Late Ideas Research Articles

White, Duncan Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (review)

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 346 avoided in real life’ (p. 194). Yet, Sebastian’s life ‘might [also] reflect the happy but hidden life Sergey had with Hermann’ (p. 194). Given the nature of Nabokov’s writing method, this approach has vast potential for development. Although annotation seems to be the most adequate tool to approach Nabokov’s works, so far very few scholars have adopted it. Only Lolita (Carl R. Proffer, Bloomington, IN, 1968; Alfred Appel Jr., New York, 1970), Pnin (Gennady Barabtarlo, Ann Arbor, MI, 1989), Ada (Brian Boyd, 1993, ongoing project), and now, thanks to de Vries, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (2016), have been annotated. The rest of Nabokov’s oeuvre is still awaiting annotated study. Gerard de Vries’s Silent Love will surely provide a solid platform to springboard future publications on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and inspire further innovative research in Nabokov studies in general. Department of Modern Languages, Literatures Irina Marchesini & Cultures, University of Bologna White, Duncan. Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2017. xiv + 234 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Ironically, Duncan White’s study of Nabokov and the literary marketplace appears within a unique marketplace of its own. Situated in the rapidly developing field of studies devoted to one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, any new Nabokov research must be original enough to claim space in the already-tight bookcases filled with scholarly criticism. The book under review is no small achievement and contributes to our understanding of how the extra-literary mechanisms of the well-oiled literary enterprise named ‘Vladimir Nabokov’ performed. Nabokov and his Books joins a number of straightforward and ostensibly simplified titles that have recently been released from the Oxford English Monographs series, such as Conrad and Women, Coleridge and the Doctors, Chaucer and Italian Textuality and Authorship and Appropriation. Nonetheless, thetitleandthetableofcontents(fivechaptersappropriatelylabelledwithaustere stylistic brevity: ‘Contexts’, ‘Inspiration’, ‘Reading’, ‘Publication’ and ‘Legacy’) should not misguide us: this monograph is as much about literature as it is about the ways that modern fiction is consumed and circulated. White begins by recapitulating the obvious: the success of Lolita not only made Nabokov wealthy but it ‘assured his novel the security in posterity that Humbert had sought for his Lolita’ (p. 3). The survival of the book entitled Lolita is, therefore, a material REVIEWS 347 expression of Humbert’s desire to preserve his love from the erosion of time. In his introduction White describes the emergence of Nabokov from personal and historical crisis; the author who narrowly escaped Nazi Germany and abandoned his readership and native Russian language was able to transform himself from an anonymous Russian writer who arrived on Ellis Island in 1940 into an author of a book about a paedophile that sold close to fifty million copies around the world by the end of the century. This was not an easy ride, though, according to White, who seeks to uncover the knotty relationship of late modernist ideas of authenticity and autonomy on the one hand, and pressures of the literary marketplace on the other. Defining Nabokov’s art as ‘a materially specific production’ (p. 8), White tests different normative boundaries and employs a special term, bibliopoetics, which encapsulates the conflict between Nabokov’s late modernism and the literary marketplace (although as readers of the ensuing chapters will realize, by becoming a successful professional writer Nabokov eventually won the battle to retain control over his published writings and even tried to dictate his own rules as he interacted with literary critics, publishers, editors and journalists). After elucidating the little-known aspects of Nabokov’s posthumously printed lectures on Don Quixote, the work that remains outside of the writer’s presumed canon, White goes on to survey Nabokov’s position in literary history. While one could argue that the monograph’s periodization (modernism, late modernism, the Cold War, etc.) is debatable, especially when it comes to reconciling several literary traditions to which the writer belonged or covertly engaged with (including contemporary Soviet fiction), it does offer White a convenient platform for contextualizing Nabokov’s oeuvre in sociohistorical...

Mexican Lawlessness: Genocide and Massacre in Julián Herbert’s La casa del dolor ajeno

Author(s): Janzen, Rebecca | Abstract: This article examines Julian Herbert’s La casa del dolor ajeno: cronica de un pequeno genocidio en La Laguna (2015), which deals with a massacre of 300 Chinese people in Torreon, Mexico, in 1911. This cronica in novelized form weaves together the history of Chinese immigration to Mexico with contemporary violence and the author’s own experiences of research and writing. I bring Herbert’s imaginative interpretation of the past into conversation with the Mexican Constitution and penal codes that were in force during the massacre, and at the time Herbert was writing. I compare his treatment of the initial reports to late 19th and early 20th-century ideas of a right to life, work and citizenship and relate his 21st-century reflections to 20th century concepts of genocide. The article concludes that this weaving together of past and present exposes the violence of capitalism that preys on vulnerable people.

