Cleopatra: A Biography by Duane W. Roller (review)

Joel J. Kupperman, 1936–2020 Diana Tietjens Meyers (bio) It is with deep sadness that I report the death of Joel Kupperman, University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He died in Brooklyn, New York on April 8, 2020. Joel received both his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Cambridge University. He joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut in 1960. Except for visiting Trinity College, Oxford as a lecturer in 1970, two years supported by NEH fellowships, and fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he remained at UConn until his retirement from teaching in 2013. In addition to these major national and international awards, Joel received the Faculty Excellence in Research award from the UConn Foundation in 2004. A widely recognized and influential scholar, Joel specialized in ethics, aesthetics, and Asian philosophy. He published numerous journal articles and chapters in all three fields. Two early books resist subjectivism in ethics: Ethical Knowledge (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970; reprint Routledge, 2002) and The Foundations of Morality (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983; reissue from Routledge, forthcoming in 2022). In his monographs, Joel’s long-standing interest in Chinese philosophy first became prominent in Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Value . . . And What Follows (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Joel’s scholarship in Asian philosophy long predated the recent professional awakening to non-Western philosophical traditions. Initially, he studied Chinese philosophy with H. G. Creel at the University of Chicago, and in 1967 he traveled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan to continue his studies. In the 1980s he created Asian philosophy courses at all levels of the UConn undergraduate and graduate curriculum. His scholarship and pedagogical initiatives were visionary. Regarded as a classic by many in the field, his Learning from Asian Philosophy nimbly integrates insights from classical Chinese and Indian philosophy as well as Western philosophy into nuanced accounts of the self, choice, moral psychology, moral requirements, and interpersonal communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Chinese translation, Beijing: Renmin Press, 2009). That Joel delivered the keynote lecture at the [End Page 1] conference honoring the ninetieth anniversary of the Peking University Philosophy Department as well as the keynote lecture at the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy’s 2011 meeting in Hawai‘i are two measures of the importance of this book. Click for larger view View full resolution Joel Kupperman (1936–2020) during his keynote speech at the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy 43rd annual conference, May 25–28, 2011 in Honolulu. In addition, Joel published books that would be valuable to professional philosophers and that would also reach college students and the larger educated public. Notable among these are Theories of Human Nature (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), Ethics and Qualities of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Six Myths about the Good Life: Thinking about What Has Value (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; second edition, 2006). When it became possible for Chinese students to come to the United States to study, Joel attracted some of them to the UConn philosophy department. Like all the graduate students, they studied Western philosophy. But thanks to Joel, they were able to study Chinese philosophy as well. Joel received the Faculty Excellence in Teaching award from the UConn Foundation in 1973. Upon his retirement, two of his Ph.D. students, Chenyang Li and Peimin Ni, celebrated his career by publishing a festschrift containing chapters by leading scholars: Moral Cultivation and Confucian [End Page 2] Character: Engaging Joel J. Kupperman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). Joel is survived by his wife, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, his two children, Michael Kupperman and Charlie Kupperman, and a grandchild, Ulysses Kupperman Dougherty. His colleagues and many students join me in sympathy over their loss. His singular voice and distinctive presence are irreplaceable. In honor of Joel and his philosophical legacy, the department and Joel’s family have set up a graduate fellowship fund in his name to provide some financial support for Ph.D. students in the UConn Philosophy...

Virgil's Literary Biography - Virgil's Biographia Litteraria. By Norman Wentworth De Witt, Ph.D., Professor of Latin Literature in Victoria College, University of Toronto. Pp. 200. Toronto: Victoria College Press; Oxford University Press: Humphrey Milford, 1923. 12s. 6d. net. - Volume 38 Issue 3-4

