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Imperative of Concretization: Translational Shifts and the Models of Reception of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Prose – The Case Study of "The Outsider" and its Polish Versions The Article discusses translational reception of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s prose in Poland on the example of his short story The Outsider. The gothic tale of a mysterious recluse visiting human society, in its original version, has no explicit interpretation due to the fact that the maincharacter’s identity is intentionally left by Lovecraft without precise and unambiguous explanation for its readers to determine. Polish versions, however, modified in the process of interlinguistic transfer, are aimed at concretization of the text, and thus solving this interpretational puzzle with different answers given by five translators (Grzegorz Iwanciw, Robert Lipski, Ewa Morycińska-Dzius, Mateusz Kopacz and Maciej Płaza), influenced by a variety of factors: image of the American writer, knowledge of his other literary works, implied readers of the translations and artistic trends popular in Polish literature.

The circumstances of the pandemic, while inviting lessons from earlier reclusions, prompt reflection on what is lost when we are forced apart. The moral sense, as Darwin reminds us, is founded in communal bonds, the very things now brought into question. How then are values—and the dispositions that inform them—being challenged by a rhetoric of care?

This article presents a new method for characterizing the Irish national tale genre based on female union rather than the typical marriage allegory. It introduces a little-known feminist text, Sarah Isdell’s The Irish Recluse (1809), then uses this text to re-examine the novels of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth, the history of absenteeism, and the Act of Union. Through its radical imagination, or fancy, The Irish Recluse idealizes feminocentric societies in order to reconceive Irish nationalism, exposing the patriarchal social order as antithetical to good governance in Ireland. Unlike other political narratives at the time, Isdell’s novel argues that the problem with Ireland is its paternal, imperial structures and that women’s influence would foster the best relationship between Ireland and Great Britain amidst debates on if and how they should be unified. Isdell’s fictive, microcosmic Ireland envisions the perfect union through female social support rather than heterosexual marriage, resulting in a definition of Irish national identity that thrives on a matriarchal structure—a concept reiterated in Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s later novels. Criticism might better classify the national tale as a feminist dialectic, which emerged much earlier in history than is typically imagined.

Article is a reflection upon f. Hugolin Sattner’s cantata “Ode to Soča”, which was created in the time of First World War and great battles of Isonzo. It outlines composer’s ideological, political and aesthetic outlook as a basis for his creativity thus applying methods of history of mentalities.

Barry Unsworth’s novel Losing Nelson (1999) takes up the themes of heroic cultural heritage, the pitfalls of collective memory, and grief and loss. It is also a novel about the hazards of writing and re-presenting history. Unsworth has been primarily described as a historical novelist. In Losing Nelson he explores historiography as well as hero-worship, bringing them to the narrative as discursive practices. The protagonist of the novel, Charles Cleasby, is an avid admirer of Admiral Lord Nelson, and in the process of writing a new biography, the conclusive biography, as he hopes. However, he suffers from serious writer’s block, and his attempts to clarify facts about Nelson’s life and politics lead him into an even deeper personal and psychological crisis.Cleasby has devoted his whole life to the commemoration of Nelson. As the narrative progresses, it turns out that his hero-worship is fanatical, seriously damaging his ability of everyday social interactions. He lives the life of a recluse, only...

This article is a case study in the methodology of “neurohistory,” combining a traditional cultural historical approach to anchoritic guidance writing with the discipline of modern neuroscience. It focuses on the guide De Institutione Inclusarum (ca. 1160) by the Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx. The essay begins with an explanation of “devotional reading,” in which texts provide meditative scripts for the reader. Following an overview of the text, one meditation on caritas prescribed by Aelred is examined in detail and compared with the meditations used in modern neuroscientific studies of compassion and empathy. The article then addresses the drawbacks and common criticisms of this methodology, before indicating possible areas of future research.

I recorded diel and seasonal activity patterns and behavior of the brown recluse spider, Loxosceles reclusa Gertsch & Mulaik 1940 in a free-ranging synanthropic population in northwestern Illinois. Recluse spiders are sit-and-wait predators that spend 85–90% of their nocturnal activity sitting motionless on a small network of silk they use for prey detection. Time not spent waiting for prey is typically occupied maintaining the web by laying down new strands of silk. Feeding and sexual behavior constitute a minute, but critical, portion of daily activity. Recluses were more active at night, but some were active during the day, especially in darker areas of the garage. Activity was relatively constant during the nocturnal hours. Recluse spiders became active in early to mid-May and ceased in mid-October. Beyond this, there was no consistent pattern observed in activity through these months. Sexual encounters were typically brief and similar to behavior reported in prior lab studies. Agonism was ra...

Although the paintings of twentieth-century artist Giorgio Morandi are well known, as a man he remains an enigma. Basing their studies mostly on his outward behavior, biographers of Morandi have portrayed him as both a sociable presence in the Italian art world and a recluse, widely referred to as “the monk.” This essay seeks to construct an integrated view of Morandi by turning a psychoanalytic lens toward his art itself. The result suggests that Morandi devoted nearly every waking hour to his work in the studio not merely as a form of avoidance but also as a creative process akin to a psychoanalysis—a way of connecting with his inner life and, through symbolic representation, sharing it with others.

