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Reviews two volumes of the book `The Papers of General Nathanael Greene,' edited by Richard K. Showman, Dennis M. Conrad, Roger N. Parks, and Elizabeth C. Stevens.

This paper argues that one way of reading the portrayal of misery in Old English poetry is as an abjected state; something against which the not-miserable self and community is continually being defined. It argues that, to this end, otherness of different forms is constructed as inherently miserable; and that we should therefore be open to reading unhappy figures as inherently othered. Using a range of poetic case studies, it goes on to suggest that this might be because Old English poetic unhappiness is associated with dissociation and fragmentation, which poses a fundamental threat to the profoundly networked sense of selfhood and intersubjective social system prevalent in the same poetic corpus. The social function of performing the poetry of alienation, then, is proposed to be a communal therapy of abjection, inviting self-identification with traumatised figures in order to abject that aspect of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard" begins and ends with the phrase "Truth be told," but the poem demonstrates just how difficult it can be to tell the truth — or even a truth — about history. "Native Guard" excavates historical events that many readers will find unfamiliar: the experience of Black Union troops guarding Confederate prisoners on Ship Island in the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the Civil War. This complex history is expressed in a crosshatched poetic form: contemporaneous journal entries arranged in a series of interlinked sonnets that juxtapose the history written in ink on paper with the pain written in blood on people's bodies and the bones buried beneath every historical account. While teaching the poem requires careful attention to historical context, poetic form, and repetition of words, the experience provides an answer to the question students keep asking: Why do we have to keep reading about slavery? This essay describes some pedagogical choices that may help students grasp their responsibility for seeking truths that can't easily be told because they lie buried beneath unexamined historical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the third series of `The Papers of Daniel Webster,' entitled `Diplomatic Papers, 1841-52.' The editor-in-chief is Charles M. Wiltse. Series three is edited by Kenneth E. Shewmaker, Kenneth R. Stevens, Anita McGurn, and Alan R. Berolzheimer.

Reviews the second series of `The Papers of Daniel Webster' entitled `Legal Papers.' The editor-in-chief is Charles M. Wiltse. `Legal Papers' is edited by Alfred Konefsky and Andrew J. King and comprises three volumes.

Reviews Volume IV through Volume VI of `The Papers of General Nathanael Greene,' edited by Richard K. Showman, Robert E. McCarthy, Dennis M. Conrad, Elizabeth C. Stevens, E. Wayne Carp, Susan M. Bowler, Nathaniel N. Shipton, Mary MacKechnie Showman, Laurie L. Weinstein, and Roger N. Parks.

Reviews the `General Index' to `The Papers of Daniel Webster.' The editor-in-chief is Charles M. Wiltse. The `General Index' is edited by Alan R. Berolzheimer.

Until the early nineteenth century, organic chemistry was the chemistry of substances occurring naturally in animal and vegetable matter, such as blood, digestive juices, and sap. Those substances were prepared by solvent extraction or, more destructively, by distillation. This form of chemistry was related to natural history, physiology, and the operations of living systems, and covered the gamut from pharmacy to the" vegetable staticks" of Stephen Hales. The case was essentially different for the mineral chemistry that lay at the heart of the chemical revolution effected by French Chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his supporters at the end of the eighteenth century.