Two Newbery Medal Winners and the Feminine Mystique:Hitty, Her First Hundred Years and Miss Hickory* Lois R. Kuznets (bio) Through the decades the authors of Newbery and Caldecott books have consciously, and perhaps sometimes unconsciously, revealed the concerns, manners and attitudes of the society in which they lived. This is true not only of realistic fiction, but of other genres as well, especially historical fiction and fantasy. As a consequence the books are interesting as documents of social history as well as literature for children. (Peterson and Solt 10) In the mid-twentieth century, two doll stories won Newbery Medals seventeen years apart: Rachel Field's Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in 1930 and Carolyn Sherwin Bailey's Miss Hickory in 1947. As well as doll fantasy, the first text can be considered historical fiction in the form of a personal memoir of American experience through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the second, while also a doll fantasy, seems ahistorical—set in a universal, seasonal time in rural New England; it also partakes, to some extent, of the Robinsonade—the tale of survival in the wilderness. What follows in this essay should be dubbed feminist analysis: I examine the nature and tradition of doll stories in general while comparing these two doll narratives in terms of both form and cultural history, actively responding to what I read in each text. At the ChLA Conference in San Diego in 1990, Valerie Cretaux presented a paper entitled "Beyond Gender Role Model Stereotyping: The Fate of Girls and Dolls in Nineteenth-Century France." She demonstrated that what Victor Hugo's narrator in Les Misérables says about little girls' [End Page 1] treating dolls as models of future babies is not confirmed by what the text shows about little girls and dolls.1 Cosette, the child, first cuddles a sword, and then treats her gift doll as a mother figure and a powerful female role model in a struggle not to conform to the passive feminine and benignly maternal stereo-archetype that both Jean Valjean, the doll giver, and the narrator seem to posit. In the same paper, Cretaux demonstrates that another nineteenth-century writer, Sophie de Ségur (1799-1874), writing specifically for children in her Les Malheurs de Sophie, shows the girl child to have aggressively hostile feelings toward her doll, which here takes the baby role, only to be mutilated and destroyed beyond repair; dolly's demise is celebrated in a grand and joyous funeral. The mutilated doll lying in state and then buried gaily contrasts well, as Cretaux points out, with that archetypal image of female life-in-death and sexual resurrection: intact Snow White waiting in her glass coffin for the prince's kiss. In the mid-nineteenth century, Juliana Ewing's mother, Mrs. Alfred Gatty, published a doll memoir, Aunt Sally's Life, which depicts multiple unsentimental doll burials along with multiple mutilations, all in the life of one doll.2 And familiar doll scenes from nineteenth-century British books not specifically for children, Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss, like their French counterparts, depict the idiosyncratic ways in which girls and dolls interact. Abused Jane Eyre treats her doll as a consolatory object and pampers it as no one pampers Jane, but rebellious Maggie Tulliver alternately babies and abuses her doll. Even more clearly, Frances Hodgson Burnett, in her autobiography, The One I Knew the Best of All, shows what a rebellious and creative little female can do with a doll and a plot line. Her doll played the heroine roles in a number of dramas taken from received texts and Burnett's own imagination while Burnett herself played all the hero and villain roles. The doll certainly learned to conform to the image of the culturally approved female in literature; whether her young mistress did the same is questionable. So, as Naomi Lewis notes also in introducing The Silent Playmate, "the doll and child relationship is not as simple and crude as the nondoll-liker desires to think. Make no mistake—unless this happens to be the play of the moment . . . the child is not the parent of the doll...

Reviewed by: Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power by Elizabeth Donnelly Carney Leanna Boychenko Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power. By Elizabeth Donnelly Carney. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 200. Hardback, $65.00. ISBN: 978-0-190-28053-6. Carney's book on the life of Eurydice of Macedon is an important contribution to our knowledge of royal women. More broadly, it is an extremely useful overview of the political situation in Macedon in the time before Alexander. Like many ancient women, Eurydice is largely defined by her relationship to men: daughter of Sirras, wife of Amyntas III, mother of Philip II and grandmother of Alexander the Great. Eurydice lived at a fascinating time—when Macedon's emerging power gave it a seat at the international table—and was a key player in the events that led to her sons' rise to power (her two elder sons ruled before Philip II), supporting them against other possible successors to the throne. Carney examines her public role, the earliest known for a Macedonian royal woman, but in the end we are left with more questions than answers, not least the question of whether some sources have anything to do with Eurydice's life at all (for instance, the so-called Tomb of Eurydice in Vergina, whose occupant is unknown). This book is short, 117 pages before the notes, and falls into six chapters. The introduction contextualizes Eurydice's life and gives an overview of our sources, Macedonian monarchy and the roles of women in Macedon. Carney also builds on Daniel Ogden's term "bastardizing," pointing out that while Ogden correctly points to the public smearing of a potential successor's birth as a propagandistic tool, frequently the successor's mother was the target, thus explaining the stories about Eurydice in which she is an adulterer and murderer of her two elder sons. Indeed, this analysis can be more broadly applied to other women in the ancient world and makes this book worth reading for that contribution alone. Chapter 2 looks at Eurydice's marriage to Amyntas III and his rule. Especially interesting is the discussion of Eurydice's contested ethnicity and its implications. The rule of her sons is covered in the third chapter, ending with Philip II's consolidation of power and legitimacy. Chapter 4 examines Eurydice's relationships with her sons and reports of her adultery and filicide. It also contains discussion of a [End Page 369] speech of Aeschines (2.27-9), in which he paints Eurydice as a "super mother" (75) responsible for bringing international support to her sons, essentially guaranteeing their safety and rise to power in Macedon. This is the strongest evidence for her political action and public importance, but is buried in the middle of the book (and chapter). The fifth chapter, focused on her public image in her lifetime, looks at dedications, monuments, physical images and inscriptions. Particularly striking is an epigram preserved in Plutarch's corpus (Plut. Mor. 14b-c) concerning Eurydice's education. According to the epigram, she learned to read and write when her sons were in their adolescence. Carney is mostly interested in a textual emendation, which would change the dedication of the epigram to female citizens (and not the Muses) as well as the location of the original inscription (no physical copy exists). I would have liked to read more about what this could tell us about the education of women and literacy in Macedonia. It is also worth considering that this epigram may not be genuine and instead is part of later reception of the queen. Finally, the last chapter concerns Eurydice's public image after her death and is mostly focused on the Tomb of Eurydice, possibly the queen's final resting place. At the end of this chapter, Carney briefly introduces some intriguing topics that deserve more attention: the importance of the name Eurydice in myth and in history; the name-change of her great-granddaughter Adea to Eurydice and what this tells us about Eurydice's legacy; Odyssean figures as models for Macedonian monarchs and Eurydice's connection to Penelope. I wish they had been dealt with more...

