Tutankhamun’s mummy equipment: wonderful and not so wonderful things

Reviewed by: The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead Kelsey Squire The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. By Melissa J. Homestead. Oxford UP, 2021. 408 pp. Biographical approaches to literature rely so often on facts drawn from archival materials—letters, photographs, birth certificates, ticket stubs—that it can be easy to overlook the role that interpretation plays in biographical studies of authors and their works. Which facts are valued? What evidence is dismissed as unimportant? In The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, author Melissa J. Homestead addresses one of the largest interpretive gaps in Willa Cather studies: Cather's relationship with longtime partner, Edith Lewis. The Only Wonderful Things provides admirers of Cather's fiction with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of Cather's life and work. More broadly, The Only Wonderful Things will be useful to scholars whose work intersects with the fields of biography, authorship, LBGTQ studies, and early twentieth-century US literature and culture. In her personal and compelling introduction, Homestead outlines how the role of Edith Lewis came to be minimized—and in some cases, erased—in the study of Cather's work. As Homestead explains, "[t]he image of Willa Cather as an autonomous artist, detached from the market and from the contemporary [End Page 131] social world, has made it difficult for Cather biographers and critics to see Edith Lewis"; and Homestead admits that she herself as a younger scholar "fell into the trap of not seeing [Lewis] or of misperceiving what I saw" (3). Questions like "was Cather really a lesbian?" and "were Cather and Lewis friends, coworkers, or lovers?" have haunted biographical studies of Cather's life and work. Homestead summarizes how scholars like Phyllis Robinson and Sharon O'Brien first began to identify Cather as a lesbian in the 1980s. Homestead goes on to discuss how critics misinterpreted evidence at the Cather-Lewis gravesite in Jaffrey, New Hampshire—including rumors that Lewis was buried at Cather's feet—and how these errors minimized Lewis's role in Cather's life. Homestead also draws on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Christopher Nealon, and Heather Love to explore claims that Cather and Lewis were closeted and that they kept their relationship a secret. Is it appropriate to label Cather and Lewis's relationship as lesbian, then? Homestead argues, convincingly, for this label. Drawing on the scholarship of historian Lillian Faderman, Homestead encourages readers to distinguish "lesbian" as an adjective from lesbian as a noun, arguing that this manner of speaking best describes Cather and Lewis's relationship (7). Homestead provides a persuasive model for how to think through historical changes of language that defined same-sex relationships from those of the late nineteenth century to our contemporary moment. While the "Cather as lesbian" question may have dominated popular public narratives of Cather, Homestead's other label for the Cather-Lewis relationship—"creative partnership"—is equally important. While The Only Wonderful Things draws on biographical approaches to literature, it is not, as Homestead clarifies, a full biography of either Willa Cather or Edith Lewis. Homestead explains her organization thusly: "I present a series of scenes from their partnership in chapters organized both chronologically and thematically" (2). This thematic organization runs the risk of being confusing to readers (jumps in the timeline need to be tracked carefully), but through Homestead's deft handling, the thematic organization allows her more expansive leeway in providing cohesive portraits of Cather and Lewis's lives across time. Chapter 1 provides essential details about Edith Lewis's life and family history, starting with her birth in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1881. By [End Page 132] describing the lives of Lewis's parents, Henry and Lillie Lewis, Homestead provides a nuanced portrait of middle-class life in the late nineteenth-century Midwest. In particular, Homestead traces how Henry and Lillie Lewis "recreated or created New England-based social networks in the West" through their professional and personal lives (19). Homestead also presents a detailed discussion of Edith Lewis's writerly inclinations by discussing the stories and sketches...

