Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization

The Evasion of Literary History

Reviewed by: Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism by Adrian Daub Sean Franzel Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism. By Adrian Daub. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. viii + 366 pages. $35.00. Uncivil Unions is a rich exploration of concepts of marriage in philosophical and literary texts of the 1790s and beyond. As Daub argues at the outset, this book explores [End Page 328] "the metaphysics of marriage" rather than pursuing an empirical, social history of marriage per se, because a turn away from the limitations of the empirical characterizes idealist/romantic theories of ideal interpersonal union in general, and of marriage in particular. Daub's book is a valuable contribution to studies of this period because it reveals the extent to which marriage was theorized as a model of ideal intersubjective relations—this alongside other key moments of intersubjectivity such as labor (in Hegel's master-slave dialectic), pedagogy (in various theories of Bildung), and aesthetic experience—that offers a countermodel to existent civil society. Daub's book adds additional complexity to previous accounts of this transformative time in German thought and uncovers new intellectual-historical genealogies that lead from the romantic period up to the present day in theories of intersubjectivity, the relationship of the family to the state, and the all-important politics of marriage. Daub's book does a great service in showing how a wide range of literary texts take up the philosophical debates about marriage, exploring the deep interrelations among philosophy, aesthetics, and experiments in literary form in the period in new and rewarding ways. Daub proceeds by unfolding philosophical texts in a clear, compelling manner and by showing the ways in which literary texts engage, extend, and sometimes subvert key philosophical ideas. The book thus opens up new linkages between Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and romantic writers such as Novalis, Sophie Mereau, Schlegel, and Jean Paul. Daub convincingly shows how debates about marriage rearticulate idealist and romantic theories of the absolute; this book will serve as a valuable introduction to students new to German idealism and it is at the same time entirely captivating for scholars working on the period. As Daub describes it, idealist/romantic thinkers explore marriage as an avenue for interpersonal self-realization, rather than a contract with state or civil society. This is the "uncivil" aspect of marriage referenced in the book's title—in opposition to Enlightenment theories of marriage as a contract embedded in concrete civic realities and sanctioned by the state, idealist/romantic thinkers approach marriage as an ideal relation based on love and mutual self-realization. Marriage is defined in a quasirevolutionary manner against the current social order, but at the same time it is an interpersonal relation that bears the potential of remaking social and political life in its own image. As Daub convincingly shows, the theory of marriage is a site where fundamental concepts of interpersonal interactivity and mediation (Vermittlung) are unfolded; in this way, this book provides a valuable new angle on the genealogy of ideas of mediation. That said, marriage is for Daub not simply a deconstructive figure for the act of writing and figuration, for poiesis writ large; rather marriage is a lived experience, a concrete instance of intersubjectivity with its specific limits and possibilities. Daub's main interlocutors are intellectual and literary historians and philosophers. His approach often does not foreground theories of the consolidation of gender roles and identity around 1800 or social histories of the rise of the bourgeois household. Daub also does not focus much on child-rearing as a feature of marriage, deliberately taking his lead here from romantic/idealist thinkers themselves, who, as Daub argues, theorize the "product" of marriage primarily as the marriage itself rather than as offspring. Here this reviewer would have appreciated more methodological Auseinandersetzung with competing approaches that foreground other familial constellations in their accounts of figures of mediation (Vermittlung) around 1800. In particular, [End Page 329] it seemed that the book's intellectual-historical method might well stand in more competition with certain psychoanalytically informed accounts of the period than the author let on (such as Friedrich Kittler...

This thesis examines the extent to which vegetarianism has been a marker of utopianism throughout science fiction’s literary history, how the vegetarian theme has been altered to reflect changes in ethical and environmental thought and the extent to which the vegetarian ideals promoted within science fiction and utopian literature have had a real-world impact on the spread of vegetarianism and animal advocacy. It does so by examining the representation of vegetarianism in the works of the major science fiction authors Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood within their evolving social contexts, tracing the development of vegetarianism’s social and literary trends from the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century.

