Literary Allusions Research Articles

How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study

How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study

Cultural and Temporal Transfer in a Heritage Film Oliver Twist (2005)

The paper will focus on how history is reshaped in a case study: the film adaptation of Oliver Twist (2005). It is of significance as its Chinese authorised subtitles mediate nineteenth-century British history for a contemporary Chinese audience. But this adaptation creates various problems of translation as it negotiates the cultural and linguistic transfer between early Victorian England and twenty-first-century China. To illustrate the challenge that translators and audiences face, examples drawn from the subtitles are grouped under Eva Wai-Yee Hung’s (1980) suggested aspects of Dickens’s world: “religious beliefs, social conventions, biblical and literary allusions and the dress and hairstyle of the Victorian era”. Moreover, Andrew Higson’s “heritage” theory (1996a), William Morris’s (Bassnett, 2013) views of historical translation and Nathalie Ramière’s (2010) cultural references specific to Audiovisual Translation are adopted to read the Chinese subtitles. They are used to bring back the audiences to an impossible, inaccessible past. The historical features shown in this modern version of a British heritage film make it possible for the subtitles to interact with Chinese culture to transfer meaning via a complex combination of translation strategies. Therefore, in order to rejuvenate Chinese cultural heritage, the subtitles of the cultural and temporal specificities and complexities involved are reinterpreted and redirected to the receiving culture

The Riddles of Mazeppa; or, More Questions than Answers: Watermarks and Cohabitations, April 1817–September 1818

Byron's Mazeppa is an unusual case in his writing career. He was generally a quick writer, but this poem – an important link between his earlier melodramatic tales and his later comic ones – was started in April 1817 and completed only in September 1818, nearly eighteen months later. This essay uses various forms of evidence, in particular literary allusion and the various paper stocks on which the poem was drafted, to suggest when and where the poem was ‘broken off’ before being finally completed. It also considers in the poem in the light of other works written during the period ( The Lament of Tasso, Manfred, Childe Harold IV, Beppo, and Don Juan) before considering its overall theme in contrast to Voltaire's History of Charles XII.

A Unique Tangut Primary Reader Brief Collection by Taizong kept in the IOM RAS

The previously undesiphered manuscript inv. № 5875 preserved in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences, proves to be the Tangut version of a primary reader. Its Chinese original is an inconsistently miscellaneous compilation of ancient literary allusions and contemporary folk maxims. The text is composed by different literary style of antithetical couplet and ordinary prose without a consistent subject. Although its Chinese original has not been found yet and the whole text has not been thoroughly deciphered so far, narrations and translations may be provided as many as possible in the present paper in order to lay a foundation for further studies.

“A Stage-Hand, Perhaps”: Life as a Stage Play in John Banville’s the Book of Evidence

ABSTRACT In the present essay, the focus is laid on literary allusions in The Book of Evidence, as I argue that the novel thematizes Freddie Montgomery’s consistent exploration of the ways in which he might endow the world around him with at least a transient order and meaning. It is as part of this quest that he repeatedly adverts to the view of life as a performance analogic to a theater play. I will further suggest that the allusions are specifically to Macbeth and the eponymous hero’s soliloquy in Act V when he learns of Lady Macbeth’s demise.

Cultural and Historical Progression: The Psychology of Literary Allusions in Theodore Dreiser's The Financier (Trilogy of Desire)

The psychology of allusion is often multi-faceted as a reference to an artefact, which could be a character from a literary piece, the quoted words of a character, a place in the country or an event from history. The reference item should be familiar to the readers. The current research identifies literary allusion in The Financer (1912) and the characters referred to Ouida's Tricotrin (1869), Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr's A Bow of Orange Ribbon (1886), Edward Bulwer Lytton's Kenelm Chillingly (1874), and William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1603) which is explained with reference to the plot of Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947). The available literature review testified that a thorough evaluation of the allusions within the novel had not been accomplished to date, although these allusions link the literary pieces of the greatest minds in literature.

Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science

Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles for their publications, but would this be mistaken in some fields? Although poetic titles are known to be common in medicine, it is not clear whether the practice is widespread elsewhere. This article investigates the prevalence of poetic expressions in journal article titles from 1996–2019 in 3.3 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields. Expressions were identified by manually checking all phrases with at least five words that occurred at least 25 times, finding 149 stock phrases, idioms, sayings, literary allusions, film names, and song titles or lyrics. The expressions found are most common in the social sciences and the humanities. They are also relatively common in medicine, but almost absent from engineering and the natural and formal sciences. The differences may reflect the less hierarchical and more varied nature of the social sciences and humanities, where interesting titles may attract an audience. In engineering, natural science, and formal science fields, authors should take extra care with poetic expressions in case their choice is judged inappropriate. This includes interdisciplinary research overlapping these areas. Conversely, reviewers of interdisciplinary research involving the social sciences should be more tolerant of poetic license.

The deconstructed ethics of Martin Heidegger, or, the university sous rature

Could there be a better instance of ethical conflict at the scene of the modern Western university than the case of Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 became a Nazi, arguably to elevate his own standing and career? In this article I examine the opposing ethical forces that animated Heidegger’s brief foray into Nazism, to ask whether the same forces continue to be found in the technocratized university described by Bill Readings. I address Heidegger’s own philosophy as a context in which these conflicting ethical forces are confronted, using metaphorical references to Pollyanna and Cujo. This absorption of literary allusions within a contribution to educational philosophy seeks deliberately to break the stranglehold that empiricism has on the discipline of education. It regards the hegemony of empiricism as an ideological fetishism. I am using the work of Jacques Derrida to deconstruct the idea of the university, with Heidegger’s political opportunism as symptomatic of current patterns of self-marketing, self-promotion, and entrepreneurialism amongst academics.

«La Traviata» remastered. G. Verdi’s opera in the stage interpretation by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko

«La Traviata» remastered. G. Verdi’s opera in the stage interpretation by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko

John Clare and the Language of Listening

This essay examines the representation of listening in a number of Clare's 1832 poems, paying attention to the language used, including prepositions, ideophones, verb forms, dialect and literary allusion. It considers how listening locates and is located in his poems and argues that in ‘The Fernowls Nest’ literary allusion is an especially appropriate language for describing the poem's strangely displaced sounds. It proposes that Clare's listening is alert and responsive to different aural perspectives, that it is compound and reflexive, and especially attuned to moments of aural ambiguity, when the boundary between self and other, subject and object becomes blurred. Such moments offer a mode of ethical relation to the natural world that resists the politics of representation John Barrell has associated with the eye in loco-descriptive poetry. 1 If the particularity and multiplicity of Clare's poems offer an alternative to the visual mode of control and possession associated with the prospect view, the distinctive forms of listening we find in his poems, and, in particular, his attunement to aural ambiguity, represent another kind of resistance to the aesthetic expression of human ownership and control over the natural world. Listening in Clare is thus a form of environmentalist poetics.

ARTISTIC REPORTAGES BY O. KRYSHTOPA’S UKRAINE: THE SCOPE 1:1

The article is devoted to artistic reportages by O. Khrystopa a Ukrainian author of non fiction literature. The artistic reportage of the early 21st century underwent significant changes, evolving from the literary coverage of the 1920s. Contemporary authors refine their texts with different artistic techniques, genre-style techniques, which leads to the emergence of common genres. Such texts tend to be meta-genre in documentary and artistic discourse. The artistic reportages have a dual nature because they synthesize genre features of literature and journalism. There is a tendency to saturate artistic reportage with artistic techniques, expanding the possibilities of literature today. The aim of the article is to find out the place of artistic reportage in the contemporary Ukrainian literary discourse and to analyze some texts, in particular the book by O. Khrystopa’s Ukraine: the Scорe 1:1. The author represented a map of his travels and assignments to different corners of the country, covering a number of small and large cities. It is noteworthy that he reproduced urgent topics: unemployment, employment, language, politics, ecology, coal fever, Chornobyl. The artist skillfully uses linguistic and imaginative means that focus on poetic micro-images in the texts of artistic reportages in the book Ukraine: the Scорe 1:1. The sound and visual images give the texts the proof. The artist imposes the text with the metaphorical, metonymic or amplifying character, uses simple comparisons, synecdoche, often parses a narrative that helps to focus on the background of the image; expresses the artistic background with literary allusions, preserving the tradition of considering one text within another. The study of the genre specificity of the artistic reportage will be the subject of the further research.

