“Occupations and Interruptions”: Christina Rossetti’s Caring Poetics

British Formalist Aesthetics and Its Literary Writing Practice

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

Reviewed by: Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn Lisa Szabo-Jones Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn, eds. Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014. 286pp. $42.99. Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third edited collection from the TransCanada Institute's conference series that began in 2005. The three collections accumulatively attempt to think across the field of Canadian literature as it is complicit in or challenges the formation of nation and the field as institution, methodology, and, ultimately, collaborative and transformative politics. Consistent with all of these collections is their authoritative weight. The contributors are long-established experts in their respective fields, the majority in literary criticism. Critical Collaborations, comprised of twelve essays, plus an introduction by co-editor Smaro Kamboureli, shifts slightly from the two earlier collections. Although the first two collections include indigenous scholarship, environmental scholarship is absent. In its inclusion of ecological thinking, Critical Collaborations can be seen as either a corrective or as a deliberate windup to the conference series. Either way, it is edifying to see a new collection merging Canadian studies with ecological epistemologies, and in inspiring multidisciplinary ways. Although the essays do not necessarily speak to one another directly, there is a connective thread through repeated concepts, "trans-", of course, being the underlying one. Yet more subtle and provocative is the persistent emphasis on generative thinking, which occurs when the scholars cross over into the possibility of other complementary or intersecting methods of enquiry and seek interconnection. While some use the term "generative" explicitly, such as Roy Miki in his call for an arts-based or creative-critical reading approach, a field that has been gaining popularity in the humanities and social sciences over the past few years, others, such as Laurie Ricou in his "Habitat" studies, establish the concept as inherent to their methodological practice. The articles in Critical Collaboration offer intellectual rigour and insight, and, although a couple are a bit theoretically opaque at times, the majority make for invigorating reading. That said, there are many stand-outs in this collection. Space allows me to touch upon only a few highlights. After Kamboureli's introduction and Miki's essay, the collection seems ordered into three parts: indigenous scholarship, environmental criticism, and diasporic studies. The first part of the collection focuses on indigenous scholarship and offers methods for de-colonization of Western epistemologies. [End Page 207] The essays, respectively by Sa'ke'j Henderson (law), Julia Emberley (literary criticism), Marie Battiste (education), and Larissa Lai (literary criticism) move from more general theoretical engagement to literary analysis. All are outstanding. In "Ambidextrous Epistemologies: Indigenous Knowledge within the Indigenous Renaissance," through an investigation of the conflicts between Eurocentric pedagogy and indigenous knowledge (ik, Marie Battiste illustrates the ties between ecological thinking, language, decolonization, and educational reform. She demonstrates that an educational model inclusive of ik promotes "a participatory consciousness" (91), which cultivates empowerment, agency, and ultimately fulfills the terms set out in the 2008 un Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the subsequent unesco conventions. Larissa Lai presents a practice model for building creative alliances between non-indigenous and indigenous peoples, which further enriches Battiste's and Sa'ke'j Henderson's call for institutional and political reform. In "Epistemologies of Respect," she calls for a practice of ethics that allows room for ongoing learning and transformation—an "ethics-under-construction" (99). The practice, Lai contends, both acknowledges complicity in the production of colonial-settler power structures and participates, through creative practices, in "remaking of contemporary culture and an imagining of the nation" (99) to construct a different future. As successful collaborative and cross-cultural illustrations, Lai provides persuasive readings of Lee Maracle's "Yin Chin," The Movement Project's How We Forgot Here, and Marie Clement's Burning Vision, three works that explore engagement between indigenous peoples and non-white settler cultures in Canada. The second part of the collection shifts to environmental criticism, and decolonization becomes associated with the challenges in transforming human relationships to the biophysical environment. The three articles, in their respective...

Despite the increasing participation of women in the Indian workforce, they continue to bear the primary responsibility for caregiving and domestic work. The Indian maternity benefit law aims to promote women’s participation in the workforce while ensuring the well-being of both mother and child. However, a closer examination of this seemingly progressive law reveals its underlying stereotypical assumptions. The law, particularly the key changes brought in 2017, overlooks the gendered division of labour in society and instead reinforces stereotypes about women’s caregiving roles. This article examines India’s maternity benefit law through an anti-stereotyping lens, illustrating how the transformative potential of the law is constrained by the gender stereotypes that inform both its conceptualisation as well as operationalisation. These stereotypes create systemic and institutional disadvantages for women, especially in the absence of corresponding paternity benefits. The article argues that dismantling the stereotypes underlying the maternity benefit law is essential to addressing the deep-rooted inequalities faced by women. It suggests that the recognition of shared parental responsibility for caregiving work, through the enactment of a law providing for paternity benefits, could help challenge these structures of inequality and contribute to addressing discrimination against women.

