Fictional Letters Research Articles

The Kierkegaardian Moment: Dialectical Theology and Its Aftermath

It is common knowledge that Kierkegaard was widely and eagerly read by European theologians of different stripes when in the early 20th century his works became gradually available in translation (into German, French, and then also English). An extensive body of schol- arship has been devoted to that reception and to the difficulties that (often inadequate) translations posed for a general readership that was not very familiar with his intellectual background or literary style, much less with the philosophical and theological message he seemed to communicate, if indirectly, by way of numerous pseudonyms and no small amount of posturing, with the help of striking paradox and a near endless variety of Biblical and dramatic parables. Add to this the protracted dialogues and sharp diatribes, portraits and vignettes, intimate journals, actual and fictional letters and what emerges is a singular oeuvre that required extensive interpretative, indeed, dialecti- cal skills and, hence, baffled most audiences. Not so theologians who, rightly or wrongly, almost immediately recognized in Kierkegaard—the very master of the incognito—a fellow Christian apologist, a witness, martyr, and, perhaps, knight of faith; a modern genius of what we would now (no doubt, well beyond Kierkeg- aard's own, far from ecumenical, much less inclusivist outlook) call Abrahamic religion (cf. Stroumsa). A significant position in the German reception history and early twentieth-century renaissance or reveille of Kierkegaard's writings is

Candidus, Marius Victorinus’ fictitious friend, and his doctrine of the “Logos”

This article elaborates the term Logos in two fictitious letters of Candidus, which Marius Victorinus wrote to present Arian points of view concerning the Trinitarian debate in the middle of the 4th century. The article investigates these two short letters and their historical and theological sources to demonstrate Marius Victorinus’ knowledge and understanding of the Arian controversy and the mystery of the Triune God. Although he wrote these letters himself, this research seems to be a particularly important in the interpretation of Marius Victorinus’ theological views and arguments presented in his writings against the Arians, in which he undertakes the most difficult questions concerning the unbegotten and simultaneously begetting God.

Framing Suriname - De verbeelding van Surinamers op de Internationale Koloniale en Uitvoerhandel Tentoonstelling in Amsterdam in 1883

From 1 May until the end of October 1883 there took place in Amsterdam the first world exhibition, of which the keynote was colonial power. Living Surinamers were to be seen as well as ‘authentic’ Indonesians. The public came with great curiosity to look at the exhibited Surinamers, and scientists had the opportunity for anthropological research. For example, prince Roland Bonaparte ordered the taking of anthropological photographs of the Surinamers. There were also so-called cabinet cards, which were sold as souvenirs. These photographs depicted the Surinamers arranged by ethnic group: maroons, indians, and creoles: they were intended to illustrate, as anonymous types of their specific group, the different stages of human civilization. Newspaper articles, reports, and photographs endorsed this view. Creoles in particular showed that the mission civilicatrice was not a mission impossible. This was highlighted by a letter that was claimed to be written by the young Creole woman Jacqueline Ricket. This fictitious letter, together with the photographs and the exhibition itself, offered an interpretative framework for Suriname: Surinamers illustrated the ‘white man’s burden’, an idea with which the Dutch could legitimize their colonial rule.

Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst: Everyday Life in Upper Canada, 1812–1814 by Dorothy Duncan (review)

Reviewed by: Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst: Everyday Life in Upper Canada, 1812–1814 by Dorothy Duncan Catharine Anne Wilson Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst: Everyday Life in Upper Canada, 1812–1814. Dorothy Duncan. Toronto: Dundurn, 2012. Pp. 247. $21.99 On the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, this book leaves political and military matters in the background and makes the everyday its focus. This is a refreshing departure from the scholarly and popular literature on the war, which has proliferated over the last few years. It is a mix of popular history and first-hand accounts, most of which were, it must be admitted, written by the elite at the time. Accounts of daily life written by ordinary folk have rarely survived. To make up for this and breathe life into the past, the author has created letters between two fictional sisters. Nearly two-thirds of the book explores life from the American Revolution up to the eve of the War of 1812. Duncan takes 131 pages to set the scene, implicitly arguing that Upper Canadians were ingenious, persevering, practical people who learned to make the most of their environment and who were concerned primarily about providing for [End Page 147] their families. They put these qualities to good use when war entered their lives. Though they were reluctant to leave their farms to fight, when their families and property were threatened they displayed their loyalty and bravery in helping to push back the invaders. It is a comforting story full of familiar characters such as Mrs Simcoe, the Rev John Strachan, Molly Brant, “Tiger” Dunlop, and Laura Secord. Short chapters read like a series of vignettes each highlighting a few individuals from different walks of life and parts of the province, and including lengthy excerpts from letters, diaries, travel journals, and business records. Many of these primary accounts have been published before, but they are now brought together in this book. They cover a wide range of experiences, from provisioning soldiers at Fort Niagara to clearing land in Glengarry County to falling in love with Captain Bird. Dorothy Duncan, one of Canada’s foremost culinary historians, author of the award-winning Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore; A Culinary History of Canada and other works, not surprisingly spends a great deal of attention on food. This is one of the strengths of the book, as the author sits down at one dinner table after another, letting the reader feast on boiled black squirrel with Elizabeth Simcoe in Niagara or select marzipan figures over peppermint pastilles in a confectionery on King Street in York. Stories amuse, such as the one about a friendly dinner between British and American soldiers eight days after war had been declared. One chapter is devoted to recipes such as spruce beer, dandelion wine, and Michilimackinac stew. Another chapter delves into folk cures found in recipe books, such as cedar bark to cure scurvy and wet tobacco applied to bee stings. The author intermittently comments on the impact that war had on everyday life: teachers had to leave school to enlist, the transport of furs and provisions was disrupted, and families had to constantly balance their duty to defend Upper Canada with the necessity to plant and harvest crops, and to protect and ensure the survival of their families. Their everyday lives were interrupted with worrying about their loved ones who were away fighting, and watching apprehensively for approaching American troops and raiding parties, or even the British regulars and Native allies who sometimes transformed citizens’ homes and barns into headquarters and hospitals. The most cleverly conceived chapter is one that begins in a parlour where young women are creating a banner and traces that banner through the events of war, its hiding place underground during the invasion of York, and its glorious retrieval and carriage through every engagement of the 3rd York Regiment thereafter. The four fictional letters created by the [End Page 148] author also help show the progressive impact of the war on Martha, who was hired help at an Inn on Yonge Street. Martha writes to her sister of her duties...