A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 by John M. Rhea

Reviewed by: A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 by John M. Rhea Kathi Nehls A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941. By John M. Rhea. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. 312. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) John Rhea has written a welcome contribution to recent works such as Patricia Loughlin's Hidden Treasures of the American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott (University of New Mexico Press, 2005) and Shirley Anne Leckie's and Nancy Parezo's Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) that look at the important, though often marginalized, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women academics and intellectuals in the American West. Rhea explores the professional activities of nine women historians of American Indian history between 1830 and 1941. He divides his discussion of women's indigenous histories into two distinct periods, sentimentalist (or pre-professional) and document-driven (or professional). He examines the shared connections between these two groups of women and argues that their professional work, unlike the work of their male counterparts, remained on the margins of the historical profession, thereby leaving the field of American Indian history largely the purview of women scholars. Rhea locates the rise of the post-Civil War professional class of "new women" in an intriguing discussion of the sentimentalist ideas and activism of early nineteenth-century female evangelists and transcendentalists whose influence, the author notes, pre-dated the Seneca Falls convention for women's equality. The remaining first half of the book—indeed [End Page 446] much of the narrative—is devoted to an analysis of Helen Hunt Jackson and Alice Fletcher, two early scholars of indigenous history, who benefitted from their predecessors' achievements but gained significantly more political clout in Washington because of the federal rather than state locus governing U.S.-Indian relations (18). Rhea makes the case that it was Jackson's and Fletcher's proximity to the federal Indian agency, through their humanitarian work, that fostered professional careers straddling the divide between sentimentalist and document-driven scholars of American Indian history (34). He demonstrates that while both Jackson's Century of Dishonor and Fletcher's Indian Education and Civilization gained significant attention, historians dismissed their work as sentimental and naïve. He lays much of the blame for why male historians discounted the women's work on the destabilization of late nineteenth-century racial ideas found in Jackson's and Fletcher's scholarship. He notes that such was not the case for pre-professional male historians such as Henry Adams, Francis Parkman, and others who were neither marginalized in the same way nor found their scholarship held to the standards that resulted in the dismissal of the women's work. The author turns his attention for the remainder of the book to women scholars of indigenous history in the early twentieth century, whose work was more document driven than experiential. He highlights the work of Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phillips Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel. This new class of professional women historians faced mounting barriers to matriculation at top universities or, owing to "institutional male chauvinism," were consigned to women's colleges or institutions outside of mainstream academia after completing their doctorates (135). Rhea builds on his thesis that American Indian history became a niche for women as Frederick Jackson Turner's ideas about American exceptionalism, and triumphalism more generally, increasingly influenced how historians framed histories that ignored the indigenous experience. The final chapters chronicle the experiences of the first group of indigenous women writing document-driven American Indian histories, such as Rachel Caroline Eaton and Anna Elizabeth Lewis as well as the better-known Muriel Wright and Angie Debo. Rhea pushes beyond the gender constraints faced by professional women scholars of indigenous history and underscores how broader debates over historical memory, as much as gender, served as an important context for their scholarship and the barriers they confronted. This book deserves the attention of scholars of western women's and indigenous women's history, but will also be of interest to historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial studies and...

The Scandalous Case of the Rani of Lathi: Female Regency, Princely Politics, and Sexual Impropriety in 1920s Colonial India

In 1922, the recently widowed Rani and regent of Lathi state in peninsular Kathiawar took a lover and fled to Bombay, astounding her fellow Indian princes as well as local British political administrators. She was accused of murdering her husband, abusing her royal powers, and illegally leaving her state. By stepping beyond the walls of the sequestered palace interior and in travelling from princely state to British India, the Rani of Lathi transgressed social, political, territorial, and geographic borders. In the official documents of the time, she was portrayed in the familiar language of colonial exoticism as an oversexed, dangerous, and irrational representative of eastern femininity expressed in its most troublesome form: the secluded oriental queen. Regent mothers, like her, had complex relationships with the colonial government. While perceived as politically inept and morally corrupt, they simultaneously frustrated, thwarted, and eluded the censure of colonial administrators. In the process, their resistance to the colonial state presents vivid historical instances of indigenous women’s agency against both the paramount power and local traditional patriarchies. This article examines her contested regency and the role of gender, sexual impropriety, and psychologies of the mind in late colonial ideas of indigenous sovereignty, female governance, and border crossing.

Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine and Confucianism: Japanese State Medicine and the Knowledge Cosmopolis of Early Modern East Asia

This article argues that Chinese state intellectual approaches to medicine significantly influenced the institutional reception of Western medicine in early modern Japan. Confucian-inspired general reforms of government in late eighteenth-century Japan encouraged an increase in state medical intervention, including the introduction of Western medical practices, achieved primarily through the use of transnational Confucian intellectual knowledge apparatuses. Through a sociology of knowledge approach, this article analyzes the links between earlier private-sphere Chinese medical practice, late Chinese imperial state ideas on medicine, and early modern state-led medical Westernization in Japan. The article highlights the role of trans-Asian Confucian ideas, networks and practices in mediating new approaches to technical innovation, including those from the West. The position for Confucianism argued in the article thereby resonates with Bayly’s idea of the early modern information order of India, and Pollock and Ricci’s ideas on cosmopolitan discursive spaces in other parts of Asia.

“The Spirit of the Vedānta”: Occultism and Piety in Max Müller and Swami Vivekananda’s Interpretation of Ramakrishna

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Oxford scholar of Sanskrit, mythology, and religion, Friedrich Max Müller, produced two works on a contemporary religious figure, the Bengali Hindu holy man Sri Ramakrishna. Müller was assisted in the second of these efforts by Ramakrishna’s most influential disciple, Swami Vivekananda, who hoped to make use of Müller’s fame to present his master to a wider audience. Rather than measuring their fidelity or lack thereof to Ramakrishna’s teachings, as previous accounts have done, this article takes as its subject matter the late nineteenth-century ideas of Hinduism, religion, and the occult which emerge from Müller’s and Vivekananda’s efforts to make sense of Ramakrishna with a view to better understanding the concepts and attitudes which made such a collaborative work possible.

Brendan meets Columbus: A more commodious islescape

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the Brendan legend and the commodious cultural ‘sea of islands’ that it inhabits, a space that connects the modern reader to a history of other connections, fact to fancy, and the real and the imaginary. When sailing in this sea, Brendan meets Columbus, and the late medieval idea of a lost island spreads though space and time.

Descartes's Intellectual Memory

The author argues that sensory memory resembles the transmission of information in classical Aristotelian theory, whereas Descartes’s intellectual memory, which has often been found puzzling, has analogues in other late scholastic ideas. He seems to use the term ‘intellectual memory’ in several related senses. It can refer to the recollection of symbolic messages, or it can refer to remembering of meanings, mastery of language. However, the term has also a different use: according to the author, intellectual memory takes care of the remembering of the subject’s own states, in other words, reflective memory. Such a view had its origin in the thought of Scotus, and in Descartes’s time it was well-known and popular. It is argued that Descartes’s version of the intellectual memory underscores especially the nature of «spiritual memory» as something maintaining the continuous unity of consciousness.

晚明艺术观念的时代精神与历史价值

晚明艺术观念的时代精神与历史价值

Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965–1989

Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin were constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. This article explores both the intentions of their planners and the experiences of their residents in these two very different societies. It challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which sees its demise with the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s. Instead, it posits that urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn, which were simultaneously more ambitious, more defensive, and more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Finally, I argue that late modernist ideas about community, in particular a kind of urban community that offered a contrast to American-style consumerism, provide a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the later Cold War.

Intermittency: the differential of time and the integral of space The intensive spatiality of the Monad, the Apokatastasis and the Messianic World in Benjamin's latest thinking

The main topic of my paper concerns the theological-philosophical nexus between the intensive and qualitative spatiality of the Monad and the Origenian idea of Apokatastasis as a nexus that can clarify Benjamin's latest idea of the Messianic World. The first step will be, therefore, to explain (1) Benjamin's use of the Origenian notion of Apokatastasis in his Essay on Leskov and in the Passagenwerk. Secondly, I will discuss (2) how and to what extent such use is relevant for Benjamin's idea of Messianism. Thirdly, I will propose (3) the thesis that, for Benjamin, a messianic idea of time implies a monadological idea of space. In this regard, the relationship between continuity and discontinuity, which is crucial to understand the late Benjamin's idea of history, must be understood precisely as a dialectical relationship that involves not only time but also space. (4 ) The figure of intermittence – as we shall see – expresses in the most suitable way the intertwining of space and time as dialectically and messianicaly oriented. This sequence of logical steps and critical considerations will shed light on the true nature of Benjamin's idea of dialectics and on its relationship to the idea of the totality. The real term of confrontation of Benjamin's late philosophy (from the Passagenwerk to the Theses on the concept of history) does not concern, therefore, Heidegger, but Hegel. In the light of this confrontation, Heidegger's Being and Time is already in pieces. It is as it were – we can say – behind Benjamin's movement of thought.

