Early Books Research Articles

What he may seem to the world: Isaac Newton's autograph book epigrams

This paper identifies, describes and analyses Isaac Newton's known inscriptions in alba amicorum (autograph books). It begins with an introduction to the early modern autograph book and its social utility for travelling students. Each Newton inscription is contextualized with brief biographies of the individual album owners. The potential reasons for Newton's use of his chosen epigrams are considered, as are possible reflexive dynamics between him and the album owners that may have helped to inform these choices. An allied consideration is the degree to which Newton's epigrams relate to scholarly projects with which he was engaged when he penned them. A special feature is the identification of the owner of an album from which a Newton inscription was stolen more than half a century ago. This study offers a glimpse of Newton's intellectual reputation across several decades, both on the Continent and in his native England. More broadly, this paper makes contributions to our understanding of Newton's personal life and the strategic use of alba amicorum in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries within the Republic of Letters.

Reading Matter

Abstract Three new studies of the history of reading, literacy, and publishing bring together reception studies and book history to offer a nuanced and multifaceted look at the varieties of reading culture in the US during the nineteenth century. This essay offers an overview of the current state of nineteenth-century reception studies and book history, and discusses A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation (2019) by Beth Barton Schweiger; Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018) by Lindsay DiCuirci; and Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading (2019) by Donna Harrington-Lueker.

Dojrzewanie do własnego głosu, czyli „Rejwach” Mikołaja Grynberga

Maturing to One’s Own Voice, or ‘Rejwach’ by Mikolaj Grynberg The early books by Mikolaj Grynberg containing conversations with survivors and their children allowed the writer to discover perspectives unknown to him before. With time these stories, combined with his own experiences, have become the basis for writing ‘Rejwach’. In the article, while introducing the author’s search for form, the author will show how the contemporary writing about the Holocaust has evolved. Grynberg, on the basis of testimonies he has heard, creates stories which many people affected by the Holocaust can identify with – people from the first, second and even third generation of survivors. Although fictitious, they have a universal value.

The proletarian revolution in early books of Soviet Ukraine (1919—1927)

In this article the author continues a series of explorations devoted to the analysis of Bolshevik literature of the first decade of Soviet power. This article focuses on the genre of "Bolshevik non-fiction", extended since the inception of the Soviet republic in Ukraine (1919) and especially actualized in honor of the fifth and tenth anniversaries of the Great October Revolution of 1917. The author is characterized by unique qualitative characteristics, namely: a synergistic presentation of revolutionary events, which makes it possible to simultaneously and comprehensively consider different episodes of complex political application; a chronicle detailing the revolutionary processes, while subsequently the details were either forgotten or consciously concealed; active use of personalization to the broad circles of the revolutionary participants, whereas in the future historical memory was sung only by individual, power-determined heroes. In addition, much of this literature was written shortly by repressed authors and therefore had a rather unfortunate fate: first it was sent to special funds (as it was done, in particular, in the Book Chamber of Ukraine), and then to catalog Stalin's confusions, catalog cards to particularly dangerous literature were noticed. rectangular ink stamp in blue with the words "removed". Even now, this inscription gives the impression of a speedy three-year sentence from the NKVD bodies. Given these circumstances, the author seeks to actualize the little-known Bolshevik memoirs, which are early books of Soviet Ukraine.

Religion around John Donne (Religion Around, Vol 4.) By JoshuaEckhardt. Pp. xii, 194, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, $49.95.

Religion around John Donne (Religion Around, Vol 4.) By JoshuaEckhardt. Pp. xii, 194, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, $49.95.

Breaking the Book: Contrasting Paradigms of Print Culture

I opened Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015) (which, paradoxically, I read in digital form on a smartphone) with a lot of anticipation. Laura Mandell is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, and an enthusiastic pioneer and advocate of digital collections such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) for studying early English texts. Therefore, I expected this book to have insights into how digital texts differed from print, and how academic discourse can make effective use of digital resources, for example to analyse texts. What the book contains, however, is much different. Rather than being an assessment of digital texts, Breaking the Book is much more ambitious: it emphasises changes in print culture for much of the book, only considering digital publishing towards the end. Mandell asks, “how does the book machine work,” by looking at the history of the printed book. The book concludes with a manifesto for print humanities – not, in fact, a manifesto for digital humanities at all, but a claim for how digital print can transform “the book machine.” Nonetheless, a reader will see this book more as a contribution to the history of the printed word than a study of digital humanities.

Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800: A Practical Guide. By Sarah Werner

‘For more than forty years,’ wrote Philip Gaskell on the first page of his A New Introduction to Bibliography (1973), ‘R. B. McKerrow's An introduction to bibliography for literary students has been the only adequate exposition of its subject.’ Another forty or more years has passed and now it is time for Gaskell to cede the floor in turn. Sarah Werner's readable, usable, teachable book is now the go-to volume for the resurgent academic and, especially, pedagogical interest in old books. This new appeal has been encouraged by the availability of digitized surrogates online, by exciting new scholarship connecting the material and the literary, and by the heroic efforts of special collections librarians and faculty to bring early printed books into the literature classroom. Werner's is the indispensable practical guide to this reshaped discipline. While she does not ignore the technical aspects of book production, it is her attentiveness...

Review: The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, by Stephen J. Shoemaker

Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 272 pp. ISBN 9780812250404. $59.95. This book is a strong contribution to the sustained surge in publications on “Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” in which the origin of Islam is explained, quite reasonably, by reference to its prior historical context. It is devoted specifically to apocalypticism, that narcissistic belief that the time in which one lives is the very most significant since creation itself, in which the meaning of history will become evident. Building on his earlier book The Death of a Prophet (2012) and an earlier article, and repeating arguments to an extent necessary to make this sequel independent, Shoemaker argues persuasively that late ancient apocalypticism and its formulation as eschatology played a major role in the genesis of Islam in the career of Muḥammad and afterward, both in its early doctrine and in animating the conquests carried out by Muḥammad's followers. In doing so he demonstrates his detailed familiarity with the recent and varied outpouring of challenging research on the Qurʾān in its historical context as well as his sure footing among religious texts of the late ancient period. In a field characterized by subtle, and sometimes unsubtle, apology and polemic, Shoemaker takes a historian's stance, adopts specific positions, and defends them on the basis of primary sources, many of which will be unfamiliar to readers. He is undogmatically open to a Qurʾānic text shaped by the prophet's followers even after his death. The general argument addresses only one piece of the puzzle of Islamic origins, apocalypticism. As Shoemaker indicates, this is a component of ideology that has been neglected by quite a few specialists in early Islam in favor of an implicitly laudatory view of Muḥammad as a reformer initiating a new society rather than warning of the end of all society. About two-thirds of the book consists of discussions of apocalypticism …

Gender Dynamics and Critical Reception: A Study of Early 20th-century Book Reviews from The New York Times

This paper focuses on book reviews at the turn-of-the century United States in order to underline fundamental compatibilities between large-scale, computational methods and book historical approaches. It analyzes a dataset of approximately 2,800 book reviews published in The New York Times between January 1, 1905 and December 31, 1925. Several machine learning scenarios are employed to investigate how the underlying reviews constructed gendered norms for reading and readership. Logistic regression models are trained and tested to evaluate how effectively lemma frequencies predict the perceived or presumed gender of an author under review. The paper discusses four different feature selection scenarios, as follows: (1) No terms removed, (2) Stop words removed, (3) Stop words, gender nouns, and titles removed, and (4) Stop words, gender nouns, titles, and common forenames removed. For each scenario, the top lemma coefficients are discussed and interpreted. Tracing the norms (gendered and gendering) of The New York Times Book Review in the early twentieth century demonstrates that even the summary-driven book reviews played an important role in mediating hierarchies of taste and distinction. Further, the paper seeks to demonstrate that cultural analytics methods can be used to investigate a range of research questions related to authorship, publishing, circulation, and reception.