Reviewed by: The Most Wonderful Thing in the World by Vivian French Jeannette Hulick French, Vivian The Most Wonderful Thing in the World; illus. by Angela Barrett. Candlewick, 2015 32p ISBN 978-0-7636-7501-1 $18.99 R* Gr. 3-5 A wise old man advises his king and queen that the best way to find a suitable husband for their daughter, Lucia, is to “find the young man who can show you the most wonderful thing in the world.” As a parade of suitors ensues, Lucia takes advantage of her parents’ distraction by would-be husbands to explore her city under the guidance of Wise Old Angelo’s grandson, Salvatore (who does not know her royal identity). While unsuitable suitors come and go, Lucia and Salvatore wander and fall in love, but after discovering Lucia’s parentage, Salvatore despairs at his chances of being with her. When he watches the king and queen interact with their daughter, though, the answer to the riddle comes to him—the most wonderful thing in the world is Lucia herself—and a happy wedding follows. According to information on the jacket flap, this is a retelling of a story that Barrett remembers from her youth, and French’s version is elegant and lyrical with touches of humor. Barrett’s refined watercolor illustrations evoke picturesque Italian vistas and Edwardian-era fashion, and the softening of the edges of the figures and backgrounds creates a dreamy mood that complements the romantic tale; the intricate detailing of the [End Page 303] scenes and the ornateness of the frames that surround both text and illustrations makes this best enjoyed at close range. This is a polished gem, to be savored and sighed over by fairy-tale lovers of all ages. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Jason Thompson, <i>Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology</i>. Vol. 1: <i>From Antiquity to 1881</i>. Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2015. Pp. 352. US$39.95 (cloth).

Reviewed by: The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead Jada Ach Melissa J. Homestead, The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. New York: Oxford UP, 2021. 394 pp. Hardcover, $39.95; e-book, $14.39. After spending eighteen years researching the life of Edith Lewis, Melissa J. Homestead learned “to see what should have been obvious all along”: “Lewis’s instrumental presence at [Willa] Cather’s side rather than at her feet” (2). Organized both thematically and chronologically, The Only Wonderful Things depicts Lewis and Cather not only as “life partners” but also as “literary collaborators” (2). Homestead depends on extensive and illuminating archival research to render visible Lewis’s artistic, editorial, financial, and emotional contributions to her “creative partnership” with Cather, a term the author borrows from Lillian Faderman’s To Believe in Women (8–9). Such an intimate and generative partnership, Homestead claims, challenges us to rethink Cather’s oeuvre through a collaborative lens. According to Homestead, who serves as director of The Cather Project and associate editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, critics and biographers have often characterized Lewis—when they characterize her at all—as a kind of assistant to Cather. Even more frequently, scholars tend to depict Lewis as “a nonentity or a mystery, or they draw thumbnail sketches of a fussy, slightly hysterical woman,” Homestead adds (8). As a corrective project, The Only Wonderful Things sets out to define Lewis as a successful writer, editor, and “modern career woman” in her own right (3). When it comes to Cather’s writing life, Lewis’s support and influence were paramount, Homestead asserts throughout. In one of the most provocative chapters, “‘Our Wonderful Adventures in the Southwest’: Willa Cather and Edith Lewis’s Southwestern Collaborations,” Homestead argues that Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor’s House, and other western regional works should largely be viewed as “collaborative texts” (115), which challenges the image many have in their minds of Cather as a “solitary genius” (13). In fact, Lewis’s “handwriting appears all over a working typed draft” of The Professor’s House, leading Homestead to refer to Lewis as a kind of coauthor. In the case [End Page 438] of this and other works by Cather, it is frequently “Lewis’s language that readers have known for nearly a century as characteristic of Cather’s style,” Homestead says (139). Later in her life Lewis even confessed to her nurse that she wrote an entire chapter of Cather’s Shadows on the Rock. This radical reframing of literary authorship does more than just demonstrate the amazing potential of creative collaboration; through close examinations of manuscripts, letters, sketches, photographs, and other materials in the vast Cather archive, Homestead argues that Lewis achieves the creative agency that many critics have either overlooked or denied altogether. In addition to helping to write, edit, and revise Cather’s work, Lewis’s financial stability as a magazine editor and advertising copyeditor gave her partner the ability to take creative risks and dedicate herself to her craft. “As a pilot and anchor, Lewis made Cather’s New York-centered life possible,” Homestead argues in the second chapter, highlighting the fact that Lewis’s position as assistant editor of Every Week gave the two women yet another opportunity to actively engage their “creative partnership.” Every Week frequently published western genre fiction, Homestead tells us, and it is probable that these stories informed the development of one of Cather’s most celebrated novels, My Ántonia. “Lewis’s magazine editorial work and Cather’s novel writing were not parallel activities running on separate tracks,” the author claims. “Instead, the two Nebraskans were thinking together about their home region and how to present it to a national audience through both words and pictures” (106). Every project that depends on the archive must grapple with the gaps that exist in the archive. Near the end of the book, Homestead admits that her “account of Cather and Lewis’s life together would be richer” had she access to more letters between the two women; currently, only one letter...