Cypriot ritual and cult from the Bronze to the Iron Age: a longue-durée approach

In two recent studies on Early Iron Age Cypriot sanctuaries and religion—the first dedicated to the memory of John N. Coldstream, the second to the memory of James R.B. Stewart—I attempted to show that looking at Cypriot ritual places (and practices) ‘before and after’ can be a stimulating and valuable methodological tool for understanding Cypriot ritual and cult diachronically. A drastic transformation imprinted upon the physical and socio-political landscape of the island during the Early Iron Age relates to the establishment—for the first time in the history of the island—of the extra-urban temenos sanctuary, related to the territorial formation of the Cypriot polities. After a careful analysis of Early Iron Age sacred topography and material culture assemblages, the next step would be a meticulous examination of their associated rituals, cults, and iconography in order to illustrate better the transplantation and transformation of Late Cypriot ideas (and ideals) into the Iron Age.

The Wife of Bath's ideal marriage and late medieval ideas about the domestic sphere

ABSTRACTThis article will explore ideas about marriage and the domestic sphere in the Late Middle Ages in relation to the Wife of Bath's prologue and Tale. While Chaucer's Wife of Bath has been read by many critics as offering a protofeminist defence of women, researchers who attempt to illuminate how the Wife of Bath and her ideas would have been perceived by a medieval audience, through recourse to medieval discourses on women, have tended to focus on the antifeminist clerical tradition in order to show that the Wife of Bath is a character made up of stereotypes from misogynist writings; these critics therefore argue that a contemporary audience would not have taken the Wife seriously. However, this article aims to show that it is conceivable that a medieval audience or reader could have interpreted the Wife of Bath's prologue and Tale as providing a serious defence of women. It illustrates that the Wife of Bath's ideas about mutuality and domestic partnership in marriage are in line with a discourse and social practices that actually existed in the late medieval period. The Wife's ideas about marriage are shown to coincide with ideas which were developing in Chaucer's society as a result of social and economic changes in fourteenth-century England, resulting in changing situations and roles for women in the context of the home. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that similar ideas about marriage are expressed in marriage sermons from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century.

Trust Generating Security Generating Trust: An Ethical Perspective on a Secularized Discourse

This text focuses on the moral character of trust. Trust is widely recognized as a morally charged concept: Values are inscribed in this concept, and its practices have moral consequences. Trust needs ethical reflection to explore what values are inscribed and if the consequences are desirable or welcome and if so for whom. The first step reflects trust’s religious biography, analyzing expressions of Gottvertrauen in early modern times und drawing the line to Erik Erikson, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Konrad Lorenz. The second step considers security’s underlying religious discourses, especially with the “Schutzmantelmadonnen” (Madonna with the cloak) which provide an elaborate security technology. The idea of multiple modernities and multiple secularities explains how present some of the late middle age ideas are within modern technologies. In a third step, an ethics of trust – how to do trust and security in a just way – is mapped out with its crucial “points to consider” a field where different rationalities are present. The Coda finally rescues the reputation of the “trust and security theater” – as an ethically relevant and needed act and action.

Of Ambidexters and Daffidowndillies: Defamation of Lawyers, Legal Ethics, and Profession Reputation

