Introduction: Reading through Error

Статья посвящена восприятию «Книги хроник» (1493) Хартмана Шеделя читателями раннего нового времени. В статье рассматриваются особенности создания «Книги хроник», то, каким видели будущего читателя ее нюрнбергские создатели, а также, кем были реальные владельцы экземпляров книги в Европе раннего нового времени. Наконец, на основе анализа читательских маргиналий конца XV–XVII вв. в ста экземплярах «Книги хроник» из британских, российских и немецких библиотек характеризуются интересы и практики читателей этой книги. Особое внимание уделяется тому, как в условиях Реформации читатели разной конфессиональной принадлежности взаимодействовали с нарративом Шеделя о «сакральной истории». The paper examines how early modern readers perceived and used the “Nuremberg Chronicle” (1493) by Hartman Schedel. The paper outlines creation of the “Nuremberg Chronicle”, discussing the intentions of its authors, and observes what readers actually possessed the “Nuremberg Chronicle” in early modern Europe. Finally, relying on the early modern readers’ marginalia in more than one hundred copies of the “Nuremberg Chronicle” held by the British, Russian, and German libraries, the paper explores the readers’ interests and reading practices. The paper especially focuses on how the readers of conflicting confessional affiliations interacted with Schedel’s narrative of “sacred history” in the context of Reformation.

ABSTRACTThe history of reading is a comparatively recent field. Work to date has been diverse both in period and methodology, ranging from case studies of individuals to statistical analyses of populations. This diversity means that it can be hard to discern either a broadly agreed narrative of reading practices or a clear set of debates. However, a range of scholars have emphasized contrasts between intensive and extensive reading, oral and silent reading, utilitarian and recreational reading, and public and private reading. These contrasts have been aligned with historical periods, with oral reading, for example, being associated with early modern reading in contrast to later periods. This article analyses the reading practices of Samuel Pepys and concludes that his example supports a contrast between a more intensive, oral, utilitarian, and public reading in the seventeenth century and that of later periods. Pepys's reading practices are also shown to have profound effects on his interpretation of texts. He sees texts of all genres as scripts to be performed by particular individuals, and judges them according to their suitability for this performance in a specific context.

