding manifestoes of the Space Age, and helped to establish him as the West’s leading techno-prophet. Restating his ideas in subsequent factual and fictional works, Clarke successfully propagated the belief that man’s destiny lay in space and that the process was already underway. On the surface Clarke’s oeuvre offers a classic astrofuturist model of progress as technology-driven, but on closer examination it also incorporates a more pessimistic, historically based strand of philosophy, British rather than American. This essay traces the genesis of Clarke’s early work and the influence upon him of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the moral philosophers Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis. Toynbee was essentially a Christian pessimist who believed that western civilization was on the way out; his long historical perspectives were an important source of inspiration for Clarke, leading him to a cyclical rather than a simply progressive model of history which contemplated both the beginning and the end of civilizations. The concerns of Stapledon and Lewis with grand narratives of decline and redemption were also influences on Clarke. All this needs to be understood in relation to both the European experience of World War I and to the coming of the atomic bomb, the latter a profound influence on Clarke’s generation. Such perspectives gave European astroculture a more modulated vision of the human future in space than the technologically based astrofuturism which dominated in the USA.     

BACK TO THE FUTURE: POSTNARRATIVIST HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Jouni‐Matti Kuukkanen has written an important book. It directly confronts a key theoretical dilemma that has shadowed debate in historiography for several decades: histories cannot be written without using some narrative structure or other, but epistemological evaluation cannot be applied to narratives qua narrative. Thus, if empirical inquiry takes the form of a history, then it cannot be rationally evaluable, and if rationally evaluable, empirical inquiry cannot be in the form of a history. Kuukkanen's book both directly confronts and proposes a strategy for surmounting this tired and tiresome theoretical barrier. Kuukkanen deserves great credit for attempting to reshape a long‐stalled debate in a way that enables the theoretical options to be imagined anew. Yet his structuring of the oppositional tendencies engenders some ongoing problems regarding how to understand the philosophical stakes and options. This review argues that achieving Kuukkanen's postnarrativist future requires going back to past epistemic concerns discarded because they were tied to conceptions of logic and explanation that could not be reconciled with narrative form. Kuukkanen practices postnarrativism but still preaches a prenarrativist conception of logic. To reach his promised future, to actually overcome the dilemma that he rightly seeks to transcend, one must actually have the courage of Kuukkanen's pragmatist convictions.     

Fabio Luca Cavazza,the New Frontier and the opening to the left in Italy

This article focuses on the key role played by Fabio Luca Cavazza, founder of the publishing house Il Mulino, in the development of cultural relations between the US and Italy in the early Cold War by drawing on Cavazza’s personal papers, an as yet unexplored archival source. The Department of State and the Eisenhower administration opposed a government that included the Socialists. However, thanks to the special relationship he had with the ‘New Frontier’s men’, in particular Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Cavazza was able to revive the issue, showing how it was in line with Kennedy’s New Frontier policy.     

Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen,A. E. Waite,and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.