Heroic Mode Research Articles

Review: Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, by Rosalind Galt

Review: <i>Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization</i>, by Rosalind Galt

Le triomphe du pathétique. Lessing, Miß Sara Sampson (1755) et le Journal étranger (décembre 1761)

The French reception of Lessing&#8217;s theatre began in 1761. In December of that same year, the editors of the Journal &#233;tranger published commented excerpts from Mi&#223; Sara Sampson (1755). They pleaded for a new form of tragedy combining the legacy of the English prototypes of domestic tragedy (Lillo, Moore) and the aesthetics of &#8220;bourgeois and domestic tragedy&#8221;. The reviewer (who cannot be Diderot) does not, however, aim to break with Aristotle&#8217;s Poetics, unlike the author of Le P&#232;re de famille. He takes sides with the emotional component, while referring to the figures of Oedipus and Orestes.Such a position made it possible for modern tragedy to return to the pathetic which, in Aristotle&#8217;s eyes, was to be elevated to the rank of essential constitutive element of the &#8220;great genre&#8221;, alongside peripeteia and anagnorisis.The article analyses this neglected and even forgotten category which is the polar opposite of the heroic mode. It relies on In&#232;s de Castro (1723), a tragedy by the French dramatist and poet Antoine Houdar de La Motte, whom Lessing knew from the 1754 edition of his Works.

Good Deaths in Wendell Berry’s Short Stories

Abstract This article looks at how Wendell Berry’s short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as ‘ordinary’ because of the way that they refuse a heroic mode of standing above the world and instead accept and live into the vulnerable connections that mark our materiality. I show also how this acceptance, and not any attempt to transcend the ordinary, is what opens these deaths up to the sacred, which I argue is a mark of belonging in love to the world and the love that moves the world. In the second section, I outline the relational role death plays in inaugurating and sustaining the gift-giving relational bonds that make up the life of affection in a place, such that there is a sense in which it is death that opens us up to love, even as death always marks an absence.

Politics by Other Means in South Africa Today

AbstractRick Abel's classic Politics by Other Means (1995) used South Africa to argue for law's ‘potential nobility’, but it did so avoiding a heroic mode characteristic of much anti‐apartheid writing. Abel showed how law could, with strenuous exertion, be turned into a defensive shield for the oppressed. As a sword, however, it was ‘two‐edged’. It allowed the powerful to frustrate or overturn hard‐won symbolic victories. Recently, the heroic mode has returned to South Africa. The Constitutional Court, in particular, is lauded for having combated ‘state capture’ under deposed President Jacob Zuma. A closer examination of this period, however, does much to vindicate Abel's earlier scepticism about law's offensive value. The spectacular deployment of law to fight politicians’ crimes has exposed the judiciary to unexpected political threats. Meanwhile, civil society's efforts to entrust judges with administrative duties shirked by the government has inevitably entailed the sacrifice of some rule of law values.

Literature Struggles

Abstract Literature struggles in South Africa—or, struggles of interpretation?—evince, and continue to evince, a thematic and stylistic impulse to belong to a common society, but, paradoxically, a society that is often more disjunctive than conjunctive. How, then, to belong? I trace the trajectory from the black-and-white voices of the 1970s to a more heterogeneous conception of the society, after apartheid, and particularly over the last decade, or so. What is peculiar about literature struggles is that the heroic mode has played a relatively marginal role in sense-making or imaginative projection; rather, the critical insight ensures that political language—too often crude in its singularities of either/or—has seldom enjoyed the unalloyed assent of literary language. Considerations of nation-building hardly feature alongside the concerns of living in a functioning society.