Análisis de un texto portugués sobre el Quijote: la <i>Relaçam de tudo o que sucedeu no sítio e defensa da grande cidade de Praga</i>

This work publishes for the first time a Portuguese text of 1743 known as Relacam de tudo o que sucedeu no sitio e defensa da grande cidade de Praga , in which final section is includes a small fictitious letter signed by Sancho Panza and destined for master Don Quixote of La Mancha. Besides offering a brief study of the textual transmission of the first document is carried out an analysis of the letter which places it in a new line of receipt of the Quixote other than those currently known in Portugal.

Et amans et poeta: Female Authorship from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Debates on the nature and representation of female emotions go back a long way, and literary tradition, shaped almost entirely by men throughout the ages, bears the stigmas of these debates. For this reason, critics have occasionally wondered about the motivations driving authors, both men and women, who endeavor to represent the expression of turmoil in the female psyche. If there is no doubt, for example, that Fair Aude, who appears in the Song of Roland for no other purpose than to swoon and die, could only have been invented by a Turold who had no interest whatsoever in feminine sensibility, it is a different story for works in which heroines play a central role. We might recall, for example, the debate over Homer's identity which raged at the end of the nineteenth century: how could the author of the warlike Iliad have written the romantic Odyssey, in which enamored women and seductresses are represented so felicitously? In a period when women writers published their works under male pseudonyms, the works of Samuel Butler did not fail to intrigue and surprise their readers. In the absence of specific documentation of the bard's historicity, the argument that a woman wrote the Odyssey never truly caught on, though we are now much more open to the idea of dual authorship in Homer, male for the Iliad, female for the Odyssey. For Ovid, the documentation is much more certain, and to my knowledge, taking the paternity of the Heroides away from the male poet is out of the question. (2) In this canonical collection of epistles, the passion that drives the eighteen fictitious letters written by legendary heroines can be quite shaking. However, it is an illusion, a simple effet de reel (reality effect), as Barthes would say, the fruit of a splendidly successful labor of symbolic projection (88). Ovid was not a woman, and he did not have to be one to reproduce brilliantly the ambiguous torments of seduced and abandoned heroines. For quite some time now, stylisticians have been providing us with an explanation by demonstrating the artfulness, that is, the artifice, with which the Latin poet crafted the elegiac form of his epistles. (3) Ovid took the idea from grammarians and rhetoricians who would assign schoolboys pedagogical exercises in which they had to make illustrious historical or mythological characters speak in a language appropriate to their rank, age, and passions (Verducci 253 ff.). Whether Penelope writes to Ulysses (Letter 1), Phaedra to Hippolytus (Letter 4), Dido to Aeneas (Letter 7), Ariadne to Theseus (Letter 10), Medea to Jason (Letter 12), Sappho to Phaon (Letter 15), or Helen to Paris (Letter 17), the woman, scorned but still dignified, invariably denounces her fickle, cheating beloved all while begging him to return to her. In other words, the question is not whether the mythical heroine could have felt so burning a passion, but whether the author has learned to express the ardor of a frenzied heart according to the rules of verisimilitude and decorum. The success of the Heroides in the Renaissance is well-known; Ann Moss lists 71 full or partial Latin editions of them between 1499 and 1593 (66-79). (4) These moving monologues were first read in Latin, and then translated into French at the end of the fifteenth century by Octovien de Saint-Gelais. (5) This translation was an immense success, and printers frequently republished it at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as there are approximately fifteen known editions and manuscripts dating from between 1500 and 1546 (Brown 73)* Michel d'Amboise even devised responses to these fictitious letters in 1541, and Charles Fontaine, a friend of Clement Marot, produced a new translation of the first ten letters in 1552, adding a revised version of Saint-Gelais's translation of the remaining eleven. (7) As such, the influence of the Heroides on the birth of the elegy in France is not to be underestimated, as attested to most eloquently by the succession of imitations and counterimitations of them. …

Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France

This volume explores the ways in which five sets of celebrated letter writers manipulate the accepted rules of the ars dictaminis in order to achieve specific agendas: Baudri of Bourgueil and Constance of Angers; Abelard and Héloise; Christine de Pizan; Marguerite de Navarre and Guillaume Briçonnet; and Étienne de la Boétie and Michel de Montaigne. The five chapters are preceded by a to-the-point Introduction outlining the importance of ars dictaminis in the Middle Ages and early modern periods. The texts analysed are in Latin and French, both verse and prose, and date from between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. In all but the last chapter, the exchange is between a male teacher figure and a woman. Abbot Baudri of Bourgueil's extolling of the beauty and erudition of Constance of Angers is characterized by ambiguous playfulness, while Constance's responses exploit the conventions of letter writing to resist the direction of the exchange. These Latin verse epistles show the two correspondents taking on the simultaneous and contradictory roles of abbot and nun, of teacher and pupil, of separated lovers, of friends, all shaped by the rhetorical demands of their medium of communication, yet resisting the boundaries imposed by literary convention. These roles also appear in the correspondence between Abelard and Héloise, although in this case the two figures are not merely play-acting: they were indeed lovers and had been married before entering religion, and the tension between Héloise's feelings as desiring wife and dutiful abbess informs these Latin prose texts. Her attempt to attain inner conversion by performing confession and obedience in her letters is perceptively analysed by Katherine Kong, who relates the representation of feelings in this epistolary exchange to other texts written by one or other of the couple or attributed to them, in particular the Historia calamitatum, the Problemata Heloissae, and the Epistolae duorum amantium. With Christine de Pizan, we are introduced to a very different situation, in that we have a successful woman writer and publisher struggling for recognition in a masculine, frequently misogynistic, clerical culture. Christine expresses herself in the vernacular, whereas her addressees typically write to each other in Latin, highlighting her outsider status. A century later, undercurrents of authority and power also colour the correspondence between Marguerite of Navarre and her spiritual director Guillaume Briçonnet: the structures within which she articulates her spiritual quest are shown to shape her entire writing career. Finally, the epistolary friendship between Étienne de la Boétie and Montaigne can be seen to be based on a shared misogyny. In a striking enactment of the function of the letter in providing presence in absence, Montaigne later instigates a quasi-correspondence with his deceased friend and mentor by editing his work. Overall, this is a valuable study of letter writing in the premodern period. The argument is founded on often masterly close textual analysis enriched with relevant examples of fictional letter writing, turning what could have been a rather dry tome into a lively and approachable discussion that should appeal to a wide readership.

Whigs in Heaven: Elizabeth Rowe's Friendship in Death

This essay provides an analysis of Elizabeth Singer Rowe's Friendship in Death (1728), proposing that her fictional letters from the dead offer a new, distinctively Whig vision of heaven. Dominant Anglican theology, following Saint Augustine, held that heaven, in its spiritual perfection, is unimaginable for those on earth. Rowe, an Independent whose circle included Isaac Watts, argues just the opposite. Drawing on Milton, Addison, and Watts, Rowe makes a case for a heaven that is a meaningful sequel to this life, describing a place that is fully available to human sense and imagination and where the souls of the dead continue to work toward personal perfection and enjoy the pleasures of a celestial society.

Ovid's Use of the Epistolary Mode in Heroides 3

In his influential reading of Heroides 1, Duncan Kennedy argues that successful fictional letters can be felt to arise naturally from or be motivated by the depicted events and, ideally, be seen as agents in the forward movement of those events. Building on Kennedy's arguments, Peter Knox asserts that Ovid reconfigures his heroines in the Heroides to develop serious issues raised by his literary models from a new perspective. In this paper, I shall follow Kennedy's and Knox's suggestions to propose a new reading of Heroides 3. I shall first discuss how Briseis' letter can be felt to be both naturally motivated by and seriously engaged with Achilles' arguments in Iliad 9. More importantly, I shall argue that Ovid implicates Patroclus' aid in the composition and delivery of Heroides 3. The result is that one can view the fictional letter as having some influence upon Patroclus' fateful appeal to Achilles, thus providing an Ovidian reinterpretation of Iliad 16. Imagining this fictional role for Heroides 3 ultimately provokes comparison of Briseis, Patroclus and their relationships with Achilles. Such a reading uses Kennedy's and Knox's suggestions as a point of departure for making Heroides 3 a more successful and provocative fictional letter.

Persuasive Letters in the Ancient Novel

Much of the interest in the representation of letters in the ancient novel has considered the letter as a plot device particularly susceptible to tuche and hence characteristic of Bakhtin’s chronotope, the chance occurrences and disjunctions that give the novel its texture. Others have viewed the prominence of letters in these texts as evidence for the interest in psychology considered a hallmark of characterization within novelistic melodrama. In contrast, this paper contextualizes the novels’ fictional letters within the rhetorical literary culture of the Greek world of the Roman empire. Focusing on Chariton and Achilles Tatius, I argue that the novels represent letters as sophisticated texts that persuade their readers by stirring the passions through recognizable rhetorical tropes, especially vividness (enargeia, diatuposis or phantasia). Fictional letters thus provide a concrete and self-conscious connection between the novels and the rhetorical theory of the Second Sophistic, familiar from epideictic practices like declamation and reflected in the works of theorists like Aelius Theon, Longinus, Quintilian and Menander Rhetor. A brief consideration of Aelius Aristides’ well-known Letter to the Emperors seeking aid from Marcus Aurelius for Smyrna in the wake of a devastating earthquake sets the stage for my analysis. As Philostratus’ description of Marcus Aurelius’ reaction to the letter – groaning and wetting the letter with tears – in his Lives of the Sophists attests, Aristides’ written text succeeds in persuading the emperor by standing in for the impassioned epideictic performance recommended by the rhetorical theorists of the empire, above all by bringing the ruined city vividly before his eyes (cf. Ruth Webb 1995). Chariton and Achilles Tatius create a number of fictional letters designed to persuade and manipulate their readers by stirring the passions in the manner of Aristides’ letter. These texts are highly rhetorical, employing figures familiar from the orators’ art, among which the vividness (enargeia) plays a central role. Moreover, the novels provide detailed accounts of the reactions to these texts, which confirm both the intent of the letters and their success. In Achilles Tatius, for example, when Cleitophon receives a letter from Leucippe chastising him for remarrying while she suffered the indignities of servitude, Cleitophon responds to the letter’s vivid evocation of her suffering as follows: Then ... as if seeing her through the letters, I reread every word.... When I got to the part about the whips and tortures Sosthenes inflicted on her, I wept as if I were witnessing them myself, for reasoning set my mind’s eyes working on what the letter said and showed these spectacles as if they were playing out before me. (5.19)In Chariton, Mithridates advises Chaereas to seek a similar reaction from his beloved, who, like Cleitophon, has remarried, believing that her beloved is dead: I think it is a good idea for you first to make trial of your wife by a letter.... Write her a letter: let her grieve, let her rejoice, let her search for you, let her call for you.... Go and write! (4.4) After demonstrating the embeddedness in the rhetorical context of imperial Greek literary culture of these letters through close readings of their texts and the reactions to them, I conclude by suggesting that the rhetorical letter provides a model for the genre of the novel, itself a vivid prose work designed to stir the passions of its reader through various techniques of vivid narration and description.

Enhancing self-regulation and approaches to learning in first-year college students: a narrative-based programme assessed in the Iberian Peninsula

A programme to enhance first-year college students’ self-regulated learning strategies is proposed and assessed in two samples, one from the University of Oviedo (Spain) and the other from the University of Minho (Portugal). Each sample was divided into two groups (experimental and control). The Spanish sample comprised 44 students in the experimental group and 40 in the control group, whereas in the Portuguese sample, the number of students was 48 and 44, respectively. The narrative-based intervention programme is organised around a set of fictional letters from a first-year college student in which he reports his own academic experiences. Each letter focuses on a learning strategy as an opportunity to teach and enhance the students’ deep approaches to learning and their self-regulated learning processes. In both samples, findings confirm the programme efficacy to teach efficient learning strategies and to promote self-regulation. Implications for college students and for teaching are discussed.

Profligate Gleaning and the Textual Economies of Judith Sargent Murray

Profligate Gleaning and the Textual Economies of Judith Sargent Murray Elizabeth Hewitt Judith Sargent Murray is best known to us as the author of the important essay "On the Equality of the Sexes." Published two years before Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Murray's essay makes the case for female equality in the natural rights tradition, declaring women to be equal to men in their capacity for virtue. More specifically, Murray emphasizes the ways that society has put a stranglehold on the abundant moral and intellectual resources that nature has distributed across the female population. Indeed, as is the case with Wollstonecraft, Murray's emphasis on the social restrictions imposed against women is critical to her argument on behalf of female education that extends beyond the domestic arts. But even as Murray proposes education as the means by which women can purchase self-ownership, she also describes individuals as so deeply implicated in the economic marketplace as to unsettle the fantasy of autonomy that is foundational to liberal individualism. While Murray only gestures toward this economic dependence in "On the Equality of the Sexes," it is of central concern to the text for which Murray was most famous in her own lifetime, the series of essays she wrote as The Gleaner. These essays, I argue, consistently evidence Murray's apprehension of the dependencies of the commercial marketplace and of the fundamental changes to the social world—one in which a Boston woman has greater access to global goods but also a more remote relationship to these goods and those who manufacture them. This rendering of entangled, albeit disembedded (that is, highly mediated and anonymous) social systems is nevertheless inextricable from Murray's feminism. Women are equal, she suggests, not because they should be free from the inequitable distribution of talents and resources but because women and men are equally dependent on these overwhelming social and economic systems. [End Page 310] Murray, I argue, renders this commercial system as a generic experiment in her book The Gleaner, which takes its title from the popular essay series she wrote for the Massachusetts Magazine from 1792–1794 under the pseudonym The Gleaner. The book begins with these original periodical essays (in roughly the same order) and then adds seventy-odd more "columns."1 What is perhaps most striking about Murray's book is the generic heterogeneity that comprises its pages: Divided into one hundred different entries of roughly equal length, The Gleaner includes epistolary narratives, moral parables, travel sketches, two plays, instructional letters, fictional letters from readers, and numerous political, pedagogical, and literary essays. Murray herself calls attention to the generic heterogeneity in the book's subtitle, "A Miscellaneous Production," and, in doing so, she effectively classifies her book as a miscellany: a collection of texts written on a wide variety of subjects. The deliberate emphasis on variety on the book's title page also serves to underscore the formal continuity between the volume and the essays' original publication venue in the Massachusetts Magazine, which advertised its own commitment to a varied agenda in its subtitle by characterizing itself as a "Monthly Museum" containing "The Literature, History, Politics, Arts, Manners, [and] Amusements of the Age."2 Murray retains the periodical pacing within the longer book by dividing the whole into one hundred essay-sized and numbered sections—even separating longer texts, like her two dramas, into smaller sections—effectively serializing a literary form we might imagine she would want to present as an integral text. The other notable feature of Murray's book—and one that likewise emphasizes textual variety—is her complex manipulation of pseudonyms and authorial voices. Following the conventions of the periodical essay, Murray introduces her pseudonymous Gleaner to the public with the conceit that her writer is a man of leisure offering his keen, if also desultory, observations from his daily wanderings around the city. Indeed, it would seem that Murray's dedication to the periodical essay is part and parcel of her larger dedication to equal distribution: Her Gleaner, like Richard Steele's Tatler, will offer his observations to "all Persons, without Distinction" (qtd. in McKeon, Secret History 79). The Gleaner, however, not...

Notes on Four Texts by Ana Cristina Cesar

The objective of this article is to comment on four texts by Ana Cristina Cesar: a sequence of fictional letters and three poems. They appear in the posthumous volume Antigos e soltos [Old and Loose] (2008), made up of poems, letters, diary entries and other texts, contained in a file of drafts kept by the author. The poems chosen are, in a way, about the dilemmas of poetic writing and the relationship between life and art.

Lust for Reading and Thirst for Knowledge: Fictive Letters in a Danish Children's Magazine of 1770

Lust for Reading and Thirst for Knowledge:Fictive Letters in a Danish Children's Magazine of 1770 Nina Christensen (bio) In the eighteenth century, when it gradually became more common to publish texts for children, writers were faced with fundamental questions: Who is the implied child reader? What characterizes the children you write for? How and what do you write for this new audience? So far, the answer in a Danish context has been that authors wrote for children in order to educate them, and that these children were thought of as imperfect creatures, inferior to adults. Very recently a doctoral thesis by Beth Juncker described the history of Danish children's literature as a development from a didactic and content-based tradition, with roots in the Enlightenment, toward a literary and form-based tradition rooted in Romanticism (Juncker 2006). Among others, Juncker refers to texts by Hans Christian Andersen, which have a poetic language rich with metaphors and texts by others that have an elaborate and "complex" narrative structure (Juncker 278). Juncker reinforces descriptions of eighteenth-century children's literature proposed by Danish children's literature historians such as Inger Simonsen (1944) and Vibeke Stybe (1970). This article suggests a revision of this relatively fixed image of children and of children's literature in relation to Danish children's literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. The object of study is a series of fictional letters written by child characters in The Friend of Youth (Ungdommens Ven), a weekly periodical published for children in 1770. The editor of The Friend of Youth reveals his views on the nature of childhood by demonstrating how he thinks children write and how they should write. He publishes letters he claims to have received from his readers, which he discusses at length. In order to highlight an important and new genre in children's literature during the eighteenth century, this article will analyze these letters and the editor's comments and replies. [End Page 189] Definitions of Children's Literature The education/amusement divide is famously described on the first page of F. J. Darton's history of children's literature: By "children's books" I mean printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet. I shall therefore exclude from this history, as a general rule, all schoolbooks, all purely moral or didactic treatises, all reflective or adult minded descriptions of child-life, and almost all alphabets, primers, and spelling books. (Darton 1) Darton does not explain how he decides whether or not a writer or a publisher intends to give children pleasure or to educate them. Prefaces to publications for children in late eighteenth-century Denmark often explicitly show an intention to combine education and amusement. German research in children's literature has long presented an alternative to the education/entertainment divide. In 1982, the Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Von 1750 bis 1800 edited by Theodor Brüggemann and Hans-Heino Ewers was published. It contains an annotated bibliographic listing of a majority of early German children's literature, including long descriptions of single works and a lengthy and thorough introduction to children's literature of the period. In the introduction it is argued that definitions of children's literature must take into account the context and historical period in which the literature was produced. The editors suggest using the descriptive term intentional children's literature as a starting point. From their perspective, children's literature in the period 1750–1800 is to be understood as "texts explicitly directed at children" including "adult literature adapted for children" and finally "texts made by children themselves" if they are addressed to children (Brüggemann 4).1 Whether it was the authors', translators', or editors' intention to address children is often explicitly revealed in the title, subtitle, or pre- or postscripts to the books. The editors also draw attention to the importance of differentiating between the use of "text" and "literature" in relation to eighteenth-century works published for children. They point to the fact that not until the last third of the...

Mme Riccoboni: Romancière, Épistolière, Traductrice (review)

Reviewed by: Mme Riccoboni: Romancière, Épistolière, Traductrice Felicia B. Sturzer (bio) Jan Herman, Kris Peeters et Paul Pelckmans, éds. Mme Riccoboni: Romancière, Épistolière, Traductrice. La République des lettres 34. Leuven: Peeters, 2007. 352pp. €48. ISBN 978-90-429-1982-2. The essays in this collection were presented at an international conference on Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, one of the most popular romancières of the eighteenth century. The essays from this conference held in Leuven and Anvers in May 2006 demonstrate Riccoboni’s importance as a novelist, letter writer, translator, literary critic, and playwright who has enriched the canon of female authors and our understanding of women’s status in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Riccoboni has been “rediscovered,” as Sylvain Menant indicates, as an author and a woman with her own story (3). The status of eighteenth-century women, sexual politics, and inequality in male-female relationships are recurring themes in Riccoboni’s personal correspondence and novels. Her masculine characters—scoundrels, victims, and heroes—are the subject of Catherine Astbury’s essay. Their nuanced portrayals parallel Riccoboni’s evolving literary preoccupations from 1750 until her death (1792). The interplay between pardon and denunciation in Lettres de Juliette Catesby à Milady Henriette Campley, son amie (1759) and Lettres de Mylord Rivers à Sir Charles Cardigan (1777) is the focus of Suzan Van Dijk’s essay, who suggests that such interplay characterizes Riccoboni’s novels as well as the correspondence with her friend Robert Liston. Michèle Bokobza Kahan, writing on the Laclos-Riccoboni correspondence regarding Les Liaisons dangereuses, emphasizes Riccoboni’s precarious social position. A female author, she must negotiate the line of demarcation between her public persona as a professional writer and her private status as a French woman in a patriarchal society. The tension of opposing masculine and feminine voices that occupy differing discursive and social spaces frames this correspondence, both private and public. Writing and reading, acts of liberation, creativity, and textual seduction, are the subjects of several essays. Writing is an act of selfaffirmation that, according to Wafa Elloumi, defines Riccoboni’s existence: “j’existe donc j’écris ou plutôt j’écris donc j’existe” (23). Youmna Charara suggests that Riccoboni’s Suite to Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne transforms imitation into narrative creation. Believing that only honesty and authenticity can result in viable male-female relationships, Riccoboni seeks transparency. Nathalie Kremer thus focuses on the interplay between the real and the fictional in Riccoboni’s 1757 epistolary novel Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd. The heroine’s sincerity and Alfred’s duplicity problematize love’s reciprocity, resulting in the substitution of letters for the lover and love itself: “La fiction [End Page 477] est un substitut de la réalité, l’univers fictif remplace l’univers réel et la lettre remplace le corps de l’amant” (119). This interchange between authentic and deceptive feelings parallels the relationship between real and fictional letters. Thus, Riccoboni’s dedication of her novel Lettres d’Adélaide de Dammartin, comtesse de Sancerre, à Monsieur le comte de Nancé, son ami (1766) to the British actor David Garrick creates a discursive space that Marijn S. Kaplan views as a transposition of and interchange between real and fictional letters marking the interplay between an authorial present and the novel’s literary destiny. For Marianne Charrier-Vozel, Riccoboni’s correspondence, situated between private and public spaces, negotiates her economic, literary, and personal concerns. The result is “l’autoportrait d’une intellectuelle au cœur sensible” (183). Riccoboni’s dual functions as letter writer and novelist incorporate a dialogue between feminine and masculine voices that reflects her feminist sympathies. Engaged in contemporary philosophical and political debates, Riccoboni confronts social problems realistically. Marie-Paule Legrand studies Riccoboni’s correspondence for evidence of her suspicion of theory and systemization. Moderation and solidarity, not theories or imposed morality, solve social problems. Riccoboni views death as part of life with a resignation devoid of sentimentality, an atypical attitude for her century. Studying her correspondence and novels, Paul Pelckmans attributes this to her distaste for affectation and exaggerated displays of emotion. For Beata Rajba, the motif of the mother’s death symbolizes women’s struggle for...

Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography (review)

Reviewed by: Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography Elaine Fantham Ruth Morello and A. D. Morrison, eds. Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii + 373 pp. 4 figs. Cloth, $115. This collection of papers is equally rich in its range of subject matter and variety of approaches. Based on a conference held at Manchester, UK in 2004, it has made excellent use of the recent flowering of texts and discussions of Greek and Latin letters. It specifically acknowledges our common debt to M. B. Trapp's fine anthology, Greek and Latin Letters (Cambridge 2003), with its substantial analytical introduction and eighty texts (documentary and literary, independent or embedded) drawn from all periods, each with translation and commentary, to which we can add Patricia Rosenmeyer's monograph, Ancient Epistolary Fictions (Cambridge 2001), C. D. N. Costa's collection of translated Greek Fictional Letters (Oxford 2001), and now Bagnall and Cribiore's collection, Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt (Ann Arbor 2006). The editors have modified the usual practice by dividing their general considerations between a preface ("Why Letters?"), which covers the utility and accessibility of letters, power dynamics and role playing, special epistolary topics, letters as a didactic mode, the effect of collections of letters, and the readers' expectations, and an introduction ("What is a Letter?") by Morello and Roy Gibson, which briefly reviews alternative versions of rules of genre before testing [End Page 135] their simple set of requirements for a letter on two extreme categories: Greek verse epistles like Theocritus 11 and Cicero's three-volume treatise De Officiis addressed to his son. Their criteria stress the physical separation of the two persons involved and the form and scale of the text but miss what most require in a good letter, namely, "engagement with the addressee" (111, from Morrison's chapter; cf. 113–14), and, we might add, with his interests and recent activities. It is this relative indifference to the addressee which leaves me dissatisfied with the letters of Pliny and makes it so difficult to remember the addressee of any given letter. Rightly, many of the fourteen chapters focus not on single ancient authors but on topics: Hutchinson's delightfully shrewd analysis of a papyrus letter from an unnamed student to his family and two letters from Paphnuthis to his parents and brother, providing social context and penetrating literary pretext to reconstruct events and motives (chap. 1); Henderson on Cicero's extended Ad Q. Fr. 3.1 (chap. 2) and Hoffer on Cicero's adoption of the metaphor stomachus, stomachari to label and limit passages of complaint, along with other typical allusive expressions (chap. 3); Morrison on "didacticism and epistolarity in Horace Epistles 1" (the best treatment since McGann's Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles [Bruxelles 1969]) (chap. 4); an important chapter by Inwood arguing for Seneca's deliberate emulation of the letters of Epicurus and explaining Seneca's choice of continuous letter form (including some quasi-dialogue) over his previous use of "Dialogues" (chap. 5). Next, Roger Rees on litterae commendaticiae from Cicero through Pliny to Fronto (chap. 6). Plus, two chapters on Pliny: Morello on Pliny's preoccupation with protecting his circle of literary friends from invidia, putting tact and courtesy before critical standards (chap. 7) and Fitzgerald illustrating from Pliny's seventh book his obsession with literary productivity and oblique methods of commemorating his own moral and literary integrity (chap. 8). Langslow (chap. 9) offers a dazzling demonstration of the sheer complexity with which the medical tradition accumulates and incorporates earlier dedicatory works, reattributing both author and addressee to attract readers. Freisenbruch in "Back to Fronto" (chap. 10) combines two recurring themes: the daily details of ill-health lavished with equal zeal by the imperial pupil and his master and their use of this topic to pay court to each other. In chapters 11 and 12, on Second Sophistic letter collections, Konig illustrates Alciphron's use of the fictional epistle while Hodkinson uses Alciphron and Aelian to show how letters could serve their writer "better than speech" (cf. the title of the preface to the volume, "Why Letters?"). The last two papers consider Christian...

Christianity and the Death Instinct: Perfect Together?

This article is a fictional letter. This “letter” is the fourth fictional letter published by the author. In each letter, I take on a different persona and address issues and questions of theological students at Princeton Seminary, all of whom I imagine to be in their early or mid-twenties, because that is when I attended Princeton Seminary (Carlin 2004, 2006a, 2006b). By doing so, I am endorsing the introspective method in the psychology of religion, which I’ve learned from Donald Capps (1997). This letter is also a reflection on a passage found in the work Erik Eriksons (1962), which is the below epigram. In this letter, a seminarian writes to his mother during his second year of seminary, shortly before Thanksgiving break. The purpose of his letter is to inform his mother—from whom he received his Christianity—about some of his latest thoughts, particularly about the doctrine of the atonement. He has come to believe that the doctrine is problematic for society and he seeks a way to (re)make Christianity into a force for good. Perhaps strangely, he concludes by calling for the death of God, apparently oblivious to this forgotten debate in theological circles. This article raises a number of questions, but perhaps most importantly this one: How far can we take the lament?

Virginia Woolf's Veil: The Feminist Intellectual and the Organization of Public Space

Virginia Woolf’s Veil:The Feminist Intellectual and the Organization of Public Space Merry Pawlowski (bio) Let us then by way of a very elementary beginning lay before you a photograph—a crudely coloured photograph—of your world as it appears to us who see it from the threshold of the private house; through the veil that St. Paul still lays upon our eyes; from the bridge which connects the private house with the world of public life. —Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas1 Two years after the compulsory unveiling of women in Iran, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas.2 In its invocation of the veil—coupled with a key reference to the Middle Eastern harem—the novel suggests the ways in which these linked emblems of the confinement of women are symbolic of a culture where space is segregated on the basis of gender (Milani 5). But the concept of the gendered segregation of space is only the most obvious of what Woolf describes; she also frames her culture in a Kodak moment, taking its picture as she, one of the "daughters of educated men," stands at the threshold that separates her private world from the public world of men, shut up with other women of her class "like slaves in a harem" (135). Even [End Page 722] as a few Islamic nations began to drop the veil, Woolf's tongue-in-cheek adoption of the veil of St. Paul is both deliciously ironic and well suited to her point about English patriarchy that appearance and substance are indeed two different things. My purpose here is to examine the concept of spatial arrangement in the text of Woolf's Three Guineas as it functions on multiple levels that call into play text and context, seen and unseen, absent and present. My essay consequently maps textual space in the novel as 1) Woolf maps geographical space divided by gender; 2) as intertextual space between Three Guineas and its research source, "Monks House Papers"; and 3) as Woolf's organization of textual space around and in relation to her illustrations. It is, in my view, the double metaphor of the veil linked to the harem/private house that helps to bind inner, inter, and extra visual/textual spaces into a cohesive argument. In the earliest reference to women's seclusion in the private house in Three Guineas, Woolf imagines a woman of her own class, the "daughter of an educated man," as she "issues from the shadow of the private house, and stands on the bridge which lies between the old world and the new" to contemplate the power of her ability to earn her own money and escape the slavery of dependence on a father or other patriarchal figure (30). Perhaps Woolf imagines this young woman to be her descendant, empowered by feminist intellectuals like herself to step outside private space. For if this young woman cannot be imagined, then it is utterly futile for a woman like Woolf to respond to the fictional letter from an English gentleman, the imaginary impetus for the text of Three Guineas, which asks her, "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" (7). Woolf's response to an impoverished vision of the world of women in the West was to invoke the iconography of the East. As Leila Ahmed writes: It is the idea of the veil much more than the veil's material presence that is the powerful signifier: of women's proper seclusion and relegation to a private world, of their proper non-participation, passivity and even invisibility—metaphorically signified by the veil—in the public domain. And so long as the veil is notionally present in a society (as it is when it is in use among a portion of society and particularly among the elite, to whose status and mores others aspire) then that society is as surely riven in two, and women—whenever possible in practice, and always, on the ideal plane—are non-participant, passive and invisible. (160) [End Page 723] For Woolf, though, the idea of the veil is doubly meaningful, suggesting not only the seclusion it represents in the Middle East but also an acknowledgment...

“You Don't Play, You Volunteer”: Narrative Public Memory Construction in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun

Narrative and ludological analysis suggests that Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor: Rising Sun constructs a narrative of World War II that selectively retells history and constructs an Orientalist representation of the Japanese Empire. The gaming environment exists as an interactive museum that immerses gamers into history so that they experience warfare in their homes. Combining newsreels, fictional letters from home, and interviews with veterans of the “Good War,” Medal of Honor: Rising Sun retells a history that omits details of Japanese internment or atomic weapons. The intertwined themes of personal revenge for the loss of a family member and historical revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor guide gamers through an “educational” experience of the war. Finally, its failure to simulate violence means that Medal of Honor: Rising Sun invites a critical blindness to commemorating war.

The Silent Woman in the “Criminal Conversation” Trial and her Displaced Defences: “A Letter Always Reaches its Destination”

In the 18th-19th-century ‘criminal conversation’ legal action, a spouse could sue his wife’s lover for economic compensation. The wife was not party to the action, even though she was implicitly ‘on trial’. This article argues that the absence of the wife’s perspective permitted the court to manipulate her image conservatively and enabled English Marriage Law to evade enlightenment pressure for reform. The counter-pressure she may have exerted is deflected elsewhere. This article shows that women’s private defences could infiltrate the public imagination obliquely, if not the legal process directly, using as examples three very different letters: a purloined love letter from an adulterous wife, a fictional letter of frank testimony from Wollstonecraft’sMaria, and a forensic analysis under a masculine pseudonym from an indignant ‘victim’.