REVIEWS 215 Florin Curta, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages: 500–1250 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2006) xxvii + 496 pp., maps. Florin Curta’s Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages: 500–1250 presents a new multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the complexity of the medieval period in this broadly defined region, and is a fitting addition to the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series. Building on the author’s earlier work, which has provided fascinating new methods of envisioning southeastern Europe and the emergence of the various peoples between late antiquity and the Middle Ages, this survey of medieval history presents a cohesive view of the historical issues within the framework of a narrative history while applying innovative research. For example, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages enlarges the body of sources to include and to rely heavily on recent archaeological findings and the scholarship that it has inspired, as opposed to the traditional presentation of medieval Balkan history primarily conceived through literary sources. The geographic range of the work has also been greatly increased from earlier surveys (which primarily were concerned with narrow definitions of the Balkans ) to include the areas of present day Hungary and Romania. Curta argues that although there is a great diversity in histories in this expanded area, traditional arbitrary models of political histories have been slow to recognize that this broad perspective allows for reevaluation of the interactions between various areas and comparison “across visible and invisible frontiers” (38). This new survey of early medieval southeastern Europe is not only a response to the growing importance of archaeological research for this period, but also a reassessment of the geographic concepts of the “Balkans” and southeastern Europe, which seems to be highly influenced by changes in the modern concept of a unified Europe and the desire to break from “national(ist)” paradigms. Although Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages balances many types of sources and adopts broad perspectives on some of the most contentious issues, the organization of the work is surprisingly conventional, divided into relatively arbitrary chronological periods which are subdivided by historical issues. The periodization tends to be divided into centuries: for example, the first chapter , “The end of late Antiquity or the beginning of the Middle Ages?” covers the sixth century; the second chapter covers the seventh and eighth centuries (“Dark Ages”); and the penultimate chapter focuses on the first half of the thirteenth century (“Between Crusade and the Mongol Invasion”). The subdivisions are less uniform and are primarily focused on either groups or locations (Croats/Croatia, Bulgarians/Bulgaria, Byzantines) or issues (The problem of Greater Moravia, the Byzantine-Hungarian wars and the rise of Serbia). The conclusions presented in the final chapter do not follow the organization of the rest of the work, and are broadly thematic, covering economy, society, and religion over the entire period. The final chapter is also very short, given the range of material and issues present in the rest of the work, and functions more like a location in which these types issues (such as agriculture) can be included rather than a set of conclusions. Curta’s presentation of archaeological evidence, and the weight which he gives it, is one of the greater methodological differences compared with earlier REVIEWS 216 scholarship, for example Fine’s The Early Medieval Balkans.2 A short illustration of this phenomenon can demonstrate the growing authority with which archaeological evidence has come to play in creating the history (or histories) of the people of Southeastern Europe. The location of “Greater Moravia,” both as a political entity and as a pseudo-mythic country where the Slavic conversion was first attempted, has been greatly contested in previous scholarship. After outlining the various theories (primarily that Moravia was located on the Morava river in present day Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which is the traditional view, or that is located south of the Danube in Serbia), Curta turns to the archaeological evidence based on grave goods and the emergence of certain types of settlements which are interpreted as clear indicators that in the period of the ninth century, the region north of the Danube should be considered as Moravia. Curta’s work is not simply an...

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

Literary history is an important aspect of literary studies. It explores the multiple dimensions of literature, including writers, works, schools, movements, debates. This paper uses History of Literature in the Republic of China as the object of analysis. This book was published in 1975, sponsored by KMT (the Nationalist Party) and edited by Yin, Xue-man. In terms of the methodology of literary history, I intend to explore the significance of this book. There are four issues examined in this paper. First, is history inevitable or coincidental? To answer this question, comparisons will be made between ”rewriting the history of literature” in 1970s and 1980s in mainland China and ”new history of literature” in Taiwan. Second, this paper will discuss the backgrounds of how this book was published. Third, I will discuss external issues such as how literature was used as an instrument to forge common identity and subjectivity. Fourth, I will analyze internal issues such as the definition of literature and periodization.