The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science by Ruth Barton

Reviewed by: The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science by Ruth Barton Susan H. Farnsworth (bio) The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science by Ruth Barton; pp. 576. U of Chicago P, 2018. $72.69 cloth. On 3 November 1864, eight men dined together at the Saint George's Hotel on Albemarle Street in London. Given the vibrancy of social life in the bustling city, such an occasion might not seem especially noteworthy. However, this evening marked the formal launch of the X Club, whose members were among the most prominent figures in the Victorian scientific community and whose activism, lobbying, and leadership significantly advanced the influence of men of science in Victorian society. The story of the X Club—its founding, the distinct personalities and talents of its members, and its diverse commitments and causes—is meticulously and precisely told by Ruth Barton in her comprehensive scholarly study The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. A professor of history, mathematics, and social science methodology at universities in New Zealand and Australia, Ruth Barton has lived with the men of the X Club through decades of research. The eight who met on that fateful night in 1864 were George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall; an additional invitation to membership was accepted by William Spottiswoode. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Victorian science immediately recognizes several of these names. Barton's ambition is to provide a full and balanced assessment of the parts played by all members of the group. Thanks to Barton's notable expertise, grounded in her mastery of wide-ranging sources, we gain a new understanding of the X Club dynamics. Attention shifts somewhat away from the charismatic and combative Huxley, and more appreciation for the members who stayed behind the scenes, such as Busk and Hirst, develops; the outlier positions of Hooker and Spencer are also assessed. While Barton provides brief biographies of each member—and the volume includes photographic portrait plates of them along with other well-chosen illustrations—her chief interest lies in how the X men acted as a group in the prime of their careers. She examines the numerous issues that engaged the X network, evaluates its members' accomplishments, and adds new dimensions to our views of their collective record. She resists the heroic mode common in group biographies and situates her subjects within the culture and conventions of their time. As she asserts, "The power, representativeness, and close networking of the X Club members, combined with the density of their archives … enables this study of the X Club to move from microhistory to macrohistory and to become, also, a study of Victorian science and the place of science in Victorian culture" (7). The book's first three chapters focus on the developing public roles of the X men. Barton places strong emphasis on their social backgrounds, contrasting the comparative ease in advancement of gentleman scientists such as [End Page 299] Lubbock and Hooker with the struggles of Tyndall, Huxley, Frankland, and Hirst, who did not have social connections on which to rely. She makes clear that awareness of social hierarchy was as pervasive in Victorian science as in Victorian society. Additionally, the book demonstrates that the links among the men were already established by the time Darwin published Origin in 1859, countering the familiar story that their main purpose was Darwin's defence. By 1859, they shared concerns about advancing public knowledge of science, as well as the social standing of scientific men, and promoting freedom of thought in public life. These priorities drew them into other debates, such as those sparked by the publication of Essays and Reviews, leading to their involvement in demanding and costly journalistic projects. Barton characterizes their publishing, lecturing, letter writing, and committee service from the late 1850s through the early 1860s as nearly unceasing activity that created intersecting networks among men who started as allies and conspirators and then, over time, became friends. One of Barton's valuable contributions, about which many readers would welcome more elaboration, is her attention to the social dynamics that...

A Multispecies Collective Planting Trees: Tending to Life and Making Meaning Outside of the Conservation Heroic

To what extent do our narratives support the work of ecological care? While working in anti-extinction conservation requires paying careful attention to the realities of precarity and ambiguity, this is not necessarily reflected in our public narratives of such work. Instead, as is typified in Jean Giono’s 1953 short story ‘The man who planted trees’, many conservation narratives are pitched in heroic modes, framing conservation labour as working to secure an obvious ‘good’ in perpetuity. In this paper, I think with practicing Buddhist and volunteer tree planter, Errol Greaves, and his work organising and working with dedicated humans helping to regenerate native forest on Te Ahumairangi Hill at the edge of Wellington City. Aiming to create a flourishing native habitat to support the endangered kākā (Nestor meridionalis), Errol’s work is largely in line with mainstream anti-extinction conservation goals in Aoteaora/New Zealand. However, his labour is framed by distinctly non-heroic narratives emphasising cooperation, ambiguity and precarity—emphases more closely related to the comedic, a mode of narration which Joseph Meeker identifies as better allowing for both ecological accommodation and responsiveness. In this paper, I consider the resources offered by various relational ontologies and non-heroic narratives for both responding well to ecological realities and sustaining work for a flourishing world, particularly in our current times of radically apparent precarity.

