Literary Gifts Research Articles

Li Bo's Flight of the Great Peng Bird: The Banished Immortal's Pursuit of Glory and Emptiness

Abstract: This paper tells the story of the life of the renowned Chinese poet, Li Bo (李白 701-762) tracing his poetic artistry along with his Daoist spiritual quest in. It examines two of his thousand poems, both inspired by the Great Peng Bird from the ancient text of the Zhuangzi 赶子. The first is a long elaborate rhapsody written in his mid-twenties showing his boundless confidence about achieving greatness; the other is a six-line retrospect written on his deathbed lamenting his misfortune of not achieving what he had thought he would in his youth. However, both of these poems show Li's failure to reach his spiritual goal of finding peace and quiescence. Holding on to his great literary gift, Li never could let go of his attachment to fame.

A Seat at the Table: Black & Latinx Teachers Reimagining Multilingual Classrooms as Culturally Sustaining Spaces for Black Children

AbstractCritical scholarship has collectively challenged multilingual spaces as operating under a Latinx/Anglo dualism that excludes the knowledge, voices, and experiences of young Black children. Therefore, we must reimagine multilingual spaces that are not only inclusive of Black languages and literacies; but also see them as vital resources that contribute to linguistic justice for Black children in multilingual classrooms. Based on a qualitative study that drew upon case study and ethnographic methods with multiple data sources to explore how teachers of Black and other students of Color reimagined their classrooms with Black languages and literacies at the center, this paper utilizes culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs) to proclaim the importance of affirming and maintaining the languages and literacies of Black children and other children of Color. To that end, CSPs calls upon educators to intentionally invite practices that value linguistic flexibility in schools and classrooms. Findings demonstrated that teachers of multilingual classrooms who utilized CSPs consistently engaged in a process of critical consciousness that included challenging language policies, mandated curriculum, and unlearning classroom norms that rejected Black languages and literacies. Additionally, Black and Latinx teachers invited children to freedom dream and negotiate ways to bring Black languages and literacies to the forefront with them. In doing so, teachers and students were able to create communities of resistance that ensured the steadfastness of CSPs that centered young Black children's literary gifts.

Рецепция художественного мира и биографического мифа И. С. Тургенева в романе В. В. Набокова "Подлинная жизнь Себастьяна Найта"

The research aim is to determine forms of the reception of Ivan Turgenev’s oeuvre in Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Until now, Turgenev’s supertext in the novel has not been the object of a separate study, although researchers note the world-forming function of allusions to Russian and European classics. The study emphasizes the fact that the reception of Turgenev’s work is present on the levels of plot and imagery: (1) Turgenev’s plot about the character being obsessed with a femme fatale; (2) the mystical images of Turgenev and the principles of constructing an otherworldly space; (3) the biographical myth about Turgenev, represented in the works of writers contemporary with Nabokov. In the first stage of the analysis, we focus on a comparison of Nina Lecerf with Turgenev’s femme fatales. Nabokov implements the features of the portrait of Turgenev’s heroines – Maria Polozova, Clara Militch, Irina Ratmirova, Ellis, but in each case the similarity is incomplete. Unlike Turgenev’s femme fatales, who subjugate the will of characters with their supernatural beauty and power, Nina Lecerf charms the characters with physical attractiveness that is difficult to put into words by V. and Sebastian. The article proves that being in love with Nina Lecerf is a challenge to the characters imagination and literary gift. In the second part, we identify the features of Turgenev’s biographical myth in the novel: Nabokov focuses on the historical-literary works of B. Zaytsev, A. Remizov, Yu. Aikhenvald, etc. The unclear aspects of Sebastian’s and Turgenev’s biographies are similar (hypochondria; attachment to a woman, interpreted as the cause of death); however, if in B. Zaytsevs fictionalized biography they are given a mystical-religious or psychological explanation, then in Nabokov’s novel the “mysteries” of Sebastian’s biography are not revealed, but activate the narrators imagination and inspire the creation of his own fictional world. Nabokov uses the myth of Turgenev the dreamer, formed in A. Remizovs works. Unlike Turgenev’s works, in Nabokov’s novel, the dream images cannot be directly deciphered: they form a monogram connecting fantasy, the narrator’s direct impressions, and memories. We conclude that the author’s affinity to Turgenev’s works and to the traditions of their interpretation is a poetological issue at the beginning of Nabokov’s American career. Nabokov highly assesses the “night theme” as a bright example of Turgenev’s style. Landscape images of “Bezhin Lea” are used by the narrator to create and describe fictional worlds. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, allusions to Turgenev’s works introduce the theme of otherworldliness as an alternative artistic world with which the characters feel their genetic connection.