James Merrill's Mirror: On Ghosts, Allusion, and the Reflections of Tradition

James Merrill's Mirror:On Ghosts, Allusion, and the Reflections of Tradition Andrew Neilson (bio) To American readers of poetry, it may not be necessary to provide an introduction to James Merrill. A poet described in his lifetime (1926–1995) as "indispensable" and "dazzling," compared to Yeats and Proust, and hailed by Harold Bloom as "an absolute master of diction, metrics and cognitive music," Merrill's reputation has held steady in the years since his passing. A healthy industry in scholarship continues to find new things to say about this fascinating poet, who—to quote Bloom again—had "profound affinities with the great artists in verse: Milton, Pope, Tennyson and Auden." Of the generation of American formalists born in the 1920s, it is Merrill's oeuvre which may be most insured against the ravages of posterity. Yet in the United Kingdom, James Merrill remains a shamefully neglected figure. My copy of his Collected Poems, a treasured book in a house of books, is the American edition published by Knopf in 2001. There is no British edition of the Collected Poems, nor is there even a British edition of the Selected Poems published in 2008. A limited selection was published by Carcanet in 1996, the year after his death, but otherwise the UK has shown little interest in James Merrill in the decades since. For a poet so immersed in the canon of English verse, Merrill makes for a ghostly presence indeed in that tradition's mother country. As it happens, ghostly presences can be found everywhere in Merrill's poetry. Take "The Will," which appears in the Pulitzer Prizewinning collection Divine Comedies (1976). It relates the loss of a stone bird, "SACRED TO THOTH," the Egyptian God of magic, writing, [End Page 61] and the judgement of the dead. Lost along with the antique is a bag containing the manuscript of a failed novel, which will in turn become the basis for the long poem—Merrill's masterpiece—which closes the collection and which has been published separately in an annotated edition (Knopf, 2018) as The Book of Ephraim. It is "The Will" that features the first published appearance of Ephraim (meaning "double fruitfulness" in Hebrew), the familiar spirit animating the longer poem. Ephraim is a deceased person, a "Greek Jew" from the early days of the Roman Empire, who speaks at one of the many sessions with a Ouija board held by Merrill and his partner David Jackson, urging the poet to "SET MY TEACHINGS DOWN": IF YOU DO NOT YR WORLD WILL BE UNDONE & HEAVEN ITSELF TURN TO ONE GRINNING SKULL It is a strange moment, where the world of the living ("YR WORLD") and the world of the dead ("HEAVEN") threaten to bleakly reflect each other as "ONE GRINNING SKULL." When Merrill inquires what he must do to prevent this from happening, Ephraim bids him "PLEASANT DREAMS" and takes his leave with this mysterious advice: GIVE UP EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE GHOST In order to better understand James Merrill, and his place in poetic tradition, this essay shall attempt to follow that ghost. ________ If we are to go ghost hunting, then we might begin by understanding how ghosts function in poetry. Christopher Ricks suggests that ghosts are a figure for self-reflection and literary allusion, that mode in which poets converse with each other across the generations. This is considered at length in an essay on a contemporary of Merrill's, Anthony Hecht, in the book True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and [End Page 62] Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (Yale University Press, 2010). Similarly, Ricks finds that if "Eliot is at times a shade and even a shadow [in Hecht's poetry], the shades of the dead are for Hecht—as for many poets—the conceivers of new life." He goes on to say that "ghosts haunt Hecht's poems" and attempts to describe them: Some of them appear to be ghosts pure and simple. (Yet what would that be, exactly?) But most of them are ghosts who breathe the air of allusion, who are there in allusion's immediate vicinity with an apprehension of how allusion may itself function as...

Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood

Reviewed by: Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood John O. Jordan Elaine Freedgood. Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Princeton UP, 2019. Pp. xxii + 152. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-19330-4. The 19th-century realist novel, it seems, has ragged edges that open up onto a multitude of alternate universes. Or so Elaine Freedgood argues in her provocative and important new book on Victorian fiction. These alternate universes – "worlds enough," as the title of her book calls them – are not exactly the stuff of science fiction. Rather, they are the result of ruptures in the supposedly coherent and stable narrative surface that many readers and critics have for at least the past half century taken for granted as the normative and dominant form of the 19th-century English novel. "Realism," Freedgood contends, is a critical construct, invented by late 20th-century critics in order to sustain a literary history that views the novels of George Eliot and her contemporaries as "the point of representational plenitude to which early novels aspire and the point of representational exhaustion from which modernist and postmodernist novels flee" (xii). In constructing this history, its proponents have overlooked the many ways in which Victorian novels interrupt and subvert central conventions of "realistic" representation: denotation, omniscience, diegetic consistency, and ontological unity. The Victorian novel, she maintains, is always already metafictional. In her influential earlier study, The Ideas in Things (2006), Freedgood struck out in this direction, but without overtly challenging the assumptions of "classical realism." In The Ideas in Things, she adopted a "literalist" approach ("strong metonymy," she also called it) in order to explore the material history of "things" like mahogany furniture and calico curtains, before bringing those histories and their accumulated meanings back into the Victorian novels where such things figure. In Worlds Enough, she tackles Realism head on. Her key trope here is metalepsis, which she defines (following Genette) as the intrusion of one diegetic or ontological level into another. Where other critics ignore or fail to notice these intrusions, or treat them as flaws and inconsistencies in a novel's diegesis, Freedgood finds them everywhere and delights in the instabilities they produce. She locates these ruptures and intrusions at points where the boundary between what is "inside" and what is "outside" a text begins to blur. They emerge in literary allusions; in epigraphs, footnotes, and other paratexts; in the presence of actual historical persons inside works of fiction; in authorial intrusions; in slippages between third- and first-person narration; and in the simultaneous presence of incompatible geographies. She notes the prevalence of ghosts in supposedly realistic stories and asks, did Victorians [End Page 198] "believe"? do we? These and other destabilizing formal elements cause the purportedly coherent story world of Victorian fiction to splinter, she says, into "a seemingly infinite number of worlds" (xiii). Despite the ultimate seriousness of the arguments it makes, Worlds Enough often adopts a playful, teasing tone toward its subject and toward the critics with whom it disagrees, including some major figures (J. Hillis Miller, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti, for example) who might be surprised to find themselves positioned as they are. Readily acknowledging that her account is incomplete and provisional, Freedgood nevertheless aims to help critics "unthink novel history and restore the full oddness of the nineteenth-century novel, putting aside 'classical realism' in favor of a novel full of self-reflexivity and formal hijinks" (x). Worlds Enough consists of a preface that summarizes Freedgood's argument, a short historical and theoretical introduction, and five "case studies" that demonstrate the workings of metalepsis in selected Victorian novels by, among others, Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. It concludes with a chapter entitled "Decolonizing the Novel," in which she expands her argument to include ways in which some critics have, she believes, imposed an "imperial" model on the relationship between the Victorian novel and works of non-Western fiction. The five case studies deal, respectively, with questions of denotation; with omniscience and its discontents; with the uncertain status of paratexts; with what Freedgood self-mockingly calls "hetero-ontologicality"; and with the vagaries of reference in several Victorian...

