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Recently, multiple collaborative initiatives have been established which all aim to incorporate and enhance the representation of multilingualism into discussions on the otherwise largely English-dominated “field” of digital humanities. Taking sensitivity to multilingualism as an overarching concept, the present paper introduces and analyzes some recent, and ongoing, collaborative initiatives (mainly with a starting point in Europe) to show how these projects conceptualize, handle, and strive to strengthen language diversity in DH. More specifically, the examples featured in the article include preliminary insights from the Disrupting Digital Knowledge Infrastructures collective, lessons from my pilot graduate course (Digital Humanities and East Asian Studies: Theory and Practice), as well as the role and significance of the DARIAH-EU supported OpenMethods platform. Ultimately, the paper, which also features interviews with Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra and Cosima Wagner from two of the abovementioned initiatives, argues for the importance of language sensitivity in research, teaching, and knowledge dissemination to create a more inclusive, and collaborative, basis toward multilingualism in DH.

This paper reflects on some of the findings from a Horizon 2020 research project, Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (UNREST, Horizon 2020, funded 2016–2019, http://www.unrest.eu/), which aimed to test and apply an agonistic mode of remembering in different settings. The analysis focuses on the potential advantages of promoting agonistic representations of past conflicts in museums through the adoption of ‘radical multiperspectivism’, as opposed to the ‘consensual multiperspectivism’ informing most contemporary exhibitions and displays. The paper argues that such an approach, which foregrounds socio-political passions by drawing on both artistic interventions and contrasting narratives, can deepen visitors’ understanding of violent conflicts and help counter the growing shift towards antagonistic memory, by turning enemies into adversaries.

This paper explores two peripheral Northern Italian dialects (NIDs), namely Lamonat and Frignanese, with respect to their genealogical linguistic classification. The two NIDs exhibit morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic features that do not fall neatly into the Gallo-Italic sub-classification of Northern Italo-Romance, but resemble some of the core characteristics of the putative Rhaeto-Romance language family. This analysis of Lamonat and Frignanese reveals that their conservative traits more closely relate to Rhaeto-Romance. The synchronic evidence from the two peripheral NIDs hence supports the argument against the unity and autonomy of Rhaeto-Romance as a language family, whereby the linguistic traits that distinguish Rhaeto-Romance within Northern Italo-Romance consist of shared retentions rather than shared innovations, which were once common to virtually all NIDs. In this light, Rhaeto-Romance can be regarded as an array of conservative Gallo-Italic varieties. The paper concludes with a discussion of the geo-sociolinguistic properties of the two peripheral dialect areas under investigation that lead to a conservative linguistic behaviour within the Lamonat and Frignanese speech communities. Given the relatively similar historical and geo-political background of these speech communities, we attempt the formulation of a geo-sociolinguistic model of linguistic innovation diffusion that captures the conservative behaviour of Lamonat and Frignanese. We propose that those dialect areas that, in Bartoli’s (1945) geo-spatial linguistic typology, are both “lateral” and “isolated” deflect linguistic innovations. This proposal must be interpreted within a more general “gravity” and “wave” sociolinguistic model of diffusion of linguistic innovations, whereby “lateral” and “isolated” dialect areas give rise to a mechanism that we call “the pond rock effect” and that renders such dialect areas resistant to language change.

Variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, World Literature has in the last two decades become a central subject in literary studies. The current debate around World Literature is certainly central to the present and the future of the discipline of Comparative Literature. At the same time, as I show in this paper, a redefinition of World Literature, which would include a deeper understanding of both its risks and its potential benefits, can push us towards a revision of the canon(s) of our national literary traditions. Moving from Tim Park’s assertion that the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s “dull global novel” would contribute to obscuring more deserving authors – among whom he cites Natalia Ginzburg – this paper argues that Ferrante’s literary success could, on the contrary, pave the way for a rediscovery of past writers within the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparison of Ferrante’s L’Amica Geniale and Ginzburg’s La Strada che Va in Città, the article shows how both works are, in Pheng Cheah’s terms, “literature that worlds and makes a world”, insofar as they foreground a world that is open and unstable, crucially caught between tradition and modernity, as well as the local and the global. Ultimately, both works call for a conception of World Literature that does not need to imply the loss of the local, but that can rather promote what Florian Mussgnug calls “responsible and responsive local sensitivity”.

