Anachronistic Use Research Articles

Still sticking to the Big Brother. History, German Protestantism and the Ukrainian War

This article examines statements on church policy by leading representatives of the Protestant Church in Germany and the World Council of Churches in the first year of the Ukraine war (2022/23) and places them in a church-historical perspective. A historical appropriations and peculiarities become clear, such as an anachronistic use of Ostpolitik, a Russia-friendly assessment and a largely secular evaluation of the situation in Ukraine.

Race, Ethnicity and Family in Late Antique Judaism and Early Christianity

Race, Ethnicity, Judaism and Christianity are problematic labels, and so is family. Recent postcolonial approaches have attempted to deconstruct them, not without facing the inherent paradox of the danger of re-essentialising them. This paper approaches these concepts retrospectively to show the complexities and to warn of their anachronistic use.

Yan Fu’s translation ‘principle(s)’ and Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics

ABSTRACT For more than a century, Yan Fu’s translation principle(s) had a great influence on translation theory and practice in China and beyond. Largely because of the pithiness of the principle(s) and Yan’s marked departure from fidelity – an aspect of the principle, there has been much discussion. The lack of a theoretical tradition in Chinese translation discourse has led to impressionistic interpretations of the principle(s), often unmoored from its/their historical context. Given the various degrees of simplification and reductionism belie the multi-layered complexity of translation, a critical and nuanced discussion of the origin and function of the principle(s) is needed to rectify some of the prevailing and persistent misconceptions and to steer the discussion in meaningful and constructive directions to avoid an ahistorical and anachronistic use of the principle(s), which has led to conceptual confusion and methodological weakness. This article contextualizes Yan Fu’s ‘unorthodox way of translating’ Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics by relating it to the deep sense of national crisis among Chinese intellectuals who were trying to find ways to enlighten the general public for China’s national survival, which is conducive to justifying the almost unapologetically adaptive nature of Yan’s translation practice, whose success and influence are undeniable.

Regional Literary Tradition in Modern World Literature: The Allegorization of Democracy in Yano Ryūkei’s Beautiful Story of Statesmanship and Its Chinese and Korean Translations

ABSTRACT Yano Ryūkei’s popular political novel Keikoku bidan (The Beautiful Story of Statesmanship, 1883-84) is a fictionalization of the dramatic victory of the democrats over the oligarchs in ancient Thebes, and is among the first modern Japanese literary works to be translated into Chinese and Korean. As such, this work may be construed as a typical case of the translation of modern ideas from the European center into an East Asian periphery. But in playing that function, it notably makes an anachronistic use of a style of classical Japanese fiction that, along with its Korean counterpart, had developed in tight relationship to late-imperial Chinese vernacular fiction. The adoption of the classical narrative form of regional provenance allowed Ryūkei to create a political allegorization of democracy whose legitimacy is not just ideologically imposed but indigenously grounded on history, and facilitated its translation into Chinese and Korean. By examining these texts, this article considers an interperipheral structure of literary exchanges that helped enable a transposition of democracy into the region. It thus illuminates a palimpsestic construct of textual circulation in turn-of-the-century East Asia where the modern center-periphery relationship is intersected with the interperipheral dynamics activated by the afterlives of a classical transnational cultural tradition.

“Bird Script” is not Bird Script

Ever since the 1930s, scholars have adopted the Eastern Han terms niaoshu 鳥書 (bird script) and niaochongshu 鳥蟲書 (bird and insect script) to refer to the beautiful gold inlaid writing, with added bird elements, inscribed on bronzes associated with Wu and Yue. However, before the 1930s, no experts agreed on how to define these terms. This paper argues that “bird script,” as used by Eastern Han writers, described writing on seals, banners, and a popular calligraphic style, none of which had added bird elements. Also, the florid style of writing inscribed on the Mancheng vessels was neither “bird script” nor related to the earlier Wu and Yue inscriptions. After discussing the florescence of Wu and Yue scripts, and then Eastern Han uses of the term “bird script,” this paper examines known examples of attempts by Songperiod antiquarians at reading characters with bird elements, including a fifth-century bronze bell from Yue. Although familiar with Eastern Han writings on scripts, Song scholars neither described these inscriptions as “bird script,” nor placed these bronzes in their correct historical contexts. Apparently, added bird elements was not yet a criterion for “bird script.” Subsequently, this paper explores the initial breakthroughs in the process of deciphering Wu and Yue scripts in the late Qing and early twentieth century. Although this was the first time some inscriptions with added bird elements were called “bird script,” this paper shows that the term was still not universally adopted by philologists until 1934, when Rong Geng 容庚 (1894–1983) produced the first systematic study of Eastern Zhou writing with added bird elements. Thanks to Rong Geng, scholars today can read pre-unification inscriptions from the southeast coast; unfortunately, Rong’s anachronistic use of “bird script” and “bird and insect script” has continued to this day.