Vocabulary, metacognitive knowledge and task orientation as predictors of narrative picture book comprehension: from preschool to grade 3

This is a study of early picture book comprehension, its determinants and later development through primary school. More specifically, picture book comprehension was analyzed longitudinally from age 5 to age 9, delineating the unique contributions of vocabulary, metacognitive knowledge and task orientation to the initial level as well as to the growth of comprehension. A total of 90 Finnish-speaking children participated in the study. The children’s narrative picture book comprehension was assessed at age 5, age 6 and age 9. Vocabulary, metacognitive knowledge and task orientation were evaluated at age 5. Latent growth curve modeling showed a pattern of decreasing achievement gaps in narrative picture book comprehension. Vocabulary and metacognitive knowledge uniquely contributed to the concurrent level of narrative picture book comprehension. The results further showed that metacognitive knowledge and task orientation were positive and statistically significant predictors of the growth of picture book comprehension over and above the initial level of narrative picture book comprehension. These findings add to our knowledge about the development of inter-individual differences in narrative picture book comprehension and the roles of vocabulary, metacognitive knowledge and task orientation in it. They also suggest a novel way to assess the narrative comprehension potential among students with compromised working memory or decoding ability.

Putting the Indices into practice: censoring science in early modern Portugal

ABSTRACTDuring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Inquisition was the institution most invested in the censorship of printed books in the Portuguese empire. Besides publishing the Indices of Forbidden Books, the Holy Office was also responsible for overseeing their implementation and ensuring their efficacy in preventing the importation, reading, and circulation of banned books. Overall, the sixteenth-century Indices condemned 785 authors and 1081 titles, including 52 authors and 85 titles of medicine, natural history, natural philosophy, astronomy, chronology, cosmography, astrology, and divinatory arts. By looking at the largest collection of early modern scientific books in Portugal, I will argue that a closer inspection of marginalia and ownership, and the establishment of a typology of expurgations is essential for the comprehension of the actual practices and the mechanisms of censorship. By examining the material evidence of censorship, in order to reconstruct expurgation practices, this paper reveals the processes and effectiveness of ecclesiastical control in the Portuguese Inquisition and highlights the differences between what inquisitors wrote in the Indices and what others put into practice.

How Anne Askew Read the Bible

ABSTRACT The two parts of Anne Askew's Examinations (1546–47) offer a first-hand retrospective narrative of the interrogation, condemnation, and execution of a woman who ran afoul of English clerical and secular authorities because she violated prohibitions on public Bible reading when she read the scriptures at Lincoln Cathedral. This was not a capital offense in itself, but her devotion to Luther's doctrine of sola scriptura (“by scripture alone”) led to her execution for denying orthodox belief in transubstantiation and the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Mass. Her experience provides an outstanding example of how reading and interpretation of the English Bible as it was translated by William Tyndale (1494–1536), individuals associated with him, and their successors led a literate laywoman to being burnt alive for heresy. This investigation clarifies our understanding of reading practices, the materiality of early modern books, book editing, contemporary politics and religion, and other subjects related to her Bible reading.

Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius by Robert L. Marshall

Reviewed by: Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius by Robert L. Marshall Marshall Brown (bio) Robert L. Marshall. Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019). xxi, 330 pp. Robert L. Marshall’s Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius collects essays originally published since 1990, as a sequel to the 1989 collection The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which assembled essays from 1973 forward.1 In both books, some of the essays have brief added postscripts to bring them up to date, and the new essays are also lightly adapted to avoid anachronism and to incorporate cross-references. Marshall is surely well known to readers of this journal, and at least two of the essays from the earlier book, “Bach the Progressive” and “On Bach’s Universality,” are justifiably classics. There are no major departures in the new book, but there are some significant shifts in approach. Most of the essays in Marshall’s earlier book are philological, concerned (as the section titles have it) with evidence for Bach’s compositional process, with “Questions of Authenticity and Chronology,” and with performance practice. The earlier essays in the new book continue in that vein. Brief essays on the Wilhelm Friedrich Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach notebooks and on Mozart’s unfinished compositions review the evidence meticulously and draw modest conclusions, working toward serious reflection (e.g., “it appears that the creative act was always driven forward, step by step, along the unfolding form,” 251). While the notebook essay ends in hyperbole (“The historical value of the notebooks .. . can hardly be exaggerated,” 37), I welcome the impulse to employ the essayist’s encyclopedic knowledge toward some general reflections. Conversely, the longest essay, a survey of Bach’s keyboard music, is in the vein of the earlier volume’s survey of his music for flute, a set of learned and judicious annotations with only a brief final gesture toward a larger argument. Judicious learning has always been Marshall’s forte. Some triumphs here are: 1) a brief compromise with “my good friend [Joshua] [End Page 306] Rifkin” (115) on the size of Bach’s chorus (Marshall concedes that probably the choral movements were sometimes performed with Rifkin’s single voices, but surely also sometimes with larger groups); 2) a defense of the St. John Passion that leaves room for Jewish discomfort with the antisemitic Gospel text (Marshall himself is Jewish); 3) a welcoming review of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus on the occasion of the release of the film version (yes, the facts are distorted to accentuate Salieri’s presumed perspective, but it’s good entertainment and aroused substantial interest in Mozart); and especially 4) the book’s liveliest read, a wry survey of the scant information leading to critics’ innuendos about Johann Christian Bach’s sexuality. Earlier, Marshall dug into archives and scrutinized manuscripts. Bach and Mozart chiefly draws on book stacks, with an encyclopedic command of information old and new, unruffled by rare errors. Adorno did not coin the term Spätstil (149), but that hardly matters. Somewhat more consequential is the claim of affinity that “Bach, like Luther, was a native Thuringian” (54). Luther’s birthplace, Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld, is in the modern state of Sachsen-Anhalt, near the border of Thuringia but not in it, now or then, and while Luther was exiled to Eisenach in Thuringia for one crucial year, he lived chiefly in Wittenberg, in the heart of Saxony. And I don’t know of any warrant for the proposal in the Luther chapter that “one would like to think that for the formally gifted Johann Sebastian Bach [aufführen didn’t just mean perform but] also implied ‘to create’” (38). This last example is an instance of the book’s core mode, a somewhat loose weave of persuasive conjecture supported by endless information, not damaged by the very occasional out-of-place stitch. In a given paragraph—and there are many such—one may find: “if we are willing to lend any credence at all .. . and if we are willing to indulge a degree of plausible speculation in the absence...

Polskie opisy Rzymu ze zbiorów Gabinetu Starych Druków BUW. Studium proweniencyjne

Polish Descriptions of Rome in the Collection of the Early Printed Books Department of the University of Warsaw Library—a Provenance Study Descriptions of the Eternal City written or translated by Poles began to appear in print in the second half of the 16th century. Before 1800 only eight titles were published, three of which are kept in the Early Printed Books Department of the University of Warsaw Library. Analysing the individual characteristics of the copies, such as ownership marks, marginalia, or bindings, an attempt is made to establish the identity of the owners of the books, their interests and reading practices, and to determine the ways in which Rome was perceived by readers born in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The aim of the study is also to show how the way of thinking about the Eternal City changed over the years and to present the purposes for which the former guides and accounts about Rome were used by the 17th, 18th, and 19th century readers. Five editions and eight copies of three titles were analysed. These are: O Rzymie pogańskim i chrześcijańskim (On Pagan and Christian Rome) by Andrzej Wargocki (two editions, five copies), Delicyje ziemie włoskiej (Italian Delicacies) by Georg Kranitz (two editions, two copies), and Droga rzymska z nawrotem do swojej ojczyzny (A Return Journey to Rome) by Kazimierz Kognowicki (one edition, one copy).