Writing primarily for an audience of medievalists, in his brief afterword to the collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, Fredric Jameson remarks: “Suffice it to say then that allegory, on my reading of it, is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations.”1 Almost a decade later, in his Allegory and Ideology, Jameson expands on and thus clarifies these remarks. Moving across time and space, from late antique biblical hermeneutics to twenty-first-century world literature, he shows the relevance of this seemingly archaic form to modernity and its crises of representation. For Jameson, allegory—as opposed to allegoresis and symbolic interpretation—promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary meaning but delivers multiplicity and disruption: I tend to feel that allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgment, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. Allegory does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but it sets them in relationship with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive knowledge.2Jameson’s electrifying remarks capture the discordance inherent to medieval allegorical narrative, to those works that extend the possibility of hermeneutic fixity but, as they disperse into shards and fragments before the reader’s eyes, ultimately show this fixity to be illusory. Within the context of English poetry, this experience of reading premodern allegory, frustrating yet intoxicating, registers perhaps most intensely in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century dream vision.This is a poem famously difficult to summarize, one whose various episodes, discontinuous rather than progressive, never seem to cohere into a narrative whole.3Piers Plowman follows its protagonist as he navigates an allegorical landscape in search of a spiritual truth that remains, time and again, nebulous and elusive. In his quest, he encounters—indeed, often verbally spars with—a lengthy catalog of personified abstractions that both aid and subvert his spiritual quest. These personifications are, for the most part, not unchangeable but pliable; they instantiate the “surreal, fluid, and confusing” design of Langlandian allegory.4 This poem’s disruptive form seems to endorse Jameson’s account of allegory and the “crisis in representation” that this mode of writing signals. Yet his account dismisses the literary mode of poems like Piers Plowman: “We will find ourselves reverting again and again to this insight: that it is the disappearance of personification that signals the emergence of modernity.” For Jameson, the personifications of classical and medieval allegory reify an ethical binary of good and evil; they embody “fixed substances or passions” that often devolve “all the way to the caricatural or the stereotypical.”5In their second monographs, Katharine Breen and Nicolette Zeeman—respectively, professor of English at Northwestern and professor of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge—interrogate the plasticity of medieval personification instantiated in the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman and other works. Like Jameson, Breen and Zeeman recognize that the instability inherent to this mode of writing captures the incommensurable and otherwise unrepresentable forces that collide in our experience of the world. However, both medievalists also advance a forceful rebuke to Jameson’s account of personification as a stagnant form—a critique certainly unintended, given the books’ publication dates. Breen’s Machines of the Mind traces the formal and historical development of three traditions of personification that, as she argues throughout the book, are available to medieval authors: Prudentian, Platonic, and Aristotelian. She describes how each type of personification functions as a pliable and complex “engine of thought” that allows writers and readers to think through difficult questions (MM, 8). For instance, in one thirteenth-century poem, personified vices register how sinfulness constitutes a “collective rather than a purely individual” problem; thus the poem proposes “public policy,” rather than private penance, as a solution to social ills (MM, 248–49). The book’s final chapter then describes how these three types of personification all “rub shoulders” in Piers Plowman (MM, 232).Zeeman’s Arts of Disruption focuses closely on moments of allegorical and narrative disjuncture in Piers Plowman, such as those in which the logic of specific personifications comes undone: when their “names remain the same while their actions and words degenerate” (AD, 13). Zeeman’s account of allegory bears a striking resemblance to Jameson’s. This mode of writing is “slippery, contrastive, pugnacious, episodic, contradictory—and not always glossable” (AD, 15). The first three parts of the book describe the pliability and argumentative vigor of Langland’s personifications. They are changeable and hypocritical; they debate and rebuke each other with violent words and gestures. The fourth and fifth parts explore how, by drawing material from the psychosomaticism of Galenic medicine and the unfulfilled quests of grail romance, Langland gestures to the ultimate unknowability of Christian salvation. Moving in and out of Langland’s poem, Zeeman argues boldly that allegory makes meaning out of frictions between narrative structures and bodies of discourse.In years to come, Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful readings of Piers Plowman and other premodern works will transform the concepts and categories with which scholars in medieval studies talk about allegory. Certainly, medievalists are the primary intended audience for both books. This is especially true of Zeeman’s dense book, evidently written for a narrow community of readers intimately acquainted with Langland’s poem and its critical tradition; summary and context are often scant. Engaging in what Piers Plowman criticism calls “crux-busting,” Zeeman treats the poem as a constellation of enigmas that begs to be solved; she both grapples with and celebrates the poem’s many knots and slippages.6 To a degree, the last chapter in Breen’s book engages in a similar critical mode. She deploys her tripartite theory of personification to explicate the strange behaviors (and, in one especially brilliant case, gender fluidity) of Langland’s allegorical characters. Most of these enigmas—Why does Piers tear the pardon? What do Hawkyn’s tears signify? Why does Piers welcome Hunger into the half acre?—will probably mean little to those readers who do not already eagerly await the annual publication of the Yearbook of Langland Studies. Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful responses will certainly provide medievalists with those “aha” moments that the best scholarship on Piers Plowman affords. They will also, most likely, spark fierce debates in conferences and specialized journals. For instance, I would reject Zeeman’s conclusion that Hawkyn’s tears signify “a kind of hope” and asseverate instead that they mobilize a critique of unthinking devotional formalism, of just going through the motions (AD, 177). In fact, Zeeman recognizes that the poem voices this worry throughout.However, these two monographs also speak beyond the disciplinary bounds of medieval studies. Breen and Zeeman stake a claim—a claim, for the most part, explicit in the former’s work and implicit in the latter’s—that personification allegory is not an “archaic or archaizing form” symptomatic of a premodern naïveté and designed for pedagogical ease (MM, 9). In their critical imagination, the alterity of the past, with its strange forms and genres, speaks to the concerns and crises of representation of modernity. My account of these books thus aims to expose those analytical moments that disclose the transhistorical vitality of medieval allegory, moments that, throughout both books, are interlaced with rigorous, historically situated engagements with medieval thought.Similar questions animate these two books: How and why do personifications in medieval allegory change? What are the cognitive, ethical, and social affordances of these fluid forms? How does medieval allegory make meaning? However, to answer these questions, Breen and Zeeman employ markedly different methodologies; I find such distinctiveness to be evidence of the rich and varied forms that the writing of literary history can embody. Piers Plowman is the indubitable gravitational center of Zeeman’s monograph. She begins not with the tradition that produced the poem but with the literary and philosophical logic of the work of art itself. After a brief introduction that describes “narrative disruption” as the “stuff of medieval allegorical narrative,” Zeeman plunges her reader straight into the poem’s muddy yet invigorating waters (AD, 15). The animating logic of this singular poem both illuminates and is illuminated by a rich corpus of medieval literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. Zeeman thus continues the critical project of her first book, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, which explores how the poem’s many moments of “failure, rebuke, and renewal” participate in and disclose a broader history of medieval psychology. In Zeeman’s critical imagination, citations, allusions, and mere resonances assemble into a vibrant network of premodern thought, which constellates around Langland’s poem. Consequently, Zeeman’s footnotes are comprehensive, reminiscent sometimes of a commentary. Most of the author’s claims are supported by and contextualized in a mosaic of premodern sources and modern criticism. The critical pleasure that Zeeman’s work affords is thus not dissimilar to the pleasure of Langland’s poem: a poem that seems to refuse linear reading and that, rife with manifold allusions and biblical and patristic citations, provides the thrill of recognition and documentation.Zeeman’s book is theoretically sophisticated. Moving across this lengthy text, the reader can infer how schools of thought such as deconstruction and psychoanalysis inform her readings of medieval literature and philosophy. However, in contrast to her first book, Zeeman’s theoretical allegiances rarely make it to the body of her text. At times, ripples do form on the surface. It is clear, indeed, that much of Zeeman’s account of allegory as a disruptive art draws from Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the “fragmentary” nature of allegory denies “the false appearance of totality” (AD, 9).7 At one point, she winks at her reader and suggests that “Langland’s narrator may have discovered the death drive” (AD, 297). A different book could have begun with an extended account of Freudian psychoanalysis and, slowly over the course of a chapter, outlined what it tells us about medieval culture. But Zeeman does not apply modern theory to premodern texts. Rather, as this nod to Freud suggests, she implies that aspects of medieval thought anticipate and thus illuminate modernity’s tools of inquiry. Zeeman’s tactical engagement with modern theory foregrounds the intellectual intricacy of the medieval text; it becomes not the object of theory but theoretical in itself.8In contrast to Zeeman, Breen does not begin with Piers Plowman. Instead, she writes a prehistory to this poem, recuperating and exploring in meticulous detail those moments in intellectual and literary history that made such a poem possible in the first place. Still, although she does not focus on the poem until her book’s final chapter, Piers Plowman is an absent presence throughout. As Breen’s book unfolds, the history of allegory teaches us how to read Piers Plowman. However, one can also sense that the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman taught Breen how to read this history. Moreover, unlike in Arts of Disruption, the argumentative animus of Machines of the Mind emerges, in great part, from extensive engagement with twentieth-century criticism. To isolate those rhetorical techniques and modes of thought that produced Langlandian allegory, Breen’s introduction confidently declares that modern criticism has misunderstood medieval personification. What follows is a dazzling rewriting of literary history that emphasizes the complex cognitive and ethical affordances of these strange, seemingly arcane forms. In response to critics as influential as Erich Auerbach, Angus Fletcher, and Gordon Teskey, Breen rejects that personification