Putting Phoenicia on the Map. From the Greeks to Ernest Renan’s Mission

Abstract. This study questions the anachronism about Phoenicia, often thought to have ended when Alexander the Great conquered the Levant. However, toponymic evidence suggests that Phoenicia came into existence with and after Alexander’s conquests. Then it became an administrative division of the Roman Empire, to subsist as an ecclesiastical title down to Ottoman times. It was only in 1861 that the French scholar Ernest Renan invented and mapped “Phoenician archaeology.” Later interpretations of Renan’s view, converging with Biblical projections, led to the anachronistic use of “Phoenicia.” This anachronism still governs historiography and politics in the Levant today.

Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski

Reviewed by: Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski Aylin Malcolm (bio) Julie Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, x + 333pp. $69.95 cloth. The events of 2020 revealed the importance of effective communication in healthcare and the potential for epidemics to inspire new narrative projects, concretizing decades of research on the intersections between literature and medicine. Though its publication anticipated these developments by several months, Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects is an important contribution to such discussions and to the study of premodern medicine, a field generally dominated by historical methods. Orlemanski offers a sophisticated new perspective on the entanglements of literature and phisik—a Middle English term that includes both academic approaches to healing and more diffuse local practices—in late medieval England. Her deliberately anachronistic use of "symptom," which she defines as "a somatic disturbance that … provokes interpretation," speaks to the parallels between diagnosing a body and analyzing a text; both projects require one to interpret visible signs in the context of larger semiotic systems, a fact recognized by many medieval writers (p. 16). As her title suggests, the book also considers what Orlemanski calls "embodied subjectivity," characterized by the tension between physical susceptibility and the medieval emphasis on free will (p. 2). Orlemanski is particularly interested in individuals who reflect on their own bodies or pathologies, thereby addressing the "gap between one's materiality and one's experience, or between having and being a body" (p. 3). While Symptomatic Subjects will appeal most to those specializing in the late Middle Ages, its rigorous engagement with both literary criticism and the history of medicine is likely to interest a range of scholars. An evident strength of the book is its careful close readings, which address canonical texts (e.g., Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale) alongside others that are often overlooked (e.g., John Lydgate's "Dietary;" Robert Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne"). Many of these textual interpretations include studies of individual manuscripts; in particular, the Wound Man (a standard diagram of the various injuries that a physician might treat) in Wellcome Library MS 290 serves as an emblem of Orlemanski's project, embodying her interests in the relationships between particulars and general causes, as well as the tension between human agency and vulnerability. Each text or object is contextualized with generous references, such that the reader trained in a different field will likely require no further notes. Indeed, while the book has a clear overarching narrative, it often recapitulates essential information in multiple chapters; each chapter might therefore be read independently without additional context, a welcome feature in the age of digital downloads. [End Page 231] Structured as four parts of two chapters each, Symptomatic Subjects progresses from an overview of medieval medical knowledge to its effects on literary genres, plot, and voice, with a brief coda on the early modern afterlives of phisik. Orlemanski begins by surveying medicine in late medieval England, where the absence of formal medical institutions produced a diverse constellation of beliefs and practices. Chapter two delves more deeply into four aspects of phisik: the etiological schemata through which physicians ascribed medical conditions to causes, the decentralized and heterogeneous character of medical authority, the tendency for physicians to read bodies as signs with identifiable meanings, and the relationships between content and layout in medical manuscripts. Both chapters offer not only useful information about medical practices, but also perceptive analyses of medical writing, as Orlemanski applies her considerable critical skills to texts not often read as literature. The next two chapters examine satire, which often criticized the obscure jargon and earthly materialism of medical texts, and exempla, or short anecdotes illustrating moral principles, a very common narrative form during the late Middle Ages. The fourth chapter's comparisons between exemplary narratives and medical case studies are especially enlightening, providing clear evidence of the fluid relationship between medieval literature and medicine, and thus of the importance of Orlemanski's work. Central to this chapter is Orlemanski's notion of the "etiological imagination," or the creative process of envisioning causation with...

