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The article explores the connection between Marlowe's "Faustus," the Horse-Courser, and werewolves, delving into the folkloric origins of the story and its possible interpretations. It discusses how Faustus tricks a horse-courser into buying a horse that turns into straw when it crosses water, drawing parallels to werewolf transformation tales. The text also examines the broader legend of transformation and shape-shifting, linking it to ancient beliefs and anxieties about alchemy and magic. The article suggests that Faustus's failure to transform himself into a Renaissance man reflects the play's themes of conflicting religious and secular views on transformation and knowledge. [Extracted from the article]

One of the earliest refutations of the Visum et Repertum (1732) by Johann Flückinger was from Johann Wilhelm Nöbling, a young student of philosophy and theology at the University of Jena, who attacked the findings from a position of scientific scepticism enshrouded with Lutheran theology in his thesis Concerning the Blood-Sucking Corpses of those so-called Vampires or People-Suckers. While he is best remembered for first proposing the incubus or nightmare of sleep paralysis as being the real cause of the superstition, his major contribution was theological, concerning the relation between body and soul. And yet while Nöbling provides a rigorous, scripture-based denial of vampirism, his framework necessarily accommodates contemporary medical theory, demonstrating both the adaptation of theology to science and the extent to which pneumatology still inhered in scientific enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article consists of an introduction by the first author, an annotated translation by the second, and then an analysis by the first, of the earliest known Scandinavian response to the Vampire phenomenon of Medvedia in 1732 by Nicolaus Boye, a state-employed physician residing in Stockholm. The translation shows that Boye's own article, which constitutes a complete refutation of Johann Flückinger's claims, was meticulously organised, abstracting and arguing against the major themes which he observed in the Visum et Repertum, while the analysis shows that Boye was working under the topical medical theories of the Dutch botanist and physician Herman Boerhaave. The analysis also demonstrates the extent to which Boye's rationalism in refuting the Visum at Repertum is informed by his Lutheranism and belief in the Day of Judgement, and concludes by showing examples of the impact his work exerted on other academics in the 1730s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the first author provides a summary and translation from the Latin of an important early medical lecture on vampires by Nils Retzius. The lecture was delivered in Sweden, at Lund University, in 1737, and was published almost immediately thereafter. This important text has been overlooked by modern scholars of vampires. This article will bring the lecture back into circulation in its first English translation. The second author then offers an analysis of the intellectual background to this rational debunking of vampires. He demonstrates how Retzius's attempt at a comprehensive rational explanation for vampires, typical of much Enlightenment thinking, nevertheless employs a fusion of Galenic medical thinking with more modern medical and psychosomatic notions of medicine, as well as certain Lutheran notions concerning the devil and the spirit world. His argument scotches the belief in the idea of sympathetic magic affecting the dreams of the living, while emphasising the psychosomatic effects of the imagination on the physical body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the literary motif in the works of authors William Shakespeare, Longus, Samuel Richardson and Harriet Jacobs. They include Longus' "Daphnis and Chloe," Shakespeare's play "Othello," Richardson's novel "Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded," and Jacob's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." It also discusses Henry Fielding's 1741 parody of Richardson, "An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews."