commits depersonalizing violence against individual subjectivity. Rather, this pliable rhetorical tool, insofar as it represents “a body of data as a human body,” negotiates relationships between individuals and collectives (MM, 2).In this rich introduction, Breen also challenges scholarship that attaches personification allegory resolutely to a particular philosophical school. This genre, Breen explains, is neither inherently nominalist (it tells us that only particulars exist, as advanced by Paul de Man) nor inherently realist (it tells us that only universals exist, as advanced by Johan Huizinga). In fact, personification allegory is “not inherently anything” (MM, 315). De Man’s idiosyncratic attachment to nominalism notwithstanding, Breen’s introduction begins to advance a line of argumentation that traverses most of her book: critics typically assume that medieval personifications embody Platonic universals or Forms, unchanging and stable. For Breen, this Platonizing tendency has led critics to recognize fluid personifications in Piers Plowman and other works as somehow deficient. At this point, Breen’s iconoclastic argumentation falters slightly. Indeed, some of the smartest work on Piers Plowman as early as the mid-twentieth century recognizes the poem’s allegorical fluidity, unattached to a Platonist formalism.9 To my eye, even one of the main objects of Breen’s critique—Jill Mann’s contribution to the Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman,” cited recurringly throughout the book—does not advance such a rigid account of personification. Although she does call personification “Platonizing,” Mann does not quite construct a rigid philosophical schema from which all personifications emerge. Rather, she argues that, insofar as it captures the real existence of abstractions, this literary genre is no mere game. Like Platonism, it shows how ideas such as love and hate participate in the sensible world.10 Mann thus anticipates Breen’s claims that personification allegory has conceptual purchase on the social world. Indeed, Breen even acknowledges that, in an earlier essay unfettered by the pedagogical demands of a Cambridge Companion, Mann advances a more flexible account of personification reminiscent of her own category of Aristotelian personification (MM, 206).Breen’s vision of literary history is in no way dimmed by this oversimplification of the critical field. In her introduction, she demonstrates that personification allegory is not tied to particular philosophical positions, especially when the modes of inquiry of these bodies of premodern thought have been mediated and narrowed by modern criticism. Her wide-ranging critique also advances an important corrective to a great deal of historicist work in medieval literary studies that renders the literary epiphenomenal to its historical or intellectual context. Although as early as 1978 Russell Peck warned medievalists that Chaucer (and, I would add, Langland or Gower or any imaginative writer) “is not a logician, nor is he a systematic philosopher,” a great deal of scholarship still seeks to restrict imaginative literature to narrow philosophical viewpoints, in the process circumscribing the imaginative and theoretical work that the literary itself can effectuate, as well as erasing the dynamism of much medieval philosophy.11 Breen captures instead how imaginative literature participates in rather than merely reflects intellectual history, indeed often pushes its boundaries. Machines of the Mind thus avoids what as the of or in which and are against each an that is ultimately her book, Breen closely those early that scholarship to to historical context or to sources for In each chapter Breen a or of that think and, techniques of and their how and early medieval to as well as imaginative works in their own personified who are not of a ethical binary but inherently The first of the book to a poem often but personifications at the of and in they “a material and presence in and (MM, In the poem, personifications like and are not inherently through the of they a of and the reader to do This often the form of what Breen calls a a of gender through which personifications their (MM, In the second of the book in the of a Platonic a who is sometimes even (MM, as a changeable Breen scholarship that, to her this and actions and some in Arts of Disruption, Zeeman also writes a history of one systematic than For the most part, her focus on the actions and behaviors of particular allegorical not on the conceptual categories to which these In the first three parts of her book, Zeeman does the of Langlandian personification in rhetoric, and and it is that her contribution to the history of medieval personification and the plasticity of this form on Zeeman explores how the rhetorical of of as who embody and “the instability and of and (AD, To Jameson’s critique of these do not reify a ethical binary of and In fact, these make the reader to the and possibility of in and (AD, For Langland’s of advances a of an that, by the of the and to the of Christian of have both and to find a stable and perhaps unitary in a poem for its and In her own book, Zeeman celebrates recognition of the relationship between form and she neither nor rejects his more historicist claims about the poem’s Yet in her reading Zeeman the inherent to the rhetorical of which may a of the critique that in the like Breen’s Zeeman’s is inherently it also from a process of rhetorical Zeeman’s of the rhetorical of this form call to the of medieval personification. In her account of the and argumentative of personification Zeeman also emphasizes how this genre a or that aims to and concepts rather than to (AD, Her brief remarks about the imaginative and functions of personification to an about and that is to Breen’s In her of and Platonic Breen describes how these personifications from and complex of the personifications are rhetorical tools that in their readers (MM, In a Christian Platonic are not They are imaginative that a hermeneutics of that a and other personifications a of that think of as (MM, Although these forms conceptual purchase on the material they are in real and the of thought in these Breen continues to rebuke twentieth-century scholarship that emphasizes the pedagogical simplicity of premodern personification. the many Breen in Machines of the may be her and most resolutely In personification allegory, evidence of an realist unable to abstractions in (MM, For the personifications of medieval allegory to its their The of the medieval that suggests a medieval unable to the of that For this Breen’s of the literary in her account of the Platonic is Indeed, it from the work of her who in Middle English literature an of the literary from other modes of an that what it to and recognizes the of these works in the social work on the of personification allegory with the work of literary who have for and as concepts to the These are concepts that have been at least by of in literary history, as and to the Middle The work of these scholars challenges influential of literary history that as a historical indeed a historical first in the Breen speaks to similar For to read personification allegory is to read a and work of as well as to the complex cognitive that its world affords. She thus challenges a vision of literary history that the inherent of the of the modern to earlier literary modes for the world. As medievalists such as and have the of this type of critique beyond the critical relationship between premodern and modern After the logic that a Middle by premodern unable to from from similar not to the logic that, insofar as it the of the as a of intellectual literary that do not those as somehow indeed imaginative vigor of these personifications is perhaps most in Breen’s account of Aristotelian personification. This last in her tripartite personification the purchase that literature, insofar as it engages with reality and and complex modes of thought, can have on the social world. Breen two philosophical traditions the of nominalism universals concepts that in the human in dream like Piers Plowman, by the human as or enigmas that readers to think about in Langland’s poem the functions as a nominalist that readers think about the nature of the (MM, that from the of particulars to the of this personifications their from an of particular by they are for about the universals with which they are and, like Langland’s can detail (MM, in these Aristotelian personifications a literary form that purchase an complex social world (MM, This form into a that allows readers to think about and social questions (MM, in Piers Plowman the personified Hunger functions as an ethical thought that ultimately and readers to the conclusion that is not a of (MM, it is out of the multiplicity of the this type of Aristotelian personification becomes “the most literary form for the social of (MM, to this late medieval that their (MM, Although by Breen’s of the modern is She writing about produced in the Middle and expansive period against which modernity itself. Breen’s signals that modernity is a that the second half of the period that in social and structures the of the as Breen thus gestures to the theoretical and indeed of this To my eye, this signals the broader and transhistorical critical of this and, most of the premodern literary works that it contrast to Machines of the Arts of Disruption does not recognize the of personification allegory. Still, Zeeman does that allegory of and a linear narrative (AD, 15). These capture “the and of in the (AD, In she recognizes that the inherent to personification allegory captures a that and more modes of literary such as to the best in both and Piers Plowman, the of the quest, that be for the or truth an object of unfulfilled As in a personification debate that is rather than Zeeman does not provide her reader with the of unitary she in fact, that the poem does not these of salvation. Rather, Piers Plowman deploys the and disruptive work of and, in into the ultimate unknowability of (AD, and also in the often fluid of Zeeman’s monograph. At the of her Zeeman that has been a (AD, The of her reflects the of medieval spiritual In its of the book’s the that, for Zeeman, is inherent to allegory. To the book’s of is not In fact, it like a of in a publication landscape that the and more forms of Zeeman her as they to the of a to recognize across the Like the of Piers Plowman the argumentative of Zeeman’s book capture a its many parts collide and grate against each other but, any do not cohere into the illusory of unitary in her conclusion Zeeman also suggests that, to Breen’s three modes of these allegorical modes “rub against each and meaning out of their (AD, The and that to those spiritual that be in especially the of Zeeman’s remarks are Indeed, they at the of two critical to Piers Plowman: one that the poem as a narrative of and spiritual and one that emphasizes the poem’s and Still, this final at Zeeman has not to those moments in the in medieval thought more these allegorical modes in Although she begins to explore questions of her that Langland’s into the and of and extended Yet perhaps the is that any final at by feel of Machines of the Mind and Arts of Disruption to debates medieval and in the of Piers Plowman are My reading of these books has instead on their broader to literary history and to the history of Indeed, Breen and Zeeman boldly the of medieval these These two monographs thus participate in an important critical tradition that recognizes the of the Middle to critical theory as well as to the concepts and ills that in this does not apply seemingly theory to early it in the logic of medieval literature and the that the of modernity and its critical However, neither Breen nor Zeeman out to a of As literary they first and to the of or forms as well as to their books are, to a great of that poem that has most of their to the bodies of with which it and to the brilliant criticism that it has This is scholarship that, as it, emphasizes how the medieval work of art, moments of its and its their true our own in those that do not the of Piers Plowman but rather to other bodies of medieval thought, these two books can sometimes feel like They rather than critique a corpus of premodern literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. In they to the vibrant thought and alterity of a medieval that and as yet especially to and the of for their and I also and for and

