Gendered spheres: theorizing space in the English printing house

The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public work taking place in a private setting. This private space emphasised the traditional hierarchies of political and legal order: Women’s work that took place within the printing house thus fell into the traditional role of household labours. This erasure of labour is one that foregrounds the erasure of women’s writing from history; women who worked in essence as publishers, as printers and booksellers, are very clearly present in the historical records but invisible in our narratives of book history. How did this erasure happen, and why is their presence, and work, overlooked? If we consider the language of space in theory and reread Moxon’s Mechanickal Exercises closely, we see the ways in which the ideas of space itself can be implicitly gendered, and how this might shape our idea of the printing house.     

Joseph’s Dialogue with the Egyptians in Genesis 47,13-26: From Grammar to Social Dynamics

The relationship between Joseph and the Egyptians in Gen 47,13-26 is a disputed topic. Halliday’s Functional grammar offers a system that quantifies the dynamics of social interaction by tracking speech roles, topic changes, and modulation. It is the intention of this study to demonstrate that clarity can be brought to the dispute over the nature of the interaction between Joseph and the Egyptians in Gen 47,13-26 by applying the analytical tools of the Interpersonal Metafunction from the Systemic Functional Linguistics of M.A.K. Halliday. Specifically, the contours of the gradual capitulation of the Egyptians to Joseph’s supremacy can be substantiated from a number of discrete linguistic variables. (10,0008 words)     

Identity predicaments and the music metaphor in contemporary Irish fiction

Abstract

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’s Beatsploitation (2012) and Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All (2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years.     

Nazi Leaks and Intrigues in Second World War Ankara: the Plot to Send Herbert Melzig to a Concentration Camp

This article excavates one of the stranger episodes that took place in the transnational microcosm of the German expatriate world in Ankara and Istanbul during the Second World War. ‘Professor’ Herbert Melzig's story, the ‘Melzig affair’, illustrates how this microcosm, with its very different constituent members - Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Nazism, German pro-Nazi expatriates, and an extensive embassy and Nazi Party network - acted as a conduit in German–Turkish relations, albeit one that produced unexpected results. This ‘Melzig affair’ sheds new light on the German presence in Second World War Turkey as well as the so-called German ‘exile on the Bosporus’ as it has been (re-)constructed and used in recent years; it also contributes to our understanding of Turkish foreign policy during the Second World War, especially regarding Turkey's reluctance to join the war on Hitler's side. At the end of the Melzig affair stood the ‘leaking’ of an internal Ministry of Propaganda memorandum. It prepared the ground for further leaks of this nature and was one of the turning points of public opinion in Turkey against the Third Reich.     

Cosmopolitan translation and patriotic sensibilities in German garden art

ABSTRACT

My focus in this article is on a small group of German theorists, designers and patrons who thought extensively about the relationship between national identity and garden design: Christian Hirschfeld, Prince Franz von Anhalt-Dessau and his wife Luise, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Prince Pückler. These garden enthusiasts knew one another through personal contact or their writings, and they responded to and developed their ideas in relation to the newly framed creative enterprise in German lands of “garden-landscape-art”. What they shared was a conviction that garden forms affect feelings, with the role of the garden artist to determine paths that would alter and diversify the visitor’s experience of place. This essay explores how spontaneous emotions, elicited by movement through the garden, were linked with a growing sense of patriotism that contrasted with cosmopolitan judgments in the writings of Hirschfeld, Pückler, and Goethe.     

Idealistisch geprägte Axiomatik des Selbstorganisationsparadigmas

The essay shows that the axiomatics of the systemic‐cybernetic‐biological theory of self‐organization by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have their roots in the philosophy of German Idealism. Especially the completely subject‐centered philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte already contains the central axiomatics of Maturana and Varela.     

‘With All My Oldest and Native Friends’. Joseph Parkes: Warwickshire Solicitor and Electoral Agent in the Age of Reform1

Joseph Parkes, Birmingham solicitor, electoral agent, whig party advisor and secretary to the Parliamentary Municipal Corporation Commission was a modern master of exposing corrupt and fraudulent electioneering and using it as a catalyst for the election of reform and Liberal politicians immediately following the 1832 Reform Act. Warwickshire's own political and legal history was the foundation for Parkes's understanding of how politics worked in Britain and what was wrong with it, and helped forge his vision for an effective reform in parliamentary and local government. This essay examines Joseph Parkes's understanding of national electoral politics, informed by his work in Warwickshire. As a local solicitor, Parkes gained the wisdom of controlling electoral registration, canvassing in a routine and orderly manner and establishing a network of professionals to secure that registrations turned into votes at elections. This experience would culminate in the formation of the Reform Club, a national organisation of whigs, Liberals and radicals, that would, eventually, become the base of the Liberal Party in modern British politics. In short, Joseph Parkes was a man who could not, and did not wish to, escape where he came from, at least in terms of his political education. His Warwickshire experiences and lessons learned, solidified a series of political reform goals that he pragmatically approached as a political advisor, operative and attorney, rather than an elected public servant, and marked the direction of politics for the rest of the century.     

英国汉学家艾约瑟的“唐宋思想变革”说

当代学术发展日益重视学术史的反思。西方汉学之根基常常追溯到十九世纪。近年来,日益受到重视的"唐宋变革思想"说在学术史上的变化己引起广泛的讨论,但学者们比较关注其逐渐完善的过程,而忽略其草创期之发源。实际上,早期传教士的汉学论题中已经提出唐宋时代思想在文化领域的急剧变化,或可视为唐宋变革论之滥觞。根据英国传教士艾约瑟在1886年《华北的秘密教派》一文的提示,十世纪是一个关键的变化期,对以后的历史发展有很大的影响,主要表现为儒生从关注文学和佛学转向关注哲学,其中关注易学更不容小觑。此观点乃后世所谓唐宋时代从文学到道学变化之先鞭。艾约瑟还指出,宋代印刷术之发达,有益于当时人保存更多文化资料以及接触儒释道思想,从而引起思想上的变化。     

The Genesis of Economic Cooperation in the Stories of Joseph: A Constitutional and Institutional Economic Reconstruction

Abstract

The paper analyzes in constitutional and institutional economic terms Joseph’s economic policies, such as changes to property rights arrangements for farming, the introduction of a barter tax on crop production, and the multi-layered bureaucratic hierarchies of Egypt. Utilizing Buchanan’s approach to constitutional economics, I argue that these policies lowered attack/defense costs as they arise, when a group attempts to escape from the natural distribution state (the “war of all”, as Hobbes called it). A key thesis is that this encouraged interacting parties, already on the grounds of selfinterested choice, to engage in societal contracting out of the “war of all,” thereby reaping mutual gains.

Complementary to this strand of analysis, I have drawn on other institutional economic concepts, particularly those that were introduced by Williamson, and by North and Weingast. The paper argues in this respect that Joseph’s policies credibly and more reliably guaranteed property rights, which in turn lowered transaction costs of the interacting parties, i.e. Egypt and Israel. This ultimately yielded mutual gains and high economic performance for the society depicted in Genesis. In this way, cooperation was generated in economic terms.