Distant Echo Research Articles

Vasić before Vinča (1900 –1908)

The work of Miloje Vasić represents a cluster of “revered common places” of the Serbian archaeology. Elevated to the throne of the founder of the discipline with iconical value, Miloje M. Vasić (1869–1956) has been treated by the Serbian archaeologists and general public alike in accordance with the widely accepted and stereotypized canon: he is one of the great personalities of the Serbian science, the first academically educated Serbian archaeologist, long-term professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, director of the National Museum in Belgrade, and the excavator of one of the most important prehistoric sites in the country, the Neolithic Vinča. The intention here is to read the papers of Miloje Vasić written in the period from 1900 to 1908, in the combined internalistic–externalistic key of the history of the discipline, but as well to interpret his personal motifs and dilemmas without the layers of the “revered common places”. As early as in 1906 Vasić started diligently developing his paradigm in which he interpreted all the prehistoric sites from the wider area of the Serbian Danube valley in connection to the Aegean world. At the same time, he did not consider the prehistory in the Serbian lands as the distant echo of the Mediterranean, but an equal, though somewhat poorer branch of the Aegean family. All the subsequent erroneous chronological adaptations and his lowering of the dates of Vinča and other prehistoric sites have exclusively been the building blocks of this imaginary model of the Aegean on the Danube and its approaching to the Aegean and Greek “motherland”. Even before he started excavating Vinča in 1908, Miloje Vasić was utterly convinced in his illusion that this site represented a grand emanation of the Bronze Age of the Aegean.

L’oeil et la bouche. Le goût du paysage pour préserver le patrimoine alimentaire libanais

This article offers a critical examination of a geographically based inventory put together in Lebanon linking landscapes and “food heritage”. This systemic approach, which attempts to explain the links between products, producers and landscapes suggests that territories are the product of a specific rural economy which only finds a distant echo in the organisational structure of modern agrosystems.

The Slightest Breath (On Living)

The Slightest Breath (On Living) Jean-Christophe Bailly (bio) Translated by Matthew H. Anderson (bio) For Giuseppe Penone 1 Behind John Cage's 1952 musical work, 4'33"—a work where, far from a desire for scandal, he suggests that one can listen to silence and that silence is itself a sonorous and variable material (and is thus alive)—is an experience he had in a soundproof room at Harvard University. In his account, it was there, right in the place where he expected to encounter silence and experience it as absolute emptiness (as the withdrawal, as it were, of all noise, all sonorous beating, no matter how minuscule), that he instead discovered something that remained within the silence. But, when the question of the two sounds he had been hearing—one high-pitched and one low—came under consideration, Cage disagreed with the sound engineer, who interpreted them as coming from his nervous system first, and his blood circulation second. But, was it still the case that the persistence of these bodily noises, regardless of their origin, quashed the very possibility of silence? Or, [End Page 1] did they allow one to think of it differently? As a resonant environment or a sort of acoustic khôra? One that is always already affected? And it was as a result that the composer had the idea of making it heard. If the score of 4'33" is blank (vierge) and entails nothing more for the instrumentalist besides the traditional tacet, which basically summons him to not play, then it follows that space of silence's duration is also an inhabited space. And if silence is itself a note, which is infinitely stretched out and withdrawn, then it is also the space of a collection. Here, what is normally seen as a disturbance—such as the slightest breath or the most distant echo—instead becomes a contribution and, thus, a material. The sculptor Piotr Kowalski recounts a similar experience (2004). Near the end of his life, he tried to produce holograms that would behave like mirrors. From a technical standpoint, holograms are similar to photos that have been recorded through the use of lasers; they thus need absolute stillness to be "taken." To make a large mirrored holograph, Kowalski needed to carry out his work in the underground laboratory of a Dutch factory, one that specialized in the production of curved glass. But in this space, isolated from the world's vibrations—similar to the way sound was cut off from Cage's anechoic chamber—he could not attain a perfect stillness, even for the briefest exposure. Here again, the disturbance came from the body, from the heat emitted by the human body. And even if it was minuscule, it still made the glass plate vibrate, making the total inertia he needed impossible. Just as Cage became enthusiastic for the resonant remainders that inhabited silence, Kowalski found enthusiasm in the unexpected subsistence of movement. He suddenly found that he was faced with the world Heraclitus dreamed of, a world where everything moves, and where it is vain to try to stop motion. These two experiences take place within the confines of the percept and they both confirm the same thing; namely, either that there is no "nothing," or that "nothing" will never be within our reach. What this unobtainable silence and this impossible inertia allow us to see is not simply the circumstances of being alive; instead they also allow us to see that life is incapable and unaware of how to leave itself behind. Even when it is distant and restrained, confined within airlocks and thresholds, it is already entirely a surpassing and an excess. The resonant or vibratory remainders are not from the world; [End Page 2] they are productions. Persisting behind what is almost effaced is the force of a beginning. It is the very potential (Potenz) of what begins or arrives. Before any determination of a being, living perhaps resides—but without a residence—in the fact that something arrives instead of nothing, and that this coming and arrival continue. Though we have a sense of this, there is someone who senses it more keenly than us...