In December 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kul’turnoi politiki (Fundamentals of State Cultural Policy), which emphasizes the preservation of and promotion of Russian culture as essential for a unified and powerful country. A key means for implementing the Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kul’turnoi politiki appears in the efforts to construct a new history curriculum designed to correct alleged historical distortions and to produce a unified historical narrative. Selected textbooks from the publisher Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) serve as the sources used to investigate this construction of a standard historical account. In particular, this paper will stress that the use of specific words or phrases as well as the very similar recounting of historical events across different class levels (aged 15–17) reveals the development of a single historical narrative for major occurrences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the events chosen are ones that have caused particular concern to Russian leaders, including Russia’s actions in the First World War; the conclusion of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; the initial days of the Great Patriotic War; the growth of communism in Eastern Europe; and the recent incorporation of the Crimean Peninsula into the Russian Federation. Ultimately, this paper will argue that an approved historical narrative aims to form patriotic students, the New Russian Citizens, who have immense pride in their heritage and who consequently will develop unwavering support for a strong Russia on the global stage.

Postposition of the subject has been widely explored in the French language but only rarely in relation to the oral medium. It is strongly associated with written discourse of a more formal variety. Through an analysis of a corpus of oral narratives, this paper analyses postposition of the subject in contemporary French syntax and its relationship to questions of medium, register and genre. The paper explores the extent to which postposition occurs in the oral medium, incorporating findings from conversational narratives, traditional stories and contemporary storytelling. It analyses the typology of the most frequent types of example, the reasons why these types of postposition might occur in the discourse in question, and the extent to which questions of medium, register and genre play a role. The paper also discusses the implications for the future of this structure in oral varieties of French.

During the second half of the twentieth-century, Mexican fictions operated under a revisionist historical logic that employed national spaces to allegorize the relationship between the individual, society and the nation. Countering this trend, since the mid-nineties, Mexican literature has witnessed a departure from an interest in collectivizing discourses of identity, displaying instead a growing faith in individualism as a means to resist state-driven cultural visions. To analyze this emphasis in individual personal emergence, this paper proposes a comparative reading of subject-formation in Álvaro Enrigue's Vidas perpendiculares (2008), and in José Emilio Pacheco’s canonical novella Las batallas en el desierto (1981). The publication of Vidas and Las batallas coincides with two moments of crisis and transformation in Mexico. Consequently, these novels of formation reflect the reconceptualization of the multiple relations between individuals, communities, and the state prompted by such changes. These coming-of-age fictions use the personal recollections of their protagonists to articulate the narration of their characters’ emergence into adulthood. Vidas and Las batallas present two highly divergent visions of the subject and her or his relationship to the social body, where in the case of Vidas the individual takes primacy over the community. Following Ulrich Beck’s insights regarding individualization in industrial societies, and informed by theories of memory and nostalgia, this study explores how literary understandings of identity have transformed to reflect the experience of late modernity in Mexico. This paper argues that in recent Mexican fiction history is spatialized as a way of examining individual subjectivity outside the framework that views history in literature as a discourse directly linked to collective, often national, identity.

My paper will examine figure of the Jesuit in nineteenth-century literature, a theme which evolves from my thesis on the image of Catholicism. The nineteenth century is of special interest in conjunction with the study of Russian attitudes to religion since it was a crucial time in the formation of Russian national identity. My paper will begin by outlining who the Jesuits are and what role they play in world history. Then I will briefly summarise the influence of the Jesuits on Russian history and how this may have affected how they were viewed in literature. I will then use some examples from some well-known texts and analyse how the Jesuit appears as a character in Russian plays and novels of this period. Starting with Pushkin’s drama about the Time of Troubles Boris Godunov and comparing this with Khomiakov’s drama, Dmitriii Samozvanets, I will outline how the Jesuit appears as Machiavellian schemer. Next I will discuss the 1840s and 1850s and the Jesuit polemics with Slavophile thinkers. Lastly, I will look at some examples from Dostoevskii’s Idiot and Tolstoi’s Voina i Mir and discuss the portrayal of Jesuits as eloquent speakers who were attempting to convert Russians. I will argue that although Jesuits are often neglected as minor characters in Russian literature, examining this theme can inform us about how Russian national identity was being formulated, and Russian writer’s response to how they felt Russian religious identity was being challenged.