With rare exceptions, William Wordsworth uses the word "spot" to designate a geographical place. His spots often are exceptionally good locations. They include the pre-Napoleonic French "Spot rich in all things that can soothe and please" ("October 1803" 8), the "green spot, so calm and green" and "the deep and quiet spot" of Peter Bell (365, 376), the "chosen spot" in "I know an aged man" (21), the "calmest fairest spot on earth" of The Recluse (1.73), the "favoured spots" that he distinguishes from the rest of the "whole earth" in the 1805 Prelude (10.701), the "pregnant spot of ground," the "dear appropriated spot," and the "hallowed spot of earth" in The Excursion (5.371, 945; 6.802), and many more. Wordsworth's spots are also places where natural or human pleasure or pain has occurred, and they are invested with the events that have occurred there. They include the "spot [...] made by Nature for herself' in the Poems on the Naming of Places ("To M.H." 15) and the "natal spot" of the briar-rose in "The Waterfall and the Eglantine" (23). Human "Passion rivets to the spot" in Descriptive Sketches (298); Margaret's overgrown cottage garden has become a "cheerless spot," and her cottage is a "wretched spot" in The Ruined Cottage (60, 487); and the place where Martha Ray spends her days crying, "Oh misery," in "The Thorn" is "The spot to which she goes" (92; also 91, 97, and 99). And so on. "Spot" is a common word in Wordsworth's poetry. It is plain speech, entering the language by 1200 CE, when it meant "moral stain, blot, or blemish; a stigma or disgrace" (OED), a meaning that resonates in Margaret's, Martha Ray's, and many other Wordsworthian spots. Its semantic range expands to include "A small space or extent of ground; a particular place or locality of limited extent" around 1400. In Wordsworth's time, as now, the word often connotes spiritual, mental, bodily characteristics: a spot on one's face, on one's reputation, etc. Wordsworth, though, places these characteristics onto or into the land. Critical accounts of Wordsworth's "spots of time" emphasize other issues than their complex placedness. Often they prioritize the trauma that has occurred at (or in relation to) the spots, as when Geoffrey Hartman shows that Wordsworth "raise [s] himself from his obsession with specific place" to deal with a Nature that assumes a "tutelary" role after he has violated it (212-4); or as when Peter Larkin shows that "Wordsworth's 'spots of time' occupy a fault-line between trauma and aspiration" (30). They highlight contradictions and conflicts in Wordsworth's formulation of "spots of time," as when Eugene Stelzig calls the phrase "famous[ly] paradoxical" (533); or as when Alan Richardson observes that "'spots of time' is an oxymoron: an enigma designed to halt the reading process and challenge conventional categories of literary experience" (15; also Wedd 225-6). But Wordsworth's contemporaries might have seen in the phrase language that is apposite to common 18th century expressions of spatial-temporal connections. In 1990, Jack Stillinger observed that the American educator Emma Willard used the phrase "spots of time" in her 1822 Ancient Geography, as Connected with Chronology and that, while she could not have read Wordsworth's lines on the spots, first published in 1850, her "sentences are a veritable anthology of Wordsworthian concepts" (Willard vii; Stillinger 71). Because of the similarity between Willard and Wordsworth, Stillinger "propose [s] that somewhere [...] there exists a pre-Wordsworthian discussion of spots of time in geographical or geographical-historical terms" (72). Along these lines, I propose that Wordsworth's "spots of time," which first appeared in the 1799 two-part Prelude, emerge from his decade-long contact with representations, conceptualizations, and theorizations of space and the precursors of space-time. In the "spots of time" passages, Wordsworth engages with the space-oriented writings and conversations of figures such as Isaac Newton, David Hartley, the Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid, and Tom Wedgwood. …

An extended treatment of Out Of Print, a documentary film by Vivienne Roumani that debuted at 2013 TriBeCa Film Festival January 2014 in New York. The film is narrated by Meryl Streep and features a continued debate between Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Scott Turow of the Author’s Guild. The success of the self-published The Mill River Recluse vis-a-vis the lack of success of most self-published titles is also discussed, as are the future of libraries and education in general. A brief history of publishing and many other brief interviews are also included.

This paper looks at Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork (1992) using John Holloway’s formulation of the theory of the ‘not yet’ (after Ernst Bloch). It suggests that the film denies a social reality where the subject is defined through the ontology of being (identity) and presents instead the subject as part of a social flow of doing. I will illustrate how this flow is embedded in the poetics of the film through the blurring of the ontological separation between subject and object in the element of ‘wandering’ split between the main character Alexandros, an old immigrant recluse and the increasing number of immigrants held at the national borders. I will also explore how the film reflects on the increasing number of national borders in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century as signs of fixity and fragmentation. Subsequently, as seen in the film, it is the phenomenon of immigration that challenges notions of static identities and sustains the social flow of doing along with the hope...

In his Confessions (1782, 1789) Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts the central importance of memory in his life, because it is only through memory that he can be fully present to himself. His most complete celebration of the present through the medium of memory is in the Fifth Walk of his Reveries (1782), where he recollects his short stay on the island of Saint-Pierre (1765) by way of his ecstatic experience of “le sentiment de l'existence.” The unhappy celebrity writer near the end of his life turns to imaginatively enhanced recollections to supplement his actual experiences on the island by way of a Romantic mnemotherapy as a compensatory mode of remembrance. Rousseau's differing autobiographical accounts (in his Confessions and Reveries) of his time as a happy recluse on the island are a poeticized version of the biographical facts, and it is only in his final and unfinished work that Rousseau realized most fully the therapeutic strategy of a healing recherche du temps perdu in the prose poetry of the Fifth Walk that constitutes a central document of European Romanticism.