This article presents Benedetto Varchi's collection of poems for Laura Battiferri, composed between 1558 and 1559 and mostly unpublished. While some scholarly attention has been given to the collection, recent scholarship has failed to notice its unity because the quires were misplaced in the library housing Varchi's papers. The article also explores the macro-textual strategies and dialogical aspects of Varchi's poetry, particularly the poetic exchange with future cardinal Silvio Antoniano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1829, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was later to write "Das Lied der Deutschen," published one of the first scholarly articles on what was known as the Gaunersprache (rogues' language), Rotwelsch. His article included a poem in Rotwelsch he had written himself. Against the backdrop of Hoffmann's nationalist persuasion and participation in the nationalist project of Germanistik, this paper discusses the question of why he turned to writing in a language he portrays in the same article as hybrid and criminal. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of minor literature, this analysis of the poem itself and of its publication context concludes that Hoffmann participates in an older tradition of inverted minor literature in Rotwelsch, that is, a literature that a majority constructs within a minor language. Thus, Hoffmann's poem appears as an attempt at naturalizing Germanness by ascribing the artificial and deterritorializing aspects of any language to the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "The Prelude," by William Wordsworth, focusing on the section "Cambridge and the Alps" in Book 6 of the poem. It examines the role of the poem in determining biographical information about Wordsworth from the summer of 1790, when he and friend Robert Jones traveled in Europe and the Alps. The author discusses the poem in light of cartography and a letter written from Wordsworth to his sister during the European tour.

A critique is presented of African American poems such as "For Malcolm, A Year After" by Etheridge Knight, "Ballad of the Landlord" by Langston Hughes, and "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" by Gwendolyn Brooks. The influence of blues music on poetry, the poems' stanzas, and the social conditions of African American poets are discussed.

The article critiques the poetry of American poet Adrienne Rich. It addresses changes in the tone and temper of Rich's feminism, the poet's mode of seeing and saying, and strategies for rescuing language from the oppressors' structures of meaning. Poems include "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," "Yom Kippur 1984," and "Transcendental Etude."

A critique is presented of poems such as "Planetarium," "The Demon Lover," and "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" by Adrienne Rich, which allude to the Vietnam War and Rich's understanding of feminism. Rich's involvement in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s is discussed, as well as her belief in pacifism.

This paper analyses in Warsan Shire's poem Home why refugees have to leave their home. In so doing, it first explores the root causes behind particularly the displacement of Somalians, which becomes an inspiration for the poem and also argues that these causes may actually be similar ones which could be seen one way or another behind any act of the displacement anywhere across the world. Secondly, the paper responds to the criticisms which accuse refugees of leaving at once their home when they face any difficulties in life. In this sense, the poem becomes the voice of "refugees" and tells the world that "refugees" will not take all the risks in very dangerous and difficult journeys without any reasonable causes. As the paper discusses, what is also equally important is that "refugees," though exposed to very hard conditions of living during the journey and in the host country, are also labelled as "Other," which immediately brings about a negative condition, in which they are humiliated, discriminated and categorised as "us" and "them, making it difficult for refugees to integrate and eventually belong to the indigenous society. Finally, the paper debates that it is not the guilt of refugees who leave their home but the ones who create intolerable causes for their displacement from their home. The paper suggests that we are all responsible - United Nations, politicians, world leaders, writers, intellectuals, and academics and so on all over the world - not only for revealing the root causes behind the displacement of people from their home but also for annihilating them all together for a humanely world and living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horace's Ode 1.12 is commonly thought to be alluding to the wedding between Augustus' nephew C. Claudius Marcellus and Augustus' daughter Julia in 25 b.c.e. but there are equally good poetic reasons for reading the poem instead as alluding to the young Marcellus' demise in the last quarter of 23 b.c.e. and to see it in direct dialogue with the epicedia for Marcellus composed by Virgil and Propertius. The present paper reviews the evidence for either dating and proposes that the poem actively resists and at the same time engenders historicist interpretations by virtue of lyric's ability to create its own historical temporalities. As a poem touching upon the thorny issue of the acceptability of imperial succession in a period when Augustus' life was in danger, Ode 1.12 can be read as actively engaged in a hermeneutic "conspiratorial" game with its readers, prompting them to question or imagine allusions to contemporary events at a time of utmost political instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new interpretation of the "sufferings of Daphnis" as they are sung by the shepherd Thyrsis in Theocritus' first Idyll. While the common view is that Daphnis' wasting was caused by a stubborn commitment to fidelity or to chastity, this paper argues that it is rather a symptom of his sexual impairment. The argument rests on two main elements: the connections between Daphnis and other figures acting as Aphrodite's consorts, and the presence of lexical clues pointing to the sexual character of the cowherd's illness. Finally, I argue that Theocritus' enigmatic account of Daphnis' fate in the first Idyll is consistent with the pervading metapoetic discourse of the poem: impotence serves to highlight Daphnis' fecundity as the founder of bucolic song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Onion Skin" by Robert Lowell' which was first published in "Notebook 1967-68" in which the material qualities of the paper Lowell was using to draft it, his sensory experience of the typed text and the multiple versions of the poem became a subject of his poetic inquiry.