The aim of investigation. The floral symbol manifests intself according to the aesthetic codes of each literary era. For romantic creators the outside world begins to lose its meaning so that the real nature will be subordinated by them to the inner movements of feelings. The literary motif of the blue flower consecrated by Novalis in German romanticism is the desire to access a higher spiritual life because in romanticism literature becomes a means of knowing the world not just mirroring it, no matter how elaborate this reflection. With reverberation in Mihai Eminescu`s poetry this floral motif is originally autochthonous along with other floral aesthetic codes. The method of research. Constructive comparativism or third-degree comparativism is the method used amd is based on relationship of dependence or influence between at least two texts. Thus, there are certain myths, themes, motives that radiate from one culture to another, from one era to another, enriching their meaning according to new visions about the world and life. Conclusion. From the dawn of literature until now aesthetic codes including floral ones have been constant they being part of the mythical structure of humanity. The relation between literary works, the contacts berween national literatures and the circulation in time of ideas materialize in the taking of some forms, of some suggestions regarding the stylistic construction or the interpretation of the phenomena from the objective world.

International audience

The Annotated Catalog of Books in the Imperial Library is an important record of written works in China. Starting from the eighteenth century, as scholars conducted research from the methodology used in the studies of literature, such as editing, supplementing and modifying, many important advancements were achieved. Up until the 1980's the direction of research gradually changed; scholars began to pay attention to the culture and thinking shown in the books. This research is focused on this change. The narrations on the history of literature is the scope of my research. My research will reconstruct the officials work on the history of poetry and the historical writings from the Tang Dynasty collections of summaries, and interpret the implicated meaning of their thinking. Because summary in The Annotated Catalog of Books in the Imperial Library were composed according to existing books, this led to the form of the complete idea seem unordered and hidden. I will reconstruct their narrations on the history of literature, and explore the complete content of their thinking. Thus, I use the The Hidden Relationship as a topic to open discussion.

Crowds in History

Reviewed by: Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature by Kenneth Rooney Ann Sadedin Rooney, Kenneth , Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature (Disputatio, 12), Turnhout, Brepols, 2011; hardback; pp. x, 304; 11 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503524313. The porous boundaries in the Middle Ages between the dead and the living, and the role of the medieval imagination in configuring the dead in a multiplicity of ways, are the subject of Kenneth Rooney's study. He probes aspects of medieval beliefs and attitudes that remain an alterity for us, despite our increased exposure to violence and death through today's media. Medieval people were confronted regularly by the reality of physical decay, and their perceptions of the more gruesome aspects of mortality appear in both texts and art. This focus on what is thought to happen to the dead body, the literary perspective from which Rooney explores his subject, and the wide range of texts discussed, complement both scholarship with a religious or historical base and literary studies with a narrower focus. Hence his work could serve students and scholars from any discipline with an interest in attitudes to death in the Middle Ages. [End Page 306] Rooney's central thesis is that notions of the macabre began in homiletic rhetoric, and emerged visually in pictorial art, with an ultimate flowering in transi tombs and images of the Danse Macabre and The Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead. This iconography then fed back into literary representations. He starts with a long discussion of the cultural context of macabre thinking and the preoccupation with the decaying corpse, the transi. Subsequent chapters move from representations of the inert corpse to those of the revenant, the animated dead body, and the disembodied ghost. Later chapters continue with the analysis of texts that illuminate the imagined experience of being dead, and works in which the personified figure of Death appears. There are many aspects of this book that deserve appreciation. The book is a vast compendium of information about attitudes to, and beliefs about, death in the Middle Ages and later. Rooney is an excellent storyteller, and takes us through many texts in a beguiling and easy-to-read style, frequently with a gentle humour. A literary historian who has his readers bursting to read the texts he discusses has achieved something that one would hope would render any defects in his work negligible. However, I found it hard to ignore the book's problems. First, the structure: Rooney repeatedly defines his purpose as dealing with the macabre. But unable to resist the much broader context, he spends many pages digressing. He strains to fit his examples into his argument; for example, is a mention of worms sufficient to define a text as macabre? He strains even harder to identify necrophilia in his texts. I frequently wanted to argue. He has trouble containing his material in the designated chapters, since many of his examples fit under multiple headings. This difficulty seems inevitable given the enormously diverse and inconsistent nature of his material. The scope of his study stretches way beyond its promise of dealing with death in Middle English literature, to include Boccaccio, French texts, many pages on non-English images, multiple discussions of early modern examples, and many other barely relevant digressions into background information or non-macabre examples. Interesting collections of epigraphs before each chapter are presumably intended to show that these attitudes persisted up to the nineteenth century (even Tennyson is quoted); but they do serve to cloud the stated medieval focus of the book. A simple modification of subtitle and more accurate definitions of scope would help the reader's expectations. Beyond these structural anomalies, Rooney's style presents problems. Apart from his engaging narrative style, the complexity of his discussion is compounded by his penchant for unusual words and secondary or obsolete meanings: condign, intercalate, invention (for 'discovery'), interruption (for 'eruption'), and many more. For example, what is a reader to make of [End Page 307] alliterative verse's 'tendency to fashion objects in hecatombs of synonyms' (my italics, p. 246)? More serious...