Reviewed by: Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan Randolph “Mike” Campbell Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. By Stephen Harrigan. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 925. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In 2015, the University of Texas Press announced an ambitious publishing project entitled the Texas Bookshelf, which would begin with a new overview of the Lone Star State’s history and continue with thirteen other volumes covering key subjects such as politics, business, music, and sports. Big Wonderful Thing, a title taken from artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s first reaction to seeing Texas, launches the series in the highly readable fashion that those familiar with Stephen Harrigan’s work as a journalist, essayist, and novelist would expect. The book is huge, but it deals with a huge subject—the story of Texas from its prehistory until the first decades of the twenty-first century. Harrigan intends to be inclusive of the great variety of people who built Texas and to tell their stories in ways that would interest and entertain readers today. Accordingly, he begins most of the book’s fifty-six chapters with a vignette describing an individual or a small group who played [End Page 82] notable roles in an important episode or development in Texas’s past. For example, from the Spanish colonial era, famous figures such as Cabeza de Vaca and LaSalle are featured, but so are persons such as María de Jesús de Agreda, “The Lady in Blue,” who likely are not so familiar to most readers. Perhaps the best chapter title of all is reserved for the one dealing with James E. Ferguson, the only Texas governor forced from office by impeachment. It is simply titled “Pa.” Harrigan tells stories of many famous adventures of Texas’s past, such as the revolt against Mexico, the nearly ten years as an independent republic, the cattle drives and great ranches of the late nineteenth century, and the oil booms of the early twentieth century. However, he does not shy away from the ugly aspects of Texas’s past. For example, the chapter on Reconstruction begins with the story of the murder of Lucy Grimes, a freedwoman, by two former Confederate soldiers in Harrison County, a murder that went unpunished in spite of the efforts of the local Freedman’s Bureau agent to bring the killers to trial. He also recounts the brutal treatment handed out by Texas Rangers on the border to sediciosos, people of Mexican descent who were accused of conspiracy and violence against the United States during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. Virtually all of the biographical vignettes are informative and good reading. For example, sketches of Heman Sweatt and Emma Tenayuca offer fine introductions to minority leaders often unknown in Anglo Texas. Some, such as the one on Lyndon B. Johnson, use the extensive research of others to paint indelible pictures of their subjects. And finally, the notorious, such as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the much-romanticized killers during the early 1930s, and Charles Whitman, the infamous shooter from the UT Campus Tower in 1966, have their places. Taken together, the biographical sketches create a great impression of Texas as a spectacular place populated over the years by people who in general never knew how to be dull. What Harrigan does not do (and, in fairness, never intended to do) is offer any general interpretation that provides Texans with what historians like to call a “usable past.” Such a history seeks to inform a people about where they have been with the intent of helping them understand where they are now as a guide to what they might try to do next. Big Wonderful Thing is a popular history that does exactly what the author intended: provide highly readable and entertaining coverage of the sweep of Texas history. By contrast, an academic history of the Lone Star State would offer an interpretive account that might ask, for example, if Texas’s heritage is essentially southern, western, or something of an amalgam of the two with a strong Hispanic influence, best called southwestern. Answers to this question differ, and all are hedged...

