Recent Studies of the Chuci and Its Literary Afterlives

This article presents new directions of literary and media memory studies. It distinguishes between (1) the study of 'traumatic pasts', i.e. representations of war and violence in literature and other media, (2) diachronic and intermedial approaches to 'literary afterlives' and (3) recent insights into the inherent transculturality of memory and their consequences for literary and media studies.

Reviewed by: Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Leckie, and: Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development by Joanna Hofer-Robinson Sarah Bilston (bio) Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Barbara Leckie; pp. 303. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, $79.95, £66.00. Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development, by Joanna Hofer-Robinson; pp. 264. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £75.00, £24.99 paper, $110.00, $39.95 paper. London still draws our fascinated eye. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jenny, looking for the city through the "blown grass," we seek out and try to make sense of a London at once real and mythical, a city that exists beneath the feet as well as on the page, in song and dreams and cultural memory (The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by William Rossetti, vol. 1 [Ellis and Elvey, 1890], 131). Generations of historians have explored and cataloged London's buildings, infrastructure, demographics, and, more recently, its heterogeneous communities, its startling "congregation of diversity" (as Roy Porter put it in London: A Social History [Hamish Hamilton, 1994], 10). More recently, scholars like Erika Rappaport have turned to how, in the face of London's multiplicity, the idea of a city was produced discursively and in daily practices such as shopping and travel. Barbara Leckie's Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Joanna Hofer-Robinson's Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development make sense afresh of London, beginning with a deep appreciation of the place of their scholarship in a tradition that can feel almost as vast, venerable, and complex as the city itself. Both writers focus specifically on the part the novel played in dissecting nineteenth-century urban and [End Page 348] architectural problems. Hofer-Robinson sees Dickensian tropes playing a crucial role in effecting real-world transformations, while Leckie explores three well-known novels that, she contends, respond to the failure of documentary writings to bring about social and architectural reform. Leckie's meticulously researched text is especially interested in the gaze—the fascinated, exploratory eye—and in how what was seen was framed to give impetus to architectural reform movements. The first two chapters of Open Houses work on a granular level to uncover the politics of nineteenth-century architectural debates, specifically those concerning the housing of the poor. Leckie points out that key social reformers produced detailed documentary examinations of housing interiors as a means of inspiring empathetic interest in the populace. Many reformers were also motivated, she adds, by a commitment to "the architectural idea," the theory that the built environment directly influences human lives and that advances in architecture can produce demonstrable social improvement (5). "Looking into" poor home interiors and encouraging readers to look, too, enabled (or was thought to enable) urban reforms that would better the health, well-being, and prospects of the residents (6). Yet, as Leckie argues, the act of "looking inside" called attention to the disturbing permeability of the boundary between inside and outside in low-income areas, problematizing the business of the exposé; perhaps what was seen was not so hidden after all, in which case what was the business of looking really worth (32)? Writers increasingly evinced doubt about the exposé's ability to generate change, and it is here that Leckie makes some of her most provocative claims, suggesting that the novel's evolution may have been directly shaped by a growing loss of faith in the exposé's potential: "frustrated by the lack of traction the documentary exposé approach was getting," Leckie suggests, novelists began "to see their genre as offering an alternative approach to petitions for social reform" (18). Locating "the discourse on housing [as] a central and shaping component" of the mid-century novel (19), Open Houses seeks to return heated discussion about the housing of the poor to our understanding of three well-known fictions: Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James...