This paper presents a bottom-up approach to building a comprehensive infrastructure for the analysis of user-generated content for several South Slavic languages (Slovene, Croatian, Serbian). The goal of this collaboration was to leverage the available knowhow and language similarity in order to provide language resources and tools for the study of netspeak for all three languages in parallel and with minimal resources. We demonstrate the usefulness of the developed infrastructure for a corpus-based, comparative sociolinguistic investigation of language attitudes by Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian Twitter users, who have witnessed a rapid codification divergence and reinforcement of national languages after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The proposed paper discusses how the relationships between the researchers and the ‘field’ in social sciences have been transformed during the last decades. It explores the concept of the ‘public engagement’, its ethical and conceptual boundaries, and the criteria of its ‘successfulness’ – in relation to the academic research, researchers, and the local communities where the research is conducted.

This paper argues for a place for linguistics within the UK Modern Languages curriculum as part of a more pluralistic approach to languages study. Based on an intervention involving over 300 A-level students of French, German and Spanish, we demonstrate: 1) that it is feasible and appropriate to include linguistics topics on the A-level Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) curriculum; 2) that many of these topics are inherently interesting for A-level language students; and 3) that pupils report increased confidence in their language skills after having been exposed to a short linguistics course (four hours). In light of our further finding that there is already considerable untapped scope for linguistics within the current formal framework of the A-level MFL qualification, we recommend that linguistics topics should be included in MFL A-levels as a matter of priority. This is the case not least because linguistics has the potential to attract new pupils to the study of MFL, while also providing a crucial bridge between language skills and cultural content, which are so often kept apart in existing MFL curricula. Lastly, we argue that the introduction of linguistics into languages teaching raises awareness of the harmfulness of deeply entrenched prescriptive and standard-language-ideological beliefs in schools, and this will lead to a more inclusive discipline.

Paul Creyssel, Vichy’s high-profile Director of Propaganda between 1 April 1942 and 3 March 1943, then Secretary-General for Propaganda until 13 January 1944, is nowadays an all-but-forgotten figure. Found guilty of undermining national morale at his trial in June 1948 after almost four years in detention awaiting judgement, he thereafter faded from public and historical scrutiny. That shift from prominence to obscurity is the focus of this article. It explores the forgotten Creyssel and argues that history’s amnesia on such a major player of the Vichy regime was what he himself wanted to engineer. In particular, the article examines how, at his trial, Creyssel’s defence was an attempt to reimagine his wartime identity and actions in order to downplay the profile of the man in public memory and record. To develop its line of argument, the article analyses Creyssel’s trial papers ― an archive that historians have generally overlooked ― supplemented with reference to his radio broadcasts, which have never previously been comprehensively examined. It identifies specific points that the defence chose to emphasise or understate, or where it was selective with or distorted the truth, and signposts evidence that was disregarded or manipulated in the account given. However, the importance of the case study of Creyssel stretches beyond the individual, for it opens up another version of wartime France and illuminates broader discussions about how collaborators subsequently explained away their activity. Equally, the article sheds light on notions of memory and forgetting in the context of the French experience of the Second World War and beyond, and so connects to discussions on the writing, and ‘righting’, of narratives of the past. In that light, the article also reflects on how the post-Occupation environment and the shifting context of historical writing contributed to the forgetting of Creyssel. A coda discusses the central place of France’s archival holdings for our continuing investigation of Vichy, and reflects on the potential damage caused by recent state-sponsored restrictions on the consultation of such materials.

This article explores interdisciplinary working in Modern Languages, drawing on recent theoretical reflection on interdisciplinarity and in particular on the notions of ‘integration’ and ‘common ground’. It is based on the experience of interdisciplinary working in a large project entitled ‘Multilingualism. Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies’ (MEITS), one of the Open World Research Initiative projects, led by Wendy Ayres-Bennett (Principal Investigator) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. After a discussion of interdisciplinary theory and a brief outline of the project and its research questions, the core of the paper explores the process of interdisciplinary research. This involves consideration of how a large research team, with disciplinary perspectives that range from entirely qualitative to strongly quantitative, can approach core concepts in a way that seeks common ground and attempts to build an integrated response to the project’s overarching research questions. The article includes discussion of challenges and tensions as well as benefits. Tweetable abstract: In a new article on interdisciplinary research in Modern Languages, Janice Carruthers and Linda Fisher use interdisciplinary theory to consider how one OWRI project (MEITS) approached ‘common ground’ and ‘integration’.