Global overviews of the history of nationalism are rare. Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990), based on a series of lectures, still represents the modernist consensus as it arose in the last decades of the twentieth century. Since then only radical antimodernist authors have taken up the challenge. The first was Azar Gat, a political scientist who in 2013 published Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. In order to substantiate his argument that people tend to solidarize with people that are genetically related, he provides a somewhat one-sided overview of four thousand years of human history. Steven Grosby's Nations and Nationalism in World History now adds a short overview with an equally radical antimodernist message. Grosby is emeritus professor of Religion at Clemson University and his research focuses on biblical history and the intersection between religion and nationalism. About two decades ago this expert on the Ancient Near East was already selected—quite surprisingly—to write the volume on nationalism in OUP's A Very Short Introduction series. In his new booklet Grosby again defends a strong anti-modernist position, which he develops in two theoretical chapters and a lengthy conclusion. Consequently, the space available for a global chronological overview is limited, and the chapters on nations in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Era are covered in less than eighty pages in total. His main point is to prove that nations have always existed. Grosby does argue that the rise of modernity—with the invention of new means of mass communication, the rapid extension of the infrastructure, the introduction of national citizenship and the adoption of compulsory education—has brought profound changes. However, he largely passes over the decisive modernist turning points, such as the birth of the nation-state during the Age of Revolution or the invention of nationalist ideology in the Romantic era. Although Grosby does not adopt Gat's sociobiological approach, he asserts that the concept of ‘nation’ is useable as a transhistorical category. He recognizes that cultures in earlier times were not uniform. Still he argues that relatively homogenous nations already existed two thousand years before Christ. In his chapter on Antiquity he discusses—among others—the Assyrians, Israelites and Iranians, while French, Scots, Sinhalese, Vietnamese and Koreans figure in the chapter on the Middle Ages. He defines the nation as ‘a social relation of a relatively extensive, yet bounded territorial community of kinship’ (p.23). Thus, a nation has a distinct territory, common traditions and institutions which persist over several generations. Their members profess loyalty to their land and, in most cases, have their own language and religion. Their territories have stable borders and often they also possess common legal codes and economic regulations. Although Grosby admits that many premodern states were empires with universalist pretentions, nations—or nationally defined states—also had a prominent role in the long history of humankind. All this implies that Grosby has adopted a nationalist definition of the nation, projecting it back into the distant past. He uncritically employs the Romantic conception of the nation as a Volk, with its own organically grown language and culture as a starting point. Nevertheless, there are some 7000 spoken languages today and only a limited number of these linguistic communities have their own state, let alone clear geographical boundaries. Grosby does not discuss the dominance of multilinguism throughout most of human history, nor reflect on the often purposeful construction of national languages during the modern era. Moreover, as Pietro Bortone has recently shown in his magnificent Language and Nationality (2022), the relationship between language and culture is at best tenuous. In addition, Grosby adopts a holistic approach to culture, interpreting it as a unique set of values and practices. This is at odds with most anthropologists today who recognize that societies consist of overlapping transnational networks, where cultural hybridization is the norm. Moreover, the literature Grosby uses is often rather dated. Any reference to fresh, ground-breaking interpretations by, for instance, Rogers Brubaker, Andreas Wimmer or Siniša Malešević is missing, while the author overlooks ambitious comparative studies on Europe or Southeast Asia. Grosby also ignores recent scholarship on the conceptual history of the nation, which shows that the meaning and interpretation of nationhood has shifted profoundly over time. Even though this book provides fascinating information on specific little known cases, especially from the more distant past, it cannot be considered an up-to-date critical examination of the role of nationalism in world history.

Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate. The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth-century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers.

The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding the history of childhood in the West from antiquity to the present day. By broadly incorporating the research in the field of Childhood Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in this crucial field.The volume is composed of three parts. The first part explores childhood from the Ancient World through to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe. The second part examines the fundamental aspects of childhood and the life of children in the West since 1600. The essays address issues such as family, work, law, sexuality, and consumption. The chapters think beyond national and continental boundaries so that readers are informed about general trends in the West, while still alert to differences in gender, class, race, and time.The final part focuses on aspects of children’s experiences in the modern world. This section explains how childhoods have developed in distinct contexts and among specific children by using the growing literature on modern childhoods in various locales and at particular historical moments.Including essays on all the key topics and issues, The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World will define how the history of children and childhood can best be understood, in the longue duree and comparatively, while still acknowledging the importance of and encouraging scholarship on specific groups, periods, places, and life course divisions. This important collection from a leading international group of scholars presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field. It will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of childhood.

Reviewed by: Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France by Leah Tether Leona Archer leah tether, Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. Pp. 224. isbn: 9781843844266. $99. In Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France, Leah Tether explores concepts of publishing through the lens of Grail literature and an examination of manuscript evidence and early print editions of Grail narratives. One of the central thesis statements of the volume asserts that pre-print book production can be considered an early form of publishing and Tether’s arguments are compelling, citing numerous records that demonstrate a thriving book trade in pre-print French society. This is explored in great depth in Chapter One: ‘Publishing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.’ Tether’s claim for a medieval publishing trade does not only arise from the records of book traders and those who commissioned manuscripts, however, but from evidence found within the texts themselves. In each of the next four chapters, the following medieval French Grail romances are examined in relation to the chapter theme: Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal, the Bliocadran, Elucidation, and the Continuations; Perlesvaus; and the Estoire del saint Graal and the Queste del Saint Graal of the Vulgate Cycle. The first section of each chapter presents the methodological framework and main arguments of the chapter, which are then supported by a detailed exploration of the primary texts. Chapter Two (‘Blurbing the Grail’) argues that the paratexts, colophons, and prologues, which frequently accompany both manuscript and early-print editions of Grail romances, may all constitute what we would now call a blurb; that is, a promotional copy that announces the narrative with the crucial purpose of enticing contemporary readers to engage with said text. Tether also proposes that the development of such texts charts changing literary tastes with a preference for more chivalric-focused Grail narratives in the later Middle Ages, illustrated by the material presentation of these in early printed books. Chapter Three (‘Disclosing the Author’) claims that the ways in which French Grail narratives disclose authorship evolve over time, while addressing the thorny questions that so often loom large over any discussion of medieval authorship; to whom do we refer when we employ the term ‘author’ and according to what definition(s)? Through a close examination of peritextual representations of authorship in French Grail literature, Tether asserts that publishers were consciously working with the ‘author’ as a brand (not necessarily a named individual) that they could exploit in order to market their books to particular consumers. The previously explored concepts of blurbing and authorship drive the discussion forward in Chapter Four (‘Re-packaging the Grail’). Here, Tether analyzes the data in order explore how Grail narratives may have been compiled to appeal to successive generations of medieval readers, by responding to changing tastes. The final chapter of the book (Five: ‘Patronage and Promotion’), examines the role of patrons in Grail literature (both those who commissioned the first creation of a Grail text from an author and those who commissioned copies), and the development of patronage as book production moved from manuscript to print. Tether concludes that across both these models of textual production, patronage [End Page 163] is a valuable commercial tool that can be leveraged to generate not only financial rewards, but also political and social benefits. This monograph is attractively presented, rigorously researched, and convincingly substantiated. The arrangement of chapters is logical and coherent, and readers with specific research interests (i.e. early book production or Grail literature) will easily find relevant sections. Consequently, this work should appeal to readers interested in a range of intersecting subjects; from the history of publishing to Old French and Arthurian literature, to manuscript and early printed book production. Leona Archer University of Surrey Copyright © 2019 Arthuriana