Shifting Perspectives on the Shogunate’s Last YearsGountei Sadahide’s Bird’s-Eye View Landscape Prints Sugimoto Fumiko (bio) Translated by Michael Burtscher Multicolored woodblock prints, or nishiki-e 錦絵, brought information about out-of-the-ordinary topics and happenings to a broad audience, depicting everything from popular kabuki actors and courtesans to the latest rumors and incidents.1 By the first half of the nineteenth century, nishiki-e had become a distinctive genre produced in a standard format by publishers specializing in the genre. Rapidly printed in large quantities, they were quickly sold on the open market to the general public by similarly specialized urban-based booksellers.2 As such nishiki-e evolved into a medium for taking up current events and, together with amusement and entertainment, brought news of the momentous developments of the shogunate’s final decades into the everyday life of Edo townspeople.3 [End Page 1] The shogunate, not looking favorably upon the open circulation of news about current political affairs and controversies, repeatedly issued regulations aimed at preventing the spread of such information. In response, authors, artists, and publishers devised means to circumvent these regulations, such as presenting current events through allusive references rather than direct exposition. For their audience, looking for hidden meanings became a customary part of the reading and viewing experience, and one of its expected pleasures. Research on nishiki-e as a source of information about current events and on the allusions they employed has generally focused on types of prints where the coding is quite overt, such as those that allude to current political developments in the guise of retelling a well-known legend. Little attention has been given to another genre that began to appear in the same nishiki-e format in the mid-nineteenth century: bird’s-eye view (chōkanzu 鳥瞰図) prints of geographical vistas.4 Bird’s-eye view perspective screens and paintings of cityscapes have a long history, and until recently, researchers have tended to regard bird’s-eye view landscape prints as simply an extension of earlier modes and to see them as no more than unmediated representations of picturesque scenery. But why would landscape prints in the nishiki-e format have appeared and sold in considerable numbers at precisely this point in historical time? And are they as innocent of allusions to topical events as has been assumed? This article argues that the popularity of panoramic landscape prints of this kind in fact stems from their adoption of nishiki-e conventions to bring topical references and allusions into the depiction of landscapes. They may thus be considered a subgenre of what has been termed “current-event nishiki-e” (jiji nishiki-e 時事錦絵).5 This kind of panoramic landscape is associated particularly with Gountei Sadahide 五雲亭貞秀 (1807–1878/9). Sadahide developed a distinctive style of spatial expression in the large number of bird’s-eye view nishiki-e he produced. Below I focus on how he adapted this distinctive style to depict current events between 1862 and 1868, a turbulent period when the long-standing early modern political order centered on the shogunate started to come apart at its seams, civil war erupted, and new political arrangements began to emerge.6 Sadahide’s panoramic prints spoke in an entertaining yet informative way to Edo residents’ desire for news about events impinging on their world, information that in the absence of established forms of journalism had to be garnered largely from rumors and broadsheets.7 [End Page 2] Scholarship on the Edo-based media that sprouted in this environment has tended to see it as supportive of the shogunal cause. Recent research, however, has shown that it often was oriented more toward communicating news about what was happening than conveying a particular political message.8 The same may be said of the bird’s-eye view landscape nishiki-e that Sadahide produced during this time period. They did not necessarily take a readily detectable political stance, but inserted in them were layers of references that served simultaneously to pique viewers’ interest and to alert them to the tumultuous course of events swirling around their city. The invitation to interpretation of the clues provided may be more subtle...