Emilie de Geer, Women’s Education, and the Materiality of Reading This article aims to study the reading practices of the Swedish noblewoman Emilie de Geer (1782–1828) of Löfstad Castle, in relation to her intellectual and political interests. The Enlightenment and events such as the French Revolution ignited new political ideas, increased the number of female authors, and gave grounds for discussions on the effect of women reading literature. Hence, women’s reading practice “is the most important arena in which to judge their contributions to social change” (Diaconoff, 2005). All Löfstad women, such as Hedvig Catharina von Fersen (born De la Gardie, 1732–1800), Sophie Piper (born von Fersen, 1757–1816), and Emelie De Geer had close connections to both Swedish and European royal and noble families – the very elite in terms of both culture and politics. The library of Löfstad has never been studied in depth, especially not through questions of gender, women’s reading and writing as a space to cultivate ideas on politics, women’s worth and agency within the social and cultural sphere they inhabited. Thus, this article will contribute to the broad fields of cultural and literary history, shedding new light on Swedish women’s reading practices, intellectual ideas, and political debate during the Enlightenment.

Since its consolidation as Greater New York City in 1898 (and even much earlier), New York City has served as a setting and subject for a number of literary experiments. These experiments in both fiction and nonfiction challenged expectations about form and content of writing about New York City. The immense variety of texts resulting from literary engagements with New York City has been collected in a host of anthologies and literary histories that have been published throughout the 20th century and in the past decade. Many of these works have offered evidence of how foreign writers have engaged with New York. Foreign literary visitors, especially the British, offered new models for literary transatlanticism through their encounters with New York City which, more often than not, explored aspects of personal and political identity. With all of its attendant anxieties, the theme of identity was at the center of early 20th-century British as well as American writing in which New York plays a significant part such as Henry James’s The American Scene (1907) and Ford Madox Ford’s An English Girl (1907), New York is Not America (1927), When the Wicked Man (1931), some of which I consider here. British and American New York texts serve as meditations on changing notions of ‘Anglo’ identity, in particular, as well as changing notions of transatlantic writing. Only by reading these texts comparatively and historically is this important cross-conversation about ‘Anglo’ identity and transatlantic textual identity revealed. For the British, this type of writing has its roots in works 19th-century travel and social commentary by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and others. Since the early 20th century, however, the models for modern British writers of New York also include those offered by American expatriate writers such as James, who foreground the complex issue of identity in an imperial and post-imperial world in their literary engagements with the city. British New York texts such as Ford’s tend to present the city as a forum for startling and frank fictional and nonfictional discussions about what it means to be ‘Anglo’ in an increasingly transatlantic and cosmopolitan world.

REVIEWS Patricia A. Morley, The Immoral Moralists (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Com­ pany Limited 1972). xvi, 144. $4.50/ Fraser Sutherland, The Style of Innocence (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Company Limited 1972). xvi, 120. $4.50 There is extant in the world of Canadian letters the idea that if a critic discusses three or more Canadian writers in a single study, he is Frigian. If he talks about them in relation to universal concepts, he is both thematic and a chauvinist. And if he mentions their cultural context, he is not really a critic at all but a social commentator. It is a time of particular difficulty for Canadian literary criticism, as indicated by the confused response it receives from reviewers. Normally, the critic can lay down the perimeters within which he proposes to function, and then function as best he can. In Canada, it is not so simple. The current need for critical direction, evaluation, and definition within the field of Canadian litera­ ture demands of the critic - or forces him to demand of himself —a social responsibility, even at the expense of his literary vision. Both the creative and explicative arts suffer accordingly. Whatever his approach, the critic draws on a presumably broad range of literary experience. The ability to analyse, form analogues, and make evalua­ tions derives from an informed taste built upon knowledge of genre and tradition. Assumptions are necessarily made as to the range of knowledge shared by those to whom he writes. In Canada, these assumptions cannot be made. Highly literate people in this country know nothing of the country's literature. They have been schooled exclusively in other literatures, and as the Canadian tradition emerges from the shadows of esoteria and indifference they suffer a dissociation of intellect which renders them simultaneously inquisitive and unreceptive. The critic, usually an academic, knows this from his experi­ ence of the world around him. Since common knowledge cannot be assumed, the critic tends to make every commentary seem a fresh beginning. Since he addresses an unpredictable readership, he is impelled always to place Canadian writing in a larger world context or to sum it up, or both. He is confronted by an apparent vacuum which will not be contained simply by the elucidation of art. All literary critics, of course, have a social function in providing a bridge E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , 1 , 2 (su m m e r 19 7 5 ) 231 R e v i e w s between art and life. The responsibility of the Canadian critic, whether taken up on his own or imposed upon him by reviewers or the reading public, is extended somewhat further. He must act as an impresario. A number of recent books, including Elizabeth Waterston's Survey, Clara Thomas's Our Nature - Our Voices, and Margaret Atwood's Survival follow in the footsteps of Desmond Pacey's 1952 compendium, Creative Writing in Canada, combining literary history with descriptive analysis and a thematic overview. These are aimed at the self-confessed initiate. They are readers' guides which attempt to sell the literature while illuminating it. Each attempts to see the literature whole, to circumscribe it within a single encyclopaedic vision which will strike some responsive chord in its Canadian readers. The critic must also act as a tour guide. Meeting this demand directly, a great number of monographs and handbooks have appeared from a variety of publishers on the works of single authors. These range from the utilitarian to the execrable with a few, such as Margaret Stobie's study of Grove in the Twayne series, and Michael Ondaatje's of Cohen in the New Canadian Library, rising to genuine heights of scholarship or creative insight. For the most part, these, too, fall into the category of study aids. The serious critic of Canadian literature, as opposed to the handbook-critic, is expected to fill the role of guru. The prototype, here, is Northrop Frye whose brilliant, sometimes restrictive, overview in the Literary History of Canada will dominate the popular conception of our literature for decades to come. Ap­ proaching the literature more...


 
 
 The full-text digitisation of literary works can have some unexpected benefits for researchers in and outside of the field of literary studies. While the broader availability and easier distribution of the text is a clear and intended result of digitisation, the preservation of extra-textual material—such as bookplates, inscriptions, advertisements, and marginal notes—is an unintended result that can help to expand our knowledge of literary networks, reading practices, and cultural history. This kind of material was preserved by the Children’s Literature Digital Resources Project (CLDR), whichdigitised nearly 600 works of early Australian children’s literature—including poetry, short stories, novels, and picture books—that were first published during the period 1851-1945. The CLDR resources are available online through AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (austlit.edu.au)1. This article will look closely at some of the material found in the CLDR texts, including evidence of the books’ provenance (found in bookplates, book labels, inscriptions, and a handwritten letter), a newspaper clipping, and advertisements. Describing these discoveries can never be as informative as actually showing them, and for this reason, this essay has a companion online resource trail, ‘Digital Traces of Past Lives: Bookplates, Inscriptions, and Ephemera Discovered in Digitised Books,’ that guides readers through the digitised texts2. The discoveries are often surprising, moving, and unexpectedly informative. They remind us of the books’ material lives, their previous owners, and their status as physical and cultural artefacts. They can also tell us a little about historical literary and artistic networks in Australia, and the position of children’s book authors and illustrators within those networks. However, in order to make best use of these kinds of serendipitous discoveries, the infrastructure housing digital archives must be able to facilitate the search for this kind of material, as this article will go on to discuss.
 