The paper explores both ‘official’ historical attempts to counter Lost Cause narratives of the former Confederacy, but also the moves towards re-memorialization in the form of statue removal as well as sites that bring forth what has been lost or excluded in Lost Cause accounts. It thus analyses the post-Reconstruction memorialization of Confederate soldiers via monuments throughout the former Confederacy, on the one hand, and the more recent moves (as seen in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery) to document and commemorate the waves of lynchings which occurred during the same period of time (~1880s–1920s) in many of the same areas of the US South.

Since 1983, following the restoration of democracy, Argentina has stood out for its transnational justice policies: it put the military juntas on trial; its National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons investigated the crimes of the dictatorship and, together with its Never Again report, became a model for numerous subsequent truth commissions; it passed reparation laws for the victims, built memory sites, and its new constitution placed international human rights laws above national legislation. More recently, after taking office in 2015, liberal president Mauricio Macri modified the Supreme Court, which then handed down rulings that introduced key philosophical changes in the way abuses were treated. In that framework, this paper will examine four rulings: the “Muiña ruling,” which released an agent of the dictatorship by commuting his sentence based on a law that holds that each year served without a conviction counts as two and which had been repealed when he was arrested; the “Fontevechia ruling,” which rejected the primacy of international human rights treaties over domestic legislation; the “Alespeiti ruling”, which granted house arrest for health reasons to an agent of the dictatorship; and the “Villamil ruling”, which found that the state’s obligation to repair victims was subject to a statute of limitations. The analysis of these rulings will reveal the instrumental use of human rights by the Court, its countering of the cosmopolitan philosophy behind the country’s transnational justice policies, and its alignment with the Macri administration’s rejection of the particular status of crimes against humanity. These cases reveal that the discussion of the international human rights paradigm goes beyond certain populist governments. It is a broader challenge: what is under discussion is the universal nature of human rights and the status of the international system that protects them.

The Republic of Austria emerged as one of the new states from the rubble of the Habsburg Empire after the First World War. Delegates from German-speaking provinces of the former Empire gathered in Vienna in October 1918 to discuss statehood. Whilst early debates focused on “German Austria” as a nation in its own right, the idea of an “Anschluss” with Germany gained ground, and soon became the prevailing political concept. Nonetheless, the State Treaty of St. Germain (1919) prohibited Austria any political association with Germany, which forced Austrians to discourse about national identity, a struggle that lasted until well after the Second World War and is still ongoing in the Austrian political far-right. Against this backdrop, Austrians embarked on an epic debate about a “national” museum as early as 1919. Recent Austrian history has since seen numerous debates about the appropriate way of visually representing national identity. Contentious issues include(d) inter alia the home-grown Austrian variation of Fascism 1934–1938, involvement in Nazi crimes, the lenient post-war treatment of Nazi perpetrators, issues pertaining to ethnic minorities, and questions of compensation and restitution for victims of National Socialism. Exactly 99 years after the idea of a “History Chamber” surfaced, the first national museum covering contemporary Austrian history opened in November 2018. Regrettably, the debate restarted just a few days ahead of the grand opening at a hastily arranged press conference, in which the Minister of Culture outlined a new concept for the museum. Claudia Leeb (Washington State University) explains these ongoing heated debates about the museum with defense mechanisms pertaining to Austria’s Nazi-past, resulting in the continuing inability of contemporary Austrian society to live up to guilt and to come to terms with its past. One of the major “defense fighters” is the Freedom Party (FPO), a right-wing populist party that briefly joined the Austrian government in 2017–2018 and strictly opposes taking any responsibility for Austria’s Nazi past. This paper addresses Austria’s ‘coming to terms with her past’ in the wake of the rise of populist nationalism and examines the possible future of the Austrian culture of remembrance, particularly with regard to the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Austrian History.

On 1 August 2017 Santiago Maldonado, a young artisan and tattoo artist, vanished in the midst of a crackdown by the national Gendarmerie on a Mapuche community in the south of Argentina. Soon after, his disappearance became a theme of national anguish and debate. While seemingly quite different from forced disappearances carried out during the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) this case has been inscribed in the ongoing debate about the possibilities and implications of coming to terms with the past. In this paper I explore the different social, political and legal processes that followed in the wake of Maldonado’s disappearance. Through the case, I consider the power of human rights discourse in the country as well as the rise and institutionalization of an alternative narrative advanced by the right-leaning political elite. Ultimately, I show that the assumptions underlying transitional justice mechanisms, specifically, the possibility of handling the past to such an extent that it can be “put behind” and “overcome” are flawed.