Confluence of factional and fictional as the structural basis in “The Gift” by Vladimir Nabokov

The paper explores the interaction of factional and fictional aspects in Nabokov’s novel “The Gift” as the efficient artistic means used to arrange its narration structure. Describing the rise and maturity of Fedor Godunov’s literary gift and his keen, bright and fanciful individual perception of the world, the author undoubtedly exposes a replica of his own world outlook as a master of belles lettrés. The images of other two central characters are also autobiographical – Fedor’s beloved Zina, whom benevolent fate brings to him, as it happened once to Nabokov and his wife Vera; and that of his father, a natural scientist who lost his life in the expedition and was worshiped by Fedor like the author of the novel worshiped his. The confluence of factional and fictional is traced in the portrayal of many other personages, including N. Chernyshevsky, which extends artistic and structural perspective of the novel. The biography of Chernyshevsky, written by Fedor according to the plot and the evidence of O. Dark’s and A. Dolinin’s works, is also based on the documentary material. Fedor’s nostalgic reminiscences of his childhood and youth in Russia, reflected in his verse, have much in common with those described in his American memoirs. Thus, the permanent synthesis of factional and fictional in the narration from the protagonist’s childhood to his maturity becomes an efficient artistic means of composing the most sincere and intimate novel summing up Nabokov’s Russian émigrée legacy.

Биографический и литературный контекст рассказа А. П. Чехова «Гусев»

The article is devoted to the analysis of biographical and literary contexts of A. P. Chekhov’s story “Gusev” (1890). The study describes the literary and biographical genealogy of the title character. The purpose of the work is to consider Alexander Chekhov, the writer’s elder brother, as a prototype that determines the profane component of Gusev’s image. The story is considered as a “literary gift” brought to Alexander Chekhov from Anton Pavlovich’s trip to Sakhalin. The significance of the genre originality of “Gusev” as a Christmas story is noted, bringing it closer to other similar works by Chekhov. The ambivalent nature of the title character is proved, which combines a dramatic beginning with a comic, travesty beginning. It is concluded that Gusev is an integral artistic image created by the creative activity of the author based on heterogeneous prototypes. The results of the study can be used in the practice of analyzing Chekhov’s prose, as well as in biographical works.

Modern humanities on the legal activities of Anatoly Fedorovich Koni

The study analyzes modern research on the life and work of the outstanding Russian lawyer Anatoly Fedorovich Koni. Koni’s works are considered using modern analytic methods (content analysis, narrative, discursive analysis, etc.). Authors study the narrative of the lawyer (philologists and historians) and his linguistic personality (philologists). Seven dissertations were defended, many books and hundreds of articles were published. Conferences were held regularly. The memory of Koni is celebrated by many lawyers. Authors consider these studies in a chronological order and using comparative analysis. Currently, active “production” of publications on Koni’s work continues. Slightly more than half of publications represent a rewriting of older legal publications; we skip these and consider only those works that have contributed to the study of Koni and his environment. Of these publications, authors limited the review to those works devoted to Koni’s legal and personal life. The study of a vast amount of such work allows to identify the main experts in the field: Z. V. Baishev (philology) and S. A. Domanova (history). Authors were able to fully learn about Koni’s literary gifts, to see his theory of practical ethics, to understand many of the motives for his activities, and to create a psychological portrait, learned much about Koni, his fight against drunkenness and prostitution, relationship with the Soviet authorities, the influence of ethics on modern legal proceedings, Koni’s psychology and psychologism, and his relations with the press. Koni’s epistolary works await further, without which it is impossible to understand the motives of his actions. It is necessary, finally, to reveal his contribution to the philosophy of law.