Reviewed by: Companion to Victor Pelevin ed. by Sofya Khagi Sarah Gear Companion to Victor Pelevin. Ed. by Sofya Khagi. Boston: Academic Studies Press. 2022. xxxiv+208 pp. $32.95; £23.99. ISBN 9–781–64469776–4. In her essay in the volume under review, 'Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys: Metamorphoses in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf ', Grace Mahoney describes Victor Pelevin's novels as 'metamorphs' which 'resist qualification and elude decisive conclusions' (p. 185). Mahoney's statement is thoroughly tested by the comprehensive examination of Pelevin's work in her own essay and elsewhere in this Companion to Victor Pelevin, edited by Sofya Khagi, a leading specialist on the often controversial author. While Pelevin's major novels Chapaev and the Void (1996) and Generation 'P' (1999) receive the most attention here, Khagi's project is intertextual, elucidating both Pelevin's highly self-referential writing and its relation to Russian literature as a whole. Her holistic approach to Pelevin's fiction is demonstrated by the extensive footnotes outlining literary theories and politics, and linking to multiple Russian authors, elevating the Companion from a sourcebook on 'Peleviniana' to a masterclass in post-Soviet literature. Khagi's thorough Introduction schools the reader in Pelevin's literary output. She charts the author's creative evolution from his first short story 'Sorcerer Ignat and People' (1989), then summarizes his work during his early, so-called 'classic', and later periods, ending with the appearance of his novel iPhuck (2017). Khagi also explores Pelevin's critical reception in both Russia and the West, discussing principal debates around his œuvre. The Companion's subsequent chapters underscore Pelevin's thematic preoccupations: the section headings 'Space, Time and History', 'Simulation and Mind Control', and 'Metamorphosis and Utopia' lead the reader through thematic and temporal explorations of his novels. In the first section, Michael Martin's article 'The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital "S"' focuses on Pelevin's The Blue Lantern (1991) and Omon Ra (1992) as reactions to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Characterized by Pelevin's subversion of Soviet literary norms, this early writing became ground zero for his subsequent experimental work. This first chapter is echoed by the Companion's final essay, in which Mahoney considers the theme of metamorphosis in Pelevin's work in relation to the author as well as his texts. Theo Trotman's essay 'The Mythic and the Utopian: Visions of the Future through the Lens of Victor Pelevin's S.N.U.F.F. and Love for [End Page 277] Three Zuckerbrins' considers S.N.U.F.F. (2011) as a reprise of Soviet utopian themes, finding parallels with Evgenii Zamiatin's We (1922) while exploring Pelevin's role as an (anti-)utopian prophet. The central chapters of the Companion focus on Chapaev and the Void and Generation 'P'. Although repetitious at times, the five essays on these novels are justified by the variety of themes they explore. While Khagi's 'Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void' focuses on Pelevin's references to Zhuangzi, Nietzsche, Freud, and Kant, Christopher Fort's 'Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void' looks instead at the novel's interaction with Socialist Realism. Fort highlights Pelevin's exploitation of the Socialist Realist preoccupation with dreams and sleep as a vehicle for satire. In 'Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask: Victor Pelevin and the Performance of History', Alexander McConnell reflects on Pelevin's 'restaging of the twentieth century' (p. 103), relying on what he terms 'hyperhistory' (p. 76). McConnell's approach complements Khagi's in her Introduction and her separate essay 'Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void', examining the themes of temporal and spatial reality in Chapaev in relation to Pelevin's historical fiction. Generation 'P' is also scrutinized from different angles. Dylan Ogden considers the influence of social theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Herbert Marcuse, and Guy Debord on Pelevin's work in '"The Battle for Your Mind": Transformation of Western Social Theory in Generation "II"'. Ogden explores simulacra, conspiracy theories, and capitalism in its corporeal form, noting that these themes and motifs are developed in Pelevin's later novels Empire V (2006) and...

Remembering Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell Andrew J. Torget (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Randolph B. Campbell pictured with the manuscript for Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, which was published in three editions by Oxford University Press. Photo courtesy of the Campbell family. [End Page 290] Among Texas historians, there was no one quite like Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell, the first Chief Historian of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), who died on August 13, 2022. Born on November 16, 1940, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Campbell grew up on a hardscrabble farm in Nelson County, Virginia, the only child of John Landon and Virginia Lyon Campbell. He attended the University of Virginia, where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1966. In 1962, he married Diana Snow, and together they raised two sons, James Landon and Jonathan Clay. Mike and Diana moved to Denton, Texas, in 1966, when Mike took a position in the history department of North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas, usually shortened to UNT). During the fifty-three years that followed, Campbell became one of the most prominent faculty at UNT, where he held both the Regents Professorship and the Lone Star Chair in Texas History when he retired in August 2019. Campbell’s prominence centered on his pathbreaking work on the southern heritage of Texas and his focus on exploring the lives of everyday people living through momentous times, which transformed how modern historians understand the Texas past. His first single-authored book, A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850–1880 (Texas State Historical Association, 1983), became such an iconic work on the Civil War that it was reissued thirty years after its original publication. Even more influential was An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (LSU Press, 1989), which traced the deep influence [End Page 291] of slavery in the development of nineteenth-century Texas and remains the most authoritative work on the subject. His numerous other scholarly works—including books on the era of Reconstruction and the life of Sam Houston, as well as dozens of scholarly articles—culminated in the publication of Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, first issued by Oxford University Press in 2003, one of the most authoritative histories of the state, which is now in its third edition and serves as a standard in college classrooms. For his many achievements, he was honored by colleagues with numerous awards and a series of influential positions in historical associations and societies. He served as President and inaugural Chief Historian of the TSHA, as well as editor of the Association’s Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He was a Fellow of the TSHA, the Texas Philosophical Society, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the East Texas Historical Association, among others. The University of North Texas bestowed its Eminent Faculty Award on Campbell in 2012. Yet Campbell’s greatest legacy may have been his teaching and mentoring. Virtually no one could hold a lecture hall in rapt attention like Campbell, and his massive sections of U.S. history were frequently oversubscribed with eager students. His local history seminars and famous biography classes were must-take courses for graduate students. Throughout his career, moreover, he selflessly offered his time, insights, and support to students, colleagues, and friends, always working in tireless dedication toward helping others achieve their best. I recognize now how much I was a beneficiary of Mike’s deep knowledge and generous heart. When I arrived at UNT in 2009, I ended up with the office next to Mike’s, which turned out to be one of the most fortunate alignments of my professional life. Mike and I both liked to arrive at the office early, which meant that weekday mornings usually began with me sitting in his office asking Mike about teaching, departmental politics, and anything else bewildering me. Even more valuable was the reality that any time that I had a question while writing my first book, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), I only...