Revolutionary Sensibility, Embodied Poetics

Revolutionary Sensibility, Embodied Poetics Alan Richardson (bio) The invitation for the symposium in honor of jerome j. mcgann that this special issue represents came as something of a surprise. I had never had the chance to study with, teach with, or collaborate with McGann although, of course, like most professional scholars of Romanticism, I have gained immeasurably from his work over the years. So I chose to frame my own contribution as one that might speak for the indebtedness of a whole generation of scholars, in recording something of my own particular debts to McGann’s significant body of work. I ask for the reader’s indulgence, then, if I need to say a little about myself, in order to make the magnitude of those debts clear. Not, sadly, the full magnitude: we were also asked to structure our symposium presentations around one of McGann’s works in particular and my choice, The Poetics of Sensibility, should be obvious from my essay title. If I could write at greater length, I would want to say much more about the importance to me in my formation as a Romanticist of McGann’s innovative and widely influential work of the period 1979 to 1985—the very years I was in graduate school, although I did not really begin to absorb this work till a year or two later. Not to mention all that I (and my peers) have gained over the years from McGann’s magnificent Byron edition (which came out during that same period), I am thinking especially of the essays gathered together in his 1985 collection, The Beauty of Inflections, and, of course, of The Romantic Ideology, which appeared in 1983.1 For fledgling Romanticists as I was at that time, The Romantic Ideology hit us like so much ice-cold water flung in our faces, abruptly waking us from our dogmatic slumbers. My slumbers, perhaps, deeper than most, as I had spent my graduate years at the feet of the Old Historicists at Harvard—which at that time was a country for old men. Let me clarify that studying with that doughty, that dying generation of scholars would later prove to give me real advantages in my own early and mid-career as a New Historicist. For their grasp of historicism, as they construed it and transmitted it, was capacious, subtle, and meticulous. But as to the “New” part: they could give me no real help there. I had taken in [End Page 535] just enough literary theory as an undergraduate to know that, if I were to survive—and I mean less survive professionally than survive intellectually—I needed, to paraphrase what Ezra Pound said of another provincial, the young T. S. Eliot, to actually train myself and modernize myself on my own. Yet, as we all know, literary scholars and critics can not in fact do this on their own—we need the right methods and trustworthy models—and I could find no one in the field to guide me at first hand. So I turned to the generation of Romanticists just ahead of mine, a group of path-breaking, theoretically savvy, intellectually fearless critical scholars whose early books were already trailing clouds of glory for us neophytes to follow. The models that proved most vital for me prominently included the work of James Chandler and Mary Poovey: Wordsworth’s Second Nature and The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer both came out in 1984, in my case, that is, just in time.2 But it was the example of McGann’s writings that made the greatest single difference for me. The essays gathered in The Beauty of Inflections, in particular, showed me a way to redeem what I had considered the driest and dustiest aspect of my graduate training, the laborious care I had been urged, or perhaps compelled, to take with matters of bibliography, of textual editing and transmission, dates and places and imprints, production and early reception history. McGann, generously sharing lessons he had learned in the course of editing Byron, showed how the old-school disciplines of philology could, with the necessary theoretical and methodological reframing, become newly significant, indeed crucial, tools...

Experiencing Chopin: A Listener's Companion by Christine Lee Gengaro

Reviewed by: Experiencing Chopin: A Listener's Companion by Christine Lee Gengaro Laura Pita Experiencing Chopin: A Listener's Companion. By Christine Lee Gengaro. (The Listener's Companion.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. [xxiv, 181 p. ISBN 9781442260863 (hardcover), $42; ISBN 9781442260870 (e-book), $39.50.] Timeline, glossary, bibliography, discography, index. Christine Lee Gengaro's Experiencing Chopin: A Listener's Companion appears nearly simultaneously with two other books on Chopin: Alan Walker's comprehensive biography Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2018) and the essay collection Chopin and His World (ed. Jonathan D. Bellman and Halina Goldberg [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017]), which brings together a substantial group of Chopin scholars. Experiencing Chopin is Gengaro's first publication on nineteenth-century music, as her principal area of research is film music and music in popular culture. (An earlier book is Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013].) With Experiencing Chopin, Gengaro explores the niche of critical literature for the nonspecialist. The book belongs to the Listener's Companion series, which provides readers "a deeper understanding of pivotal musical genres and the creative work of … iconic composers and performers." This task is accomplished by placing readers "in specific listening experiences in which the music is examined in its historical context with regard to both compositional and societal parameters" (p. ix). Experiencing Chopin is organized into ten chapters, supplemented by a timeline, a glossary of musical terms, and selected readings and listening lists. Most of the chapters use biography as a context to discuss a set of pieces, usually from a specific genre. Chapter 1, "The [End Page 473] Piano Lesson," examines Chopin's etudes in relation to his experiences as a music student in Poland and as a teacher in Paris. Chapter 2, "Chopin's Concert Life," deals with Chopin's performances from his years as a child prodigy through adulthood and the composition of the two piano concertos. Chapter 3, "Confidants and Collaborators," explores Chopin's relationships with some of his Polish mates and close friends in Paris while commenting on his collaborative work with Auguste Franchomme on the Grand duo concertant sur des thèmes de Robert le diable and his Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor. Chapter 4, "Creative Nocturnes," looks at Chopin's stay in Vienna in 1830 and the influence of John Field on his nocturnes, while chapter 5, "Devotion to Poland," considers Chopin's mazurkas and polonaises in the light of his nationalism. The ballades and Chopin's relationship with George Sand are the focus of chapter 6, "Love, Chopin Style." Chapter 7, "Chopin and the Voice," discusses Chopin's songs in the context of his fondness for vocal music and his association with the poets Stefan Witwicki and Adam Mickiewicz. In chapter 8, "Musical Inheritance," Gengaro observes the influence of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on Chopin's preludes and the variations on "La ci darem la mano." As part of an examination of his piano sonata, chapter 9, "Maladies among the Melodies," presents various theories on Chopin's fragile health and the cause of his death. The last chapter, "Modern Chopin," offers a study of the endurance of Chopin's legacy in popular culture as reflected in the use of his music in cartoons and his presence as a character in films and video games. Gengaro's book is not a standard text of music history and criticism but rather an investigation of both Chopin's artistic and mundane self—a "portrait of an actual man, touched by genius" (p. xv). The author makes clear from the beginning that her aim is to use the historical contexts of creation and reception, and musical commentary on the pieces, to connect readers with Chopin's musical world and thus inspire them "to sit back and really listen" (p. xv). In doing so, she draws from historical facts and quotes extensively from correspondence and other personal sources—by Chopin, his lovers, friends, and students—while also indulging "in some invention and speculation" (p. xv). Whether Gengaro has been successful in such a venture is not easy to answer...