I trovatori nel Veneto e a Venezia. Atti del Convegno internazionale - Venezia, 28-31 ottobre 2004 (review)

Reviewed by: I trovatori nel Veneto e a Venezia. Atti del Convegno internazionale - Venezia, 28-31 ottobre 2004 Wendy Pfeffer Lachin, Giosuè, ed. I trovatori nel Veneto e a Venezia. Atti del Convegno internazionale - Venezia, 28-31 ottobre 2004. Medioevo e Rinascimento Veneto 3. Roma/Padova: Editrice Antenore. 2008. ISBN: 978-88-8455-623-3. I Trovatori nel Veneto includes most of the presentations given at the conference organized under the auspices of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, with support from the Società Italiana di filologia romanza and the Association internationale d'études occitanes. The premise of the 2004 meeting was to summarize research of the last thirty years or so and to share current work of the scholars involved, with a particular focus on the area of Venice and its surroundings. Given the importance of the northeastern region of Italy as a venue for troubadour performance and for the preservation of medieval Occitan texts, there was no shortage of content. The volume opens with a long essay by Giosuè Lachin labeled "Introduzione" (xiii-cv), though the essay is anything but. Lachin uses this opportunity to showcase his current work with troubadour manuscript D, offering readers a very careful description of that volume and an interpretation of the logic of its composition. Lachin hypothesizes that D and the Liber Alberici represent a primitive phase of the development of a troubadour canon of authors (lxxvi). Lachin emphasizes the role of scribes trained at the university (e.g., Padua, lxxxviii) as an important factor in understanding the composition of D; he sees the volume as an example of pecia construction1 (xciv). Daniela Rando considers the question, What is a court? in "I luoghi della cultura nella Marca del duecento" (3-25) and offers a coherent response, not only to the question itself but also how the setting for culture evolved in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries in Italy. In this retelling, the passage from vagrant court to castle to city seems almost ineluctable. The next essay, "Alla corte dei Tempesta: trovatori e magistri nel castelle di Noale (sec. XIII-XIV)" by Raffaele Roncato (27-38) is a bonus, for the presentation was not on the original conference program (xii). Roncato emphasizes the importance of the castle and court at Noale as a stopping point for troubadour and Occitan culture. [End Page 69] Francesca Flores d'Arcais reminds the reader, in "Letteratura cavalleresca e arti figurative nel Veneto dal XIII al XIV secolo," (39-46) of the role of figurative art in this region, though most of the examples illustrate Old French rather than Occitan texts. The author suggests two frescos may refer to the themes of Occitan lyric, one in Bassano portraying a lover (45) and a second in Trento, which portrays a courtly scene, a distant echo of troubadour poetry (46). Continuing the theme of pictorial arts, Giordana Canova Mariani addresses "Il poeta e la sua immagine: il contributo della miniatura alla localizzazione e alla datazione dei canzonieri provenzali AIK e N" (47-76). Here an art historian uses the methods of that discipline to date four chansonniers. The author suggests that A can be dated to shortly after 1273-75 (61), that I and K can be dated to the 1290's (67), that N dates from the 1260's–1270's (75).2 The arguments mustered depend almost entirely on comparing the art in these four manuscripts (portraits and flourishes) with dated manuscripts from scriptoria in the Veneto. Historian Michel Roquebert offers "L'Emigration languedocienne en Italie padane au cours du XIIIe siècle" (77-95), based largely on Inquisition documents relating to four heretic travelers. Roquebert establishes a geography and a sociology of exile; the documents he examined allow him also to consider the material and social conditions of exile. In "Sur quelques troubadours qui franchirent les Alpes du temps de la Croisade contre les Albigeois," (97-133), Gérard Gouiran extends Roquebert's discussion to specific troubadours, notably Folquet de Romans. Gouiran's essay is, in truth, a description of the lifestyle of troubadours and joglars who flourished in thirteenth-century Italy. Saverio Guida's contribution, "Esperienza trobadorica e realtá veneta" (135-170) complements Gouiran's essay nicely...