Defamation has been a subject of considerable interest to legal historians. It did not become actionable in the royal courts until the early 16th century. As the secular cause of action for defamation developed, there were a number of actions instituted by lawyers. Defamation suits by lawyers accused of being ambidexters, the contemporary term for conflict of interest, constituted a large category of these lawyer defamation suits. Medieval discipline of lawyers for ambidexterity, a common form of lawyer misconduct, likely contributed to making these accusations actionable defamation. The purpose of this article is to study these defamation suits and their interrelationship with legal ethics, the public and professional images of lawyers, and professional reputation. The article is divided into three parts. The first part studies 45 early modern defamation cases involving accusations of lawyers of ambidexterity. The discussion analyzes the initial and evolving defamatory language and its judicial treatment. The cases show that accusing a lawyer of being an ambidexter was clearly and unequivocally actionable as defamation and that nothing was more defamatory than charging a lawyer with disloyalty to a client. Moreover, the word, ambidexter, signified substantial opprobrium. The second part studies public and professional images of lawyers to understand why such an accusation and the word, ambidexter, were so clearly defamatory and had such substantial stigma . This portion first discusses the concept of a disloyal lawyer by exploring the existence of a loyalty norm in the common learning and inherited wisdom of the contemporary legal profession and by studying late medieval and early modern religious ideas and discourse, contemporary literary images, and more general social and political norms. The analysis then turns to a study of the word, ambidexter. The discussion begins with a history of the word and its legal use and then explores its religious and literary uses. The second portion concludes that the concept of disloyalty and the word, ambidexter, appeared often with in the usages of legal system, in religious discourse, and to portray lawyers as characters in literary works. All these usages likely created in the social and political milieu a very perjorative image of the disloyal lawyer and the ambidexter. Thus, these images contribute to the association of accusations of ambidexterity with serious profession opprobrium and help explain why they were so clearly and significantly defamatory. The final portion of the article notes that cultural changes and legal developments in the 16th and 17th centuries made professional reputation especially vulnerable to attack. Attitudes toward honor, an increasing importance of reputation, and changes within the legal profession combined to create a climate conducive to defamation suits against lawyers and to explain the beneficial nature of these suits to those accused of ambidexterity.

Translation at the Service of Greater Britain

The late-medieval French text, the Debat des Herauts d’armes does not provide an explicit argument in support of early or, for that matter, later British imperial aspirations. It does not even present the English in a particularly good light. Henry Pyne’s translation of this text in 1870 as a vehicle for the promotion of what his contemporary Sir Charles Dilke termed Greater Britain would therefore seem to be problematic. Nevertheless, this paper will argue that by surrounding his translation with extensive paratextual material, Pyne presents his text as an important document explaining Britain’s historical relationship with Europe and the wider world. More specifically, Genette’s understanding of paratexts as a means of limiting the reader’s interpretive options will be used to investigate the ways by which Pyne, through the title, prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, investigation into authorship and conclusion, ensures a reading of the text consistent with an interpretation of history supporting a particular set of late nineteenth-century British ideas about race, national character and Anglo-Saxon colonial ‘destiny’. The paper will therefore offer further insight into the ways in which translation has been used not to challenge hegemonic cultural discourse but rather to promote and reinforce dominant ideological positions.

Moon, Mars, Mercury: Basin formation ages and implications for the maximum surface age and the migration of gaseous planets

Basin formation ages for Moon, Mars and Mercury are determined by cratering statistics, compared and evaluated with respect to their maximum surface ages and available isotope ages, and two possible Solar System evolution models. Both Mars and Mercury appear to have undergone significant resurfacing, so that at least the first 200–400 million years are not recorded on their surfaces. Basin frequency and crater frequencies below 150 km indicate that the Moon has the oldest surface, Mercury has an intermediate age, and Mars has the youngest preserved terrain. An offset between the basin size-frequency distribution, the smaller crater size-frequency distribution and the main belt asteroid size-frequency distribution is observed in all three cases, suggesting an age difference of about 150 Ma between basin and smaller crater distribution-based ages. I interpreted this in terms of lack of understanding of the basin formation process, and suggest that one possible explanation for the apparently under-representative basin frequency could be a different (lower) average impact velocity compatible with the ‘Nice’ flux model. The basin formation pattern derived with the standard monotonically decaying or the sawtooth-like Nice-model flux does not reveal a coherent picture according to the late heavy bombardment idea. This is here attributed to an incomplete understanding of the cratering rate ratios between the planetary bodies considered here. Because of the Moon's unique formation history, I also suggest that it is questionable whether the Moon is a suitable analogue for the formation, evolution and cratering record of the other terrestrial bodies.