Bart Moeyaert as Writer, Author, Performer, and Public Figure: "That's Also What Literature Can Be"

Bart Moeyaert as Writer, Author, Performer, and Public Figure:"That's Also What Literature Can Be" Vanessa Joosen (bio) Though only in his mid-fifties, Bart Moeyaert began his writing career over forty years ago, when at age thirteen, he addressed a diary to an imaginary friend called Judith. Caught and ridiculed by one of his brothers, Moeyaert turned the diary into his first novel, which he published at nineteen. In the course of almost four decades as a published author, Moeyaert's views and writing practices have inevitably evolved. These developments can be attributed to personal experiences from living through adolescence, young adulthood, and middle age, which include his increased independence from his family, influential encounters, and the development of his career as an author and teacher. As a writer, he had the chance to experiment with new genres, topics, and writing styles, gradually growing into Belgium's most acclaimed children's author and gaining international fame. In this article, I will highlight four crucial experiences that transformed Bart Moeyaert's views on children's literature and had an impact on his subsequent books: the influence of Aidan Chambers and his distinction between author and writer; the experience of writing primers with specific, target-audience restraints; the pleasure of performing for a dual audience; and his mandate as Antwerp's city poet, which provoked a reflection on the writer as a public figure. What these experiences have in common is that they produced a tension between Moeyaert's personal and artistic desires on the one hand and considerations for his readership and broader social needs on the other. As such, this article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Moeyaert's developing poetics and diverse oeuvre, and to consider how an author's growing age and concomitant experiences can influence their views and work. Click for larger view View full resolution Author or Writer? Moeyaert wrote his first novels, Duet met valse noten (Duet with False Notes; 1983) and Terug naar af (Back to Square One; 1986), in his teens and early twenties—a time when he was still close in age to the audience of the [End Page 38] books. The novels are both set in school and draw on Moeyaert's intimate knowledge of adolescence. Terug naar af even features an alter ego with the same initials (Matthias Brandt) who, like the author himself, is made to repeat his final year in secondary school. Despite this obvious autobiographical input, Moeyaert wanted the story to be more, and when the book met with some criticism, he felt frustrated that many readers did not pick up on the symbolism in the story: "Apparently it is not expected of an adolescent novel that you would construct another level under the narrative" (qtd. in Lambrechts).1 The desire to construct this additional layer coincided with an incisive experience that Moeyaert often foregrounds in his development as an author: his reading of Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave. In 1987, Moeyaert dedicated the thesis of his degree in education to Chambers's works and visited him to discuss views on literature. In an interview a decade later, Moeyaert contrasted Chambers's views with those of his publisher at Altiora/Averbode (Verbeken). His publisher spurred him to keep his young audience in mind when writing—Moeyaert's youth had, after all, been a key factor in the success of his best-selling debut. Chambers made a distinction, inspired by Roland Barthes, between "authors" and "writers" (Chambers 14). Whereas writers are led by their audience, authors are led by their own artistic views and their stories' needs. This is reflected in Dance on My Grave, which Moeyaert describes as "[a] beautiful story about a friendship, if not to say, love, between two boys. But also a formal masterpiece full of flashbacks, repetitions, changes in narrative perspective, and so forth. A magnificent literary kaleidoscope that taught me: ah, that's also what literature can be" (qtd. in Verbeken).2 Moeyaert developed the novels Suzanne Dantine (1989) and Kus me (Kiss Me; 1991) along the lines that Chambers taught him. "Forget about the earlier books," he would say about Suzanne Dantine in 1991. "With...