En gave til Veleda – Om en magtfuld spåkvinde og tolkningen af de sydskandinaviske krigsbytteofringer

En gave til Veleda – Om en magtfuld spåkvinde og tolkningen af de sydskandinaviske krigsbytteofringer

Mitochondrial Haplogroup U5b3: A Distant Echo of the Epipaleolithic in Italy and the Legacy of the Early Sardinians

There are extensive data indicating that some glacial refuge zones of southern Europe (Franco-Cantabria, Balkans, and Ukraine) were major genetic sources for the human recolonization of the continent at the beginning of the Holocene. Intriguingly, there is no genetic evidence that the refuge area located in the Italian Peninsula contributed to this process. Here we show, through phylogeographic analyses of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation performed at the highest level of molecular resolution (52 entire mitochondrial genomes), that the most likely homeland for U5b3-a haplogroup present at a very low frequency across Europe-was the Italian Peninsula. In contrast to mtDNA haplogroups that expanded from other refugia, the Holocene expansion of haplogroup U5b3 toward the North was restricted by the Alps and occurred only along the Mediterranean coasts, mainly toward nearby Provence (southern France). From there, approximately 7,000-9,000 years ago, a subclade of this haplogroup moved to Sardinia, possibly as a result of the obsidian trade that linked the two regions, leaving a distinctive signature in the modern people of the island. This scenario strikingly matches the age, distribution, and postulated geographic source of a Sardinian Y chromosome haplogroup (I2a2-M26), a paradigmatic case in the European context of a founder event marking both female and male lineages.

An Amateur of Quality: Postwar French Cinema and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la mer

I consider myself an amateur, and I'd like to remain that way. This may not seem very modest, but as Flaherty said, cinema, change Isn't brought about by professionals, but by amateurs. -Jean Rouch EVERY CINEPHILE HAS A FAVORITE IMAGE of Jean-Pierre Melville. Nowadays, admiration for Melville's distinctive films and the legend of their maverick creator resonates widely in cinema culture. A still from an interview with the French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch in a recent issue of Premere magazine provides one such point of departure (Gravelines 90). Klapisch is shot in high contrast black-and-white, posed insouciantly in a dark, beat-up leather jacket. A 1940s gangster-style fedora, its brim pulled down low over the director's eyes, casts a long shadow over his impassive facial features. The portrait is labeled simply: Melvillian chic.1 In visual shorthand, Klapisch's photo-homage invokes succinctly an aesthetic of the underworld-rogue and taciturn masculinity, defiance, the suggestion of criminality, a distant echo of Hollywood and film noir. More than thirty years after his death, here and elsewhere, Melville's reputation reaches powerfully into the twenty-first century. Melville today is a mythologized auteur, hailed as much for his unconventional persona as for his actual films. Offscreen, Melville is remembered as a dynamic, outspoken, cigarsmoking iconoclast in a Stetson. Onscreen, he is celebrated for a career of fetishized films: the underground Resistance parable Le Silence de la mer [The Silence of the Sea] (1949), the offbeat New Wave harbinger Bob le flambeur [Bob The Gambler] (1956), policiers such as Le Doulos [The Finger Man] (1962) and Le Deuxieme souffle [The Second Breath] (1966), and muted thrillers like Le Samourai [The Godson] (1967) and Le Cercle rouge [The Red Circle] (1970). Known for his collaborations with iconic French stars-Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, Catherine Deneuve-Melville is also famed for his fierce creative independence. Later in life, he bought and ran his own film studio, doggedly controlled his productions, and became a cited inspiration for filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Neil Jordan (who remade Sob le flambeur, as The Good Thief, in 2003), John Woo, and Quentin Tarantino. Melville's career is at last being reappraised, and its significance is belatedly emerging. In 2002, Richard Neupert's invaluable survey, A History of the French New Wave Cinema argued for Melville as a renegade role model, in style and technique, for the Young Turks that followed him (63-72). In July 2003, the British Film Institute officially recognized Melville's body of work by hosting a complete retrospective of his films. Later that same year, Ginette Vincendeau's monograph, lean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris, outlined Melville's career through textual analyses of his films, in particular their representation of gender. More recently still, high profile 35mm and DVD restorations have made Melville's once-obscure films, notably Le Cercle rouge, available for a new generation of enthusiasts. Despite these advances, our knowledge of Melville's emergence in the 1940s, and, concomitantly, his formative role in postwar French film history, is far from complete. Most studies of Melville, indeed, continue to appraise him in abstract terms, as the source of cultural discourse, an artist ripe for interpretation. Such approaches have led to a systematic neglect of the logistics and practical contexts that shaped Melville's filmmaking directly. Most crucially, Melville's radical position as a self-styled amateur-his work as the producer as well as the director of his films-has been widely ignored. Hence, vital questions remain unasked and unanswered. As Melville began his career in cinema, which industrial imperatives did he react against? Why was piecemeal, nonprofessional independence Melville's solution? And how did these unorthodox methods manifest a controversial yet influential new model of individualized production? …