For the first time Emil Bønnelycke's Asfaltens Sange (1918) is examined in the context of Marc Augé's theory of places and non-places in this paper. The analysis of Asfaltens Sange focuses on the implicit presence of places and non-places. Reading Bønnelycke in content of Augé opens up for a new research position; it elucidates his position to 'supermodernity'. Places and non-places are palimpsests in Bønnelycke's text about Copenhagen's urbanity. The main subject in Asfaltens Sange is the walk in Copenhagen. The big city is considered a space of formation that should be 'read' to disclose its anthropological status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three ancient poets—Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus—provide neglected evidence for Greek wedding poems composed in hexameters. Theocritus, Idyll 18 and Catullus in Carmen 62 are usually thought to reflect Greek wedding songs originally sung in lyric or choral meters; but why did Sappho, herself a lyric poet extraordinaire, compose some of her wedding poems in hexameters, a meter that she hardly uses elsewhere? This paper suggests that the Greeks traditionally performed at least one kind of wedding poem in dactylic hexameters. This in turn leaves open the possibility that when Theocritus and Catullus use hexameters in their wedding poems, they, too, are imitating the content and the form of this neglected genre. This is a circular argument of sorts, but one familiar to scholars seeking to make sense of the earliest fragments of ancient Greek poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on aphasic poetry by Chris Ireland, exploring how her poems create an aesthetic equality that challenges communicative hierarchies between aphasic patients and their surroundings. The paper delves into the pathological, poetical, and sociocultural implications of aphasic depictions of sounds caused by both society and aphasia, highlighting the potentials and perils of poetic approaches to language impairment.

Christopher Okigbo conveyed in his poetry the sense of patriotism and personal anguish at the monstrosity of a benighted nation. Some critics have argued that Okigbo was not only obsessive in his depictions of metaphors that incarnated the recurring trope of death, but also embodied a death wish culminating in his death in the Nigeria-Biafra war. They further argue that he embodied a suicidal impulse that motivated his general conduct and death in that battle. Unfortunately, only a handful of scholars have sought to contest this view and to illuminate Okigbo's self-immolation in the name of a higher duty. To be sure, suicide and martyrdom may go beyond the question of dying to the problem of laying one's death dramatically at someone else's door. Following Kant's theory of the ethical act, this paper undertakes a critical intervention that reappraises some of Okigbo's poetry as well as documented accounts of his life in order to identify him appropriately: is he a genuine martyr or a mere suicide who presides ritually over his own dismemberment, or both? Examining lines of his poetry that have been misread as embodying his 'haunting' death-wish, on the one hand, and evidence of his self-giving impulse, on the other, the paper seeks to articulate how Okigbo as a tragic poet transcends his destiny by submitting to it--victor and victim at once. In its conclusion, the paper reconciles Okigbo's will to heroic action with the symbolic meaning that is locked in his poetry in order to justify his ascension to the rank of martyr. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the papers `Agarain Reform and Official Development Assistance in the Philippines, Four Papers,' by J. Putzel, A. Quisumbing, F. Lara and W. Armstrong.

Presents a list of documents, bibliographies and other books related to world history that appeared in April 1985 issue of 'The American Hisorical Review.' 'L'Esclavage dans le monde grec: Recueil de textes grecs et latins,' edited by Yvon Garlan; Byzantium: Church, Society, and Civilization Seen Through Contemporary Eyes,' by Deno John Geanakoplos; 'King's Inns Admission Papers, 1607-1867,' edited by Edward Keane et al.