Transgressive Women, Transworld Women

Reviewed by: Franz Schubert 1797–1828: A Literary Biography by Gloria Kaiser Lyle T. Barkhymer Gloria Kaiser, Franz Schubert 1797–1828: A Literary Biography. Translation with an afterword by Lowell A. Bangerter. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2013. 211 pp. This attractive and imaginative little novel, dubbed a “literary biography,” about the Austrian composer Franz Schubert provides a layman’s insight into the life and creative world of the only one of the four greatest “Viennese” composers of his day to have been born in Vienna. Schubert’s parents had migrated to Vienna from Moravia, a Crown land of the Austrian Empire, now in the Czech Republic. Author Gloria Kaiser uses the existing letters of Schubert and his circle to create a vivid picture of the composer’s tragically short life; less so of his astonishing output and path-breaking works. Her biographical vision is by and large in line with musicological studies. But, as Robert Winter writes in Grove Music Online, “the enigmatic nature of [Schubert’s] uneventful life has invited a wide range of readings of both man and music that remain among the most hotly debated in musical circles.” The reader needs to have a clear understanding that in her selection of source materials Kaiser has created a personal reading, which the title “a literary biography” clearly allows. Those seeking to encounter Schubert on a more complex level would be well advised to keep the literary character of this book in mind and to read further in the Schubert literature that provides a variety of viewpoints and deals with controversies. For example, it is no longer debated that Schubert contracted syphilis and may have died from it, but the nature of his sexuality has been the subject of controversial research in recent decades, particularly by Maynard Solomon and Susan McClary. Others reject the idea that there is any relevance of Schubert’s sexuality to his creative work. [End Page 162] One might question a few of the leaps of imagination that the author makes where little or conflicting evidence exists. Particularly, the premises that Schubert’s father was continually physically abusive and that singer Theresa Grob and pupil Caroline Esterházy were love partners seem overdrawn. Given the premise of “literary biography,” however, one may grant the author such license. It is clear that the author does not intend the book for an academic audience, but some indication of sources, not necessarily in scholarly format, would be an advantage and an improvement to this pleasant volume. The glossary, chronology, Schubert family tree, and afterword are welcome finds at the end of the book, as is the translator’s afterword, which expands on “the themes of loneliness, isolation, social alienation and father-son conflict that are presented in the novel” (208). High marks go to Lowell A. Bangerter for a flowing translation that reads naturally and idiomatically. Lyle T. Barkhymer Otterbein University Copyright © 2015 Austrian Studies Association

As is well known, David Ben-Gurion had an enormous impact on the history of modern Israel. Rarely have one person's thoughts, decisions, and actions had such an effect, for not only is the writing of Israeli history dominated by the towering figure of Ben-Gurion, but that history--in fact, the history of the entire Jewish people in the modern era--often takes the form of life-writing by or about Ben-Gurion. Therefore, Ben-Gurion biography and Israeli historiography are strongly interrelated. This may allow us to observe transformations in Israeli historiography by observing changes in the biographical literature on Ben-Gurion, which itself impacts these changes. By outlining these transformations, this paper attempts to both highlight the relationship between biographical work and historiographical change, and to provide a conceptual framework for an analysis of that relationship. The case study discussed here allows us to do so because of Ben-Gurion's dominance in modern Israeli history, but there is reason to believe that the relationship may hold in a wide range of cases. This is so because biographical work is an important part of any society's self-consciousness about its history--and "historiography" may be defined as such self-consciousness. My argument is that biographies published on political leaders in a given polity play an important historiographical role, and may be analyzed both in terms of the historiographical trends they reflect, and the impact they have on these trends. The exact nature of the relationship between biography and historiography could of course be determined only after wide comparative analysis. One would want to know, for instance, how the biographies of Churchill, De Gaulle, Gandhi, Mandela, Nasser, and others written over the years reflect and affect historiographical changes in these leaders' respective countries. Though one case study is obviously [End Page 332] no replacement for such a comparative study, it may be helpful in demonstrating the usefulness of exploring the biography-historiography relationship and in providing a conceptual framework for such an endeavor. In what follows, I propose a typology for the classification of biographies, and analyze changes over time in categories of Ben-Gurion life-writing in relation to changing historiographical trends. I conclude with a note on the usefulness of the conceptual framework proposed here for future research. The Typology Biographies are mostly classified by their subjects. Bookstores, for instance, sort them by the name of the person whose life is being told (Lenin's biography, Kennedy's biography, and so on), or by a broader occupational category (literary biography for writers, political biography for political leaders). Current biographical research is often interested in classifications like "new" vs. "old" or "modernist" vs. "post-modernist" biography. The typology proposed in Figure 1 is concerned no less with the biographer than with the subject of the biography. I employ two criteria: "orientation," defined by the overall approach the biographer takes towards the subject; and "focus," defined by the perspective the biographer takes on the subject's position in his or her environment. Figure 1. Variables for the Analysis of Biographies. ORIENTATION IDENTIFICATION INVESTIGATION UTILIZATION FOCUS PERSONAL CONTEXTUAL MYTHOLOGICAL 1. The Orientation Criterion Identification, investigation, and utilization are the three variables of orientation. A. Identification Biographers may approach a subject with a feeling that by telling the life story, their own lives are affected. Such identification does not necessarily have to involve a positive approach to the subject, although it most likely does. In theory, one may identify with a subject whose evil character is [End Page 333] being recognized. Although identification is often seen as stemming from psychological motives, this does not necessarily have to be the case: one may identify with the subject of a biography on sociological grounds, for instance, as when the subject fulfills a social function, or provides political symbols to a community lacking them. B. Investigation A biography may also be written as a means to learn in a "cool" manner about the subject, whether...