DONOGHUE, P. C. J. & SMITH, M. P. (eds) 2004. Telling the Evolutionary Time. Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record. Systematics Association Publication no. 66. viii + 288 pp. Boca Raton, London, New York, Washington D.C.: CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), for the Systematics Association. Price £72.99 (hard covers). ISBN 0 415 27524 5

J. B. S. Haldane, famous for his quip about the Creator’s inordinate fondness for beetles, is also well known for his reply as to whether anything might make him abandon his belief in evolution. The response was to the effect that a rabbit found fossilized in Ordovician strata would shake his faith to the core. Haldane’s reply was hardly surprising; we do not find Ordovician rabbits any more than we do Devonian tulips or Cambrian dinosaurs. To the first approximation, the history of life shows an overall order that investigations of the fossil record continuously refine, but these days very seldom overthrow. In recent years, however, and perhaps as a distant echo of the corrosive relativism of the Kuhnian world picture of paradigm shifts, the old securities seem to have been eroded. One topical instance is the renewed questioning of whether the effect of the available sediment in a given geological interval, as well as other factors, such as Raup’s ‘Pull of the Recent’, do not conspire to distort completely any original diversity trends. Of equal, if not greater, importance, is the rather extraordinary fact that with few exceptions the estimated times of divergence that are based on molecular ‘clocks’ significantly exceed the palaeontological data points of first appearances. The implications are as obvious as they are intriguing. Could it be that the …

Distant Echo of a Strong Voice: Reflections on Margaret Mead’s Evaluation of the Salzburg Seminar

Distant Echo of a Strong Voice: Reflections on Margaret Mead’s Evaluation of the Salzburg Seminar

Developing the history of unintentional injury: the use of coroners' records in early modern England

27 August 1578. Peasmarsh, Hastings coroner: “About 7am on 12 August when Edmund Pette, aged over 8 months, was in a water-mill at Peasmarsh with Helen Pette, Helen went outside...

Theatre and Translation

Among the contexts in which this issue is produced is the memory one of us has of growing up francophone in Ottawa, feeling the frustration of always having to translate in order to get on with the business of everyday life: the feeling, spoken in the epigraph above, of both speaking and being heard “in translation,” as a distant echo of “what’s inside.” But, in a sense, all human communication – the encoding and decoding of meanings – consists of acts of translation, of refracted echoes. And since such acts are performative, the topic of theatre and translation is potentially a very broad one, taking all human communication as its subject-including, as Ellen MacKay and Jeanne Klein demonstrate in this issue, various kinds of border crossing and code-switching both within and across linguistic divides, and various performances of identity. To a greater or lesser degree, moreover, all translation, between languages, peoples, cultures, species and codes – and even between individual people in intimate relationships who speak the same languages but remain proverbially “misunderstood” – is mistranslation. This, of course, is at the root of many conflicts in the home, the workplace and the world, ranging from divorces to disasters: brutal wars and intercultural conflicts that are all too familiar as the world sidles anxiously into the third millennium with no sign that the human capacity for brutality is on the decline. But, as Jacob Wren points out in this issue, translation as an inexact science is also at the root of all invention and creativity: mistranslation itself constitutes the frisson, friction and Assuring from which pleasure derives and from which emerges the possibility for social change. When translation happens within generous and congenial contexts such as those Don Druick describes in this issue at the Tadoussac residency, moreover, the possibility emerges of enlightened and mutually enriching exchange – and, through exchange, change.