In the Preface to The Excursion, when Wordsworth describes the 107-line extract from the unfinished first book of The Recluse as "a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole Poem" (x), he invokes a genre which would have been familiar to contemporary readers. M. H. Abrams, who builds his masterwork Natural Supernaturalism around this text, describes it as a "poetic manifesto" (73), an "indispensable guide" not only to Wordsworth's poetry but also to Romanticism itself, so clearly does it articulate the deepest literary and philosophical concerns of the movement (20). This claim rests on the "high argument" and imagery of the "Prospectus," Wordsworth's announcement of his plan to surpass Milton's Paradise Lost by writing a visionary poem about "the Mind of Man, / My haunt, and the main region of my Song" (96-8), and by reformulating the ancient Biblical prophecy of a new heaven and a new earth as an apocalypse of the imagination, "A simple produce of the common day" (113). Wordsworth's term "Prospectus" also links his manifesto with the mundane realities of the book trade. A prospectus in the literal sense was a printed advertisement for a projected book, book series, periodical, or other publishing venture, circulated prior to publication (and sometimes prior to writing) in order to attract readers and obtain advance sales. Prospectuses were a marketing device that played a part in subscription publishing, a method of publication used for most periodicals in this period and for certain types of book, particularly expensive, specialised books and multivolume books or book series such as collected editions, encyclopaedias, and anthologies (Feather 14). Typically a prospectus would describe the proposed work, explain the reasons for publishing it, how it improved on the competition, and what the terms and conditions of sale were, including where the order could be placed, how much it would cost, when the book was expected to be published, and how it would be delivered to the purchaser. If an order were placed, the prospectus became in effect a contract of sale and might even be used as a receipt, with the author's signature and the name of the subscriber. The prospectus could also contain specimen pages, a table of contents, endorsements (sometimes called "sanctions"), and illustrations, anything that might entice a prospective buyer or subscriber. Often the prospectus would be printed on the same paper and in the same format as the work itself, so that the prospectus would provide a physical sample of the book, not just an abstract description of it. This aspect of the transaction was important: a material object as well as an intellectual product was being offered for sale, and book purchasers were attentive to formats, typefaces, paper quality, and other physical features, all of which would be specified on the prospectus under the "Conditions of Sale." A prospectus could range from a single page to four, eight, twelve, or even more pages, but a typical length was four pages, and a typical format was octavo. Prospectuses were free-standing pamphlets, distinct from other forms of advertising such as newspaper advertisements, publishers' catalogues, and end-page advertisements, all of which were used in this period (Raven 283). Prospectuses would be sent to booksellers, librarians, and individuals, and distributed at public places such as coffee houses. Some publishers and booksellers had national networks of agents who toured the country distributing catalogues and prospectuses. Often, though, authors themselves distributed the prospectuses and received the orders, and authors frequently wrote the prospectuses, as authors still sometimes write their own jacket "blurb." (Powers 135) And they were used on a wide scale: the print run of a prospectus might be many times that of the work itself. The intended publisher of Coleridge's journal The Friend (which eventually acquired around 650 subscribers) advised that 10,000 copies of the prospectus be circulated in advance, with another 2000 per month for each new issue (I. …

According to Wordsworth, the signature difference between The Excursion (1814) and the rest of The Recluse project is "the intervention of characters speaking" (II 37). These intervening characters constitute a formal excursion from the solipsistic voice of "the first and third parts of The Recluse," which "will consist chiefly of meditations in the Author's own person" (37). And this formal excursion matches the philosophic injunction to sympathetic communion--"the mind's excursive power" (155)--that the poem repeatedly prescribes for the forlorn Solitary. The intervening characters can be easy to ignore, however, because they are only thinly differentiated versions of Wordsworth tinged here and there with a feature of Coleridge and Thelwall. They are all "Wordsworth-surrogates" (Johnston 409; cf. Bushell, Gravil); they speak in the same idioms, and they share similar habits. The Wanderer wanders, but so does everyone else, including Margaret and her "truant sheep" (60-1, 64). Wordsworth's characters are likewise so anonymous and flat, more like the typological cast of a generic joke (A wanderer, a solitary, a pastor, and a poet walk into pub ...) than analogues of Lord Marmion or Childe Harold, never mind Elizabeth Bennet, Victor Frankenstein, or Edward Waverley. And yet something about the character and characters of The Excursion worked, for many early- and mid-Victorian readers loved the poem and "character" was their most prevalent evaluative category. The poem straddles an aesthetic and epistemological shift from, on the one hand, the historically dominant model of character exemplified in The Excursion and upheld by its admirers and, on the other, the model of character emerging in the work of Romantic essayists and novelists and inhering still in modern critical assumptions and methods. The overwhelming majority of 20th-century critics, from Abrams and Bloom to Siskin and Levinson, and some of their more influential Romantic forbears, like Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Jeffrey, are invested in a depth model of character and knowledge. In an earlier version of this article I perpetuated this assumption by speculating that Wordsworth seems to characterize the material world of his poem by ascribing depth and interiority to it, as if the value of characters and objects must inhere in their depth. But the Solitary claims to be "pleased / To skim along the surfaces of things, / Beguiling harmlessly the listless hours" (II 97), and I have become skeptical, accordingly, of the epistemological dominance of depth. Surfaces also matter to Wordsworth. The Excursion exhibits a meaningful superficiality. With The Excursion Wordsworth turns not just to characters, then, but to a different model of character than appears in The Prelude and Romantic fiction like Austen's or Scott's: a model of character dependent on the touch, exchange, and mutability of surfaces instead of the inwardness and developmental growth that 20th-century critics applied to The Prelude and the Bildungsroman-1 Character in The Excursion is marked less by "lyric" or "inward" turns than by turns to sociality and the surfaces of things. This surface matters less as evidence of some putatively hidden meaning or agency than as a medium for feeling in-touch with the world outside of oneself. However much it invokes deep, internal feeling, The Excursion consistently intimates a taxonomic affect, the feeling of contiguity with other entities. In The Excursion, that is to say, character appears less as round fictional personhood than as the visible, taxonomical marks that differentiate and articulate species and varieties, groups and individuals, persons and things. These intervening characters hold together "the mighty commonwealth of things" (130). The principal early critics of The Excursion, Jeffrey and Coleridge, dwell less on Wordsworth's characters than on the alleged superfluity of everyday things in the poem. It does indeed teem with the "real" objects and concrete particulars that many later critics identify with realism. …