Sara Coleridge married Henry Nelson Coleridge at Crosthwaite Church, Keswick on September 3, 1829. event--some seven years in the making--was a truly remarkable affair. Robert Southey, Sara's surrogate father, gave the bride away. John Wordsworth officiated. Attended by Dora Wordsworth and Edith Southey, Sara looked beautiful, as friends and family had observed for years. So began the marriage and formal bond that would define Sara's life. As Earl Leslie Griggs wrote, Sara Coleridge loved only once, but with an intensity and devotion which made her marriage to Henry Nelson Coleridge idyllic and his death a major catastrophe (viii). Sara's marriage continues to define her because it is associated with her father' literary afterlife. S. T. Coleridge's legacy depended upon the success of Sara and Henry's editorial work; the affirmation of their marriage was necessary to the affirmation of his memory. Yet, if Sara is defined by her relationship with Henry and their editorial collaboration (what Alan Vardy has described as the posthumous process of constructing Coleridge) then the independence of her dreams, desires, and intellect suffer. While writing Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought (2014), asking who Sarah Coleridge was in her own right, found myself wondering if indeed she loved only once. answer reveals Sara's many romantic affections and brings to light the Coleridgean idea of love. Sara inherited her father's genius and fashioned herself as heir to his thought. He had defined love variously throughout his life, but a common theme was the unity of being. One 1820 notebook entry explains the concept well: Love is the Desire of all my Being to be united to some other Individual (conceived as alone capable of perfecting my Being ... the means which Nature, Reason, & Duty, permit or dictate--the means observing the same harmonious relation to each other, as the Body, the Soul, and the Spirit do--and with a similar Coadunation & due Subordination (CN 4:4730). (1) In Coleridgean terms, love springs from the desire for unity with the other. Sara's earliest experiences of love were familial and associated with her mother especially. Sara's account of her strong attachment to her mother in the unfinished Autobiography has all the marks of deep that one might expect between a mother and a six-year-old daughter living in close quarters. Autobiography reveals the tension Sara felt between her love for her mother and the hopes of her otherwise negligent father. Her account of a month away from Greta Hall (and her mother), while staying with her father and the Wordsworths, illustrates the inherent ambiguities of parental love: I think my dear Father was anxious that should learn to love him and the Wordsworths & their children, and not cling so exclusively to my mother and all around me at home. He was therefore much annoyed when on my mother's coming to Allan Bank flew to her and wished not to be separated from her any more. (261). Her father's accusation--Sara displayed a want of affection in the act--stung with the venom of jealousy. Sara compares the feeling to a debt owed to her father: The sense that you have done very wrong, or at least given great offence, you know not how or why--that you are dunned for some payment of love and feeling which you know not how to produce or to demonstrate on a sudden--chills the heart & fills it with perplexity and bitterness (261). event shaped Sara's thinking, and likely contributed to her father's lifelong interest in the love relationship between parents and children. If Sara's relationship with her mother bothered S. T. Coleridge, then it had little impact on his philosophy. He frequently comments on the relationship between the knowledge of self and the care of a parent--particularly the relationship between an infant and its mother: The first dawnings of its humanity will break forth in the Eye that connects the Mother's face with the warmth of the mother's bosom, the support of the mother's arms. …

This collection of essays on the 2nd-century Roman miscellanist Aulus Gellius, the author of the Attic Nights, is the first multi-author study of his work in any language. It brings together the work of established and younger scholars with different specialities and approaches in order to study various facets both of Gellius' intellectual outlook and that of his later readers. The book is dived into three parts. Part I, ‘Contexts and Achievements’, examines the use of Greek by Gellius and other Romans, in particular the leading orator Fronto and Apuleius; the conflicting criteria of Fronto and Gellius for lexical choice outside the standard Latin vocabulary; Gellius' linguistic skills in etymology; his literary skills in narrative; and his relation to Roman antiquarianism. Part II, ‘Ideologies’, considers Gellius' work against the expectations aroused by writing a miscellany and his claim to offer moral education — which proves acceptable once stated in less than absolutist terms — and compares his attitude to intellectuals with that of Apuleius. Part III, ‘Reception’, reviews various aspects of Gellius' literary afterlife down to the 17th century, ranging from medieval florilegia and a baroque-era song, through false ascriptions and lost manuscripts, to his presence in Montaigne and other Renaissance French authors, humanism, and the Scientific Revolution.

There are two instances in the entire Hebrew Bible in which women feature as the to write. “One is Esther (Esther 9:29) and the other is:” כתב subject of the verb Jezebel (1 Kgs 21:8). This paper takes this fact as a starting point from which to illuminate the narrative and thematic junctures of writing, power and gender in Esther and its literary afterlife. It utilizes the hermeneutical framework of feminist literary theory, as well as drawing upon narratology and linguistic theory related to gender and power, and textual theory related to metatextuality and intertextuality, in order to explore the ways in which the narrator, the canonization process and the reception history of the text have functioned to constrain and restrain Esther’s authorial identity and status, and conversely the places and spaces where it has been developed and emphasised. Key areas of exploration include the writing culture of the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic periods, creative rewritings of Esther in the Targums and in Rabbinic Haggadah, and a consideration of the implications of the fact that Esther and Jezebel are the only explicitly identified female writers in the Hebrew Bible (Esther. (9:29, 1 Kings 21:8–9)).