Literary critics at work and their information needs: A research-phases model

Care

The review deals with the comparative analysis of the second edition of the book by Kharkiv literary critic, Doctor of Philology, Professor Leonid Genrikhovich Frizman (1935–2018) “In the circles of literary critics: Memoirs essays”, published in Kyiv and Moscow in 2017. The history of the book is described in the context of the author’s creative practices and similar experiences of Russian and Ukrainian literary critics; its substantive focus, the concept embodied in it, the personal composition, style, architectonics, illustrative component and artistic design are characterized in the review. The focus is on the study of the semantic role of the corrections and additions, made by the author in the second edition. The analysis takes into account the existing critical experience of perception of the first edition of memoirs in Russia to avoid unnecessary repetition.

This article provides a critique of neoliberal feminism and argues for nuanced and critical approaches to the question of what constitutes feminist resistance. It focuses on visual artist Billie Zangewa’s creative practice and positions it within the longer history of how women have made use of traditional crafts, such as quilting and embroidery, as a means of expression and as a form of resistance. It positions Zangewa’s work alongside that of some of her feminist contemporaries who have also used thread and cloth in their work to reveal how the political is woven through the fabric of everyday life. I argue that in order to understand why Zangewa’s seemingly mundane, even bourgeois practice, has been framed and taken up as a form of feminist resistance, it is necessary to read her work through a historical lens that takes colonial dispossession and the brutal history of violence in Southern Africa into account. My readings of Zangewa’s work acknowledge the significance of the artist’s affirmation of care and self-love as resistance, as much as they point to the limits of a politics that valorises (unpaid) domestic work and fails to address the structural violence of capitalism.

Creative accounting in the public sector represents a hidden threat to financial transparency and budgetary sustainability. This article explores the mechanisms, motivations, and impacts of creative accounting practices within public entities through a dual theoretical and empirical approach. First, a critical literature review conceptualizes the various forms of accounting manipulation and highlights their detrimental effects on governance. Second, a practical case study, based on an audit mission conducted by the author within a Moroccan public organization, illustrates the anomalies identified and the corrective actions implemented. The analysis shows that creative practices, often driven by political or institutional pressures, undermine the quality of financial reporting and weaken democratic accountability. In response, the article proposes a set of remediation strategies, combining technical corrections, strengthened internal controls, the promotion of an ethical culture, and the modernization of financial information systems. This research emphasizes the need for a robust regulatory framework in public accounting to restore citizen trust and ensure responsible and sustainable financial governance.

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Jason Phillips (bio) Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 242. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Insiders, Outsiders showcases exciting new work in southern history, and most of it focuses on the Civil War era. Dedicated to Michael O'Brien, the volume reflects the vibrancy and curiosity that marked his work and inspired his field to explore the South's diversity of thought. In the introduction, editors Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe also acknowledge how the 1977 Wingspread conference shifted American intellectual history toward a broader engagement with cultural values and practices. Whereas conventional intellectual histories studied the persistence of ideas across space and time, this newer approach explained how thoughts developed within distinct historical contexts. Despite this more holistic approach, the volume that resulted from Wingspread, New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979), and more recent anthologies, including The Worlds of American Intellectual History (2017) and American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (2018), lack literary studies.1 With its long tradition of collaboration between historians and literary critics, southern studies—including works like Insiders, Outsiders—encourage interdisciplinary conversations by sharing important questions, theories, and methods. Gardner and Stowe organize their book into two parts that explore common themes in southern history. In part 1, historians study intellectual life in the South to consider how the region affected thinking within its borders and was, in turn, changed by that thinking. These essays range beyond the usual subjects of intellectual history. Stephen Berry argues that the "southernness" of Edgar Allan Poe questioned mainstream American and British faith in progress, capitalism, and destiny. Poe yearned to belong to a pantheon with Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other contemporary luminaries, but his realism and rage offended their clique, making him the insider's outsider. Michael T. Bernath uncovers how efforts to purge a South Carolina community of northern teachers after John Brown's raid exposed internal divisions along class lines. Only the wealthiest families could afford to hire northern tutors for their children, but this luxury became a social and political liability when sectional fervor and hysteria increased. Beth Barton Schweiger calls for new book histories of the South that focus on the uses and circulations of texts instead of their production. She encourages us to consider a book's linguistic, musical, and anthropological customs as it traveled through the region, touching everyone from [End Page 134] intellectuals to illiterates. Timothy J. Williams studies an obscure book, Edwin Wiley Fuller's autobiographical novel Sea-Gift (1873), to interpret southern men's fantasies during Reconstruction. In search of personal greatness and a utopian South, Fuller's Lost Cause romance focuses on the future, not the past. Mitchell Snay concludes part 1 by analyzing different Reconstruction writers, the journalists and politicians who saw immigration as a panacea for the southern economy after emancipation. His essay suggests the global dimensions of Reconstruction and how immigration debates exposed assumptions about race, citizenship, and capitalism, and how they still do today. In part 2, literary critics take the lead to interpret thinking about the South. Melanie Benson Taylor opens this section with an insightful essay on southern literature and the Anthropocene. The apocalyptic perspective of southern writers and the region's history of environmental destruction and dispossession frame southern stories as profound commentaries on humanity's endangerment to itself and others. Next, John Grammer identifies a "southern turn" in New Journalism by focusing on the careers of Willie Morris, Marshall Frady, and Larry L. King. As southern white men, this "Wrecking Crew" reported the civil rights movement from a privileged position—that of insiders who enjoyed better access than northern journalists, while staying outside the perils that threatened Black writers. Scott Romine explores the inchoate and contradictory identities of Lost Cause southerners by focusing on different versions of Edward Pollard's iconic text. His delightful essay introduces "subintellectual history," or "the history of ideas that are not quite complicated, as articulated by southerners...