Honoring The Excursion at two hundred---the poem that Keats called one of the "three things to rejoice at in this Age"--requires honoring our own experience as readers. Hence, in choosing to speak of the destination, 1 must also point out places where I think the poem takes wrong turns. In this respect, the route is more important than the destination, which it does not reach. I am not speaking of the three or four locales in England where the action occurs--those long conversations--but of the philosophical goals, social, political, and moral. The ideological destination of The Excursion, precisely if narrowly conceived, is to cure--"correct" is Wordsworth's word--the Solitary's despondency over the failed idealism of the French Revolution, his "loss of confidence in social man." (IV.262) I see his despondency as a symptom of his membership in a lost generation of post-war, post-revolutionary disillusionment, some of whose stories I tell in Unusual Suspects. Pitt's Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (2013). There are other aspects of interest in this very long poem, to be sure, but the core rhetorical contract with the readers--the point of the excursion--is the promised redemption of the despondent Solitary, and that is what I am solely concerned with here. The Solitary's life-experience, his isolation and dejection, can be directly linked to the social and political apparatus of Prime Minister William Pitt's regime of domestic Alarmism: not only the system of spies, special courts and rigged juries that convicted nearly seventy "usual suspects"-- political activists--but also the informal, vigilante, or hegemonic overflows of this system which damaged or ruined the careers of many more "unusual suspects"--liberal sympathizers or fellow travelers. Their experience resembled the talented young people in the arts and academia whose careers were ruined by the rumors and blacklists emanating from the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch-hunts in 1940s and 1950s America. When Wordsworth re-started his work on The Recluse in 1806, with materials that eventually became Book II of The Excursion, titled "The Solitary"--having just completed his prefatory poem, The Prelude, in 1805--The Recluse was "going somewhere," according to the heroic editors of the Cornell edition (382): it was on a mission to rescue The Solitary. Book II, "The Solitary," and Books III and IV ("Despondency" and "Despondency Corrected") present a typological version of Wordsworth's own story of imaginative crisis in the similarly titled Books IX-X of the 1805 Prelude: "Imagination, How Impaired and Restored." A little-remarked internal quotation from Gilbert Wakefield in Book II is one sign among many that Wordsworth had persons from his "lost generation" in mind. The Wanderer tells the Poet that the Solitary has come back to the mountains "resolved ... that he will live and die / Forgotten, --at safe distance from 'a world / Not moving to his mind'." (11.312-15) The last seven words are from George Dyer's 1802 poem, "On the Death of Gilbert Wakefield." Wordsworth underscores them by calling them "serious words." The source is not identified in the 1814 text, nor anywhere else by Wordsworth, not even in the Fenwick notes of 1843. They were first traced by Nowell Smith, one of Wordsworth's best early editors, later in the 19th century. It's significant that Wordsworth should allude to Wakefield so specifically, yet so anonymously, at this point in his renewed effort to revive The Recluse. For Wakefield's 1798-99 trial for seditious libel marked the successful conclusion of Pitt's "Reign of Alarm," 1792-98. Charles James Fox declared that Wakefield's conviction (and subsequent death from prison fever) marked the end of the freedom of the press in England. Fox was right: this sedition or treason trial was the last in Britain for more than five years, after an average of about twenty a year between 1792 and 1798. …

The intentionally provocative title of this essay seeks to contribute to a simmering discussion about representations in Eliza Haywood's writing that have variously been characterized as non-normative, sapphic, homoerotic, or lesbian.1 No longer can scholars consider her an arbitress purely of hetero- sexual passion; rather, her texts in multiple genres throughout the course of her career structurally and descriptively present same-sex relationships of varying degrees of intimacy. Attachments along a spectrum of female homosociability-ranging from the kinds of same-sex emotional intimacies Caroll Smith-Rosenberg describes as characterizing the female sphere to, per- haps, physical intimacies unknowable to us-punctuate her work.2 Indeed, her texts, like other eighteenth-century texts, abound with "evidence of women's emotional attachments to each other" demonstrating, in Katherine Binham- mer's words, that "deep and intimate passions existed between women" (8). Yet these relationships and representations, passions and attachments, go largely undiscussed. The deeply ingrained habits of thought that have shaped Hay- wood criticism, habits Kathryn King's generative biography repeatedly ex- plodes, certainly include too often reading through a culturally defined heteronormative lens-a paradigm that limits the horizon of possibilities with which scholars read her work. 3 Scholars often fail to "penetrate the screen that heteronormativity constitutes insofar as it masks itself as natural," observes Susan Lanser; consequently, mainstream eighteenth-century women's studies "remains quite heavily heteronormative to the impoverishment and perhaps distortion of the field " ("Of Closed Doors" 275). In the face of that potential distortion, Lanser urges us to scrutinize "seemingly normative systems and spaces" where we might uncover "subtler formations" that have remained "below the scholarly threshold" (277). The word "seemingly" invites us to recog- nize what we miss, to read the familiar anew by shedding the theoretical or methodological blinders that have previously guided our work.4 It is as though the heteronormative critical paradigm itself has, to borrow William Warner's metaphor, "overwritten" representations that are in fact unstable or "queer." 5Over the last two decades, Haywood scholarship has had moments where some critics brush up against the textual evidence of sapphic relationships and then retreat from its implications-perhaps to the impoverishment of which Lanser warns. For example, a number of scholars have discussed The British Recluse (1722), a fiction rich in sapphic possibilities. The novel details the rela- tionship between two women, Belinda and Cleomira, betrayed by the same man, who narrate the details of that experience to each other and forge an inti- macy. Writing of eighteenth-century domestic fiction generally, Lanser re- minds us that the narrative device of the confidante and "the transmission of letters, journals, or conversation places two women in a structurally erotic rela- tionship" ("Novel [Sapphic] Subjects" 498, emphasis in original). So it is with Belinda and Cleomira, the "Recluse" of the title. From the moment the women meet, an encounter "particular for Persons of the same Sex . . . that . . . kept both from speaking for some Moments" (9), they are filled with admiration for each other. The word "particular" which specifically means "close" or "inti- mate" captures the intensity of the moment and perhaps codes a sense of the non-normative relationship hidden in plain sight. Belinda wants to experience a narrative exchange with Cleomira through a written and oral sharing of their stories that fulfills her desire to "indulg[e] my Grief" and "mingle my Tears with hers" (7, 158).6 They create a structurally erotic relationship. Bonded by the end of the text, they are "scarce a Moment asunder" and "still live in a per- fect Tranquility, happy in the real Friendship of each other, despising the un- certain Pleasures" of heterosexual relations and embracing a "more solid Comfort" in each other (137-38). …

When Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth of the witches' prediction and they begin to discuss their plan to kill Duncan, she tells him, "To beguile the time, / Look like the time" (5.65-66). "To beguile the time," that is, Macbeth needs to make those around him feel as if everything is normal, that he is still Duncan's loyal subject; in order to do that, he must "look like the time," or comport himself in a way that portrays loyalty. He must, in other words, act. These are some of the earliest lines Lady Macbeth speaks, and no doubt when Sarah Siddons, probably the most famous embodiment of the character, delivered them, her own ability to beguile the time was palpably clear. It is equally clear that Ann Radcliffe was one of the audience members touched by Siddons's performance. Whether or not she was touched by these particular lines is relatively unimportant, but as her biographer Rictor Norton has proven, Radcliffe did in fact see Siddons play Lady Macbeth, and her description of Siddons's affect on her is one of the few personal recollections we have: Whenever the poet's witch condescends, according to the vulgar notion, to mingle mere ordinary mischief with her malignity, and to become familiar, she is ludicrous, and loses her power over the indignation; the illusion vanishes. So vexatious is the effect of the stage-witches upon my mind, that I should possibly have left the theatre when they appeared, had not the fascination of Mrs Siddons's influence so spread itself over the whole play, as to overcome my disgust, and to make me forget even Shakespeare himself; while all consciousness of fiction was lost, and his thoughts lived and breathed before me in the very form of truth. Mrs Siddons, like Shakespeare, always disappears in the character she represents, and throws an illusion over the whole scene around her, that conceals many defects in the arrangements of the theatre. (Radcliffe qtd. in Norton 50-51) (1) It is highly likely that Radcliffe saw Siddons perform on several occasions including in The Tempest and Hamlet, and she seems to have also been affected by the performances and by the theater in general (Norton 62). While Radcliffe did become more of a recluse as her publications became more successful, initially she spent quite a lot of time at the opera and theater both in Bath and in London (see Norton 50). Radcliffe was careful to pay attention to the ways in which acting made the audience feel, which we see when she imagines Siddons in the role of Hamlet: I should suppose she would be the finest Hamlet that ever appeared, excelling even her own brother in that character; she would more fully preserve the tender and refined melancholy, the deep sensibility, which are the peculiar charm of Hamlet, and which appear not only in the ardour, but in the occasional irresolution and weakness of his character.... Her brother's firmness, incapable of being always subdued, does not so fully enhance, as her tenderness would, this part of the character, (qtd. in Norton 50) We see here that she is thinking about how certain actors act and comparing them, and in that comparison she pays attention to the subtlety of Siddons's acting technique; she values her "deep sensibility." These types of comments from Radcliffe are not easily found because of how little material there is from her life, but from reading her fiction, we can also see that she understood and appreciated the sensibility of the theater, as is evident in the character of Adeline in Radcliffe's first success, her 1791 The Romance of the Forest. By examining exactly what that acting sensibility consisted of, in connection to the everyday performances of Adeline, I argue that Radcliffe creates in Adeline a representation of the sensory relationship between Gothic writers and readers, revealing a powerful affect in both the character and the text that otherwise might be neglected. …

This article uncovers the lost history of the early fourteenth-century religious recluse, Katharine de Audley, a woman whose life came to be both distorted and romanticised by legend and literary adaptation in the centuries that followed. Tracing first the various literary treatments of Katharine as medieval anchorite, and second, her lived history as it emerges from the records, and by placing both within the historical and ideological context of medieval anchoritism, the author argues for the female anchorite as forming part of a critical practice which continued to address socio-religious and personal needs both in her own day and long after she and her vocation had fallen from immediate cultural consciousness.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice . As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice : the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse , but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion , to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.

What happens if one wishes to affirm reclusiveness at the very time in history when it is physically and pragmatically most difficult to be alone? In such times, what does it mean to be a recluse and to opt out of present and future connectedness? The article briefly reviews strategies and cultures of reclusiveness in history, from anchoritic existences to the enigmatic withdrawals of figures like Maurice Blanchot. It also assesses claims of inescapable panopticism in contemporary social structures. Reference is made to fictional and nonfictional narratives that prefigure the fortunes of reclusiveness in posthuman times. At the same time, however, the article tries to avoid any glib suggestion that reclusiveness is technologically readaptive. Rather, it considers how the natures, cultures and timescapes of aloneness in a futurological age of techno-generalized nodality might help us better understand the atemporal and timeless dimensions of posthumanist subjectivity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was very critical of his publics, especially when it came to the power play, networking, and trade in intimacy that informed the role of the philosophes and hommes de lettres of salon culture. (1) And indeed, his Confessions can be read as the narrative of how be became an author who increasingly avoided contact with his contemporary publics in favor of the virtual and ideal audience of posthumous print publications. Yet he was also proud of his celebrity status, of being known among an anonymous crowd of people whom he would not be expected to know. In fact, be even relied on it in the hope that it would provide him with more work as a copyist and thereby secure his financial autonomy, providing him with a stable alternative to the dependence on gifts and patronage. (2) Moreover, to the extent that Rousseau conceived of himself as the producer not only of verbal but also of musical texts, he was intensely aware of the importance of a real, live audience. For a composer of an opera to be able to enjoy his own work, the work has to be performed, which in most cases means before a live audience. When Rousseau points this out in book 8 of the Confessions, the center of his autobiographical reflections on authorship, he adds that when it came to the performance of his opera, he wished to have it performed exclusively for him alone. Indeed, Rousseau's self-portrait as a writer, composer, copyist, and author, his narrative of how he came to inhabit different positions toward authorship, ranging from that of the impostor, who falsely claims to be able to provide valuable musical entertainment, to the censored and persecuted writer of an educational treatise, and the recluse who defers the publication of his Confessions to a posthumous date, is centered on his relationship to different kinds of contemporaneous audiences, be they the exclusive circles of the salons, the larger, and partly anonymous group of readers and critics involved in scholarly polemics and debates, the coffeehouse publics, or the theater and opera audiences at court and in the city. How Rousseau developed his concept of authorship with regard to these different audiences, implying different media of publication and dissemination, is the focus of the present essay. According to his Confessions, Rousseau becomes a famous author all of a sudden. At one moment he is an unknown individual among the anonymous crowd of the print audience of the Mercure, an ordinary reader encountering the question of the essay competition, seized by excitement, feeling he has an important insight, jotting it down. A year later, suddenly and unexpectedly, he wins the first prize of the Academy of Dijon and becomes a public figure. Although he mentions that it was Diderot who encouraged him to finish the piece and who eventually found a publisher for it and although he also acknowledges that the abbe Raynal, the editor of the Mercure, was a good friend to him, he does not elaborate on Raynal's role. Instead, he presents the case as if he had become an instant celebrity by winning the Academy prize. Rousseau does not mention that he did not attend the award ceremony but sent a proxy and was not present when the piece was read aloud to the members of the Academy of Dijon. Moreover, his essay was not published then, but was first made available to a print audience through Raynal's summary. According to Cranston, Raynal devoted an entire year's publications of the Mercure to calling attention to Rousseau's piece. (3) Both Rousseau's actual account and these significant omissions make it clear that Rousseau is highly invested in attributing his status as a publicly known author exclusively to the quality of his writing and the originality of his thinking, not to personal connections and the publicity generated by reviews and scholarly debate. This is why he has to present himself as an author who emerges all of a sudden out of the anonymous audience of a printed journal. …