Psycho-historical analysis of The Acts of SS. Perpetua and Felicity indicates that the reasons why Perpetua was willing to give up both her life and her infant child in the service of her faith were political and emotional as well as doctrinal. The possibility within the third-century Church of fraternal friendships with men, and visions of their continuation after death, offered relief from the demands of an intense relationship with her father, and the power (ordinarily available only to men) to order the pattern of her existence and environment. N case there is someone here who does not know by heart the story of St. Perpetua's martyrdom, let me summarize briefly how and what we know about it. A narrator tells us about group of Christians who were executed in Carthage in 203, including Vibia Perpetua, a newly married woman of good family and upbringing . . about twenty-two years old . . with an infant son at the breast; with her is her brother, also Christian convert (2.1-2). The narrator then quotes directly from Perpetua's own memoirs, which consist of her account of her imprisonment and of the dreams she had in prison; she tells how her father, who has remained pagan, pleads with her to abandon her religion and tries to get the authorities to let her out; detailed, explicit visions tell her meanwhile that she must die. The narrator then tells the story of her fellow martyrs and their joint execution: they were exposed to wild beasts in the arena; Perpetua herself was attacked but not seriously wounded by wild cow, and finally killed by gladiator, whose sword she willingly guided to her neck. As you can tell even from this summary, there is ample subject matter here for many sermons, as Bishop Augustine of Hippo knew.' The Acts of SS. Perpetua 'Augustine Sermons 280-82 (P.L. 38. 1280-86); Tertullian de An. 55. 4 cites Perpetua's testimony as evidence for the privileged position of martyrs in heaven. This paper is based on discussions with Dr. JoAnn Fineman and Susan Miller Havens. I am grateful to Prof. Morton Smith, Drs. Bennett Simon and Jay Katz, and Mr. Clayton Fant for suggestions and criticisms. All citatione from Acts of the Christian martyrs are from Herbert Musurillo's text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). MARY R. LEFKOWITZ is Professor and Chairman of the Greek and Latin Departments at Wellesly College, and Director of the American Philological Association. Author of book and numerous articles and reviews on Greek lyric poetry, she is co-editor (with Maureen B. Fant) of Women in Antiquity, collection of readings from Greek and Roman sources, which will be published by Hakkert later this year.

Reviewed by: Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature Todd Hoffman Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, edited by Emily Miller Budick. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 288 pp. $71.50. This important addition to SUNY Press’s Modern Jewish Literature and Culture series is a collection of thirteen essays by such notable scholars as Gershon Shaked, Wolfgang Iser, and novelist A. B. Yehoshua, among others. This anthology reads like an encyclo pedia of American and Hebrew-Israeli writers and their position in the contemporary history of Jewish writers in general. It is both a fine compilation of incisive analyses of cultural and historical influences on the shaping of American and Israeli Jewish identity and also a useful and thorough introduction to this particular field: namely, the debate [End Page 162] over what constitutes “Jewish” writing or writers. The general claim of this book is that despite what Emily Budick calls the “disinclination of writers and intellectuals from the world’s two major communities of Jews to relate seriously to the experience of the other,” this very disinclination “tells us as much about processes of Jewish self- definition . . . as the narratives themselves.” Furthermore, the historical conditions that gave rise to both American and Israeli conceptions of Jewish identity run along parallel lines: both literary traditions tend to construct narratives of Jewish identity upon secular grounds, exclusive of Judaism; both share commonalities in their early Zionist orientations and the subsequent separation from “Old World” values as immigrant groups slowly assimilated into a new culture; both were influenced by the Holocaust and the formation of Israel in 1948; and lastly, both have a “shared commitment to doing in the world” (Budick’s italics) and have a keen sense of one’s ethical responsibility and engagement with political issues. This anthology constructs “a dialogue” between these seemingly disparate groups who share a common culture and attempts a reconfiguration of the possible points of coordination in their literary output which would disclose an identifying category of Jewish writing and identity. The organization of the essays is effective, beginning with a comprehensive examination of the overall periods of Jewish writing in America and Israel, moving on to a discussion of the various methods of appropriating specifically Jewish “cultural goods” in order to reconstruct a secular Jewish identity in a new homeland, progressing to a series of critiques of conservative accounts of Jewish history and language use, and finally ending with a discussion of the role of the critic in facilitating the dialogue of what it means to be a Jew. Eliezer Schweid’s thorough and convincing account of the role of Zionism in the formation of a nationalist Hebrew-Israeli identity in his essay “The Construction and Deconstruction of Jewish Zionist Identity” nicely pairs with Shaked’s own more sweeping examination of the role of historical conditions in the continually evolving formation of Israeli literary themes (“Contemporary Israeli Literature and the Subject of Fiction: From Nationhood to the Self”). Both critics provide an encyclopedic account of the various authors involved on this grand historical stage, succinctly yet lucidly discussing each author’s subtle permutations in their respective delineations of Jewish identity. This nicely juxtaposes with Morris Dickstein’s account of the general trends in Jewish-American fiction, in his equally comprehensive essay entitled “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer.” Because these general accounts of the last one hundred years or so of literature in America and Israel (or pre-Israel) can only provide a gloss of the major issues, two essays are provided that examine specific authors as emblematic of these trends. H. M. Daleski’s “Philip Roth’s To Jerusalem and Back” and Ruth Wisse’s “The Yiddish and the Hebrew Writers Head for Home” outline Roth, S.Y. Agnon, and Jacob Glatstein’s personal literary journeys and transformations as microcosms of the greater cultural trends in Jewish identity formation. [End Page 163] The compilation also provides interesting analyses of how specific cultural functions in religious or communal Jewish life were adopted for literary purposes in order to search for new grounds of establishing Jewish identity. Particularly fascinating is Hana Wirth-Nesher’s “Magnified...