«At last, here is a book written by an Italian about the homeopathic but essential role that Italian artists, and among them, important writers, have played to introduce the digital transformation to Italians. Long before government or business, and least of all educators, took notice, artists, as was their wont for centuries, were the first to reveal the potential of the new technologies. Emanuela Patti not only pays them a long overdue tribute, but along the way revisits with care and engaging style the key features of that transformation. A wonderful read!» (Professor Derrick de Kerckhove, University of Toronto) «We were missing a systematic survey of e-literary arts in Italy. Emanuela Patti has filled that void. Indeed, her study is much more than a survey: it brilliantly connects semiotic theories of open textuality to the profound techno-cultural transformations of socio-political life from the 1960s to the present, from experimental writing to popular culture.» (Professor Massimo Riva, Brown University) In 1962, Umberto Eco published Opera aperta, setting the ground for a new wave of creative experimentation across the arts and media. The concept of «open work» – informed by systems theory, cybernetics, relativism, pragmatism and other influential disciplines of the time – was used by Eco to reconsider the work of art as a site for interactivity, collaboration and intermediality. Starting from this perspective, this book reconstructs the history of Italian electronic literature, looking at creative practices across literature, electronic and digital media from the early days of computers to the social media age. It examines how Italian writers, poets, literary critics and intellectuals have responded to each phase of the digital revolution, by enacting «poetics of openness» and «politics of intermediality». Case studies include Nanni Balestrini, Gianni Toti, Italo Calvino, Caterina Davinio, Wu Ming, Michela Murgia, Francesco Pecoraro, Roberto Saviano, Tommaso Pincio, Fabio Viola, Fabrizio Venerandi and Enrico Colombini. In some cases, literary experimentation with new technologies has taken a clear polemical stance towards mass media, globalisation, information society and late capitalism, in order to challenge and/or reconfigure artistic or social ontologies. In others, digital technologies have been used to enhance and extend the parameters and «languages» of literature.

Comprising nine original essays by specialists in material culture, book history, literary criticism, and curatorial and archival studies, this co-edited volume addresses a wide range of Bronte’s writing—from vignettes composed during her teenage years (“The Tea Party” and “The Secret”) to completed novels (The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette) and unfinished works (“Ashworth” and “Emma”). In bringing to life the surprising array of embodied experiences that shaped Bronte’s creative practice (from writing to book-making, painting, and drawing), Charlotte Bronte, Embodiment and the Material World forges new connections between historical, material, and textual approaches to the author’s work.

