Epic Poem Research Articles

El territorio de Chile en la poesía épica del siglo XVI: un imaginario sobre los desafíos de la conquista de Arauco

El artículo tiene como objetivo revisar y analizar los pasajes referentes al territorio chileno en los poemas épicos que cantaron la Guerra de Arauco en el siglo XVI. Aun cuando su argumento central consistió en los acontecimientos bélicos, algunos pasajes dieron cabida a la descripción del espacio como un paisaje épico. Así como se demostrará, su representación no solo se configuró atendiendo a las condiciones fisonómicas del territorio, sino también a los recursos literarios propios de la epopeya que caracterizaron al sur de Chile como un escenario desafiante y peligroso, espacio histórico y a la vez literario, representativo de la condición heroica e indomable del Reino de Chile.

Of asses and nymphs: Machiavelli, Platonic theology and Epicureanism in Florence

ABSTRACTIs Machiavelli an Epicurean in his political and religious thought? Recent scholarship has identified him as the foremost representative of Epicureanism in Renaissance Florence. In particular, his incomplete epic poem, The Ass, is read as an expression of his adherence to Lucretian naturalism. This article offers a new reading of the poem and shows that its teaching reveals that Machiavelli is closer to a Platonic variant of classical naturalism linked with the idea of a natural virtue modelled on the lives of animals which has been lost through human civilization and progress and to which it is necessary to return periodically. The article focuses on the poem’s claim that civil religion is a necessary component for good laws that maintain a free republic and argues that Machiavelli offers a poetic reflection on the role of Numa as the founder of Roman religion on the model of a neo-Pythagorean philosophical religion that was instrumental in the rise of constitutional government. More than Lucretius’s critique of religion, Machiavelli’s poem can be read as an extended reflection on Plutarch’s texts – above all, his Life of Numa.

ULIS (Upper Limb International Spasticity), a 10-year Odyssey

Homer's Odyssey, one of the major Greek epic poems, tells the story of the hero Odysseus (or Ulysses in Roman versions) and his journey home to his wife Penelope. An epic poem is a long, narrative poem that is usually about heroic deeds and events that are significant to the culture of the poet. In keeping with this classic storytelling style, we describe the journey that the Upper Limb International Spasticity Study (ULIS) program has taken. The program was started in 2008 and has encountered a number of trials and obstacles along the way. This article sets out the history of development through its 10-year “Odyssey.” We use the benefit of hindsight to discuss how conducting large-scale, international observational studies can inform and influence routine practice in an area as diverse and complex as spasticity rehabilitation. We focus on the clinical pearls found within the now extensive ULIS dataset and how continually building upon the insights from each study can provide a real impetus for change.

"A Lawful Alarme against ye Prynce": Gabriel Harvey and Vindiciae contra Tyrannos

A book discovered recently in the National Library of Wales includes Gabriel Harvey's annotations of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. The title page of this volume calls Vindiciae a rebuttal of Machiavelli's Prince, with which it is bound. It is in fact a critique of the institution of monarchy and was the subject of fierce debate in Harvey's lifetime (1552/3–1631), since it presents tyrannicide as legitimate. This essay considers the consequences of these findings for Harvey's reputation, since the appreciative and nonjudgmental way he comments on the text in his marginalia contrasts sharply with the condemnation of it in his printed works. The existence of this book may also shed new light on two lost works of Harvey's, Anticosmopolita and Tyrannomastix. This article argues that, far from being an epic poem as commentators have so often said, Anticosmopolita was Harvey's response to another antimonarchical text, and Tyrannomastix was his rebuttal of Vindiciae.

“The heat of Milton’s mind”: Allusion as a Mode of Thinking in Paradise Lost

One of the most contested and arguably misunderstood aspects of Milton’s poetry is his use of allusion. The long critical tradition on Paradise Lost, in particular, has spent much of its labor not only identifying the poem’s allusions and their significance, but also teasing out the terminological differences between allusion, echo, imitation, topoi, reference, and pun. But rich, insightful, and complex disagreements among readers of Milton’s epic poem nevertheless remain. This article suggests that part of the difficulty of Milton’s allusions lies in the fact that he did not use allusion in the way most poets do. Rather than deploying allusion as a “learned gesture” intended for readers to recognize, Milton used it as a thinking mechanism, a mode of apprehending and creating poetry.