Subversive intent: gender, politics, and the avant-garde

INTRODUCTIONIn December 1982, after more than twenty years of continuous presence on the international intellectual scene, the French avant-garde journal (as it had long characterized itself and been characterized by others) Tel Quel published its last issue. Without tears, without grandiose farewells -- without the slightest indication that number 94 would not be followed by 95.In truth, for a while already, Tel Quel had been preparing its demise. Or, if one prefers, its transfiguration -- for the first issue of a new journal, L'Infini, with the same directeur (Philippe Sollers), the same kind of layout and cover (down to the typeface in which the titles were set), many of the same authors, but a different publisher (the venerable house of Gallimard, rather than the postwar upstart, Editions du Seuil) appeared in spring 1983, without missing a beat. This time, there was an opening editorial to explain the shift; it was in the form of a dialogue between two unidentified voices, those of a typical Parisian questioner and Sollers. Te/ Quel has stopped and begun. What do you mean by that? the questioner asks. Sollers replies it was not we who stopped Tel The old publisher would not release the title, insisted on keeping it. Now it was dead. But there is nothing to regret, he says two pages later: L'Infini is a much better title than Tel Quel. Which was only a threshold [seuil -- a belittling pun on the abandoned publisher], which in any case had had its day.1Tel Quel had had more than a day. For well over a decade, starting with the heady days and months that preceded May 1968, its name not only had been synonymous with the radically new -- new conceptions of writing, of language, of subjectivity, of history, promising to revolutionize the human sciences, including philosophy and the study of literature, in France and elsewhere -- but also had represented, for many people, the latest incarnation of the European avant-garde. Like its historical precursor, Surrealism, Tel Quel considered itself a collective movement with a doubly revolutionary program. One cannot make an economic and social revolution without making at the same time, and on a different level, a symbolic revolution. This declaration by Sollers, speaking for Tel Quel in 1970, appeared like a distant echo of Andre Breton's often-quoted statement, made in a speech in 1935: Transform the world,' said Marx; 'change life,' said Rimbaud: for us, these two watchwords are one.

On relation between radar super-refraction echoes and height of ducting layers along west coast of India

The paper presents a study of abnormal propagation of microwaves observed along the west coast of India and across Arabian Sea using a S-band radar 1ocated at Bombay. Very distant echo of Arabian Peninsula has been seen on PPI scope. The variation in the abnormal propagation has been studied ID relation to meteorological conditions using radios9nde data of RS/R Unit, Bombay. It is seen that whenever elevate Conducts are present, super-refraction echoes are also present on .PPI scope. The Increase In ground echoes is seen to be directly related to the decrease in the height of these ducting layers.

Nuevas pinturas de Lucas Valdés

The paintings of the Sevillian artist Lucas Valdes, one of the most interesting artists of the transitional period between the seventeenth and eighteenth century local school of painting, are slowly coming to light and being identified. His style, which is a distant echo of the Baroque intensity of bis father Juan Valdes Leal, is distinguished by its tone of restraint, at times brimming over with personality. This recent discovery of six works by Lucas Valdes helps to place bis sphere of activity in both Sevilla and the city of Cadiz, where he lived from 1719 till 1725, the year of bis death.

Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West

Foreword Note to the paperback edition Abbreviations Introduction: imperial triumph as a historical problem 1. Invincible empire: the ideology of victiry under the principate 2. Out of the streets and into the circus: the development of imperial victory celebrations in the later Roman empire 3. Imperial victory celebrations and the public life of the later Roman state 4. The development of imperial victory celebrations in early medieval byzantium 5. Organizing a byzantine triumph 6. A distant echo: victory celebrations in the imperial provinces 7. Ephemeral empires: triumphal rulership in Barbarian Africa, Burgundy and Italy 8, The king's victory in visigothic Spain 9. From late antique to early feudal society: frankish victory celebrations Conclusion Epilogue Bibliography of primary sources cited Frequently cited secondary sources Descriptive list of figures Index.