A Multispecies Collective Planting Trees: Tending to Life and Making Meaning Outside of the Conservation Heroic

To what extent do our narratives support the work of ecological care? While working in anti-extinction conservation requires paying careful attention to the realities of precarity and ambiguity, this is not necessarily reflected in our public narratives of such work. Instead, as is typified in Jean Giono’s 1953 short story ‘The man who planted trees’, many conservation narratives are pitched in heroic modes, framing conservation labour as working to secure an obvious ‘good’ in perpetuity. In this paper, I think with practicing Buddhist and volunteer tree planter, Errol Greaves, and his work organising and working with dedicated humans helping to regenerate native forest on Te Ahumairangi Hill at the edge of Wellington City. Aiming to create a flourishing native habitat to support the endangered kākā (Nestor meridionalis), Errol’s work is largely in line with mainstream anti-extinction conservation goals in Aoteaora/New Zealand. However, his labour is framed by distinctly non-heroic narratives emphasising cooperation, ambiguity and precarity—emphases more closely related to the comedic, a mode of narration which Joseph Meeker identifies as better allowing for both ecological accommodation and responsiveness. In this paper, I consider the resources offered by various relational ontologies and non-heroic narratives for both responding well to ecological realities and sustaining work for a flourishing world, particularly in our current times of radically apparent precarity.

CHRIS KYLE AS A HERO IN AMERICAN SNIPER: A STUDY OF POPULAR LITERATURE

&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this research is to describe the portrayal of hero and heroic mode in the &lt;em&gt;American Sniper &lt;/em&gt;movie and explain the reason of hero and heroic mode are represented in the &lt;em&gt;American Sniper&lt;/em&gt; movie. The researcher uses popular literature in this study. The research method is descriptive qualitative research. There are two sources of the data; they are primary data and secondary data. The primary data of this research is taken from &lt;em&gt;American Sniper&lt;/em&gt; movie. Meanwhile, the secondary of this research are from references from other source which are related to the popular literature. The technique of collecting data is by using documentation. The content analysis is chosen to analyze the data. The result of the research is described as follows: 1) The portrayal of hero has already happened in the previous time, but the heroic mode of hero’s mentality as a husband and father who love his wife and his family as it is shown in &lt;em&gt;American Sniper movie &lt;/em&gt;is one of new version which does not happen in the previous time. 2) It &lt;em&gt;shows &lt;em&gt;that the movement of action war movie from time to time reflects the audiences’ interest or the movie lovers to the action war movie. So, it is the motivation for the Hollywood production to continuously create the newest hero movie to fulfill the market request.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Social Remembering, Disenchantment and First World War Literature, 1918–1930

The way that the First World War would be remembered was yet to be solidified in the years immediately after the Armistice and peace treaties. Using key case studies from the years 1918 to 1930 by combatant authors Gilbert Frankau, Ernest Raymond, C.E. Montague, R.C. Sherriff and Richard Aldington, this article charts the development of the complex relationship between the dominant heroic mode and emergent modern disenchantment. Theories of social remembering provide a valuable framework for understanding the social processes by which disenchantment became a, if not the, widely-held memory of the conflict, reaching acceptance in the War Books Boom that followed the dual successes of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues, first serialized on the tenth anniversary of the armistice, and Sherriff's Journey's End, first performed the following month.