How to Become an Author: The Poet Isa Asp and Her Childhood Fascination with Writing for Magazines

In this article the author explores the early development of the identity as a writer of a Finnish-speaking poet Lovisa (or Isa) Asp (1853–1872). She wrote her lyrics in the Finnish language in the 1870s, and she is regarded as the first 19th-century female Finnish poet (whose works were published in Finnish). She began writing poetry (initially in Swedish) as a teenager and started her literary career as a contributor to children’s magazines. Asp began her studies at the Teacher Training College in Jyväskylä in autumn 1871 with the aim of working as an elementary school teacher, but she also dreamt of becoming an established writer someday. Unfortunately, her early death meant that most of her poetry remained unpublished until the 21st century.
 The author investigates what kind of literature Asp read and why she was able to read extensively as a child in the remote Finnish-speaking countryside at a time when Finnish-language literature for children was scarce and still only nascent and being developed for nationalistic reasons; in those decades, most of the books and publications were still written in Swedish. The author analyses in particular the gendered experiences of reading (and writing) in the life of a young girl and woman from the countryside, because in those days most of the authors were men living in towns. A special focus of the article is on the texts that she wrote and edited for children’s magazines. The author studies her autobiographical sources using a biographical method and considers what kind of literature and libraries inspired her career as an early female poet.
 National poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg and poet and historian Zacharias Topelius, the major Fennoman authors, were the literary models for the young Isa Asp. Their works inspired her to write and to aspire for a career as a poet and author, an occupation that was then still rare for a woman. Writing for children’s magazines was a crucial stage in her career, and her identity as a writer was strengthened by the opportunity to have her poems and short tales published. Also, writing for these handwritten as well as published magazines made her dreams visible and encouraged her to pursue them with effort. All this shows that her development as a writer was a deliberate, goal-oriented process. The publication of her poems and obtaining the community’s approval of them were important for the young poet. The encouragement to pursue a career in writing that Isa with her literary gifts received as a child from her immediate surroundings helped her to achieve her dreams, which in the end turned out not to be impossible to realise.

Н. Я. МЯСКОВСКИЙ: ПРИТЯЖЕНИЕ ТАЛАНТА

The article is dedicated to Nikolay Yakovlevich Myaskovsky, whose 140th birthday will be celebrated in 2021. Myaskovsky's role in Russian and world culture is unique. A composer, teacher, music and public figure, who had an indisputable literary gift, critical thinking, inclined to scientific understanding of historical facts and artistic potential of art, he was a defender of the Artist's high destiny, a creator who, at a time when the country was collapsing, cutting off the deep ties of culture and tradition, remained faithful to these traditions and believed in the continuity of culture. And this was at a time when deviations from the course set for Soviet music were severely punished. N. Ya. Myaskovsky did not escape this fate either. During that difficult period, he was supported by his work and immersion in the world of Old Russian church music in connection with the writing of the Twenty-sixth Symphony. The personality of Myaskovsky, who had an indisputable authority, attracted; he was constantly surrounded by students, in direct creative dialogue with performers, conductors, close-minded figures of musical art, as reflected, among other things, in many "musical dedications" to the master that are stored in his archive.