Holiness and the History of the Church in Benedict XVI’s General Audiences Louis J. Rouleau (bio) When Benedict XVI was elected to the papacy in 2005, he continued to deliver the weekly General Audiences on the psalms and canticles that comprise Vespers using the text that St. John Paul II had prepared.1 After completing that cycle of talks in February 2006, Benedict began his own series on the great figures of the history of the Church with the stated intention of reflecting on “the mystery of the relation between Christ and the Church.”2 As part of this series of audiences, which lasted until April 2011, Benedict delivered 170 addresses on the most significant figures in the history of early, medieval, and early-modern Christianity, proceeding chronologically from the apostles, through the Eastern and Western Church fathers and doctors and concluding with St. Thérèse of Lisieux.3 These audiences can be counted among the most important contributions of Benedict’s pontificate not only by reason of their numerical extent and historical breadth, but especially on account of their pastoral and theological significance. In this article, I will offer an overview of this series of audiences, explore the influence of history on Benedict’s theological vision, and consider how Benedict offers an apology for the truth of Christianity by chronicling the historical unfolding of sanctity. [End Page 158] I. The Scope of Benedict XVI’s General Audiences on the History of the Church With the complete cycle of addresses in view and following the cues given in the audiences themselves, it is possible to discern ten parts. Benedict begins with an introductory set of seven talks reflecting on the apostolic constitution of the Church. He then turns to the apostles, dedicating fifteen talks to the Twelve. The numerical discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that Peter and John each receive three addresses, while Simon shares one with Jude and Judas shares one with his successor, Matthias. Next, Benedict turns his attention to the first witnesses of the Christian faith mentioned in the New Testament, with Paul being the focus of four of the nine talks. The next section features the principal writers, theologians, and doctors of the Eastern and Western Church, stretching from Clement of Rome to John Duns Scotus. Interspersed within this extensive series of eighty-four addresses are two interruptions. To mark the Year of St. Paul, which the Church celebrated in 2008 and 2009, Benedict delivered twenty talks dedicated exclusively to Paul in addition to the four already given in 2006. Similarly, during the Year for Priests that followed, he reflected on the essential character of the priesthood by drawing attention to a number of holy priests. While these two subsets of audiences do not follow the chronological structure of the other audiences, they nevertheless share the same pastoral program of calling attention to saintly historical figures and, for this reason, can be seen as belonging to the larger project. Returning to the saints and theologians of the medieval period, Benedict continues his trajectory until he reaches Duns Scotus and then dedicates sixteen audiences to the greatest of the medieval women saints. Using Teresa of Avila as a bridge, he ventures beyond the medieval period to focus his attention on the eight remaining doctors of the Church that had not already received his attention. One final concluding talk sums up the entire series by focusing on the theme of holiness. The following table summarizes the entire cycle of audiences: [End Page 159] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Benedict XVI’s General Audiences on the History of the Church Notwithstanding some exceptions, which will be described momentarily, each of the addresses focuses on a notable figure from the history of the Church and follows the same general format. In each case, Benedict offers a brief biography, surveys the individual’s literary output, and highlights some of the principal themes that emerge from this person’s life and work in order to identify what is of enduring relevance for contemporary Christians. In addition, many of the addresses conclude with a brief exhortation drawn directly from that person’s writings. It is...

Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia:Anecdote and Women’s Biographical Histories April London (bio) The proliferation of anecdotal writing over the course of the eighteenth century offers an interesting pathway to questions of genre adaptation in the period. Lionel Gossman’s argument—that from their European advent, these “highly concentrated miniature narratives” were “closely related to history, and even to a kind of counter history”—identifies anecdote with the most prestigious of contemporary forms.1 But anecdote was also important to other, so-called lesser strands of historiography, and in particular to modes such as biography, reshaped in the decades following the 1750s by a new attention to private experience and personality. Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) appears at this critical juncture. Described by its author as a Plutarchan “Biography” infused with “some Mixture of Romance,” and by modern critics variously as biography, orientalist text, historical fiction, satire, novel, and didactic tale, the work has a categorical indeterminacy ideally suited to exploring the relation between biography’s emergent focus on inwardness and the English tradition of anecdotal writing that stretches from the late seventeenth century to the Romantic period.2 While Cleopatra and Octavia did not exert any observable influence on its successors, Fielding’s inventive adjustments to the anecdotal secret histories she inherited illuminate the spate of early nineteenth-century biographical [End Page 137] histories, particularly those written by women. Comparison of Cleopatra and Octavia with Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina (1804), Elizabeth Benger’s comments on that work in her 1818 Memoirs of the late Mrs. Hamilton, and Lucy Aikin’s reflections on her own Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1819) suggests that by realigning Fielding’s unstable genre mix these later writers articulated a version of anecdotal biographical history that was deemed appropriate for women in ways that political history was not. The emergence of anecdote as a distinct mode following the 1674 translation of Procopius’ Anekdota as The Secret History of the Court of Justinian, combined with its subsequent ubiquity, makes it a particularly useful guide to genre transformation. Initially Whiggish in orientation, English secret histories retailed scurrilous anecdotes about court culture in an effort to expose monarchical abuses of “power, privilege, and prerogative” and thereby make the case for “limited constitutional monarchy.”3 Subsequent Tory polemicists, most notably Delarivier Manley, retained their predecessors’ emphasis on sexual intrigue and on the suspect motivations of private individuals who sought to direct affairs of state to their own benefit. While Isaac D’Israeli’s Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First (1816) condemned the nineteenth-century reprinting of these early secret histories, dismissing them as “garbage” that “would have perished in their own merited neglect” had they not been “dragged from their lurking holes,” his contemporaries clearly relished both older and more recent exercises in political defamation.4 D’Israeli himself made extended use of existing anecdotal secret histories when writing his James the First and Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England (1828), and Sarah Green’s The Private History of the Court of England (1808) revives the techniques of the romans à clef when she sets her narrative in the period of Henry VI, finding in assumed names and a remote period a cover for her satire on Regency corruption. For many writers before mid-century, including Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, “Anecdotes, or secret History” were very nearly transposable terms.5 But as anecdotal modes proliferated, the initial identification with secret history loosened and new narrative possibilities emerged. Evidence of changes in the representational functions of anecdote can thus be seen not only in the continuing interest in the secret histories that Eve Tavor Bannet denominates “a self-conscious genre of historical, political, and life-writing” reaching from Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, John Oldmixon, and Henry Brook through to Walter Scott’s nineteenth-century two-volume compilation on the Jacobean court, but also, more generally, in anecdote’s evidential importance to developing [End Page 138] professions, including law and medicine; its late-century authorizing as a rich source of quasi...

Reviewed by: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs Betsy Klimasmith (bio) Keywords Fiction, Literary history, Print culture Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States. By Thomas Koenigs. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Cloth, $45.00.) [End Page 672] With Founded in Fiction Thomas Koenigs sets out to write a literary history of the United States before 1865 that de-centers the novel genre even as it "recovers the array of theories and varieties of fictionality that early U.S. writers developed as they wrestled with the most pressing political and social questions of their moment" (2). Koenigs calls attention to the multiplicity of fictional forms from the period that are not novels and convincingly argues that retrospectively labeling them as such obscures their richness and diversity as well as their distinctness from the novel genre. Koenigs explores a wide variety of texts: novels and other fictions along with the reviews and paratextual material that, he argues, explain to us not just how the texts were read, but the reasons why fictionists, as Koenigs calls them, wrote the kinds of texts they did. Bringing Catherine Gallagher's influential focus on fictionality to the U.S. context, Koenigs argues, allows him to make visible the range of roles fictional texts played in their uneven and incomplete movement from instrumental form to literary art. Founded in Fiction makes a convincing argument that readers and writers of the varieties of extended fiction that proliferated during this period understood fiction's worth and impact in many ways—didactic, political, and aesthetic, to name a few. In addressing the early U.S. print landscape, Koenigs explores familiar and forgotten texts as he moves through the decades, at first chronologically and then thematically. He persuades that a diversity of strange and rich fictional forms and aims makes early American literature exciting, especially when we take seriously and at face value responses to fictional texts, including sermons and reviews, but also the paratext and responses to fiction found within the works themselves. Though arguing that readers should not "back project" ideas about genre and reading onto older texts seems to run counter to the project of literary history, the wealth of material Koenigs presents underscores his point that we need to look more closely at fiction in the U.S. through a frame that encompasses the period's strange diversity. The first half of Founded in Fiction looks at U.S. literary production through 1820, an era whose strange and unwieldy fictional texts benefit most from Koenigs's approach. The categories into which the texts are divided are familiar: Chapter 1, for instance, puts "Tales of Truth"—or what Koenigs terms "nonfictional novels"—like Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and The Power of Sympathy in conversation with one another, while Chapter 2, "Republican Fictions," considers Modern Chivalry, The Algerine Captive, and Wieland. These chapters read the literary texts in [End Page 673] conversation with reviews, paratext, prefaces, and comments about fiction—especially novels—expressed within the text by narrators and characters. Chapter 3 explores the least familiar group of texts and authors: the numerous extended fictions including Margaretta, Dorval, and Female Quixotism written by U.S. women between 1800 and 1820. This chapter offers a useful catalog of the decades' many overlooked fictional productions, but the sheer number of the texts mentioned means that attention to any single work (besides Margaretta), remains limited. In the second half of the book, which covers the decades during which novels became a more familiar and recognizable form (1820–1850), Koenigs moves to a more thematic treatment of fictionality, with chapters on historical fiction, hoaxing, social criticism, and enslavement. This approach pairs texts and authors—sometimes in expected ways, like Cooper and Sedgwick (history) and Sheppard Lee and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (hoaxes), and sometimes with more surprising duos, like the juxtaposition of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to Lippard's The Quaker City (social criticism). While it was heartening to see Koenigs attend to the thorny question of whether novels could provide white readers unmediated access to Black consciousness, which Frederick Douglass...