Much of the contemporary crisis in coming to terms with the past may have digital origins. We can see this crisis as engineered or assembled through a new series of historical actors: memes and posts on social media and, behind them, the work of trolls and paid influencers. These actors do not travel with first-person accounts of events so much as accumulate in the digital ephemera of daily lives and are then archived as the currency of digital capitalism, saved in individual online albums, on smart phones and then republished elsewhere. Their circulation and accumulation can be strategically directed by political actors who seek to overturn established historical consensus. Tracing the trajectory of memes featuring the Philippines’ President Duterte, this paper explores how digital objects have contributed to attempts to rework the history of the Martial Law era.

Commentators have wrongly assumed that the operations and outcomes of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reflected the intentions of the African National Congress (ANC) government that instigated it. In line with its agenda of substantive social history, the ANC intended to establish a new Gramscian ‘common sense’ of anti-colonialism and self-determination to drive anti-apartheid transformation. As part of its additional aim for an institutional intervention, the ANC sought to renovate the inherited technology of the colonial commission of inquiry itself. As the paper shows, these aims were overturned through the superimposition of ‘transitional justice’ within the workings of the TRC and the TRC’s ‘Final Report’. The continuing implications of this abduction are addressed in closing.

This article examines the work of contemporary German-Jewish writer Sasha Marianna Salzmann through the framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minority. Focusing on Salzmann’s debut novel 'Außer Sich', I investigate how the text complicates ideas of familial, national, linguistic and gendered belonging, which results in a fundamental deconstruction of the very concept and possibility of belonging. I argue that the framework provided by Deleuze and Guattari needs to be extended in Salzmann’s case, by bringing it together with Judith Butler’s thoughts on the “ec-static” character of the self and interpersonal relationships. Based on Butler’s notion of ec-stasy, I demonstrate how Salzmann’s text develops an innovative politics and poetics of non-belonging, which connects their writing with a broader “postmigrant” trajectory. Apart from helping us question facile conceptions of belonging, Salzmann’s work thus also enables us to shift our current understanding of the cultural location of German-Jewish writing. Tweetable Abstract: This paper examines minority and ec-stasy in Salzmann’s debut novel 'Außer Sich', staking out these concepts’ innovative politics and poetics of non-belonging.

This article explores the relationship between minor, mainstream and situational positionality in the work of Eva Menasse. Menasse can be categorized as a second-generation Jewish writer, an Austrian writer and a woman writer, and this theme of multiple affiliations or situational positionality lies at the heart of her novels and short stories. The paper will focus on her short story collection 'Tiere für Fortgeschrittene' (2017) to explore the way in which her writing challenges received narratives to move beyond binary and linear concepts of ‘Austrian’ and ‘Jewish’ identity, and indeed of the ‘minor’, towards a more multi-facetted and mobile concept of situational positionality. Tweetable Abstract: Anita Bunyan explores the relationship between minor, mainstream and the more multifaceted and mobile concept of situational ‘Austrian’ and ‘Jewish’ positionality in Eva Menasse’s 'Tiere fuer Fortgeschrittene'.

This position paper argues that the interaction between translation studies, comparative literature and modern languages has not been as productive as imagined by the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies in the 1990s. It is argued that the vocational orientation of translation studies education and the continuing presence of national literary ecologies have limited collaborative developments. The notion of ‘untranslatability’ has not always been productive of a more open exchange and a case is made for an ecological notion of difference and the concept of ‘fecundity’ as a means to move towards the common cause of a terra centric paradigm in modern languages, comparative literature and translation studies.

This paper examines arguably the most challenging of Gabriel García Márquez’s works: his 1975 El otoño del patriarca. I pay particular attention to the role of its circular temporality and constantly shifting narrative voice, examining these closely through the lens of structuralist narratologist Gérard Genette's 1972 Narrative Discourse. In doing so, I elucidate some of the key difficulties of the García Márquez novel, and explain how this difficult narrative mode is essential to the novel's success. With Genette's ideas in mind I show the extent to which El otoño del patriarca is able to escape structuralist conceptions of narrative and convey a story of life under a dictatorship in a way that defies the limits of our language.