In the mid-1920s the poet W. B. Yeats was pleased to discover contemporary philosophers, Giovanni Gentile and A. N. Whitehead, whose metaphysical and educational philosophies seemed to coincide with his own commitments. Whitehead shares with Gentile a sense of reality as activity and an understanding of knowledge as constructed from abstractions that are open to evaluation and imaginative reconfiguration. Yeats was a Senator of the Irish Free State and took an interest in schooling. Soon after visiting a Montessori-inspired girls' school in Waterford, he began his poem 'Among School Children". (The text of the poem is printed at the end of this paper.) I argue that an awareness of the philosophical ideas Yeats had recently encountered should encourage restless rather than fixed interpretations of the poem and that this sense of restlessness and imaginative reconfiguration reflects the approach to education the three writers, at that time, shared: that at best our modes of apprehension provide only glimpses of reality and therefore each child's understanding and learning must be kept moving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze Octavio Paz's theoretical and political thought vis-à-vis his view of the poet as a member of an exclusive brotherhood. By tracing the displacement of Paz's thought from philosophical discourse toward literary language and poetic expression, I establish how (in opposition to Hegel's dialectic) Paz defined poetry and the poetic experience as superior forms of knowledge that could serve as the foundation for a poets' brotherhood, as well as being the ideal cognitive instruments with which to think about the origin of community at large and to develop a subversive critique of it. I trace Paz's evolving view of the decline of both the poets' brotherhood and the subversive power of poetry during the twentieth century, as he grappled with the profound transformations in language and communications provoked by the development of technology. I examine this transition in his thinking, which occurred between the first and second editions of El arco y la lira, to discuss the trajectory that guided him to the position that he assumed as an intellectual when he finally returned to Mexico in 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together the poetry of authors T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and César Vallejo (1892-1938), comparing and contrasting their perceptions of time as simultaneity, following the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Simultaneity is for both poets a way of reconnecting with the past, and making the present a more endurable experience. This paper looks specifically at Vallejo's 'A mi hermano Miguel', Trilce VI, LXI, LXIV, LXV and 'Fue domingo en las claras orejas de mi burro . . . ', and at Eliot's 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar', The Waste Land and Four Quartets ('Burnt Norton', 'The Dry Salvages'), arguing how it is possible to discern in both authors a use of time which is a union of past, present and future, allowing both Vallejo and Eliot to reconnect with a past irremediably lost and perpetually sought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has as its main concern a reexamination of Stephen Gray's 1977 poem "Hottentot Venus" in the light of two events that occurred after the poem's publication: first, the return of the remains of Sara Baartman (Gray's Hottentot Venus) to South Africa and their ceremonial burial; second, the publication of a biography of Baartman by Clifford Crais and Pamela Scully, a work that has much to say on the production of knowledge and the uses made of this. The paper compares Gray's poem with a poem on Baartman by Diana Ferrus and with Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, focusing on the attribution of agency or its absence. This discussion leads into an examination of the ethics of representation (especially the representation of the Other and of suffering), surveying, first, historical studies of the representation of Khoekhoe, Bushmen, and other marginalized peoples of southern Africa, then novels that attempt such representation or that problematize this by Dalene Matthee, Yvette Christianse, and Zoe Wicomb, and addressing views on the ethics of representation by, among others, Antjie Krog, Susan Sontag, and Alice Walker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1187, Zhu Xi (1130-1200) wrote ten poems called "Wuyi Boating Song," which imitated the local boating songs, and described the scenery of the Wuyi Mountains as seen from a boating trip on the Jiuqu River. Li Huang (Tuixi, 1501-1570), a Korean Conflician scholar in the Joseon dynasty, in 1547 compiled tread rhyme poetry of Zhu Xi's "Wuyi Boating Song" and made a final edition twelve years after. This paper aims to interpret the meaning of Zhu Xi's "Wuyi Boating Song" and the reasons underlying changes made in Li Huang9 s version. From the further discussion of Joseon dynasty scholars regarding the poem, Li Huang's points of view shown in his version of "Wuyi Boating Song" are not well accepted. This paper indicates that Zhu Xi was trying to express the idea of shanshui youguan (wandering in a landscape), which, according to Korean Confucians, inculcated the metaphor of shanshui qiudao (pursuing truth). The main reason Li Huang' s interpretation was different from those of other Korean scholars is based on the argument of "The Ninth Bend of Wuyi" poem, about whether it is the ultimate of the pursuit of "truth." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of the paper is to demonstrate the presence of Easter Island's history in Neruda's writing, mainly in The separate Rose (1972). I propose that in order to read these poems it is necessary to connect them with historic events and characters, because through those connections new readings -until now absent from nerudian criticism-may be born. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As they depart the Garden of Eden at the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve must “choose their place of rest” in the world. Most scholarly treatments of this “rest” place it in the eschatological context of Hebrews 4. Our paper highlights the neglected worldly significance of rest in Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve come to understand rest in relation to work, speech, understanding, eating, and sexual expression, both before the fall and after. Our article enables readers to identify with “our first parents” in seeking a “place of rest” in this world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since his translation of Aeschylus's Oresteia, produced at the National Theatre in 1981, Tony Harrison has been closely associated with ancient Greek literature, especially that of the dramatic poets. And while his work since the 1980s has often drawn on fifth-century BC Athenian drama, his training as a Classicist is steeped in Latin poetry, particularly that of Virgil. Little has been written, however, about the place of Virgil or Latin poetry more broadly, in Harrison's poetic imagination. This is largely because of the relative paucity of works by Harrison which explicitly engage with Latin poetry. This paper will argue, however, that there is as much to learn from the absence of explicit engagement as there is to learn from the works that do engage with the Latin poetic tradition, particularly when it comes to the influence of Virgil's Aeneid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I apply current ecologically centred methodologies in the humanities to explore the familiar image of the bird-soul in The Seafarer in close relation to the real seabirds that are one of the most striking aspects of the maritime environment of the poem. Far from appearing as mere background incidentals, the poet's treatment of the seabirds we first encounter resonates with contemporary ornithological knowledge, and suggests that they feature specifically as species that best convey the ascetic trials and endeavours of the sea-going speaker who observes, listens to and names seabirds. The curious essence of seabirds as creatures that are always at home on the seas, and yet journeying to a home elsewhere, establishes them as what I term "native foreigners", a paradox that highlights the seafarer's conflicting yearnings and reflects the difficult earthly/celestial dynamic in the poem's perceptions of the soul's journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figurative pointing and painting in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's poetry create unique intersections of voice, person and gender whence lyric in the neuter or third person may speak. This paper follows her use of deixis (from the epideictic tradition), the gesture of pointing at and describing a person or an object, as a way to trace her subjectivity to the point of origin for the invective or praise, while exploring her navigation of the third and first persons within that tradition. Though the lyric traditionally operates on the first-person/ second-person dialectic, Sor Juana's productive use of the epideictic in her lyric poems opens a space for the neuter, or ternary logic, in a genre dominated by male subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Taiwanese woman poet Ye Hong 葉紅's poems about death, attempting to articulate her perspective on death and what it means in her poetry. Based on her poetry linking psychiatric treatment with death writing, this paper further explains how the poet employs the imagery of death and poetry writing as an escape from life crisis. In the case of Ye Hong, literature as psychiatric treatment did serve to soothe her melancholia and prevent her from losing her capability of speaking. At the same time, she also attempted to save herself by writing about death, that is, by sublimating the death drive by incessantly refashioning the signs of death in her poems. Ye’s death, however, indicates the impossibility of redemption through writing: poetry can never be a substitute for medical treatment. Nevertheless, considering the eternal value of literary work, we may conclude that literature is Ye’s afterlife, through which readers can overcome her physical death by returning again and again to her narrative of death before she died. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines foreignness in Mohja Kahfs poetry volume, E-mails from Scheherazad (2003), as a celebratory commodity rather than a literary trope to resist Arab women representations or to accentuate exilic voices. Drawing on Julie Kristeva's conceptualization of foreignness as internal personae and not a projection of an external locus of identity, this paper explores how the speakers in some of Kahfs poems view foreignness as festive rather than negative. In sharp contrast to the traditional conception of difference as publicly alienating, foreignness to the Arab-American speakers becomes a distinctive mark that they uphold and celebrate. Examining foreignness in Kahfs poems through Kristeva's lens provides a sense of uniqueness to the immigrant's experience. The notion of recognizing the foreigner in ourselves, that Kristeva provides, subverts the general perception of foreignness as external and intruding. Kahfs poetry can be perceived as a negotiation of foreignness, which is not an estranging element that incurs resistance but rather as a celebratory part of the human consciousness that should be jubilantly defined rather than politically defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I looked at the call for papers, “Poetic responses to Orlando” and paused. Should I contribute? And then I thought, how could I hide in the safety of my so-called normality and straightness when others may have become afraid to dance? So I invited my friends to join me in a poetic response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses one of the less commonly studied aspects of the poetics of César Aira: exoticism, which in Aira stems from the unstable and paradoxical place proper of a post-modern writer from the Rio de la Plata facing traditional (and European) representations of exoticism in a period of cultural globalisation. The paper examines such a paradox and concludes that Aira's exoticism is manifest in the ethnographic simulation and in certain thoughts on the de-familiarisation of the mother tongue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the presence of Fray Luis de León in the literary and critical work of Antonio Colinas. In addition to the lyrical homages dedicated to the Augustinian friar in Noche más allá de la noche, Tiempo y abismo, and Canciones para una música silente, Antonio Colinas, an excellent essayist, interprets Fray Luis in the light (mystical, lato sensu) of reasoned music, a wise symbol of poetic art, inspired reason and harmony between word and world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a poem written by Anne Carson in 1999 in response to a drawing by artist Betty Goodwin titled Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988). The critical issue both artist and poet explore is interrogation. For Goodwin, interrogation relates to the history of torture, forced disappearances and other state-perpetuated atrocities. Torture is not an overt theme in Carson's poem but it remains central to the poem's broader exploration of the meanings of interrogation as a mode by which Western culture has sought knowledge, truth, and certainty, which have as their stakes the objectification of others. Arguing that the poem retrieves a connection between the notion of truth (alethêia) and the ancient Greek practice of basanos — or truth by torture — the paper explores the formal strategies the poem uses to challenge the legacy of rationalist epistemology. Like Goodwin, Carson evokes and then refuses the grid-like structures of containment of syntax and sense. She also refuses to subject her words' visual other to an interrogation by refusing to picture the picture; she will not frame, name, or make the image speak. Referring to the writings of Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze praises the capacity of art to offer "a new image of thought."1 This paper shows how, in refusing representation as its central operational mode, the poem reaches "to the edge of the thinkable" to demonstrate art's capacity to offer its own uncertain form of thinking that, in its dynamism, provisionality, and conditionality, brings into being "that which does not yet exist."2 In so doing, Carson's poem draws on and draws out interrelationships that heal the subject–object split Goodwin's art evokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to determine the place of Alvaro Mutis's poetry in the general landscape of Colombian poetic movements. I begin with an overview of the poetic generation in the first half of the 20th century in order to identify the legacies that have had the most significant impact on his poetry. Special emphasis is made on the contrast between Mutis's innovative poetic language and his conservative political views as the main characteristic of his insularity in Colombian literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term posthumanism does not come readily to mind in