Holobionts, Symbiosis and New Narratives for the Troubled Times of Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene

The aim of the article is to discuss the basic assumptions, theses and solutions of Donna Haraway’s book “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene”. The authoress places the considerations of an American philosopher and biologist against the background of her earlier books and conceptual proposals. She analyses her suggestion of using the category of Chthulucene instead of Anthropocene, the category of sympoietic system instead of an autopoietic one, she presents her appeal for creating new forms of kinship and extensive response-ability for each other.

Ciaran CarsonFrom There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations

which the author’s name and book’s title are superimposed. The title, from the Wajarri language, means “my mother,” the author tells us. What are the implications: Is Nganajungu Yagu to be a book of tragic travelogues undertaken in mostly lost indigenous tongues, Charmaine Papertalk Green versing and traversing brutally colonized lands? Or does the code-mixing in this book (between Wajarri, Badimaya, and English) imply language as a portmanteau, comporting disempowerment for indigenous language users in epistemically violent colonial contexts? Or is this writer working interlinguistically against inheritances bequeathing disconnection in a monoculturally imperialized place, as if to send an epistle issuing a set of instructions on the means by which Aboriginal Australians might fight back against a version of “Australia” that historically and systematically displaces and dispossesses indigenous peoples? In her preface, the author explains the book’s cover image, the letters from forty years ago sent to the poet by her mother “protected in my red life-journey suitcase. . . . [The book is] inspired by Mother’s letters , her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture.” Nganajungu Yagu is spliced with fragments from those letters, to which the poet responds in short bursts of autobiographical nonfiction, and this structure enables her to divest poems that speak of a family drama constituted within an overtly and infrastructurally racist Australia. Papertalk Green guides readers through often tragic scenes of forced institutionalization, domestic violence, eviction , poverty, substance abuse, and welfare dependency, but, throughout, her mother’s letters show how “being grounded includes strong connection.” Despite the systemically organized impoverishments her family confronts, they nonetheless remain bonded , and therein this book remains a work of unbroken fealty, a powerful statement attesting not only to oppression but, despite it all, prodigious hope. Papertalk Green makes clear she is writing “during invasion,” and these texts are Books in Review Ciaran Carson From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2019. 208 pages. FOR THOSE READERS somehow unfamiliar with Ciaran Carson’s poetry, these selected poems, chosen from thirteen books and presented in chronological order from 1976 to 2014, will provide an almost dizzyingly fast-paced tour of his essential work. More than any other poet in recent times, Carson’s poetic style changes dramatically from one phase of creativity to another. Were it not for certain consistencies in voice and topic, one could even wonder if all these poems were written by the same poet, so dramatic are the formal evolutions encountered in rapid succession. From beginning to end, however, Carson’s preferred method of conveying stance and “meaning” is consistent , using gesture and suggestion rather than declaration, achieving resonance through careful description and scrupulous diction. In his earliest books, Carson (1948– 2019) writes poems detailing the Troubles in Belfast. Without taking any particular overt stance on the conflict other than that implied by his focus, he uses a language of partial disclosure to evoke the psychology of that time, narratives that carefully allow the readers in while keeping them out with a certain level of secrecy and evasion. The language could be that of the hushed, clipped language of IRA soldiers huddled together in an English bar. For example, consider these lines from “Last Orders”: “Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but / It’s someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens . . . / . . . The barman lolls his head at us. We order Harp— / Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks daggers at us / From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how easy it would be for someone / Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and ourselves, to Kingdom Come.” Typical of this period also is the use of irony and grim humor as in the title and first lines of “Belfast Confetti”: “Suddenly as the riot squad moved in it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion / Itself.” Such long—almost prosaic—lines that confront the right margin of the page characterize this period. Then, in 1993, with the book First Language and on through...