Reviewed by: Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet by Paul S. Atkins Terry Kawashima Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet by Paul S. Atkins. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2017. Pp. x + 265. $68.00 cloth. Fujiwara no Teika (藤原定家, hereafter Teika; 1162–1241) is, undoubtedly, one of the most famous waka 和歌1 poets in Japanese history. In the past two decades, there have been substantial English-language studies of well-known literary projects that involve Teika. For instance, Laurel Rasplica Rodd has recently published a milestone translation of the complete Shinkokin wakashū 新古今和歌集 (1205; also known as Shinkokinshū 新古今集), the imperially commissioned anthology compiled under Teika's editorial leadership; Robert N. Huey studies this anthology contextually in much detail in his book The Making of Shinkokinshū.2 Another set of scholarship deals with the popular Ogura hyakunin isshu 小倉百人一首, a collection of one waka each by one hundred poets said to have been selected by Teika and later immortalized as a karuta かるた game with decorated cards; Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin isshu in Word and Image by Joshua Mostow is a representative example.3 Another productive approach, epitomized by Steven D. Carter's Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History, is to understand Teika's figure through his genealogical legacy.4 But as Atkins aptly notes, surprisingly, there has not been an in-depth English-language monograph dedicated entirely to the life and works of Teika. This monograph thus represents a much-needed, classic single-author study that fills this void thoroughly and with great care. As Atkins clearly spells out in the introduction, his main question is: "Why Teika?"—that is, What is Teika's significance within and beyond his lifetime, in literary realms as well as in the larger cultural arena? The answers to this question are provided from various angles in the chapters that follow. [End Page 269] Chapter 1 provides Teika's broad biographical sketch, starting with his family background and noting key life moments, including the trajectory of his sometimes-fraught career, his famous literary accomplishments, his complicated relationships with powerful patrons, such as Kujō Yoshitsune 九条良経 (1169–1206) and Emperor Gotoba 後鳥羽 (1180–1239), and the impact of events, such as the Jishō-Juei Wars 治承寿永の乱 (1180–1185; more popularly known as the Genpei 源平 War) and the Jōkyū Rebellion 承久の乱 (1221). The next two chapters delineate the defining characteristics of Teika's poetry. Chapter 2 explores Teika's poetic style by outlining the specific strategies through which he and his allies distanced their work from the pejorative label daruma uta 達磨歌 (Bodhidharma verse)—verses that are too opaque to comprehend. Instead, they distinguished themselves as innovators who used canonical words in new ways (such as the use of inverted syntax or verses ending with a noun), guided by a steadfast sense of fuzei 風情 (discriminating taste) while aspiring to the ideal of yūgen 幽玄 (often defined as mystery and depth). Chapter 3 takes a closer look at Teika's stated poetics as gleaned from an array of his writings. This project involves first an assessment of the various texts that have been associated with Teika. Atkins provides a methodical taxonomy of these texts, listing them from the most to the least trustworthy in terms of authorial attribution. He then organizes Teika's scattered comments into a coherent poetics by relying solely on the most dependable sources. Atkins's analysis shows that Teika privileged poetry of antiquity (though not too antique) and encouraged both lexical conservatism and allusive poetic quotations (honkadori 本歌取り), but the poet also suggested that poetic words should express new sentiments and create an out-of-the-ordinary atmosphere. Chapter 4 turns to Teika's sinographic writings and works about China. After surveying a number of such texts, both prose and poetry, Atkins critiques past scholarly positionings of China vis-à-vis Japan, concluding that the cultural relationship was less fraught or rivalrous than previously claimed. Rather, he asserts, Teika operated smoothly across a range of hybrid literary languages within the Japanese and Chinese milieu. Chapter 5 traces the history of Teika's literary afterlife, starting with his contemporaries and ending with ours. This chapter provides a sweeping look at important moments...

Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale metropolitan demolitions, modernisation or reform projects in the mid-nineteenth century and tracks a Dickensian vocabulary in these discussions across multiple media and fora, including written commentaries, parliamentary debates, theatre and the visual arts. It argues that tropes, characters and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly remediated to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about the urban environment and linked social problems. In so doing, it poses the questions: what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives? And can we trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit?

Dante metamorphoses: episodes in a literary afterlife

From the end of the Roman Republic to the French Revolution Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome, was a recurrent figure in writing about religion and the social order. In the first century B.C.E. he was celebrated for using religion to civilize the early Romans and became a symbol of the gods' favor to the Roman state. Latin Church fathers subsequently denigrated him as the personification of the socioreligious system they were bent on overthrowing. After the triumph of Christianity his legacy ceased to be of concern, and in due course humanist intellectuals began to make him an object of admiration again. From the Renaissance on he exemplified the effective use of religion to mold nations. Although a number of texts that deal with Numa have received scholarly scrutiny, the trajectory of his literary afterlife has never been traced. This amounts to a prehistory of the modern idea of civil religion—an idea that, for all its familiarity, has remained ill defined and of uncertain provenance.

Reviewed by: F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature by William J. Maxwell Tamara Slankard William J. Maxwell. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. xiv + 367 pp. Black writers were targeted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for over fifty years in a systematic attempt to undermine their cultural influence and to paralyze racial equality movements as a result. William J. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes lays out an airtight case against the Bureau and Hoover’s G-Men, demonstrating how writers like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka were spied on, surveilled, and harassed throughout their careers. Maxwell examines nearly 14,000 pages of FBI files on some of the most significant writers of twentieth-century African American literature to show how the “Hoover boys … aimed to make a national public enemy of the Harlem Renaissance” (29). He also argues that this campaign of destruction was only partially successful. Undoubtedly, countless “writers and works were lost” to covert modes of censorship and overt, strong-arm tactics of “the FBI’s culture war on African American letters” (218), but many others survived to tell the tale in more or less thinly veiled ways. Afro-modernist writers were well aware of the gaze always on them, and they engaged with the censor actively and sometimes openly. Maxwell argues convincingly that at the core of Hoover’s practices was not only a desire for “nationwide public approval” (29) but also a warped recognition of the power of literature to influence and shape the national consciousness. As his “librarian-pirates” set to work seizing “entire institutional libraries” during the Hoover Raids (50) and his G-Men kept close tabs on the comings and goings of Afro-modernist writers, Hoover put many more agents to the task of “ghostreading” every shred of African American writing they could get their gloved hands on—before publication, in many instances—from 1919 to 1972. The sum total of these practices was meant to garner “knowledge of all published threats to the state, especially threats to the state of the Bureau’s reputation,” an agenda Maxwell calls “Total [End Page 568] Literary Awareness” (100). But at the height of the Black Power and Black Arts era, Bureau practices extended beyond the acquisition of knowledge and even beyond duplicitous, state-sponsored violence. None of these tactics satisfied what Maxwell contends was Hoover’s and the FBI’s “hunger to speak the foe’s literary language” (113). And so the Bureau undertook a kind of twisted ghostwriting, which Maxwell aptly calls “blackface minstrelsy’s literary afterlife” (4). By appropriating and adulterating “Black Nationalist vernaculars,” Maxwell explains, “[d]ozens of G-Men stole time from the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s to counterfeit … hundreds of poems, letters, comics, political platforms, and at least one entire newspaper” (113). In pen-mightier-than-sword fashion, this phony genre not only garnered clout for “Hooverite antiradicalism inside FBI headquarters,” Maxwell argues, but for much of the twentieth century it also posed a genuine threat to literary expression and to social justice (124). F.B. Eyes is more than just a historical laundry list of the FBI’s racist practices. Perhaps two of its most compelling assertions are these: first, that the power of Hoover’s FBI was tied directly to his ruthless agenda of containment for African American literature and its writers and, second, that the success of this agenda was tied directly to the “model citizen’s” willingness to see Hoover as a literary as well as a moral authority. Maxwell illustrates just how effectively the Bureau was able to couple racism with anti-Communism in the minds of midcentury white Americans and just how easily author and speaker could be elided so that any attempt at creative criticism of the Man automatically meant the author was guilty of at least literary treason. Hoover’s attack on African American literature happened with the aid of the 1940 Smith Act, which made it criminal merely to express antigovernment sentiments. It also happened right under the nose of...