This paper investigates how African nations have portrayed the COVID-19 pandemic in their postage stamps. After an introduction, a timeline offering short descriptions of global editions of this theme from its inception until March 2021 will be established. The timeline will consider most issues to the above date, with the caveat that additional examples might still be found, and that more will no doubt be produced after the publication of this paper, as the pandemic persists. Major design types will then be determined based on the preceding information. Then various publications related to Africa will be discussed. These primarily concern the so-called 'Stamperijia' issues, produced in Lithuania, and then bogus stamps produced in the name of various African countries. Apart from the 'Stamperijia' and similar issues, it is noted that only two African nations have produced a COVID-19-themed stamp on the continent itself up to 20 March 2021. The implications of this will be discussed in the conclusion, with suggestions for future action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Makhanda ka Nxele has finally received official recognition by the South African government as a national hero. While recent historical research has made great contributions to our knowledge of Makhanda as an historical figure, surprisingly little attention has been paid, except in the case of Thomas Pringle's poem 'Makanna's Gathering,' to other representations of the man in English literature. This article attempts to fill this gap by comparing four substantial texts on Makanna, starting with Pringle's poem, and followed by an anonymous novel of 1834, Makanna, Or, The Land of the Savage, Bronze Napoleon, a novel by M. Norbert Morgan (1940), and a slightly later poem by John Cargill Rae, 'Makanna and The Battle of Grahamstown.' Makhanda has been depicted in the historical record in a range of guises, from that of a heroic freedom fighter to a very demon. Whether he is praised or vilified, it is hard to deny that Makhanda is a man who emerged from a complex contact zone and used his knowledge of both European and amaXhosa culture to unite the majority of his own people and make a substantial mark on history. This article will investigate how the four authors have situated the character 'Makanna' within this dynamic, and then question how literary depictions of Makhanda might function in either negative or positive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two years after the publication of Mungo Park’sTravels in the Interior of Africa(1799), the claim by a German cabinet maker/joiner, Christian Friedrich Damberger, to have crossed the African continent on foot over a period of 16 years, from the Cape of Good Hope to Morocco, made for an instant bestseller. After the narrative was unmasked as a hoax, however, critical reception was particularly vitriolic in Britain. This article analyses the reviews in order to determine why the hoax caused such outrage. It emerges that this narrative presents a direct challenge to Banksian notions of travel writing. Furthermore, its portrayal of Africa and its peoples tends to subvert contemporary attitudes concerning inter-racial relationships, the idea of ‘going native’, and, importantly, the slave trade. The article then asks what type of truth the narrative might be generating, if not a strictly factual one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on physiognomy in the European novel, Graeme Tytler denoting intensity of nature, temper, fire, spirit, enthusiasm, and magnetism.

This essay accepts that discourses (in the Foucauldian sense) shape what we know and can know about the world, but this process is extraordinarily complex. The 1840s can be viewed as a time of particularly significant ideological shifts in imperial and colonial attitudes towards China. Critics have often highlighted a transition in colonial representations of China from Romantic 'Orientalism', which tends to exoticise alterity as distant or alien from the observing self, to the later Victorian imperial gaze (so well described in Pratt's Imperial Eyes), which tends to 'incorporate, in an ethnographic gesture, otherness in a framework of familiarity and sameness' (Kuehn, 79). The essay does not view this general trend as a strictly linear process, however, and contends that a range of approaches to alterity were available to, and often employed by, Anglo-American writers of the time. With the above in mind, I investigate the way in which various competing nineteenth-century tropes interact with Quaker ideology to mould Kinsman's representations of the Chinese in Macao in some of her letters during the mid-1840s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the Journal of Harriett Low, a substantial section of which was written in the Cape from 12 January 1834 to 4 May 1834. A brief summary of the Journal's main preoccupations is given, and then Low's presentation of Cape fauna and flora and landscape, the Cape Dutch, and slavery, is considered in greater detail. Low's identity as a young American woman who had spent several years in Macao (China) offers a fresh perspective on the Cape in 1834. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kaatje Kekkelbek, or Life among the Hottentots, by Andrew Geddes Bain, continues to be of academic interest for three main reasons: firstly, for its peculiar linguistic composition, secondly, as one of the earliest examples of South African Settler drama, and, thirdly, for its portrayal of the life of so-called 'Hottentots' in the 1830s. Concerning the latter, critical opinion has been divided. This article aims to lay to rest the claims of Michael Chapman and others that Kaatje Kekkelbek is in any way sympathetic to the lot of 'Hottentots', as represented by the eponymous heroine, by attempting to locate the play in the historical context of its production. A further claim is then made that, owing to the form of the drama, Kaatje Kekkelbek is actually a pastiche of a slave narrative, quite possibly The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, which was edited by Thomas Pringle in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes poet Thomas Pringle's images of bushmen in his works. Pringle's attitude toward gypsies; Pringle's understanding of colonial injustice towards natives; Separation of Pringle's work as activist and poet; Themes of Pringle's works on bushmen.

The author presents a criticism of the English poem "Ulysses" by Alfred Lord Tennyson and the novel "Ulysses" by Irish author James Joyce. He mentions the work "Heracles, An Introductory Lecture" by Lucian of Samosata, his idea of a last voyage by the character Odysseus, and the use of this theme by Tennyson and Joyce.

Presents correspondence on literature. Attempts to a critical edition of Mark Rutherford fictions of W. Hale White; Status of Walt Whitman as father of American poetry; Criticisms in the representation of the essay the Other.