From Internal War

From INTERNAL WAR / Volodia Teitelboim Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa SEPTEMBER DIALOGUE The poet had come to the end of the road. He went down the Avenida La Paz. But, according to the Junta, the Internal War was just beginning. The strange cortege halted. Although the tune was distantly familiar, he couldn't quite make it out. Music had never been his forte. It came to him weak at first, then powerful. Because he was hearing everything, as never before, in a way that might have come from hypertrophy. He could still hear through dead ears. He could still see through dead eyes. But with new conditions, with a different intensity and a different clarity. He could hear what had been inaudible to him before. He could see what had been invisible to him when he was alive. He could penetrate walls, eliminate distance. It was like a long-distance lens and an amplifier turned up to X power. That's where he saw her. Her. Esperanza. Yes, her name was Esperanza a Pesar de Todo, "hope in spite of everything," the way other women might be named Pilar Pérez de Arce or Jimena Alvarez de Toledo, or Ana Hidalgo de Cisneros. Combinations of surnames, different amalgams of lineage. Hers was a dynasty of poor people. He knew her parents, Raimundo and Margarita. He'd met them in Lota precisely when the mother was awaiting the birth of the one who would be this woman and from her, always ready to turn a good face toward bad times, must have come the wild idea, which he had celebrated with a shout, of baptizing her with that name. But now he could see that her face didn't look good. There was a shadow of panic, running away, eyes flying even though her feet were walking on the ground. The poet spoke to her suddenly and she shuddered. In order to give her confidence and take away her fright, he said to her: I knew you before you were born. And just look at me now, talking to you after I'm dead. I died the day before yesterday. He thought, afterward, with regret, that those words would scare her even more; but she didn't seem surprised. Tell me, what are you doing in that house across the way? Aren't you coming to my funeral? he reproached her, a bit offended. He turned around as if to hear her better and then he noticed why that whole voiceless dialogue of imperceptible sound seemed natural to her. It was like her own atmosphere, air where the dead floated and swam. What are you doing there, Esperanza a Pesar de Todo? I've come for someone. For whom? For your mother, your father? No, for him. Like almost The Missouri Review · 209 everybody I began looking for him two weeks ago. Yes, two weeks ago I got the coup de grace too. But I held off for twelve days and their twelve or twenty-four nights. Twelve days with their twenty-four nights, she repeated like a distant echo, from the moment they called me on the phone. I was the only one who had a phone in the settlement. Lots of times, almost always, they'd be messages for other people. But this time it was about Roque. Did I know him? I don't think so. But you knew his father, the poet who died in Pisagua during the time of González Videla's concentration camp. When the curfew was lifted on Thursday I went out to look for him. First I went to the National Stadium. My mother told me that I had been born from a night of love after the concentration camp at the National Stadium, when you recited a poem she remembered. But which I don't want to remember. Why not? The name of the poem? "The People Call Him Gabriel." Almost as if we said "the people call him César Augusto." Don't the people call him Pinocchio? No. Pinocchio has what they call a conscience. Every time he tells a lie his nose grows longer. And this...

The Hunt and the Erotic

No serious argument proves that mythology is only a by-product or a residue of history. On the contrary, a certain number of analyses and theoretical reflections on the myth suggest that different levels of meaning, covering the whole body of mythology, demonstrate a great autonomy and that if the hunt, for example, introduces a series of myths, in a society as fundamentally agricultural as Greece in the first millenium, it is not a distant echo but rather is faithful to the social means of production of a horde of hunters who had crossed the clearings of History some millenia before, but in a less diffuse manner because the cynegetic activity constitutes an excellent operative in the scheme of the myth. For a series of reasons: the hunt, a fundamentally masculine activity where the confrontation with wild animals results in bloodshed in order to procure a meat complement, contrasts with the cultivation of the land but is closely linked with warfare. If this is completely the privilege of the male, because it is a work of death, the production of cultivated foods, on the contrary, takes place on the level of gestation and reproduction, even if working the land in Greece is assumed by men.

Stephen Crane—A Distant Echo

FEW BOOKS have been so enthusiastically received in England as The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane's novel of the American Civil War. In December 1895 it was welcomed unanimously by authors and critics alike, and caused a good deal of public excitement. The book arrived in England, in the words of Joseph Conrad, ‘with the impact of a twelve‐inch shell’. It has since come to be regarded as one of the most significant books in the development of modern American literature.