The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesRethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesRethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

Queer Intimacy: Vocality in Jesus Christ Superstar

Queer IntimacyVocality in Jesus Christ Superstar Larissa A. Irizarry (bio) Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock opera depicting the last week of Jesus Christ’s life from the perspective of Judas Iscariot.1 Norman Jewison’s 1973 adaptation of the rock opera into a musical film (hereafter JCS) is important to both musical film studies and the growing discourse of queer musicology because, I argue, the characters’ embodiment of authenticity through fraught vocality destabilizes the passion narrative not only by presenting Judas (Carl Anderson) as a tragic hero but also by depicting his relationship with Jesus (Ted Neeley) as embodying queer intimacy that is inflected by race, with a black Judas opposite a white Jesus.2 To read Judas and Jesus’s relationship as queer is a departure from the film’s reception history and from contemporary representations of the Jesus figure in popular culture, which have strongly aligned him with heterosexual kinship structures.3 The film’s premiere was met with an overall positive popular reception.4 Reviews from critics, on the other hand, were mixed, and the film’s queer framing of erotics went largely undetected. Gary Arnold of the Washington Post said of the musical numbers that, “after coming on strenuously, many of the numbers seem to end with a shocking lack of either point or ceremony.” He further labeled the film as nothing more than a kitschy commercialization of the passion story. Arthur D. Murphy of Variety disliked the anachronistic use of such props as war tanks, claiming [End Page 162] that the drama depended on “forced metaphor to [the] outright synthetic.”5 Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune disliked the actors’ characterization of the lead roles, calling them “so confused, so shapeless, [that] the film cannot succeed in any meaningful way.”6 Rotten Tomatoes, a review-aggregation website, gave the film a 55 percent rating, with the critique that “the miscasting and tonal monotony halts this musical’s groove.”7 US-based Jewish organizations gave the most condemning reviews, labeling the film anti-Semitic in its portrayal of a group of Jews as the most villainous characters (a prime example being the musical number “This Jesus Must Die,” sung not by the Romans who killed Jesus but by the Sanhedrin). This claim escalated to the point where the Israeli government issued a statement distancing itself from the film, which was shot on location in Israel.8 The film was labeled by some commentators not only as anti-Semitic but as antiblack and imperialistic through reference to a black Judas and an Asian American Mary Magdalene (Yvonne Elliman).9 JCS was also considered provocative in its portrayal of intimacy between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which characterized Jesus as a sexually integrated person rather than an asexual, transcendent messiah.10 The discourse concerning Jesus’s intimate relations is in line with other works (artistic and otherwise) that assume Jesus’s heterosexuality. In the gnostic Gospel of Philip, for example, Mary is called the most loved companion of Jesus, whom he frequently kisses on the mouth.11 Other modern films have explored this theme, including The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), whose plot is based on Jesus being tempted to eschew his messianic duties and instead start a family with Mary.12 In Stephenson Humphries-Brooks’s study on cinematic depictions of Jesus, the Mary of JCS is understood as desiring to be Jesus’s lover.13 This contention is supported by the torch ballad “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” sung by Mary. With Mary labeled the primary love interest, Jesus is firmly fixed to heteronormative scripts. Despite this traditionally heteronormative reading of JCS, the gendered performance of the two leading high tenors of the musical film—in combination with their shared musical material, parallel virtuosic vocal failures, and tessitural [End Page 163] intimacy—frustrates straight readings. Throughout the work, the actors suggest through their body language that Judas and Jesus know each other’s fears and weaknesses, more so than any other couple in the story. For instance, when Simon the Zealot suggests taking Rome by force, Judas and Jesus share a knowing glance of...