A History of Irish Autobiography ed. by Liam Harte

Reviewed by: A History of Irish Autobiography ed. by Liam Harte Taura Napier (bio) A History of Irish Autobiography Liam Harte, editor Cambridge UP, 2018, 434 pp. ISBN 978-1107131446, $110 hardcover. In writing his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo left all future autobiographers with the conundrum of inscribing self-truth to be both compelling and maieutic. Augustine's omissions no less than his emphases articulate the autobiographical genre's imperative to create a narrative that in illuminating its subject engages the reader in self-discovery, with the speaker's persona as the maieutic catalyst for that [End Page 409] discovery. In addressing himself directly to God, Augustine compels the reader both to identify with and pass judgement on his spiritually questing persona as it moves toward epiphany. As Stephen Spender observes of confessions and autobiography, the author is caught in the double bind of alchemizing the "dirty business" that comprises the self-revelation of the inner life into a new and revealing object, growing out of and beyond observation (117). For Irish autobiographers, to this challenge is added the requirement of self-declaration within an ancient storytelling tradition fundamentally associated with place and gender. The two Irish oral narrative traditions of scéalíocht and seanchas depend on connections to the geographical and sociocultural spaces from which their tellers originate. Scéalíocht are associated with heroic legend and ancient mythology; often told as epic narrative poems, they are substantial in length and traditionally the exclusive province of male storytellers (Harvey). Seanchas deal chiefly with local legends and domestic sagas; they may focus on a single family or small group within a single area, and include material from ghost stories to place-name explanations to humorous anecdotes of a prominent family. Both traditions are centered in specific places, both have specific gender designations, and together they comprise the foundation of later narrative and self-narrative styles. Liam Harte's most recent edited collection, A History of Irish Autobiography, cuts an impressive critical swathe through Irish life writing in its multifarious forms, from Saint Patrick's Confessio to medieval Celtic poetic narratives to contemporary digital forms of Irish autobiography. The twenty-four analyses are grounded in the importance of a story told well, from the viewpoint of a recognizably Irish persona. Harte is by now rightly considered the maverick of Irish self-narrative scholarship, having edited the groundbreaking Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation, and Society (2007), the first scholarly collection to address the self-writing of post-independence Ireland, as well as having produced monographs and edited collections on Irish fiction and life writing. Here he undertakes the ambitious project of bringing scholars of diverse areas of Irish life writing together under a monolithic and somewhat peremptory title. Whether these insightful but slightly disconnected critical analyses can rightly be called a history is perhaps the collection's only question of accuracy. Each of the twenty-four contributors showcases a facet of Irish life writing in sociohistorical context, from Maire McNonagh's "Writing in Medieval Ireland in the First-Person Voice" to Claire Lynch's "Irish Life-Writing in the Digital Era," a spectrum that unfolds from Harte's solid introductory essay "Autobiography Theory and Criticism in Ireland." As Harte points out, "despite the immense proliferation of variant forms of first-person narratives in Irish culture since medieval times, autobiography, memoir and life-writing have long been little more than marginal presences in the authoritative histories of the nation's literature" (1). Harte's introduction to his previous collection Modern Irish Autobiography begins by identifying Irish self-narrative as a "Cinderella genre" relegated to the background in the [End Page 410] immense array of Irish literary criticism. It is worth mentioning that the present collection was commissioned by Cambridge University Press, certainly a sign of progress in the transformation of this body of criticism from its stubbornly marginal status to one of the fastest-growing areas of Irish scholarship. The "select chronology" Harte provides at the beginning of the book is indeed very select. It purports to include Irish autobiographical writing from the fifth century to the present, with autobiographical works under the guise of fiction indicated with an asterisk. These asterisked...

Відлуння слова Івана Котляревського в мові художньої прози Павла Загребельного

The article explores the intertextual interaction of stylists, who in the works of I. Kotlyarevsky and P. Zahrebelny represent the concept of «laugh culture». The linguistic and aesthetic signs in the epic burlesque-travesty poem «Aeneid» by I. Kotlyarevsky, which served as a model for the creation of expressive and pictorial means – carriers of humorous axiology in the language of a number of P. Zahrebelny's novels, are revealed. Attention is drawn to the fact that the foundations for the formation of a ridiculous culture as a genre segment of Ukrainian literature are laid in the poem «Aeneid» by I. Kotlyarevsky, which is written in a syllabic-tonic verse (iamb) – the size most appropriate for the Ukrainian language. The linguistic and literary traditions of ridicule are at the heart of the humorously narrative tonality of P. Zahrebelny's two novels – «The Lion's Heart» and «Exile from Paradise», which form the thematic-storyline. It is emphasized that the figure of I. Kotlyarevsky is a significant creative personality for P. Zagrebelny, who often appeals to the creator of the creator of Ukrainian literary language in his prose. The novelist dialogues with the artistic texts of the laughingstock, introducing meaningfully expressive fragments of them into the intersemiotic field of prose works. The intertextual interplay of linguistic components of the individual-linguistic paintings of the world of two writers can be traced in the functional and structural-semantic similarity of a number of style word, which are often the result of stylistic reception of the language game: intertext (linguocultural and ethno-language characters), literary and artistic anthroponyms, as well as words-symbols, which are functionally significant components of the peripheral-evaluative sphere. The individual and authorial rhetorical figures of P. Zahrebelny are comprehensively analyzed within the limits of linguistics, ethno-linguistics, theory of intertextuality, literary onomastics. It has been concluded that the linguistic creation of the prose contains an important humorous-axiological segment of artistic narrative, which is organically incorporated into the context of Ukrainian laugh culture.

Archipelagic Performance: Scenes from Maritime Southeast Asia

Archipelagos are complex environments that combine land and water in dynamic ways. As geological and discursive formations, they are performatively produced, and the kinds of cultural expressions that archipelagic communities perform represent distinctive manifestations of their location and interrelations. This essay considers a recent trend in contemporary performance for exploring archipelagic conditions, and places it within the context of an "archipelagic turn" in the interdisciplinary domain of island studies. It focuses in particular on three examples from maritime Southeast Asia: the installation Dapunta Hyang: Transmission of Knowledge (2017) by Zai Kuning; the theatrical performance Epic Poem of Malaya (2010) by Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan; and the solo dance SALT (2017) by Eko Supriyanto. The essay uses these examples to demonstrate that performances are of particular significance in understanding archipelagos, because they are able to contain, in concentrated form, many of the characteristic complexities of the formation that are otherwise distributed in space and time.

Don Leon & Leon to Annabella ed. by John Lauritsen

Reviewed by: Don Leon & Leon to Annabella ed. by John Lauritsen Nikolai Endres (bio) Review of John Lauritsen (ed.), Don Leon & Leon to Annabella (Pagan Press, 2017), 185 pages, ISBN 978-0-943742-21-2. Pornographic, Byronic, scatological, blasphemous, censored . . . why does no one read Don Leon? The Victorians did, and Lord Byron exerted a powerful spell on Victorian writers. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, when Dorian retreats to Nottinghamshire, “entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank,” Oscar Wilde is paying tribute Byron’s home (where, no doubt, Byron entertained his own crop of fashionable young men at New-stead Abbey). John Lauritsen has re-issued this classic, composed in the 1820s or 1830s, but not published until the Victorian period, in 1866. In his Introduction, he briefly explores authorship (coming down on the side of Byron as one of the co-authors among a veritable “gay think tank” but preferring to refer to “the Leon poet”), the various manuscripts, and the work’s relevance. What is Don Leon about? The epic poem surveys the attractions of a high-class (“patrician”) male, including a choirboy (alluding to Byron’s relationship with John Edlestone, who died prematurely); rehearses standard validations of same-sex desire (Anacreon, Plato, Socrates, Plutarch, Horace, Catullus, but also Christian examples, real and literary); recounts travels in search of sexual enlightenment; proffers an argument for homosexuality as a remedy against overpopulation; and hammers home the misery of sodomites: “The panic flight, the suicidal beam, / The knife, the bullet, do they trifles seem?” (998–99). The narrator couples this with the hypocrisy of justice: “Thou ermined judge, pull off that sable cap!What! Cans’t thou lie, and take thy morning nap?Peep through the casement; see the gallows there:Thy work hangs on it; could not mercy spare?” (1–4) [End Page 105] At one point, Leon’s wife Annabella, privy to her husband’s tale, asks: “Can man with man hold intercourse of love, / And mar the ends designed by God above?” (1134–44). (Later, as we read in Leon to Annabella, she will leave him because of too much a tergo intercourse during her pregnancy, another way of marring God’s ways.) This is clearly a set up, to which the narrator replies: “God of the universe, whose laws shall last,When Lords and Commons to their graves have past,Are good and evil, just as man opines,And kens he thy inscrutable designs?” (1401–05) This most radical argument (for Byron’s time) juxtaposes man-made laws with a higher power, typical in Victorian writers—for example, as in Wilde’s poignant “It is no doubt true that to be filled with an absorbing passion is to surrender the security of one’s lower life, and yet in such surrender there may be gain” (“The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”). About sixty pages of notes (in the original) follow. They explain contemporary references, such as the Bishop of Clogher, who was indicted for unnatural crime but fled to Scotland, where he died incognito twenty years later. There is the scandalous William Beck-ford, author of Vathek, art collector, Member of Parliament, who got away with sodomy (and pedophilia) because he was filthy rich but who was confined to his fabulous estate of Fonthill Abbey. A similar case involves another Member of Parliament, caught with his breeches down in the company of a soldier, who was tried behind doors and acquitted on the testimony of the Duke of Wellington and other character witnesses (after a repeat arrest, he disappeared from society). We find a perceptive observation that legal contracts tend to be very detailed, while one or two verses in the Scriptures have been taken to condemn gay people to eternal hellfire. Another sentence reads like a spot-on description of Byron: “It does not follow as a natural consequence that pæderasts are mysogynists [sic], or that a culpable indulgence in inclinations for the one sex argues an insensibility to the charms of the other” (63). Finally, the annotator lists the usual suspects in his literary defense of homosexuality—Petronius, Juvenal, Lucian, Shakespeare’s sonnets, even Dante’s sympathetic treatment...

Opiates and the adrenal: the tip of the iceberg?