Experiments reported in Sandidge (2003; Nature 426: 30) indicated that the brown recluse spider, Loxosceles reclusa Gertsch & Mulaik, preferred to scavenge dead prey over live prey and that the spiders were not detrimentally affected when fed insecticide-killed crickets. Extrapolations made in subsequent media coverage disseminating the results of this research made counterintuitive statements that pesticide treatment in houses would increase brown recluse populations in homes. This information was presented as if the scavenging behavior was specialized in the brown recluse; however, it was more likely that this behavior has not been well studied in other species. To provide a comparison, the current laboratory study examined the likelihood of non-Loxosceles spiders to scavenge dead prey. Of 100 non-Loxosceles spiders that were tested (from 11 families, 24 genera, and at least 29 species from a variety of spider hunting guilds), 99 scavenged dead crickets when offered in petri dishes. Some of the spiders were webspinners in which real-world scavenging of dead prey is virtually impossible, yet they scavenge when given the opportunity. Therefore, scavenging is a flexible opportunistic predatory behavior that is spread across a variety of taxa and is not a unique behavior in brown recluses. These findings are discussed in relation to pest management practices.

Mystic. Rebel. Recluse. Genius. Skeptic. Poet. Pastoral theologian? Who was Emily Dickinson? Among other descriptors, Dickinson (1830–1886) was a complex 19th century woman who possessed great intellectual and poetic gifts, whose life and work retains tantalizing mysteries, and who can be considered a fascinating “woman out of order” in her time and still in ours (Stevenson-Moessner & Snorton 2010). Immersing oneself in the stories that continue to spin around her life and ongoing discussion about the meaning of her poems can be a rewarding, inspiring adventure, and in what follows, I attempt to show how at least some of her poems can be considered artistic expressions of pastoral theology.

It's the stuff of legend and the legend of stuff. With a front-page head line heralding "Homer Collyer, Harlem Recluse, Found Dead at 70," the New Yor\ Times reported on 22 March 1947, that "the circumstances sur rounding the death of 70-year-old Homer, blind as the poet he was named for, were as mysterious as the life the two eccentric brothers lived on the unfashionable upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, in the middle of Harlem."1 Tipped by an anonymous phone caller the day before, police found Col Iyer's emaciated corpse in his Harlem brownstone located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street. Days later, officers discovered the rotting body of his brother, Langley, lying several feet from where Homer had died. Buried beneath mountains of material, Langley had been crushed to death by fallen stacks of bundled newspapers, one of the many booby traps that he had rigged to ward off priers. Their bodies included, over one hundred tons of material ranging from several grand pianos to scads of pinup posters were excavated from the dilapidated mansion. Con demned as unsafe, the house was razed, and the city would later dedicate the lot as Collyer Brothers Park. This sensational story of two elderly white men living and dying in a predominantly black neighborhood has sparked fascination and anxiety from the mid-1930s to the present day, and the following pages argue that the Collyers were pivotal in advancing a sea change in a curious identity category—the hoarder—that proved inextricable from their "mysterious" household effects as well as the "unfashionable" district of Harlem. I'll

This paper focuses on the Cistercian historia in honour of the beguine and recluse Mary of Oignies. A context for the office is provided by studying the musical and literary culture at the Cisterci...

The southern and eastern margins of the range of the brown recluse spider run through the southeastern quadrant of the United States. Populations vary from abundant in states such as Arkansas and west and central Kentucky and Tennessee to absent in the Atlantic seaboard states. The diagnosis of loxoscelism should be restricted to areas of the southeastern United States where brown recluse spiders are both common and widespread. Better knowledge of the local presence of recluse spiders in one's area, along with the list of differential diagnoses for dermonecrosis, will allow medical personnel in the south to better assess the probability of spider involvement in a necrotic skin lesion. In North America, there are two groups of spiders proven to be medically important: the widow spiders (genus Latrodectus) and the recluse spiders (genus Loxosceles). The widow spiders are a known entity, because their distinctive coloration makes them readily identifiable by nonarachnologists. Also, the physiological mechanism of the venom, the antivenom to counter it, and the symptoms are known, causing misdiagnosis to rarely occur. In contrast, recluse spiders are almost at the other end of the spectrum. They are readily misidentified or confused with harmless spiders, and the physiological mechanism of the venom is still being elucidated. Furthermore, no antivenom is commercially available, and the brown recluse's infamy causes many skin lesions of nonarachnid origin to be misdiagnosed as brown recluse spider bites.

Much recent scholarship explores the consequences of Heidegger's transformation of philosophic thinking for our understanding of political theory at the edge of modernity. In a response to recent readings, this essay argues that the contemporary literature on Heidegger fails to account for two fundamental concerns: the ontic/ontological distinction and the importance of moods, particularly anxiety and boredom. Utilizing these moods, this essay explores the ways in which Heidegger's thought escapes politics through a privileging of the ontological, or object-less, experience, relying on a reclusive reflection as the way to authenticity. Instead of fostering a strong community or strong liberal sense of self, Heidegger leaves us with the nothingness of anxiety and the emptiness of boredom as our alternatives. By transcending the ontic in favor of the ontological, Heidegger divorces himself from politics in the everyday sense and posits an existential response to political theory that is unable to foster authentic collective life.Résumé.Une part importante de la littérature récente explore les conséquences de la transformation de la pensée philosophique amenée par Heidegger et ses effets sur notre compréhension de la théorie politique à l'aube de l'ère moderne. En réponse à de récentes lectures, cet essai relève deux manquements fondamentaux dans la littérature contemporaine sur Heidegger. Le premier concerne la distinction entre l'ontique et l'ontologique et le deuxième a trait à l'importance des humeurs, plus particulièrement l'anxiété et l'ennui. En explorant ces humeurs, cet essai dévoile les manières dont la pensée de Heidegger échappe à la politique en privilégiant l'expérience ontologique ou immatérielle et en se fondant sur la réflexion recluse, voie qui mène à l'authenticité. Au lieu de favoriser une communauté forte ou un sens profond et libéral de soi, Heidegger nous laisse comme options de rechange le néant de l'anxiété et le vide de l'ennui. En transcendant l'ontique en faveur de l'ontologique, Heidegger se sépare de la politique au sens premier du terme pour donner une réponse existentielle à une théorie politique incapable de forger une vie collective authentique.