Литературные аллюзии в романе Д. Лоджа «Мир тесен»

Литературные аллюзии в романе Д. Лоджа «Мир тесен»

Жук готический: к одной возможной аллюзии А. С. Пушкина

The paper deals with the beetle as a minor character of the seventh chapter of the novel “Eugene Onegin” and a literary allusion. It is syntactically and rhythmically highlighted in the text of the stanza. V. V. Nabokov was the first to try to set the origin of the character from English literature. The closest meaning of the allusion was a reference to V. A. Zhukovsky, with his surname associated with the beetle by its etymology and the appearance of a “buzzing beetle” in his translation of T. Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The landscape of the 15th stanza of the novel is represented within the genres of elegy, pastoral, and ballad. We expand the field of Pushkin’s allusion to the Gothic novels of A. Radcliffe and Gothic fiction in general. Mentioning the beetle launches a chain of reminiscences from Gothic novels during Tatiana’s walk and her visit to Onegin’s empty “castle.” The quotations from Shakespeare and Collins in Radcliffe’s novels are of great significance. Shakespeare’s beetle, a Hecate’s messenger, is involved in creating an atmosphere of night fears and mystery surrounding the scene in Onegin’s castle. A collection of Radcliffe’s novels in Pushkin’s library suggests the poet was somewhat familiar with the paratext of the novel “The Romance of the Forest”. Moreover, the beetle as a parody character for a ballad and a Gothic novel appeared in the unfinished poem “Vasily Khrabrov” by the poet’s uncle, V. L. Pushkin.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance by Andrew Hadfield

 Reviews narrator, the tragic story from Ovid that sends him to sleep, and the mysterious man in black. Here, B. S. W. Barootes sheds light on the therapeutic benefits of idle activities, including reading; and Rebecca Davies explores the recuperative work of sleep. Ardis Butterfield’s valuable retrospective of the book’s contents completes the framework begun by Fumo’s excellent Introduction. Butterfield reconfigures some of the key features of the Book of the Duchess—including its literary allusions, referencing of lyric, and shape-shiing—as an archive that memorializes Blanche by allowing access to her memory not as an inert image of an irretrievable past but as a living affect assimilated to the continuing present. U  K P B Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance. By A H. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xvi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. ‘[T]he opposite of truth hath many-many shapes.’ Montaigne’s observation in his essay ‘Of Lyers’ could serve as an apt motto for Andrew Hadfield’s wide-ranging study of lying in early modern England (where it is quoted on page ). Attending to various religious, rhetorical, and political contexts, Hadfield’s ‘cultural [. . .] history of lying’ (p. ) persuasively demonstrates that early modern conceptions of mendacity were marked by their plurality. A recognition of the noxious effects of lying existed alongside a politics that exploited dissemblance and a literary culture that understood the power of persuasive fictions. A perceived tension between God’s authority and the power wielded by temporal rulers also played an important role in shaping the manner in which lies were used. Hadfield’s volume comprises two parts. e first of these discusses the relationship between lying and oaths: its two chapters, focusing on the Oath of Supremacy () and the Oath of Allegiance (), bookend the historical period covered by the study. Chapter  discusses the trials of omas More and Anne Boleyn, which are informed by ‘a context of oath-breaking, perjury, and lying precipitated by the Reformation’ (p. ). Hadfield’s treatment of More is especially illuminating , showing how appeals to divinity could justify dissimulation: More’s promise before God surpassed Henry’s oath in its binding force. Hadfield’s discussion of Wyatt’s poetry is likewise effective in demonstrating how a new scrutiny on spoken words inflected literary representations. In Chapter  Hadfield’s investigation of the accounts of the persecution of Roman Catholics later in the period uncovers further connections between lies, political power, and discursive practices. Whereas James’s oath demanded that it be sworn ‘according to the plain and common sense and understanding’ of its own words (quoted on page. ), Catholic adherents formulated an array of verbal dissemblance techniques that would preserve the speaker as a ‘truth-teller before God, while deliberately misleading the authorities’ (p. ). Again, Hadfield usefully places the treatises and trials of Catholics that he examines within broader literary and political contexts. e second part contains expansive and detailed case studies, showing how MLR, .,   notions of lying depended on different circumstances. Chapter  examines lying in religious contexts: it demonstrates the variety of positions adopted vis-à-vis dissemblance in the religious turmoil of the period, when a polemically stark distinction between truth and lies existed alongside strategic ‘duplicity’ in terms of religious allegiance (p. ). Hadfield turns to rhetoric, commonplacing, and poetics in Chapter , where he examines the dangers and uses of mendacity in Renaissance rhetoric, and the strategic advantage of literary fictions for Sidney. Perhaps the most compelling part of this chapter occurs when it thinks about the hermeneutic aspects of deception, particularly in addressing the relationship between lying and humanist reading practices adumbrated by Erasmus. Chapters  and  are arguably the strongest elements of the volume’s second part. e first of these, examining courtesy, lying, and politics, draws on Spenser, courtesy books, Machiavelli, and Cicero to assess the uneasily close relationship between courtly politics and dissembling; it also features a superbly nuanced reading of political lying in Marlowe’s plays. Chapter  attends to testimony, and as such allows for a wonderfully detailed account of fictive embellishments and literary archetypes...