Living on the Borderlines by Melissa Michal

Reviewed by: Living on the Borderlines by Melissa Michal Kate Rose (bio) Melissa Michal. Living on the Borderlines. Feminist Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-9369-3246-7. 175 pp. Adeptly navigating between individual and collective traumas ("borderline" personalities due to imposed borders defying tribal autonomy …), Michal's work is distinctly poetic, poignant, and political. It traces the thin line between enough and not enough, and the subtle boundaries between people, especially those who love each other. With an impressive span of characters and tribal affiliations (sometimes reminiscent of Sherman Alexie's much acclaimed collection, Ten Little Indians), she portrays contemporary American Indian identities with irreverent humor and astute sensitivity: "Some white person's legend says that [End Page 237] there's a white doe, a woman who jumps over the edge with her man and turns into a deer. Who does that? Certainly not a Seneca woman" ("The Crack in the Bridge," 140). Both Michal and Alexie universalize American Indian experiences, mocking and overturning stereotypes along the way. Michal has a particularly effective way of doing this, often not mentioning that her protagonists are Indian at all until well into the story. This is the literary Trojan Horse approach advocated by Monique Wittig, through which authors universalize the particular and through this make the Other, One.1 By the time readers from the dominant group recognize the nature of the literary gift, the shifted identification has already crept inside their minds. Readers of any Indigenous identity, and particularly American Indians, may approach Borderlines as a work of healing, inspired (as the author states) from storytelling traditions. Trauma survivors will appreciate how accurately Michal depicts trauma's lingering effects on the body, mind, and spirit. The thirteen stories included in the book vary in length and form. Often the evolution of more than one person is central, rather than an individualistic focus on a single protagonist. The use of sounds, short phrases, and exclamations, even outside of dialogue, heighten the perception of orality, of being told a story. The language, clean, straight, and forceful as a mountain stream, is at times delicately figurative: "The liquid trickled down her throat, burning in the way she liked, filled with her grandmother's choices" ("The Long Goodbye," 18). Indeed, food is often a theme with deeper meanings, for example the young protagonist Nala's rejection of fried bread: "Why do we make this? … It only carries pain, you know … We sell that stuff to white people at festivals, powwows. They eat our past. We didn't have that flour or lard before them or before the long trails" ("The Long Goodbye," 17). There is a poetic frugality to the descriptions; a little goes a long way, nothing wasted: "They weren't the kind of couple who finished each other's sentences. But thoughts they read by a simple gesture or look. A familiarity from years of listening when there were more words" ("The Carver and the Chilkat Weaver," 48). The woman of the couple described is white, but Michal has significantly given her the title "Chilkat Weaver" as she spent a lifetime with her husband's tribe, honoring traditions even while innovating together with her (carver) husband. Women traditionally do not make the designs for their weaving, but in a graceful dance, the couple work together. The everyday poetry of the couple's lives is by no means [End Page 238] romanticized: the opening scene has this aging pair walking hand-in-hand down the cleaning supplies aisle. This story also characterizes the extended family (and her relationship with them) with a stroke that is sharp, bold, and true: "She told them, 'Don't bring anything.' They always did. They came bundled down with children and some type of food or paper product, making the tables multicolored and full of flavors" (58). Though each story is distinct, they seem to fall into three intertwined categories: trauma, poverty, and the living world. Michal portrays the much neglected and misconstrued issue of trauma in the body at a time when many professionals still deny the impact of lived experience and provide chemical "cures" to the lived realities of trauma: "'What would you do if you were...

«Другое дело Толстые...» А. К. Толстой в бунинском опыте исторической рефлексии: жанровый аспект темы памяти

The article deals with I. A. Bunin’s perception of the personality and works by A. K. Tolstoy. The key components of this reception are the system of philosophy of history views formulated by A. K. Tolstoy and his concept of historical memory. The belonging of the 19 th century poet to the large Tolstoy family was mythologized by Bunin and became a reason for understanding and determining the young writer’s own position in relation to each of the three writers: L. N. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy and Bunin’s contemporary A. N. Tolstoy. The paper draws upon fictional and nonfictional documents by I. A. Bunin and A. K. Tolstoy. Bunin’s reception of the personality and artistic heritage by A. K. Tolstoy was determined by the history of his origin. The Tolstoy family attracted Bunin’s attention because it was an illustration of his own concept of the literary gift as a “family affair”. Leo Tolstoy enjoyed an undisputed genius and generally recognized family reputation. Aleksey N. Tolstoy’s biography, on the contrary, was ambiguous – the fact that inspired Bunin’s scandalous hints in his essay “The Third Tolstoy”. Aleksey K. Tolstoy’s biographical path of was also surrounded by similar rumors – but Bunin in his article “Inonia and Kitezh” prefers to keep silent on them. In the 1900s, A. K. Tolstoy appeared to Bunin as a rival poet, and in the eyes of Bunin’s contemporaries as the one of his main literary predecessors. Bunin’s poem “Kurgan” was a kind of poetic response to A. K. Tolstoy’s ballad “Kurgan” dedicated to the problem of historical oblivion. These works-doublets could serve as an illustration of one of the types of literary “revision” introduced by H. Bloom. Bunin developed the plot of A. K. Tolstoy’s “Kurgan” in the elegiac genre and demonstrated the value of the past in the present. Since 1918, Bunin’s perception of Tolstoy’s legacy has changed. A. K. Tolstoy’s views of the Russian history are publicly emphasized in the “Cursed Days”, “Mission of the Russian Emigration” and “Inonia and Kitezh”. According to A. K. Tolstoy, the historical catastrophe for Russia was programmed by “Tatar yoke”, which distorted the European character of the national culture and personality and later drove the nation to the particularly Asian, as Tolstoy thought, phenomenon of Ivan the Terrible. Borrowing some modern ideas from the natural sciences, Bunin transferred a number of A. K. Tolstoy’s observations into an anthropological sphere and pointed out specific signs of the “Mongolian” traces in Bolsheviks’ Russia.

Hawthorne's Gifts: Re-reading “Alice Doane's Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” in The Token

The essay recasts Hawthorne's tales, “Alice Doane's Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” in the gift book, The Token, or Atlantic Souvenir where they were first published. Reading the tales alongside the neighboring entries, it seeks to show how Hawthorne's understanding of his own literary gift developed against the sentimental publishing culture of the 1830s.

"DET DUKKET OP EN FREMMED I BYEN": KNUT HAMSUNS MYSTERIER OG GURAM GEGESHIDZES EN SYNDER

Knut Hamsun has always been regarded as an important prose writer in Georgia, admired for his unique literary gifts. His novel Mysteries and its enigmatic protagonist, Nagel, have especially fascinated Georgian readers. Guram Gegeshidze (1934 –) is one of the best-known novelists in post-Stalinist Georgia. His novel, A Sinner was written in 1966. That there is «something Scandinavian» in A Sinner and that the novel even bears a resemblance to Hamsun’s Mysteries was pointed out almost as soon as the novel was published. In spite of this, A Sinner is quite clearly an independent work with an intrinsic value of its own and its own characteristic inner logic. When A Sinner was written, there was a renewed interest in the modernist tendencies that had arisen in the years before the Soviet occupation of 1921. When we bear in mind that Hamsun’s writings of the 1890s have always been particularly popular in Georgia, it is not so surprising that one of the best Georgian novels from a period that may be characterized as a new wave of Georgian modernism has such a creative and interesting relationship with Hamsun’s masterpiece.

The Place You Come from Stamps You: Saul Bellow’s Midwest

The Place You Come from Stamps You:Saul Bellow’s Midwest Andrew Seal A review of Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) and Saul Bellow’s There is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor ( New York: Viking Press, 2015). “I am an American, Chicago-born,” wrote Saul Bellow, in the opening line of The Adventures of Augie March. But while that simple statement was true of Augie, it was not true of Bellow, who was born in Québec, in Montréal. Bellow did not even become a naturalized American citizen until 1943, only ten years before Augie March was published. Bellow is therefore, among other things, the most decorated first-generation author in U.S. literary history—a distinction not often mentioned in his list of accolades. He is also perhaps the best-known undocumented immigrant writer in U.S. history (his family crossed the Canadian border on the Fourth of July, 1924, smuggled over by bootleggers). Yet in the most important senses, Augie bore no false witness on Bellow’s behalf: if Saul was not a Chicagoan by nativity, he had what some Jews would call a Chicagoan neshama, a Chicagoan soul or spirit. Bellow brought a renewed wave of literary respect to the city of Chicago; he spoke often of it in public talks and affirmed how much it had shaped him. Although his fiction was set in many places over the years, Chicago was obviously an anchor, his axis mundi, a place to renew his literary gifts. The Chicago that people all over the world knew was the Chicago of the Bellovian imagination. But if Bellow was unimpeachably a Chicagoan, was he also a midwesterner? In Zachary Leader’s first volume of a two-volume biography of Bellow, we are given Bellow affirming his affinity for the Midwest on a number of occasions, for instance in an interview with a University of Minnesota student newspaper: “I think the place you come from stamps you,” he remarked, [End Page 207] and added, “I consider myself a mid-westerner.” But generally Bellow discussed his midwesternness in connection with his love for the City of Broad Shoulders, as when he wrote to Ralph Ellison enthusiastically about his time spent in Minneapolis: “I find the Midwest agrees with me. Here I recognize things. And I’m near Chicago.” A Chicagoan first, then, and a midwesterner second—perhaps not an uncommon form of nested identities, local and then regional. But even though a good chunk of the biography is set in Minneapolis and in Madison, Wisconsin, Leader’s biography of Bellow barely probes the question of region or regionalism in Bellow’s work or life, though that is not exactly a knock on his work, as most Chicago-centric lives and books seem to let the question of regionalism subside rather quickly, that jump from city to region left undefined. Those books which have been written about this question generally take a roundabout way of answering it. When that relationship is faced squarely—in a novel or a monograph or a biography—it is generally from the viewpoint of a migrant to the Windy City—which Bellow was, although not from the midwestern hinterland. Midwesterners become Chicagoans; Chicagoans, perhaps, are midwesterners by a kind of courtesy appointment. To read the two books under review—Leader’s biography and Benjamin Taylor’s edited collection of Bellow’s nonfiction—simply to settle the case of Saul Bellow’s midwesternness, however, would be a poor use of their vast scope. Leader’s biography in particular is an extraordinary work of accumulation and organization—it is really one of the most complete pictures of intellectual life in the United States of midcentury that we have. It more than earns the title “authoritative,” although biographies which are considered authoritative are also often said to have “the last word” on their subject, and while the work is certainly the former, it does not really attempt to have the latter. It is comprehensive—enormously impressive in its breadth of context and in its diligence of detail—but it...

Encounter between literature and science: Galileo’s impact on Milton

The relationship between literature and science finds its roots in the Renaissance, with the widely acknowledged literary quality of works such as Galileo’s, extending to novels of today such as Ian McEwan’s Solar, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder and Daniel Kehlmann’s Vermessung der Welt. Here, I will focus on the influence that one of the greatest scientists of all times had on John Milton, when writing his Paradise Lost. Albert Einstein, in his Foreword to Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i massimi sistemi del mondo ( Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) writes about its author that: His unusual literary gift enables him to address the educated men of his age in such clear and impressive language as to overcome the anthropocentric and mythical thinking of his contemporaries and to lead them back to an objective and casual attitude towards the cosmos, an attitude which had been lost to humanity with the decline of Greek culture. ( Galilei, 2001 : xxiii)

The First Vernacular Caesar: Pier Candido Decembrio’s Translation for Inigo d’Avalos with Editions and Translations of Both Prologues

Among the first humanist translations of classical Latin texts is Pier Candido Decembrio’s vernacular version of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries. While his dedication of Caesar’s Gallic Wars (1438) to Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, has long been in print, the two dedications with which he prefaced the remaining books of the Caesarean corpus, both addressed to the Aragonese nobleman Inigo d’Avalos, have remained almost unknown and accessible only in manuscript. This article presents editions and translations of these prologues, dates them (to 1438-1442, and post-1452, respectively), and identifies the Latin manuscript family from which they derive. It then reconstructs the cultural and political contexts of Decembrio’s Caesar translations, showing how these literary gifts made him a cultural ambassador for Visconti and himself. Finally, it examines Decembrio’s approach to Caesar, whom he valued not as political or military exemplar, but as writer of history. The last preface, which contains a res gest...

The “intimate enemies”: Edward Dowden, W. B. Yeats and the Formation of Character

Stung by Edward Dowden’s reluctance to endorse the Irish Literary Revival, W. B. Yeats distanced himself publicly from the TCD Professor. This act of distancing has largely been accepted by subsequent scholarship as a reflection of Dowden’s lack of influence on Yeats. Despite obvious disagreements on some key points, this essay will argue that Yeats is close to Dowden on a number of issues, by tracing their intimate dialogue about the writings of George Eliot, Shakespeare and Goethe. The concept of formation of character—an English translation of the German Bildung—will prove central to their related responses to the question of what sort of life is best suited to further the development of literary gifts. These findings are framed by a discussion of Yeats’s profound, and often underestimated, indebtedness to Victorian culture and ideas, and the essay also traces the biographical background to these two writers’ changing relationship.

Molly Lefebure 1919-2013: A Tribute

A dozen Lefebures could not have accomplished in ninety-three years all that has been attributed the one we knew, followed, obeyed, and loved for over forty years at the Wordsworth Summer Conference and the Winter Schools. Born in London in 1919, her life was a series of firsts starting with her early schooling at North London Collegiate School, the first school for girls (founded in 1850), where the suffragette movement began. In World War II, leaving her studies as a journalist at King's College, London, she served as the first female court reporter, and, then, as medical secretary forensic pathologist, Keith Simpson, became the first woman work in a public mortuary. For six years, while writing and dodging bombs, she collected the gruesome evidence from murders, suicides, infanticides, up 8,000 autopsies of criminals and victims, encountering every form of mayhem which a body can be subjected in London hospitals, prisons, and crime scenes. These experiences later appeared in her writing, her first and often reprinted published fiction, Night in the Front Line (1942), her novels Blitz (1989) and Thunder in the Sky (1991), the non-fiction memoir, Evidence for the Crown: Experiences of a Pathologist's Secretary (1958, 1958, 1975, 1990), re-published as Murder on the Homefront and dramatized for ITV in a two-part program which aired after her passing. To journalists, detectives, even a hangman, she was Miss or Molly of the Morgues, admired for her discipline, focus, and cool professionalism while, from photos (posted by her grandson Oliver Gerrish on his blog, Arch Music Man), she appeared glamorous, feminine, engaging, exotic, with a charm that illuminated the very dark world in which she worked. To her, the morgue was fascinating, preferable the horrors of regular secretarial work, the fate of most women of her age and generation, and she felt much more inclined, she wrote, to spend the evening in the mortuary than with a hysterical young man who was lacking in imagination. For the right man, however, in 1945, she gave up the morgue, married John Gerrish, who had served as an officer in India, and settled in Kingston on Thames, London, where John was a corporate executive. While raising their two sons, wrote books, journalism, radio and television plays, acquired diplomas in teaching and social psychology, and worked in London with delinquent and drug-addicted young people. As Mary Blandy, she wrote Razor Edge: The Story of a Youth Club (1967), and Harvest from Rotten Apples: Experimental Work with Detached Youth (1971). Later, she brought her knowledge of addicts and addiction Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (1974), and the effect of addiction on extended familiaes in The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1986), and Consolations in Opium: The Expanding Universe of Coleridge, Humphrey Davy and 'The Recluse', a Wordsworth Summer Conference 1986 lecture (published in TWC, 1986, and 2005). The sociological studies were enriched by her literary gifts and the literary Studies were enhanced by her experience among the estranged and wounded, by her journalist's habits of research, her comfort with primary sources, her skill interpreting evidence, and her enviably engaging and suspenseful narrative style. In 1957, and John purchased a home in Newlands Valley, Cumbria, where they had spent their honeymoon, and Molly of the Morgue became of the Fells, an entirely different person, an ardent bird watcher, hunter (she began hunting as a child), and fell walker with Alfred Wainwright as her guide, who was later illustrate her children's books, Scratch and Company (1969), The Hunting of Wilberforce Tike (1970), and Loona Balloona (1974). She also wrote three books of her own on the local culture, the landscape and history: The English Lake District (1964), Cumberland Heritage (1970), Cumbrian Discovery (1977), and the literary, The Illustrated Take Poets (1987) while studying and writing books on Coleridge and editing The Coleridge Connection (1990) along with Richard Gravil in honor of their friend, Tom McFarland. …

Uncivil wars: Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, and the battle for cultural memory

Runner-up, PROSE Award, Media and Cultural Studies, 2013 The first English-language book to place the works of Elena Garro (1916-1998) and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) in dialogue with each other, Uncivil Wars evokes the lives of two celebrated literary figures who wrote about many of the same experiences and contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity but were judged quite differently, primarily because of gender. While Paz's privileged, prize-winning legacy has endured worldwide, Garro's literary gifts garnered no international prizes and received less attention in Latin American literary circles. Restoring a dual perspective on these two dynamic writers and their world, Uncivil Wars chronicles a collective memory of wars that shaped Mexico, and in turn shaped Garro and Paz, from the Conquest period to the Mexican Revolution; the Spanish Civil War, which the couple witnessed while traveling abroad; and the student massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, which brought about social and political changes and further tensions in the battle of the sexes. The cultural contexts of machismo and ethnicity provide an equally rich ground for Sandra Cypess's exploration of the tandem between the writers' personal lives and their literary production. Uncivil Wars illuminates the complexities of Mexican society as seen through a tense marriage of two talented, often oppositional writers. The result is an alternative interpretation of the myths and realities that have shaped Mexican identity, and its literary soul, well into the twenty-first century.

Giambattista Della Porta's Histrionic Science

One of the lifelong concerns of Giambattista Della Porta (1535-1615) was the description and the production of seemingly extraordinary and hence inexplicable experiments that would testify to his amazing abilities as a natural magician. But this Neapolitan nobleman was not only one of the most renowned "professors of secrets“ in his time, he was also the author of highly influential books on physiognomy and exercised his literary gifts in more than a dozen successful works for the theater. This paper looks into several instances where Della Porta managed the contemporary political and religious situation in order to stage his natural philosophy, thus pointing to specific examples where both the realms of theater and early modern science interacted on a literary as well as on a conceptual level. The paper relates Della Porta's writings to his ideal of a silent audience that watched mirabilia with amazement and delight.

Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power , and: Constitutionalism, Conflict, Consent: Jefferson on the Impeachment Power (review)

Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power. By Jeremy D. Bailey. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 280. Cloth, $87.99.)Jeremy D. Bailey, Constitutionalism, Conflict, and Consent: Jefferson on the Impeachment Power, Review of Politics 70 (June 2008), 572-94.Reviewed by R. B. BernsteinWorks of history become valuable when they persuade us to abandon former ways of seeing a given historical problem in favor of a new, illuminating perspective. By this test, Jeremy D. Bailey, who teaches political science at the University of Houston, has written a truly valuable book. Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power persuades us to discard the stale, misleading dichotomy between and presidents for the far more enlightening approach of grasping how a particular president understood his office as a constitutional institution and sought to meet the challenges that that institution posed for him.For too long, historians have privileged presidents and damned the ones; in the process, they have shown magnificent lack of attention to what strong or weak might mean in historical context or whether there might be an array of models for a strong presidency. Using this test and invoking the magisterial authority of Henry Adams to back it up, historians have hailed Thomas Jefferson's successes as president while stigmatizing his vision of the presidency as limited and by comparison with the presidency advocated by his great adversary, Alexander Hamilton. Under the old view, Jefferson succeeded as president because he was a skilled politician and used his personal gifts for consensus and persuasion, though ultimately giving in to the need to wield his presidency in Hamiltonian terms.Bailey rejects this interpretation, seeking instead to determine what Jefferson understood the American presidency to be and how best to make it work. Taking seriously Jefferson's insistence that he sought to govern by reference to the views of the American people, Bailey shows that Jefferson devised an approach to the presidency conceptually distinct from the Hamiltonian vision as an office of executive command. Jefferson rooted the presidency's strength in the president's ability to connect with and give voice to the will of the people, a presidency not only consonant with but governed by public opinion. Thus, Jefferson succeeded as president when he governed in line with the public opinion that he could discern and articulate, and he failed as president when, as with his embargo policy in his second term, he increasingly found himself veering away from what public opinion was trying to tell him.As Bailey shows, Jefferson's ideas about executive power go back to his earliest involvement in constitution-making in 1776 and thus had been developing and evolving in his mind for nearly a quarter-century before he took the presidential oath in March 1801. Jefferson, as Bailey demonstrates, took his democratic ideals seriously and sought to meld them with his understanding of executive power so that he could devise a way for a chief executive to be both vigorous and legitimate, with public opinion of his words and deeds as the touchstone of legitimacy. Further, Jefferson insisted that a constitutional chief executive had to be both a vehicle for needed constitutional change, by mobilizing and mustering public opinion in its support, and a respecter of the Constitution. Previous scholars have denned these two views as forming a paradox in Jefferson's thought, whereas Bailey seeks to reconcile them and show how, in Jefferson's thinking, they were both consistent and complementary.Jefferson's method for resolving the paradox was to offer the people what he called declarations of principle, in which he both sought to voice public opinion and to educate it. (It is no accident that this method of constitutional governance was peculiarly suited to Jefferson's literary gifts, which formed one of the foundation stones of his success as a politician throughout his career. …