Morphine-like compounds based on opium and derived from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, have been known for millennia, and their use recurs throughout the ages in personal reports and in world literature. For many decades their use was, if not fully condoned by society, tolerated as an effective means of ameliorating pain and indeed for ‘recreational’ purposes. The Opium Wars in the nineteenth century pitched the enthusiastic British traders in China against the local authorities who wished to control their use, with the eventual triumph of commercial capitalism and British firepower. In late nineteenth century London such opium dens were an accepted part of the Limehouse landscape, at least according to Charles Dickens, and frequented by well-connected gentlemen; indeed Coleridge’s epic poem Kubla Khan was said to be written under the influence of opium, while Thomas de Quncey immortalised the habit in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. However, over time and especially in the twentieth century, such opium-like compounds, the opiates, increasingly became drugs of abuse in addition to their profound analgesic effects, with heroin in particular becoming a global scourge. In addition, various analogues of the opiates were synthesised, with varying potencies, hoping to emphasise the analgesic efficacy while limiting their addictive potential. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to separate these two factors, and with the active encouragement of pharmaceutical companies, drugs such as oxycodone have become a major source of addiction and distress. Thus, in addition to their widespread use as highly effective analgesic agents in medicine, opiates have moved from an illegal phenomenon as part of the global drug trade to a phenomenal prescription-agent problem in many parts of the developed world. It has been estimated that since 1999, 200 000 Americans have died from oxycodone and allied prescription opiates, while in recent years US clinicians have issued a quarter of a billion opiate prescriptions annually (1). The pharmacology of opiates has become literally of deadly interest. Thus, their pharmacology, and especially their effects on neuroendocrine axes, is of very considerable interest.

Math and Myth: A Quantitative Approach to Comparative Mythology

The article is devoted to the application of a certain mathematical apparatus–the theory of complex networks–to quantitatively describe and compare myths belonging to different cultures. One of the fundamental results of comparative mythology is the finding of structures common for many cultures–monomyths. In our study, we focus on other aspects that are also common to different narratives. The approach we take is based on a new way of getting information about the relationships between the characters in the narrative. These characteristics are uniquely expressed in numerical form, and thus there is the possibility for quantitative comparison of different characters of the same text and texts belonging to different periods and different cultures. The method of analysis we use is based on the study of social connections between the characters of a particular epic narrative and on the quantitative analysis of these connections. To this end, the structure of a narrative is depicted as a network (graph) where the nodes are the characters and the edges are the connections (friendly or hostile) between the characters. This enables one, within a unique approach, to carry out a quantitative analysis and comparison of network structures that correspond to different texts. In particular, our work covers such texts as Homer’s epic poem The Iliad , the Irish sagas Táin Bó Cúailnge and Gaedhel re gallaibh, the five largest Icelandic sagas, and Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic. A quantitative analysis of the networks of connections between the characters of these works suggests that, in addition to the existence of monomyths, there are common universal characteristics in the structure of characters’ social networks. Among the common properties is the small characteristic size of the network (the average length of the shortest path) and significant correlations between the network nodes (high value of the clustering coefficient). Common features of these networks include the social balance corresponding to the location of hostile and friendly relationships and characteristic behaviour under the node removal from the network. Our findings suggest that network analysis can serve as another way of addressing issues related to the classification or study of narratives.

As traduções d´Os Lusíadas na Polónia ou a revisitação de Camões entre «os Sármatas» e «os Polónios» (questões históricas, culturais e sócio-políticas)

The epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572), by Luís Vaz de Camões, generated copies, imitations and translations, in between them the first Polish translation: Luzyada by Jacek Idzi Przybylski (Craccow, 1790). The poem has the power of to raise cultural, social and political questions, becoming the starting point for various theses in different epochs. The work of Camões is a pretext for a meditation about Poland’s past in the epoch of Romanticism and today. Camões invites us for an imaginary journey to the Christian rampart of the East, telling not only what had happened in the epoch of the Discoveries, but also what might have happened in the Easter Europe cultural space open for an imaginary journey coursing various methodological perspectives: history, literature, literary criticism, history of ideas and traductology.

Wordsworth and the Deluge

Wordsworth and the Deluge Tess Somervell (bio) In essays upon epitaphs william wordsworth analyzes the marquis of Montrose’s elegy for Charles I, in which Montrose claims that “I’d weep the world to such a strain, / As it should deluge once again.” “His soul labours,” Wordsworth observes of the poet, —the most tremendous event in the history of the planet—namely, the deluge, is brought before his imagination by the physical image of tears,—a connection awful from its very remoteness and from the slender band that unites the ideas:—it passes into the region of fable likewise; for all modes of existence that forward his purpose are to be pressed into the service.1 The Deluge is located in distant history, but its “tremendous[ness]” has lingered to the present, translated into and captured in the “awful” remoteness of the simile comparing it to tears. For this reason, it becomes something useful which can be “pressed into service” by a poet. This passage tells us that key to its “service,” for Wordsworth as well as Montrose, is the Deluge’s ontological and temporal status. Here Wordsworth distinguishes between the “history” of the Deluge and the “fable” of the classical myths alluded to in the elegy’s next lines. These belong to two different “modes of existence,” or ontological categories, but these “modes” are contiguous “regions” that can be traversed with ease within the space of a sentence of prose or a few lines of verse. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Deluge occupied a privileged position on the border between these “modes of existence,” history and myth. The seventeenth-century European proto-geologists who developed the discipline of Earth history did so whilst maintaining their implicit belief that the Deluge as recorded in the Book of Genesis had really occurred. The Deluge offered a fitting explanation for some of the most perplexing features of the Earth: notably the marine fossils found in inland, upland areas, even on mountaintops; and erratic boulders, huge rocks in peculiar locations which were frequently accounted for as diluvial relics that had been [End Page 183] carried and left by the floodwater. However, later in the eighteenth century the centrality of the biblical Deluge to Earth history was challenged by theories such as Abraham Gottlob Werner’s Neptunism, premised on a global ocean that predated humanity, and Plutonism, the theory that rock formation was driven not by water but by volcanic heat. By the early nineteenth century James Hutton and other geologists had argued that the land was shaped by continuous, gradual processes (a principle later labeled Uniformitarianism), rather than by dramatic upheavals like global floods (Catastrophism).2 Nevertheless, many Earth historians continued to cite the enormous Deluge that had been recorded in Genesis as a defining epoch in Earth’s history, even if Noah’s flood was only the most recent of a series of violent flood events.3 Georges Cuvier, Jean-André de Luc, and William Buckland, for example, all argued in the first decades of the nineteenth century for the historical reality and geological import of the biblical Deluge. Along with fossils and erratic boulders, an important piece of evidence for the Deluge for these later geologists was that most known cultures around the world seemed to have their own versions of the flood myth, suggesting a shared global memory of a real worldwide catastrophe. “We have seen in general,” wrote de Luc in 1809, “that the ancient mythologies were entirely founded on certain traditions of the deluge.”4 Thus the Deluge, according to many Romantic-period Earth historians, passed from divinely ordained but real geological event into mythology. As well as for natural philosophers, the Deluge remained an important resource for Romantic poets, and a particularly flexible one given contemporary uncertainty about its validity, origin, and effects. Robert Southey cherished an ambition to write an epic poem about the Deluge, in which he would use the story to reflect obliquely upon contemporary political upheavals (as George Gordon Byron would later use it in his mystery plays, Cain and Heaven and Earth). “The subject [of the Deluge] has been long my favourite,” Southey wrote in 1805, “because...

William Carlos Williams's The Great American Novel

William Carlos Williams was first of all a writer-not a poet, essayist, or novelist. Life isn't any more poetry than prose, he mused in a late essay,' looking back on a career that included over twenty collections of poems and an equal number of books in prose. During the Twenties, years of personal and artistic ferment for Williams, he wrote seven books of prose to one of poetry. His interest in the experimental, the new as a means of communicating, is nowhere more evident than in The Great American Novel (1923). Williams' experiments with the reciprocity between poetry and prose would culminate in Paterson, the five-book epic poem appearing between 1943 and 1958. But already in the Twenties he was an eager critic of contemporary proseHemingway, Ford, McAlmon, Stein, Joyce, Anderson. By 1923 he had voiced dissatisfaction with his own first prose collection, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920): fault is their dislocation of sense, often complete.2 He disliked the weak structure of the improvisations, the incomplete transitions; but he admired the dominant themes in the book: began there and then to revalue experience, to understand what I was at. In Spring and All (1923) Williams continued his search for an effective mode, this time a reasonably conventional prose mixed with poems. That he was fascinated by the differences in poetry and prose is clear from his many distinctions between the two. His interest in prose as a viable-a forceful-writing form had been evident as early as 1921 when he wrote admiringly of the work of James Joyce,

Epic Hares and Local Heroes: Vicente Pérez de Culla’s Expulsión de los moriscos rebeldes de la Sierra, y Muela de Cortes por Simeon Zapata Valenciano (1635)

In the midst of heightened hostilities abroad, an agricultural slump, economic strain, and demographic decline, Vicente Pérez de Culla wrote an epic poem. Expulsión de los moriscos rebeldes de la Sierra, y Muela de Cortes por Simeon Zapata Valenciano (1635) offers insight into the realities of post-expulsion Valencia. The poem’s overlooked dedication to the Count Duke of Olivares and its exceptional portrayal of Moriscos illuminate the mechanisms through which inhabitants of the “garden of Spain” struggled to make sense of Philip III’s decision decades later. Though often lumped in with the apologetic historiography produced during and shortly after the Moriscos’ banishment (1609–1614), Pérez de Culla’s text transcends the official narrative of the past and reveals distinct preoccupations of a tumultuous present. This article reconsiders the poetic homage to the forgotten Zapata brothers and their significance to Valencians in 1635.

Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 by Edin Hajdarpasic

Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 by Edin Hajdarpasic Charles Wukasch (bio) Hajdarpasic, Edin. Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans,1840–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Notes. Index. xii + 271 pp. $45.00 (cloth). On two occasions in recent years, I've chatted with young Bosnians. I asked each one if he or she was a Serbian, Croatian, or Muslim Bosnian. In both cases, the person replied adamantly "I'm Bosnian!" Now one can hardly generalize from two instances. However, it does make one wonder, at least based on these two brief conversations, whether the younger generation is moving away from the ethnic and religious labels of the past. One is reminded of the old joke about the census taker in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who asked a house owner what his religion was, Catholic or Protestant? When the reply was "neither—I'm an atheist," the census taker then asked "yes, but are you a Catholic or Protestant atheist." Whose Bosnia? comprises five chapters ("The Land of the People," "The Land of Suffering," "Nationalization and Its Discontents," "Year X, or 1914?", "Another Problem," plus an introduction and epilogue. Hajdarpasic's work is detailed and carefully researched. He recognizes the problem of defining terms which are often used loosely both in the media and even by academics: state, nation-state, nation, ethnic group, etc. One of his major contributions is the concept of the Muslim Bosnian as the "(br)other." In other words, the Bosniac, as viewed by the "true" Serb or Croat, is a fellow South Slav, yet has not been fully accepted as such. In "The Land of the People," Hajdarpasic comments "in the South Slavic context alone, thousands of pages were filled by debates over the implications of the term narod, which has been variously translated as the people, nation, folk, population, ethnic community, and so on; […] In Croatia, nineteenth-century scholars published lengthy accounts comparing different connotations of the term narod in different Slavic languages" (18). An integral element in defining a narod is, of course, language. Tied in with language is religion, folklore, history, etc. The emphasis in this chapter is on the life and work of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, although other important literary and cultural figures, e.g., Ivan Lukić, are dealt with. Hajdarpasic posits the question "who exactly were 'the Turks' in Bosnia, given that Serbian and Croatian activists used the same term both for their 'brothers of the Turkish faith' and for the hated Ottoman oppressors? Could any 'Turk' be a Serbian brother?" (32). Karadžić also posited the question "and where do they speak the purest Serbian?" (23). Ironically, Karadžić, although he felt that the "best" Serbian was spoken in Herzegovina, never visited either Bosnia or Herzegovina, citing as one reason lack of funds. Of course, it must be remembered that the [End Page 156] researchers of the nineteenth century (e.g., the Great Team of British folklorists) did not have universities and academic foundations to support their travel and research with grants. "The Land of Suffering" is largely concerned with what would today be called Islamophobia. Hajdarpasic discusses the portrayal in nineteenth-century South Slavic literature and art of the Muslim as a sadist who covets Christian woman. Ivan Mažuraić's epic poem Smrt Smail-age Čengića is undoubtedly the best example of the Turks' supposed propensity for torture by impalement (71). The Czech poet Jaroslav Čermák's painting The Abduction of a Herzegovinian Woman can only be described as Islamophobic and racist. As Hajdarpasic quotes a reviewer, "the sensational 'whiteness of the victim' contrasted with the 'swarthy Satanic ravager [i.e., of the Turks]" (76). One is also reminded of the U.S.'s racist past, when African-American men were stereotyped as lusting after white women. Chapters three through five ("Nationalization and Its Discontents," "Year X, or 1914?", "Another Problem") can be treated as a unit. Hajdarpasic catches the reader's attention with the opening line of chapter III: "One winter day in 1840, a small group of revolutionaries crossed the River Sava … vowing to 'liberate the Raya' [i.e., the Christian Muslims of Bosnia...

Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard

Reviewed by: Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard Maria A. Windell HAVARD, JOHN C. Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2018. 224 pp. $44.95 cloth; $44.95 e-book. The president of the United States is an avowed nationalist who constructs his position as such most consistently through xenophobic screeds against (im)migrants from Latin America. In such a political moment it is vital that we both produce and attend to scholarship that explores the US’s relationship to the Americas. John C. Havard’s Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity undertakes this task by tracking how the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US defined itself through and against depictions of Spain’s imperial presence in the Americas. Havard posits the Hispanicism of his title as a counterpart to Edward W. Said’s and Toni Morrison’s more familiar formulations of Orientalism and Africanism. His use of Hispanicism builds on Ed White’s earlier coining of the term as a hemispheric parallel to the exoticism of Orientalism, and his argument more generally builds on developments in transamerican studies that highlight the necessity of nuancing nationalist and transatlantic framings of US literary traditions. In particular, he emphasizes Hispanicism’s “political dimension,” arguing that it “had a special role” in developing “the idea that Anglo-Americans were racially fitted for liberal-democratic self-government,” an idea that he insists goes beyond Africanism’s “constructi[on of] whiteness as a prerequisite for freedom and agency” (15). He thus asserts, “It is no coincidence that US representations of Hispanic difference focus on what is construed as the metaphysical aversion to liberty of the Spanish and their New World descendants in a period in which US expansionists turned their eyes toward Spanish Louisiana, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America” (18). Hispanicism and Early US Literature covers the aftermath of the American Revolution through the late nineteenth century, working to explain how the nation arrived at 1898 and the Spanish-American War, so often seen as a turning point in the development of US imperialism, with a discourse fully prepared to promote US intervention in Spanish America. In tracing Hispanicism across the long nineteenth century, Havard engages an array of canonical and noncanonical authors and texts—at times crossing these categories by, for instance, working with lesser-known novels by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. The study includes poetry, novels, novellas, and essays, thereby demonstrating Hispanicism’s breadth, depth, and duration. Havard’s argument balances its formal, temporal, and geographic range with a focus on literature’s relation to US political discourses, particularly liberalism. Each chapter of Hispanicism and Early US Literature close reads its central text(s) while questioning how Hispanicism related to developments within liberalism. Havard notes that Hispanicism and liberalism were not, as we might presume today, opposed in the nineteenth century: “For many early national and antebellum whites, it seemed obvious that the capacity to establish liberal institutions was a specifically Anglo-American faculty. Liberalism and racialism were not at odds for these US Americans” (17). By locating Hispanicism within liberal political discourse, Havard illustrates not only the literary but also the cultural, social, commercial, and governmental impact of US tendencies to paint the Spanish (Americas) with a broad brush. The book is organized into an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters divided in two parts. The introduction offers an historical and critical framework [End Page 320] for Hispanicism. Part I of the book examines “The Black Legend, Hispanicism, and the Emergence of National Identity in the Early United States.” The three chapters that compose this section cover ways US authors positioned the nation in relation to ideas, perceptions, and images of Spain, Mexico, and Spanish(-American)ness from the 1780s through the years preceding the US Civil War. The first chapter reads Joel Barlow’s epic poems The Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807) as establishing an Hispanicist ideology by juxtaposing a rising, cosmopolitan, commercial US against a greed-driven...

Translating Césaire

Translating Césaire Carrie Noland Journal of a Homecoming/Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Aimé Césaire. Translated by N. Gregson Davis; Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by F. Abiola Irele. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. 328. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire, Bilingual Edition. Aimé Césaire. Translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman; Introduction, Notes, and Glossary by A. James Arnold. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017. Pp. 994. $50.00 (cloth); $39.99 (eBook). Nothing ever frees but the obscurity of the word. Aimé Césaire 1 A few weeks after Aimé Césaire died on April 17, 2008, I organized a marathon reading of his epic poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land). Over the course of two and a half hours a heterogenous group of students, professors, and neighbors read the entire text out loud, using both the French text published by Présence Africaine in 1956 and an English translation from Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith's 1983 edition of The Collected Poetry. 2By 2008, Présence Africaine's version had been republished at least eight times. For my generation, it was the "definitive version," and Eshleman and Smith's translation was the definitive translation of that definitive version. 3 Recently, however, a plethora of new translations of Césaire's poem have appeared on the scene, providing an exciting opportunity to reflect both on the diverse and erudite language of the poem and on the difficulty of translating it. Césaire first published the Cahierin Volontés, a modernist review associated with Eugene Jolas and Raymond Queneau, [End Page 419]right before France's entry into the war in September 1939. 4That version was largely absorbed into the longer 1956 version—the one we used for our reading in memoriam—that begins with the famous refrain "Au bout du petit matin," translated by Eshleman and Smith as "At the end of the wee hours." After years of teaching and writing on the Cahier, and after hearing the entire poem recited out loud, that refrain has become inscribed in my memory as an essential part of the poem's texture in Englishas well as in French. How would more recent translations approach the refrain? I wondered as I prepared to write this review. "At the end of the wee hours," I told myself, is only one translation among many. What new form would it take in the hands of N. Gregson Davis? How could Eshleman, now joined by A. James Arnold, improve on his earlier rendition of "petit matin"? "Wee hours" is indeed an odd locution, and I had every reason to look forward to something new. Yet I was taken aback by Davis's translation of the Cahier, titled Journal of a Homecoming, which renders the haunting refrain as "At the close of foreday morning." I was even more disconcerted by the beginning chosen by Eshleman and Arnold. Those of us raised on the 1956 version expect the poem to move quickly from the refrain to a series of insults and invectives: "Va-t-en, lui disais-je, gueule de flic" (Beat it, I said to him, you ugly cop). Quite sensibly, the two translators had opted for "At the end of the small hours" instead of "At the end of the wee hours." But what surprised me the most was that, between the covers of a volume that sports the title The Complete Poetry, they had chosen to omit the invective "Va-t-en" and the entire paragraph it introduces in the Présence Africaine version. 5That is, Eshleman and Arnold decided to revert back to the shorter original version printed in 1939, thus eliminating all the material Césaire had added since then. Why would they do such a thing? Let me begin with the issue of the refrain. Disconcerted by Davis's choice in particular ("At the French literature to translate the opening refrain as an assignment—and I did so before I showed them any of the published English translations. As might be expected...

The Female Martyrs of Agrippa d'Aubigné's "Les feux"

This article explores a unique portrait of women within Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les tragiques: those who died for their faith. Exploring the testimonies of the female martyrs commemorated in Book 4 of this epic poem, we highlight several themes of d'Aubigné's work—political, theological, and humanistic. Ultimately, considering these women's stories against those of their male counterparts, we assess differences in the rhetoric, prominence, and eminence of the female victims of "Les feux."

Chopin and His World ed. by Jonathan D. Bellman and Halina Goldberg

Reviewed by: Chopin and His World ed. by Jonathan D. Bellman and Halina Goldberg William M. Helmcke Chopin and His World. Edited by Jonathan D. Bellman and Halina Goldberg. (The Bard Music Festival.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. [x, 369 p. ISBN 9780691177755 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9780691177762 (paperback), $35; ISBN 9781400889006 (e-book), $19.25.] Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, index. Halina Goldberg and Jonathan Bellman introduce Chopin and His World by situating nineteenth-century Polish national music within the context of partitioned Poland, which did not exist politically between 1795 and 1918. Their overview points to "probably no better introduction to Chopin than one of the most famous passages in Polish literature, which describes a vision of Poland's history as expressed through music" (p. 6): the "Concert of Concerts" concluding Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz. They deserve kudos for promoting this world-class epic poem. Goldberg's "Chopin's Oneiric Sound-scapes and the Role of Dreams in Romantic Culture" offers a compelling dream-based aesthetic of Frédéric Chopin, who created dreaming effects via "temporal distancing through auditory distortions—fading, blurring, and fragmentation" (p. 20) evoked by "soft dynamics, the use of pedal points, drones, or non-chord tones, rubato, and … the pedals" (p. 21). She traces the interest of Frühromantik writers in "liminal states" to German idealism and Naturphilosophie "that could be manifested as both the subjective and objective" (p. 26), which helps explain those qualities in Chopin's music. Goldberg links Frühromantik philosophers to Warsaw intelligentsia and Chopin's circle, keenly noting, "Chopin's teacher Józef Elsner included an iconic dream sequence in Król Łokietek, his opera about King Władysław the Short, who restored partitioned Poland at the end of the fourteenth century" (p. 35). In relation to Chopin, she discusses Karol Kurpiński's Chwila snu okropnego (A Moment of a Frightful Dream; 1820), observing "chromatic melodic lines, extremes of register, and loud dynamics" (pp. 35–36). Regarding the evolving capabilities of the piano, she points to a "variety of timbres that could be achieved through the use and various combinations of the pedals" (p. 36). Goldberg introduces "Józef Sikorski's 'Recollection of Chopin': The Earliest Essay on Chopin and His Music," expertly translated by John Comber. Sikorski believed that Chopin's wide-spanning chords "represent the boundlessness of the spirit encompassing space, penetrating infinity" (p. 53) and acknowledged the "indeterminate meaning of musical expressions" (p. 80). Anatole Leikin's "Chopin and the Gothic" detects "three cases of direct literary connections" (p. 85) in Chopin's music: Alphonse de Lamartine with the preludes, op. 28; Adam [End Page 486] Mickiewicz with the ballades; and William Shakespeare with the Nocturne in G Minor, op. 15, no. 3. Leikin argues that "Gothic fiction" (p. 85) unites those writers. He extends the Gothic aesthetic from the Dies irae–infused preludes into nocturnes and ballades by astutely recognizing that "each ballade follows the general outline of a typical Gothic story: tranquil beginning leading through abrupt plot twists and violent episodes to a calamitous denouement" (p. 99). David Kasunic's "Revisiting Chopin's Tubercular Song, or, An Opera in the Making" links "the sounds produced by a tubercular chest to the sounds produced by Chopin's piano as well as to Chopin's singing writ large" (p. 103). His point is that "Chopin as the child orphan of Polish Mother, as Orpheus, as a nightingale—all of these renderings of him index singing and death, a convergence that, in Chopin, amounts to a swan song: Chopin's tubercular song" (p. 117). Jeffrey Kallberg's "Chopin and Jews" treats that sensitive topic evenhandedly, exercising "caution when judging figures from the past by ethical and moral standards of our time" (p. 128). Kallberg conceptualizes Chopin's enigmatic Prelude in A Minor, op. 28, no. 2, as an evocation of Jewish music, "which was understood to embrace cacophony, dissonance, and incomprehensibility" (p. 130). In "Middlebrow Becomes Transcendent: The Popular Roots of Chopin's Musical Language," Bellman claims that Chopin's popularity hinges on "gestures heard moment-to-moment on the musical surface" (p. 147). After discussing dance and song influences on Chopin's music...