* Introduction - Tea with a Mummy: The Consumer's View of Egypt's Immemorial Appeal* Mummymania for the Masses: Is Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy's Curse?* How to Stage Aida?: Vicent Lleo's Operetta, La Corte de Faraon* Egypt in Hollywood: Pharaohs of the Fifties* Lost in Time and Space: Ancient Egypt in museums* Acquisitions at the British Museum* Selling Egypt: Encounters at Khan el-Khalili* Egypt's Past Regenerated by Its Own People* What do Tourists Learn of Egypt?* 'Wonderful Things': Publishing Egypt in Word and Image* Hijacked Images: Ancient Egypt in French Commercial Advertising* Ancient Egypt on the Small Screen: From Fact to Faction in the UK* Alternative Egypts

Reviewed by: Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology by Eleanor Dobson Kathleen Riley Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology. By Eleanor Dobson. (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. xiv+265 pp. £80. ISBN 978-2-4744-7624-9. In her Introduction to Writing the Sphinx, Eleanor Dobson makes an important distinction in terms of classical reception: 'It is [its] relative popular appeal and accessibility that distinguishes Egyptology from comparable disciplines, such as the study of ancient Greece or Rome' (p. 3). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the focal period of Dobson's fascinating monograph—Egypt infiltrated the popular imagination with a fluidity, ubiquity, and marketability that the Graeco-Roman world, for all its aesthetic allure and erudite cachet, simply could not match. As an idea, and very often a fantasy, it bridged highbrow and lowbrow culture with tremendous ease, from Decadence to detective fiction and from Fokine's Cléopâtre to Wilson and Keppel's sand dance (the latter a notable omission from Dobson's otherwise thorough investigation), literally leaving its exotic imprint on everything from Oscar Wilde's gold-tipped cigarettes to the gloves of 1920s flappers sporting Tutankhamen cartouches. As Dobson demonstrates, this period of 'Egyptomania' coincided with, and was nourished by, such phenomena as the democratization of tourism (thanks to Thomas Cook & Son), museum patronage, and book ownership; the commodification of the ancient artefact as an affordable, wearable luxury; and the unprecedented reach and speed of mass media. On the last point, the Tutankhamen excavations, commenced in 1922, were the first archaeological dig to be recorded using moving-picture cameras. Dobson begins her analysis with the highly atmospheric account by Howard Carter and A. C. Mace (in the first volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter) of the moment in which Carter peered through the darkness into the tomb of Tutankhamen. The two most enduring and spellbinding phrases in that fabled account are 'everywhere the glint of gold' and 'wonderful things' (quoted p. 21). Rat the passage reads as a romantic adventure tale, rather than the more prosaic excavation diary from which it originated, is the result of Carter's own storytelling sensibilities and the assistance provided by popular novelist Percy White, who, Dobson indicates, 'may [thus] have had a hand in rewriting history' (p. 24). Re collaboration between Carter and White encapsulates Dobson's principal thesis, namely 'the substantial and mutual debt that Egyptologists and authors owed to each other across a period of decades' (p. 5). Another defining aspect of this collaborative relationship, and its impact on [End Page 292] the popular imagination, is Harry Burton's photographs, which accompanied the text of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, with their almost cinematic composition and lighting. Witness, in particular, the dramatic chiaroscuro of Burton's image depicting Carter 'opening the door of the second shrine' (fig. 1.1), a scene of artfully posed but nonetheless breathtaking wonder. Dobson has, appropriately, excavated a wealth of sources to reveal more fully 'these cultural synapses' (p. 225), as she calls them, the creative connections and conflicts between Egyptologists, writers, and visual artists. In evocative detail she explains how the Egyptological engagement of serious scholars and writers of fiction alike was characterized by a fascination with, and desire to emulate, 'the materiality of ancient Egypt itself' (p. 41). With an admirable set of illustrations she relates how the bindings of all manner of Egyptological texts as well as contemporaneous fiction 'relied upon the glamour of gold, sensation, theatricality and Gothic thrills' (p. 51). She devotes subsequent chapters to the increasing visibility (and physicality) of hieroglyphs in public and private spaces; to the talismanic aura of Marie Corelli's Egyptian necklace; and to Egyptian antiquity as an intoxicating sensory, and especially olfactory, experience to be achieved by ingesting the dust and effluvia of mummies or, more palatably, by incense, tobacco, and perfume. In her final chapter, Dobson explores a particularly intriguing form of cultural exchange or overlap, that between Egyptologists and practitioners of esotericism, uncovering along the way a conviction advanced in the pages of fiction...