 

Writing Genius Daniel Rosenberg Nutters (bio) Why Write? Mark Edmundson Bloomsbury www.bloomsbury.com/us/why-write-9781632863065/ 288 Pages; Print, $17.99 Soon after beginning my M.A. thesis, I discovered myself in a rut and expressed frustration to my advisor. What was the purpose, I asked, of producing another study of an author who already possessed a library's worth of criticism? The question is a familiar one to writers of all varieties. What do I have to contribute? My advisor, borrowing a term from the philosopher Jacques Derrida, told me to cultivate my "scene of writing." He implied that writing is the site where our self or identity comes into existence. Writing, in other words, implicates us in a struggle with the voices that circulate in our mind, the strictures of culture, tradition, and history that define us in advance. Like reading, it is a forum that allows us to discover our latent genius and learn, following Emerson, to "recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Mark Edmundson puts the matter succinctly: "writing can bring your mind to birth." His new book, Why Write? A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters, offers a defense writing (as well as literature, art, and the humanities) in the Emersonian tradition. What I have described as the forces of history and culture that inhibit the freedom of self-definition, Edmundson calls the "habitual self": our unthinking day-to-day existence. Writing is therefore a process of learning how to "outwit the pressures of the ordinary" and come into contact with something like Emersonian genius. More than just a medium where we immerse ourselves in thought and language to escape custom, where we momentarily elude the social conventions that regulate our behaviors and desires, writing, for Edmundson, is education itself. As he remarks, "I don't think education is complete, truly complete, until you have turned your significant experiences into words and seen what the words might reveal to you. And since experience continues, there is always the possibility for further education, as you turn what's happened to you (and what you've made happen) into more sentences." Writing is less the translation of who we are into words and sentences than the creation of a self already comprised of language: we craft it, illuminate and weave together its hidden connections, recover its lost elements, and produce a representation (i.e. work of art) that is always subject to ongoing revision. Why Write? is an exploration of the anxieties and joys of writing. It is not a style guide but rather a story told through a series of short meditations. A collection of over twenty brief essays (each around ten pages) which are divided into five sections, Why Write? examines various thematic features of the writer's routine while also presenting a narrative that chronicles the shape of the writing life: from early motivations, the day to day labor of writing, and finally old age. "Getting Started," the opening section, contains two essays where Edmundson draws from his experience to answer his book's titular question. The eight essays in the section entitled "The New Writer" focus on topics such as writing for fame, money, or to get the guy or girl. "Perils and Pleasures" and "Pleasures and Perils," the next two sections, turn to the writer's relationship to reviewers, isolation, alcohol and other stimulants, the ambition of creating a great novel, or even the importance of different writerly mediums (e.g. computers or pencils). The final section, "The Writer's Wisdom," describes what we learn from writing: why the writer is a crucial part of who we are and essential to living a fulfilled life. Edmundson's essays are saturated with literary history, anecdote, humor, gossip, existential wisdom, and at times practical advice. Their pithy and conversational style makes accessible a wealth of knowledge about writing and literature that Edmundson passes on from his experience in the academy and beyond as well as from the authors he most admires. For example, when discussing writers who write "to get even," as one essay is titled...

“Il nous faudroit des topographes qui fissent narration particuliere des endroits où ils ont esté” [We need topographers who can provide detailed accounts of the places where they have been].1 In his essay on “Cannibals,” the early version of his celebrated plea for objective accounts of the fauna, flora, local cultures, and singular features of the New World, Montaigne admonished a tradition of reports made by cosmographers who bore false witness to the Americas. Those observers, he implied, filled Europe with ill-formed and fanciful fiction and had little to do with any first-hand contact with spaces unfamiliar to Europeans. He impugned a line of writers, from Boemus and Sebastian Münster to François de Belleforest and André Thevet, who used the overarching network of a new but compendious genre to capture in its descriptive webbing customs at once primitive and refined, facts archaic and modern, and material both classical in aura and uncanny in shape. Montaigne’s praise of the topographer shared affinities for the person who later became Pierre Bayle’s ideal historian and, no less, the modern ethnographer: one who belonged to no land, was uprooted, déraciné, and capable of casting a candid gaze on any cultural foible that met the eye; one who refused to jump to any moral judgment about cultural practices or the outcome of historical events in past or present; one who was aware of the allure of allegory and rhetoric, on whose seductive delight the effusive and amplified style of the cosmographia was constructed; and one who could report in simple language—of a clarity and measure precise as a toise and discrete as a measured piece of prose—what constituted a singularity.Montaigne’s call for a scientific view of things also suggested that he and his readers wished to know what “really” happened when the French first sought to gain a foothold in the New World. Two failures were on the horizon. The first was Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon’s 1555 expedition to the bay of Rio de Janeiro and the establishment of a settlement, which was obliterated by Portuguese warships in 1561. The second expedition, led by René de Laudonnière, settled on the coast of Florida in 1562 but succumbed to the Spanish two years later. In these pages of “Cannibals,” it can be implied that the nascent anthropology of the Essais was born of mixed impressions about colonial endeavors whose memory was quickly swallowed in the oblivion of violence that reigned during the wars of religion from 1562 up to 1598. For the essayist the reminder of the ventures was revived through the appeal to be rid of cosmographers in favor of new, ingenious, and naïve observers of the pluralities of cultures. A politics subtended the chapter on “Cannibals” and in fact exceeded what is too often taken to be either its humanistic tenor or its anti-Iberian inflection.2The chapter built its observations on the grounds of a double bind. For if “chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage” [everyone calls barbarity whatever is not of their own custom], and if the only available measure of truth and reason is “l’exemple et idée des opinions et usances du païs où nous sommes” [the example and idea of opinions and ways of the country where we are], there exists no way to get out of ourselves and our solipsism. The essay proceeded to do so through its inquiry into Amerindian culture, but its most reliable sources were often the very cosmographers it called into question. The more Montaigne spurned the falsifying effects of a Sebastian Münster or a François de Belleforest, the greater the sense of an affiliation and a need, it appeared, to sort through their histories. Crucial for the reflections were the descriptions in André Thevet’s Les Singularités de la France antarctique, a work that laid the foundation both for an anthropology and, to a lesser degree, a reflection on the illusion of the New World seen as a golden age or an idyllic landscape. After meticulously describing Tupinamba culture from sources teased out of Thevet’s account, Montaigne told of two natives he met in the city of Rouen in 1562, a time synchronous with the outset of the wars of religion. Their observations about rampant social contradiction and the impotence of the French king amidst the mercenary troops who protected him inaugurated a counterdiscourse aimed at French readers. Its rhetoric of criticism stated in the voice of the native, literary historians have shown, became part of the arsenal of the philosophes two centuries later.3In this short essay I would like to argue that Montaigne’s watershed essay, a decisive chapter in the history of French colonial policy, in the tactics of counterdiscourse, in the philosophy of heterology, and in the origins of ethnography, also thresholds the impact of the failed expeditionary venture in the years prior to the outbreak of civil strife. The essay infers that it is in accord with the way the André Thevet had negotiated the history in the passage between the first—and seemingly ocular—impressions circulated in 1557 and the more shaded, confused, and even Baroque treatment of Villegagnon’s mission to Rio de Janeiro in the Cosmographie universelle of 1575.4 The confusions projected through the rewriting of the history of the colony show that Thevet did not belong to one ideology or another, but that the complexity of the chronicle he constructed highlighted a welter of issues pertaining to inner and civil conflict. Like Thevet, Montaigne looked at the French presence in the New World through the lens of religious strife and, as a result, he developed an ethnography and a political praxis on the basis of a memory revised and rewritten for the ends of the moment in which it was crafted.In the early part of his essay, Montaigne builds on the literature surrounding the establishment of Fort Coligny first described in Les Singularités, but at the end, where the political aims are resonant, the multiple inflections of his words echo the revised treatment in the same author’s Cosmographie universelle. Thevet’s shift in perspective grounds the ethnography of “Des cannibales.” For the cosmographer the new material of 1575 was also retained for inclusion in the unpublished Grand pilotage et insulaire (1584), especially because it had been the subject of fresh and violent polemic with Protestant Jean de Léry and his Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578 and 1580), a Protestant work written against the grain of Thevet’s accounts and published just prior to the first two volumes of the Essais.5Thus the history of Fort Coligny can be separated from the cosmographic genre that had inaugurated a style of inquiry and of writing that welcomed encounter with other cultures.6 The topographers Montaigne extolled had in fact already been familiar to writers of geography and cosmography. The distinction between a cosmographer and a topographer was heralded in the first and celebrated sentence of every printed edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia.7 It may be that the term “topographer” was a name fitting for anyone who observed and described whatever had not yet appeared in any history of the first French colony. The essay allusively begged its reader to look at earlier representations of the complex events to which it vaguely referred and on which its own history depended.Not long after Pedro Cabral’s discovery of Brazil in 1500 and the Portuguese claim to own the land, the coastal line was developed and exploited by trade in brazilwood. French voyagers made incursions along the coastline and developed trade with indigenous tribes. Less bent on commercial development than bartar and informal exchange, many Norman sailors (indeed avatars of coureurs de bois) developed adventitious connections along the eastern coastline and in riparian cultures from the Amazon southward.8 Pockets of French presence marked the coast of Brazil, as they have been amply shown on the maps of the Dieppe School.9 One site became formalized when Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, a member of the Order of Knights of Malta who had an envied record of military service, asked Protestant Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and the cardinal of Lorraine to underwrite a colonial expedition to the mouth of the Guanabara River in southern Brazil. Coligny sustained interest in the New World by launching the idea of a new haven for dissidents, at the same time he led Henry II, the Catholic king of France, to believe that trade in brazilwood would be enhanced by a French foothold in rivalry with Spanish and Portuguese settlements. In the mid-1550s the Portuguese had only sparse holdings along the coastline, while Norman traders had by then deepened their ties with indigenous tribes.10 The French felt that an exotic colony in the west would dispel or defer religious turmoil through a national project aimed less at overwrought expansion and more toward respecting a parity of economic and theological interests.The ships left Dieppe on 15 August 1555 under Villegagnon and his pilot Nicolas Barré. They dropped anchor at Cabo Frio, on 10 December of the same year. Several days later they sailed to the bay of Rio de Janeiro (a. k. a. Guanabara). Villegagnon chose to settle on a small island in the bay that now borders the landfilled embankments of the Santos-Dumont airport. The prospect from the island allowed the colony to look seaward where Portuguese vessels entered the bay but remained at a safe distance from the Margageaz Indians who circulated in canoes in the bay on the other side of the island. Villegagnon’s Fort Coligny was built with earthen walls and palisades erected with the assistance of indigenous labor. In the paranoid frenzy about the fort being put under siege the leader soon broke off relations with the Tamoio Indians, who were traditional allies of the French. An epidemic came with reinforcement of new colonizers in 1557. The healthy were quickly impressed into service (or even forced labor) directed toward completing the defensive structure. Relations between the colonizers and friendly Indians were curtailed under Villegagnon’s orders. A revolt ensued. Norman truchements, or interpreters, who had acclimated to rustic life, fomented further rebellion by turning friendly tribes against the colonial leaders. Besieged and betrayed by men who preferred the exotic liberty of life on the mainland to the carceral regime on the island, Villegagnon sent messages to Jean Calvin in Geneva, begging the Protestant leader to send him a second wave of colonizers equipped with stronger moral backbone. A tiny population of convicts and unruly elements was about to be supplanted by militants of the reformed church. At this point Villegagnon’s project, “because of the failure of expansion into the mainland and the conversion of the Brazilians, moved toward the creation of a city of refuge cut off from the back country and reserved for the principal benefit of persecuted Protestants from Europe.”11Apparently the leader had until then harbored a desire to establish a Gallican colony based on respect for religious difference and compromise. In anticipation of an outburst of religious wars within the borders of France, lines of belief hardened and, under new strain, civil conduct gave way to conflict. On 7 March 1557, 14 Protestants from Geneva emigrated to the island and were welcomed by Villegagnon’s outstretched arms. But on the day of Pente-cost, in a debate on Presence and the nature of the Eucharist, the seeds of new violence were sown. Villegagnon argued along Catholic lines, attesting to the identity of the sacramental wine and wafer with the body and blood of Christ, while the new arrival, minister Chartier, conscientiously disputed the idea of Presence. Villegagnon later returned to Geneva for counsel. Minister Richer took part in the ideological collapse of the colony. Accusing Villegagnon of being a cannibal, the Protestants attacked Catholic ideology in the ambient distinction that was used to separate humans from savages. Several months later the reformers took refuge on the mainland with the Indians, the people whom they had assumed, contrary to Villegagnon’s symbolic anthropophagia, to be real cannibals. In January 1558, five surviving Calvinists returned to the island. Villegagnon put them in irons in a desperate attempt to furnish an example for others and to use force to correct miscreant behavior. He drowned three of the men before leaving the colony, en route to Paris, where he sought to obtain funding and wherewithal to rebuild the mission in accord with the principles of the Counter-Reform. The efforts failed on 15 March 1560, when, under the leadership of Villegagnon’s nephew, Bois-le-Comte, Fort Coligny fell under the attack of 26 Portuguese warships.12André Thevet played a very minor part in this history. His account of the passage along the coast of Brazil began upon his return from the colony after accompanying the members of the first expedition to Guanabara. The writing of the Singularités commenced upon his return to France in 1556. Having been ill for most of the journey, Thevet was bedridden for ten weeks, even though the text reported that he had encountered Chief Quniambec, smoked a “petun” cigar to the point of vomiting and fainting, and had been naked as an Indian after the natives had robbed him of his books, paper, and clothing.From these shards of experience a popular and profitable novel could be made. Fantasies were mixed with the notes and impressions. In the travel book that resulted little attention was paid either to the history of the French fort or any latency of religious dispute; nor did the author launch propaganda to encourage new settlers to uproot themselves from the old country and develop new lives in the land he named “Antarctic France.”13 Commentary was scattered in the thick of varia about nature, diet, preparation of fermented beverages, the aspect of Capo Frio, and exotic birds and fish.The first and only visit to Guanabara is the topic of chapter 25. A topographical description proceeds an incipit underscoring the movement of the eye that records the impressions of an idyllic landscape, itself in motion, because of the welcome brought by the natives thrilled by the sight of ships arriving from the high seas. Thevet remarked that the group spent two memorable months in the area before they baptized it.The description remains topographical in the best sense both for the attention it brings to the defensive virtue of the island that Villegagnon chose for settlement and for the bonus of the exchanges made with Indians for goods and foodstuffs. Any fear about scarcity or famine is dispelled by the aura of the site when the prose turns from an engineer’s view to that of a tourist or of a painter, depicting an exotic scene whose titillation owes much to the indigenous people eternally residing in a space from which the reader or spectator is forever excluded.The area recedes into the background of the account that follows. It is, literally, a point de repère, a place whence observations were made of the surrounding water and land. It was a camp, too, from which trips were taken to inquire of the fish in the river and to see how the land might have belonged to a continental accounts of life, diet, social of and the they The historical material into the of description of things that are by from the classical The text the effects made in the The are of and A of a is to of long or of The nature of the and description a of and familiar in turns of and The of in the tradition of the a new and in France in the this Les to be as a work of as a book to a of In this New World version of a de or a modern the André Thevet is in the first who a an that the of the and with reports of new and that like the spaces he with impressions. Singularités, they are also and of and scattered an They an for a new genre with the revived from the by in the name of the the varia are not by the that them but to a where they are mixed is a of and of of an with and but also of that from the of Thevet’s is to the reader to to the of Villegagnon or to develop a new to a of the A book of it the as and other have shown, of an The of history in Les Singularités that belonged to the colonial venture so many others in a work to to and from classical and a written The French mission is seen in the of and through the space of a new it into the overarching project of a new and mixed built in part on Thevet’s earlier and a voyage to the the de is not Crucial for the of Fort Coligny in the work of 1557 is the of the and presence of the of the same material was taken up in the second of Thevet’s and Cosmographie universelle. the new and amplified is from what was in Les The wars of religion were inaugurated after the of in 1560, a that made the river blood from the of of a religious and its The in the synchronous with the collapse of Fort began a of violence that up to and past the of the author’s own Thevet’s revised account of at Guanabara in 1575 could not be from the of history that the colony to In a and singular way they are in the of Les exotic and had way to of indigenous life, and The work and the eye to see and in the same material that in the of the and the surrounding in many of the same effects are enhanced by the of the two to the eye is a much greater of printed writing the or of chapter that had marked the earlier The in the new work is by or in in a than the of the descriptive from Les return to and to the new material along with inclusion of new and that the history of Fort Coligny is taken up in chapter two of book of the second In the Singularités the had la de de où France the in other words of and how the country where we was named a more that the site had into the turmoil of en la de de et qui the in the and of the and ill that In the of the chapter is a the that a Portuguese when it laid siege to the island and soon Fort For a the of the colonial is shown and a in the in the fort des A view from a it and the places and of the siege and The an that place in a A with in the a of a regime of in The view of the bay and the of its surrounding is by the of a of vessels the island with text of the chapter is written or the it places at the of the The printed writing and the are in the of a or a that can be from the to the or and about a The same is in the in which the island, seen from an recedes while being in its Like the of the ships that the island on which they are their the text and places at a turning a the that brought to the In a sense the of Villegagnon’s colony were in Thevet’s history. into and in the lines of an the colony is seen in the area of the bay what might have been a of or even a that the area the at The of the its own failure to the events that led to the the text of the chapter the or could have been Thevet took to put the a sentence that of the or of two who were and to the of the space is into the perspective of the just the left is the in small while at the in the is made to the and the attack the Portuguese upon the island. The is in the text to the on both of the chapter is aimed toward this point in at two the description of the and about the of and the history and into the of Thevet’s passage up the river and on the island. The history of the colony was with the account of the of the fort and of the first of the collapse of the defensive structure. It was by not of the fort but as if an or a were who about to claim to a island. The collapse is only 15 lines just the before the of the mission are through a of by as and had to the it also the of in the first is in the second by that of Calvinists and the natives synchronous with the outbreak of and on religion a of the Portuguese attack the of the In this of the that Thevet had taken at of the of the New World as an are where the author at his the cosmographer François de Belleforest who was to false in his work published in the same of Thevet’s into two and that belong to the of allegory or what historians call an The line of is marked by the historical the only of the within or by a prose to or the French by and the principal of the history. The latency of the the for the of the fort on the island. It the places and the of ships to and from on the mainland and the that the two of land that the bay and the It is a and a historical point of The of the fort is the is and in the same new events the that the reader the of the descriptive to the of descriptive chapter to between the of the style in Les Singularités in the first pages in what a with its report of religious strife. The is The chapter the history by from a to the style of the work of 1557, of an island to be for the natives a exotic place by They to its for what to be to in for or five and their and that the is the island was a in and with a there were of seen were but they were from Thevet, because they a and were very and with a on the of their The called these and the called them who were people the of this I believe have put these in the country to have the of an description of the to its the description of the the line of of the landscape. An and its birds to pertaining to the new In the are of the first seeds of the of the French Thevet that the contrary to not His experience that the could not of as if it were itself to the violence of the that Fort the swallowed or to with its the also laid that were to was that the could small of the west brought to the New World, and that its bore the memory of the that brought an to the colony. an of the of and the the history that and the more in its failure to where it its or to for Thevet that the island, like the was not and less than the by the of the in the material that the the description and began with the of or though the island was and an was built for the la a de the island was for the principal that there was so much and The exotic island that inaugurated the chapter way to a site of In the accounts it was that the space was but by the the were there an was the population or did the who not to to the mainland there as The exotic of one are to the of the the is in the descriptive of the the island is and to a of it is de de qui

In Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance, and Drama, 1050–1350, John Stevens refers to medieval traditions of dance-song as he describes the many variants associated with pastourelle, which combines “the courtly chanson and dance-song.” He further suggests, “The pastourelle is a sophisticated genre where several traditions meet; it is an imaginative literary and musical plaything.” He notes the genre’s “aural geometry,” which “derives [its elaborate sense of pattern] in part from verbal factors.” Stevens also observes that the verbal designs intersect structurally with musical patterns.1 Conventional scholarly reliance upon Virgilian origins for the literary histories of pastoral literature obscures its connections to other powerful performance and visual traditions associated with the genre, at least for its early modern compositors, performers, authors, readers, and viewers. Placing Wroth’s play Love’s Victory into conversation with the aesthetics and stylistics that permeate musical and dance production allows attention to its strengths, its artifice and ornament, its manipulation of rhythm and meter, its composed fusion of sources and genres. In particular, the dance performance practices embedded in this pastoral tragicomedy, manifested in its groupings of characters, its shifts in tempo, and its symmetries, offer a means to interpret its performance. Wroth constructs a play text with enormous potential for performance once its choreographies come to the surface, and this essay begins the analysis of how an appreciation of early modern composed dance forms can and should suffuse our understanding of Wroth.2

This chapter discusses how translation has affected literature. When we assess criticism of translated literature as part of the larger national conversation about the novel's purpose, the formation of the national literary canon comes to resemble a process of negotiating the foreignness that lies within it and not solely a process of casting the foreign out. In doing so, we ascribe historicity to the formation of national literary history itself, reformulating not just the position of Arabic in an imagined world literary canon but also the modern Arabic literary canon. Translation helped to shape a category of national literature that belonged in turn to a comparative process. Reading the history of the novel in translation forces us to recast national literary histories, to read the nation in translation. To locate foreign literature within national literary history at the moment of its formation is only possible if one uncovers the impact that translations had on “original” writing, discourses and institutions of modernity, and reading practices. Understanding that history challenges us to read novels' depiction of even national environments or characters in the comparative critical context in which they were written and to see “national realism” as a mode that was canonized through comparative and translational methodologies and as perhaps the culmination of a history of translation.