discussions of the modernist writer T.S. Eliot, but the present article argues that applying a posthumanist lens to readings of Eliot might offer up new ways of approaching his work. Critiques of humanism, the de-centering of the human, the notion of the subject as an empty center, and the re-configuration of consciousness are thematic axes where posthumanism and Eliot's Four Quartets can be seen to converge. These convergences show how Eliot might be considered as anticipating certain aspects of posthumanist thought. This paper argues that these posthumanist strategies serve the broader scope of Eliot's project in Four Quartets, by pointing the way toward the creation of a morally and socially responsible consciousness. It is this consciousness, envisioned by Eliot in response to the devastations of war and social unrest, that, I argue, could be applied to addressing the social upheavals of our own present-day global society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proceeding from the Latin mottoes for the Great Seal of the United States, this paper explores the use and repercussions of eschatological themes in Virgil's poetry. A hitherto unnoticed datum in the history of the Great Seal's final design exemplifies how comparatively recent readings of the myth of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl could inform our understanding of how the same myth was conceived in the Augustan Age. The discussion revolves around topics such as ekphrasis, the conflation of memoir and myth, and the eschatological significance of spatial and temporal transmission. The final part of the paper introduces some new thoughts concerning the ludi tarentini and the centennial life span. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the image of the maternal in Hayyim Nahman Bialik's poetry and short prose. Contrary to most prior critical evaluations, which have viewed the autobiographical or symbolic mother in Bialik's works as a monolithic representation of misery, helplessness, and self-sacrifice, this paper emphasizes the mother's portrayal as a feared, loathed, and highly ambivalent object of identification vis-à-vis the emergence of the romantic Hebrew male poet. In a reading that spans from Bialik's early lyric poetry to his mature epic "Yatmut" (Orphanhood), the author traces the development of the mother image over the course of the poet's adult life and compares it to maternal images in the works of other romantic poets (William Wordsworth, for example). She also draws parallels between the ambivalent knot through which the poet is bound to his mother, and a similar ambivalent knot that cements the bond between national poet and his "people." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Exeter Book poem, “The Wonder of Creation”, named in the standard edition “The Order of the World”, is at the centre of the paper. It is a much-neglected Old English poem, yet interesting intellectually, and often difficult. Vanity is important in it, idle lustas “vain desires”, are central to it. There is more in it than the negative teaching that all life is vanity, for there is hope of a better realm. The temptation of Vainglory, the seventh Capital Sin, worthless glory, is a theme in Old English homiletic literature: the wish for false joys is a vanity. That is a theme in Cynewulf's poetry and in the prose of the Blickling Homilies. That a life of prayer and fasting enables man to fight the devil is a serious homiletic message. Our First Parents experienced unprofitable desires. Original Sin is mentioned in this paper, but not every healthy, hearty meal shares in that fundamental theological concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how Arun Kolatkar’s 1976 Commonwealth Prize winning sequence Jejuri constitutes a challenge to the interpretation of postcolonial poetry. In particular, it is concerned with examining the interpretive demands Jejuri makes of its readers, arguing that its microcosmic spatial and temporal composition requires the reader to dispense with his or her own sense of exteriority to, or distance from, the text. At the same time, Kolatkar’s use of cross-cultural and trans-historical imagery situates Jejuri within a macrocosmic, global network that implicitly compels the reader to adopt an interpretive position undetermined by national or cultural preconceptions. Jejuri is thus a sequence that prompts specialist postcolonial readers to question the set of methodological practices they work within. Moreover, the interpretive demands made of the reader confirm the ethical imperative of the act of reading more generally, requiring the non-specialist audience to also abandon preconceptions about the meaning of the sequence. This paper draws on Edward Said’s notion of worldliness in order to suggest that Kolatkar’s sequence requires a particular kind of critical response: one that is attentive to the historical and cultural specificities of the text, and yet one that is able to acknowledge the wider political implications of reading the poems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]