In about 1080 the young English nun Eva decided to step up her religious com mitment and become a recluse. Apparently without discussing her move with any one, she secretly left her convent, the prestigious royal abbey of Wilton, and crossed to Angers, where she joined what appears to have been an established community of anchoresses attached to a church there. Her former teacher and mentor, the monk, hagiographer, and musician Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, learned of her departure after some delay. His Liber confortatorius, datable to about 1082/ 83, is by far the most personal and most original text in his considerable oeuvre, expressing deep personal grief about Eva's departure.1 It is a book of spiritual advice, in the tradition of Jerome and Ambrose, or more recent masters like John of Fecamp and Anselm, and anticipating later and more familiar anchoritic texts like Aelred of Rievaulx's De institutione inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse. It is an anthology of texts and excerpts that Goscelin and Eva both valued. It is a guide to meditation. It is also a personal letter, a lament, a consolation, and self consolation. One of the exciting things about the Liber confortatorius, apart from its per sonal engagement and its sometimes disconcerting glimpses of more than just spiritual attachment, is precisely its early date. Goscelin tends to anticipate ideas and practices that are familiar to us from the later Middle Ages, and it is often surprising to find them here in the 1080s. And, as is often the case with letters of spiritual counsel, one has the impression of watching someone's private theology unfold-not so much original thought as a personal mix of reflections and de votions. Some religious practices that later in the Middle Ages gelled into standard usage or hardened into prescriptive rules are here offered as personal habits, an exchange of ideas, suggestions, shoptalk along the lines of "I do it like this" or "here is something you might want to try." For instance, the Little Office of the Virgin, not exactly referred to in this text but certainly implied, had evidently been around in personal, voluntary, or local usage some two centuries before it became near-universal monastic practice in the twelfth century and a centerpiece of lay devotion with the development of the book of hours.2 Goscelin's comments on

In their detailed commentary as part of the Northwestern Newberry edition of The Confidence-Man, the editors proposed the accepted theory that Herman Melville began writing his novel after reading a newspaper article about the re-appearance in New York of an "original confidence man," known as William Thompson. Yet beyond this assertion they confess uncertainty on several points still to be resolved. Two of these are the nature of the story's initial setting and its philosophical development.Nor do we know two further basic matters: how or when it occurred to him to put his Confidence Man aboard a Mississippi steamboat rather than keep him, like his prototype, in an eastern city, or when in his planning and writing of the book Melville enlarged his Confidence Man to a character of wider social and even cosmic significance than the newspaper original. (Branch 1984, 278)Since the days of Howard Vincent's pioneering analysis of Melville's method of composition (1949, 1970), readers have acknowledged Melville's tendency to deliberately "expropriate," embellish and append observations and incidents from other writers to his own work (Branch 1984, 280). Although Melville never mentions French novelist Honore de Balzac in the documentation we possess from the 1850s or earlier, Balzac was a good candidate for literary borrowing. At the time The Confidence-Man was written, Balzac was among the most-read or at least most talked-about European authors in America (Post-Lauria 1996, 129). Moreover, we can show that Melville had easier access than has been previously considered to information about world literature through friends, family and the daily progress of his own reading habits. Researchers have successfidly verified that in his later life Melville became voracious for writings by and information about this master proto-Realist (Ddlingham 1996; Haydock 1996; Sealts 1988; Cowan 1987). Melville appears even to have used Balzac's Seraphita as a partial character sketch for Billy Budd. AdditionaUy, several studies suggest that some dependence on Balzac may have been active much earlier (Hayes 2000; Haydock 2000; Lawson 1994; Chai 1987). Significantly, Kevin Hayes's discovery of common elements from Balzac in MelviUe's writing relates to the very same time frame as the conception of The Confidence-Man.1 Although the dominant opinion is that Melville did not encounter Balzac's writing until at least 1870, to assume that Melville was ignorant of Balzac's achievement up to that time would make him practically a literary recluse; and the massive documents we have available now (Parker 1996,2002) prove that this image is certainly not accurate. However, the hypothesis of early contact still evokes strong resistance from many conventional Melville critics and scholars. Consequently, a close examination of the opening section of The Confidence-Man and in particular the characterization of the man in creamcolors in relation to Balzac's similar character in "Jesus-Christ in Flanders" should put any implausibility to rest while simultaneously providing a resolution to the Newberry editors' unanswered questions.Melville and BalzacThe track of relying on internal evidence can be a slippery one. However, when such evidence is reviewed in the context of prevailing modes of cultural exchange, intellectual preoccupations, and public discourse the same points can become clearly demonstrative of real entanglement and not simply unintended affinity. The proofs offered from the texts that follow will be more authoritative once we establish the facts that there were many conditions in Melville's experience that made contact with the works and ideas of Honore de Balzac before 1857 probable and indeed vital for his creative life. As Jane Lundblad established, "When acknowledged in the early thirties, Balzac immediately became known outside the boundaries of France, and, as we have already seen, was read also in America ..." (1965,167). …

The village recluse, avowed to remain in his or her cell, was a feature of the later medieval landscape, but in what circumstances did recluses and the notion of a distinct reclusive vocation emerge? Examining the earliest recluses identifiable, this article contends that reclusion as such, though not without precedent, gained popularity in England in the third quarter of the eleventh century and acquired a terminology (already current on the Continent) in its last third as an expression of the ascetic movement within the emerging parish.