In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter's Maternal Elegies

Hester Pulter's elegies for her twenty-year-old daughter Jane (ca. 1645) represent a mother's grief as excessive and expansive. Attention to the materiality of Pulter's manuscript reveals the importance of one of her main motifs—the circle—to her processes of grief and poetic composition. Her Jane poems expose the limitations of cultural ideas about moderate mourning and embrace a gendered style of grieving and parenting that Pulter calls "indulgent," as they insist that maternal elegies can be both emotional and intellectual. Pulter's manuscript shows evidence of her own "indulgent" return to the subject of Jane's death and allows us to read one of her elegies in two stages of its composition. In "Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, J. P.," a nine-line addition transforms a poem about individual loss into a royalist lament. Pulter's Jane elegies are especially salient examples of the way her poems frequently echo and expand upon one another as they play with literary allusion and demonstrate the centrality of recycling and revisiting to her authorial process.

«Я желал бы называться князем де Монбаром»: к проблеме определения отсылки

The article considers a series of possible allusions implied by the name of “prince de Montbard” in Captain Lebyadkin’s monolog in The Devils. The article analyzes the traditional reference to the allegedly historical figure of the buccaneer Monbars (or Montbars) presumably featured in several adventure novels. We point out that the buccaneer Montbars probably never existed; we consider the novel by Jean-Baptiste Picquenard traditionally cited as a work about the historical Montbars and several novels by Gustave Aimard (published in Russian translations by the time Dostoevsky started working on The Devils). In all those novels, the hero called Montbars is either unrelated to the alleged prototype or is given a fictional biography. The literary allusion to Montbars is important both as an assertion of Lebyadkin’s Romantic ambitions and as an indication of his social ambitions and his dissatisfaction with his own personality that he would like to replace with another’s, for which purpose he aptly selects a provisionally real Montbars. The article also considers a possible historical allusion to André de Montbard, one of the founders of the Order of the Temple. This allusion is connected to the accusations against the Knights Templar who had been charged with apostasy. The article also considers the meaning of the title “prince” and its political and religious connotations that go far beyond romantic adventure-seeking. The ultimate conclusion is that it is hardly possible and necessary to determine some singular and unequivocal literary or historical reference. The range of meanings implied by the name of “prince de Montbard” generally fits in the overall concept of The Devils as a novel about metaphysical imposture that includes the comical Captain Lebyadkin among potential impostors.

‘Kafka is among us’: Turkey’s Transnational and Interlingual Literatures

This article focuses on the reception of Kafka in Turkey in conjunction with the status and treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. Investigating the reception and appropriation of Kafka in Turkey reveals the ongoing effort to secure freedom of speech in a country that is marked by a long history of Turkification and Islamisation. The strong tradition of Kafka reception in Turkey sensitises readers to the kinds of literary allusions and rhetorical flourishes that are associated with the Prague author. Characters such as Herr K. and Gregor Samsa, labyrinthine narratives and the motif of estrangement left a lasting imprint on literary texts that openly challenge or circumvent censorship. This article argues that Kafka became a seminal figure for writers in Turkey, writers whose investment was not necessarily in Kafka’s Jewishness but in specific narrative techniques that allowed them to develop their own literature of resistance. This article analyses four novels in this regard - Ferit Edgü’s Hakkâri’de bir Mevsim (1977), Erhan Bener’s Böcek (1982), Bilge Karasu’s Gece (1985), and Orhan Pamuk’s Kar (2004).

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity by Andrew Newman

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity by Andrew Newman Yael Ben-Zvi (bio) Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity andrew newman Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019 236 pp. Many former captives wrote Indian captivity narratives to assert their belonging to the settler societies into which they were trying to re-integrate themselves. Andrew Newman’s Allegories of Encounter shows that reading played a similar social role during captivity, allowing captives to reconstruct discursive communal ties that approximated those their captors had severed. By reading books and other texts in captivity, captives could anticipate the reunification that writing would eventually confirm. [End Page 227] Newman analyzes a broad range of “literacy practices” in numerous captivity narratives, extending literacy’s centrality to settler colonialism beyond its familiar uses in land acquisition and the civilizing mission. If settler colonialism reproduces metropolitan sociopolitical settings, literacy bolstered captives’ faith in this reproduction as captivity threatened to frustrate it. Captors unversed in alphabetic literacy recognized and often respected its significance for captive settlers to whom they gave books and whose engagements in literacy practices they often accepted. By contrast, captives utilized literacy as the major means for distinguishing their historical positions and sociopolitical affiliations from those into which captivity had forced them. The book revises conventional treatments of literary allusions and intertextual references in Indian captivity narratives as extradiegetic afterthoughts or merely decorative tropes. It develops an intertextual history in which reading and the meanings with which readers invest texts become constitutive elements of captivity narratives’ plots rather than sources of stylistic rhetorical effects. Drawing on sociolinguistics and academic literacy studies, Allegories of Encounter explores various “literacy events” that enabled captives to perform “their participation in [the] discourse communities” from which their captors had separated them (3). The book’s “mode of inquiry” is deliberately “inductive, speculative, associative, [and] slow” as Newman traces what literacy might have meant for captives, its significance within its various discursive, cultural, and historical contexts, and its functions in shaping captivity experiences (194, original emphasis). The book expands the range of activities and capabilities included under the term literacy as well as Indian captivity narratives’ social investments and functions. This book history study reconstructs the discursive communities that settlers have created with literacy’s aid, analyzing the texts they read and sometimes wrote in captivity, and imaginatively re-creating the worlds that literacy brought into being. The first chapter, “Rowlandson’s Captivity, Interpreted by God,” analyzes the Bible’s role in the genre’s hypercanonized text, Mary Rowland-son’s The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682). Scholars have distinguished Rowlandson’s narrated experiences from the numerous biblical citations in her book, at times crediting Increase Mather’s editorial intervention for these allusions. Newman argues that multiple intimacies and [End Page 228] dependencies tie these biblical allusions inextricably to Rowlandson’s experiences. In “Rowlandson’s rendering,” he states, “the provision of a Bible” by one of her captors “was an experience” that “enabled” a “series of literacy events” that were as experiential even though they were anchored in specific biblical verses rather than in the particular geographic places she traveled (20–21). The dynamic interactions that settlers created to link textual passages to captivity’s locales subordinated the latter to the former. Chapter 2, “Psalm 137 as a Site of Encounter,” extends this analysis to various authors who used this seminal representation of the Israelites’ Babylonian exile as the definitive experiential axis of their own captivities. Newman argues that “[h]istorically, culturally, geographically, the circumstances of Christian captives in the Eastern Woodlands correspond to the language of the psalm so closely as to entail a partial collapse in the structure of the allegory between the biblical narrative and their own experience” (51). Rather than keeping those levels distinct, Newman suggests that Christian captives had to collapse them because the “first three verses of Psalm 137 conformed so closely to the circumstances of American captivity narratives” (60). The recurring adverbial phrase “so closely” emphasizes literacy’s potent ability to blur these boundaries. Newman subtly critiques settlers’ typological identification with biblical Israelites by acknowledging that “perhaps no...