Heavenly Masters: Two Thousand Years of the Daoist State by Vincent Goossaert (review)

Reviewed by: Heavenly Masters: Two Thousand Years of the Daoist State by Vincent Goossaert Jan De Meyer (bio) Vincent Goossaert. Heavenly Masters: Two Thousand Years of the Daoist State. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2022. XIV+ 418 pp. $68.00, isbn 978-988-237-202-3. To an already astonishing list of publications, Vincent Goossaert has added a book that will forever change the way we look at Daoism as an organized religion. In Heavenly Masters: Two Thousand Years of the Daoist State, Goossaert tells the story of the Zhangs of Longhushan 龍虎山, and their Heavenly Master institution, that considered itself the heir to the original Heavenly Master church (Tianshidao 天師道). As in many of his earlier books and articles, Goossaert, a leading scholar in the field of the social history of Chinese religion, has expertly analyzed an enormous amount of primary source material (works in the Daoist canon, gazetteers, collections of anecdotes, archives, manuscripts, literary collections, and newspapers) to provide us with an account of two millennia of what the author provocatively calls "the Daoist State." By "state" Goossaert means "an institution that proclaims and enforces norms and laws that apply to the whole population, that taxes its registered subjects in order to support itself and its officers, and that wields violence against its enemies" (p. 5). As the Heavenly Master institution attempted to do that "within and as part of the imperial state" (ibid.), Goossaert also uses the term "deep state." As is well known, the true origins of the Zhangs of Longhushan are shrouded in mystery, and their claim to constitute an unbroken tradition going back to Zhang Ling 張陵 (later Zhang Daoling 張道陵), the first Heavenly Master, rests on very little. As Goossaert explains (p. 42), the earliest trustworthy date for the presence of a Heavenly Master named Zhang at Longhushan is 828.1 Among the many historical Zhangs who claimed descent from Zhang Daoling before the ninth century, Goossaert (p. 26) mentions Zhang Daoyu 張道裕, described as a "twelfth generation descendant of Ling, Heavenly Master of the Han" (漢朝天師陵十二代孫) in an early sixth-century [End Page 186] stela inscription.2 A stela inscription dated 677, not mentioned by Goossaert, refers to Zhang Wenli 張文禮, fifteenth generation descendant of the Heavenly Master (see Chen Yuan, Daojia jinshi lüe, p. 67). That, one and a half centuries after the 677 inscription, Zhang Shaoren or Zhang Shiyuan should only have been eighteenth generation descendants, suggests the simultaneous presence of different patriarchal lines, or the extraordinary longevity of a number of Medieval Longhushan Heavenly Masters. However, the "exceptional longevity" for which the Zhangs were praised (p. 268) is not confirmed by the historical record. Longhushan Heavenly Masters died relatively young: the average age of the twenty-eight Heavenly Masters for whom we possess reliable dates of both birth and death was forty-nine. In light of the paucity of trustworthy historical documents relating to Zhang Daoling, Goossaert, in his chapter 1 ("Inventing the Founding Ancestor"), focuses on the history of the myth that grew around the first Heavenly Master. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the success of the Longhushan Zhangs in utilizing the wealth and power concentrated in their region during the latter half of the Tang, and in obtaining what Goossaert describes as the "ultimate grail" (p. 74): the empire-wide, state-sanctioned monopoly on ordinations. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze how the Heavenly Master institution grew to maturity during the early modern period (tenth to fourteenth centuries), against a background of thorough changes in Daoist ritual (the rise and integration of new exorcistic traditions). During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Longhushan Zhangs continued to be active throughout the entire empire, cooperating with the imperial bureaucracy, and shaping local society by licensing all sorts of religious specialists, and local gods as well. They were major landowners, living on the rent from their landed estates, they received donations from the court, and they charged fees (at times very substantial ones) for their ritual services (ordinations, canonizing local gods and "recycling demons," sale of talismans). The organization also functioned as a court of law, and taxed local communities so as to be able to maintain their status of elite Daoists, who...