Tyrannick Faith: Martyr Drama, the Heroic Mode, and Dryden's Tyrannick Love

Tyrannick Faith:Martyr Drama, the Heroic Mode, and Dryden's Tyrannick Love Geremy Carnes Religious uniformity (as promulgated under the 1662 Act of Uniformity and later renewals of the act) was Restoration England's chief strategy for addressing the nation's deep religious divisions. The ultimate failure of the Stuart monarchy may be attributed in part to the failure of this strategy, which kept alive the wounds of the Civil War and amplified political dissent. Recognizing the dangers that uniformity posed to their reigns, the Stuart kings often pursued other strategies, including toleration (which they attempted to grant in 1660, 1672, and 1687, with increasingly disastrous results). As their poet laureate, John Dryden also explored the possibilities of state management of dissent through toleration. Michael McKeon has observed that Dryden signaled his misgivings about the kingdom's prevailing model of unity-in-uniformity in the poem that earned him the poet laureateship, Annus Mirabilis (1667). Writing in response to the Fire of London and the Second Dutch War, and to the fractures in English unity those events had exposed, Dryden promoted an alternative model that "involves the abolition of division by subsuming group interests under that of the court." According to Dryden, it is possible for the state to maintain stability even with a diverse, sectarian population, but it requires universal submission to "court ideology."1 That such submission would be an enormous prop to the power of the court is, of course, the most attractive aspect of this model of toleration, at least for Dryden and his patrons. Colin Jager finds Dryden maintaining similar positions in his poetry of the 1680s as well. In Religio Laici in particular, Jager perceives an anxious exploration of "the role of state power in creating and sustaining the largely empty spaces of tolerance"—empty spaces that set the boundaries of what cannot be tolerated, but that seek to avoid differentiating between anything that manages to exist within those boundaries.2 [End Page 31] As political propaganda, the poems considered by Jager and McKeon were, inevitably, of limited use, confined as such works were to a relatively elite sphere of circulation and discussion. But Dryden also had access to a social arena that could more widely disseminate his arguments for religious toleration: the theater. As a site where people of diverse backgrounds and opinions came together to observe characters of diverse backgrounds and opinions resolve conflicts, the theater was an appropriate (if potentially dangerous) place to mount a vigorous defense of religious toleration. Most of Dryden's plays have little to say in support of toleration, and many even seem to argue against religious plurality (a fact no doubt indicative of the public's general feelings on the subject). Yet a few of his dramas do exhibit tolerationist agendas, and none more daringly than his heroic martyr drama, Tyrannick Love; or, the Royal Martyr (1669). Tyrannick Love is one of Dryden's least studied plays, no doubt due to its poor critical reputation. Although it had a successful initial theatrical run and was revived several times in subsequent decades, its critical reputation decayed with that of heroic drama itself, and it has never recovered. Scholars generally view it as a poorly plotted and hastily written propaganda piece, starring a villain whose bombast threatens to slip into self-parody.3 Eventually it even fell out of favor with its own author, who, embarrassed by the grandiloquence of Maximin (and The Conquest of Granada's Almanzor), said of some of their lines, "I knew they were bad enough to please, even when I writ them: But I repent of them amongst my Sins."4 I would argue, however, that the play ultimately fails not so much as a result of careless composition as of its outsized ambitions.5 The play is one of only a handful written in the Restoration to take religion as its central subject, and possibly the only one performed.6 Even more audaciously, Tyrannick Love confronts the problem of religious dissent and seeks to resolve it by urging toleration, even for (indeed, especially for) Catholics. The difficulty of supporting such an agenda in Restoration England is reflected in the play's artistic...

“And am I thus Rewarded?” The Rejected Hero and the Raped Heroine in Mary Pix’s Ibrahim

Abstract This article assesses Mary Pix’s tragedy Ibrahim (1696) at the transition from traditional heroic drama to pathetic she-tragedy. Considering the coexistence of different ‘heroic modes’ towards the turn of the century, Pix’s tragedy can be placed between Dryden’s heroic drama The Indian Queen (1665; revived 1696) and Manley’s she-tragedy The Royal Mischief (1696). Ibrahim made use of traditional, popular theatre practices such as an oriental set and the incorporation of rape as stage spectacle; yet with the increased presence of women on the Restoration stage, Pix attributed a double function to the raped Morena as a reward for the male hero and as a heroine in her own right, thus mitigating the focus of earlier heroic plays on male heroship.

Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr

Reviewed by: Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr Susan J. Wiseman (bio) keywords sleep, Aristotelianism Descartes, soul, vitalism, Spenser, Milton, romance, Dryden Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ix + 206 pages. $79.00. This study investigates the place of the Aristotelian soul in key literary texts from the 1590s to the 1670s. In exploring texts from Spenser to Dryden, Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment turns on the question of the survival and change of the Aristotelian human after Descartes’s reconceptualization of the soul. Thus, the central argument traces the Aristotelian tripartite soul beyond a Cartesian denial, into a world where, Sullivan argues, Cartesian thinking may not have triumphed conceptually but nevertheless intervened in Aristotelian assumptions concerning a blurring of the boundaries among human, animal, and what we consider environment. In tracing the place of the tripartite soul and the challenges to it, Sullivan analyzes sleep and what he refers to as “the romance episode,” a moment in texts when the romance mode is foregrounded. In these contexts and others, he finds vegetative moments in texts. Overall, these examples demonstrate the immersion of his chosen texts in an Aristotelian world. Sullivan investigates the importance of all three aspects of the Aristotelian soul—the vegetative, sensitive, and rational—as, crucially, intercommunicative or, in his terms, connected horizontally as well as vertically—that is, by association, episode and accumulation as well as by hierarchy. He tracks the ability of the human actor to be motivated by all three. While acknowledging the importance of hierarchy in the understanding of the soul and therefore the moralised aspect of human sliding to bestial status, Sullivan also indicates the moments in texts which evoke the blending of human into environment through the dominance of the sensitive or vegetative souls. Sleep, though used in multiple ways in relation to the soul, is consistent in showing the intercommunicative aspects of the Aristotelian soul and, at the same time, in mediating the “romance” and “epic” states of a text or a hero. Thus, the “romance episode” within epic is for Sullivan a key generic location making visible this interplay. There is a focus on the vegetative soul—in Aristotle the foundation of connected life, possessing the kind of vitality shared by plants, creatures, and humans, but little studied within either literary studies or ecological thought, though, as Sullivan notes, some contemporary philosophy uses the concept. [End Page 145] Sullivan’s introduction offers a productive discussion of the conceptual implications of the tripartite Aristotelian soul, which deftly explores the importance of the vegetative soul as the source of all life. He discusses the soul in the formation of vegetative, sensitive, and rational; the soul which was refused so significantly by Descartes. This exploration of the vitality of all living things (and many, indeed, that we would not now consider to be exactly living) sets the scene for the place of both hierarchy in life forms and connectedness among plants, animals, and humans. His study explores the tensions amongst these ways of thinking in The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV (1598) and sets these and Sidney’s Old Arcadia against post- (albeit, broadly speaking, anti-) Cartesian understandings of the vital soul in Paradise Lost (1667) and Dryden’s All For Love (1677). He is also concerned with the “play” of sameness and difference between epic and romance, where the two share the aim of heroic conclusion, but romance defers, postpones and diverts the achievement of renewed heroic hierarchy, substituting a continuous wandering. Sullivan identifies both the body and the environment as enacting the competition between the heroic achievement of hierarchy and the romance contiguity, and particularly explores attraction between romance episodes and heroic modes. This gives a significant framing to, for example, Sidney writing as author of the Old Arcadia who both fears and identifies with the sleepy irresolution of his figures in romance as opposed to heroic mode. Discussing the place of Verdant in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, Sullivan teases out the importance of the vegetative soul in locating the...

Transmitting fantasies: Sexist glossing, scholarly desires, and translating the heroic woman in medieval Germanic literature

This article proposes that in the field of medieval Germanic literary studies, popular twentieth-century translations operated in a uniformly sexist fashion when addressing female figures in the heroic mode. Examples of such translations, glossing choices and critical commentaries are investigated for the case of Beowulf and the Poetic Edda. This leads to a critical analysis of the cultural values of the translators themselves, suggesting that sexist glossing reflects scholarly desires to reduce gender ambiguity in the service of patriarchal and imperialist cultural agendas. Implications for current criticism include the possibility of recognizing both the critical legacy of the sexist project and the interpretive potential created by the ambiguities in the original texts.

Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660‐1745 – By Elaine McGirr

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesVolume 35, Issue 2 p. 257-258 Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660-1745 – By Elaine McGirr Hannah Smith, Hannah Smith St Hilda's College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Hannah Smith, Hannah Smith St Hilda's College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 May 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2010.00338.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume35, Issue2June 2012Pages 257-258 RelatedInformation