On November 26, 1814, William Wordsworth wrote to his younger brother Christopher to express his relief on hearing that his "intentions" in sending him a copy of The Excursion had been "fulfilled" (MY II 170-1). The poem was the first published part of Wordsworth's projected "philosophical" epic, The Recluse. But like its autobiographical precursor, The Prelude, described by the Eclectic Review as a "fossil relic newly dug up" in November, 1850, The Excursion was already belated when it appeared in July, 1814. The tone of stoic optimism was better suited to the earlier, dark days of the war against Napoleon. And the substance in some places was--as with the story of "The Ruined Cottage" in the first book--almost two decades old. The Excursion fell, as William Hazlitt put it, "still-born from the press" (Wu ed. VII 165). The expensive first edition still loaded the shelves at Longman's into the 1830s (Gill 17). But with the abdication of Napoleon and the restoration across Europe of what Burke had called the old "Gothic" order, Wordsworth clearly cherished high hopes of the poem that he famously likened to a "gothic Church," catching the zeitgeist. "I should, " he told Christopher, "have been sorry had you not been pleased with it; sorry both as a poet and an Englishman. I hear from many quarters high commendations and not a few from members of your Profession. Yesterday I had a letter from Sir George Beaumont in which he says the Bishop of London is enchanted with The Excursion, and indeed I hear but one opinion on the subject!" (MY II 171). If Christopher Wordsworth, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of Bocking, and founding member of the National Society for Church education, had failed to appreciate this "gothic Church" of a poem, then Wordsworth's "intentions" must have miscarried seriously indeed. It would have been a double failure of communication. "As a poet," it would have meant a breakdown of Wordsworth's desired sympathy between the author and his audience. And "as an Englishman," it would have meant a dysfunction in the "Constitutional Sort of Reverence" that patriotic periodicals like the Gentleman's Magazine had for decades depicted as unfailingly communicated by Gothic architecture (December, 1739 641). Wordsworth had relied heavily upon the receptive and reverential attitude of his audience when composing the preface to The Excursion. After describing the relationship of the poem to The Recluse with an "allusion" to the structure of a "gothic Church," he went on (perhaps in response to Jeffrey's jibes at his "new system") to disclaim any intention "formally to announce a system." He found it "more animating," be said, "to proceed in a different course, and if he shall succeed in conveying to the mind clear thoughts, lively images, and strong feelings, the Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself" (ix-x). But "extracting the system" of this "gothic Church" required considerable ingenuity of the reader. For where the definite function of "Anti-chapel" ("the outer part at the west end of a [college] chapel" OED) was assigned to the unpublished Prelude, the published Excursion was given only the vague and disjointed designation of "the second part" of the "body," and the relatively well-known Lyrical Ballads, downgraded to "minor Pieces," were jumbled together as "little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses" (vii-ix). Professing himself, as in the unknown Prelude, no "slave" of the "false secondary power," and unskilled "to class the cabinet / Of [his] sensations" (1805 II 220-229), Wordsworth thus referred the intelligibility of the whole Recluse scheme to his readership. In his sketch of Wordsworth in The. Spirit of the Age (1825), Hazlitt summed up the problem; The Excursion, he wrote, "affects a system without having any intelligible clue to one" (Wu ed. VII 165). By the time he wrote to Christopher, Wordsworth had begun to doubt his readers' imaginative sympathy. …

This article studies the politics of The Convention of Cintra (1809), William Wordsworth's prose tract on the notorious Convention between the British and French armies in Portugal during the Peninsular War. In Cintra, I argue, Wordsworth adumbrates a ‘Gothic’ politics that mediates between his past radical and his future loyalist political sympathies. I begin with an account of how the Peninsular War came to be conceived in specifically ‘Gothic’ terms by Wordsworth and his contemporaries. I then offer a reading of Cintra as a rehearsal of the pamphlet war between competing accounts of the ‘Gothic’ state in the 1790s; setting the tract against Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Tom Paine's Rights of Man (1791-2), John Thelwall's Rights of Nature (1796), and Wordsworth's unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793). I argue that in Cintra Wordsworth develops the ‘Gothic’ language of reform coming out of Spain for the purposes of domestic reform. I conclude with a discussion of the presence behind Cintra of John Milton; a presence that I suggest links the ‘Gothic’ politics worked out in Cintra to the Recluse project—that ‘gothic Church’, as Wordsworth called it, of a poetic enterprise.

Emily Dickinson never traveled to Japan, but her work has had a passionate Japanese readership, and many of her early admirers in the West were connoisseurs of Japanese culture. Among these were Mabel Loomis Todd, Ernest and Mary Fenollosa, and Amy Lowell, along with the Boston-based expert in Asian art Kakuzo Okakura. My essay ventures three explanations for why Dickinson seems at home in Japan: biographical, cultural, and interpretive. Dickinson's temperament recalls the Asian tradition of the scholarly recluse, and so do her haiku-like nature poems and inscrutable letters. Her cultural situation in Calvinist New England has parallels with an older Japan, before Commodore Perry's "opening" of 1854. There was much East-West cultural exchange in the rise of Emersonian Transcendentalism, on which Dickinson also drew. The reception of Dickinson's poetry in the West has Asian resonances. The successive spikes in her reputation—during the 1890s, the 1920s, and the 1950s—correspond to periods of heightened American awareness of Asian culture. For a hundred years and more, American readers have read and interpreted Dickinson's work through a Japanese lens.

The Brown recluse (L. reclusus) is the best-known species of spiders belonging to the genus Loxosceles. Although found throughout North, Central and South America Loxosceles spiders in the United States are most prevalent in southern and central states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas. These spiders are some of the most easily identified because of their characteristic markings. Commonly referred to as "fiddle back" spiders, they possess a dark, violin-shaped marking on the cephalothorax. The Brown recluse is known not only for its unique appearance but feared because of its bite. Research has identified specific components of the spider's venom responsible for the pathophysiologic features of the bite. In 1978, Forrester et al. identified sphingomyelinase D as the component that causes haemolysis. This factor is thought to be involved in both cutaneous and systemic reactions. Patel et al. later proposed a possible sequence that accounts for the dermo-necrosis. The venom first activates vascular endothelium inducing the expression of E-selectin and causing release of interleukin-8 and granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor. These two cytokines are key mediators in the attraction and activation of neutrophils. As soon as they are present, the neutrophils bind to E-selectin, degranulate and cause tissue destruction. Language: en