Bluestocking Catherine Talbot is now perhaps best known as the closest and most "angelic" friend of the learned Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, poet, translator, and prolific letter-writer. But Talbot's literary afterlife as a relatively marginal figure in Carter's illustrious career is hardly accidental. Hers are the only letters placed alongside Carter's in the volumes published by Montagu Pennington after Carter's death, and yet she is introduced to us (and remains throughout) Carter's "deceased friend." The letters chart her painful decline and then repeatedly eulogize her after death, keeping her memory alive. Though the letters are obsessed with Catherine Talbot, living and dead, Talbot's is always a voice from the past, from memory, from the margins, and that voice serves an important function: it becomes a way for Carter to represent the unrepresentable, death.

For the Romans, Mercury held some particular narrative and socio-cultural implications during the First Punic War and was connected to a nexus of thought with specific resonance during a markedly naval conflict. An underappreciated testimonium of Naevius’ Bellum Punicum (c.220 BCE) suggests that he crafted a version of the god who built Aeneas’ ship and led the hero from Troy to Italy. This understanding of the god’s maritime role in the epic and its literary afterlives are traced out in later texts and objects in order best to reconstruct a largely lost characterization of the god in Roman culture. Focus is given to Naevius, Vergil, Silius Italicus, Marcellus of Side, and the visual narratives found on the Augustan Tabula Iliaca Capitolina.

This article argues that Charlotte Brontë effected a thorough mediation of Emily Brontë’s authorial image after her death by becoming her sister’s editor. For the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte extensively edited Emily’s poetry and wrote an influential ‘Biographical Notice’ and ‘Preface’. She also composed new lines for some of the poems, establishing herself as a true co-author of her sister’s work. Her purpose, as this article argues, was to soften the ‘coarse’, masculine image that the critics’ reviews had attributed to the writer of Wuthering Heights. Thus, Charlotte created the image of a more innocent, female poet, in a deliberate (?) attempt to replace the existing view of Emily as a rough, unfeminine writer.

This essay concerns Māui’s famous, canonical encounter, known only from Aotearoa (New Zealand), with one of Māori myth’s most important deities: Hine-nui-(i)-te-pō, ‘Great lady of the night’, queen of the underworld and, some would say, goddess of death. In particular, this essay traces Hine-nui-te-pō’s literary afterlife, focusing on formulaic descriptions oft her physiognomy from Te Rangikāheke’s “Tama a Rangi” (an 1849 manuscript) through to Karen Healey’s young-adult novel Guardian of the Dead (2010) and Barry Powell’s World Myth (2014). After introducing Hine-nui-te-pō and her place in Polynesian myth, I detail the textual history of the standard (and, I would argue, now formulaic) description of Hine-nui-te-pō’s physical form, comprising four recurring attributes: (i) eyes of, or like, greenstone (pounamu), (ii) hair of, or like, sea-kelp, (iii) teeth of, or like, obsidian and (iv) a mouth of, or like that of, a barracouta. First, I present a new transcription and translation of the relevant passage of Te Rangikāheke’s “Tama a Rangi”, taken from a facsimile of the manuscript. Then follows an account of the textual history of this passage, through George Grey’s various publications to Agathe Thornton’s 1992 edition and translation. I argue that subsequent editions and translations of this passage subtly misrepresent Te Rangikāheke’s handwritten Māori text. Next, I survey scholarly and literary receptions of this formulaic description, revealing that descriptions of Hine-nui-te-pō derive from, develop and indeed at times depart from Te Rangikāheke’s text; and that Hine-nui-te-pō has over time become a locus of progressive mythopoesis. On the one hand, she is a multiform from whom uniformity across different texts, genres, authors and languages should not be expected. On the other hand, I conclude, it is vital that we not forget Te Rangikāheke’s important but little-known account.

"Dickens and demolition: literary afterlives and mid-nineteenth-century urban development." Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 41(2), pp. 225–226