This essay recasts the central locale ofThe Mill on the Flossin order to show how the geography and society of George Eliot's novel function together as a conjoined ecological system. I show that the port at St. Ogg's is set on an estuary, and from this observation, I claim that the entanglement of multiple estuarial waters provides a formal model for the overall ecology of the novel. Referring to this system as “ecological form,” the essay shows how the characters’ misunderstanding of the estuarial nature of the St. Ogg's hydrography is the primary source of the communal divisions with which the novel is so famously riven. In so doing, this essay makes two methodological interventions, one local, and one slightly more global. In the first, I show how unsticking the progression of our criticism from that of a novel's plot—especially one with such a catastrophically strong telos asMill’s—can allow us to view form and, particularly, geography as newly vital to literary history. This leads to the second intervention, in which I suggest that reading practices in an age of environmental collapse should look beyond disaster itself and toward affected communities’ systemic ties to those extraneous systems—economic, legal, imperial—that aid and abet disasters elsewhere and even ignore the potential for catastrophic reoccurrence in the near future. In other words, reading for water readily yields a wide-ranging map of global capitalism perhaps unexpectedly centered on a small town in Lincolnshire.

While it might be assumed that post-Christian women have rejected the sacred texts of Christianity, this chapter highlights their continued use of the Bible to resource their spiritual lives, and in doing so raises two questions for gendered religious reading practices. First, post-Christian women’s biblicalism crosses the distinction between sacred and secular literatures, and reading processes sometimes made in religious feminisms. Second, despite the emphasis on ‘women’s experience’, feminist theology has focused on the text to the extent that actual readers and their spiritual reading practices are often overlooked. Yet, qualitatively interviewing post-Christian women reveals the biblical reading and the ‘filtering’ strategies they employ to monitor their use of the Bile. This questions the assumption that women who use literature as a spiritual resource are doing so because they have found the Christian testaments lacking in opportunities to access the divine and have therefore excluded them from their personal collections of spiritual texts. While post-Christian women readers in this study are critical of scripture and question its relevancy, they are still reading the Bible.

Tang Studies 20-21 (2002-03) Note on a Portrait of Li Jilan (d. 784) CAROLYN FORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY A number of documents concerning the lives and legends surrounding Tang women poets have recently come to light.1 This note, in contrast, deals with a minor work which should have been in plain sight, as the relevant catalogue has been extant since 1120. According to the Xuanhe huapu Jlffnillfff, Song Huizong Hfc 7H (r.1101-1126) held seventy-six paintings by Zhou Wenju JH>t£f=[ (lOth-c.) in his art collection,2 one of which was a portrait of the Tang Daoist poet Li Jilan ^Epjjt], who was executed in 784 for treason.3 Although art historians of the Ming and Qing dynasties were aware of its existence, present day art historians have not paid much attention to this lost portrait.4 Literary historians, past 1 These documents, which supposedly come from Dunhuang, deal with the treason poem for which L i Jilan was sentenced to death as well as the lost tenth-century poetry collection Yaochi xinji ^£jfeS?H, which consists wholly of poems by Tang women. These potential recoveries are analyzed in detail in my doctoral thesis, "The Textual Transmission of Poems Attributed to Tang Women" (University of Oxford, 2004). 2 See the anonymous work in 20 juan, Xuanhe huapu, 7.2a. Some of the paintings by Zhou Wenju listed in this catalog are still extant, for example, "Watching the Chess Match through Doubled Curtains," in the National Palace Museum, Taibei. 3 For a brief description of L i Jilan, see Gao Zhongwu H f ^ i S , in Zhongxing jianqi ji tpMf^^^, Tangren xuan Tangshi xinbian JlfAMJSf##rlii/ ec *- ^ u Xuancong ifiWM (Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 506. For an account of her execution, see Zhao Yuanyi $ljt—, Fengtian lu ^ ; ^ ; i f : (Xuxiu SKQS), 1.10b. 4 The relevant catalogues will be cited in detail below. Osvald Siren describes some of Zhou Wenju's extant paintings, such as " A Child Among RoseMallows " and "Ladies with Children on a Terrace," in A History of Early Chinese 151 Ford: Note on a Portrait of Li Jilan and present, were certainly unaware of it.5 This portrait deserves some brief attention because, had it survived, it would be our only early portrait of a Tang woman poet. Guo Ruoxu ffl^EfMg (ca. 1020-1075) wrote one of the records6 upon which the Xuanhe huapu is based. In a section on portraiture he describes Zhou Wenju as a native of Jurong ' n j ^ (present-day Nanjing, Jiangsu) who served in the court of the Southern Tang ruler Li Yu ^ ; j g (r. 961-975) as a painter in attendance. Wenju was adept at painting people, horses, trees, and landscapes. He particularly excelled at painting gentlewomen. For the most part Wenju's style was similar to Zhou Fang's JH55 (730-800), but he altered it and made it more delicately beautiful. There are pictures of the royal family on a spring outing, women beating clothes and ironing silk etc., which Guo noted as extant at the time of writing, but he did not mention a portrait of Li Jilan. The treasures of the Painting, vol. 1: From the Han to the Beginning of the Sung Period (London: Medici Society, 1933) 115-16, and plates 81-82. He does not, however, discuss Zhou Wenju's lost works. I refer to the portrait as lost because no Qing dynasty catalogue refers to it as extant and modern scholars of Chinese paintings such as Suzuki Kei ip/fcffc and Duan Shuan ISUS: et al. have yet to locate any copies. See Chugoku kaiga sogo zuroku ^MWllt&iiMfsk, 9 vols. (Tokyo: Tokyo University , 1982-2000), and Zhongguo gudai shuhua tumu suoyin ^ S S f ^ t f ^ B I B ^ ? ! (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2001). I am grateful to my colleague Fongyee Walker, Cambridge University, for checking the last four volumes of Chugoku kaiga sogo zuroku for me. 5 Even the most detailed scholarly accounts of her life and work make no mention of such a portrait. See, for example, Chen Wenhua $$C0, Tang nushiren ji sanzhong Hr&j^f A K l H f l t (Shanghai: Shanghai guji...

Introducing an auction catalogue that lists more than 1000 works from the combined libraries of the Dutch bibliophiles Gaspar Fagel and Stephen Le Moyne, the London bookseller John Bullord pushes quantity and exclusivity: ‘numbers of very choice books’. This essay narrows the selection of choice books further than the trader intended by focusing on the female-authored texts that were advertised for sale in such catalogues in the late seventeenth century; what number of books written by women were held in early modern libraries? It emerges from our work on the RECIRC project (Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700), which runs until 2019.1 RECIRC is researching the impact made by women writers in the early modern period from the perspectives of reception and circulation, building on scholarly work of recent decades that has centred on recovery and analysis of women’s literary production. It participates in a shift away from recovery research toward interrogating women’s place in literary history via the assessment of textual transmission and audience. Our use of the concept of impact cannot be untouched (and is therefore informed) by the contemporary drive to measure academic scholarship in sometimes controversial ways. Elsewhere in this volume, Katherine Binhammer critiques ‘the neo-liberal university’s appetite for quantification and empirical research’. We cannot claim to be independent of the moment in which we research and write, and our project responds, in a historicist way, to the debates generated by that appetite. We argue that the quantitative moves advocated in this essay can generate new grand narratives as well as raising research questions that return us anew to the qualitative and particular.