The past fifty years, 1945–1995, are unique in the history of physics. During these rare decades, our perceptions and expectations as professional physicists have been shaped. Thus, it is our perception that over the past three years there has been a job crisis. Why? Because it is our expectation that new PhDs in physics ought to move directly into permanent positions that allow them to do the specialized research that is their heart’s desire. Over the past fifty years, these same unusual cold-war years, something wonderful has been going on—going on right under our noses and, with few exceptions, we have not seen it. This wonderful thing is still going on and many indicators suggest that this wonderful thing has the potential for getting even better. The objective of my remarks today is three-fold. First, I shall identify the wonderful thing that is going on right now; second, I shall attempt to show that the present and future are made to order for us physicists and that the wonderful thing currently going on is going to be enhanced beyond what it is today; and finally, I shall comment briefly on some implications for the undergraduate physics major.

Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, at the Met, and: Dear Honeysuckled, Dear Fire Department Marcela Sulak (bio) … with some difficulty [I] obtained seeds from the gardener, and these [I] planted in [my] throat, ears, mouth … elsa schiaparelli To have a face covered with flowers would indeedbe a wonderful thing: bright, metallic insects around the chosen throat,and sprays of crinkled roses in the hair, to weara shoe on my head, to cover my shoulders with monkey fur. My daughteris drawing the clear plastic shoes with the plasticpink heels and plastic tears of chandelier pendants (Prada) and the pink dresswith butterflies. She pulls my journal from my hands,Write pink on top, she commands. All her models accompanied by babies,babies in dresses' bellies, like her father's wife's. Herfavorite hat is the lynx head and paws, with its jaw opened, blood on the chin. To have a face covered with stars would indeed bea wonderful thing, a constellation on your naked chest, to have spilleda cosmos onto your dinner jacket, to havebeen lifted by buoyant shoulder pads through ambiguity. Men respectstrong women. They do not necessarily lovethem. Schiaparelli should know. I want to stay here forever with Daddysays my daughter. I know. I'd love to stay here, too.Not to go back at all again, I agree. To have a mouth full of seedswould be a wonderful thing, to be drowned, a throatfilled with hard, shiny points, like the mark left by the tip of a pencil, poised on a page. No, I mean to stay with Daddy. Youcan go back. Said Miuccia Prada, the women who wear my clothes vary [End Page 131] dramatically. Of course, I'd hope they were cleverand interesting. I'd also hope that my clothes made their lives a littleeasier, that they made them feel happier.Not more beautiful, necessarily, just more of a person. Oh, ifthat's what you want, that's fine with me, I say, splayingPrada's quote across my notebook. Does feeling like a person make lifeeasier, happier? Really? You'd just let me go away from you? As a paperweight, I was always being told that I was too fickle. As a placeholder, I was told I dressed too personally.There is no correct response. What do you want meto say? That to have a face covered with black netting, a doll hat, a chest,an armor against amour and its aftermathwould be a wonderful. To have a face covered with butterflies, to havebutterflies in the stomach, across the shoulders,over the groin, over the kneecaps like scabs. I want you to say you wouldnot let me go. They created hard chic and naïve chic—and ugly chic. And zipper means lightning close, and Schiaparelli designshers from electrical cords. I wouldn't let yougo. Some of Schiaparelli's buttons (naïve chic) are acrobats. Well, I'mgoing anyway. Goodbye. I like those best. Dear Honey Suckled, Dear Fire Department Dear honey suckled, dear poison ivy, dear yaupon with your poisoned berries aiming your leaves at random stars and pretending to be pretty, that was me, that was my foot that broke the poison oak, my shoulder that broke the banana-spider web. I forgot what I forgot there, but what you took was mine. Dear honey suckled, have all the mosquitoes died? Dear me, how awful it all was, and how familiar. Dear home, how I hated you. How I thought something was missing all that time. Dear me, it was me. I was the missing. [End Page 132] Dear asp in the mustang grapes, dear acid, dear sugar boiling hard, dear mother crying, dear rattlesnakes, dear potatoes underneath the house, dear house on its cement blocks, dear crowbar, dear nails, dear wall we ripped out, dear fire that ate you up, dear shotgun shells exploding in the heat, dear fire department, dear deer you were not shot that season. Dear bobcat killed on the bridge, we couldn't swerve, dear creek, dear dredging, dear alligators, dear history...