Are We There Yet? Virtual Tourism and Victorian Realism by Alison Byerly (review)

Reviewed by: Are We There Yet? Virtual Tourism and Victorian Realism by Alison Byerly Richard Menke Byerly, Alison. Are We There Yet? Virtual Tourism and Victorian Realism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 254pp. + x. $85.00 hardcover, $35.00 paper. “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us lands away,” claims Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth century’s most famous ode to armchair travel. But Alison Byerly convincingly shows that bookish voyages could actually have a lot in common with ones conducted by ship, or at least with travels via public panorama displays, Thames excursions, and railways—the Victorian experiences around which she centers her study’s three sections. In Byerly’s analysis, these sites and itineraries for real experience merge with their descriptions in guidebooks, handbooks, and other representations; indeed, she argues that even physical travel could come to have something virtual about it. Like readers, she notes, viewers of a splashy panorama, or occupants immobilized in a railway carriage zooming through the countryside, seem to occupy two places at once, immersed yet abstracted from the scenes presented to them. Studies of Victorian travel writing often emphasize the Victorians’ taste for writing about the exotic or colonial. But Byerly notes the concurrent popularity of real and imaginary excursions into the familiar. For instance, before or after—or instead of—visiting a panorama of London (located in London, naturally), you could read a description of it that addressed you as a fellow traveller sharing the experience. This evocation of a simultaneously immediate and distant reality becomes a formula for what Byerly calls virtual travel. (Influenced by late twentieth-century ideas about virtual reality experiences, she is nonetheless careful to distinguish their interactivity from the nineteenth-century texts and images she analyzes.) Yet clearly it might also be a recipe for fictional realism. Juxtaposing guidebook descriptions with scenes from works by Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Hardy, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others, Byerly examines what she argues are Victorian fiction’s responses to the conventions and techniques of virtual travel. Her skillful analyses bring out important features that we might not notice otherwise, even in well-known passages—for instance, Victorian fiction’s tendency to describe locations from moving rather than fixed viewpoints, or its use of an observing figure as what Byerly calls an “avatar” for the reader. Byerly assumes, and asserts, that these fictional practices reflect the influence of travel accounts on realistic fiction, but it’s not clear to me why the influence should have been only one-way. Perhaps fiction might have helped teach readers the pleasures of re-encountering, through a screen of artifice, a world that seemed familiar and nearly at hand. In any case, Byerly’s focus on finding and bringing together new materials is one of the pleasures of her study. On the travel side, we encounter a variety of reviews and guidebooks, including a useful look at the ubiquitous “Bradshaw’s” (a name that actually covers a multiplicity of railway and tourism guides). And Byerly regularly examines underexplored but once-popular genre fiction, works that respond to popular excitement about new experiences, technologies, and media in a revealingly direct way. Byerly also discusses a number of images related to virtual travel; the book’s few illustrations are so good that I longed for more. (The cover image, a witty collage that shows an unimpressed Queen Victoria appearing to contemplate a tethered hot-air balloon from the window of a train car on the doomed Tay Rail Bridge, is ingeniously perfect.) The paradigm of feeling as if you’re in two places at once provides the leitmotif not simply of the Victorian texts Byerly analyzes but ultimately of her book itself. For, as it proceeds, Byerly propounds—with more and more insistence—a double chronological vision that considers Victorian virtual experience against parallel possibilities in our [End Page 704] own media environment. Victorian avatars, cyborgs, chat rooms? Byerly’s “approach… assume[s] that it is possible to examine a historically specific body of material with both an awareness of its immediate cultural context and an openness to the illumination offered by comparing it with contemporary aesthetic and...

The Legend of Good Women and the Affect of Invention

The Legend of Good Women conceptualizes invention as an affective force, linking the processes of emergence that precede the mind’s conscious recognition of emotion with the inventional processes which culminate in poetic art. The Prologue introduces a theoretical method for reconceptualizing invention, and the legends dramatize the process by which affect and invention collapse into emotion and poetry. In so doing, the poem attempts to gesture behind both the discourses that shape late medieval ideas of gender and the affect that infuses those discourses with their personal and cultural power.

CREATING POPULARIS HISTORY: SP. CASSIUS, SP. MAELIUS, AND M. MANLIUS IN THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE LATE REPUBLIC

Abstract The sources are clear in associating Sp. Cassius, Sp. Maelius and M. Manlius Capitolinus with Late Republican popularis programmes, both in the men's actions (agrarian laws, grain distributions, redemption of debts) and in the language used to describe them. Not only were the adfectatores regni (anachronistically) identified as popularis, but they were also conceived of as part of a continuous political tradition, which went down to Clodius and the Gracchi. The content of these stories can illuminate Late Republican ideas about popularis politicians and ideology, especially the tension between the actions of the men and their stated intentions on the one hand, and the perception of tyrannical behaviour on the other. The association of these figures with later populares allows us to use their examples to more fully describe the Late Republican view of what popularitas meant and how it related to attempts at, or accusations of attempts at, tyranny.