Reformation und alter Glaube: Zugehörigkeiten der Altgläubigen im Alten Reich und in Frankreich (1517–1540), by Marc Mudrak

Marc Mudrak’s study is about the development of ‘old believer’ (Altgläubige) identity in the first decades of the Reformation. Mudrak correctly avoids the anachronism of calling those who rejected the appeal of the evangelical movement ‘Catholics’. While the label ‘old believers’ is awkward to English ears, it reflects sixteenth-century usage, especially in Germany. Of particular importance to writers was the label of ‘old’, which they saw as a positive presentation of traditional religion in opposition to the innovations of the evangelicals, whom they labelled (of course) ‘heretics’. An important strength of this study is Mudrak’s wide secondary reading. He engages deeply with German, French and English historiography, with a particular emphasis on incorporating French theoretical insights. This breadth is refreshing and allows Mudrak to break away from some of the older traditions of German writing about the Reformation. In addition to moving past the anachronistic use of confessional...

Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth by Ariadne Konstantinou

Reviewed by: Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth by Ariadne Konstantinou Vanda Zajko Ariadne Konstantinou. Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. xiv + 189 pp. 1 black-and-white map. Cloth, $102. Since feminism began to make its presence felt in the 1970s, and certainly since the publication of Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Greece in 1975, the question of the access of ancient Greek women to public space has been fiercely debated. What counts as reliable evidence for the experiences of women? How do the representations of women in literary texts relate to the material realities of their lives? And what is the relationship of myth, as broadly conceived, to other kinds of data? This book both summarises and evaluates these discussions by painstakingly working through a wide range of material relating to female characters in myth and mapping their trajectories through domestic, civic and natural spaces. The methodological issues familiar to classicists are foregrounded throughout the four main chapters, to the extent that at times the explication of approach distracts from the overall argument; the interesting theoretical perspectives from the emergent fields of space and mobility studies are, for the most part, restricted to the introduction and the final chapter. This is a shame because it means that insights derived, for example, from the conceptualisation of space as socially produced, or the contemporary focus on the moral effects of mobility are tantalisingly alluded to (e.g., 9, 11) but never allowed fully to irrigate the ancient texts. The desire to avoid the anachronistic use of conceptual vocabulary, explicitly articulated and presented as a virtue (11), positions the work within a tradition of scholarship that privileges a certain [End Page 367] kind of historicism over other approaches. While there is nothing wrong with this per se, when dealing with myth and the ancient Greek imagination, a more relaxed attitude towards creative hypothesis tends to produce more engaging results. The book is divided into two halves, the first devoted to female deities and the second to mortal heroines. Within these sections there is further division into chapters on virgin goddesses, Olympian wives and mothers, mobile heroines in Greek tragedy, and female mobility and gendered spaces between myth and ritual. Each chapter has its own introduction and conclusion and is comprehensively annotated with accurate references to up-to-date bibliography and relevant primary sources. From this perspective, the book will be invaluable to students and scholars wishing to familiarise themselves with the current state of play regarding discussions of gender and space in archaic and classical Greece. In the first chapter, the famous description of Athena, Artemis and Hestia from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite is used as a springboard for discussion of the connection between the three goddesses' sexual status, their gender, and their mobility. There is much that is familiar here, from the association of Hestia with the domestic and public hearth, to the exploits of Athena in the Trojan war, and the characterization of Artemis as a mountain-dwelling huntress. The critique of Vernant's hugely influential article on Hestia and Hermes (Vernant, J.-P., 1963, "Hestia-Hermès. Sur l'expression religieuse de l'espace et du mouvement chez les Grecs," L'Homme 3:12–50) results in an adjustment of the view that Hestia's fixity is a result of her femininity and suggests instead that her lack of mobility results from the divine privileges which involve receiving honours in both private and public spheres and which identify her primarily with "the centre." Otherwise, the chapter reaffirms the idea that virginity for these female deities does not automatically entail any kind of restriction of movement and thus argues that they cannot be regarded as paradigmatic for human women. The second chapter continues the discussion by focusing on Aphrodite, Demeter, and Hera and concludes similarly that in epic contexts, divine wives and mothers are free to move where they want to, apart from in the case of Hera, whose limited mobility is either the result of her superior position in the divine hierarchy or a form of punishment by Zeus. These...