&lt;i&gt;Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745 Mary Ann O’Donnell Elaine Mcgirr. Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745. Newark: Delaware, 2009. Pp. 245. $56. Ms. McGirr’s ambitious Heroic Mode and Political Crisis explores the “heroic” from its rise as a literary and political modality shortly after the Restoration through its pejorated finality in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745—from Charles II to Charles Edward, from the Exclusion Crisis through the Glorious Revolution to the end of the Stuart pretensions. Each chapter is framed by a national crisis, each chapter explores the role of the heroic and its antithesis. Ms. McGirr traces the anti-heroic from Buckingham’s Rehearsal through Steele’s attempts to replicate a “Christian hero” to theatrical farces of the 1730s and especially the 1740s as Buckingham’s Rehearsal returns to the stage with renewed popularity. It is a tall order for a small book. In 1660, as Charles II returned to claim the throne left empty by the public decapitation of his father, he tried to close the gap left by the Interregnum but could never erase the concept of desecration of the anointed king’s body. Charles brought back the public theater and all the royal trappings that emulated both the theater and the theatrical court of his cousin Louis XIV. He also returned with both an asset and a liability in his brother James, Duke [End Page 81] of York, a leader who provoked great loyalty and greater animosity. James wanted to be seen as the new Caesar, the valiant leader, as the book’s dust-jacket illustration, the portrait of James as Caesar by Henri Gascar, so aptly illustrates. Heroes demand an inflated mode, but what the Stuarts got, as Ms. McGirr shows, was the quasi-idolatrous outpourings of Dryden and Orrery, among others, in the first decade of the Restoration. Plays and poems focused on the return of the rightful king, the recognition of interrelationship of birth and worth; yet several oddities already appeared in that decade, most notably Orrery’s Henry V, a play that used the real coronation robes of both Charles and his brother, as it celebrated the coronation of the son of the usurper Bolingbroke. Ambiguity was further undermining the image of divine right. Even as Dryden’s Conquest of Granada sought, as Ms. McGirr sees it, to ease public tension about James’s religion, the Whigs were turning to satire and mockery, both literary and polemic, to focus public attention on the rigidity, the absolutism, the closet-Catholicism inherent in the heroic. Privileging the political over the literary, Ms. McGirr, however, seems to forget that the dramatists were often just seeking to get to a third day. Certainly the major undermining of the heroic mode, the Tory mode, came from Buckingham’s Rehearsal, but public tastes do get sated, the ticket-buying public wants something new, and new voices arise to vie for a third day. This is not to sell short what Ms. McGirr does with the history of The Rehearsal and the use to which it is put, especially as Drawcansir in the eighteenth century revitalizes anti-heroics in the service of Whiggism and the Hanoverian succession. In fact, her tracing of the anti-heroic from Drawcansir to Grandison offers a new way of looking at the decline of the notion of the hero in English literature. Her epilogue on “Novel Conclusions,” however, is too brief, and this is one of the areas that needs perhaps a book of its own, a study of how the public turn from the theater to the novel combined with the pejoration of the heroic to bring forward a Tom Jones or a Charles Grandison. Other less fully developed suggestions tease the reader, such as a hint that the heroic is “indebted to the visual and live arts, especially the baroque and the sensory elements of the Catholic Mass.” Intriguing, especially in the sensuous and sensual description of an ordination Mass in the third part of Behn’s Love-Letters, this insight is, unfortunately, never again addressed, other than to note that James II used little spectacle except for “elaborately staged Masses...

Reflexive particularism and cosmopolitanization: the reconfiguration of the national

AbstractIn this article we examine the cosmopolitanization of national memory cultures as a matter of reflexive particularism, referring to negotiations over ‘the national’ driven by the endogenization of European norms and discourses. Reflexive particularism emerges from a historically specific memory imperative that issues two demands – first, that national polities reckon with the Other, and second, that they engage with, critique and challenge exclusionary or heroic modes of nationalism. Our findings, based on the analysis of official discourse and 60 open group discussions conducted in Austria, Germany and Poland, suggest that reflexive particularism is manifested in an ongoing negotiation between variable modes of national belonging and cosmopolitan orientations toward the supranational or pan‐European. More specifically, reflexive particularism is expressed in co‐evolving articulations of Europeanness and shared European memory practices that include: affirmative and ambivalent perspectives; sceptical narratives about nationhood (for example those that emphasize legacies of perpetratorship); and a disposition to (ex)change perspectives and recognize the claims of Others.

Colonialism from the Middle: African Clerks as Historical Actors and Discursive Subjects

In a review of my first published book one of the founding figures of african historical studies suggested that instead of giving so much attention to European colonial administrators and African traditional chiefs I should have focused upon “the clerks, the schoolmasters and the evangelists, who were to take the lead when indirect rule had failed.” The terms in which this admonition was expressed implies a confidence in the nationalist project of “educated elites” that is less tenable today than it was during the 1960s. Nonetheless, in the late stages of my own career I have come to the conclusion that of the various occupational categories cited by Roland Oliver, African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa. However, if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of “nation-building” than in the more problematic and continuous role as “gate-keepers,” or “brokers” (honest or not) between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage.I am not alone in this concern and an entire recent volume of essays has been dedicated to the study of such colonial “African intermediaries.” I contributed a chapter to this book and have continued to pursue a study of colonialism from “the middle” (as opposed to the “above” of my previous work as well as the social history “from below” that emerged in more recent decades). The focus of my research on this topic is upon two figures who are of both historical and literary significance: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991), the very renowned Malian writer and scholar who produced a memoir about his early career as a colonial clerk; and “Wangrin,” a clerk and interpreter of an earlier generation, who is the subject of Hampâté Bâ's most widely read book.

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS