Literary Artifact Research Articles

Argentinian Children's Literature and Independent Publishing Houses: Emerging Forms in the Re-editions of María Teresa Andruetto's Poems

This article addresses the relationship between children's literature and the ecosystem of independent publishing houses in Argentina. The first part of the article focuses on describing the editorial operations carried out by independent Argentinian publishers and, by virtue of the examination of their editorial practices, it is argued that their interventions (i.e., their re-editings of literary works) seek to introduce both textual and material innovations to Argentina's editorial landscape. It is also argued that the emergence of these editorial practices manages to resignify literary textualities and book materialities, as well as reading practices. The second half of the article offers an analysis of two works by María Teresa Andruetto that have been re-edited by independent presses in Argentina: Peras and Poesía a la carta. Both re-editions are analysed in view of their editorial kinship to their corresponding collections and catalogues. The analysis of these works (re-edited in picturebook and playbook formats, respectively) illuminates and acknowledges the existence of editorial gestures that, in their mediations/modulations of the canon, strive to challenge age boundaries and intended readerships, as well as conventions on literary genres and their materialities. Ultimately, these features profile the re-editions of Peras and Poesía a la carta as disruptive literary artefacts, insofar as they manage to challenge aesthetic and editorial orthodoxies.

Peerless Dulcinea, Love of God, and Shoah

Abstract Building upon the extended notion of conceptual history as a diachronic study of conceptual interactions, the article begins with deconstructing the paradoxical semantic core of incomparability statements that, it is claimed, endows them with a capacity of stabilizing social semantics. By declaring certain foundational values—positive (Shoah) or negative (God)—“incomparable” and thus immune to the challenges of cross-evaluation, the users of discourse uphold the boundaries of civilized society. On a smaller scale, this exclusion of competitive valuation is undergirded by the ascription of “incomparability” to the small pool of political and cultural figures, literary artifacts, social events, and representative allegories. The conclusion outlines the social contingency of conventions regulating the ascriptions of “incomparability” against the backdrop of their discursive stability across genres, epochs, and languages.

Arap Şairlerin Osmanlı Hükümdarlarına Övgü Şiirleri

This study aims to examine the rich tradition of panegyric odes composed by Arab poets in honor of Ottoman sovereigns, highlighting the historical, cultural, and political context that gave rise to this distinctive form of literary expression. The paper seeks to explore the reciprocal relationship between Arab poets and the Ottoman Empire, shedding light on how these poets paid tribute to the imperial majesty, conveyed the sultans’ might, and helped to legitimize their rule. By focusing on a diverse range of panegyric odes from the later periods of the Ottoman Empire, the research encompasses the evolving dynamics of power, patronage, and poetic expression that underpinned this unique interaction between Arab poets and the Ottoman court. The primary purpose of the study is to offer a comprehensive analysis of the thematic and stylistic features of these panegyric odes, elucidating the creative strategies employed by Arab poets to extol the virtues of the Ottoman sultans and to articulate their own political, social, and religious allegiances. The paper utilizes historical, literary, and textual analysis, to examine panegyric poetry’s role in fostering cultural exchange and diplomatic communication between the Arab and Ottoman worlds, and its function in bolstering imperial ideology and projecting the Ottoman state’s image. This paper further delves into the critical intersections of politics, religion, and artistic expression within these odes, illuminating how the poets navigated these spheres to construct a nuanced portrait of Ottoman rule. By interpreting the subtexts, allegories, and metaphors employed within these poems, the research uncovers the profound philosophical, spiritual, and cultural paradigms that underscored the political landscapes of the time. Through this lens, the panegyric odes emerge as invaluable literary artifacts that bear testimony to the grandeur of the Ottoman Empire and the intricate socio-political relationships that existed between the Arab poets and the Ottoman court.

Die Kantate als musikoliterarische Gattung.

Abstract The cantata genre is one of the most important intermedial art forms in European cultural history. Originating in Italy, it has also been used productively in music and literature in Germany since the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Since Erdmann Neumeister, who was the first to formulate a poetics of the (madrigal) cantata, numerous cantata poems have been written, which – even before they are potentially set to music – are literary artifacts in their own right. It is therefore surprising that the genre of the cantata has been researched almost exclusively by musicologists, and that there has been a lack of literary studies, and consequently, interdisciplinary approaches, which would be necessary for a systematic understanding of the cantata as a musical-literary hybrid genre. This article is intended as a contribution to an interdisciplinary study of the cantata. It examines the cantata text “Ich will den Kreuzweg gerne gehen”, written by Erdmann Neumeister and set to music by Georg Philipp Telemann, according to literary-textual and musical criteria, paying particular attention to the mechanisms and dynamics of the interaction between text and music.

Success and its Relativization: General Remarks on the Fate of Literary Works and their Authors (Specific Features of Czech Literature)

The author of the present paper deals with the general features of success of literary artefacts on the examples of several Czech authors. Regardless of some typical cases going back to the 19th century, among others a famous one connected with the name of possibly the only real Czech romantic Karel Hynek Mácha, probably the most significant romantic poet in the world observed from the point of view of poetics and artistic values and existential angles, there are quite a lot of interesting 20th-21st-century authors whose success on the one hand and loss of popularity on the other signalled the causes of the whole process and its markers. While the 19th-century authors and the success of their work were linked with the preparedness of the reading public, with aesthetic tastes and prevalent styles, more modern literature since modernism has been connected, besides the mentioned factors, more with political shifts of emphasis and with the whole social atmosphere; it also depends on the thematic and genre structure of literary artefacts, on the problems dealt with, on the degree of experimentalism. The examples of several Czech 20th-century authors demonstrate various aspects of the problem of the markers of succes and their association with their creative individuality.

Language of Intermediality: Merging Arts, Cultures and Literature

The paper demonstrates through specific examples the peculiarities of intermedial ‘language’ employed by E.M. Forster to enlarge the contextual field of his novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Thus, through the application of the close reading technique and hermeneutical method, it covers the specificity of pictorial depictions and theatrical medium, as well as intermedial references integrated into the canvas of the literary artefact to extend its contextual field, draw borders between cultures, deepen the conflicts. It concludes that the writer applies specific intermedial language patterns and frameworks to extend the context of the plot and deepen the conflicts and oppositions between English and Italian, own and strange, old and new.

Overcoming the Myth of the Silent Woman and Double-Colonization in Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp

This paper explores the theme of overcoming the myth of the silent woman and double colonization in Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp (1924). It scrutinizes the subversive demolishment of double-minority status lifting the curtain on the thunderous screams of a female character as an emblem of expressive agency. To thematize this research topic and critically diagnose its feasible dimensions, this research paper casts the spotlight of analytical interpretation on the political dynamics, the implicit underpinnings and the insinuated textual unsaid underlying the female character of the Indian woman as a case study placed under scrutiny. To excavate in depth the ideological ramifications and the political implications tacitly embedded in the overall textual fabric of this literary artifact, this current study brings into play the postcolonial feminist perspective as a deconstructive paradigm through decomposing and dismantling a miscellany of excerpted extracts quoted from the decomposed text. This research paper selects relevant thematic insights that embody the counter-patriarchal upheaval and the defiant insurgency unravelling the notion of the Voice as a third space of self-revival, restorative replenishment of the Indian female subaltern and decision-making power. This research paper culminates in a wide array of clear-cut conclusions: A. The strategic reversal of the gender-exclusive model of grand narrative shifts it from misogynistic patriarchy and the top-bottom androcentric monopoly of power to a gender-inclusive vision of democratic parity, political enfranchisement and performative agency. B. The transformational metamorphosis in the tectonic plates of male-female asymmetrical power structures and the replacement of the hierarchically structured pyramid of man-woman relation by a harmonious continuum of gender complementarity. C. The counter-active shift drifts from the reductionistic mindscape of phallocentric discrimination to the anti-patriarchal philosophy of gynocentric perspective.

“Finding My Way to Freedom”: Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

This paper explores Dionne Brand‘s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2011) as a non-traditional archive, yet idealistically a poetic narrative map, beginning epically at the Door of No Return on the west coast of Africa and spreading out infinitely. I argue the main focus is freedom as marronage mapped out through a set of hyperlinked tension-filled stories across time and space that collectively connect geography and/to history; its method is collecting and recording “conversations” (224), both spoken and observed, about Black diasporic lives and encounters across time and space. In Map Brand’s desire for freedom leads her to interrogate and challenge selected old world maps, charts journeys, and, in narrative and poetry, re/call and re/invent the past and actively re/imagine the present and future of new world liberated Black people as self-created individuals. The result is a modern literary artifact: as memorial to the marooned, with a ruttier for freedom for the marooned. This work forms part of a neo-archive of Black Diasporic texts that collectively perform reparative story-telling. Brand maps and builds a different (non-traditional) repository by recording selected experiences of Black people in the New World Diaspora—connecting paths forged from “a place emptied of beginnings” (6). Map charts the points on a journey to a liberatory future, one based on, as Brand describes it, “a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves” (224)—human dignity. Brand’s Map, then, for inspiration, preserves selected histories that might have otherwise remained unexplored. It makes future retrieval possible, and the possibility of forgetting impossible—and ultimately this is the ageless beauty of this provocative work.

On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection by Mary Dartt

Reviewed by: On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection by Mary Dartt Erica Hannickel Mary Dartt, On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection. Edited with introduction by Julie McCown. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2021. [Originally published 1878–79.] 246 pp. Paper, $27.95; e-book, $22.95. Scholars at the intersections of western American literature and history, women’s literature, animal studies, gun culture, environmental studies, and World’s Fair history have long awaited an accessible, well-annotated reissue of On the Plains and Among the Peaks for use in research and the classroom. The book traces Martha Maxwell’s life as the “Colorado Huntress” and taxidermist, famous for natural history installations placing animals in their reconstructed environments—a revelation for the age—and most significantly displayed at the Philadelphia International Centennial Exposition of 1876. There are many additional reasons to take another look at the primary text, originally published in 1878–79. Two of them are the editor’s thoughtful introduction to the book, including biographical sketches of Martha Maxwell and her biographer and half-sister Mary Dartt, as well as McCown’s excellent historical and literary footnotes throughout. Reading the book with McCown as guide makes for a rich experience—one of the most surprising elements is the care with which Dartt is treated as narrator. We come away realizing that this text is not just an important historical document about Maxwell but equally prescient as a literary artifact by Dartt— quite close as sisters in the far West, but women who clearly had [End Page 91] different priorities and passions in life. In this way, the book gives much-needed additional texture to nineteenth-century women’s expertise in natural history and American literary and artistic canons. At the same time we see Dartt’s soaring descriptions of Colorado predating our most lauded poetry about the Rockies by two decades, and Maxwell’s acuity in how her “work would symbolically and materially affect society’s attitudes and behaviors toward women in general” (14–15). Both women were well aware of the national stage they were on and yet clearly used it to different effect. We might set historically competing descriptions of Maxwell— the hunter-housewife, lady-amazon, white-Native American—as a challenge to midcentury American culture: she was both too smart and too violent for the public to know what to do with her (with the exception that they were keen to buy a lot of postcards of her petite figure among large taxidermied mammals). And yet, Dartt continues to place Maxwell within the company of famous male artists, ornithologists, and authors of the age. Describing an “excursion party” she attended with Maxwell in Colorado, these often lasting between three days and three weeks, Dartt writes: Don’t let any one [sic] innocently imagine these were basket picnics, where everybody rode out in fresh dresses and blue ribbons at nine in the morning, partook of sandwiches, cold chicken, champagne and ice-cream, on rustic seats in a grove, and returned in good order to their usual domiciles at night. If any one [sic] has such an idea lingering around that word, excursion, I advise its banishment as soon as possible. (95) Throughout we find Dartt referencing Albert Bierstadt, William Cullen Bryant, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon in relation to Maxwell. (A slightly longer scope must add big-game hunter Teddy Roosevelt to the list.) Yet the conditions in which these men worked were quite different from Maxwell’s. Her taxidermy serving as her family’s primary income for decades, Maxwell performed her best work on pared-down hunting excursions at altitude—no other adults present, very few supplies carried—yet we find out late in the book that her young daughter [End Page 92] Mabel, born in 1857, was often in tow. Think about that: would there have been a Bierstadt, Bryant, Thoreau, Audubon, or Roosevelt had they also been caring for a small child alone in their peak years? Dartt offers the question more provocatively: “What, amid such an awful passion-burst of nature, is...

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry

Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry Riti Sharma Elizabeth McHenry. To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship. Duke UP, 2021, ix + 238 pp. It takes courage to write, and even greater courage to see oneself as part of a literary history. Elizabeth McHenry bases To Make Negro Literature on this premise. McHenry also reveals what it took for African American authors to make it in the publishing industry. To Make Negro Literature offers a rich and variegated approach to the method of reading literary history. One of the ways McHenry highlights is through the relationships and correspondences between authors, publishers, and other authors. This is identified toward the end of the book as a network of underground channels, which is visible to the naked eye. The book is a response to the question of how Black literature came into being, and the travails that people went through to create their places in the publishing industry in America and Europe. McHenry not only charts the contributions of writers who resided in America, but also takes into consideration correspondences between African Americans in Europe and how such correspondence can be viewed as part of African American literary history. The introduction itself stresses the complex literary landscape in which African Americans created their works of art in a bid to challenge stereotypes, racism, and fascism. The author explains that the word Negro with an uppercase N, as opposed to that with a lowercase n, was considered a word of dignity. This makes one ponder what strength a community may derive from reinterpreting remarks and words meant to be derogatory. To alter the flow of thought and perception is what most African American authors and public figures did, and McHenry provides a granular image of this history with the help of a few memorable figures. The first chapter explores education through self-learning—how average African Americans educated themselves with the help of books, instead of school. Formal schooling was in many cases a dream deferred, owing to responsibilities and the racially charged climate. The fixed, immobile site of education such as the Atlanta Exposition's Negro Building was replaced by a mobile and flexible form of literacy through books such as William Crogman's Progress of a Race. The chapter gives the publishing history of this book, the context in which it was created and disseminated, and how it performed the task of bringing literacy to a large portion of the American population. Now, McHenry points out that dissemination attested to a fact of racial pride and dignity, which aided in the sale of the books. This [End Page 179] allows one to analyze the logic behind subscription book selling that is situated on the premise of a personal relationship and respect for the buyer from the seller's side. Ultimately, owning a copy of Progress of a Race was a mark of self-respect. McHenry therefore establishes that the connection readers make with books is not only with the literary artefacts themselves but also with the politics of reception of a given work. Progress of a Race offered every reader a chance to engage with the politics of being Black in America and to understand the nuances in which identities can be formed. This chapter showcases Crogman's journey from the Liberal Arts Building in Chicago, the Negro Building in Atlanta, to the site of the book. The material being forged showed the progress from literacy to the literary, which entailed a deeper understanding of textual politics. McHenry argues that the concept of education herein shifted from the idea of being literate to the values one attaches to the process of reading. The second chapter details books that enabled one to move from literacy to literary. McHenry argues that bibliographies are a conceptual tool for understanding African American literary history. The argument grapples with the idea of the "site of learning" (37), which entails not only the details of the text and author but also the location of the text and author. Some examples include Daniel Murray's project, which draws on information from various sources outside America...

Thinking with the Nation: "National" Literatures at the Cusp

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

The Tale of the Cards: An Old Believer Work on the False Prophet Napoleon

From the beginning of their history, the Old Believers had not doubted that the Antichrist either reigned in the world or would appear shortly. In this regard, they continued the tradition of “factual proof” and chronological calculations, which had developed even before the schism, to define the exact time of the Antichrist’s accession and define the image in which he would appear. Along with the Russian tsars, Napoleon Bonaparte also appears as the embodiment of the Antichrist in Old Believer literature. Among the original eschatological writings which brought together the stories about the Russian emperors who incarnated Antichrist and about Napoleon, there is The Tale of the Cards. In this essay, the French emperor acts as a false prophet, the forerunner of the final coming of the Antichrist. This “fact” is confirmed by his introduction of new banknotes, or “cards”, in Russia, which helped prepare the conditions for the emergence of an enemy of mankind. This article analyses three copies of the literary artifact. Based on this analysis, it is established that it was created between November 1824 and the end of December 1825. Most probably, its provenance is connected with the Old Believer Cossacks of the southeastern part of Russia, the Volga Region, Orenburg or Uralsk, which is most closely connected with Irgiz, the most influential centre of the Beglopopovtsy denomination of the Old Believers. The author assumes that Ya. M. Tarasov, an Old Believer dogmatist and foreteller from Uralsk, could have been the author of The Tale of the Cards. In the Appendix to the article, the author publishes the text of The Tale following three copies from the 1820s–1870s: from the Russian State Library (Moscow), Ural Federal University (Yekaterinburg), and the Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk).

Spinning and singing: Exploring memory and gender non-conformity through screenwriting for publication first

This article discusses a short screenplay written for publication first, rather than production, and how this approach enabled the writer to explore fringe or non-commercial topics, specifically male gender non-conformity and queer identity formation. Shifting the focus of screenwriting from the sole goal of production to a twin goal of publication first and then production opened up a number of creative and scholarly avenues for the writer and means that the script will find an audience (a readership) irrespective of production. It also means that the textual qualities of the script are foregrounded. The script and this article explore the notion of effeminacy as a non-normative gender of considerable discursive potency that simultaneously disrupts both masculinity and femininity. The screenplay and this article also explore the relationship between memory and identity, arguing that interventions into memory contribute to the shaping of queer identity. The screenplay foregrounds dialogue as a textual strategy to enhance the readability of the screenplay and position it firmly as a textual or literary artefact.

The ‘Optimistic Cruelty’ of Hayek’s Market Order: Neoliberalism, Pain and Social Selection

This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy.

An Inaugural Address by the Committee

An Inaugural Address by the Committee Anthony Madrid (bio) 1 The purpose of this feature will be to present to the public the recent findings of ABR's Society for the Unearthing of Treasurable Literary Relics. We are calling our series "Lost and Found" to get across our feeling of recovery, in the legal sense of the word—the getting back what was always ours, but which had been misplaced. We also wanted to evoke a sense of motley. I, the President of the Society, am delighted to report that our 2022 Expedition into the Interior has been exceptionally successful, so far. We've spared no expense, whether in terms of money, time, or spirit, to read texts that no one has read in thousands of years, and to extract therefrom whatever might compel you to read them. Or at least put 'em on your list. The present "episode" is only an introduction, sketching our methods and aims. Starting with the next issue of ABR, you'll hear from one of our Senior Researchers on a literary artifact that's been lost to view for a long time but which has nonetheless enchained his attention. I'm about to "hand over the mic" to that researcher, but before I do, I wish to take a moment to invite readers of ABR to send the Society suggestions, care of Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Di Leo, for "Lost and Found" reading projects. These suggestions needn't be reasonable. None of this is going to be reasonable. 2 Our President has just mentioned we are open to suggestions. To give you some idea of the parameters involved, let me reveal to you some teaser highlights of materials already in our queue. This will help you identify the kind of thing we have in our sights. [End Page 75] • The special file that James Boswell kept on Samuel Johnson, called the "Tacenda" file, detailing Johnson's frustrated erotic energies when he was first married, as reported by Elizabeth Desmoulins, who had been his (and his wife's) servant. • The Salernitan Questions—a set of unanswerable-at-the-time scientific questions that circulated among medical students in Renaissance Italy. The collection is only a few pages long, and is strikingly poetic. Aristotle and his students produced a vast book of these things, and started a tradition … • The history of translations into English of the pre-Islamic Muʿallaqat, a set of seven "odes" that are among the most famous poems in Arabic. No English translation of any of them is even tolerable. Why. • Medieval Irish Dishonoring Law and its relation to certain satirical Irish-Gaelic quatrains preserved in manuscript. Mockery considered as an aesthetic and moral category. • The particular English version of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (the 1717 edition of the Thomas Creech translation) used by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The special significance of Creech's handling of the material and the prosody. • The American poet Sara Teasdale and her relation to the Italian arts power couple Eleonora Duse and Gabriele D'Annunzio, with special reference to the most narcissistic novel ever written in any language, D'Annunzio's Il Fuoco (1900). • Classic Shakespeare reference books, like Abbott's A Shakespearian Grammar (1870) and Tilley's Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeen Centuries (1950), which, though old, are still cited in every single college edition of the plays, and are themselves literature, if anyone but knew it. • Pearl Buck's translation of the Ming dynasty romance Shui Hu Zhuan (All Men Are Brothers, 1937), compared to various modern treatments. Get the picture? We actually did come on this show to make friends. We're out here, every minute, air tanks strapped to our backs, reading stuff that one [End Page 76] might see casually quoted by somebody like Jorge Luis Borges. We basically want to come off like him. And we want to bring you along, if you're into it. Melville's epic poem Clarel. Nobody, but nobody, has read that. You can be a pretty big Melville fan and not even know what happens in Clarel. It would be cool to be able to weigh in...

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Confronting book banning and assumed curricular neutrality: A critical inquiry framework

ABSTRACT Recently, false accusations of Critical Race Theory (CRT) being taught in elementary and secondary schools have emerged in response to culturally relevant, sustaining, and revitalizing curricula; this pushback makes it difficult for many educators to safely employ culturally relevant literature in their classrooms. This article confronts the increasing censoring of curriculum (via book banning and other policies) that privileges White, unidimensional perspectives on language, culture, and curricular topics. Specifically, we suggest a critical inquiry framework (CIF) to guide how students read such text and that draws on the tenets of Yosso’s Cultural Wealth model. Our CIF is rooted in (1) student examination of the economic and political contexts of literary production and constructs of linguistic and cultural legibility, (2) critical engagement with the represented values of literature, and (3) research and critical engagement in the unrepresented and misrepresented values, languages, and cultures of the literary artifact. Collectively, these components contribute to a framework of how to engage traditionally canonical texts in ways that are culturally sustaining and revitalizing by troubling the assumed neutrality of such literature. The article demonstrates the utility of the CIF in its application to sample text; F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s essay “Winter Dreams.” We offer consideration for pedagogy and other mediating issues.

Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature. Martin Eisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 259.

<i>Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature</i>. Martin Eisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 259.

Cultural Diplomacy in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

Cultural diplomacy refers to the relationships between two or more countries through the exchanges of cultural activities. Its key principle is to foster common values like faith, social justice, and responsibility. Cultural diplomacy helps people from diverse backgrounds to find common ground. A literary text like a novel can express the issues of identity and culture that are relevant to the readers of different nations and cultures. The purpose of this article is to give the theoretical concept of cultural diplomacy and to dig out the ingredients of cultural diplomacy inherent in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown. This paper asserts that the novel is a great literary work to study cultural diplomacy. The novel tries to justify that the external selfish interference can change a paradise-like place into a battleground butchering human beings in a very inhuman way. The novel presents Kashmir as a melting pot for all religious followers before it was intruded on by outsiders. The misuse of power by a diplomat like Max Ophuls, an American ambassador to India, causes great misfortunes in his own as well as the lives of many others. As the result of the selfish interests of the foreign countries, Kashmir becomes a battleground with mass killings, genocides, frequent rape cases, and mass exodus. This type of realistic depiction of Southeast Asia, mainly Kashmir, in the novel shows how the selfish desires of different nations create situations of chaos. The ideas that the novel uses to describe Southeast Asia, mainly Kashmir, help readers make up their minds about that area. The readers may long for harmonious relations between different nations. It happens mainly because of the literary artifact i.e. the novel that expresses cultural diplomacy. The fictional characters and the fictitious societies depicted in the novel help us understand foreign countries and foreign cultures. The reader certainly takes the novel as a work that advocates cultural harmony

Peter the Venerable

Polemics against Islam, the Qur’ān and the Prophet Muḥammad (peace be on him) are not new in the realm of literature. Nonetheless, the artefacts produced by Peter the Venerable (1092-1156 CE) were seminal and had lasting effects on the perceptions of Islam in the West. His work has been considered prophetic and the line of arguments he developed continued to find space in contemporary Islamophobic literature. His work included translation of the Qur’ān in Latin with the help of his associates and annotations by himself; besides al Kindy, Summa, and Contra, to name a few. This paper analyzes the polemics produced by Peter the Venerable against the Prophet Muḥammad in the twelfth century CE. This analysis encompasses three main dimensions i.e., exploring axiological connections of the polemicist with his chosen area for creating literary artefacts, linguistic techniques and metaphors used, and areas of the personality of the Prophet aimed in the polemics. Further, six main areas of the life of the Prophet have been identified and analyzed, which included polemics against the person of the Prophet; polemics against his family and friends; polemics against his actions; polemics against his regional affiliation; polemics against his prophethood; and the polemics to prove the Prophet a personification of Satan. The paper concludes that the continuation of negativities in such an organized fashion against Islam and the Prophet has transformed Islamophobia into neo-Islamophobia, wherein a socio-cultural and political order seems to have been prevailing in the West.