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The brief biographical sketch that appears in every anthology of English literature in the past century—including the current edition of the Longman and the Norton—refers to George Herbert’s book of poetry simply as The Temple . When it appeared in print in 1633, however, it was published under the title, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations . This essay posits that the ejaculations of Herbert’s subtitle register an unstable print culture in the seventeenth century, and a more complex reading of Herbert’s poetry, both of which are compromised when editors erase Herbert’s ejaculations, regardless of their intent.

Although once at the center of debates about modern poetry, the canoni? cal status of William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow," along with the imagist and objectivist practice it represents, now seems beyond dispute. If anything, the poem runs the risk of becoming, as Denise Levertov described it, one of those "tiresomely familiar and basically unrevealing anthol? ogy 'specimens'" (263). By the same token, the tendency to treat the poem as an "anthology specimen" owes something to Williams' efforts to remove it from its original context in Spring and All. For despite the intense critical scrutiny the poem has received over the years, very little attention has been paid to what Williams said about it and the different frameworks he provided for it. As if transfixed by its telescopic power, critics see through these frames and, in the process, keep a dark figure in the poems biographical history?Marshall, the red wheelbarrow's African-American owner?at the poem's margins. To my knowledge, Williams only mentions the owner of the wheelbar? row on two occasions. One is in an article, "Seventy Years Deep," written for Holiday magazine (1954) and the other appears in an introduction to the poem in an anthology entitled Fifty Poets, An American Auto-Anthology (1933) edited by William Rose Benet. The article "Seventy Years Deep" is a human-interest story in which Wil? liams presents himself as a poet of the people. The article's subtitle describes him as "A physician who is considered by many to be America's greatest living poet . . . [who] attributes his success to what he has learned from the people of his home town?Rutherford, New Jersey" (54). Stressing his connection to the community, Williams presents himself through what is, for the most

ith this disturbing scene of marital rape occurring in the opening pages of her 1991 novel C h a n g e s , Ama Ata Aidoo introduces her reader to some of the major issues she takes on in the work. Yet in her pre f a t o ry "confession," Aidoo apologizes for having written C h a n g e s , which she claims is "about lovers in Accra." "Because sure l y," she explains, "in our environment there are more important things to write about?" And while the subtitle of Changes is simply "A Love Story," such a description fails to adequately suggest the riches of this recent work by the Ghanaian writer. Other themes Aidoo discusses include working women's double shift, p o l y g y n y, the visibility of single women in urban environments, education, and the lack of significant change in contemporary women's circ u m- stances. An African feminist, Aidoo grounds her discussion of these issues fully in the African context. Thus, whereas We s t e rn feminism tends to focus on working women chafing under the glass ceiling, Aidoo presents us with the more "concrete" reality of African women's limiting factors, an u n a d o rned portrayal of the complex web of frustration making up the e v e ryday lives of contemporary West African women. Among these exacer- bating factors are the traditional social expectations of women's roles as wives and mothers first, with an outside job only if necessary to support the f a m i l y. More o v e r, the traditional division of labor within the household allo- cates the bulk of the chores to women, thus placing extreme time con- straints on working women. Wife-beating, euphemistically re f e rred to as " c o rrection," is still seen as a husband's right, to be exercised should a woman fail to perf o rm to expectations. 2 Most women work because a single income is insufficient to support their household. While their economic contribution to the household is often vital to the well-being of their fami- lies, few women are formally employed, and most work in service industries.

With the capitulation of the apartheid government in the Republic of South Africa in February 1990, inevitably for the Southern African region as a whole would begin a new process of stocktaking in the subcontinent's literature. Here are three fresh works that embark in various ways on this challenging enterprise of redefining the past, find? ing a reformulated future. The drag on the region's progress has been removed, leaving much damage; now we must recover, move forward. The first of these works is the least successful in assessing this new ter? ritory, although the title of Emmanuel Ngara's collection is quite explicit: new writing from Southern Africa. Correcdy speaking, apart from South Africa itself, this includes what used to be called the front-line states of the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference: its neighboring territories of Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho; its "fifth province" for most of the century, now independent Namibia; the inland block of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi (in all of which English is a major language); together with the flanking Portuguese-speaking countries of Angola and Mozambique. Ngara hardly tries to be representative: 87 of his pages are devoted to the giant, now-free South Africa where he currendy lives and teaches; 59 to his home-country of Zimbabwe?which, indeed, since its independence in 1980 has developed a convincing literary output; and 15 pages to vital and accomplished Malawi, also recentiy democratic. Namibia is referred to only twice; none of the other countries qualifies for a mention. One would have thought the greatest contemporary practitioners of "new writing" in Southern Africa, Jose Craveirinha, Pepetela and Mia Couto, would have become tangled into the footnotes at least, but apparendy their language has ruled them out. Admittedly Ngara's subtitle is "Authors Who Have Become Prominent since 1980," but even Bessie Head (d. 1986), who really put Botswana on the map, is omitted.

Aphra Behn's 1688 novel, Oroonoko , tells the story of "the royal slave," in the subtitle's phrase, ostensibly an African prince captured by an English ship captain off the African coast and transported across the Atlantic into slavery in Surinam. Overlooked in this brutal, murderous, dismembering finale is the violent role of an Irishman, "one Banister , a wild Irish Man." This essay springs from a few simple questions: Who was this man, this Irish man, and what is he doing in Surinam, and in Behn's novel? The answers to those questions offer important points of access to the larger, contextual implications of Behn's novel—its relationship to British political developments more or less contemporary with its publication, its reflections on the comparatively late English emergence in the transatlantic slave trade, and the formal disjunctures within Behn's novel that reflect and highlight related tensions in plantation modernity.