Andrew Lang (b. 1844–d. 1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, journalist, scholar and story anthologist active in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. He wrote in diverse fields and was highly intertextual in his thought and creative practice, making it difficult to compartmentalize his extensive literary output. Early in his career his principal ambition was to be a poet, and whilst a fellow at Merton College, Oxford University, he focused primarily on poetry, publishing works of his own as well as poetry in translation. Following the poor reception of his epic poem Helen of Troy (1882), however, his attention shifted to other forms of writing. Lang left Oxford in 1875 to marry Leonora Blanche Alleyne and settle in Kensington, London. In London he embarked on a career as a professional writer and journalist, producing regular columns for The Daily News, The Academy and The Saturday Review, and later a literary column for Longman’s Magazine titled “At the Sign of the Ship” which appeared monthly for nineteen years (1886–1905). Lang made a name early on as a classicist and translator, producing a prose version of Homer’s Odyssey with Samuel Henry Butcher in 1879, a volume that would remain in use in schools for decades. In this period Lang also embarked on several influential works of scholarship, publishing his collection of essays on anthropology and folklore, Custom and Myth, in 1884, and his two volume Myth, Ritual and Religion in 1887. Lang’s first work for children, The Princess Nobody, appeared in 1884, and marked the start of a productive decade of writing for children, in which he completed the majority of his children’s novels and began editing the successful series of fairy tale anthologies starting with The Blue Fairy Book in 1889 and The Red Fairy Book in 1890. This series, which Lang worked on in collaboration with his wife and a circle of translators and contributors, eventually ran to twelve volumes, with thirteen spinoff anthologies on various themes. In later years, however, Lang distanced himself from these publishing ventures, and his focus shifted to biography, history, literary criticism, and writings on psychical research. When Lang died of heart failure 20 July 1912 at Banchory in Scotland he was among the best known and most influential public intellectuals working in Britain.

This chapter outlines the ways in which Classical Reception Studies have developed from their origins in literary criticism, in order to become one of the most flourishing and wide-ranging strands of Classical Studies in the twenty-first century. Historical fiction has always been a central preoccupation of this field of scholarship. An exploration of its rich seams of scholarship—and indeed creative practice—provides a valuable insight into how Classical Reception Studies conceptualise our encounters with the past and our attempts to reconstruct it. The chapter also demonstrates the importance of the intersections between classical literature and ancient material culture, particularly in the example of Pompeii, where the creation of historical fiction has been one of the most powerful ways of attempting to restore and understand an antiquity whose presence in the literary and archaeological records is seductive, yet always incomplete.

Reviewed by: Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama ed. by Jennifer Jensen Wallach, and: The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin David A. Davis Ed. Jennifer Jensen Wallach. Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2015. 295 pp. $27.95. Toni Tipton-Martin. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. Austin: U of Texas P, 2015. 264 pp. $45.00. Food, like literature, philosophy, music, dance, fashion, technology, and art, is a cultural product. Scholars have focused significant attention on most of these products, exploring how they reflect evolving ideologies, circumstances of time and place, and changes in taste and aesthetics. Food, however, has been mostly marginalized within academic discourse until the recent past. Lately, scholars have begun applying the theories and methods of cultural criticism to food and foodways. Two of the inherent challenges of food scholarship make it especially important to the study of African American life and culture. First, food production involves [End Page 166] overlapping issues of class, gender, and labor. By studying African American food, we can examine forms of work and experience that have been crucial to African American life that are otherwise rendered invisible. Second, the source materials for foodways studies come from recipes, dishes, cookbooks, advertisements, oral histories, community traditions, government policies, literature, and history. Analyzing these sources together yields a kaleidoscopic rendering of African American life with levels of nuance, detail, and specificity often lost in grand narratives. A number of works have blazed a trail for the study of African American food and foodways. Maurice Manring’s Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (1998) uses the trope of Aunt Jemima to explain America’s enduring fascination with the mammy figure, and Doris Witt’s Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (2004) examines the association of black women with food within the structures of social, political, and economic life in America. Several histories published in the past few years have explored African American foodways and documented its development in concert with social history. These include Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (2008) by Frederick Douglass Opie; African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture (2008) edited by Anne Bower; High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (2012) by Jessica Harris; Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine (2013) by Adrian Miller; and Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2013) by Rebecca Sharpless. One of the best examples of the possibilities of cultural studies and African American foodways is Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006) by Psyche Williams-Forson. Her book combines traditional historiography, literary criticism, advertising history, art history, and media studies to interrogate the ways that chicken has been used as a signifier for blackness in America. Two new books contribute to this vibrant field of discourse, Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin. The essays in Wallach’s collection expend on the growth of African American food scholarship. They use a variety of methodologies, “ranging from library science to literary close readings to spatial analysis to archival research to media studies and beyond,” and the variety of approaches used in the collection (xxii). As a whole, the collection explores the ways of studying African American foodways, offering a survey of the current state of a dynamic field that is coming into maturity. The book contains fifteen essays, and the range of its approaches to food studies is a great strength, but it is also the book’s weakness. Many of the essays in the collection open novel conversations about a topic, but the essays are too short to lead to a thorough conclusion. The first essay in the collection, for example, argues that the association of enslaved West Africans with rice production has obscured the role of cassava root in the diets...