ZAP! Nikola Tesla Takes Charge by M. Kulling

Kulling, Monica. ZAP! Nikola Tesla Takes Charge. Illustrated by Bill Slavin. Tundra Books, 2016.In this, her ninth contribution to Tundra Books’ Great Ideas Series, prolific children’s author Monica Kulling distills and simplifies the life and inventions of immigrant engineer and scientist Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) for primary school readers. Confining her story to the first half of Tesla’s long life, from his humble origins in Slovenia (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), to his achievements as nineteenth-century America’s foremost electrical engineering genius, Kulling has maintained a manageable length compatible with the attention span of her audience.The rivalry between Tesla and his one-time patron and employer, Thomas Edison, over the suitability of alternating versus direct electrical current (AC vs. DC) is described without exposing all the sordid details of their rivalry. The story then quickly moves on to Tesla’s partnership with George Westinghouse to illuminate the 1892-93 Chicago world’s fair site, and to build the first hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls, employing alternating current, a system that allowed electricity to be transmitting over greater distances more cheaply and efficiently than Edison’s rival system. Kulling ends her story in 1898, when Tesla demonstrated a model boat controlled by radio waves, an invisible force that he suggested might also be used for wireless communication, a concept soon made real by radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.Apart from an anachronistic use of the word “robot,” Kulling’s text is historically and scientifically accurate, clearly written, and age-appropriate, without being condescending. Bill Slavin’s illustrations are nicely evocative of the late nineteenth-century buildings and workshops, and are scaled large enough for story-hour readings to groups of children.Reviewer: Merrill DistadHighly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsMerrill Distad is Associate University Librarian (Research and Special Collections Services) and University Archivist, University of Alberta, and is the co-editor of Peel’s Bibliography of the Canadian Prairies to 1953 (Toronto, 2003). He is the author, most recently, of The University of Alberta Library: The First Hundred Years, 1908–2008 (Edmonton, 2009).

A toponímia proto-histórica como ferramenta do arqueólogo? Comentários sobre uma relação problemática

Estudos recentes têm vindo a destacar a toponímia proto-histórica enquanto ferramenta para a interpretação do registo arqueológico, particularmente da sua filiação étnica. Este artigo discute, do ponto de vista metodológico, o uso anacrónico das informações da Linguística no discurso arqueológico, sobretudo no que diz respeito à formação, transmissão e cronologia destes topónimos, assumindo que são estudos realizados sobre línguas antigas desconhecidas. Estes aspectos levam a que a relação entre Arqueologia e Toponímia seja problemática, principalmente quando o objectivo é a análise de vestígios materiais de períodos mais recuados. Apresentam-se alguns casos que revelam estes problemas.

Political Authority in Vietnam: Is The Vietnamese Communist Party a PaperLeviathan?

In a contribution to the political analysis of contemporary Vietnam – a single-party state often wrongly assumed to be an author of reform and deploying considerable and varied powers – this paper seeks to provide an understanding of the Vietnamese term ‘authority’ ( uy) and its relationship to power. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan serves as a reference to the notion of authority in Vietnam and is compared to data: what the Vietnamese thought their word best translated as authority meant. The paper concludes that in the ‘two-way street’ of social contracts, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) actually has little authority. This helps to explain the chronic problems the VCP has faced in securing state capacity and generalised ability to implement policy. It highlights gaps between the current anachronistic use of Soviet-style power in Vietnam and what could be done if the regime deployed new powers based on authority. The authors conclude that, given the identified lack of authority, the VCP is no real Leviathan. Although more research is needed, this conclusion implies that proactive political tactics in Vietnam may move towards a search for acquiring authority in a ‘two-way street’ relationship within the Vietnamese political community. Enhanced state capacity and Party authority could follow.

Critical remarks on the Italian research assessment exercise VQR 2011–2014

Abstract For nearly a decade, several national exercises have been implemented for assessing the Italian research performance, from the viewpoint of universities and other research institutions. The penultimate one – i.e., the VQR 2004–2010, which adopted a hybrid evaluation approach based on bibliometric analysis and peer review – suffered heavy criticism at a national and international level. The architecture of the subsequent exercise – i.e., the VQR 2011–2014, still in progress – is partly similar to that of the previous one, except for a few presumed improvements. Nevertheless, this other exercise is suffering heavy criticism too. This paper presents a structured discussion of the VQR 2011–2014, collecting and organizing some critical arguments so far emerged, and developing them in detail. Some of the major vulnerabilities of the VQR 2011–2014 are: (1) the fact that evaluations cover a relatively small fraction of the scientific publications produced by the researchers involved in the evaluation, (2) incorrect and anachronistic use of the journal metrics (i.e., ISI Impact Factor and similar ones) for assessing individual papers, and (3) conceptually misleading criteria for normalizing and aggregating the bibliometric indicators in use.