Wonderful Things: Artifact and Argument in the Brooklyn Museum’s “Converging Cultures” Lonn Taylor (bio) Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. Diana Fane, Sarah Faunce, and Kevin Stayton, curators; Rod Faulds, designer. The Brooklyn Museum. Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. Edited by Diana Fane. New York: The Brooklyn Museum in Association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996. 319 pages. $65.00 (cloth). $34.00 (paper). When archaeologist Howard Carter broke through the doorway to King Tut’s burial chamber, his patron Lord Carnarvon, who was standing behind him in the narrow passage, asked him what he could see. “Wonderful things,” Carter replied. These words describe the contents of the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibit of Spanish Colonial art with equally apt succinctness. While the objects in the exhibit have not been buried quite as long as those that Carter excavated, most of them have been safely at rest in the less frequented storage areas of the Brooklyn Museum since 1956, when the museum’s last exhibit of Spanish Colonial art was dismantled and its contents distributed among four separate departments of the museum. Now they have reemerged, and, in combination with a few [End Page 138] loans from other museums, have been reassembled by a team of curators, conservators, and scholarly advisors into a dazzling exhibit about the artistic and artisan achievements of the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The subtitle of the exhibit, “Art and Identity in Spanish America,” provides the theme and thus a clue to the argument that accompanies the exhibition of these magnificant artifacts: since their origins were in a place and time where highly developed civilizations came together for the first time, how do these objects relate to “the issues of identity that were of concern to colonists and native peoples alike?” In other words, how Spanish is the art and architecture of Spanish America, and how Indian is it? This is not the first exhibit of Spanish Colonial art to raise this question, and it surely will not be the last. Indeed, Converging Cultures takes its place on a long continuum of exhibitions that have wrestled with the question of mestizaje, or the mingling of European and Spanish peoples in the Americas. The first major exhibit to deal with the subject was Mexican Arts, organized by Rene d’Harnoncourt for the American Federation of Arts in 1930. In many ways Mexican Arts was a prototype for many of the exhibits that followed, although its extreme stance was tempered somewhat in the subsequent shows. It was assembled with the cooperation and the vigorous participation of the Mexican government and the government-sponsored Mexican art establishment; its chief American patron was Ambassador Dwight Morrow; its distinguished advisory committee included Diego Rivera, Dr. Atl, and the Mexican Minister of Finance Luis Montes de Oca; it opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and travelled to Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Washington, Milwaukee, Louisville, and San Antonio; and like many subsequent exhibits it had a political subtext. It was intended to help repair a relationship that had been strained by the Mexican government’s expropriation of American-owned oil and agricultural properties during the preceeding decade. Mexican Arts took an uncompromisingly indigenist stand, reflecting the intellectual and political climate of the 1910 revolution in Mexico, a revolution that was still unfolding when the exhibit opened: art in Mexico received its vitality from its Indianness, rather than from any European styles or models. In fact, the opening sentence of d’Harnoncourt’s catalogue essay stated unequivocally that “This is an exhibit of Mexican arts, not of arts in Mexico.” Mexican arts, he explained are “such works of art as are an expression of Mexican civilization”; all “unassimilated copies of foreign models must be disregarded for the purposes of this exhibition.” [End Page 139] Many objects produced in Mexico in the past have been of “indubitable artistic merit but with no possible relationship to the cultural arts of the country.” They are, in fact, only “the results of foreign arts accidentally practiced on Mexican soil.” Concrete examples of such objects, d’Harnoncourt wrote, were the blue-and-white ceramics...

The wonderful thing about tiggers Is tiggers are wonderful things! … 1I was given my first Winnie-the-Pooh plush toy for my seventeenth birthday. He spoke and wriggled his nose when you squeezed hi...

This study describes how the participants in a singers’ master class weekend collaborated with their teacher, an internationally renowned former opera singer in her mid-80s, to compensate for the difficulties in communication caused by her dementia. The workshop’s success was due to the teacher’s professionalism and personal dignity; the high esteem and affection in which she was held by the participants; the shared assumption that she had information to impart; her unimpaired musical abilities; the scope for singing, text recitation and gesture to convey complex ideas; and the legitimate formulaicity of the teaching activity. The nature and role of her predominantly formulaic language is examined from the perspective of its function in the very specific context of her teaching, with reference to features from Orange’s (2001) strategy framework for communicating successfully with people with dementia.

Judith MacKay: self-made scourge of the tobacco industry

The interaction between human and non-human can be visualised through archaeology, the excavation of material culture, which provides a unique insight into frameworks of ontological encounter. Indeed, it is the realisation of how the human subject perceives the non-human that is utilised by both exhibitionary institutions and adventure fiction to elicit a recognition of material ‘identity’ within a viewing subject. Both the visual framings of film and the representative reductionism of prose therefore project narratives about materiality but simultaneously imply that such an identification reflects an emergent ‘object ontology’. Encounters with ‘wonderful things’ or xeno-artefacts may thus appear extraordinary, but become tacitly ‘knowable’ through the way they are framed to the subject. This thesis focuses on the cultural production of the artefact encounter to demonstrate how notions of ‘object identity’ reflect on human perception rather than any realisation of non-human ontology. Analysing the subjective labelling involved within the differentiation of rubbish and relic, the thesis investigates how encounter is fundamental to prescriptions of material value or worth. Literary representation draws upon such a materialist paradigm to evoke a recognition of ‘objects’ and thus provides a platform where such preconceptions can be both identified and confronted. Weird Fiction’s inclination to notions of exteriority is therefore perfectly suited to depictions of contact that eludes a distillation of macro ontologies to micro representations and rather resides within the process of encounter. Yet while Speculative Realist or Object-Oriented thought utilises the Weird to re-conceptualise ontological definitions, this thesis argues that such formations return to a recognition of non-human alterity as lying beyond anthropocentric depiction, rather than confronting the biases within the framework itself. Through artefacts, ruins, zones and xenoarchaeology, this thesis analyses the very processes of encounter to consider how imaginative modes can help underscore the urgency of re-negotiating ontological contact points.

The Children's Gallery in the Science Museum in London opened in December 1931. Conceived partly as a response to the overwhelming number of children visiting the Museum and partly as a way in which to advance its educational uses, the Gallery proved to be an immediate success in terms of attendances. In the Gallery, children and adults found historical dioramas and models, all of which aimed at presenting visitors with the social, material and moral impacts of science and technology on society throughout history. Also, there were numerous working models with plenty of buttons to press, handles to turn and ropes to pull. Controversial visitor studies carried out in the 1950s revealed that the historical didacticism was more or less lost on the children who came to the Gallery. Consequently, the New Children's Gallery that opened in 1969 had to some extent abandoned the historical perspective in favour of combining instruction with pleasure in order to make the children feel that ‘science is a wonderful thing’.