Josef Haslinger’s story "Fiona und Ferdinand" (2006) revolves around a disclosed secret in its narrator’s childhood hometown, which implicates two (deceased) village elders in a decades-old rape and murder mystery long blamed on two anonymous “Russian soldiers.” The discovery of two partial skeletons locked in a bedroom trunk awakens the narrator’s memory: years before as a child, he unearthed the same skeletons after first spying a finger bone buried in a stream. The identification of the bones is central in determining the perpetrators of the rape/murder, but no one -- and in particular the narrator’s mother -- seems interested in hearing the testimony of the crime’s lone eyewitness, now an aged woman. Instead, the revelation evokes a collective effort to willfully impede any investigation into the truth, presumably as a means to maintain the town’s dual pretenses of order and respectability. "Fiona und Ferdinand" emphasizes Haslinger’s preoccupation with the Austrian failure to confront its own past, specifically via families as fundamental units of transmission and memory. In this analysis of the text, I explore Haslinger’s treatment of space, time, and memory in several ways. First, I examine how his notion of “officially sanctioned memory” intersects with a landscape that contains past and present alike. Second, I discuss how bodies, either the violated female body or the rotted skeletons Fiona and Ferdinand, are emblems that raise discussions of space, gender, and memory. Last, I consider collective memory and how it enables processes of forgetting. The reluctance to “dig up the past” is thematized in "Fiona und Ferdinand" using devices common throughout Haslinger’s oeuvre, and this paper will analyze the story through the lens of Haslinger-as-archaeologist, exploring how families, and the memories they possess, are both the key to truth and the foil to its revelation.

Since the mid-1990s in Spain, a renewal of interest in the history of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975) has resulted in a surge of cultural and historiographical production related to the subject, as well as instigating a robust debate about how these difficult periods ought to be officially interpreted and commemorated. This so-called memory boom indicates that there is still an unresolved tension in Spanish society, and while there are many who speak in favour of a final reconciliation, the means of best achieving it are so contested that old divisions appear to have been paradoxically widened rather than diminished. The two novels which are treated in the present study Eduardo Mendoza’s Riña de gatos (An Englishman in Madrid; 2010), and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos (The Night of Memories; 2009) make an important literary contribution to the debate, and although they are very different in tone and style, they evidence a mature, considered approach to the issues. Drawing upon the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope (the organisation of space-time in the novel), this paper will contend that the two works, in their different ways, inscribe and subvert the conventions of the classical historical novel in order to challenge historical myths and open up a dialogic space within which the reader can engage critically with the past. This narrative strategy prevents the war from being plotted as an inevitable tragedy, therefore emphasising the argument made by both novels that, contrary to popular belief, the civil war was not simply the result of a radical polarisation between the mythical “two Spains” eternally at war, but of a complex of factors, both national and international.

"The mystery of the appearance of a new being, a great mystery and an inexplicable one", as Shatov describes the birth of his wife's son, is one of the great unanswered questions in Dostoevsky's Demons. A baby boy is born to free-spirited former governess Maria Shatova just hours before her husband is killed by a secret clique of would-be revolutionaries. Shatov's murder and Kirillov's suicide precipitate the new mother's fatal illness and, consequently, the infant's death within three days of entering the world. Legally Shatov's son, biologically Stavrogin's, this nameless baby represents one of several apparently unfinished subplots within Demons. Why produce a child with such complicated origins, only to kill him off? Why transform a universal symbol of hope into banal tragedy? My paper examines the metonymy between the child's brief life and the novel's theme of abortive radicalism, both of which are linked by the figure of the nihilist midwife, Arina Prokhorovna Virginskaia.

The Caucasian spa resort is a significant setting in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. This paper will trace the origins and evolution of Russian fictional writing about watering places like Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk from romanticism until the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time it will consider the semiotic theories of Iurii Lotman’s Tartu-Moscow School and the ‘transtextual’ apparatus of the French narratologist Gérard Genette as ‘toolboxes’ for work on place in narrative.

This paper proposes that the forgotten Earl's Court Spanish Exhibition of 1889 provides a valuable window onto the complex relationship between the British and Spanish Empires at the moment of one's expansion and the other's fragmentation. Part I assesses the limited archival evidence together with media reports from both Spain and Britain to uncover the Exhibition’s origins in London’s Spanish expatriate business community and its takeover by British businessmen with interests in Latin America. Part II reconstructs the Exhibition’s layout and contents in order to explore how the contrasting geocultural logics of Spain’s renewed self-projection as a modern Empire and the longstanding British obsession with Spain’s Islamic past play out in the exhibitionary space and its contents. Part III analyses the rhetorical and imaginative strategies employed in British press coverage of the Exhibition, to argue that their coded representations of Spain and Spanish culture open the door to understanding the Exhibition in the context of Spain’s partial absorption into Britain’s nineteenth-century ‘informal empire.’