Project and prototype: industrialized and prefabricated construction in Italy (1945-1980)

Based on archival survey, the study sheds the lights on a neglected story. The research track a line between the post war debate, the traditionalist turn of the INA Casa plan, to the main actions of the public planning for housing and schools. However them were false starts. The process, reduced to anachronistic use of foreign building techniques, will last only few years, dilated over time by constant discussion about the results. Once were given up expectations of an overall reconversion of the building sector, prototypes, remain, presently, witnesses of the foresight that Italian experience demonstrated on the small scale industrial production.

Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel by Srinivas Aravamudan (review)

Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2011. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $91.00 hc. $31.00 sc. E-book $7.00-$30.00. xiv + 342 pp.Has the Enlightenment-as the historical threshold for the philosophical positions, institutional events, and epistemological infrastructures that we associate with modernity-been too hastily tied to Orientalism and European imperialism and to the political oppressions they enabled well into the twentieth century? Although Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) focuses mainly on Europe's self-serving nineteenth-century version of instrumentalized knowledge, the account resonates with critiques that implicate the Enlightenment, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's account of its quick march to fascism and death camps in the twentieth century and Michel Foucault's critique of the Enlightenment as a facade for will-to-power. Given this powerful critical alliance lined up against the so-called age of awakening, Srinivas Aravamudan's characterization of his book, Enlightenment Orientalism, as a heretical exercise is perhaps not just tongue in cheek (3). Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the widespread influence Said's work in particular, and postcolonial studies in general, has had over the years in the reevaluation of European thought. While postcolonial scholars may find Aravamudan's introductory hypothesis-that Enlightenment interrogation was not just bent on the domination of the other but also aimed at mutual understanding across cultural differences-provocative, this is not news to scholars of the early modern era (3). For decades, scholars of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century have complained about the mistaken and anachronistic use of the terms of nineteenth-century imperialism for East- West encounters of an earlier time. Where Aravamudan's work goes further than these existing criticisms of the totalizing binaries of a monolithic Orientalism is in the solid research that unearths a dizzying range of genres within which a complex self-scrutiny of Europe was under way and that details the strategies through which imaginative fiction (rather than scientific, philosophical, historical, or ethnographic discourse) constituted a powerful anti-foundationalist strain in the European Enlightenment. In this comparative study, Aravamudan shows that eighteenth-century English and French fiction in a variety of modes- Oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires-were engaged in a contest with what would later emerge as the canonical forms of domestic realism. The book demonstrates that Orientalist fiction was much more than a tool for othering the non-European; in effect it produced a counter- Enlightenment of sorts by challenging the tenets of social and epistemological realism-a discourse that, in engendering scientific rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism, is now widely regarded as a key legacy of the Enlightenment. Rich intertextual readings produce hitherto unacknowledged genetic traces and new genealogies: from Giovanni Paolo Marana's spy fiction and Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights' Entertainments to Aphra Behn's and Daniel Defoe's continuations of these genres, from Montesquieu's Persian Letters to the writings of Oliver Goldsmith and Elizabeth Hamilton, and from the work of Fontanelle through to Swiftand Voltaire.The book is divided into two parts: the first half deals with pseudoethnographies or narratives that rely exclusively on the theme of the external foreigner delivering home truths, which thus install a critic of European culture as an embodied externality (29). The second half of the book discusses the proliferation of Oriental tales as transcultural allegories where the generic experimentation of the Enlightenment looks beyond national realism and identity politics and moves into the bizarre and the fascinating: interplanetary adventures, beast fables, it-narratives, and scandal chronicles. …

Victorian gear heads and locomotive zealots: Vicarious nostalgia, retro-futurism and anachronisms of Steampunk and Dieselpunk

Abstract This article explored the histories of both Steampunk and Dieselpunk with a focus on their dress behaviour and musical preferences as related to the ideologies of these groups. Particular attention was paid to both group’s fixations on nostalgia for periods outside of the individual members’ living memories and how this nostalgia is a feature of their consumption experiences. The article also addresses the anachronistic use of the word ‘punk’ in the name of each of these groups. There is an obvious incongruity with the naming of Steampunk and Dieselpunk because they are shameless consumer cultures with no obvious political inclinations. Although Steampunks and Dieselpunks do share the DIY aesthetic of the traditional punk subculture, their styles have been prefabricated, neatly packaged and made available for sale on any of the many websites devoted to providing the quintessential Victorian or diesel-era garb.

"Is he a licentious lewd Sort of a Person?" Constructing the child rapist in early modern England.

When in April 1747 judge presiding over trial of John Hunter for rape of Grace Pitts, aged ten, at Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, asked a witness called testify Hunter's character and reputation, Is he a licentious Sort of a Person? he clearly had in mind that a particular kind of man was likely be guilty of rape of a child. Such a man would have demonstrated through his behavior that he was likely behave in a sexually immoral and immodest fashion--but not necessarily that he would direct his attentions primarily toward Unlike modern pedophile, who is understood have a primary, if not exclusive, interest in children that he is likely conceal, early modern child rapist was a man whose immorality would be clearly visible as someone who frequented lewd women or who acted in an unseemly fashion with other women. This article investigates how individuals living in early modern England may have understood and thought about behavior of those who engaged in activities with children below age of consent and especially whether they were regarded as having a particular, and abnormal, desire for It examines how such people were characterized and represented in prosecutions of crime involving children in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London and what extent such characterizations and representations conformed later sexological categorizations. It argues that, as suggested by quotation above, such men were thought be a particular sort of a person, but not one whose identity was defined by whom he had sex with. He was, rather, a man who was characterized as generally immoral, lewd, lustful, and loose-living, notable for his debauchery and lack of self-mastery, and therefore inevitably coming a very bad, and untimely, end. Categories of deviation--or perversion--emerged with development of psychiatry and sexology in late nineteenth century, particularly from Richard von Krafft-Ebing's exhaustive cataloging of such behaviors in his Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in German in 1886. Krafft-Ebing did not, in his brief discussion of those who engaged in activities with employ term pedophilia or pedophile describe such individuals but rather referred violation of individuals under age of fourteen. The term paedophilia, defined by Oxford English Dictionary as sexual desire directed towards children, appears have first been used by Havelock Ellis in his Studies in Psychology of Sex in 1906. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) first used term in 1980 to describe a specific subset of child molesters who displayed particular characteristics. By 1987 DSM definition had been revised define pedophilia as characterized by recurrent intense urges and sexually arousing fantasies involving activity with a prepubescent child or children. One of major narratives in history of sexuality since Foucault has been shift in understandings of behaviors, particularly homosexual, between early modern and modern worlds. Sexual acts that were previously understood as subject religious and legal regulation and that anyone might commit now became understood as integral identities. The rise of sexology and medical categorization of behaviors defined primarily by object choice gave birth the homosexual as well as other types such as pedophile. The early modern period predates these formulations, so it would be anachronistic use term pedophile for those who engaged in activities with It would also be next impossible: there are few diaries, letters, or autobiographies recording thoughts or fantasies, let alone behavior, including with those who today would be under age of consent. Sir Simonds D'Ewes and Samuel Jeake both recorded marriages girls of thirteen and that these marriages were consummated, but these marriages were legally contracted, since age of consent marriage for girls was twelve. There would not have been any contemporary sense that such men harbored abnormal desires. Despite some contemporary concern about... Language: en

Stephanus the Philosopher and Ps. Elias: a case of mistaken identity

The assumption, based on studies of the life and works of the late-sixth to seventh century philosopher, Stephanus, by Herman Usener and Wanda Wolska-Conus, that (1) the seventh century author of the commentary on De Interpretatione was summoned by the Emperor Heraclius from Alexandria to take up teaching post in Constantinople at a newly founded imperial institution of higher education (according to Usener) and (2) the same Stephanus was the Constantinopolitan author of the anonymous Prolegomena Philosophiae and Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge published by L.G. Westerink under the name of Ps. Elias (according to Wolska-Conus), is questioned and it is shown that Usener’s hypothesis of an imperial university under Heraclius was based on the anachronistic use of the titles oikoumenikos didaskalos and katholikos didaskalos to describe ‘Stephanus’ in some astrological and alchemical manuscripts. Accordingly, there is no evidence for an imperial institution of higher education under Heraclius. In addition, the evidence for Stephanus’ discussion of the term diairesis (as found in his commentary on De Interpretatione and the Dialogues ofSeverus bar Shakko) differs so completely from that ofPs. Elias that there can be no possibility that the two commentators are the same person. Accordingly, Wolska-Conus’ hypothesis of the identity of the two must be abandoned.